The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  The doctor was clearly impatient with this part of her day’s work; there were much more interesting questions awaiting her back at the morgue. It would be a remarkable milestone in her career to analyze, anatomize, and psychologize the killer of a Pope.

  “If you were to ask me, I would say the theft was opportunistic,” she said, trying to conclude. “The Fontana building was completely swept Friday evening; one of the guards involved probably came back and took it with an eye to selling it for the silver. It wasn’t, after all, a very impressive picture.”

  Both Maryse and the curator gave pained sighs at this; it was their only moment of mutual understanding that morning. The doctor elevated her remarkable chin and asked if that would be all. Kane ordered her once again in fluent Italian to maintain confidentiality, gave her a short nod, and she swept out of the room, examining her watch.

  The gun remained visible on the screen. “Beretta 92FS, nine millimeter?” Maryse whispered to Kane. He smiled at her inadvertently, surprised once again at her eye and memory; she not only admired beautiful objects, she somehow captured them, savored them, mentally cataloged them, remembered every detail about them. It didn’t matter if it was the living hand of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling or the dead hand of a man holding an Italian semi-automatic pistol—to her it was all beauty.

  “Right,” he whispered back. She could see that he was pleased. He had taught her all about guns, about their force and utility, while she was fascinated with them as sculptures, tactile, smooth, and cold. Even so, she now wished she had never seen a gun in her entire life.

  It had been nearly a dozen years since that last day Kane had taken her to the target shooting in Glendalough. Fog was falling into the round valley so that the mountains were invisible around the rim. They seemed to be on a borderless plain, and the test range stretched almost to the mist, the ground before them sandy, pitted black and glimmering with spent shells. It was unlike any other piece of ground in the green glen. David, as she had known him all her life, had brought her here on his visits for as long as she could remember. At first, she had been afraid of the place, of the strangers who queued up to practice and of the fierce crackle of the guns.

  With outsized ear shields over her brown braids, she had begun learning to shoot with a tiny rifle at the age of eight. She had hated it, sweated through the target practice and murmured in the cold, although she loved being with her Uncle David. He wasn’t really her uncle, but that’s what she called him; and her father had loved him like a brother.

  A tall, squarely-built blond man whose hair had gradually worn into white, David Kane had a bond with her father that had drawn him back to Glendalough twice each year—at Christmas and at Easter—and he had always spent the two holidays of obligation with them. This drive to the firing range, sometimes in the bleakest weather, sometimes under the cherry blooms of Easter, had taken on the strength of a pilgrimage for her. Over the years she enforced her own discipline on herself, practicing with rifle and pistol until she achieved precision, and until speed matched precision. On Uncle David’s return, she never failed to astound him, even when she suspected that his stern, quiet praise came more from his fondness for her than from marks on the target.

  She had made little mark on anyone else. She grew up alone with her thin, animated father, the headmaster of the Priory School, and kept a shy distance from other children. Her mother had gone away, unable to live in the silent green cocoon of the glen, but perhaps more unwilling to stay, as her Irish father had said, “in the barrel.” It was years before she understood about whisky, but even more years before she understood about the barrel. At age fourteen, she had asked her father one more time why her mother had gone away. “Claustrophobia,” he had said, and then hugged her as if he were afraid she too would leave him. But he had no reason to fear.

  She and her father had awakened early nearly every day. They worked wordlessly together in the warm stone kitchen, making hot cocoa and studying the newspaper together. Then they would walk to the priory church for morning mass, often the only two people there except for the minister. It was always a little morning heartbreak to say goodbye to her father as they parted ways, he to his classroom and she to the village grammar school run by a teacher with a raw civil-service face. As each day faded, her spirits revived and she would run to the bus and to the comforting evening stew and biscuits and the walk through the glen with her father to evening prayers. They had lived in the new century like two castaways from an old world.

  The seasonal visits of David Kane had lifted her out of this little life into something sterner, more challenging. He always took his holidays near the upper lake at Hunter’s Cottage, which he owned. Then at first light on his first day in the glen he would arrive at her house and knock gently at the door. Her muscles strained like little wires to keep up as he charged through the bracken and woods of the glen on early morning walks that were like forest raids. They scared the animals and drove frightened birds out of the glen. A former Marine, he taught her to track him. And he taught her to ride horses, which terrified her at first. Afraid of heights, she refused to climb the cliffs of flint around St. Kevin’s Cave, but watched patiently as he pulled himself up by his fingers inches at a time, sweat blackening his white singlet even in the ferrous cold of December. She loved the rocks, could admire their shapes for hours, as well as the grace of the climber and his clock-slow dance against the cliff face.

  Kane was all method: his visits lasted exactly ten days; his climbs and walks and trips to the firing range were scheduled to the minute. The only exception to this iron regime was supper. Two or three times a week, he would sit with the Mandelyns over coffee and biscuits and watch the fire and listen to her father. At times she was amused by this: ample David Kane, crew-cut and stolid, posing questions like a small boy to her father, a thin, mild man in a pale-blue cardigan he had worn in the evenings for as long as she could remember. Her father’s responses were serene and animate. These talks seemed to quiet something in Kane, like calm water on a hungry fire never totally extinguished.

  The subject was theology. By day her father was Professor Ian Mandelyn, conservative, secure, and sincere in his Catholicism, the kind of headmaster his equally conservative patrons valued. The school catered to wealthy English Catholic families, mothers with pearls and lustrous hair who enrolled their boys in fresh air and tough schooling that was supposed to make them into men. Mandelyn presided over a small staff of lay sisters and male teachers whose main interest was football. While the sisters taught the catechism classes, the headmaster reserved to himself the theology class, which in his hands became a rich inquiry into popes and saints, artists and doctors, the Virgin and the Son. Once he closed the classroom door behind him, he made an uncanny connection with the boys. Their ties loosened, their faces became intent; the stories were too good, the faith too powerful to resist, although many had tried. They came to him with dead spirits, on their eyes hard scales of hard music, sex, in many cases drugs. He rarely failed to break through the scales, which fell away under the pressure of pure, clear fascination.

  David Kane had been one of the worst. “Ungovernable” was the word on his admission papers. The nephew of a prominent Irish bishop, he was also the offspring of a conventionally Catholic English woman, another muted blonde, and an American tennis player who had passed through Wimbledon like a quick storm. When David had arrived at the school, he seemed to be at some opposite pole from the rest of the students. The other boys wore long hair like spaniels’ ears; David’s was shorn. The others were unhealthy from smoking and drinking too young; David had a puritan’s aversion. Where most of the boys joked about the futility of adolescence, David was angered by it. He was stronger and larger and struck fear into the other boys, which they dealt with by taunting him; and when after the first week he struck one of them a blood-bursting blow to the jaw, Mandelyn drove him directly to see the constable.

  But they n
ever arrived. Stopping on the road, Mandelyn invited David to walk with him a while. They climbed a few steps and sat on a stone overlooking Glendalough, where they could see the soft green of the lake and woods and the ancient church tower that St. Kevin had built. They talked for hours. The professor made no reference to the fight; he simply talked, telling all about St. Kevin, whose cave was hidden in the hills overhead.

  All this had taken place before Maryse was born when her father had been a young headmaster. After his walk with her father, David had become as close to him as a son. There had been no further problems. The spring day he received his diploma from the Priory School, he and Professor Mandelyn both cried quietly all through the ceremony. David returned as often as he could, even while at Cambridge, through his years in the Royal Marines, even after he had gone into the diplomatic service. David had held her at her baptism, carried her in a backpack as he hiked around the twin lakes of Glendalough, and brought money for her Easter frock.

  Then she went away. Because David Kane had gone to Cambridge, so did she, although to a different college. In her first year at Cambridge she held on to Fisher House, the Catholic chaplaincy, as tightly as if holding to the edge of a cliff. But reading art history loosened that grip. Her faith remained unquestioned but gradually calcified into the smooth marble of the Madonna’s face and faded into the texture of Murillo’s leathery saints. Her religion turned tactile, tough, and exquisitely precious.

  After obtaining two degrees, she decided to spend a last holiday with her father. Glendalough looked dusty to her. It was a dry, windy summer. Each morning she rose early, put on her boots, and walked half an hour to the stables to hire a horse. Her favorite was a great black one that cast up steam as she rode him fast over the grassy margins of the glen. Tall, as agitated as a slim tree in the wind, she could not remain still. That summer she first felt like a woman, independent, all energy. The glen seemed smaller and dirtier, her father weaker, and the mornings more hazy. Professor Mandelyn thrilled for hours over the art books she had brought home from university; he sat quietly with them day after day, wearing his heavy sweater even in the afternoon heat, while she talked in an aimless stream as if to unload the heavy cargo of her education on him.

  It was on such a visit to Glendalough that she crossed into David Kane’s sterner world.

  One afternoon he knocked on the door. She had just finished the washing up, so her hair was flying and her clothes sweaty. She was stunned. She had not seen him in years. He seemed taller and broader than ever, his hair on the edge of white, his poplin suit as sharply tailored as the crisp black car on the edge of the green.

  “It’s not Easter. And it certainly isn’t Christmas.”

  “I know,” he smiled. “But I thought I’d take a chance.”

  She wanted to throw her arms around his neck but drew back. He looked her over with amusement and she felt shy. Summer had dried and browned her skin, still spattered with the freckles she had hated as a child.

  “Who is it?” her father called, coming out of the library in his sweater and slippers. He was surprised too. The men embraced and then walked wordlessly into the library and closed the door; speechless, Maryse was too tangled up in embarrassment to follow. Instead, she went to her room, changed to go riding, and started for the stables. She was determined not to be the little girl standing around waiting for the two of them to notice her.

  On her favorite black she dug into the hillsides, racing the shadows of afternoon clouds, keeping an eye on the main road in the glen. After an hour or so, she caught a glimpse of the big car moving down the road. She did not know what to do. He couldn’t be leaving already. She longed to see him, to talk to him. Too much of her heart was taken up by him. She cursed herself for being too proud to wait; they had no doubt wondered where she had gone.

  She galloped down the hill, through a space in the trees toward the main road on the chance of giving him a last wave, maybe of flagging him down just to say goodbye. As she came out of the clearing, she found herself at the entrance to the rifle range. And there, next to the big car, David Kane stood in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened.

  “I came down to do a little target shooting. Like to join me?” he asked as if years had not passed between them. He opened the boot, removed two glossy gun cases, and tossed her a magnificent Beretta handgun that she had no doubt was fully loaded. She dismounted from the horse and tied it to the gate.

  “He won’t like the noise,” she said.

  “He’ll get used to it.”

  Together they walked into the range and all the memories came back. He handed her ear shields from his gun case and watched her adjust them just as he had years before.

  They were alone. The range looked more desolate than ever, cratered, sprinkled with blown-out tins and bordered by a rank of tattered old paper targets. Kane took aim and fired firmly at one of them, emptying the magazine in seconds. From where she stood, she could see a tiny black hole in the heart of the target widening with each shot. Behind them the horse started and whined. Kane looked at her expectantly.

  The marvelous light balance of the pistol felt natural in her hands. Selecting a target, she poured bullets into it; the sound was like the beating of birds’ wings. Kane walked to the target and examined it for a long time, and closely. She wondered if he had gone off daydreaming, but then he strode back.

  “Maryse, I’m not really a diplomat, although there is a lot of diplomacy in what I do. I’m an intelligence officer, and I want you to come and work for me.”

  She laughed. It was a joke; but then she remembered that David Kane did not tell jokes.

  “I’m at Interpol—it’s the international criminal police organization.”

  “I know what Interpol is.”

  “You don’t have a job, do you? You have an art history degree, and what on earth can you do with that?”

  “I can make my own way,” she said, unconvincingly.

  “You can start on the margins. I want you to get acquainted with all the big collectors and collections.”

  “Collectors of what?”

  “Art, of course. That’s what we do—we chase art thieves, along with terrorists and drug kings. Art theft is the third or fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world—after drugs, money-laundering, and maybe high-tech weapons.”

  She felt the old resistance. He had always done this to her, tossed challenges at her as if they were the next logical steps toward some elusive goal. She was afraid again, but she knew that, for her, that logic could not be escaped.

  Ha-Tikvah Road, Tel-Aviv, 0750h

  Ari gradually awoke to a strange sound, like creaking rocks or yawning, breaking wooden beams in the distance. Then he realized it was the call of the shofar from the synagogue, and that it was the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. He lay there in the heat, sunlight coming through the window slats over his body, the shofar droning faintly outside.

  He remembered going to the Great Synagogue when he was a boy, the shofar on the loudspeakers, the singing of the musaf tefillah, the long prayers on this day that seemed to stretch on forever. “May the Messiah come this year, and if he does not may we live as if he has.…” There would be no prayers today in the Great Synagogue, he thought. The last time he had seen it, weeks before, sheets of plastic had replaced the smashed windows and the charred stone was barely visible beneath a network of white scaffolding.

  Forty-five minutes later he was in his car speeding up the deserted road to work. He didn’t want to be late for the morning meeting. He passed the great statue of a six-winged cherub that marked where a Scud rocket had exploded harmlessly over a schoolyard during the first Gulf War. Miraculously, no lives had been lost. Ari was born during that war, and he reflected that he had lived his entire life under the threat of another attack from the air—a threat that was worse now than ever.

  Hardly anyone was on the road but a few men h
urrying down the pavement toward a neighborhood synagogue. They crowded the entrance as he passed, kissed the mezuzah at the door and bowed their way in. He caught just a brief echo of the singing from inside.

  As there was no traffic, he zipped along the highway toward Jerusalem in record time. He slowed down as he approached Queen Helena Street, the headquarters of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence force. At the door he went through the rituals required to enter and soon found himself in the meeting room—early for a change. But the meeting was already under way, and clearly had been for some time. Cups and papers littered the table. The lights were muted in the windowless room, and everyone was looking at a giant wall screen.

  “Come in,” his chief said in her rough voice. “We’re getting a full briefing on last night.”

  There was worry in the air—not the typical anxieties this time. Obviously, only one item was on the agenda. The usual participants in this meeting had been displaced and sat on chairs next to the wall. The ten seats at the table were now occupied by people who were mostly strangers to Ari, so he sat down in a chair by the door.

  The wall screen fluttered, and Ari watched as the feed from his own digital camera was projected onto the screen. Everyone in the room was silent, listening to Ari’s recorded narration, breathing hard as the dead figure on the floor came into view. One man in particular seemed barely able to contain his anger. Eventually, the screen paused on the face of the victim and there was a rumble of voices around the table.