by John Case
‘Jewels in a setting wrought by God,’ Maggio thought, pleased at the phrase. Of course – he was practically a professional. In his spare time he often wrote poetry. Della Torre got to his feet, and Maggio saw that his features resembled those of every other statue in the Forum. Maggio scribbled in his head: ‘A classic Roman profile . . .’ but then turned his attention to the man himself. His heart beat double-time. He was having dinner with Silvio della Torre!
‘Salve,’ della Torre said, extending his hand. ‘You must be Brother Maggio.’
Maggio stammered that he was, in fact, that person, and the two men took their seats. Della Torre made small talk as he poured them each a glass of Greco de Tufo, then raised a toast. ‘To our friends in Rome,’ he said, and they clinked.
The meal was simple and delicious, and the conversation was the same. Over plates of bruschetta they talked about soccer, about Lazio and Sampdoria, and the agonies of Serie A. A waiter opened a bottle of Montepulciano. Moments later a second waiter entered with plates of agnelotti, stuffed with tartufo and leek. Maggio remarked that the agnelotti were like ‘tender little pillows,’ and della Torre responded with what, to Maggio, sounded like a dirty joke (but perhaps he misunderstood). As they ate and drank, the conversation shifted to politics, and Maggio was thrilled to learn that he and della Torre agreed on very nearly everything. The Christian Democrats were a mess, the Mafia was resurgent, and the Freemasons were everywhere. And as for the Jews, well . . . They gossiped about the Pope’s condition and discussed the chances of each likely successor.
A waiter came with the next course – trout – and expertly boned the two fish. When he left, della Torre remarked that he was happy to find that, in Father Maggio, Umbra Domini had a friend in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Maggio was flattered, and in between forkfuls of meltingly succulent trout he displayed his knowledge of the congregation’s inner workings and the personalities of the men who had access to il terzo piano – the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, where the Pope’s apartments could be found.
‘It’s always helpful,’ della Torre said, ‘to know what Cardinal Orsini and the Holy Father are thinking.’
The trout gave way to salad, and soon afterward to a thick bistecca alla fiorentina, streaked with carbon. Finally, the dinner was over. The waiter came in, cleared the plates, and brushed the crumbs from the table. He put a bottle of Vin Santo before them and a plate of biscotti. Then he stirred the fire and, after asking if there would be anything else, he left the room, pulling the door shut behind him.
Della Torre poured each of them a glass of Vin Santo. Then he leaned toward Father Maggio and, fixing his eyes on the priest, lowered his voice to a silky growl. ‘Donato,’ he said.
Father Maggio cleared his throat. ‘Silvio?’
‘Enough of this bullshit – why are we here?’
Father Maggio concealed his surprise with a white linen napkin, dabbing it daintily against his lips. Finally, he put the napkin aside, took a deep breath, and cleared his throat again. ‘A priest – a country priest – came to the Vatican – this was a few weeks ago – and told a story.’
Della Torre nodded his encouragement.
‘Well,’ Maggio said with a shrug, ‘sometimes . . . I hear what the cardinal hears – unless it’s a matter that’s considered too momentous for my ears. This didn’t seem important at the time and so I remained in the office while the priest talked. And now . . .’ Father Maggio chuckled ruefully. ‘Well, now I’m sure the cardinal is unhappy that I was there.’
‘It’s a sensitive matter, then.’
Father Maggio nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Della Torre pondered this for a moment. Finally, he said, ‘And this was “a few weeks ago”?’
‘In between discussions about the new Pope, they’ve been talking about little else ever since.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because they had to decide what to do.’
‘Ah! And what did they decide?’
‘They decided nothing. Or to do nothing. It’s the same thing. That’s why I’m here.’
Della Torre looked thoughtful. After a moment he refreshed Father Maggio’s glass and said, ‘Well, Donato . . . perhaps you should tell me the story.’
Father Maggio furrowed his brow and leaned forward. He rested his elbows on the table and put the tips of his fingers and thumbs together. Slowly, he tapped them against one another and said, ‘It began with a confession
When the story was done, della Torre was on the edge of his chair, with a dead cigar in his hand. Embers sizzled and spit in the fireplace, but there was no other sound in the room. ‘Donato,’ della Torre said, ‘thank you for telling me this.’
Father Maggio threw back the last of his Vin Santo, and stood. ‘I have to get back,’ he said.
Della Torre nodded.
‘Thank you for having the courage to bring this to me. They couldn’t decide what to do,’ he said, ‘because there was nothing to decide. There’s only one thing that can be done.’
‘I know,’ Father Maggio replied. ‘They had a failure of nerve.’
Della Torre got to his feet. Maggio offered his hand, and della Torre, rather than shaking it, took it in both of his. Slowly, he brought the back of the priest’s hand to his lips and kissed it. For a moment the priest imagined that he felt the man’s tongue against his skin, and then it was over.
‘Grazie,’ della Torre said. ‘Molto grazie.’
PART II – NOVEMBER
5
UNTIL THE EVENING of November 7, Keswick Lane was one of those streets about which it is always said that ‘nothing ever happens.’ Curling through a real estate development in the town of Burke, a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., the street was lined with $400,000 homes, BMWs, and the best gas grills money could buy. The houses in Cobb’s Crossing, as the development was known, were uniformly Nouveau Colonial in design. Each house was different, if only in color and architectural details, but all were of the same vintage – six years old. Because the developers had taken care to preserve as many trees as possible, and spent heavily on landscaping, the neighborhood bore a superficial resemblance to an old and settled one.
The true tale was told by the unblemished and deep black asphalt of the street itself, which followed a graceful curve to the west, ending in a cul-de-sac. In many ways it would have been an ideal block for young children, who might have played there without fear of traffic. But with a single exception, the children on Keswick Lane were too old to play in the street. Because the houses were expensive, the people who lived in them – lawyers, mostly, some lobbyists and business executives – tended to be of a certain age, and so did their children. For the most part, the kids were everywhere but on the street. They were taking lessons in horseback riding or karate, playing soccer or lacrosse, or blasting demons on their computer monitors.
So the sidewalks on Keswick Lane, and Keswick Lane itself, had a deserted feeling. The sight of a pedestrian – of any age – was rare.
Except, of course, for the dog walkers. Nearly every house on the street had a dog in residence. During the week, their owners tended to be gone all day, which meant that it was in the evenings that the dogs enjoyed their only real outing, a dutiful turn around the tidy blocks of Cobb’s Crossing.
On November 2 there were still reminders of Halloween to be seen, saggy pumpkins on front porches, the occasional segmented cardboard skeleton hanging from a front door, fake cobwebs in some of the windows. In the quiet minutes before midnight, a woman who had just returned from a performance of Tosca at the Kennedy Center was walking her Labrador retriever, Coffee.
Coffee and his owner stopped across the street from 207 Keswick Lane when the dog paused to sniff intently at the base of a mailbox post.
Suddenly, his muzzle rose and a low growl rolled from his throat. A patch of fur stood up on his back and his ears lifted. Just as he barked, it happened: There was a flash of light followed by a crash of gla
ss as a man exploded through the picture window of the house across the street.
The man was on fire.
He landed, burning, in a hedge of azaleas, staggered to his feet in an aura of flames, collapsed and rolled on the darkened lawn. Across the street the dog strained at his leash and howled, even as his mistress stood in the darkness, stock-still and staring. She couldn’t seem to process what she saw; her attention was held, not by the man, but by the window through which he’d burst.
It was actually a single plate of glass fitted with a wooden lattice that gave it the appearance of a window with many small panes. A section of this lattice was caught on the man’s body, and the woman was transfixed by the sight of it – a piece of white wooden grid, fringed with fire, crumpling and snapping as the man rolled back and forth across the lawn. It reminded her of a fireworks display that she’d seen in Mexico, on vacation some years before, and the inappropriateness of that memory somehow paralyzed her. For seconds that seemed like minutes she braced herself against the howling dog’s protracted lunge – until the man rolled into a clump of river birches, thrashed and lay still.
It was only then that she snapped out of her trance. She released the dog and ran to the man, tearing off her jacket to flail at the flames. His head was on fire, his eyebrows were gone, and he was screaming. Dropping to her knees, she pressed the jacket to his face and rubbed the flames from his hair.
Whuuummmmmp!
A hollow thump came from behind her. The dog yelped as a wave of heat and light rolled across the lawn. When she looked up, the drapes were in flames. Seconds later the house exploded into fire.
The fleece on her coat was burning, and she tossed it aside. Getting to her feet, she ran to the house next door and banged on the door. A startled man in boxer shorts, a bottle of Red Dog in his hand, answered her pounding. ‘Nine one one!’ she screamed. ‘Call 911!’
By the time the woman returned to 207 – with blankets in her arms – several of her neighbors had congregated on the street in front of the house. Most of them were in their nightclothes, with coats thrown over them. The man on the lawn was no longer on fire. A couple of men, one of them shoeless and dressed only in pajama pants, carried the burned man awkwardly down the driveway, away from the ferocious heat surging from the house. The man was groaning as they set him down on the sidewalk. The woman heard herself talking. ‘I was walking Coffee,’ she said. ‘I was right across the street . . .’
She rattled on in an insistent, irrelevant way that, as a psychologist, she knew was a typical reaction to trauma. It was only when she looked up the driveway and saw the red and yellow Little Tyke car, parked on the walkway next to the garage, that she thought of the people inside – the woman, what was her name? Karen? Kathy! And the darling little boy, the only real child on the block, the boy who drove that plastic car up and down the driveway on weekends. The boy who came to her door on Halloween, dressed as a rabbit and carrying an orange plastic pumpkin. She remembered it exactly: the boy on the front porch, his mother behind him, smiling.
‘And who are you?’ she’d said, holding back her basket of candy. ‘Who could you be?’
The child had not quite mastered the pronunciation of the letter R. ‘Eastuh bunny,’ he said intently. Behind him, his mother had smiled.
Why didn’t she think of them before? The boy’s car was beginning to melt, its surface bubbling as it buckled in the heat. Were they home? Were they in there?
‘Oh my God – oh my God,’ she said, and started running toward the inferno. She was nearly to the front steps when someone grabbed her from behind and pulled her back.
The dog was still barking.
In the Fair Oaks Hospital emergency room the nurses were preparing to cut the man’s clothing away, when one of them winced. ‘Polyester,’ she said, and shook her head. Cotton burned. Polyester melted. When you pulled it away, it took a lot of skin with it.
The victim was wearing a black turtleneck, and the nurse could tell from the charred and viscous mess around the neck that removing the shirt was going to be extremely unpleasant. The burns were third-degree, and infection was almost certain. Even so, he’d recover from that. The real problem was his lungs. He was having trouble breathing, and it was likely that he’d scorched them, breathing superheated air.
It took a while, but the man’s vital signs finally stabilized. With IVs in his arms, he was taken on a gurney to the operating room and prepared for surgery. The first procedure would be to perform a tracheotomy and insert a breathing tube. The lungs were bad enough, but the tissues in the throat were so swollen that he could hardly breathe. The tracheotomy would fix that. And, eventually, they’d begin to debride him, stripping the incinerated flesh and debris from his body, leaving him raw, flayed, and suppurating.
The anesthesiologist was thinking that there’s nothing more painful than burns, when the patient began to mumble. It was a horrible sound, a strangled mutter that was just recognizable as a human voice.
‘That’s funny,’ one of the nurses said, ‘he doesn’t look Hispanic.’
The on-duty resident stood with his gloved hands at shoulder level, in what the nurses jokingly called the ‘I surrender’ stance. ‘That’s not Spanish,’ he said. ‘Dat’s Italian.’
‘Well, what’s he saying?’
The resident shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I never really learned it.’ He cocked his head and listened again. ‘I think he’s praying.’
6
BY THE TIME the burned man was on the operating table, the blaze on Keswick Lane had been brought under control and two Fairfax County firefighters were getting ready to go inside in search of victims. The neighbors had already volunteered that two people lived in the house – the woman who owned it, and her three-year-old son. There was no husband. She was a single mother, and her Volvo was in the garage.
Despite the November chill and the late hour, the crowd of onlookers had swollen to more than fifty. It was a chaotic scene, with ambulances and police cars, fire trucks and television crews. Emergency lights strobed through the night – red, yellow, and blue – turning the street on and off. And everywhere, lengths of canvas hose snaked across the lawn, which had become a muddy swamp.
Two camera crews and a radio reporter created their own confusion, trailing a tangle of cables and braces of bright lights. Looking earnest and concerned, they worked both sides of the street, shoving microphones in the faces of firemen and firebugs alike.
‘And which house is yours?’
‘None, really. I’m a renter? Over in the Hamlets? Anyway, I heard about it on the radio – police radio? So I came over.’
The fire had been a virulent one, and by all accounts, no one had gotten out alive – with the exception of the burned man.
On their first foray into the house, the firemen searched the charred and sodden wreckage of the ground floor, looking for survivors and finding none. A search of the second floor was delayed by the condition of the staircase, which was structurally unsound.
Outside, a cherry picker, with two young firemen in its basket, was maneuvered into position against an upstairs window, and the window smashed.
Each of the firemen was convinced that his mission was pointless. No one could have survived the conflagration. If anyone had escaped the flames, the smoke would have done him in. Still, there was always the possibility, the very remote possibility, of someone huddled in an interior bathroom, someone with the presence of mind to stuff wet towels against the door. Fires were unpredictable – sometimes they sought you out, and sometimes they left you alone. You could never be sure with fire.
The younger of the firemen leaned in through the window and tested the floor with a crowbar. When the floor showed no signs of giving way, he climbed inside, leaving his partner in the cherry picker, ready to assist.
What the fireman found was just what he’d expected to find: an adult. And a small child. They were still in their beds, or what was left of their beds – the mattresses reduced to b
ox springs and bits of disintegrated cloth. The victims’ bedclothes had gone up in flames and left a charred and netted residue embedded in their skin. Next to the child’s head were a pair of little glass eyes, the last remains of a stuffed animal. The boy and his mother were still recognizable as human beings, which was ‘lucky.’ If the fire trucks had arrived only a few minutes later, or if the hydrant had been farther away, they and the house would be gone. Smoke and bones, and nothing in between.
It was the deputy chief’s job to inform the next of kin – which had to be done immediately. When a $400,000 home burned in an expensive suburb like Cobb’s Crossing and killed the people inside – that was news, and the news spread quickly. Though the fire hadn’t broken out until after the Post had put its last edition to bed, there’d be footage of it on the morning news. So the deputy chief made the calls he had to make, and learned that the home belonged to a Kathleen Anne Lassiter, who lived there – or had lived there – with her young son. According to insurance records, the next of kin was a brother, Joseph, who resided in McLean.
And who, at that moment, was dreaming.
In his dream, Joe Lassiter was standing on the shore of the Potomac River, just above Great Falls, casting for largemouth bass. He flicked his wrist and the line arced out over the river – a perfect, parabolic dream cast that dipped precisely toward the spot that he’d selected. As soon as it hit the water, the bass struck, and he began to play it, lifting the rod toward the sky.
But, somewhere, a telephone had begun to ring, and it pissed him off. It was bad enough that the goddamn things rang in the middle of concerts at the Kennedy Center, and in the bottom of the ninth at Camden Yards – but this! Some unseen idiot had actually brought his cellular phone fishing. What was the point of fishing if you took your fucking telephone with you?