Strangers (59 page)

She gasped twice in surprise as Dom was speaking, and when she tried to respond she had difficulty talking.

When he realized she was on the verge of tears, he interrupted. “Miss Monatella, I don’t know what’s happened to you and your family, but the worst is past. The worst is past. Because whatever might still be to come…at least you’re not alone anymore.”

•

Over twenty-four hundred miles east of Elko County, in Manhattan, Jack Twist spent Sunday afternoon giving away more money.

On returning from the Guardmaster heist in Connecticut the previous night, he had driven through the city, looking for those who were both in need and deserving, and he had not rid himself of all the cash until five o’clock in the morning. On the edge of physical and emotional collapse, he’d returned to his Fifth Avenue apartment, gone immediately to bed and instantly to sleep.

He dreamed again of the deserted highway in an empty moon-washed landscape, and of the stranger in the dark-visored helmet who pursued him on foot. As the moonlight suddenly turned blood-red, he woke from the dream in panic at one o’clock Sunday afternoon, flailing at his pillow. A blood-red moon? He wondered what that meant, if anything.

He showered, shaved, dressed, and took time for only a quick breakfast consisting of an orange and a half-stale croissant.

In the large walk-in closet that served the master bedroom, he removed the cleverly concealed false panel and inventoried the contents of the three-foot-deep secret storage space. The jewelry from the job in October was finally gone, successfully fenced, and most of the money from the
fratellanza
warehouse in early December had been converted to scores of cashiers’ checks and mailed to Jack’s accounts at three Swiss banks. Only a hundred twenty-five thousand remained, his emergency getaway fund.

He transferred most of the cash to a briefcase: nine banded packets of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred bills in each, and five packets of twenty-dollar bills, a hundred in each. That left twenty-five thousand still in his cache, which seemed more than enough now that he was no longer involved in criminal activity and would not be putting himself in situations that might necessitate a swift exit from the state or country.

Although Jack intended to dispose of a considerable portion of his ill-gotten wealth, he certainly did not plan to give away all of it and leave himself penniless. That might be good for his soul, but it would be bad for his future and undeniably foolish. However, he had eleven safe-deposit boxes in eleven of the city’s banks—additional emergency caches in case he needed to escape but could not reach the money behind the false partition in his bedroom closet—and those caches contained more than another quarter of a million. His Swiss accounts were worth in excess of four million. It was far more than he needed. He was looking forward to shedding half of that fortune during the next couple of weeks, at which point he would pause to decide what he wanted to do with his future. Eventually, he might give away even more.

At three-thirty Sunday afternoon, he carried his money-filled briefcase out into the city. All the strangers’ faces, which for eight years had seemed fiercely hostile, every one, now seemed like animated portraits of promise and dazzling possibilities, every one.

•

The Block kitchen smelled of coffee and hot chocolate, then of cinnamon and pastry dough when Faye took a package of breakfast rolls from the freezer and popped them in the oven.

While the others sat at the table, listening, Dom continued to call the people who had registered at the motel on that special Friday night.

He reached Jim Gestron, who turned out to be a photographer from L.A. Gestron had driven throughout the West that summer, shooting on assignment for
Sunset
and other magazines. Initially, he was friendly, but
as he heard more of Dom’s story, he cooled off. If Gestron had been brainwashed, the mind-control experts had been as successful with him as with Faye Block. The photographer was having no dreams, no problems. Dom’s tale of brainwashing, somnambulism, nyctophobia, obsessions with the moon, suicides, and paranormal experiences struck Gestron as the babbling of a seriously disturbed person. He said as much and hung up in the middle of the conversation.

Next, Dom called Harriet Bellot in Sacramento, who was no more troubled than Gestron. She was, she said, a fifty-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who had developed an interest in the Old West when, as a young WAC, she was stationed in Arizona. Every summer, she traveled old wagon-train routes and visited the sites of the forts and Indian settlements of another age, usually sleeping in her little camper but sometimes splurging on a motel room. She sounded like one of those likable, dedicated, but stern teachers who brooked no nonsense from her pupils, and she brooked none from Dom. When he started talking about fanciful stuff like poltergeist phenomena, she hung up, too.

“Does that make you feel better, Faye?” Ernie asked. “You’re not the only one whose memories were so thoroughly scrubbed away.”

“Doesn’t make me feel one damn bit better,” Faye said. “I’d rather be suffering problems like you or Dom than feel nothing. I feel as if a piece of me was cut out and thrown away.”

Perhaps she’s right, Dom thought. Perhaps nightmares, phobias, and terrors of one kind or another
are
better than having a little pocket of absolute emptiness inside, cold and dark, which would be like carrying a fragment of death around within her for the rest of her life.

•

When Dominick Corvaisis telephoned St. Bernadette’s rectory at 4:26 Sunday afternoon, seeking Brendan Cronin, Father Wycazik was in the study with officers of the Knights of Columbus, concluding the first of many planning sessions for the annual St. Bernadette’s Spring Carnival.

At four-thirty, Father Michael Gerrano interrupted with the news that the call he had just taken on the kitchen phone was from Father Wycazik’s “cousin” in Elko, Nevada. Only a few hours ago, one day ahead of schedule, Brendan Cronin had boarded a United flight to Reno, taking advantage of cancellations that had opened up some seats, and intending to use a small commuter airline from Reno to Elko on Monday. At the moment, Brendan was still in the air with United, not yet even as far as Reno and in no position to be calling anyone, so Michael’s message intrigued Father Wycazik and instantly pried him loose of the planning
session without alerting the visitors that something extraordinary was happening in the lives of their parish clergy.

Leaving the young priest to conclude matters with the Knights, the rector hurried to the kitchen phone and took the call meant for Brendan. Dominick Corvaisis, with a writer’s appreciation for the fantastic, and Stefan, with a priest’s appreciation for mystery and mysticism, became increasingly excited and voluble as they spoke to each other. Stefan swapped his knowledge of Brendan’s problems and adventures—lost faith, miraculous cures, strange dreams—for Corvaisis’ stories of poltergeist phenomena, somnambulism, nyctophobia, lunar obsessions, and suicides.

Finally, Stefan could not resist asking, “Mr. Corvaisis, do you see any reason for an old unregenerate religious like me to hold out the hope that what is happening to Brendan is somehow divine in nature?”

“Quite frankly, Father, in spite of the miraculous cures of that police officer and the little girl you mentioned, I don’t see the hand of God in this. There are too many indications of human connivery in this to support the interpretation you’d like to put on it.”

Stefan sighed. “I suppose that’s true. But I’ll still cling to the hope that what Brendan’s being called to witness there in Nevada is something meant to bring him back into the hands of Christ. I won’t give up on the possibility.”

The writer laughed softly. “Father, just from what I’ve learned of you during this conversation, I suspect you’d
never
give up on the possibility of redeeming any soul, anywhere, any time. I’d guess you don’t save souls quite the way other priests do—by finesse, by gentle and genteel encouragement. You strike me more as…well, as a blacksmith of the soul, hammering out the salvation of others by the sweat of your brow and the application of plenty of muscle. Please understand: I mean this as a compliment.”

Stefan laughed, too. “How else could I possibly take it? I firmly believe that nothing easy is worth doing. A blacksmith bent over a glowing forge? Yes, I do rather like the image.”

“I’ll look forward to Father Cronin’s arrival here tomorrow. If he’s anything like you, Father, we’ll be glad to have him on our side.”

“I’m on your side as well,” Father Wycazik said, “and if there’s anything I can do to help with your investigation, please call on me. If there’s the slightest chance these strange events involve the manifest presence of God, then I do not intend to sit on the sidelines and miss all the action.”

•

The next entry on the guest list was for Bruce and Janet Cable of Philadelphia. Neither of them was having trouble of the sort that plagued Dom,
Ernie, and the others. However, they were more willing to hear Dom out than Jim Gestron and Harriet Bellot had been, but in the end they were no more swayed by his story.

The final name on the list was Thornton Wainwright, who had given a New York City address and telephone number. When Dom dialed it, he reached a Mrs. Neil Karpoly, who said the number had been hers for more than fourteen years and that she had never heard of Wainwright. When Dom read the Lexington Avenue address from the registry and inquired if that was where Mrs. Karpoly lived, she asked him to repeat it, then laughed. “No, sir, that’s not where I live. And your Mr. Wainwright’s not a trustworthy sort if he told you that’s
his
address. Nobody lives there, although I’m sure there are thousands who might enjoy it. I know I enjoyed working there. That’s the address of Bloomingdale’s.”

Sandy was astonished when Dom reported this news: “Phony name and address? What’s that mean? Was he really a guest that night? Or did someone add the name to the registry just to confuse us? Or…what?”

•

Jack Twist possessed complete sets of sophisticated false IDs—driver’s licenses, birth certificates, Social Security cards, credit cards, passports, even library cards—in eight names, including “Thornton Bains Wainwright,” and he always employed an alias when planning and executing a heist. But he worked anonymously that Sunday afternoon, portioning out another hundred thousand dollars to startled recipients all over Manhattan. The largest gift was fifteen thousand to a young sailor and his bride of one day, whose battered old Plymouth had broken down on Central Park South, near the statue of Simón Bolívar. “Get a new car,” Jack told them as he stuffed money into their hands and playfully stuck a wad of bills under the sailor’s hat. “And if you’re wise, you won’t tell anyone about this, especially not the newspapers. That’ll just bring the IRS down on you. No, you don’t need to know my name, and there’s no need to thank me. Just be kind to each other, all right? Always be kind to each other, because we never know how much time we have on this world.”

In less than an hour, Jack gave away the entire hundred thousand that he had taken from the secret compartment in the back of his bedroom closet. With plenty of time on his hands, he bought a bouquet of coral-red roses and drove out to Westchester County, an hour from the city, to the memorial park in which Jenny had been buried over two weeks ago.

Jack had not wanted to put her to rest in one of the city’s crowded and grim cemeteries. Although he knew he was being sentimental, he felt that the only suitable resting place for his Jenny was in open country,
where there would be expansive green grassy slopes and shade trees in the summer and peaceful vistas of snow in the winter.

He arrived at the memorial park shortly before twilight. Although the uniform headstones were set flush with the earth, with no features to distinguish one from another, and although most of them were covered with snow, Jack went directly to Jenny’s plot, the location of which was branded on his heart.

While the dreary day faded into a drearier dusk, in a world colorless except for the blazing roses, Jack sat in the snow, oblivious of the dampness and cold, and spoke to Jenny as he had spoken to her during her years in a coma. He told her about the Guardmaster heist yesterday, about giving away all the money. As the curtain of twilight pulled down the heavier drape of night, the memorial park’s security guard began driving slowly around the grounds, warning the few late visitors that the gates would soon close. Finally Jack stood and took one last look at Jenny’s name cast in bronze letters on the headstone plaque, now illuminated by the vaguely bluish light of one of the streetlamps that lined the park’s main drive. “I’m changing, Jenny, and I’m still not sure why. It feels good, right…but also sort of strange.” What he said next surprised him: “Something big is going to happen, Jenny. I don’t know what, but something big is going to happen to me.” He suddenly sensed that his newfound guilt and subsequent peace with society were only the beginning steps of a great journey that would take him places he could not yet imagine. “Something big is going to happen,” he repeated, “and I sure wish you were here with me, Jenny.”

•

The blue Nevada sky had been armoring itself with dark storm clouds ever since Ernie, Ned, and Dom had begun boarding up the diner’s broken windows. Hours later, when Dom drove his rental car to the Elko airport to pick up Ginger Weiss, the world turned under a gloomy light, girdled in battlefield gray. He was too restless to wait inside the small terminal. He stood on the windswept tarmac, huddled in his heavy winter jacket, so he heard the twin engines of the ten-seat commuter craft even before he saw it descend through the low clouds. The roar of the engines contributed to the mood of impending warfare, and Dom realized uneasily that, in a sense, they were assembling their army; war against their unknown enemy loomed nearer day by day.

The plane taxied within eighty feet of the terminal, and Dr. Weiss was the fourth passenger to disembark. Even in a bulky, thoroughly unattractive carcoat, she looked petite and beautiful. The wind made a streaming banner of her silky silver-blond hair.