Bong. Bong. Bong.
Through the sound of the bell came the sputter of an engine. The driver grabbed Adam and together they pressed into the shadows. A diesel-powered taxi drove up and someone sprang out.
22
It was Joshua.
“Muito obrigado,” he said to Adam’s driver, “apresse se,” clapped him in a swift, comradely gesture on the shoulder, and turned to Adam. The young driver ran back to his cab. They heard him gun the engine and roar down the street.
Joshua pulled a key out of his pocket and bent to unlock the gate.
“How did you know—” Adam started.
“Kali phoned me. How did she get my numbers?” The gate creaked open. Joshua pulled Adam through, clanged it shut, locked it. When Adam did not answer his question he did not repeat it. They hurried down the path, brushed by early evening shadows cast by the tall hedges. Behind them they could hear the squeal of tires, screech of brakes, slamming of car doors.
“Run.” Joshua sprinted ahead, Adam close on his heels. The path turned, leading them to an arched side entrance. Again Joshua bent to the lock. As the door swung open they could hear footsteps pounding down the path. Joshua slammed the door and leaned against it for a moment, panting. “Are the papers still on you?”
“Yes.”
Behind them there was a pounding at the door. Joshua pulled Adam away as shots rang out, splintering the heavy wood. “Quick.”
The room they were in was so deep in shadows that Adam could see nothing after the light outside. Joshua grabbed his hand and they ran, Adam stumbling, slowing them down, ran through the room, through a corridor illuminated by high, dusty windows, and then out and into the light of the cloister. In the center of the garden the fountain rose high, catching the long rays of sun in a shower of silver. They ran pounding down the echoing stones; their footsteps echoed, and the echo was lost in the crash of heavy feet seeming to close in from all sides.
Ahead of them a hulking form loomed up: Molèc.
“God,” Joshua said. He swung Adam around and shoved him into one of the monks’ niches as a shot rang out.
Still running, Joshua fell.
Out of the niche beside Adam came Typhon Cutter, and Kali ran swiftly along the cloister and plummeted into his arms. “Well done,” Typhon Cutter said, and Adam saw, with a feeling of nausea, the look of adoration she gave her father, the spider weaving his inexorable web in which they were all trapped. How, now, was there any escaping the tightening threads?
Despair burned in the pit of Adam’s stomach, then burst into a fierce and controlled anger such as he had never felt before. He stood, crouched like a panther ready to spring.
Another shot.
The gun dropped from Molèc’s hand and he gave a scream of rage and pain. Another shot dropped him, writhing, to his knees. Typhon Cutter pulled Kali back into the monk’s cell.
Joshua lay, without moving, on the stones a few feet from Adam.
“Stay back!” A voice catapulted across the cloister as Adam started to leap out of the niche into which Joshua had shoved him.
He had no weapon. No gun. He could not help, only hinder. There was, at the moment, nothing to do but obey.
Across the cloister he saw the dark form of Canon Tallis, smoking gun in hand. He thought he saw Arcangelo. A shot rang across the cloister from Typhon Cutter’s cell and ricocheted from a stone column.
Adam looked at Joshua’s still form, only a shadow as light began to withdraw from the cloister, and let out a cry of anguish and rage.
His cry was echoed in the high shriek of a siren. Turning, he saw Typhon Cutter and Kali slip out of their cell. As they disappeared into the darkening corridor he was after them, and with one leap he flung himself on Mr. Cutter, throwing him to the ground.
“Daddy, don’t kill him!” Kali screamed.
Adam’s fingers clamped around the wrist that held the gun, his knee was on the bloated stomach.
“No,” Kali said. “No.” She grabbed the gun from her father and pointed it quaveringly at Adam. He could barely see the gun because the passage was almost entirely locked in darkness. The light filtering dustily through the high windows was above their heads and they were enclosed in shadows. “Let him up,” Kali ordered.
Adam looked toward her. In the dim light her face was contorted in a horrible mixture of emotion. If ever she had been beautiful for him she was not beautiful now.
“Let him up,” she said again, her voice steadier, “or I’ll shoot. I mean it.”
Adam lifted his knee from the belly, released his hold on the wrist. Typhon Cutter struggled to his feet as a searchlight swept across the cloister, penetrating the dark reaches of the corridor where the three of them stood, panting.
“The papers,” Typhon Cutter said.
“I gave you the papers.”
“Not those. You have others. Give them to me.” The treble voice soared.
“No,” Adam said. “I don’t have any papers.”
“The gun, Kali.”
“No, daddy. No.”
If he shouted, Adam thought, they might hear him in the cloister and come. But no sound emerged from his constricted throat.
“The gun.”
The muzzle pressed against Adam’s chest.
“The papers.”
“Go ahead and shoot,” Adam croaked, “for all the good it will do you.” He expected to hear the explosion of the bullet if, indeed, he heard anything.
But Cutter said, “Kali,” and the boy felt, instead of a deadly burst of lead, her long fingers moving over him, coming closer, as she searched, to María’s pocket.
Without conscious volition his hand flashed out and slapped across the girl’s face, the sound sharp and unexpected and immediately followed by a shot and the crash of the gun dropping from Typhon Cutter’s hand.
The shot had not come from Cutter’s gun. From where?
Cutter began to back down the passage, holding Kali in front of him as a shield.
Through the darkness came the voice of Arcangelo. “Let them go. My men outside.”
Adam reached down in the shadows to look for the dropped gun, but he could not find it. His breath came in painful gasps as his heart thudded against the rib cage.
“Come,” Arcangelo said. “It’s over. Everything is over. Come.”
The searchlight swung around again, and Adam moved toward it and to the cloister that still contained the last rays of the sun, the fountain glistening as it rose toward the sky, Joshua, lying sprawled on cold stone.
With an absolute carelessness and indifference to what was going on around him Adam ran across the pavement to Joshua and knelt by him. Joshua’s eyes were open, but he did not see.
“Joshua!” Adam cried. “Joshua!” He put his head against Joshua’s chest, listening, listening, and thought he felt the faint thread of a heartbeat. He noticed two uniformed men going by with Molèc bellowing on a stretcher, noticed it only because the sound kept him from listening for Joshua’s heart. He pressed his cheek to Joshua’s lips to try to feel the faintest breath.
“Adam.” It was Canon Tallis’ voice.
Adam looked up.
The priest stood there, gun still in hand, with two uniformed policemen beside him. Adam could tell that the canon was thanking them, that he was giving them instructions. When they turned toward Joshua he spoke to them brusquely, and they bowed and moved away.
“Get up,” Canon Tallis said to Adam, and the boy stood. The canon knelt beside Joshua. A faint sound came from his lips, the single word, “God.” It was also the last word Joshua had said.
Out of the shadows Arcangelo and Father Henriques emerged, Arcangelo looming enormous beside the tiny priest. Canon Tallis looked at them. “Morto,” he said.
“No,” Adam babbled, “no, he’s not dead, he can’t be.”
“He is dead. Be still,” Canon Tallis said. He leaned over Joshua again and it was as though the two of them had gone two thousand miles away, that they were
not in the cloister with Adam and Father Henriques and Arcangelo. The canon took Joshua into his arms, holding him close in a gesture of infinite tenderness and love.
Father Henriques touched Adam’s arm and drew him away. The three of them, Father Henriques, Arcangelo, Adam, walked slowly along the cold stones of the cloister, their feet muffled in darkness and grief, leaving Canon Tallis with Joshua.
23
Was it only that the light bulb in Father Henriques’ tiny office was dim, like the light bulb in the Avenida Palace, or was the darkness in Adam’s mind?
He sat on a straight chair across from Father Henriques and Arcangelo. Their faces were closed and emotionless, as though turned to stone. Adam did not know when Father Henriques and Arcangelo started to talk in low voices, nor when he realized that they were speaking French, until he heard Father Henriques ask, “Arcangelo, how did you know—”
“You think you could keep me away,” Arcangelo asked, “when I am needed? You think I will hide in safety when you are in danger?” His voice deepened with emotion. “You think I cannot find out when you try to protect me?”
Father Henriques held up a thin white hand, and Arcangelo rumbled into silence.
A dark shadow moved across the doorway and Canon Tallis came into the office. “The papers,” he said without preamble and, as Adam handed them to him, he demanded, “Why was Joshua here? He was to be at the Bélem Tower.”
Adam stood up, but his knees were trembling so that he sat down again immediately. “He was here because of me.”
Then came the questions, Canon Tallis clear, precise, ice cold, Father Henriques gentle but nevertheless touching every raw and open nerve.
It had been again (again and again: would it never end?) the unexpected, the unforeseen that had happened. The papers Adam had delivered to Professor Embuste at Dr. Ball’s rectory had indicated a meeting at the Bélem Tower. Joshua, working with Interpol and the Lisbon police, was to have been there. Typhon Cutter was to have been led into his own spider web.
“As indeed he was,” Father Henriques said. “But not in the way we thought.”
And not before Molèc’s bullet had found Joshua.
Adam cried in anguish, “I killed Joshua. I believed Kali and I didn’t tell Dr. O’Keefe.” He began to gasp through sobs that racked his body. “I let Kali get Joshua’s phone numbers and he came to save me—”
Canon Tallis cut him short. “Stop.”
“But he would still be alive—”
The canon’s voice was quiet, firm as a rock. “You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future. Come, Adam. We must go.”
In the back seat of a police car Adam rode beside Canon Tallis. Two policemen sat in front, talking casually. The last late light of evening had left the sky, so time must have passed, and light from street lamps, shop windows, neon signs, streamed across the mosaic sidewalks. A mule-drawn wagon turned into the street in front of them, a lumbering, cumbersome wagon bearing great red clay jars of wine. The mule ambled along, paying no attention to the honking of the police car. The driver shouted threats at the mule driver, and finally managed to swerve around wagon and mule, almost knocking down an elderly man in a tam-o’shanter who was riding along on a bicycle. The man wobbled precariously, shrieking at the police car and shaking his fist. The policeman leaned out the window and yelled back, zigzagging toward the curb to more shouting from excited pedestrians.
Beside Adam the canon sat still and stern, paying no attention. The driver regained control of the car and himself, and turned down a side street, then down another and darker street where laundry flapped, ghost-like, in the breeze from the Tagus.
The car stopped and the canon got out, beckoning to Adam, crossed to a narrow house faced with blue-and-white tile, and banged a brass knocker against a blue door. Above them a window was flung open and a man with a long white beard and a nightcap stuck his head out.
“A.H. 173-176,” the canon said.
“E.H. 269,” the man in the nightcap replied.
“ΦΩΣ λαν γας δóξης ϑαντου Πατς, oανου, γου, μαος, ησο Xιστ, λϑóντες π το λου δσιν, δóντες ϕς σπεινν, μνομεν Πατα, α Υν, α γιον Πνεμα Θεο,” the canon said.
“’′Αξιος ε ν πσι αιoς μνεσϑαι ϕωνας σαις, Υ Θεο, ζων διδος. Δι óσμος σε δοξζει,” the man with the beard replied, and disappeared, pulling the window closed behind him.
It had sounded like Greek to Adam. As a matter of fact, it probably was Greek.
The door creaked open and the man in the beard led them into a small side room containing only a high desk and a stool. The canon explained curtly, “Father Metousis is the only one who can break Dr. O’Keefe’s code.”
The patriarch sat on the stool, steel-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose. He wrote with a scratchy, sputtering nib which he had continually to dip into ink. Adam did not know how long Canon Tallis and he stood there while the old man wrote, thought, wrote, scratched out and wrote again. It must have been more than a few minutes. It was probably less than hours. Time had no meaning: it was not.
Finally Father Metousis handed the papers over.
“Joshua?” he asked.
Canon Tallis nodded. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Gaea?”
“Yes.”
Adam no longer attempted to understand. He swayed. Canon Tallis gestured to him and they left, climbing back into the police car which was waiting outside. “The American Embassy,” the canon said, then, dryly, to Adam, “We don’t usually have this kind of escort.”
At the Embassy a party was in progress. Lights and music filled the night. Uniformed servants were passing trays of champagne, platters of canapés. The canon walked by the open archways that led into the rooms in which the party was being held. At one end of the large room to the right an orchestra was playing, banked by palms. That they could play on the night of Joshua’s death, that the world could still turn, the Tagus flow, seemed to Adam incredible.
“Come,” Canon Tallis said.
They went up a flight of wide marble stairs. Adam could feel himself climbing, but he could not see: he was blind with rage, and even the brilliant lighting of the room into which he was led could not clear his vision. The kaleidoscopic events of the past hours crackled around him. He stood obediently by Canon Tallis while the echoing shots in the Saô Juan Chrysostom Monastery sounded in his ears.
He knew that he was being introduced to the Ambassador, and that he was being questioned kindly. He answered, but he did not hear what he said. In the bright room the Ambassador had to repeat a question.
Adam replied, the question slowly filtering through. “Oh. He was with the Singer Sewing Machine Company. I don’t think he was one of Cutter’s men.”
“No,” the Ambassador said. “One of ours.”
“Poly—” Adam said to the Ambassador, but heard no answer to the name that was now a question. “Charles cried,” he said, but when the ambassador, with gentle patience, asked, “What was that, Adam?” the boy only shook his head as though to try to clear it. Then he was able to answer the questions he had already answered once for Canon Tallis and Father Henriques.
Through the open windows of the Ambassador’s bright room the singing of summer insects came clearly, and it was as though their buzzing was in Adam’s head. The Ambassador was looking through the decoded papers. Later Adam would remember that there had been a transatlantic call to Washington. There were other calls.
Later it would all sort itself out in Adam’s memory, questions and answers finally settling like sediment in a test tube. Next to Canon Tallis’ steel control the Ambassador seemed excitable, harried, but Adam realized later that although he was undoubtedly the second he was not the first.
“But why did Arcangelo let Cutter and Kali go?” Adam exploded once. “Why did he let them leave the Saô Juan Chrysostom?”
&n
bsp; “The police and Interpol were both there. If you remember, they were already at the Bélem Tower.”
“But how—”
The canon silenced Adam with a stern glance. “When your young taxi driver friend left you and Joshua at the Saô Juan he went, as Arcangelo had directed him, to Bélem.”
“But what about Cutter and Kali now? Where are they?”
“Free,” Canon Tallis said, “in a manner of speaking.”
“But—”
The Ambassador sighed. “You are not at home, Adam. Trying someone like Typhon Cutter in a Portuguese court is difficult if not impossible—”
“You mean he can buy his way out?”
Now the Ambassador’s voice was hard. “You think our courts are entirely free from corruption? Of course Cutter would be able to buy and subvert at least part of the testimony against him. But this is nearsighted oversimplification. Even in America it’s difficult to arrest someone on suspicion of intent to commit murder. You have to have real and absolute evidence.”
“But Molèc—”
“—is being tried for murder. And will be found guilty. The beast caught in his master’s trap. One can’t help being sorry for him.”
“I can.”
“That’s evading the issue. He is, in a way, our scapegoat, too. Remember that the Portuguese are not interested in the moral and ethical qualities of expatriates, especially people whose extremely lucrative businesses bring employment and money where it is rather desperately needed. This is worth thinking about.”
But Adam was not capable of thought.
The Ambassador continued—or was it before? when? words floated to Adam’s mind with no consecutivity: “Has it occurred to you, Adam, that we don’t want to air Dr. O’Keefe’s experiments in court? The need for silence has not been removed. Has it occurred to you that both the Portuguese and the United States governments would wish to avoid the appearance of an international incident which Cutter would not hesitate to exploit? Something like this, allowed to snowball, could start a holocaust. Is this what Joshua would have wanted?”
The Arm of the Starfish (O'Keefe Family) Page 22