Charisma (5 page)

“That was it,” John said.

“I take it you’re not a Christian,” Father Carnetti said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, certainly not a Catholic.”

“I don’t know,” John said again. He hesitated. “My father was a Catholic once, I think. A long time ago. I think I was too little to remember.”

“What about your mother?”

“She used to go to church.” John coughed. He could only vaguely remember his mother going to church, mornings when she left him alone with his father or just alone. He couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. Then he remembered something, and brightened. “She used to have beads she carried around. Beads with a cross on the end of them. That’s Catholic, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. That’s a rosary.”

“So she must have been Catholic once in a while.”

“What is she now?”

“The next best thing to dead.”

“Ah,” Father Carnetti said. “I see.”

John held his breath. He had no idea what he’d meant by what he’d said. He had no idea how to explain it. If Father Carnetti asked him about it, he was going to have to turn and run.

But Father Carnetti had turned back to the crucifix. He had his hands behind his back and his chin down so that it tucked into his high collar.

“I came over here to get away from the rectory,” he said. “My housekeeper made my dinner for me and then went home. She’s got six grandchildren. Do you want to come and eat with me?”

“Eat?”

“Well, it is Christmas. I hate eating alone on Christmas. My family’s out in Oregon and I couldn’t get away.”

“Do you have children of your own?”

“Priests don’t have children of their own. We don’t marry. I have a sister in Portland. She’s got the children.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t—get away.”

“So was I. Now maybe I’ve changed my mind. Will you come and eat with me?”

“Yes,” John said. At that point, he would have gone to eat with vultures in a lion’s den. His stomach felt like one of those black holes they’d told him about in one of the schools he’d attended in those intermittent periods when his father had money.

“Good,” Father Carnetti said. “I’ll tell you all about the Catholic Church. When we get to the pie, maybe you can tell me about that look you had on your face when I came in here.”

“Look?”

“Never mind. I used to walk around with that look on my face once, when I was your age. I think we’d better get moving. The stuffing’s sitting out on the table getting cold.”

Father Carnetti turned and started walking back toward the side door, his robe flapping around his legs. John stood watching him for a while and then followed. The only choice he had was dinner with the priest or those rooms his father had found them where there was going to be no dinner at all.

Besides, there was something else, something he couldn’t pin down but something that made him feel good.

He was interested.

Interested. The buzzer on his intercom was going off like a third-rate smoke alarm. His cigarette had burned to cinders in the ashtray. Here he was, forty years old, an auxiliary bishop, vicar of the bishop of Bridgeport for New Haven. It wasn’t the best he could have done. There was a vast field for ambition in the Church, a veritable Jacob’s ladder of preference and preferment. He could have been assigned to a more important diocese or even sent to Rome. Still, considering who he was and where he’d come from—
what
he’d come from—he hadn’t done badly. He could have been sent to South America or imprisoned in a boy’s school in the bowels of the Bronx. Either of those things could happen to him yet. He was successful and he was safe. The safety was the important part. The Church wouldn’t let you go bankrupt. The Church would always give you a home. He had to be losing his mind.

Sometimes he thought Marie was going to make him lose his mind. He’d told her a hundred times. Buzz once and then stop. Considering the noise that thing made, if he didn’t answer he wasn’t in the building.

He flipped the damn thing to talk and said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Murphy’s here,” Marie said. “I know you told me to send him right in, but I thought I ought to buzz.”

“Send him right in,” John Kelly said.

“I will. Now that I’ve buzzed.”

“Marie—”

She flipped off with an angry little click. The office was silent.

Bishop John Kelly sighed and stood up. He rarely wore full clerical dress, but he was wearing it today. He’d always considered it good policy to meet movers and shakers in the costume of a prince of the Church. He wasn’t a prince of the Church, not really, not yet, but all this time in the Jesuits had taught him the importance of image. Dan Murphy would have understood. He wasn’t really a mover and shaker either, but when he came through Bishop John Kelly’s door he looked like one.

He also looked a little amused. He had a Kevin McCarthy kind of face, what John thought of as “upper-class Irish,” and it was pulled into a smirk.

“Well?” he said. “Have you thought it over?”

John Kelly sighed. He liked Dan Murphy, maybe because Murphy was a known quantity. He always knew what Murphy was going to say and do and want and think. Unlike someone like, say, Father Tom Burne.

He pushed thoughts of Tom Burne out of his mind—Burne was a bad subject for contemplation at any time—and said, “I’ve thought it over six or seven times. Are you sure this Cometti person doesn’t have ties to the Mafia?”

“Coletti,” Murphy said. “Victor Coletti. If Coletti had ties to the Mafia, I’d know about them. And I wouldn’t know him.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“A district attorney has to be careful.”

“You have to be careful, at any rate,” John said. He thought of asking Dan if it were true that he wanted to run for governor some day, and decided against it. Dan would deny it, and he already knew the answer. He took the letter Dan had sent him off his desk and flattened it out against his hand.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “Tuesday and Thursday nights at seven thirty. On WNHY. Which is a network affiliate.”

“Right,” Dan said. “I told you it was going to be good exposure.”

“It’s impossible exposure. Seven thirty is when the affiliates make all their money off the game shows. I asked.”

“Victor Coletti is a good Catholic layman,” Dan said.

“If he’s that good a Catholic layman, the Pope is a South American nun.”

John Kelly sighed again and sat down.

All other considerations aside, there was the religious situation to consider. If he took this offer, he’d spend an hour a week explaining Catholic theology over the air. What would they do to him if he didn’t get it right? The Bronx? Worse? He’d never been popular with his bishop. They were from different backgrounds and didn’t get along. That’s what he was doing in New Haven.

He was successful and he was safe. That should have been all that mattered to him. Unfortunately, the idea of this project kept making him high.

If he did it right, he could be the next Fulton J. Sheen.

Ambition.

He folded the letter and stuck it in his letter holder. He trusted Dan Murphy as much as he trusted anyone. Murphy had more to lose than he did. The Church might send renegade auxiliary bishops to the Bronx, but she didn’t throw them out on the street.

“Look,” he said, “let’s be intelligent. Before I agree to this thing, let’s you and me figure out what Victor Coletti wants.”

For the longest time, the Congo was the only name he had for it. It was only later he realized that it must have been built for something better. It was a wide street, lined by tall buildings that had once been handsome, or at least imposing. In the period before this present incarnation, it had been the place where “good” black people lived. Now the quietly decorated apartments of quietly industrious Baptists had been handed over to the connoisseurs of neon. The small stores that hung back from the curb were called Silver Balls and Passion Pit. Every once in a while, two or three of them had been knocked together to make a movie theater. In the dark like this, with the lights flashing and the fuck meat picking its way over the bodies of bums, it seemed impossible that the Congo had ever been anything but what it was.

He had a newspaper in the pocket of his new jacket, the one he had boosted out of Macy’s on the afternoon after the morning he had killed Margaret Mary McVann. The jacket was long and warm and stodgy. He knew better than to boost anything with style—or to wear anything with style either, at least down here, where style usually translated into the announcement of a drug deal successfully completed. It was like the man said: this was not his place and these were not his people. When he had a lot of luck, they thought he was invisible. When he had less, they thought he was harmless. He didn’t want to know what would happen to him on a day when he didn’t have any luck at all.

Harmless.

The street sign above his head was bent, tilted, and out of true. When the lights flashed the right way, he could just see the words
CONGRESS AVENUE
in black letters on a white background. They were filmed over by electric-blue paint.

He started walking into the light, up the street toward the Stick Up Theater and the crowds of girls who hung out in front of the laundromat. It was cold and he was colder. The knife was colder still. He had stuck it under his clothes, deep into his underwear, caught by the waistband of his jeans.

Every time he moved, it pricked him in the hip.

At the place where Congress Avenue intersected with Duval Street, he stopped. There was a street lamp there that was actually working, and a garbage can, and a little bump in the sidewalk where a newsstand had once been. The newsstand had disappeared around the time the Baptists did. The garbage can was empty, although the gutters around it were full of trash. He took the newspaper out of his pocket and dropped it neatly into the can. He was getting into dangerous territory here. Even the girls refused to go this far out.

He had been searching for something about Margaret Mary McVann for five days, but until today there had been nothing. It had made him very nervous. Margaret Mary had lived alone. She had had few friends. She had talked to nobody at all in the building where she lived. Even so, she hadn’t been a hermit. There were the people at the soup kitchen where she worked and the people at the church. Somebody should have noticed she was gone. He kept thinking of her lying in the living room like that, her neck bent too far to one side, the cold streaming in from the broken window at the back. He kept thinking about the rosary on her coffee table, too, and how hard it had been to find it. He had to steal the rosaries from the Daughters of Saint Paul bookshop, one by one. The two things seemed linked together somehow, or maybe not. It had gotten to the point where the only thing he was absolutely sure of was his charism.

A charism was a gift of the Holy Spirit. Someone with charisma was filled with the Holy Spirit: he glowed with an inner light. That was why they liked to use the word for politicians. They mistook a talent for television for the Spirit. They mistook ambition for a righteous fire.

He had meant to leave the newspaper folded open to the story about Margaret Mary McVann, a small square of story on page three, without a picture. Instead, he’d dumped the paper into the can with the front page facing out. There was another picture of Billy Hare on that page, and a bigger one of the district attorney. The boy had been dead for twenty-four hours. Attention was beginning to shift to the living.

And the interesting.

He started to reach into the can to rearrange the paper and stopped himself. One thing he never wanted was to be caught rooting around in a garbage can. It was a line you crossed that you could never cross back again.

He crossed the Congo instead, and walked into the blackness of Duval Street.

Like many of the streets off the Congo, Duval was deserted. The process that had only started farther down the avenue was completed here. Windows gaped, clear of panes. Here and there an entire wall had fallen in, as if demolition had been begun and then abandoned. To someone who knew nothing about places like this, it would have sounded as silent as a void.

Since he was very familiar with places like this, he could hear what there was to hear. The buildings were full of people, junkies on the run from rehabilitation. If he’d gone through any of the doorways, he would have found a litter of broken needles and bent spoons and crack vials. He would have found bodies, too. When junkies started dying of AIDS, they did one of two things. They either got themselves to a hospital and got religion, or they got themselves to a dealer for one last rush. The ones who wanted to rush curled themselves into hall closets or the corners of staircase landings and pumped themselves into convulsions.

He passed a building that sighed like Spanish moss in the breeze and turned down yet another street, a worse one, called Amora. At the end of Amora there was a building with all its doors and windows intact and lights on in every room. Glowing alone in the gathering night, it looked like a fairy castle or a prison. At one time or another, he had thought it was both.

It was called Damien House. Once, years ago, he had known it well.

The first time he had gone to Damien House, he had gone to the front door. There was a sign there and a bell to push. It had seemed like the right approach. Now he went around to the back. There was a little garden there with a wrought-iron gate and a door that led to the kitchen. He let himself through the gate and stood on the kitchen steps.

It was only six o’clock in the evening, only December 6, but it was already full dark. It was darker than it might have been because of the clouds that covered the sky. The bad weather they’d been having all week was set to continue. There was a smell of snow in the air. There was a bite, too, just to let him know something was coming.

All the buildings for blocks around were deserted. The only light came from the bulb above his head, screwed into the outer wall above the kitchen door and protected by a net of plastic-covered wire. He thought about using his key and decided against it. He could hear her moving around in the kitchen, moving slowly as she always did when she didn’t have much to do. It was Friday night. Most of the rest of them would have had their dinner at a pizza parlor up on Chapel Street and gone on to Saint Bartholomew’s for a dance.