Read Sugartown for Free Online Page A

with mouseholes in the corners, and Mayk would have said it felt like a room with a stiff in it.
    It wasn’t. I got up dusting my palms and looked around the room and at a long sideboard with a row of religious pictures painted on flat wooden rectangles the size of paperback books propped up on top. Several of the pictures had fallen or been knocked over and lay on their backs or faces. My toe nudged one on the floor and I picked it up. It was an exquisitely detailed rendition of a blond beach boy wearing a sheet and holding a flaming sword high over his head. The colors had the rich patina of age. For a century anyway its artist would have known the Archangel Michael by sight.
    I stood it up on the sideboard and walked through a door into the room with light in it. If they wanted me they could have me. I was through with floors.
    This one was a front bedroom, with an eight-drawer chiffonier scraping the comparatively low ceiling, more brown wallpaper and disapproving saints in frames with gilt cupids carved into the wood, a painted nightstand holding up a tarnished brass lamp with a yellow paper shade, and a high bed with a painted iron frame. By the window a candle the size of a big toe burned with a pale orange fixity of purpose in front of another pocket-size painting like those in the other room on a varnished stand. The room smelled of hot wax.
    Some of the parched furniture and all of the artwork were antique. The rest was just old, like the man on the bed.
    In the light shed by the lamp his head was large, yellow, onion-shaped, and as bald as a thumb. There were blue veins in his closed eyelids and his eagle’s profile had been cut with an engraving tool out of tough old ivory without a line or a crack in it except for those that seemed to have been drawn by the weight of his moustache. It was the size and shape of an inverted horseshoe and as white as virtue, as white as bones in the desert, as white as an old man’s moustache under electric light in a house in Poletown after dark. It made the pillow his head was resting on look dirty. He lay on his back in an old-fashioned cotton nightshirt with a thick brown sweater over it and his fine long yellow hands with the blue veins in them resting on a pink quilt drawn over his stomach.
    His eyes snapped open. It was as if a pair of shutters had been flung wide on the dawn. They were gray with a bright sheen and I could see my reflection in their pupils.
    “All Christian czardoms have come to an end,” he said, “and have been gathered together into one czardom of our sovereign, according to the book of the prophets, that is to say the Russian czardom; for two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be.”
    “Okay,” I said, drawing it out.
    “The seeds for Constantinople’s destruction were sown by the Latin heresy, the belief in immaculate conception and the trinity, over the true faith of just the Father and the Holy Ghost. In the patriarch there is continuity and power.”
    He stopped talking suddenly and his eyes became slits. I felt them rake my face. “You’re not Father Olszanski,” he accused.
    “I never have been.” I said it a little too loud. His voice was little more than a cracked whisper, but there was in it the memory of strength and I was trying to match it. He rolled his consonants ponderously in an accent that was familiar but not precisely Polish.
    “No need to shout,” he said. “I’m close to blind, but my hearing works perfectly around the middle register. I thought you were the priest come to continue the argument. He smiles at everything I say until I get to the Pope. That’s when he leaves. Otherwise he’s harder to get rid of than a cataract.”
    “I thought most Poles were devout Roman Catholics.”
    “He’s Ukrainian,” said Howard Mayk, coming in. “Some of them are Russian Orthodox.”
    The former detective sergeant was carrying one of the small religious paintings in one hand and his Colt