by Ruby Spinell
He waited until the front door was buzzed open, then got in the car and drove to the office.
He’s being extremely cooperative,” Eli was watching Fay’s fingers tap a drum roll on the file cabinet. “Danley’s out of the country. His secretary says he left yesterday for Cambodia.”
“Callous about the fix his prelate is in?”
“Unknowing, Elias claims.”
“A complete innocent huh?”
“Yep.”
“Preposterous.”
“The only name he’s giving us is O’Reilly. Monsignor Thomas O’Reilly had mercenary ways. No one cares about the purity of his name.”
“What about Maysenrod?”
“A man named Robert, he calls ’im, that’s all he knew. He flew into Da Nang in ’67 and met this guy at the airport. He was outfitted, they picked up half a dozen others, and off they went.”
“Janah!” The two of them looked up at the lieutenant’s shout. He waved from the door of his office motioning Eli across the floor. Before he took a step from the desk bay where he and John had been talking, he saw the portly figure of the captain in Lieutenant Morley’s chair.
“Case closed, Janah, congratulations.” He pulled his ponderous bulk up and leaned across the desk. “Good work, Inspector!” Eli felt sordid shaking the flabby, moist palm. The shrewd little eyes in the jowly face watched him. He registered the promotion, but at the same time took in the import of the words that followed. They were connected, too damn connected.
“I read your report. Father Elias’ ‘Robert’ is not Bob Maysenrod! I know Bob, great old guy. His brother-in-law is Senator Brimly. Maysenrod’s served on more defense committees than any one cares to count. His contacts go all the way up.” A bloated finger pointed at the ceiling. “Anyway, who took Father Elias on his supposed tour in 1967 is no concern of ours.
“This business about Elias is going to shake Bishop Danley up,” the fleshy cheeks shook sympathetically, “makes his work look bad. He’s in Southern Asia right now helping with the arrangements for those orphans—you probably heard about. Shriners offering to do the bone surgery free of charge. He’s gotta realize it has no bearing on him at all. There’s always a bad apple in the lot.” He eyed the silent man before him, “Can’t chain your priests down now, can ya?
“Now that this is wrapped up,” he looked over at the lieutenant and winked, “we want you to take charge of that high society murder in Bronxville. See Ragusa about it. I’ve told him I’m handing over the reins; they’ve gotten nowhere fast.” Strange guy this. He’d just been promoted to full inspector, yet you couldn’t read a thing on the guy’s face. He could have been talking to a stone Buddah. He waved his hand in dismissal.
So that’s the way it’s going to be, Eli thought walking back to his desk. He wasn’t surprised. He thought of Mir. Then he thought of Danley. No!
There was a sword hanging over him, but it wasn’t the slug sitting back there in the lieutenant’s chair. Danley played his cards well. It was Mir who was suspended over his head. She would not take meddling in her life lightly. What would be her response if he walked up and said, “Hey, the guy you slept with the other night is an absolute worm.”
She was so smart, how the hell could she have let herself in for such a shit load.
No. He couldn’t very well confide in her … especially after last night. What had been entirely spontaneous and right would look like hard-boiled maneuver.
“Case is closed. I’ve been promoted to inspector.”
Fay’s eyes widened. He had never seen such a storm cloud on Eli’s face.
I’ve tried to stay out of this story. But I can’t help putting a bean’s worth in at this point. My father believed in an orderly, not a haphazard world. Dark followed day. The poles were predictably stable. Sun, moon, stars, planets kept their orbits. We have a universe … not chaos.
As above, so below. He believed in law and order.
He was also a Kabbalist and speaking as a Kabbalist, he often remarked that only two levels of his soul were developed. Formation and Creation. Neshama and Ruah. Mother, he said, was strong in the other two. Wisdom and Action. Yichide and Nefesh. This had pulled them together.
When she left him, I think she was trying to develop all four levels. When she left him, he searched and found what was lacking.
He was walking on two legs then and didn’t have to be a topologist—a mathematician who deals with the multi-dimensional shape of things—to see the eternal triangle.
Reverend Mother Michaels, wearing a modified version of the habit, groped blindly for a chair and sat down abruptly. “Oh dear Lord, no. No!” She searched Sister Damian’s face for a way out. The only thing on Damian’s face was the hard, awful truth. Her eyes filled; she began rocking back and forth, tears pouring down her face. She put her hands up to cover her eyes and the hot tears dripped between the fingers. “No … no … no” Damian knelt down before the older nun, put her arms around the heaving shoulders and held her while she sobbed.
Her pain entered Damian like a frozen knife. It went into her heart and from it liquid freon ran through all her arteries and veins. It couldn’t be blood; it was too cold. They rocked together until Mother Michaels’ sobs were mute murmurs. A tremendous shudder went through her frame. She sat within the shadow of the other sister’s arms completely limp.
They heard six bells off in the distance. Thirty seconds later they heard them again. Only this time they were nearer; the sister ringing for her had come to the head of the stairs. “It’s Sister Alice, I asked her to mind the turn.” She looked closely at Michaels, “Are you all right?” Mother Michaels nodded weakly. Sister Damian put her hand gently on the other woman’s head, then rose and let herself softly out of the narrow cell.
Sister Alice was signing to her that she was expected in the speakroom. She smiled benevolently and signed she would cover the turn. Damian bowed her head thanking her; she had momentarily forgotten the interview.
“Mrs. Janah! Good morning! I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” She smiled at Mirari.
“How did you know?”
“What?” The nun leaned forward questioning.
“The name, Janah … I was going to tell you.”
“Oh … no matter. I’ve known since the first meeting.” Her eyes were rimmed in red, but they crinkled up suddenly and little blue darts appeared. “No extra sense,” she laughed. “I lost your number. The operator had a Buttrick-Janah listing.” She raised her shoulder momentarily, “Your husband was just here.”
“Ex-husband.”
Sister Damian searched behind the eyes of the woman opposite her. She smiled then, as if humoring a child and repeated it just as before. “Your husband.”
Mir suddenly wanted to cry.
She looked into the red-rimmed, gentle eyes for a long moment. “My dear, you better sit down. We have work to do.” The voice caused a rill of pleasure. She felt the way she did when she heard the first peeper singing from her wet place in the spring.
“I have been sorting through the archives for what might be helpful to your article.” The nun looked at her. There was a weighing in the grey eyes. She pulled her chair up closer to the bars.
“At first,” she hesitated. “At first, I was going to select what I thought would look good in print.” She looked intently at the bars as if willing them out of her face, or making them a confession. Her head bent into the palm of her hand. It waggled back and forth, “That won’t do … it will not do! We need to trust you. Father Elias’ confession makes many things clear. So many things. You did know about that?” Mir nodded. “Good!”
Sister Damian of Mary sat upright then and said decisively, “I have a proposition. We work together. An hour and a half a day; that is all I can spare. I shouldn’t think it would take more than a week. The heavy writing you can do on your own.
“I’ll see that a large table is placed out there for your use.” She thought a minute, “And a lamp.” She noted Mir’s silence
, “I will not interfere with your actual writing, but I hope you will allow comment.
“I have decided what course of action I should take,” she looked away. Mir thought she heard something about a pitfall.
“I have work to do myself, work that I can do here while you are going through all the boxes. I’d be available for questioning. I could help clarify. Do you want to start this morning?”
“Yes.”
The tall nun burst from her chair, every part of her habit in motion, “Well, then!” Within ten minutes the door to the cloister opened to the tinkling of a bell and three veiled figures along with Sister Damian pushed a long table through to Mir who caught and pulled it over the threshold. One of the figures, holding her veil out as a tent before her face so that she could see where she was going, reached around a wall and produced a floor lamp. The shade on the old ornate metal lamp came bobbing and dancing forward, the hand holding the black face covering following along behind as far as the door sill.
There was a chittery sound of swallowed laughter from the shortest of the sisters. Her hands full of the boxes of archive material, she stood at the door jamb like a demented sprite. Her veil had caught in her mouth. In between chortles, she was making little puff-puff sounds in an attempt to blow it back out.
Mir, watching the black material fill out below the angle of the nose, deflate and fill again, felt something snap loose within. She burst out laughing. Without hesitation, she reached out and gently pulled the serge from the sister’s mouth. Chuckling came from under the veil and the black head bobbed a thank you over the boxes. Mir found herself bobbing in return, still laughing.
Sister Damian’s unveiled face behind the other smaller nun smiled at her and nodded as if something had been confirmed. It wasn’t blue, Mir thought. The glitter in those grey eyes was the deep purple of amethyst.
After Compline that evening, Sister Damian approached Reverend Mother Michaels, knelt, kissed the floor by her feet, and asked permission to keep an all-night vigil. Mother knew she would be the first to ask. The community who had only learned that Father Allen would be replacing Father Elias and the reason behind this, was still in a state of shock.
Slowly, if she did not watch over them, she would have half the house going without sleep in the chapel. God bless them, some would sleep if a third world war were upon them. She needn’t concern herself about them overdoing it.
At one a.m. tiny beads of hail hit the windows of the chapel of Annunciation Monastery. They slid on to each other on the cross sections and collected on the sills. The relative heat from the rambling old building, clumped them into random groupings that would be admired by the postulants in the morning. They would get high on God.
A silent figure, her arms outstretched in the form of a cross, knelt in the darkened church close to the grill, her eyes intent on the tabernacle. A war was going on within Sister Damian.
Words escaped her anguished lips. Something about union and karma was followed by a question of lifetimes and tumultuous sobbing. “How many lifetimes? …” The question rose in the cold air and reverberated about the nave. The wind threw the bare branches of the trees against the building with increasing frenzy. Distant low grumblings approached and hovered overhead buffeting the old building with sound waves. In the flashes of blinding light that followed, the figure kneeling by the grill looked infinitely weary.
At five a.m. when the hail quickened to a steady pit-pit, the tall kneeling figure collapsed in a heap on the floor. She was still unconscious when the sister sacristan lit the light on her way to prepare for Mass. She ran to Mother Michaels’ cell for help in moving Damian to the infirmary.
Sister Patrick had found Damian flushed and incoherent. “She keeps moaning something about a choice, Reverend Mother. And she’s been reciting the Dies Irae over and over again; that’s quite clear. At ‘Qui Marion absolvisti’—thou, the sinful woman—she becomes hysterical, but somehow continues to the end of the sequence and begins all over again.
“She’s very caught up in this Mass of the Dead. Oh, by the way,” she looked uncomprehendingly at Michaels, “Bishop Danley’s name keeps coming up in the ‘Requiem aeternam dona ei domine.’”
Mirari, working alone in the speakroom, became very absorbed in the papers before her.
Monday morning Sister Damian greeted Mirari with a huge grin on her pallid face. There were dark circles under her eyes and the irises were deep purple, not grey.
“I was concerned about you!” Mir gripped the grillwork on her side, watching the nun put a large wicker basket down on the floor by the round table.
Damian looked on her with love. “I’m all right now. A little matter of a decision that had to be made. The vision of living; it got to me,” she chuckled low, “but that’s universal law. We must make choices. All of time.”
Mir was not sure what she was talking about. Was she referring to Father Elias, the choices and decisions he made …? Damian looked deep in her eyes,
“Once we own them, we take them to ourselves,” she shuddered as if standing in a strong wind.
Instinctively, Mirari thrust a hand through the grill as far as it would go in a measure of support. The tall sister smiled, “For as many lifetimes … however many as it takes to burn up the results.”
Sister Damian pulled herself erect. Responding to the look on Mirari’s face she spoke to her, “Shush … shush …” as she would to a baby. “I’m fine, just fine! Now, tell me what you’ve been doing here. I’m sorry I left you alone yesterday, but maybe it was just as well. You had a chance for an overall look in peace and quiet. Some beginning intuitions about how you’ll handle it.”
As she pored through the materials Damian had put at her disposal, Mirari Buttrick Janah had been sitting on a growing excitement. A sizable picture of power and greed was taking shape.
She had never been convinced that an orderly sequence was appropriate in writing. Something more like a spiral felt right. Sidling up to the facts, then floating away, was much more satisfactory than hitting them on the head with a baseball bat. There was intelligence out there. Let them draw their own conclusions. It was more of a dance than a boardroom report.
Last night looking over her notes by the fireplace, her thoughts kept going back to Danley’s secret cache. Surrounded by visions of these munitions, some of her notes acquired a sinister character.
The more she saw, the less she understood his permission to write the article. Was he so secure? Did he think the bedclothes tossing they engaged in was going to hog-tie and bind her? Didn’t he care? She felt the power of the man again. What had he wanted? Did anyone really know what she wanted or were they all just opportunists taking what they could as it came along? So many questions.
She looked across at Sister Damian working steadily at her sewing. “You know, Sister, this is not the article I thought I would be writing.”
“It never is, Mirari.” The eyes shone. “We were so caught up in what we were doing, I’m afraid we did not notice the inconsistencies.” She took a deep breath.
She resumed her work. She was pulling fine threads from the lining of a dark green cope.
“That’s a beautiful vestment!”
“Yes. We have put a lot of work into it. It’s a Christmas gift.” With great care and concentration she separated the remaining fibers. She must have had some preordained plan in mind for she began sewing little blocks like Morse code fragments together in bundles.
“Who is going to see the lining?” Mir was entranced at the care the nun was taking.
“The one who matters,” came the tongue in cheek reply.
“Words are very powerful beings Mirari,” Sister Damian’s voice lowered, “a malediction, fully consented, backed by free will … well, it is probably better that most do not know, at this time, what can be built up … what can be pulled down.”
Three people in Westchester County were extremely conscious of Bishop Danley’s arrival at Kennedy International the following Sund
ay.
Eli buried himself in the new investigation, grateful for Bath and Fay’s unspoken support. He otherwise resumed a monk’s existence. He left a message with Marion’s answering service saying he would be extremely busy. Although he wanted to very much, he did not contact Mir.
Every particle of him wanted to face Danley but his own energy was so riled, so out of touch with the Chi, that he could not in all sanity trust it. Little more than a brute urge to break the guy’s neck, it was, and where would that lead? He watched the press conference Danley had called for that evening.
Mir also watched Danley on TV. She watched his deferential handling of the reporters. His work in Southeast Asia for the orphans? Totally insignificant beside the enormous amount that others had done. He did little more than arrange passage.
But the reporters really wanted to know about Elias. Is it possible he had no previous knowledge? “No previous knowledge … not a clue.” His voice became sonorous … “There is forgiveness in the house of the Lord for the worst sinner …”
Mir watching, knew she had to see him face to face. There was something she had to know. She called his unlisted number.
He was brusque, “Why don’t you come down tonight? The hoopla’s died down.”
“It’s too late … the last train left.”
His voice was deliberate, “I’ll send the car.”
Sister Damian worked on the brilliant green vestments long after the community was asleep. The words she painstakingly inserted would be seen by no one, that is, unless they opened the lining and held it to the light. Each word was built from threads removed. In minute, invisible lightstitch Damian lay the Dies Irae down. There was no room for mistake.
For a moment, riding the cage elevator, Mir was frightened. Why had she come? To see his face when she told him what she knew? To know why? A cold shiver went down her spine. She looked down grimly at the floor of the elevator. Her jaw set then, and she placed both feet squarely on the snake’s head.