Charisma

  Pat smiled. “What’s the matter, Anton? Your empathy wearing thin?”

  “It’s not my empathy I’m worried about. Sometimes I think all women are crazy. Anyway—again anyway. I went into the cold storage. The body I wanted was in the back, in one of the drawers with the green tags on them that let the attendants know they’re available for release. The three new bodies were on tables in the middle of the room. They should have been stored when they came in, but we only have that one man on duty nights, except for weekends, and he was too involved with his papers. So I had to walk by these three bodies lying out to get to the drawer I wanted, and as I was going past—”

  “What?”

  “What do you think? He moved, for God’s sake. He picked up his hand and he God damned waved at me. I spun around and stared at him, but he was still, and then I thought, well, it’s impossible, but you ought to check, you have to check. So I did.”

  Up to then, Pat had been standing, shifting back and forth on his feet in a halfhearted attempt to stay warm. Now he sat down on the edge of the desk Anton had vacated and put his hands in his pockets, so that he didn’t have to watch them shake.

  “Then what?” he asked, and his voice sounded tight and high. “Then what?”

  Anton smiled. “From Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King. The boy opened his eyes, looked straight into mine, and said, ‘Father.’ ”

  “Oh, dear sweet Jesus Christ.”

  Anton bolted out of his chair. “Listen,” he said, “it’s bad, but it may be better than you think. If they can keep him alive long enough to get him to the hospital—if they can stabilize him here—I think he’s going to live. And not just live, Pat. Think. I checked him out while I was waiting for the emergency crews. They shot off a lot of hair and a lot of skin but practically no skull. They didn’t get his brain at all. He may still die—from the shock and the exposure, all that time in the ice and water—but if he survives he’s not just going to be alive. He’s going to be functioning.”

  Chapter Four

  1

  BY THE TIME SUSAN got home, it was late—later than she’d promised to be—and the weather had gone from miserable to apocalyptic. Getting off the bus on Chapel Street, walking across the Green toward Prospect Street and Edge Hill Road, she kept wondering why she had been so reluctant to ride back to a sensible stop. Down on Congress Avenue she had told herself she was in a hurry. She’d left Damien House just after eleven, full daylight as daylight went in weather like this, and the surrounding neighborhood had gone eerie. She’d almost wished for a return of the Rockettes and the young girls in sarongs. Walking down the long stretch between Amora Street and that part of Congress Avenue that was still what Dan would call “economically viable,” she was looking for the boogeyman. Boogeywoman. Her final conversation with Father Tom Burne—the one after the one about Dan, which hadn’t quite made sense—was dancing in her head.

  “Do you know where they get most of these kids?” he’d said. “The eight- and nine-year-olds they use for prostitutes?”

  “No.”

  “Foster homes. State-approved, state-paid, state-regulated foster homes. There’s more child abuse, especially child sexual abuse, in foster homes in this state than in all the other family venues combined.”

  “But if the real parents—”

  “If the real parent—and it’s usually only one—if the real parent is an abuser, he ought to be locked up. Child abuse is the only crime we have where we punish the victim instead of the offender, by law. Do you know what we do here, Miss Murphy?”

  “I think I do.”

  “I think you don’t. We provide an escape hatch. Most of these kids will do anything—and I do mean anything, including selling their butts on the street—to stay away from the social welfare people. We give them an alternative. We fight their battles with the departments. We help them avoid the depredations of the helping professions. And we get royally and eternally hassled.”

  “You have to go home, Miss Murphy. You have to come back when you’ve made up your mind.”

  Up on Prospect Street, she couldn’t even make up her mind to go home, although she knew she had to. The street was full of Yalies and girls from Albertus Magnus, pale biology majors of both sexes weighed down under book bags, nice Catholic girls in nylons and long coats with their hair pinned up under red-and-green snow hats. It wasn’t snowing but it looked like it ought to be.

  Near the Gesell Institute, she stopped, picked up a rock, and looked at it. A pair of students passed her talking about Kent, and then another pair talking about “the practically irradicable phallo-centrism of Western society.” She put the rock in her pocket—God only knew why—and headed toward home.

  One way or another, it all reminded her of the day she had left home for the convent. She was striding ahead, giving the best imaginable impression of purpose and determination, while all the time she was simply going the only place she could think of to go.

  2

  “Listen,” Andy said to her, as soon as she walked in the door, “where have you been? There’s a frigging sit-down lunch laid out in the dining room.”

  Sit-down lunch. Susan looked at the parka in her hands and frowned. She had known all along that Dan was coming home for lunch. She’d even known he expected her to be here.

  She put the parka on a hanger in the foyer closet and sat down on the small bench next to the front door to take off her boots. Overhead the chandelier was blazing, its light coming clear, and she realized someone must have polished it. In fact, someone must have polished it today. She’d turned it on last night and gotten only a muddy smear of half-illumination. Even the bulbs up there had been caked with dust.

  She got one boot off and kicked it into the closet. “I don’t understand why you’re so anxious,” she said. “It’s just Dan. It’s just lunch.”

  “He’s in one of those moods.” Andy looked off toward the center of the house. “Did you go down to that place? To Damien House?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think you ought to tell Dan you were there. I don’t think you ought to tell him we were there. I don’t think he’d like it.”

  “I’m not sure I care what Dan would like.”

  “You ought to.”

  The other boot was loose. Susan kicked it into the closet after the first one and sat up. Andy was still staring off toward the center of the house and he was sweating.

  Once, in her senior novitiate year, Susan had passed a mirror and seen her face looking just like Andy’s did now. It had been the day before a scheduled Chapter of Faults and she had had a fault to proclaim, a very serious fault, because she had broken a mirror, failed to report it, and let another sister take the blame. After hearing about eight-year-old prostitutes and twelve-year-old porn queens and children who died of cocaine overdoses at the age of ten, it seemed like a little thing, but it hadn’t then. What was worse, she had made it worse by becoming petrified of what would happen to her if anyone found out. Every time she tried to imagine confessing it, even to a priest, she got visions of her life ending in fire.

  Right now, Andy looked like his life was going to end in something much worse than fire, end by the hand of whatever it was he expected to come through that damned door. The problem was that Susan couldn’t figure out what it was he thought he was going to see.

  “I can take care of myself,” she said, thinking that wasn’t what he was up to at all. He wasn’t worried about her. “You don’t have to run interference with Dan for me.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  Andy forced his eyes away from the back foyer door. Sounds were coming from back there, clankings and rattlings, the music Susan remembered as the overture for a Really Formal Lunch.

  “They’re all crazy about him,” Andy said. “The housekeeper and those people, I mean. They think he walks on water.”

  “Dan
’s good at making people think he walks on water. It can be useful, sometimes.”

  “Dan always makes himself useful.”

  “I mean useful to us.” Susan hesitated. “It was once, wasn’t it? When we needed it most?”

  This time, Andy turned his back to the foyer door. It was an effort. Dan was bounding through the door, literally, like Ben Vereen playing the leopard on “Zoobilee Zoo.” His arms were waving in the air. His lips were stretched across his face like a rubber band pulled to the breaking point. His teeth shone.

  “Susan,” he was shouting. “Susan, Susan. Hurry up, you’re almost late.”

  “Hurry up for what?” Susan said.

  There was no more time for explanations than there had been for conversation. Dan threw his arms around her waist, picked her up, and charged off toward the dining room and the back of the house.

  3

  Susan had forgotten how intense Dan could be, how wild, how blind to the fact that other people might not be as excited for him as he was for himself. She let him carry her because it was easier than struggling. His grip was too soft to make her feel secure, and she kept imagining them tumbling over, tumbling down, breaking bones against the living-room furniture they had to weave their way through to get to the dining room. When he stuffed her in the armed captain’s chair at the foot of the table she breathed a sigh of relief, and when he thrust a glass of wine into her hand she drank it, even though she never drank wine. Andy came in behind them, dropped into a side chair, and smiled weakly.

  “Christ,” he said, “I thought you were going to kill her.”

  “I’m going to kill everybody,” Dan said happily. “I’m going to explode the biggest bomb the City of New Haven has ever seen. I’m going to end up governor in two years and the fucking president of the United States in six.”

  “My heart bleeds for the destruction of my country,” Andy said, but his heart wasn’t in it. His voice was flat.

  Dan was at the head of the table now, fiddling with a big black box that Susan suddenly recognized as the kind of radio usually called a ghetto blaster. Between them was the long, dark mahogany table, set with lace-trimmed Irish linen place mats. All the place mats had been set for lunch, even though they weren’t having guests. There was something weird about all those fans of heavy sterling silver, all those ranks of leaded Waterford crystal, all those arrangements of Royal Doulton plates, offered up to nobody and nothing at all.

  “You got out all of mother’s things,” Susan said.

  Dan fiddled with the radio dial. “Mrs. Menninger got them out. She always does when I come home for lunch. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she likes to do it.”

  “You never told her it wasn’t necessary,” Andy said.

  “I don’t see any reason for hurting her feelings. It’s not like she leaves the stuff around and makes me clean it up.”

  The radio finally hooked into a clear station. From the look on Dan’s face, it was even the right clear station. A tinny voice shot into the room, half perky puppy and half whine, saying, “This is WNHC two minutes before the hour, coming up with news.”

  “Two minutes.” Dan dropped into his chair. “I hate radio stations. Armageddon could be going on right in the middle of the Green, and they’d still wait two minutes to get to the news.”

  “Radio stations sell advertising time,” Andy said, “that’s how they make their money.”

  “Radio stations ought to be publicly financed,” Dan said, “then they’d learn to develop some concern for the public interest.”

  “Of course, you mean some concern for you.”

  Dan ignored him. It wasn’t hot, but he was jumpy, so he stood up, took off the jacket of his suit, and hung it on the back of his chair. Then he unbuttoned his vest and rolled up the sleeves. Sitting down again, he reminded Susan of the pictures of him that appeared in the Register at the start of a case. Once he got to court he was always photographed in full Brooks Brothers splendor, but just after he’d announced his intention to go to the Grand Jury he liked to appear workmanlike. At the head of the table, what he really appeared was much too thin.

  “The problem with most district attorneys,” he said, pacing back and forth in front of the radio, “is that they’re afraid to take on high-visibility cases. They’re afraid of the downside.”

  “I thought district attorneys liked high-visibility cases,” Susan said, “I thought they were good for their careers.”

  “They are if you win them.” Dan patted the radio, like a child, on the head. “The problem is, it’s so easy not to win them, especially if the case is notable because the people in it have a lot of power. I mean real power. Not just a title and a weekly check from the state.”

  “I take it you’re not about to arrest our esteemed state senator,” Andy said. “Who are you about to arrest?”

  “The problem with power is that it really is very diffuse,” Dan said. “It’s not so much what you control and who you control. It’s image. You get what I mean?”

  “No,” Susan said.

  “Well, think about it. How much power do you assume Mother Teresa has?”

  “Mother Teresa?” Susan blinked.

  “Good God,” Andy said, going white again. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you think you’re going to get away with it.”

  “Get away with what?” Susan said. “He can’t arrest Mother Teresa. She’s in Calcutta.”

  “The problem with people like Mother Teresa,” Dan said, “is that they appeal to the emotional in people. They get everyone all gushy and mushy. They totally circumvent all common sense.”

  “If you mean it’s not common sense to spend your life doing good for the untouchables in India, I agree with you,” Susan said. “Fortunately, not everyone is all that wedded to common sense.”

  “They ought to be. Mother Teresa is a very dangerous woman. People like Mother Teresa are dangerous people. They—wait.”

  Dan stared at the radio, which was sending out a little jingle about a used-car place in North Branford. The song was soprano-sharp and unoriginal, and he frowned at it.

  “I wouldn’t go there,” he said. “I know the guy who runs it. I would go to Stephen’s World of Wheels out in Bristol.”

  “Stephen’s World of Wheels sells new cars,” Andy said.

  “You’re a fool to buy a used car anyway. Not that you ever buy cars.”

  The jingle stopped and was replaced by a gong, a contralto sequence dangerously close to the one NBC used to use in the early days of television. Dan grabbed the radio and turned it first toward him and then away, toward them, as if it were a defective loud-speaker and they needed to have it pointed directly at their ears to hear anything at all. The gong stopped ringing and the tinny, perky, whiny voice from two minutes before came back, saying,

  “It’s one P. M., and this is WNHC at the top of the hour with the news.”

  “There,” Dan said, and then he sat down, abruptly, like a sitcom drunk collapsing into his chair.

  Susan found herself reaching for her cigarettes automatically, lighting up without looking to see if there was an ashtray on the table. The room was suddenly very tense, with Andy wound up tight and Dan oddly deflated. Susan thought Dan was like a small child who had waited all week for a party, only to begin being disappointed as soon as the party got under way. Andy was something else again. There was too much going on for her to be able to think about Andy.

  The tinny announcer had been replaced by the basso voice of an actor pretending to be a newsman. “At the top of the news this hour,” the actor was saying, “sources close to the top of District Attorney Dan Murphy’s office report that the New Haven prosecutor has ordered a hush-hush investigation of Father Thomas Burne, founder of New Haven’s Damien House, on charges of child abuse…”

  “Child abuse,” Andy burst out. Then he picked up his wine glass, broke it off at the stem, and said, “Son of a bitch.”

  Chapter Five

  1
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br />   FROM THE BEGINNING, THERE was one thing he had always been careful about, and that was drugs. He had seen too many people flying to believe in them. The high never lasted very long and it never solved anything. When the crash came you were just where you had started out to be, except that you were sick. Even so, it had been hard to stay away from them. Five years ago, crack had been practically a medium of exchange on Congress Avenue. Young boys who sold themselves to chickenhawks almost had to be junkies, because they had no pimps to negotiate for them and the johns expected to pay off in dope. He thought it was wrong of all those clean and shiny people to be so outraged about the pimps. The pimps served a purpose—the way lawyers and tax accountants served a purpose on Prospect Street and Edge Hill Road.

  It was getting late in the day now and he was tired. He was cold, too, but he thought he was going to be cold for a while. It was better to pretend that he was warm than to try to do anything about it. There were a thousand different ways of surviving on the street and he knew them all, but he wasn’t really good at any of them except shoplifting. He’d already picked up enough to eat so that he wasn’t hungry, and there wasn’t any point in going looking for anything else. All the best places to steal would be getting ready to close.

  He was in a part of town he didn’t know very well, just walking. The streets were lined with dry cleaners and delis and religious-articles stores, stuffed into the ground floors of six-story buildings. Above him the sky seemed to be composed of plate-glass picture windows, lit up, tortured into odd shapes by the curtains that hung at their sides. Every once in a while he would see a woman—always a woman—carrying a vase of flowers or a glass of something to drink.