15
He minded the woman.
It surprised him how much.
Alaric turned the white Escalade he had rented under one of his aliases onto E. 51st Street from Third Avenue just as a light rain started to fall. Two twenty p.m. This was his second shot at being able to double park right in front of the building. The first time, he was thwarted by a Coors delivery truck. As he bullied his way in front of a yellow cab who rightly gave him both the finger and the horn in their short-lived competition around the truck, he continued in fine, Caddy splendor on down the block. It wasn’t long before Alaric’s mind slipped again to the woman at her desk.
In some other, normal world, wherever that may still be, he would simply have stepped onto the threshold of her office, done his two-second perfect scan of the scene, leveled his weapon and fired. Without a bead of sweat, without a racing heart. He became a master of sloughing off human feeling many years ago. Ever since those double-wide trailer days when his half-sister would crawl into his bed and slip her trembling hands down into his pajamas, and his mother broke his jaw when he finally worked up the nerve to tell her. His jaw healed only okay, but it made him look older and street-wise, there in that shithole of a place where there were hardly any streets to get wise in. As he grew, it gave him a kind of speculative, sizing-up look that women seemed to like. His mother stopped whaling him, but his half-sister only snickered, you tole on me, ya sweet little shit, ya tole, ain’t you a fine one.
He had found his way to a small brick Catholic Church just four miles away from the double-wide, where he confessed to all sorts of things, just so they’d let him stay—bad thoughts, bad deeds, bad intentions, bad.
He read the balding priest right, him with the eyeglasses from Sears and the paunch. That parish priest gave him a bed in the rectory basement and three squares a day and once tried getting the kid to open up by saying: You’re a handsome fellow, boy, and there will be those who take advantage of you. And the boy just polished the communion plate and waited for the priest to be one of them. It never happened.
But the handsome boy with the jaw broken by his worthless mother started to make stealthy searches of the priest’s rooms while he was out on sick calls. The boy saw secrets as his insurance against eviction, starvation, or even just nighttime hands thrust deep down inside his pajamas. His fingers learned speed and precision rifling through underwear and toiletries and personal papers, his eyes settling with no expression on the Crucifix hanging over the priest’s bed.
And he recalled how he felt something strange and wondered if it might be shame. It was as if the beautiful little dead Christ fashioned out of silver closed his eyes not in the death the whole damn story seemed to be about, but in grief. Grief for the boy standing before him, trespassing in ways for sure different from his half-sister’s, but still trespassing. When he stopped to think about it, it was all hands down the pajamas. That was the day he actually had something to confess. And that was the day he determined to become devout—Lord, he prayed, let me be worthy—and to find a way to make a fine living away from this place where the riverbank breeds boredom and evil.
So he minded killing the woman.
That poor blundering kid monk had told Alaric what happened to the Crown there on the ridge. On the directive from Animus, Alaric had been reassuring to the distraught boy—after all, he recognized in the boy a very old, familiar desire to be worthy. The boy wasn’t at all terrified when he turned away and Alaric brought a rock down with two hands on the back of the erring head. And Alaric had picked the body up heavily, weary from something he didn’t quite understand, and released it over the edge of the cliff.
He should have minded the boy more.
But for now it was the woman. The recent one, not the sly, chain-smoking ferret in heels who owned the East End secondhand shop in London where he had found the lance after two years of searching. And she had figured out what it was, put up a fuss, set a new and exorbitant price, and the only way he could settle their differences was to leave her strangled on the floor of her shop. No, the one he minded was Adrian Bale, who had unwittingly transported the third and final relic of the prophecy. When Alaric shot out the security camera, he made his way silently down the corridor, and stepped into her doorway.
They stared at each other for two agonizing seconds.
It was her, the woman from Olde Bandylegs Pub.
But how could that be?
He felt so rattled that he shot her in the head as though he could obliterate her barest memories of him. Oh, he was going to have to kill whoever possessed the Crown anyway, but it threw him that he knew her. As he actually found himself wishing it had been someone else, he double-parked in the spot where the Coors truck had been. Then he pressed the hazard lights and quickly scanned the street.
Alaric slipped out of the Escalade, which he locked, and stepped lightly up to the sidewalk and hit the panic button. The screeching wheep that wouldn’t stop brought the doorman at a loping run to check out the drama on 51st Street. Alaric slipped inside and strode to the tenant directory. There she was. Although he had checked her office, just to be sure. No more surprises, not like he had with the Bale woman.
Her name was fourth down alphabetically.
V. Cameron. 5-B.
Norfolk
By the time Bale set foot on the grounds at Burnham Norton Abbey, the sun was high in the sky and the wind was coming off the North Sea. In this part of the world, he liked both sun and wind, and he liked them together. Sunlight was always reassuring and wind kept him alert to the unpredictable. Abbey life was so needfully routine that Bale had come to relish the unexpected. Not murder, he thought as he let himself in through the kitchen door. There he nodded to Brother Sebastian, the stooped monk with pendulous dark eye bags who headed up the kitchen. Sebastian was rarely seen without his pin I AM IN SILENCE, which Bale cynically suspected was a ploy to head off any complaints about the abbey food.
As he left the kitchen, the distinctive smell of industrial grade dish detergent that somehow never smelled as though it cleaned followed him out. Bale strode along the cloisters, where Brother Martin laid a hand on his arm. “Welcome back,” said Bale’s pal, the monk with a thatch of dark hair as tangled as the weeds he attacked in the garden beds.
“Thanks. Any new information on the boy?”
Martin sighed, which always deepened the furrows in his face. “Inconclusive. Back of the skull crushed. Rather impossible for the ME to tell whether it occurred before or after the tumble off the ridge. Looks like it’s going down as death by misadventure.”
Bale rubbed his face. “I’d say murder is a misadventure, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, the greatest. Go get settled. You’ll be pleased to hear you missed every single one of the morning prayers.” Bale smiled. Then Brother Martin leaned in. “And your sister, Antony? You know I’m sorry as I can be.”
Bale nodded once, tightly. Brother Martin was his closest friend at Burnham Norton, but it was a very old habit of Bale to keep information to himself. Trust, he had found, was highly situational. “The investigation is—what do they say?—moving along.”
Brother Martin took a step back, scrutinizing Bale. “I know better than to ask whether you’ve got a theory of your own.”
Bale studied the graceful arch at the end of the east cloister. “It’s early days yet,” he said with a soft smile.
“Early days yet, that’s right,” hooted the garden monk. “Another way of saying get your snout out of my trough. You’ll tell me when you can.”
As Cellarer, Antony had been responsible for the hiding of the Crown. It had made a kind of sense, when Prior Berthold had suggested the task to him. After all, in the most basic way imaginable, storage was lay brother Bale’s job at the abbey. Nuts and bolts, cases of altar wine, Q-Tips, toilet paper, cans of creamed corn, and the Crown of Thorns. He, Berthold, and Brother Martin were
the only monks who actually knew its hiding place. The Prior had suggested Martin as a third—a safeguard in the event something knocked out the other two—based on an implicit trust he had of the man. A trust Bale had only ever felt for his sister Adrian.
“You’ll be wanting to check in with the Prior,” said Martin, clapping Bale on the shoulder as he headed toward the abbey door that led to the garden shed. “He’s in the office, poring over paperwork in what he called ‘Brother Antony’s tragic absence.’”
Bale made a grab for his friend’s robed arm. “The young monk named Eli. I’ve got some questions for him.”
“Ah,” said Martin, narrowing his dark eyes. “He’s with me today. I’m saving him from Sebastian. The boy hates the whole silence thing. That one, Eli, has a taste for the careless speech of others. Mind you, he’s pretty much trash on my patch, but I can manage. Interesting lad, that one, I can tell you.” With a billowing wave, Martin turned away. “I think today I’ll tell him we’re viewing our weeding as a silent devotion, just to play with his head.” He grinned. “Bye, Antony.”
Bale watched his friend leave, loping along the cloister. Off to his job as garden monk. At times Bale suspected he himself was a bit of a trespasser in the house of the Lord, among all these genuinely good brothers who toiled at the liturgy and the daily workings of the abbey out of what seemed to their Cellarer a rather threadbare hope of better things to come. Bale had always found himself strangely sentimental about people who sacrificed much for an idea that clung on in their hearts despite the evidence of their senses.
He liked men and women who believed there was something ineluctably beautiful about scrubbing stonework for the glory of a God they would never in this—or any other—lifetime get to see, which was why he chose to lend his talents to a religious community. He liked men and women who made good honest efforts despite outcomes, which was why the figure of Christ still interested him.
Bale let himself into the dorter where the lay brothers and male guests stayed. It was a strange, cool place, always dim regardless of the time of day or the season. Nothing seemed to penetrate the thick stonework right at this place, and sounds were only ever muffled. For Bale, it was a perfect place, this spot where he left behind the public and devotional life of the abbey. This was the place where Bale could always find something cached inside himself that could still surprise him. In that moment, he pushed back into the dim stony source place, hoping for a bolt of insight into the connection between the death of the thief Fintan and the murder of Adrian. Because what connected them, it was clear, was the relic. And now its second theft. But in the space at the foot of the steps to the second floor of the dorter, what Bale found himself thinking about was Val Cameron.
Then he took the stone steps three at a time up to his modest cell on the second floor, where he would shower away his fatigue from the red-eye flight and the train from Norwich, and change back into his brown wool robe that identified him as a member of the Carmelite order. Antony Bale, Cellarer. For everything else about him that he kept strenuously out of sight, there was no order, no robes, no promises rather haphazardly kept.
16
Bale sat down in the upholstered chair motioned to him by the Prior of Burnham Norton Abbey. There he waited in silence for the Prior to set a match to the kindling in the fireplace insert. At seventy, the Prior was a sack of skin draped on a skeleton, a man too studious to pay much attention to meals. Berthold kept his head close shaved and went barefoot as much as possible, in the Carmelite spirit. But none of his scrupulous behavior helped him in terms of warming his meager flesh. The Scotch did. The fire did. And Antony’s frequent news of the outside world. All three at once would probably make him fan himself with the most recent issue of Catholicism Today.
Berthold sat back on his knees and together they watched the satisfying little sparks and crackles start up. “I like what begins,” the Prior said in that beautiful and irrelevant way Bale had always appreciated. “Everything is still ahead, you see.” Bale himself was undecided. He liked what flourished and had the capacity to make him senseless, but didn’t. “Well?” prompted the Prior as he handed him a double shot of Oban in a souvenir glass from Svenska. Then he raised his own. After a soft clink, each of them sipped. Smacking his lips once, the Prior swung around a chair to face Antony. “What did you learn?”
Bale stared into his drink, then lifted his eyes to his host. “The fact my sister was killed within twenty-four hours of the death of Fintan McGregor tells me there’s a single killer at work here.”
“Frankly, I find that notion terrifying,” he said with a lightness Bale could tell he didn’t feel.
“I feel nothing.”
The Prior shot him a skeptical look, then stretched his legs out stiffly in front of him. “So it’s the Crown.” He closed his eyes. “A simple snatch for a collector somewhere in Buenos Aires,” he mused, waving his shot glass. “What do you think?”
It was a good question. After a moment, Bale pushed himself out of the Prior’s chair and stared at the framed print of Giotto’s “Crucifixion” on the wall alongside the fireplace. On the poor head of a bleeding Jesus Christ near death was a Crown of Thorns where the tips of each barb disappeared into flesh. As much the centerpiece of the story as the dying man himself. Through the ages, when it came to pictorial representation, the Crown was outsized, drawn disproportionately big to the scene.
Was that still what was at work behind the double theft in the past week of this holy relic kept hidden by the Carmelites since their days in their first abbey on Mt. Carmel?
Bale opened his own empty hands and stared at them. In the mind of someone willing to kill twice, so far, to possess it, was the Crown for some reason disproportionately large? Finally, he turned to the Prior. “This is no maverick art collector at work here, Berthold.”
The Prior challenged him. “Why not?”
Bale shook his head. “A collector hires a thief for a simple smash and grab job, no matter how finessed. No,” he said, turning what was left of his drink in his palm, “whoever is at work here, Berthold, hired a killer.”
“I’d much rather be dealing with a collector, you know,” the Prior said peevishly.
Bale sank back into the blue upholstered chair, gazing into the spreading flames, blue and yellow and red. A flame was never just one color. “We’re not.” Bale rested his elbows on his knees, then finished off his Scotch. “These killings,” he said softly, “are desperate, and intense. As if there’s some sort of time pressure at work in the operation, something we don’t know about yet.”
“Ah, you think we’re looking at an operation.”
“Yes,” said Bale slowly, his heart pounding. “I believe we are.”
The Prior slung him a sideways look. “Have you heard anything, Antony, anything in your—”
“Networks? No, not a whisper.” The Prior of Burnham Norton Abbey was the only one who knew about Bale’s occasional intelligence work. He had to. Without his plausible cover stories, it wouldn’t take long for the brothers to get suspicious about those times when Antony Bale was absent, in service to the most ectoplasmic of the spook agencies in the U.S. As an American member of a religious order housed in Europe, he had a certain freedom of movement that carried with it very little notice. Consequently, Bale handled discreet little “maintenance” operations.
Known informally throughout the agency as the Network Administrator, he was sent in when terrorist activities—the Charlie Hebdo attack late in 2014 had been his last big assignment—made agents’ anxieties run high, threatening to disrupt the network. Not even Adrian knew. His assignments were a rare indulgence—like a bottle of the finest single malt Scotch, or an accomplished woman who seemed to like his company—that came at opportune times, say when he was pacing entirely too much in his cell.
“Listen, Berthold,” he said with energy, “I’ve got to start with the boy’s murder. It�
��s the only way to get closer to understanding why his killer needed the Crown of Thorns specifically, and—” he lifted his hands helplessly, trying to figure out motive, “either killed him in a rage when the boy misplaced it…”
“Or,” interrupted the Prior, “in fact, he may have been told to kill the boy regardless.”
“Ah,” murmured Bale, suddenly infinitely sorry for the boy thief, who had no doubt expected something quite different in the way of a reward. How big was this operation, after all? It struck Bale it could be centered literally anywhere in the world. How would he ever figure it out? He needed more resources than either Val Cameron or an aging monk with a taste for fire and Oban could provide.
When Bale realized he had been holding his breath, he ran his tense hands through what was left of his dark hair and started to pace. He knew then he had to keep it small, had to narrow it down to the murder of a young monk up on the ridge. “Help me think it through, Berthold.” The other man nodded curtly, and Bale continued. “No sooner does Fintan McGregor steal the Crown than he misplaces it in a stunning bit of bad luck, for both him and Adrian, and then he gets brained and helped over a cliff.”
“The Crown goes home with your sister—”
“Whereupon she’s tracked down by the one who got the information from the boy—” Bale suddenly stopped. The pressure in his chest was all he could think about, and maybe it was what the Prior would call a blessing. Better some pain that demands attention than the tendency of the mind to draw the image of Adrian at her desk, marveling over what she had inadvertently brought back from her trip to Norfolk, looking up in her innocence to find a figure suddenly appearing in the doorway. “It’s otherwise entirely too coincidental that whoever killed her stole the Crown she pulled from the urn.”
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 11