Well, Adrian went on, not met exactly, but noticed. He might be a sailor, or at least someone who lives a seafaring kind of life. Listen to me, sounding like Herman Melville. Wrong seacoast, I know, but the Royal Navy isn’t all that far away, I’m pretty sure. Something in the set of his shoulders in that classic pea coat and the blue watch cap pulled down over hair that looked shaggy and dirty blond made me think of it. Around here, all the available men appear to be either sailors, monks, brewers, or dead. Ha! Anyway, I was reading in a booth at the pub called Olde Bandylegs here in Sidestrand—only about a mile from the abbey—waiting for Antony to turn up, and this stranger caught my eye. Finished what they call a pint, checked his watch, and swung himself away from the bar. I was appreciating the sleek way he moves like something that could take you unawares in the woods—and I do mean take you—when he noticed me.
I’m a little past the weak-in-the-knees phase of my life—unless of course you’re talking a Sumerian goblet—and this is supposed to be a Trip Journal, not some sweaty diary—but I caught my breath. Those eyes (green? gray?) settled on me just long enough to make him slow down, appraising me. For what? Sex? A drink? A discussion of whether the royal babies look like Kate or Will? All three? I gave him that arch look I’ve seen Val manage many times, and I actually fingered my pearls. Only I wasn’t wearing any. With one final glance at his watch, he brushed a crumb from his thigh, which set my heart pounding, watching me the entire time. I could swear he was stroking my thigh. Then, shooting me a quick, slight smile that I’d like to think held some regret, he walked quickly out of the pub. Dear Trip Journal, it was the best sex I’ve never had.
12
From the vestry of the Robus Christi chapel in Gramercy Park, the man called Animus watched the members of his High Council assemble. Millard Mackey, the veteran of the first Gulf War who kept house for him, had brushed the black trousers and frock coat the head of the organization wore on these important occasions. Garments hung like hell on him anymore, what with the disease, and in many ways he was little better than a coat hanger, no better than a skimpy wire that just does a job. In helping his employer dress, Millard had the task of working around the two canes Animus insisted on using instead of the walker his oncologist recommended. A walker was not at all the right image for the head of this organization he had carefully built, whereas a cane has true mystique. Two, even more so.
Millard, who had suffered burns over half his body in the battle of 73 Easting in southeastern Iraq, and had undergone two reconstructive surgeries to the left side of his head and torso with indifferent results, had lost much of the use of his voice, half his hearing, and all of his left eye. Although his bleary right eye was still perfectly discerning and could execute a Windsor knot with admirable speed and panache, Millard had to steady himself against the frail man who clung to his canes with the wispy remnants of his strength, otherwise both of them would land on the floor. They may have become bent and lopsided men, but Animus always reassured his indispensable Millard that the prophecy at the core of Robus Christi would include them both. Because it enveloped all of the righteous.
At these words, the dogged Millard, half of whose scalp was so scarred it no longer grew hair, would nod and get an equivocal look on his ravaged face like he was trying to decide between taking the train or the crosstown bus. On some level, Animus understood. Prophecy for the likes of Millard fell more along the lines of shrieks about incoming enemy missiles, followed by a minute of scrambling horror, fulfilled in a deafening explosive truth.
Peeking around the doorway of the vestry, Animus watched as one by one, his High Council greeted each other with warm glances as they found seats in one of twelve rows of walnut pews. He called this special meeting to announce that the fulfillment of prophecy was very near. Millard brushed the shoulder of the frock coat with the arm it was painful for him to raise above his waist, so it was clear what it took. “Go, go,” Animus whispered, patting the ruined man with a vague fondness. “I’m ready,” he assured him. Millard shot him one of his frequent looks that could mean anything from that’s what you think to it’s tough doing what you do, and I am honored to press your pants.
When Millard slunk out through the door that led to the other half of the house, the man turned and opened the bank vault he had—at unfathomable expense—installed at the rear of the vestry when a credit union on the Lower East Side had closed five years ago. Two-foot thick reinforced steel, climate controlled, accessible by a combination lock, this vault had become, for his eyes only, the holy of holies. On an octagonal display case in the very center of the space were the precious items. Now, since Alaric had presented him with the final missing element—the Crown—he set aside his canes and opened the glass halves of the lid.
Iron, and thorn, and an ancient leather fragment—which he kept close to him in his study next door—had brought him his life’s work.
All collected in terrible secrecy.
No one else except the indispensable Alaric knew the cost.
Alaric, too, was iron and thorn.
We are what we pursue. Nothing more or less.
Pulling himself up to his full height—three inches shorter than when he began his course to fulfill the prophecy—the head of Robus Christi grabbed his two canes and turned the lock on the door to the vault. With a flash of his old poise, he headed slowly into the chapel, spotting Alaric in his gray leather jacket standing at the back with his arms crossed. As the High Council fell silent, he was struck all over again by how very fine they were, each of them. And why not? He had hand-picked or vetted them all. Inventors, IT virtuosos, philanthropists, NASA scientists, a film director, three United States senators. Everyone world-class. Everyone on board for the highest promise of Robus Christi. A Kingdom of God in the Kingdom of Man, for all.
“Evening, Animus,” said Malka, the concert violinist who always sat in the front pew at council meetings.
He inclined his head. “Malka.”
Then he glanced around the chapel, which looked inexpressibly warm and beautiful in the early evening light. Millard and Alaric had lighted the candle wall sconces, set into the old wood paneling that lined the walls, the little flames going up and up. Next to the altar was the Gothic wrought-iron standing candelabra, all five branches holding the traditional Robus Christi blue pillar candles, alight. The sight always settled his heart. He let his eyes go soft, gazing into that white-hot shapeless place inside the flames. This was their own Gat Smanim, right here on Gramercy Park West.
He leaned lightly against the altar, just enough to brace himself without drawing too much attention to his weakness, which he had carefully kept from each of them, and turned his head slowly to face the Robus Christi High Council. “I have news,” he raised his voice as he gazed at the handpicked assembly. Once the prophecy was fulfilled, these fifty would continue in advisory roles and the true democracy of never-ending life and faith would spread like new oxygen over the troubled world.
“How exciting,” cried one of his IT experts.
For the past eight years he and his High Council had to take heart with mundane victories. Variances, trusts, mission statements, neighbor conflicts (particularly getting the ordinance about picking up after your dog enforced—hard-won and extremely contentious). So when Alaric came up with the first of the items specifically mentioned in the fragment—tracked down to a junky secondhand shop called Milady’s Miscellany in the East End of London—the High Council wept and rejoiced.
When he came up with the second item, two years ago, finally, in a stable in Brittany, the High Council fell silent. They were within one sacred object of what they needed to fulfill the prophecy that was the very engine of the organization. That night, the prayers and communion were especially hushed and meaningful because the possibility of final success loomed large. They were close. And it was partly…frightening.
“Nothing in the papers, I hope,” cried one of them.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Wait,” said Malka with her unfailing intuition. Beaming in the chapel’s candlelight, she swiveled to look for Alaric in the back. “Has Alaric—?”
At that, the fifty members of the Robus Christi High Council fixed their eyes on the visionary head of the organization, and waited, poised with what they somehow already guessed was coming. “He has,” said the frail man, holding up a hand. “Our very estimable man in the field has delivered the third and final sacred object.” They cheered. It struck him that even the High Council never knew the identity of the objects, these artifacts of the Crucifixion, nor what Alaric had done to take possession of them. Difficult choices had to be made in the service of good works. Nothing that comes cheap can also be priceless.
“And now what?” said the IT expert. “When does the prophecy—?”
Animus spoke over the murmurs. “Get fulfilled?” That was the question now, wasn’t it? “Very soon,” he said with a smile, his mind already listing the final steps in what he had built very carefully over these last eight years. “Robus Christians, you will know.”
Gone forever will be the agonizing and unanswerable questions about a hereafter that in the new world promised by the prophecy will become completely inconsequential. What greater conversion tool could there possibly be than the promise of life in which suffering and mortality play no part? What the prophecy was about to usher in was what he and Alaric had worked selflessly to achieve, a dissolving of all violent differences and impossible sufferings into what only he himself had gleaned from the secret of the acacia wood box: a messianic age without a messiah. The ultimate spiritual democracy.
And, now that the three holy relics had been collected, it would begin with him.
Animus.
At the hour of his death that would be no death at all.
Cued by his slight nod, the fifty members of High Council reached into the racks where hymnals used to be kept and drew out the laminated cards that held the single prayer he himself had written. Then they intoned, “Haec est Robus Christi.” After five minutes of chanted prayer, they stood and filed silently up to the communion table that held the small silver bowls the faithful Millard once grumbled were a bitch to polish. Each bowl contained a host. Returning to their seats, the High Council performed the Robus Christi open-handed benediction over the bowls, reciting the credo, I believe the world to come lives already in the world of man. Then they set the hosts on their tongues.
After all this time, the frail man still felt his breath catch at the splendor of it. A self-administered host among Peruvians and Laplanders and Masai and Nebraskans, in a world where the promise of perfect peace would prevail. And death would have no place. No claim on humanity. After all. What he wouldn’t mention to any of them—not even Alaric or Millard—was that tomorrow he had an appointment with his oncologist, who expressed the desire to discuss in person the most recent test results, and press once again for hospice care. The head of Robus Christi would have to work very hard to keep from smiling.
13
“I could use a drink.”
After finding the Trip Journal, Val and Bale spent another hour in Adrian’s office at the Coleman-Witt, hoping to get a feel for the crime—and hoping to stumble across some piece of evidence the NYPD had overlooked. Finally, while Val thumbed through one of Adrian’s specimen drawers, filled with potsherds dated twenty-five hundred years ago, she slowly became aware of how still the room was. She glanced up from a particularly sand-roughened shard labeled Tikrit, ca. 2195 BC and noticed Bale standing motionless in the center of the office. He had the look on his face she had seen on TV news broadcasts covering tornado survivors standing in disbelief in the rubble of their homes.
Bale was done for the day, that much Val could tell. “Where do you want to go?”
He ran a hand roughly over his head. “I want to get out of this neighborhood,” he muttered. “I never want to come back here.” To the place where a beloved sister comes to work because she’s actually working her dream job, her with her fake purse and totally innocent find of a holy relic she’d picked up by mistake, when she’s possibly humming about some sexy stranger in a Norfolk pub and she looks up to see something unexpected in her doorway. A killer. Adrian, who only ever wanted to grow old acquiring and exhibiting what for her were treasures from an ancient desert civilization. Where was a motive for murder in that?
Val zipped the Trip Journal back into Adrian’s thermal lunch bag and cast a final look around her dead friend’s office. Bale was right. There was nothing here. Adrian had been gunned down for a perfectly impersonal and antiseptic reason. She had the fatally bad luck to be given a Victorian urn that had been made the makeshift hidey hole for a priceless stolen object. The Crown of Thorns. “I’d say…” she went over to Bale and looked him in the eye, “we’re looking for a single killer, don’t you think?”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Bale, touching her arm lightly. As Val tucked Adrian’s lunch bag under her arm, it felt precious to her. She’d have to talk to Bale about getting it to Adrian’s apartment, and he could call Eva Toscano and have the rest of Adrian’s personal effects at the Coleman-Witt boxed and delivered to Adrian’s as well. As they headed together toward the main hall, Bale’s turned his tired face to Val. “A single killer…?”
“Adrian and the boy monk who stole the Crown.”
Bale’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, but we don’t know that. Last I heard the coroner was still out on the cause of death of Fintan McGregor.”
At seven fifteen for the next two mornings, Val played a waiting game. Dressed for work both days in her favorite Ann Taylor gold ankle pants, black asymmetrical top and black Dansko clogs, she put in an hour on what she came to think of as her West 73rd Street stakeout and then dashed to Broadway to catch the train to her office. What she was looking for was a face. Any face. Someone she possibly recognized from three days ago when Adrian was murdered.
She was counting on the ironclad routines of early morning New Yorkers. Those Upper West Siders who would leave for work twenty minutes early to get in the line out the door at the Starbucks on Columbus Avenue. The ones who pounded the same route daily in all weather and pricey running shoes. The retired neighbors who ambled with their identical cockapoos long enough for some steaming product they bag, all in time to get to a zumba class at the 92nd Street Y.
Val had called Cleary to see if there was anything new on the investigation, and whether a couple of detectives from the 20th Precinct had indeed hit the jackpot with someone out on the sidewalk that morning who had been able to give them some kind of lead. “We got the runner with the ponytail, and she thought she had seen a Con Ed truck parked up the block. Only no one else did. Still, we’re running it down to be sure.”
Not promising. “Anything else?”
“Suspicious looking men ran the gamut,” Cleary went on. “Young and black, middle-aged shifty Italian, an old Sikh who was about half a mile out of his neighborhood and no doubt about it, up to no good. In short, every stereotype known to man.” And the routine door-to-door yielded squat. Nothing out of the ordinary. “You know the MTA mantra, right?” Cleary suddenly piped up. “Plastered all over the trains and buses, ‘if you see something, say something’?”
“Right.” Val had no idea where the homicide cop was going.
“People report all the wrong things. Nobody seems to have a clue what’s important,” she grumbled. Like she was referring to love, voting, and paying your bills.
But Val’s first solid lead came toward the end of her shift that first morning as she stood in the drizzle that in the city hardly counted as precipitation. She had accosted the runner with the ponytail, who blinked at her and went on in a strained way, lightly jogging in place, about the possible Con Ed truck. Val must have looked disappointed because the woman jogged sideways and added she saw a mixed race guy who might h
ave gotten out of the truck.
“Might have?”
The runner waved a hand dismissively. “He looked like a blue-collar kind of guy. The kind you see fooling around with power lines.”
This information told her something about the witness, but nothing about the crime. Still, Val grasped at anything as her bangs were slowly starting to stick to her forehead. “I don’t suppose you remember the time?”
One of these days she’d have to break down and buy an umbrella. Something beautiful from MoMA.
Back and forth, back and forth went the runner, like Rocky Balboa on the steps of Philly City Hall. “Past seven thirty. I always turn the corner onto 73rd Street at seven thirty, otherwise I fall behind my PB.”
“PB?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed at her. “Personal best.”
“But the crime occurred sometime before seven thirty,” Val said, studying her Danskos, noting how the raindrops were beading up. By a little after seven thirty, the killer would have been long gone from the Coleman-Witt.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” said the woman, as though Val was being thick and difficult. A very small old woman with short flyaway hair and two hearing aids that pushed her large ears slightly forward joined Val and the runner. Rainwater streamed down the red frames of her eyeglasses. Folding her arms, she puckered her lips and looked thoughtfully from the runner to Val. “Are you with the police?” the runner asked with the most curiosity she had shown since Val collared her.
“No,” said Val, turning up the collar of her black raincoat. “It was my friend who was killed.”
The runner slung her a quick, sad look that turned helpless. “Con Ed, mixed race guy, later than seven thirty.” Dancing backwards from Val, who nodded at her, the runner made a lithe turn and took off up the block, dodging a twin stroller pushed by a hollow-cheeked dad.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 9