Charisma (9 page)

“Tsk, tsk,” Andy said. “Aren’t you blaming the victim?”

Francesca shook her head. Then she went to a door Susan hadn’t noticed before and opened it.

“Maybe you ought to wait in here,” she said. “Mark came back because of Theresa, but he’s very skittish about being here. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone and I don’t think he’s going to stay. I think I’d better go up and get Father Tom myself.”

The room Francesca showed them into was small and square and crammed with furniture. It reminded Susan of convent parlors as convent parlors had been when she first entered her order. It held none of the icons of the New Church: no bright banners or watercolor murals, no doves of peace or names of Jesus spelled out in psychedelic letters. There were two couches, four overstuffed chairs, five straight chairs, and a coffee table with a Bible on it. There was a brass-and-walnut crucifix hanging from a nail on the wall between the two front windows. That was it.

Susan circled the room, checking it all out, and then turned back to Andy. He had taken up residence in one of the overstuffed chairs, and he was looking distinctly uncomfortable. Susan didn’t blame him. If her day had been a series of shocks—and even pleasant surprises, like the rhythm of Congress Avenue—then this was the biggest shock of all. She had known her brother Andy literally all her life. The last thing she’d ever expected to hear of him was that he’d spent significant time in a place like Damien House. And yet he had to have spent significant time here. Francesca knew him well. Susan tried to imagine the possibilities and couldn’t. Andy volunteering to counsel down here two or three nights a week? Andy couldn’t counsel anyone. Even as a child, he’d been a perpetual, deliberate mess-up, an apostle of the futile gesture. Andy running donation drives for canned goods and thermal blankets? Andy hated to work, and donation drives took a lot of it. She ought to know. She’d run a couple of dozen herself.

She dropped down on one of the couches and looked across the room to him. “Well?” she said. “Are you going to tell me about it? Why were you never going to darken their door again?”

Andy was peeling a roll of Life Savers, peeling it strip by strip, as if engaged in some esoteric form of origami. “I had a fight with Father Tom Burne,” he said.

“Why? What were you doing down here?”

“I was living here,” Andy said.

Susan stared. “But what were you living here for? What could you possibly have wanted here? Did Dan throw you out of the house?”

Andy put the Life Savers down on the coffee table. “No, Dan didn’t throw me out of the house. It was Dan’s idea, if you want to know the truth about it. I don’t think anyone here does. I lived here for two years: 1982 and 1983.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what people do,” Andy said. “Oh, there are people who come in by the day, run programs, take the kids to the movies, that kind of thing. But the core group lives in. That’s what I was doing. I was part of the core group.”

“What does the core group do while it’s living in?”

Andy grinned. “Serves as role models, basically. Can you imagine me as a role model?”

“No,” Susan said.

“Neither can I.” Andy sighed. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t last. I did all the work, made dinner and cleaned up and taught some of the kids how to read, but I always felt like a phony doing it. And the religion. You know how I am about religion.”

“You believe in the great god Pan.”

“If I believe in anything. This is a very Catholic place. Considering what goes on here, you’d think Tom Burne would be a hip priest. He isn’t. He’s straight out of the Baltimore Catechism.”

“Dan says he saves boys from prostitution.”

“Boys and girls both. Sometimes he just saves kids from social workers. After two years in this place, I hated the social workers more than I hated the pimps.”

Susan got off the couch and went over to look at the crucifix. The wood of its walnut base was chipped, but it had been expensive once. She wondered where it had come from.

“Why would Dan send you down to a place like this?” she asked. “He has to know you’re not suited for it. He isn’t suited for it himself.”

“Do you think he’s suited for the governor’s office?”

Susan turned to look at him. He had scrunched down in his chair. His legs were extended halfway across the room and his feet tucked under the coffee table. He had his chin on his chest and his eyes closed. Susan felt the irritation bubbling up inside her, the way it had when she had to deal with parents who refused to discuss the truth about their children. There were people in this world who not only didn’t want to think, but didn’t want to know. It made her a little crazy to realize her brother Andy was one of them.

She went back to the couch and sat down again. “I know Dan wants to be governor,” she said. “I don’t know what that could possibly have to do with Damien House.”

“Think about it,” Andy said. Only his lips moved.

“I have thought about it. Wouldn’t it have been more to the point for Dan to place you with the state Democratic Committee?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Andy opened his eyes. It made Susan feel better. For a while there, talking to him had been like talking to a corpse.

“Back in 1979,” Andy said, “when Tom Burne opened this place, he was practically proclaimed a saint. The next year, Reagan got elected, and the Democratic Party needed saints. Every jackass in the state was trying to cram money down his throat. Even though they knew he wouldn’t take it.”

“Why wouldn’t he take it?”

“He said he didn’t want to get tied up with the bureaucracy. He still says that. You start taking money from the government, you start having to follow government rules. And there are a lot of government rules.”

Susan stared at him with exasperation. “A lot of rules you don’t think make any sense. You never think rules make any sense. I suppose your Father Tom is exactly the same way.”

“He isn’t at all that way. That’s why we had a fight.”

“What about, Dan?”

This time, Andy sat up. “Dan is still trying to get himself connected to this place,” he said. “He has to. Like I said, the Democratic Party needs saints. It’s too bad it was Theresa that was killed. Fran’s right—it’ll turn out to be some kid on crack. If it had been something a little more interesting to the media, Father Tom offed by Mafia dons, Dan could have jumped in and made network with it.”

There was a clatter on the stairs, then a clatter in the hall. Then the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall and broad, as shaggy as a mountain man, dressed in a frayed arctic parka with ratted fur along the edge of the hood.

“They’re in here,” he said to someone behind him. Then someone behind him made a strangled little noise, annoyed.

Susan sat on the couch, her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles, feeling like a dowdy ex-nun and an imbecile at the same time. The words she could not get out of her mind were so familiar she could hardly believe them—stupid words, used by Catholic laywomen from one end of the country to the other, the litany of women who had never been in religious life and could not understand.

Here she was, face to face with Father Thomas Burne, and all she could think of was:

What a waste.

She was not face to face with Father Tom Burne. She found that out quickly enough. The big man came into the room, cleared the path to the door, and another man came in behind him. He was wearing a Roman collar and a distracted expression, and Susan remembered what Andy had said about him:
he’s straight out of the Baltimore Catechism.
If the big man was a priest, he was anything but straight out of the Baltimore Catechism. He was some kind of renegade.

Andy was on his feet, holding his hand out to Tom Burne, looking a little embarrassed. “I read in the paper about Sister Theresa,” he said.

“Everybody did, on page three,” Burne said. He turned to the big man. “Do you know Pat Mallory?”

“Yes,” Andy said. He held his hand out again, looking a little relieved when the big man took it. “I know him through my brother, Dan. You remember.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Your brother’s Dan Murphy. Who is this?”

“This is my sister, Susan,” Andy said.

Tom Burne looked her over and said, “Nun.”

Susan had been sitting on the couch through all of this. Now she stood up and began to pace around, bumping into furniture, finding it an agony to sit still.

“Actually, I’m an ex-nun,” she said. “I left my order—last week.”

“It could have been last year, or last decade,” Burne said. “It wouldn’t matter. Nuns get trained and they never lose it. If they’ve been trained right.” He considered it. “Theresa was an ex-nun,” he said finally. “Andy might not know about that.”

“I do now,” Andy said.

Father Burne sighed. “They’re all ex-nuns these days. I can’t believe it. They pop in and out of habits the way Imelda Marcos changed shoes. They pop in and out of the seminary that way. It makes you wonder what’s going on in the real world.”

“Father Tom refuses to believe this is the real world,” Pat Mallory said.

He’d sat down on the other couch, the one Susan had not been using. Susan made herself stop pacing and look at him. He looked as big now as when she had first seen him, which surprised her. She’d been sure at the time that his size had been at least partially her imagination. On the other hand, he looked relaxed, which he hadn’t when he first came in. It was as if he’d been expecting a problem he now knew wasn’t going to arise.

“I tried to tell the good Father once that this was the only real world,” he said, “but he gave me a lecture on the joys of Heaven. I won’t do that again.”

Susan smiled. “I’m sorry if we came at a bad time. I did know about the murder. I’ve got to admit I didn’t realize there would still be so much going on.”

“There usually isn’t. Mostly we get done whatever we’re going to get done the first few hours after we’re called. I probably shouldn’t even be here.”

“You can be anywhere,” Burne said. “You’re the chief.”

“Being chief amounts to being a glorified office boy, and you know it.”

“I’m glad you came anyway,” Burne said. “It was a terrible thing.”

Mallory shifted his attention back to Susan. “If you’ve been in a convent, you wouldn’t have known her, but we all did. Theresa Cavello. Unless you were a Franciscan?”

“Immaculate Heart of Mary,” Susan said.

“Oh. Well. She was a Franciscan once, and then she quit. She was killed last Friday night, in the kitchen here.”

“I found her,” Burne said. “I came downstairs at ten o’clock and there she was, all over the kitchen floor.”

Mallory stood up. “He got on the phone and called me. There’s a precinct house three blocks away, and still he called me. And I came, didn’t I, Father?”

“Yes, Pat, you came.”

“I always do,” Mallory said. “I even come back. But I’ve got to go now. You’ll do those things I asked you to?”

“Of course I will.”

“Good. When you get the information, call me. Call me at home if you have to.”

“I will,” Burne said. “But Pat, you’ve got to understand about the precinct. You know we think they’re linked to—well, everything that goes on down here.”

“I
do
understand. Christ, trust me. I understand.” He turned to Susan and Andy, aiming for a place between them, talking to neither and both of them. “Good to see you again, Andy. Nice to have met you, Miss Murphy. I’ll tell Dan I ran into you both. I gotta go.”

He went out of the room, shaking the house as he walked. They all watched him until he disappeared.

When they heard the front door closing, Father Tom shook himself, blinked, and seemed to come out of a trance.

“Pat always says he understands about the precinct, but I don’t think he does. I don’t think he understands at all.”

“Understands what?” Andy asked.

Burne waved him quiet. “Never mind about all that. I’m sick of thinking about all that. Let’s see what we can do about
you.
”

The “you” was directed at Susan, and so was the smile. Its wattage rivaled the light in the foyer and seemed to send out sparks.

For the first time, Susan understood why people talked the way they did about Father Thomas Burne.

H
EADQUARTERS WAS ONE OF
those buildings, built in the fifties and sixties of concrete and plate glass, that was faintly reminiscent of a parking garage. There were others that looked like prisons. The fifties had been big times for New Haven. Korea followed on the heels of World War II, and the combination acted like an amphetamine cocktail. There were new schools, new hospitals, new police stations. There were even new residential colleges at Yale, although Yale had more sense than to build in concrete. Now it was forty years later and the town was a checkerboard of Victorian Gothic and Prison Camp Aesthetic. Only the Gothic looked like it was going to last another decade.

Usually Pat Mallory didn’t notice any of this. As a man, he had grown up to be what his parents had wanted him to be, and what all those brothers and sisters had taught him to be. They had crowded his life then and they crowded it now, even when they lived a thousand miles away. Eileen the nun, Kathleen the nurse, Maureen the housewife, Jack the plumber, Dick the accountant: workaholics every one of them, although
workaholic
wasn’t the word for it. Work, Pat’s mother had once told him, was identity. What you do is what you are. How well you do it is like the carat stamp on gold. It tells you how heavy you weigh in the scales of God.

Since he had gone out to Damien House on his own time, he had also gone in his own car, and without a driver. He stopped his little Toyota at the gate to the parking garage, signed in with the patrolwoman on duty, and slid down the ramp to the underground. This was one of those days when everything bothered him, when even work couldn’t stop him from getting irritated by inessentials. Headquarters building was ugly and moronic. Nobody with a brain in his head could have thought for a moment that the place would be a congenial one to work in. His car was a mistake. He had a log cabin out in Oxford and a closet full of outdoor clothes. He was six feet six. He should have bought a Wagoneer. At least that would have fit him.