Excerpt

Milwaukee City Hall rotunda, looking down from the top floor

Prologue: What is Already Spent

So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 76

Lenny Swiatko Jr., aged twenty-one, crouched in a broom closet of the Milwaukee City Hall, a pen in hand and a sheet of paper resting on his knee. Normally the flaccid muscles of Lenny’s face molded, too readily, into the smile or frown or pucker of sympathy that best met the expectations of his interlocutor; but alone and unobserved at this moment, huddled in his little closet, Lenny permitted himself to break into a sharp-angled smile of childish vindictiveness as he signed his name with a flourish in the margin of his suicide note.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,” Lenny announced to the stifling closet air as he folded the sheet of paper with a snap. A moment later he flushed with shame: he had, he realized, just committed the humiliating sin of mimesis. He couldn’t remember all of a sudden which Great Author had ï¬rst appropriated those ancient and sacred words, Introibo ad altare Dei, for the opening of his Great Play or Great Novel or whatever the devil it was?—?no doubt one of those incomprehensible doorstoppers he had been forced to muck through in English Lit?—?but whatever it was and whoever had written it, Lenny had got his inspiration from some other source than the Holy Spirit; which only proved, once again, that Lenny Swiatko Jr., whose very name had come to him second-hand, couldn’t do anything, even sacrifice himself, with the originality that his ruthless and whimsical deity occasionally bestowed on more privileged others.

With great effort, Lenny pushed himself to his feet and stepped out into the bright lunchtime emptiness of the Milwaukee City Attorney’s office. He walked with heavy, deliberate steps to the bank of windows on the north side of the room and looked down. The concrete heart of downtown Milwaukee shimmered beneath him, its dry soul baking in a fierce, late-summer sun that had not seen rain in sixty-six days. Only an offering in blood would lift the burning hand of God.

Lenny consulted his watch: one minute after noon. His half-time shift was over, his earthly duties done. “Asperges me, Domine,” he intoned as he turned away from the window toward the anteroom.

As expected?—?everyone else was at a lunch meeting with the Mayor?—?the room’s sole occupant was a part-time receptionist named Nadine Jeffrey. The young woman’s eyes were fixed on the computer monitor, her beaded dreadlocks occasionally clicking in rhythm with her dancing fingers as they worked the keyboard. Pausing in front of the desk, Lenny placed the sheet of paper in Jeffrey’s “In” box.

“Your mom called,” Jeffrey said, her distracted words underscored by the syncopated percussives of the computer keys. “You’ve got a doctor’s appointment, you know. One o’clock.”

“Mysterium Fidei, ?” Lenny assured her with a benedictory nod.

Finally looking up, Nadine Jeffrey offered her sad-faced colleague a compassionate smile. “What was that, honey?”

Straightening the too-tight knot of his navy tie, a remnant of doubt flickered across Lenny’s face, only to be dispelled by the reflexive sotto voce recital of more comforting old words: “Libera nos, quaesumus, Domine, ab omnibus malis…”

Jeffrey’s eyes widened.

Giving a faint shrug?—?Miserere nobis —?Lenny picked up the small arm-chair that squatted in front of the receptionist’s desk and carried it through the open double doors that led out on to the eighth-floor gallery overlooking the rotunda. He set the chair next to the gallery railing, stepped up on the seat, and lifted one mirror-polished shoe to the brass rail.

He didn’t hear Jeffrey’s scream behind him as he made the sign of the cross and pushed off with his lower foot. For one swift moment between heaven and earth, Lenny balanced on the rail, his arms outstretched, the coffin-shaped rotunda opening out before him like a vast inland sea?—?seamless, liquid, inviting; then Lenny Swiatko Jr. pitched head-first to the rotunda floor eight stories below.