Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  It was because of Jordan, not Leah, that I had spotted the surveillance by Pericle Starraci the first day he had identified me in the Campo dei Fiori. “Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real,” I once wrote to Jordan in a postcard from Bergen, Norway.

  I walked quickly through the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, where a tour bus brimming with Americans was unloading its bovine cargo.

  When I was sure I was not being followed, I slipped into the Benedictine Church of Sant’ Anselmo. Mass was in progress and I heard the monks lifting their voices in ancient plainsong as I made my way to the third confessional on the left-hand side of the church. A sign announced that its confessor spoke German, Italian, French, and English. After two Italian women came out making the sign of the cross, I entered the confessional and knelt down. The priest within turned off the light, indicating that he was done with absolving crimes against God on that day.

  “Father Jordan,” I said immediately.

  “Jack,” Jordan answered. “I’ve been waiting for you. Four people have already come to me for confession this morning. A record, I believe.”

  “Word’s out,” I whispered. “A holy man’s on the loose at Sant’ Anselmo’s.”

  “Hardly. Would you like me to hear your confession, Jack?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m not ready for that yet.”

  The voices of the monks lifted up in their serene chant to God.

  “God’s patient, Jack. He’ll wait.”

  “No, he won’t. He doesn’t exist. At least, not for me, he doesn’t.”

  “That’s not true. He exists for all of us in different ways.”

  “Prove to me there’s a God.”

  “Prove to me there’s not one,” the priest said softly.

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “It’s not much of a question, either,” said Jordan.

  “At least try,” I urged. “Tell me about the beauty of the sunsets or the grand designs of snowflakes. Tell me in words, no matter how stupid or silly, why you believe in God.”

  Jordan sighed. I knew his own faith had stalked him through days and nights of despair, and when it finally chose to pounce, he was ready for it and let himself be devoured like a lamb. Readiness is the opening God needs, I thought, as I listened to my friend in the dark, Latinized air.

  “Jack,” said Jordan, “the wing of a fly is proof enough of the existence of God for me.”

  “I’ve lost the gift of faith. I used to have it, but I lost it and can’t seem to get it back. I don’t even know if I want it back. I’ve forgotten how to pray.”

  “You’re praying now, Jack. You’re on a quest. It takes different forms with all of us.” Jordan paused. “How’d the trip to Venice go? How’s Mike? How’s pretty Ledare?”

  “They’re both fine, although Mike has taken the Hollywood stuff to the extreme. He dresses in suits that look like they were made from the foreskins of llamas.”

  “What is the movie that Mike wants to make?” he asked, ignoring my comments.

  “The kind that tells the story of Jordan Elliott, who disappeared in 1971 and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  The chanting had stopped and the church gave off a strong odor of incense and melting tallow. Without the chant, the church seemed suspended in midair, and I was aware that Jordan was strangely still.

  “What does Mike want to tell about Jordan Elliott?”

  “He wants to tell our story. The sixties included. It’s a hell of a story.”

  “It ends with Jordan’s death.”

  “That’s the conventional ending,” I said. “But it sure as hell isn’t the one that Mike believes. I implied that Mike’s become a trifle shallow. I didn’t say he’d become stupid.”

  I tried to study Jordan’s face through the confessional screen but, as always, he kept his cowl pulled down around his head. Jordan was now only a voice to me, as he’d always tried to be since that amazing day when Jordan Elliott’s mother came to Rome to tell me that her son was living there in secret. Because he was a hunted man, Jordan agreed to meet with me if I would agree not to see him face to face.

  “How did Mike hear the rumors that I was still alive?” the priest asked, and there was an exhaustion in his voice, something damaged that I had not heard in him before.

  “The same source. Always the same source. When Mrs. McEachern went to confession at the Vatican several years ago and someone she taught English to in eleventh grade was her confessor.”

  “Mistaken identity,” Jordan said. “That’s what I told her that day.”

  “She’s also the voice teacher at Waterford High. Claims she never forgets a voice.”

  Jordan scoffed, but he was shaken by what I had told him. “What are the chances of hearing in Italy the confession of a South Carolina English teacher who once taught you Life on the Mississippi in high school?”

  “Not good,” I admitted. “The rumors started in earnest when she got back to town. But they had been floating around Waterford since the day of your untimely death.”

  “I was so overwhelmed then. I didn’t have time to think it through.”

  “You didn’t do badly. I read your obituary and I went to the memorial ceremony as an honorary pallbearer.”

  “So did Mike.”

  “He has interviewed Mrs. McEachern. A lot of folks think her story had a lot of credibility. She is neither a quiet nor a flaky woman. What better place to hide in the modern world than the priesthood?”

  “No, Jack,” the priest said. “You’ve never understood that either. The priesthood’s the worst place to hide. You become a priest to remove the mask, to come out from under the rock.”

  “You became a priest because you were good at running away, not because you were good at facing things. You and I are blood brothers when it comes to that.”

  “I became a priest to better worship my God,” Jordan said angrily, “you low-life son of a bitch.”

  I tapped on the thin membrane that separated me from my confessor’s ear. “Excuse me, Lord. My confessor just called me a foul name.”

  “Only under extreme provocation.”

  “I brought you some mail from your mother.”

  “She’s planning a trip over here next spring.”

  “I didn’t tell you. Shyla’s sister came to town. Tracked me down with a private eye. It surprised me that I was pleased to see her. She’s trying to find out everything about her sister.”

  “Then you should help her.”

  “I might.”

  “Tell her what I think about Shyla, Jack. Tell her that I think that Shyla is the only saint I’ve ever met, the only holy woman.”

  “Too bad she didn’t marry a saint,” I said, getting ready to leave.

  “You’re not even close,” Jordan agreed. “But she married a hell of a friend.”

  In the darkness of the confessional, Jordan quietly prayed the words and made the sign of the cross.

  “Go now and sin no more, Jack,” Jordan said. “You’re absolved of sin.”

  “This was no sacrament,” I said. “I delivered the mail.”

  “So it’s not a conventional absolution,” the priest said, “but you’re not a conventional man.”

  “Lay low for a while,” I advised. “Mike’s got enough money to find Jimmy Hoffa.”

  As I left the confessional booth, I turned toward the chanting monks standing in their pews and walked to the altar where a priest was just finishing Mass. The Italian vernacular reminded me of the Latin responses I used to say during the Common of the Mass during my childhood. A painting in a side altar caught my attention and I studied it, wondering if this painting of the Annunciation was the work of Raphael or someone who had studied the techniques of the master with great precision. In Rome, masterpieces were as common as Easter eggs and you never knew when you would stumble across one in your wanderings. Since I knew enough about the history of art to know that the answer to the painting’s provenance would
not come from me, I made a note to look up the artist the next time I had business at the Vatican library.

  Crossing the nave of the church, I knelt beside an older Roman woman, put five hundred lire through a coin slot, and lit a single candle for the repose of Shyla’s soul. Impatient with the flame and the gesture, I rose too quickly and started the long walk down the aisle. On the other side of the church, I watched as Jordan left the confessional and made his way to the side door leading to the interior of the monastery.

  Jordan had rarely let me get a good look at him since we had resumed our long-interrupted friendship in Rome. He felt that the less I knew about his life as a priest the more protection I would have if someone blew his cover. I knew he went by another name during his daily rounds in his order, but he had never revealed that name to either his mother or me. As I watched him move quickly toward that netherworld of prayer and fasting that now sustained him, I could still spot the swagger of the athlete beneath his habit. His head was shaved and he was bearded, but any woman with an appreciative eye would have turned to admire his handsomeness and physicality. Of all the boys I ever played ball with, Jordan Elliott was the only one I feared when we took the field together. The hardships of the monastery had only made a hard body more formidable. He did not seem to possess the interior governors on his reserves of physical courage that the rest of us did. On the playing fields of Waterford, that gentle priest I watched moving gracefully toward some modest cell deep in the city would kick the country ass of any boy who got in his way and all of us knew it. In a full-contact scrimmage before the Bishop England game, Jordan once nearly tore my head off when I went out to receive a swing pass from Capers Middleton. It was the day I learned what smelling salts were.

  As I resumed my way out, I saw something that looked vaguely like a firearm sticking out of a confessional in front of me, pointing at Jordan. I had worked side by side with photographers for much of my career, knew many of them were fanatical about getting the perfect shot, but never knew one who would occupy a confessor’s seat during a Mass no matter how much money he was earning from the shoot. I heard the Nikon’s rapid-fire clicking as the telephoto lens recorded every step of Jordan’s departure. Then I watched the camera withdraw inside the confessional as the monks began to sing again.

  Stepping into another side chapel, I waited for the unseen photographer of the departing monk to make his appearance. For five minutes, there was not even the quiver of a curtain around the confessional, then I saw a well-dressed man carrying a leather bag step out, make the sign of the cross, and genuflect before he turned and left the church. Though the man did not see me, I know it would have surprised him if he had discovered I was still in the church. In my mind, I retraced my steps going backward, wondering where I had let my guard down, when I took the rituals of security and watchfulness so seriously whenever I paid Jordan a visit.

  But as I watched the private investigator Pericle Starraci pause at the holy water font and bless himself, I caught a look of preening self-satisfaction on his face and was quite sure that he thought he had solved the disappearance of Jordan Elliott once and for all and had the photographs to prove it.

  Chapter Seven

  I was in the middle of a dream about Shyla when gunfire in the piazza awoke me at three in the morning. The sound of a motorino racing down the side street just below my bedroom window made me think of the drone of June bugs tied to a string and let loose in the false freedom of circles. The dream washed itself out when I turned on my night-light and made my way down a dark hallway toward the living room. In the piazza, I heard the sound of people running and screaming, and far off on a hill above Trastevere, a siren howled its way down a curving street, the sound echoing back on itself. Leah was already at one of the windows watching the policeman bleed to death.

  The man was nearly dead, and it was hard to believe a man’s body could hold so much blood. It would prove to be a last-gasp action of the Red Brigades, and this poor, dying policeman would be the final fatality the city of Rome would suffer due to the extreme views of that group.

  “He’s so young,” Leah said.

  “A kid,” I agreed, looking down at the man as a crowd began to form, shouting prayers and imprecations as the carabinieri who guarded the French Embassy tried to keep order. A doctor from the next building checked his pulse, and nodded his head sadly.

  “Why did they kill him?” Leah asked.

  “His uniform. He represents the government. He stands for Rome,” I said.

  “There should be a better reason,” she said. “Think of how his parents will feel.”

  “It’s politics, sugarpeeps,” I said. “It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you’ll know what I mean.”

  “Don’t tell Ledare this when you pick her up today,” Leah said as I carried her back to her bedroom. “We want her to like Rome, don’t we, Daddy?”

  “That we do.”

  “Will they clean up the blood before she gets here?”

  “That’s one thing Europeans do great,” I said, laying her back down in bed. “In this century, they’ve had a lot of practice cleaning up blood. No one’s better at it.”

  “If the Great Dog Chippie were here,” Leah said, starting to fall asleep as I watched her, “the men who did that would be in big trouble, right, Daddy?”

  “They’d be lying in the piazza,” I said quietly, “covered with dog bites. Chippie was always there when you needed her.”

  “A great dog,” Leah said, then slept.

  After I got Ledare Ansley settled in the guest room, I told her about the early-morning killing and invited her to go along with me on a typical day of an American living in Rome. She had spent two weeks in Venice and Paris often listening to Mike talk about all the memories he carried with him of his family and town, and still trying to convince her to come aboard on the project. I began to lead her through the winding pathways of Rome, knowing it would make her drop the subject. It only takes Rome about ten minutes to make you forget you have ever been anywhere else on earth. With Ledare, I had the pleasure of watching the wizardry of stones and broken columns take her by surprise. In Rome, every step you take has been taken by a Caesar, a pope, or a barbarian before you. We floated above the history of the West as Ledare related the tales of Waterford to me. Each step I took with Ledare carried us over a dozen civilizations, layered like shirts in a drawer.

  At the top of the hill we paused to watch an elegant young couple coming out of the chapel of the Palazzo dei Conservatori to the applause of relatives, friends, and passersby like us.

  Making my way through the crowd with Ledare, I ducked inside the courtyard of the museum and walked past the outsized monuments of the statue of Constantine, distributed in gigantic, unsettling fragments around the courtyard. We passed by a huge veiny hand, large as a caboose, and an index finger taller than I am.

  “Because you write, Ledare, and because you write in English, there is one holy shrine here that you must see,” I said as I pointed to some Latin words on an entablature.

  “I don’t do Latin,” Ledare said. “What does it mean?”

  “An elderly Englishwoman showed me this tablet when I was up here with Leah. She told me that the emperor Claudius had taken his legions across the English Channel. She asked me to consider the amazement of our forebears as they watched war elephants disembarking on the beaches of Dover.”

  “Probably like we felt when we first saw television,” Ledare said, smiling.

  “Quiet,” I ordered. “No jokes. When Claudius returned victorious from his campaign in England, he had this inscription carved on a page of pure Luna marble. Look carefully at these four broken-off letters that spell B-R-I-T.”

  “Okay, I give up. I surrender,” Ledare said.

  “This is the first mention of Britannia, the isle of England, in all of history. Our mother tongue began at this spot, Southern girl.”

  “I can’t take all this in. It gives me a headache,” Ledare said.
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  “We should fall to our knees in gratitude at this spot,” I suggested.

  Ledare said, “You go ahead, darling, I’m wearing panty hose.”

  “Ha! I see you’re no romantic,” I said.

  “I’m romantic about people, Jack,” Ledare said. “I’ve got real self-control when it comes to rocks.”

  As we moved southward away from the museum and toward the Forum we walked onto the Belvedere Tarpeo, where a cluster of Japanese tourists huddled close to a tour guide pointing toward the Temple of Saturn. The air filled with the snapping shutters of Minoltas and Nikons, sounding like some parliamentary debate of extinct insects. I jumped when a handsome young couple who stood apart from the group called to me to take their picture. I took their camera, advanced the film, set the light meter, then after Ledare gestured for the couple to move several steps to their right, I managed to photograph them with both the Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Colosseum in the background. We took turns bowing to each other, then Ledare and I continued down the hill secretly replenished by that meeting of strangers.

  On the Via di San Teodoro, we took turns drinking out of the fountain in front of the Belgian Embassy. The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl. I led Ledare down the long street to the antique store where I came to pay my rent once a month.

  Savo Raskovic was looking through a large leatherbound volume when we walked through the door. Savo took one look at Ledare and said to me, “Finally, you have gotten yourself a girlfriend. It is unnatural to be without a woman so long. I am Savo Raskovic.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Savo,” Ledare said as this tall elegant man took her hand and kissed it. “My name is Ledare Ansley.”