The Assassini (14 page)

We walked slowly along the creek bank, then turned slowly back toward the church. I told him what Dunn had said about the killer being a priest.

Peaches shook his head. “I know a couple of priests who are killers at heart but, well, this sounds a little crazy. One priest kills Lockhardt, Heffernan, and Val. Who knows what kind of hell Val was stirring up—but why Lockhardt and Heffernan? Members of the inner councils—it’s crazy.”

“Dunn seems to take it pretty seriously.”

“Priests,” Peaches said. “Reminds me. Mrs. Hanrahan’s got something I want you to hear. Hang around while I wrap this party.”

Edna Hanrahan had made a fresh pot of coffee. She pushed a plate of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos toward the middle of the table. Her hair was gray, her face ridged with laugh lines, her eyes perky behind thick lenses. You could see the girl she’d been. She had old-fashioned nuns’ hands with a history of hot water and carbolic soap. She wasn’t a nun, but she’d been taking care of the priests at St. Mary’s for thirty-five years. As a girl at parochial school in the late thirties, she’d been a pupil of a teacher I’d never heard of, Father Vincent Governeau. What could she have to tell me?

“Tell them about Father Governeau, Edna,” Peaches said. “What you told me this afternoon.”

“Well, you know how silly girls can be, and he was so handsome, like a movie star. Like Victor Mature, I’d say.” She stroked a Mint Milano as if it were the bone of a saint. “Dark, swarthy. And ever so nice to talk to. Very
sensitive
. Paintings, religious paintings, that’s what he lectured to us about. He loved the paintings, like he knew the men who painted them. He showed us paintings of popes and he talked like he knew
them
. He was so familiar. We were all thrilled.” She cleared her throat. “Cookie?”

I took one, and she sighed gratefully.

“What else did you girls talk about? You silly girls?” Peaches was grinning gently, a masterful interrogator.

“Well, we thought he was quite a dish. And he seemed to like us all right, so we’d flirt with him, outrageous we was—all in good fun, mind you. But we’d never seen a priest like this one.” She sipped her coffee, savoring the memory from so long ago. “And there was a nun, Sister Mary Teresa, she was so pretty. Well, we saw the two of them talking, walking under the trees, they looked so sweet. And we used to think what a shame it was they could never marry. And some of the boys used to say that Father Governeau was having a, you know,
relationship
 … and we wondered if it was with our Sister Mary Teresa, and we wondered how, for heaven’s sake—” She gave us a plaintive look, as if she hoped we weren’t holding all this against her. “Well, I’m sure we should have kept our noses out of other people’s business. Then we graduated and left our happy schooldays behind us. I moved to Trenton and, you know, life went on.”

“And then?” Peaches prompted her.

“I never saw Father Governeau again.” Edna took another cookie, turning it slowly in her roughened fingers, staring at it. “Until I saw his picture in
The Trentonian
. He was dead … I just couldn’t believe it.”

“Priests do die,” I said.

“But not like that! By his own hand! I’d never have believed it, not in a million years.” She looked up at me.
“But I thought you’d know all about Father Governeau, Mr. Driskill.”

“Why’s that, Edna? I’ve never heard of him before.”

“Well, it was your orchard and all, what he hanged himself in … I just thought you’d know, that’s all. ’course you was so little …”

“We never talked about it,” I said.

We were driving back toward Princeton with the defroster and wipers working on the frozen mist dimpling the windshield. I said, “Why was Val asking questions about the hanged priest? He hangs himself in our orchard and Val, never having shown the slightest interest in him before, turns up all these years later wanting to see Sam Turner’s files.”

Dunn stared at the slippery road. “Speaking as a writer of books, the hanged priest may be a red herring—”

“But she did ask to see the file. That’s a fact. And I’ve got another fact for you—the person,
your
homicidal priest if you insist, who killed my sister also stole her briefcase, whatever notes she may have been carrying with her. Notes for her book or anything else. It’s gone.”

“How do you know?”

I told him and he nodded. “One book of mine, you wouldn’t believe the reams of notes. The immortal Wodehouse said that the notes for one of his novels filled many more volumes than the manuscript itself. It took me eight years to plot that book of mine and I wrote it four times.” He hummed tunelessly for a moment. “Hanged priest. Forty-plus years later she asks about the hanged priest and another priest kills her and steals her briefcase. We’re already out there in the gap, my friend. When you’re alone in the fog in no-man’s-land, when you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been, when you’re but there in the gap … the trick is not to step on a land mine. You’ve got to move carefully. Or the priest will come at you out of the night and kill you, too.”

When we pulled into the drive leading up to the house the wind hit the car sideways, shook it.

“You were good at pinning the tail on the donkey,” I
said. “I saw you do it three times in a row. How’d you do that?”

“The only possible way. I cheated. Kids are very easy to fool. They love it. They expect it from a priest and I wouldn’t want to let them down. It’s all part of the great seduction.… It’s the way we’ve always done it, you know that. Take a young mind in its formative years”—he smiled at me, holding the wheel in the frozen ruts, the snow graying in the headlights—“and seduce it. It’s yours forever.”

“Thank you, Miss Jean Brodie.”

There was a police car parked in the forecourt. A cop was waving a red flashlight at us. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Driskill. Chief Turner figured we’d best keep an eye on the place for a few days. We’re gonna switch off every four hours or so.” He looked cold and his nose was red.

“Why don’t you come inside, then?”

“That’s okay, sir. It’s warm in the car. Chief says we stay in the car. I got me a thermos of coffee, I’m fine.”

“As you wish. I appreciate it.”

Dunn watched the cop go back to his car. “We’ve gotten a bloody nose since last night, Ben. You know what my dad used to say to me? I’d come home from school, all banged up from a schoolyard scrap, he’d say, ‘Artie, nobody ever died of a bloody nose yet.’ So, get some sleep. Take a look at things tomorrow.”

I went inside. The house was quiet in the way that a sailboat on Long Island Sound is quiet in the night. It creaked, it moaned, almost seemed to give underfoot. The fire was reduced to a clump of faintly glowing coals. I placed a couple of logs among them and pulled one of the leather chairs closer and watched the fire come back to life.

Father Dunn’s remarks about cheating the kids, how easy it was, how the Church set out to seduce the minds of the young, came back to me and made me smile. He was a rascal. And he never had told me what his job was. But he had access to Archbishop Cardinal Klammer.
And to cops who told him inside stuff. And what had Peaches said? Dunn had big-deal pals in Rome.…

I was feeling the pull of the Church, the insidious beckoning finger stretching toward me, the seduction. The march of my thoughts was disorderly and ragtag, darting from the Vuitton briefcase to the priest dangling from the limb in our orchard to some other priest calmly pressing the gun to the back of my sister’s head to yet another priest unerringly pinning the tail on the donkey every time, and I was too worn out to impose my will on the mental chaos. There was no fighting back.

It had been so long since I’d thought of myself as a Catholic. A long time since I’d
been
a Catholic. Damn. Being a Catholic … it had been love and hate, right from the beginning.

It was less a dream than a memory bobbing to the surface. Between waking and sleeping, I saw the bird and smelled the wet wool and the years slipped away, and I found myself back in the darkening March afternoon so long ago.

A wet, cold day: spring had not yet declared itself. From the schoolroom window I saw the piles of dirt-encrusted snow melting away into the mud, the wet gravel driveway curving from the tree-lined street. The clouds lay low and gray over the town. The schoolroom was overheated, but I sensed the wind and the smell of the rain.

I was eight years old and scared half to death. I had loused up my catechism earlier in the day and Sister Mary Angelina had swept down on me, marched the length of the aisle between the desks, mouth clenched, eyeballs peeled back, holding the triangular metal ruler in her white, bony hand. I couldn’t take my eyes from the thin, bloodless lips, the pale and unlined face, the habit rustling softly as she approached. The radiators hissed. My classmates turned solemnly, eyes wide, glad it was me and not themselves.

I heard her voice but was too frightened to fully comprehend her remarks. I stuttered, botched my response, forgot what I had memorized so carefully the
night before. Tears sprang. The metal ruler flashed and the skin split across my knuckles. I saw a thin red line traced across my hand. I felt the hot flush blotching my face. I was crying. I swallowed against the need to cry out, heard the resulting shameful whimper.

I moped quietly through the rest of the day, kept my eyes downcast, managed to avoid Sister Mary Angelina’s gaze. But the fear, and what I was beginning to recognize as hatred, was building to an eight-year-old’s crescendo, leaving me shaking in the boys’ toilet, running cold water across my knuckles. After lunch I returned to class, my plan in place. Benjy Driskill had had enough. I thought it over, tracing the arcs of possible consequences, and couldn’t see how anything could be worse than an endless train of confrontations with Sister Mary Angelina.

At afternoon recess I worked my way to the back of the school which loomed against the grayness, all porches and turrets and recessed windows. Deep red building stones, black trim with dim yellow lights glowing from within. A fortress. I was about to escape.

I waited in the shrubbery near an old unused coach house. The afternoon dragged on, no one came looking for me. The schoolday ended, the other kids burst out, ran for home or to waiting cars. My plan had extended only so far as not having to return to class. Once the grounds were empty of children and nuns I felt wonderfully daring, alone. Ground fog clung to the wet grass, formed itself around the evergreens.

As I stood shivering, however, another hour passed and darkness began overpowering the afternoon, and I discovered that having escaped Sister Mary Angelina was not altogether enough. The excitement at the moment’s triumph faded. It was time to go home and face that music. I was edging along the high black iron fence when I saw the bird.

It was impaled on one of the arrow-shaped points at the top of the fence. It was dead and decomposing, little more than a straggly handful of feathers stuck with blood to the spindly skeletal remains. It hung there, an open glittering eye, unblinking, shiny, staring malevolently at me.

In my eyes, terrified at not knowing my catechism for Sister Mary Angelina, paralyzed at the sight of the painting of the gaunt, agonized Christ crucified and dripping with gore just outside the door of the third-grade room, the bird was incomprehensibly evil, the climax toward which the long, unhappy day had been building.

I couldn’t face Sister Mary Angelina anymore, the black eyes burning behind the flat, round discs, the pale white face like a kind of clown’s that turned again and again to stare me down in my dreams.…

I bolted, slipping and falling, running across the wet, half-icy grass. I reached the gravel path and tore down toward the towering black gate and the freedom beyond, away from the nuns and the dead bird.

Panting, dripping with sweat, I looked up as I approached the gate. My mother was coming up the walk. She didn’t look happy.

Turning, I ran blindly back up the gravel path toward school.

And suddenly I was overwhelmed in a cloud of heavy, damp black wool. The scent overwhelmed me, like a gas, like the ground fog. I swung my arms, beating at the cape, struggling to free myself, but strong arms enfolded me, held me tight. I was crying, frightened, and ashamed and sick.

It was Sister Mary Angelina.

When I saw her face through the tears, all I could make out were the piercing eyes behind the glasses … the bird skewered on the point, the bleeding Christ, the darkness of the school halls … I saw the hatred and the fear, all the powdery white women in long black robes, the ravens swooping down on me.…

“Benjy, Benjy, it’s all right, dear, really, it’s all right, don’t cry.…”

Sister Mary Angelina’s voice was soft and she was kneeling beside me on the muddy gravel. The arm around my shoulders, her arm, softened its grip, and through the fists I’d flung before my eyes I saw that she was smiling gently, eyes shining and warm. I tried to speak but could only cough and hiccup and she was sheltering me with
her arms, patting my back, cooing softly in my ear. “Don’t cry, Benjy, there’s nothing to cry about, nothing atali.…”

Everything in my small universe was spinning, nothing made sense, but I couldn’t deny her touch, the loving voice.

She seemed young, not an old lady. She seemed someone else, a different Sister Mary Angelina. She was motioning my mother to wait. Whispering to me. Her woolen cape was dragging on the gravel, getting dirty, and she didn’t seem to care.

I leaned against her shoulders, burying my face in the dampness. Inexplicably, everything was all right.

Sister was a person. And with that realization my first rebellion against the Church had ended.

Somehow nothing had been what it seemed.

The hatred had been put down by kindness. And Sister Mary Angelina had been transformed, metamorphosed. She had become someone to turn to.

No one ever explained to me how it had happened. But I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to cling to her and feel her arms around me and the strength of her body.

It took me a long time to understand that the great seduction had just begun.