“Five thirty-five,” Cain said.
Coopersmith said, “That covers just about everything, then. We’d all better wait out front until it’s time; leave now one by one. The two of you come back in here, separately, between half past and twenty-five to. I’ll have Maude or Ellen playing the organ as soon afterward as I can manage it.”
The three men stood for several silent pulsebeats. Tribucci wanted to say something to Cain, to tell him he was sorry about the tragic loss of his family, to thank him for the choice he had made; but he had no words, it was not the time for words like that. Later, he thought, when it’s over. Later…
He moved first to the closed vestry door.
Ten
There was $3,247 in the Mercantile’s safe.
Brodie had taken too much time getting the box open, and Kubion’s patience had ebbed away finally and he’d told him to quit diddling around, quit diddling around you queer bastard, and Brodie said he was doing it as fast as he could, and Kubion just looked at him over the raised muzzle of the automatic. Six minutes later Brodie had the combination dial punched out with hammer and chisel and the safe door open wide. Inside were sheafs of papers and some ledger books and a key-type strongbox. With Kubion watching him closely, Brodie snapped the lock on the strongbox and counted out the money it contained onto the desk’s glass top.
$3,247.
Kubion stared at the thin piles of currency. Three thousand lousy goddamn lousy dollars! He had figured ten grand at least, maybe fifteen or twenty, some banker Hughes had been some hick banker son of a bitch. If he wasn’t dead already he’d be dead right now, just like all the hicks were going to be dead pretty soon, pretty soon.
He centered his gaze on Brodie standing by the desk in a litter of tools and bits and pieces of safe metal. Brodie’s face was stoic, but those purple eyes of his were like windows and you could see what he was thinking, you could hear we-told-you-so-didn’t-we running around inside his head as plainly as if he were saying it aloud. Kubion shouted, “Shut up, shut the fucking hell up!”
“I didn’t say anything, Earl.”
“This is only the beginning, you hear, there’ll be more in the other stores and in the houses, plenty more.”
“Sure there will.”
“Plenty more,” Kubion said again. The impulse, the need, had begun whispering to him; the ball of his index finger moved tightly back and forth across the automatic’s curved trigger.
Brodie said quickly, “I’d better gather up the tools before we leave here. We might need them again.”
Kubion’s temples throbbed. His finger continued to slide across the trigger, increasing pressure.
“Did you hear what I said, Earl?”
“I heard you.”
“There’s probably other safes in the valley: the inn, the Sport Shop, the cafe, the Hughes’ house or one of the other houses. I can’t open them without tools.”
“There won’t be any other safes.”
“We can’t know that for sure, not yet.”
“If there are I’ll get combinations or keys from whoever they belong to, I don’t need you for that.”
“Suppose whoever it is gives you trouble and you have to kill him before you find out a combination? Suppose there’s a safe at the Hughes’ house and the wife doesn’t know that combination either? Could be Hughes kept a spare bundle at home, some of these guys don’t like to keep it all in one place, right?”
Kubion’s finger became still. The impulse was still whispering to him, but it was saying now: Don’t kill him yet… he’s right, you might need him… don’t kill him yet, soon but not yet…
He said, “Put the tools back in the box, hurry it up, shag your ass.”
Brodie let breath spray inaudibly between his teeth. Immediately, carefully, he knelt and put on his coat and gloves and then began feeding the scattered tools back into the cardboard carton. When he was finished, Kubion ordered him to lace his hands behind him again; stepped forward and scooped the bills off the desk top left-handed and wadded them into his trousers. He went back to the doorway, told Brodie to pick up the carton and come out. A moment later, following him down the aisle between the counter and the wall shelves of liquor and bottled goods, Kubion felt the chill breath of the wind that came stabbing through the glassless door half. Snow whipped in the darkness outside, eddied into the store; the cry of the storm was like that of something alive and in pain.
Kubion’s mouth twisted into a vicious grimace. Snow, wind, cold, goddamn Eskimo village with wooden igloos, and three thousand in the safe and have to keep Brodie alive and Brodie’s back like a target in front of him, urge saying don’t kill him but then saying smash something else, smash something! He stopped moving, smash something do it now, and transferred the automatic to his left hand and swept his right through the bottles of liquor on the nearest of the shelves, driving a dozen or more to the floor. Glass shattered, dark liquid splashed and flowed. Brodie whirled and stared at him, carton held up at chest level, and Kubion yelled, “Don’t say a word, don’t move I’ll kill you if you move,” and picked a bottle off the shelf and threw it into the grocery section, toppling a pyramid of canned goods in another banging, clattering counterpoint to the shriek of the wind. He caught up a second bottle and pitched it at the gated Post Office window, missing low, this one not breaking, and a third bottle was in his hand and he flung that across the store at the left front window. The heavy bottom struck the cardboard replica of Santa Claus at the base of the spine and drove it and exploding fragments of glass outward to the sidewalk. One of the torn reindeer clung to a jagged piece of window, flapping in a sudden gust that hurled more flurries of snow through the opening.
The impulse grew silent then, momentarily satisfied, and he leaned panting against the counter. After several moments the smile reappeared on his mouth, and he straightened up again and returned the automatic to his right hand.
“We’ll hit the Sport Shop now,” he said. “Then the inn and the cafe and the rest of the buildings along here. Then the Hughes’ house.”
“However you want to do it,” Brodie said carefully.
“That’s right, Vic, however I want to do it.”
They went out into the sharp white wind.
Eleven
The interior of the church had grown progressively duskier with the coming of night. The votive candles on the altar had melted down, and the filtered daylight shining through the stained-glass windows had faded and then disappeared altogether. Spaced at intervals along the side walls, brass-armed electric candles burned palely, cheerlessly, and did little to dispel the pockets of grayish shadow forming on the pulpit and along the front wall.
In one of those pockets, by the peg-hung garments at the south front corner, Rebecca stood alone and wished that she could cry. Crying was a purge, in the same way vomiting was a purge, and it would get rid of some of the nauseating dread that persisted malignantly inside her. But there was no emetic for tears. You could cry or you couldn’t, and even as a child she had rarely wept. Once she had considered this a sign of inner efficacy; in truth, however, it was nothing more than a simple incapacity, like not being able to sing on key or stand on your head or perform backflips.
A voice beside her said softly, “Mrs. Hughes?”
She had not heard anyone approach, and she blinked and half turned. Zachary Cain was standing there. She searched his bearded face briefly and found no pity; empathy, yes, but mercifully, no pity. She thought then that he seemed different somehow. She hadn’t noticed it at the cabin earlier or on the ride down, she had been too frightened to notice anything; but there was a definite strength in him only hinted at previously, and the haunted irresolution which had ravaged his features last night had been effaced. It was as if he had undergone some sort of tangible metamorphosis; and today’s ordeal had had no apparent effect, or possibly some esoteric fortifying rather than weakening effect, on that change.
She said, “Don’t say you’re sorry. Please don
’t.”
“All right. I… know how you must feel.”
“Do you?”
“I think I do.”
“Nobody can know how I feel right now, Mr. Cain.”
“I can, because I’ve been through it-some of it.”
“What do you mean?”
He said slowly, “I lost my wife and two children six months ago, in San Francisco. My carelessness caused the deaths of all three of them.”
Rebecca stared at him.
“That’s why I came to Hidden Valley,” Cain said, and told her briefly what had occurred and the way it had been for him since.
The only words which came to her when he stopped talking were the same emptily condolent ones she had just asked him not to say to her. She moved her head slightly from side to side, right thumb and index finger worrying one of the buttons on her open parka.
At length she found other words and her voice. “Why did you tell me all that? Why now?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe… well maybe because of what you’re going through and will keep on going through for a while, the similarities of the things that have hurt both of us.”
“Keep my chin up, roll with the punches, don’t let happen to me what happened to you-is that it?”
“I didn’t mean it exactly that way.”
Rebecca looked away from him. “No, of course you didn’t,” she said, and then, in an undertone: “It’s just that everything seems so hopeless now. What’s the use of thinking about the future when there might not be any tomorrow for any of us? We might all be killed today, just as my husband was killed.”
“We’re not going to die,” Cain said.
“I wish I could really believe that.”
“You can. You have to.”
He extended a hand, as if to touch her and transmit by osmosis some of his own conviction; but he did not make contact, and his arm lowered and dropped again to his side. He held her eyes for a long moment, and Rebecca once more felt the new strength in him, felt some of the same intimacy they had shared the night before.
He said finally, “You’re going to be okay, all of us are going to be okay,” and one corner of his mouth spasmed upward in what might have been half of an ethereal smile. He moved past her and away along the front wall.
Rebecca watched him stop in front of the entrance doors and stand there staring straight ahead; watched him for a full thirty seconds. Then she thought that she wanted to sit down again and took a place in the nearest pew. She looked at the round whiteness of her joined knees, saw them mistily-and realized that the eyes which never cried were suddenly brimming with tears.
Cain waited gravely, leaning against the locked doors, for it to be time to go into the vestry.
His nerves jangled now and then, as if in reaction to a silent alarm bell, and a clot of fear existed parasitically just under his breastbone. But his earlier self-composure and the sharp anger remained forcefully dominant. He had only to look deep within himself again to know that he would be able to do whatever had to be done.
He thought of the unburdening of himself to Tribucci and Coopersmith. He had known, of course, that he would have to tell them, and he’d been both reluctant and willing. Like the words which had piled up inside him and finally spilled over to Rebecca last night, the entire tragedy had reached the limit of containment-she had been perfectly right in her comments about bottled-up emotions needing an outlet, too, sooner or later-and with self-perception there had come the need to relieve some of that pent-up pressure. The telling had been much easier than he might have thought, and even easier still when he’d related some of the facts to Rebecca minutes ago, and would be progressively easier each subsequent time he did it-if there were to be any subsequent times. The onus became so much more bearable when you confided to somebody, he knew that now: not because you wanted their pity or reassurances, but because it was like lancing a festering boil and letting some of the hurt drain away with the pus.
He had come to Rebecca with at least a half-formed intention of doing exactly as he had done-and he was not quite sure why. There were surface reasons, but there was also an underlying motivation that was elusive and amorphous. Perhaps it had something to do with Rebecca herself rather than Rebecca as just another person, something to do with empathy and mental concord and the way she had huddled against him in the pickup…
Abruptly he told himself: You’re doing too much thinking, there’s just no point in it now. Remember what the military taught you about survival in combat: concentration on fundamentals, on the external and not the internal; instinct, training, death as an abstract, doing the job at hand. The military was wrong about a great many things, but not about that.
Cain glanced down at his watch, and it was five thirty-two. He located Tribucci with his eyes, alternately pacing and standing along the northern wall. Coopersmith had been sitting by his wife, but now Cain saw him stand up and come toward the front, stop by the woman who worked in the Mercantile-the church organist.
Time, he thought. And walked with careful, though apparently aimless, strides to the opposite aisle and past Tribucci and up onto the pulpit.
Coopersmith bent, at the waist, resting his left hand on the pew back, and said sotto voce to Maude Fredericks, “Maude, I think it would be a good idea if you played some hymns for us.”
Pouched in red, tear-puffed hollows, her eyes moved dully over his face. Ordinarily she was a strong-willed woman, but the day’s life-and-death crisis, coupled with the twin shocks of Matt Hughes’ death and unfaithfulness-Coopersmith knew she’d maternally worshiped her employer-had clearly corroded that inherent strength.
“You mean now?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It would give us all a little comfort,” he told her, and it was at least part of the truth. “A hymn is a prayer, you know that, Maude.”
“Is He listening? If our prayers reach Him, why has He allowed us to suffer like this?”
“I don’t know, Maude. But I haven’t lost hope or faith, and I don’t believe you have either.”
Faint color came into the crepy whiteness of her cheeks. “No,” she said, “no, I suppose I haven’t.”
“Will you play some hymns then?”
She nodded and rose, and they went together to the pulpit. Sitting at the organ, Maude reached out to touch the open hymnal with the tips of her fingers; then she began to flip the pages slowly toward the rear of the book. Coopersmith did not see Cain, and Tribucci had just entered the vestry. He turned and announced quietly what he had requested of Maude. A few nods or murmurs of acceptance followed his words, though most of the drawn faces registered a kind of benumbed apathy. There was a single vocal objection.
“What for?” Frank McNeil demanded in shrill tones. “What’s the sense of it? We don’t need any damned hymns.”
The Reverend Mr. Keyes, conscious for some time now, struggled onto his feet. Pain-narrowed eyes sought out McNeil and pinned him with a look of uncharacteristic vehemence. “We are prisoners here, yes, but this is nonetheless a house of God. I won’t have further blasphemy, I won’t have it!” His voice was surprisingly strong and galvanic.
“The Reverend’s right,” Verne Mullins said. “Watch that mouth of yours, McNeil.”
More softly, Keyes said to Coopersmith, “Thank you, Lew. The playing of hymns, the singing of hymns-conjoining ourselves in prayer-is exactly what is needed now. Only Almighty God can put a swift and righteous end to this siege of wickedness.”
God and two men named John Tribucci and Zachary Cain, Coopersmith thought. He saw McNeil’s pinched mouth form words without voice, could read them plainly: “Hymns, prayers, religious mumbojumbo-ah Christ! ” Pursing his own lips, he went to sit once more beside Ellen; took one of her large, rough-soft hands in both his own, and gazed over at the vestry door.
“They’ll do it,” he thought, and then realized that he had spoken it aloud.
Ellen said, “What, Lew?”
As he came into the vestry, Tribucci saw that Cain was standing like a sentry beside the ladder which led up into the belfry. He went over next to him, taking the penknife from his trouser pocket and thumbing it against his palm while he buttoned his coat. They did not speak.
Long minutes dragged away, with the only sound that of the wind hammering beyond the outer wall. Tribucci was a simple, if intelligent, man who did not think in terms of metaphysical or Biblical symbolism, but standing there, waiting, he was struck with a wholly chilling perception: In its snowbound isolation, invaded by godless forces, this tiny valley had been transformed into a battleground; All Faiths Church was the focal point, its ultimate sanctity to be preserved or irrevocably destroyed along with the lives of seventy-five individuals; the conflict being waged and about to be waged here seemed in an apocalyptic sense to transcend the human element and become a battle between random representatives of Good and Evil.
Hidden Valley, California-on a Sunday two days before Christmas-was a kind of miniature Armageddon…
Raised voices came suddenly from inside the church proper. Tribucci tensed, listening. Another minute passed, and then the organ burst into swelling sound out on the pulpit; the Reverend Mr. Keyes commenced to sing in a shaky contralto, and Lew Coopersmith’s voice and a few others joined in. The chill deepened within Tribucci as he turned ahead of Cain to start up the ladder.
The hymn was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Twelve
When Cain emerged into the belfry behind Tribucci, he saw that there were four obelisk-shaped windows: two set side by side in the western and eastern walls. They were a foot and a half wide, of plain glass puttied into wooden frames. The church bell itself was not visible, exposed high above, but its four heavy redwood supports slanting outward to the walls beneath the windows filled most of the enclosure. The bell rope hung down between the supports.
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