Masquerade

by William Kienzle

  All things considered, she felt fortunate there was a cab on duty outside the hotel. As she entered the vehicle, the driver awakened. He half turned to appraise his passenger. A nun. Odd.

  Especially at this time of night. But cabbies quickly get used to all manner of humanity. “Where to, Sister? “

  “Forty-eight hundred Grand River.”

  “Forty-eight hundred . . . that be near 14th, 15th?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You got it.”

  She was grateful for the warmth of the cab. The driver had kept the motor running while waiting for a fare. He had little alternative. It was December 26, a frigid December 26. That near the Detroit River, with the force of its piercing wind, without heat a person could get hypothermia in a hurry.

  “Forty-eight hundred,” the driver mused aloud, “and 15th. That wouldn’t be old St. Leo’s, would it?”

  “Uh-huh.” She didn’t want conversation; she hoped monosyllables would make that clear.

  “Ain’t much goin’ on at old St. Leo’s anymore.” The cabbie had not gotten the message. “You know, I grew up around there.”

  She made no sound.

  Her lack of response did not discourage him. “Yessir,” he continued, “it wasn’t even St. Leo’s. Was a franchise or a mission or something like that. Called Guadalupe—Our Lady of Guadalupe. Only one or two white families there when I was growin’ up. Hell—’scuse me, Sister—but Guadalupe doesn’t even exist anymore. Hell, St. Leo’s hardly exists any more.

  “Geez, we used to go from church—Perpetual Help services—over to the old Olympia. Hell, the Olympia is gone, too. Red Wings—Howe, Lindsay, Abel—the Production Line. Jack Adams, best damn coach in history. Jack was a good Catholic too.” He looked at her in his rearview mirror. “I’m a Catholic, ya know, Sister.”

  “I would never have guessed.” Her attention then abandoned him. She became lost in thought: Was now the time to quit?

  “Geez, Sister, I’ll never forget one priest we had at old Guadalupe: Famer Paddock—a good man he was—gone, now, I guess. This was a pretty quiet neighborhood most times back then, except on Saturday nights. Then all hell would break loose. I remember old Father Paddock telling me one day that he stopped one of the black guys in the parish and asked him if the neighborhood could keep the noise down on Saturday nights ‘cause on Sunday he had to work and he needed some peace and quiet on Saturday nights to get ready for Sunday Mass. And this guy says to him, ‘Father, if you ever was a black man on Saturday night, you would never want to be a white man again.’”

  She didn’t laugh, But then, nuns, as he remembered them, were a quiet lot.

  She had thought that when it was time to quit, she’d know it. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, she was overwhelmed by a growing certitude that this was it. It had nothing directly to do with tonight’s trick. He had been easy enough. Even, pound for pound, a gentleman. No, her concern was that she had been pushing her luck, The odds, if you will. Countless occasions of extreme danger . . . she had been saved by something. Some-thing beyond her power to control. What? Prayer? She smiled. Whatever it was, she sensed that it was running pretty thin lately. The last thing she wanted was to end up on a slab in the medical examiner’s emporium,

  “So, there we were, Sister,” the cabbie rattled on, “me and this friend of mine helpin’ this guy sell newspapers outside the Olympia. The deal was, after we helped this guy, he would move us inside where he told the ticket taker that we worked for him and we were gonna sell papers inside, and when they were all sold he’d see to it that we left. But”—laughter—“that wasn’t how it worked, Sister. Nah, we’d go in, leave the papers on the floor inside, and then go see the show,” He shook his head, pleased at the memory.

  “This one night it was wrestling, with Primo Carnera. . . ” He looked at her in his rearview mirror again. “He was the former heavyweight boxing champ, y’know.

  “Anyway, it was a pretty good show. A fake of course, but a good show anyway. Then, after all the matches were over, I started walkin’ home all by myself. And then, under a streetlight, I see these two guys waitin’ on either side of the sidewalk. Well, I decided to go right ahead and right between them. But when I got to them, the bigger guy—he was lots bigger’n me and black to boot—anyway, he steps up and says, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  “So I says, ‘Teddy.’

  “And he says, ‘Well my name is Joe Louis.’ And with that, he takes a swing at me—a roundhouse right.

  “Well, I knew darn well he wasn’t Joe Louis—but I knew what he was gonna do next. So I ducked and got the hell out of there so fast they couldn’t have caught me, even if they’d been firing bullets. Man, I really moved.”

  Still no sound from the nun. Well, maybe she’d fallen asleep. Hell, it was late enough. Matter of fact, after this fare, he was gonna go home and get some sleep himself.

  It’s simply too late, she thought; I’m too tired to make a hard and fast decision about quitting right now.

  But tomorrow, she’d give the idea a serious analysis. Yeah, that was it: Something as crucial as this demanded the light of day before any firm decisions were reached.

  “Well, here we are, Sister.”

  For the first time since their brief journey began, she was conscious the cab was not moving. “Oh?” She glanced out the window and recognized the familiar old, dirty gray buildings that had at one time, many decades earlier, constituted one of Detroit’s prestigious parishes. She rummaged through her purse. “Listen,” she told the cabbie, “wait for me here. I won’t be long.”

  “Wait?! Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding. I want you to wait for me!” Testiness crept into her voice.

  “Look, Sister, I don’t mind drivin’ you to this neighborhood, but I ain’t about to sit here like a duck waitin’ for somebody to step out of die shadows and off me.”

  “What are you anyway, a lily-livered coward? Nobody’s gonna hurt you, little man.”

  “No need to get on your high horse, Sister. I’m not arguing with you. I’m just tellin’ you I ain’t gonna wait for you, that’s all.”

  She was furious, but said no more. She found her cash and peeled off just enough for the fare plus an infinitesimal tip.

  He quickly tabulated the excess as she exited the cab. “Thanks a bunch, big spender,” he called out as he peeled away from the curb.

  “Go to hell, you little son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured ineffectually as she watched him speed off.

  It was bitter cold and her coat, while stylish, was not all that warm. She turned her collar up and pulled the lapels as high as they could be stretched. It gave her face and ears some little protection against the wind-whipped snow. She found her keys, turned, and headed for the darkened convent. God, it was cold! Her entire body shook.

  She glanced up at the building, now entirely dark and deserted. She hadn’t planned on staying there this night. But now that the damn cabdriver had left, she had no choice. How was she going to get another cab to come to this neighborhood at this time of night? But of even more urgency was her need to get out of this frigid weather.

  As she walked toward the convent, she recalled the vast number of nuns who had traversed this selfsame pavement over the years. Hundreds, probably. Undoubtedly, none of those nuns had actively chosen to be missioned to St. Leo’s. They had been sent. And they went. Obedience. There must have been in excess of twenty nuns here at any given time years ago. Now just one person inhabited this entire building. What a waste! How senseless!

  Just the thought of the olden days when there were so many nuns living and working in buildings like this brought to mind the old joke—definitely dated now, when the legendary chock-of-nuns convents of the past no longer existed—about the repairman—Protestant—who was called to a convent to repair electrical outlets. He was taken to the site of the main problem—the convent’s living room. The nuns called it their common room. While he was working away, all the nuns
entered the room to spend some quiet time before supper. Their order’s Rule demanded that at this hour they assemble together in absolute silence. And so they did.

  The repairman observed this for the full hour they were together. Finally, the nuns left the room for dinner. Shortly thereafter, the repairman finished his work and left the convent. He went directly to the rectory where he met the parish priest. “Father, I’m not a Catholic, but I want to take instructions.”

  “That’s nice,” said the priest, “But why?”

  “I was just over at the convent doing some repairs,” the man replied, “and I figure there must be something to any religion that can put twenty women in the same room and for a full hour not one of them says a blasted word!”

  She didn’t see him.

  She would not have seen him even if she had been looking for him.

  He’d been waiting in the shrubbery to one side of the convent steps. That gave him the cover of the bushes and the poor light further shrouded his presence.

  As she passed by, he stepped out of the darkness behind her, gun in hand.

  In one sweeping motion, he raised the gun to the base of her skull and fired.

  She never knew what hit her. The bullet entered her head and tumbled in its unstructured path, tearing tissue as it went.

  She fell in a heap like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She was motionless.

  He pocketed the gun. Seizing her by the ankles, he dragged her, face down, toward the bushes. But the branches were too dense at the base to position the body beneath. He had not anticipated that.

  He resumed dragging her, face downward, around the corner of the building and toward the rear of the large, front-lawn shrine. As he dragged, her head and arms flopped about grotesquely.

  Here, out in the open, her body would be discovered earlier than he would have preferred. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

  He pushed the body with his foot until it rested tight up against the slightly less than life-size crucifix. Under the circumstances, it was the best he could do. He looked about one last time and faded into the shadows.