“Mr. Burkhalter.” The priest turned to Blaise. “Dr. Cunningham.”
“Sergio Paoli, Father.”
Father Argyle contemplated Sergio for an eternal moment, then said, “It’s encouraging to see Saint Paul’s Roman protector alive and well in the twentieth century.”
Sergio grinned as he must have when he was a boy and some literate priest uncovered his secret.
“Why don’t you sit down, Father?” Blaise offered his seat, but the priest settled for the chair Linda had abandoned. Standing in the center of the room, staring at her uncle and biting her finger between her small, even teeth, she said, “He’s going to die.”
Milo held his arms out, inviting her to come to him. “It’s probably best, my dear.” His voice was at its best when comforting grief: deep, resonant, full of compassion. It should have been a priest’s voice.
“You did it.” Linda’s jade-green eyes locked with her uncle’s. Milo could not look back. Whatever the relationship between him and his niece, he had crossed the barrier.
Milo slumped back into his seat.
“Why not tell the priest?” Blaise’s voice contained neither censure nor anger. “You want to tell somebody.”
Milo’s expression remained the same, but his facade of indifference had slipped.
“It would be a confession. You and the priest. The rest of us already know. How else will you ever get Linda to listen?”
Milo’s eyes flicked toward Linda and returned as quickly to his hands on the desk blotter.
Sergio looked at Blaise and nodded so slightly that Blaise wouldn’t have caught the sign if he wasn’t looking for it. Sergio felt the flow of emotion. Blaise let the minutes stretch, doled out by the tick of a nineteenth-century clock that was measuring this moment by the standards of another age.
“Will it, Father?”
Milo spoke into his hands on the desktop, but the priest understood and said, “Yes.”
Looking into Sergio’s unwinking eyes, Milo averted his face and began talking. After a time the clock with the Seth Thomas works chimed, and Milo stopped as the sound permeated the house. When it finished he took up the narrative as if he had never paused, reciting details in an emotionless monotone that gave no hint of what he felt.
Finished, he stared at Father Argyle and then, in afterthought because he had started without preparation or ritual, he crossed himself and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it, priest?” Blaise demanded of the Jesuit.
“I am sorry, but it is,” Father Argyle said. He gave Milo absolution. “I’m sorry for you, too,” he said as he reached across the desk and touched Milo lightly.
“You have to go now, Father.” Sergio stood and the priest faced him, an elongated black shadow poised to resist.
“You must, Father. There’s no more you can do here.” Blaise shrugged when he had the priest’s attention. “There’s other business that’s no concern of yours, or of mine, either. Staying will not change it. I believe it would be better if we make you leave.”
“Why will you stay?” The priest’s question was a challenge Blaise understood. One that he would rather not answer.
“Because,” he said finally, “I have no soul to stain.”
“Every man has a soul.”
“I lost mine, Padre. Some time ago. Please go now.”
“Padre?” Sergio indicated the way out and the priest followed along reluctantly.
While Sergio was gone, locking the front door, Milo stared at the desk drawer he had slammed shut earlier. “I still have my gun, Milo.” Blaise spoke gently, as if fearful of spooking an excited horse into running.
Sergio came back and examined Milo critically. “What are we going to do with you, Milo? Should we ask your niece?”
Milo glanced at the couch where Linda sat with her legs tucked under her. Blaise looked and felt . . . remembrance, perhaps. He had started after something, and despite his best efforts it hadn’t worked out. And now he could barely recall what he had wanted in the first place.
“No,” Milo said.
“Do what you want,” Linda said. “I don’t care anymore.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Blaise made the suggestion as gently as he could but Linda shook her head. Her hair glinted blood red in the shadowed light.
“I’ll stay.” She tilted her head down so Blaise couldn’t see her face. It gave her voice a muffled quality.
“I’m not going to kill you, Mr. Burkhalter.” Sergio opened Gordon’s leather case, revealing a syringe and long needed and a little belted row of brown ampules like plastic bullets. He removed the syringe and screwed on the needle. Then he selected an ampule, holding it up to the light to see inside before inserting the needle and drawing the plunger back. “You can’t,” Milo said.
“Yes, he can, Uncle!” Linda’s eyes were hot as she witnessed the ritual. “You knew. You could have stopped Jonathan. You didn’t tell the priest, but I know your deft little ways of taunting my husband into doing what you want.” Her mouth turned down. “Poor Jonathan. You were always so far ahead it was no contest.”
“For you, Linda.” Fright was starting to work on Milo. “Realistically, what kind of husband was he for you?”
“I don’t know. I hurt him terribly, and he loved me all the same.” Linda thought a moment. “I love him, too.” Blaise felt a hundred years old, but he owed Sergio and Gordon. He told himself he was not killing Milo. He had helped Gordon do the same thing to Helen because Linda told Milo about Dobie, and Milo told West. And there had been Esther Tazy . . .
There wasn’t much struggle left in Milo. Blaise held him and said he was sorry when Sergio positioned the needle and squeezed the contents of the little brown bullet into Milo’s brain. But he lied. He wasn’t sorry.
There are things men do that only men can do. This will not change.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 35
Landing at the San Diego airport on a PSA nonstop from San Francisco, the final turn drops the jet low enough for passengers to read license plates on the freeway. It is a relatively safe airport because pilots are scared spitless as they worm their white-knuckled way down into that hole amid the hills, too busy flying to note the unreality of looking up at what used to be the rooftop bar of the El Cortez. During this landing Blaise experienced no fears or fantasies. Something had stayed behind in San Francisco, and he knew he would never be the same again.
Cool morning air, rank with smells of the bay, filled the city. The carpeted hotel hallway held lonely echoes, and the sun was still long minutes away from washing out the shadows. Blaise stopped at the door, knocking softly. It opened while he debated returning later.
Helen wore a filmy peignoir. With the white cap of bandage on her head she looked like a nun. “I waited up for you.” The black kitten raised its head from her cupped hand and looked at Blaise with unfocused eyes.
He stepped inside, gently closing the door. “How did you know I’d come?”
“I would have waited until you did.” Moving slowly, Helen deposited the kitten in the drawer of the hotel night table where it went back to sleep.
Blaise started shaking and she undressed him and pulled him into the bed. “Reaction,” he said. He was too weak to stop.
Helen said, “I know.” But she didn’t. She knew better than to ask to what he was reacting. Later, when the sun started warming the room, she snuggled against him. “Do you want to talk?”
Blaise stared out the window at pigeons starting their day. “No.” He spoke without thinking. Then: “Yes. A little.”
“All right.”
“I love you,” he said. “I have to say it now because you can’t expect me to tell you that often. It’s something you have to know and believe. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Gordon said I had to tell you about my parents. But I don’t believe I can. Some people think
I caused their deaths. For a time I thought so, too. Now I’m not sure. Either the universe is random and my parents died because they were supposed to—or they died for what they were and what they made me.”
“That’s all?”
Blaise shrugged. “I’m no good at telling people what I feel. That won’t change. I thought about it flying down here and I had to tell you I love you now, while I can talk. But it’s just a moment, Helen. It will go away, and we’ll be back to square one if you don’t believe me.”
“You could try to tell me more often, Blaise.”
“I am trying.” He forced a grin. “Also not to lie.”
“I’m grateful for that.” Helen laid her head on his arm. “You will try. You promise?”
“Yes.”
“It’s your parents, isn’t it? Gordon said you blamed yourself for their deaths. He said your anxiety was caused by the fear of failing people you loved. Of killing them by the common sins. He was right, wasn’t he?”
“Gordon said a lot of things. Not all right.” Blaise looked at the ceiling, seeing Sergio saying good-bye at the airport and knowing what he was going to do next, knowing what was going to happen to himself eventually. And Gordon’s dying face.
Confessing, Milo had said Gordon knew what he did. Maybe not at first, but later. West kept Gordon in line by threatening to expose his greed. Gordon had millions in a Zurich bank. He had grown up poor. Blaise compared his own desperation for another Prize. He tried to visualize himself in the ceiling but all he saw was mist. “No,” he said. “Don’t blame my parents.”
She held him even after he fell asleep. Gordon had lied.
He’d told Blaise he was going to have to tell Helen about his parents. Then Gordon had told her himself.
“I know you’d tell me if you could,” Helen whispered. She held him and when he jerked in his sleep she rocked him and sang in a language he didn’t know.
The intelligence to understand more may only make the day brighter and the night darker.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 36
An hour before dawn, Sergio walked barefoot through wet grass surrounding the main house. The ground was rough, but he didn’t feel pain anymore. Sensation remained, but deadened, without trauma.
After dropping Blaise at the airport, he swallowed the last of the amphetamines before getting back on the winding coast highway north to the wine counties. Blaise had offered to go along. Standing barefoot in the darkness staring at the house he was going to break into, Sergio had to smile. The closer the end came, the more Blaise acted like a wet nurse, and the more useless and dangerous he became. He was upset enough over Milo’s ramblings about Gordon.
Sergio understood the pressure on Gordon. Sooner or later Blaise would be realistic. What mattered was that Gordon injected himself after he had the money, and had protected him so long after recognizing Blaise as a threat. Milo said West fretted constantly, and only Gordon stood between West’s rage and Bruno’s orders to kill. Sergio understood rage.
He stepped noiselessly onto the porch, moving in stages in case of a dog. The buildings were fairly new. Before actually coming onto the grounds Sergio had recognized an echo of Giovanni Oesti’s simpler, poorer winery in Southern California—as if West was recreating some idyllic childhood that never happened. Blaise had predicted this.
A board creaked. Sergio was half in the hall, but he stopped anyway, listening. You’re a brainy bastard, Blaise Cunningham, he thought. The house was dark and a familiar tension gripped Sergio. He’d been doing B and E’s all his life, but the thrill never went away.
In the back of the house, two doors had breathing behind them, the sound of sleep in a closed room. Sergio looked at the doors in the dim light and made a face. He could open one, shoot whoever was in the bed, then go in the other room like a runaway truck. Fifty-fifty he wouldn’t kill West. Fifty-fifty he’d be killed himself. It don’t take a mathematician, Doc.
He moved a chair in front of the two doors and sat down to wait.
Huddled on the leather couch, Linda knew how she appeared to Sergio and Blaise and Uncle Milo. Pathetic, lost, a waif needing a kind hand. Uncle Milo encouraged the deception when she was a girl and she kept it up into adulthood. Uncle Milo looked at her with pathetic eyes when Sergio, the man West had sent after Blaise on the airplane and then at the marine park in San Diego, slid the long needle into the flesh of his neck.
Sergio was neat and careful with the needle. Milo stopped moving. He wasn’t unconscious. Blaise held him still and talked to him in low tones Linda couldn’t hear. But Milo’s eyes stayed on her, a mirror of the sickness and terror.
Linda hardly noticed. Her uncle’s docility in Blaise’s hands fascinated her. She had wondered, too, how Blaise had stolen a man like Sergio from a man like West, whose oily company she had endured at her uncle’s insistence.
Afterward Sergio cleaned the needle methodically with alcohol and repacked the little case before returning it to his pocket. He’d bowed over her hand before leaving with Blaise.
Uncle Milo sat behind his desk. The massive wood shell that seemed a fortress when she was a girl had become insignificant, her uncle pathetic. He did not protest when she got in the elevator.
Jonathan’s breathing was virtually nonexistent, the pallor of his skin was undefinable, like a wax apple that some artisan had forgotten to tint.
In the yellow glow from the small bedside lamp, she curled her legs under herself and watched her husband in the murky silence. Once she heard something like a muffled shot, but what Uncle Milo did was his business. She barely looked up.
Late into the black of night a slit appeared in the side of Jonathan’s head. The skin opened a little, almost without blood. Linda breathed shallowly as the slit widened into a bottomless hole. The process was slow and tedious. First a burst of activity, then quiescence, then another flurry until finally it looked something inside Jonathan’s head was probing through the skin with a hairy stick.
The head followed: bulbous multicellular eyes and a glistening wet body with spiky black hair and gossamer wings pasted down like a wet T-shirt.
The creature stood on the night table in the pool of light rubbing itself with its feet, drawing wings loose and drying them out. Linda picked up the yellow-and-green vase from her dressing table. It was jade, a fine example of the Sung Dynasty which Uncle Milo had given her because, he said, the color matched her eyes. She walked close to the bed and the huge fly looked up at her. Its feet became motionless. It made no effort to escape.
Linda hit harder than she intended. The vase shattered, spraying the room with small chips. A pity. The jade was one of a kind, irreplaceable. Her hand opened, and the mouth and neck bounced still unbroken on the emerald-green shag.
Her hands were sweaty. She dried them on the front of her dress, smoothing it down over her thighs as she left the bedroom and climbed stairs to the widow’s walk on the roof. From there she could see the moon and the bay over the surrounding trees, the moon laying a silver track across the restless water.
She slipped her shoes off and stood on the balustrade staring at mile-away water before she kicked off high into the air, like a bird soaring into the darkness. After a moment she remembered, completing the jackknife and blossoming into a full swan dive, careful to keep her back arched and her head out. She didn’t want any accidents.
The doorknob turned and Sergio came instantly alert, tensed against the lethargic drag of his body. Gregory West opened the door and Sergio blocked it with his foot, holding the pistol against West’s forehead. West wore pajamas with vertical blue-and-white stripes.
He started to speak. Sergio placed his hand over the man’s mouth. He pushed West back into the darkened bedroom, onto the bed where he made West roll over gripping an edge of the sheet until he wrapped himself like a pupa in a cocoon.
Taking a roll of two-inch-wide surgical gape, Sergio ran it around West’s mouth and head and ba
ck again. He taped bare ankles together and then forced West’s arms tight against his body, banding him at the elbows, waist, and wrists.
West strained, checking for slack. Sergio punched him in the solar plexus and put an end to that. Patting West on the cheek, he went back to the hall and opened the other bedroom door. The light switch was beside the door where God intended switches to be. Sergio flicked it with his left hand. When Dr. Hemmett sat up in bed, blinking, Sergio shot him once through the right eye.
The noise was deafening in the closed room. The slug tore bone and skin away from the side of Dr. Hemmett’s face, enough that Sergio didn’t need to get closer to the body.
His ears were still ringing when he returned to sling West over his shoulder. Almost gently, Sergio carried West from the house to the winery, a large barnlike building redolent with the odor of must and fresh wood shavings. The walls were lined with huge, two-hundred-gallon casks of clean, white oak. The eastern sky was lightening as Sergio began to assemble needle and syringe.
West rolled his eyes and made strange gasping squeaks like an unweaned puppy.
Sergio held the needle to the light and smiled. “Do you want to talk?”
West nodded. The white bandage across his mouth contrasted with his perpetually tan.
“If I were you, I’d want to talk, too.” Sergio took an ampule from his case. The light was still flat, the ampule gray in his fingers so he put it back. “But I don’t think I’ll let you.”
West made a noise.
“You got me and Bruno and you used us like toilet paper,” Sergio said. “You knew the treatment was fatal, didn’t you, Gregorio?” Sergio smiled. “Of course you did. But you needed some quick and dirty help. I wish I could talk to you the way Blaise talked to Mr. Burkhalter. You understand, Gregorio, it wouldn’t change anything, but Mr. Burkhalter seemed so comforted, so resigned to what was going to happen. It’s better that way, don’t you think?”
The Cunningham Equations Page 32