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Elmore Leonard - Pagan Babies

Here you can read online Elmore Leonard - Pagan Babies full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2000, publisher: Delacorte Press; Random House, Inc., genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

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Elmore Leonard Pagan Babies
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    Pagan Babies
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  • Publisher:
    Delacorte Press; Random House, Inc.
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  • Year:
    2000
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    New York
  • ISBN:
    0-385-33392-7978-0-385-33392-4
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    4 / 5
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Pagan Babies: summary, description and annotation

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Nobody writes novels like Elmore Leonard, with his crackling dialogue, breathless pacing, and hilarious hard-luck, unfailingly human characters. In his sizzling new novel, the New York Times best selling author crosses continents to tell an adrenaline-charged story of crime and retribution-where double crosses become triple crosses, revenge is where you find it, and absolution is just around the corner. Father Terry Dunn hears a lot of strange confessions. After all, hes the only priest for miles in the lingering aftermath of the worst massacre Rwanda has ever seen. And Fr. Terry, who has forty- seven bodies in his church that need burying, has just heard one confession too many. After exacting from them a chilling penance, Fr. Terry has to get out of Africa-pronto. Now Terry is coming home to Detroit, where a five-year-old tax-fraud indictment is hanging over him. Is Terry Dunn really a priest? He certainly doesnt act like one. A fugitive felon on two continents, Terry is being pursued by a cigarette-smuggling cohort, who rolled over on Terry to save jail time-yet still demands his share of the money. But Debbie Dewey has other plans for Terry. Shes just been sprung from a three-year fall at Saw- grass Correctional for aggravated assaultand is now trying to make it as a stand-up comic. Debbie and Terry hit it off beautifully. They have the same sense of humor and similar goals: Both of them want to raise a whole lot of cash. Terry, for the children of Rwanda; Debbie, to score off a guy who owes her sixty-seven thousand dollars. Its Debbie who keeps prying, until she learns the bizarre truth about Terry; Debbie who sells him on going in together for a much bigger payoff than either could manage alone. That is unless the priest is working a con of his own. With an unforgettable cast of oddballs and schemers-including a mob boss on trial, an unlikely assassin called Mutt, an ex-con con artist who dreams of doing stand-up, and a priest who may not be a priest- Pagan Babies is Elmore Leonard at his double-dealing best. In the hands of this master, the stakes are always life and death. Crime fiction doesnt get any better. ELMORE LEONARD is the author of thirty-six novels, including such bestsellers as Be Cool, Cuba Libre, Out of Sight, Riding the Rap, Pronto, Rum Punch, Maximum Bob, Get Shorty, and numerous screenplays. He and his wife, Christine, live in a suburb of Detroit. Visit the Elmore Leonard website at www.elmoreleonard.com.

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Elmore Leonard

Pagan Babies

For Jackie Farber

1

THE CHURCH HAD BECOME a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs.

Since the living would no longer enter the church, Fr. Terry Dunn heard confessions in the yard of the rectory, in the shade of old pines and silver eucalyptus trees.

"Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin. It has been two months from the last time I come to Confession. Since then I am fornicating with a woman from Gisenyi three times only and this is all I have done."

They would seem to fill their mouths with the English words, pro-nounc-ing each one carefully, with an accent Terry believed was heard only in Africa. He gave fornicators ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, murmured what passed for an absolution while the penitent said the Act of Contrition, and dismissed them with a reminder to love God and sin no more.

"Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin. Is a long time since I come here but is not my fault, you don't have Confession always when you say.

The sin I did, I stole a goat from close by Nyundo for my family to eat. My wife cook it en brochette and also in a stew with potatoes and peppers."

"Last night at supper," Terry said, "I told my housekeeper I'd enjoy goat stew a lot more if it wasn't so goddamn bony."

The goat thief said, "Excuse me, Fatha?"

"Those little sharp bones you get in your mouth," Terry said, and gave the man ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. He gave just about everyone ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys to say as their penance.

Some came seeking advice.

"Bless me, Fatha, I have not sin yet but I think of it. I see one of the men kill my family has come back. One of the Hutu Interahamwe militia, he come back from the Goma refugee camp and I like to kill him, but I don't want to go to prison and I don't want to go to Hell.

Can you have God forgive me before I kill him?"

Terry said, "I don't think He'll go for it. The best you can do, report the guy to the conseiller at the sector office and promise to testify at the trial."

The man who hadn't killed anyone yet said, "Fatha, when is that happen? I read in lrnvaho they have one hundred twenty-four thousand in prisons waiting for trials. In how many years will it be for this man that kill my family? lmvaho say two hundred years to try all of them."

Terry said, "Is the guy bigger than you are?"

"No, he's Hum."

"Walk up to the guy," Terry said, "and hit him in the mouth as hard as you can, with a rock. You'll feel better. Now make a good Act of Contrition for anything you might've done and forgot about." Terry could offer temporary relief but nothing that would change their lives.

Penitents would kneel on a prie-dieu and see his profile through a framed square of cheesecloth mounted on the kneeler: Fr. Terry Dunn, a bearded young man in a white cassock, sitting in a wicker chair. Sideways to the screen he looked at the front yard full of brush and weeds and the road that came up past the church from the village of Arisimbi. He heard Confession usually once a week but said Mass, in the school, only a few times a year: Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and when someone died. The Rwandese Bishop of Nyundo, nine miles up the road, sent word for Fr. Dunn to come and give an account of himself.

He drove there in the yellow Volvo station wagon that had belonged to the priest before him and sat in the bishop's office among African sculptures and decorative baskets, antimacassars in bold star designs on the leather sofa and chairs, on the wall a print of the Last Supper and a photograph of the bishop taken with the pope. Terry had worn his cassock. The bishop, in a white sweater, asked him if he was attempting to start a new sect within the Church. Terry said no, he had a personal reason for not acting as a full-time priest, but would not say what it was. He did tell the bishop, "You can contact the order that runs the mission, the Missionary Fathers of St. Martin de Porres in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and ask to have me replaced; but if you do, good luck. Young guys today are not breaking down the door to get in the seminary."

This was several years ago. Terry left the bishop shaking his head and was still here on his own.

This afternoon the prie-dieu was placed beneath a roof of palm fronds and thatch that extended from the rectory into the yard. A voice raised against the hissing sound of the rain said, "Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin," and started right in. "I kill seven people that time I'm still a boy and we kill the inyeni, the cockroaches. I kill four persons in the church the time you saying the Mass there and you see it happen. You know we kill five hundred in Nyundo before we come here and kill I think one hundred in this village before everybody run away."

Terry continued to stare at the yard that sloped down to the road, the clay hard pack turned dark in the rain.

"And we kill some more where we have the roadblock and stop all the drivers and look at the identity cards. The ones we want we take in the bush and kill them."

The man paused and Terry waited. The guy wasn't confessing his sins, he was bragging about what he did.

"You hear me, Fatha?"

Terry said, "Keep talking," wondering where the guy was going with it.

"I can tell you more will die very soon. How do I know this? I am a visionary, Fatha. I am told in visions of the Blessed Virgin saying to do it, to kill the inyeni. I tell you this and you don't say nothing, do you?"

Terry didn't answer. The man's voice, at times shrill, sounded familiar.

"No, you can't," the voice said. "Oh, you can tell me not to do it, but you can't tell no other person, the RPA, the conseiller, nobody, because I tell you this in Confession and you have the rule say you can't talk about what you hear. You listen to me? We going to cut the feet off before we kill them. You know why we do it? You are here that time, so you understand. But you have no power, so you don't stop us. Listen, if we see you when we come, a tall one like you, we cut your feet off, too."

Terry sat in his wicker chair staring out at the rain, the pale sky, mist covering the far hills. The thing was, these guys could do it.

They already had, so it wasn't just talk, the guy mouthing off.

He said, "You going to give me my penance to say?"

Terry didn't answer.

"All right, I finished."

The man rose from the kneeler and in a moment Terry watched him walking away, barefoot, skinny bare legs, a stick figure wearing a checkered green shirt and today in the rain a raggedy straw hat with the brim turned down. Terry didn't need to see the guy's face. He knew him the way he knew people in the village by the clothes they wore, the same clothes they put on every morning, if they didn't sleep in them. He had seen that green shirt recently, only a few days ago

***

Among the stalls in the marketplace.

This one wearing the shirt and three of his friends drinking banana beer from a tin trough, the trough long enough for all four of them squatting around it to stick reed straws into the thick brew, lower their heads and suck it up warm, the beer giving them a glow that showed in dreamy eyes looking up at Terry walking past the open stall, Terry catching the look and the one in the green shirt commenting as the others laughed, his voice louder then, shrill, following Terry to a man who was roasting corn in a pan of hot coals.

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