18
Bale found Melanie Ruskin stacking beer glasses in the Olde Bandylegs Pub in Sidestrand. A pink Vespa, apparently the wheels of all the truly great sinners, was parked outside, looking docile enough. To the credit of Olde Bandylegs, there wasn’t a flat screen TV anywhere in sight. It was a traditional kind of pub, one where a wheezy old setter dreaming in the corner was more welcome than the field exploits of Manchester United. Bale realized it was a brew pub with a couple of homegrown lagers and milds. The Olde Bandylegs label featured an illustration of an old man and older dog, both bowlegged, walking away down a country lane.
It must have been in one of the old wood booths with embossed backs crudely depicting the Norfolk coast that Adrian spied a guy she had written about girlishly in her trip journal. Maybe if something had happened between them she would have delayed her return to New York, and no hidden Crown would have found its way into her hands, and she would still be alive. If, Bale wondered, there was such a thing as destiny, could it really hinge on something as capricious as a fleeting moment in a Norfolk pub? If the guy had stared at her one second longer, if one of them had taken the initiative, would Bale still be taking his sister dancing?
The American girl named Melanie Ruskin wore a yellow pullover and khaki skirt that hit just above her knee. A safe, collegiate look for a girl with dyed black hair in a severe cut with a bright blue hank tucked behind an ear. A line of silver studs mounted her right earlobe, and around her neck was a lanyard with a vapor pen attached. She had large green eyes that tried to look less large under a spray of sandy eyelashes, and a nose that was just a little too pert to work with the stabs she made at an alternative look. At what Bale took for twenty years old, Melanie Ruskin was coping with being cute when she longed to be edgy, retro punk, unsettling.
As he slid onto a bar stool and she gave him a quick look and then a double take, which he could tell annoyed her about herself, he was close enough to catch the brushing of fine powder across her tight, pale cheeks, and the carefully plucked eyebrows. A college girl doing a term or a year abroad pushing all four corners of the envelope of looks, a whole lot safer than nearly anything else. She’d be the girl with the blue bangs and the pink Vespa. The girl who could get it on with—gasp—a monk. She could be that girl. Keep them all guessing. Including herself.
Gliding silently across from Bale, the bartender was a beefy forty-something guy with a surprisingly high voice and a problem with blinking. “Help you?”
Bale eyed the drafts. “Pint of Wee People’s Jig, please.” On the shelves along the mirrored wall behind the bar, the Jig was a lager, and to the label showing the bandy-legged old man and dog, a leprechaun—also bandy-legged—had joined the walk down the country lane.
“Our signature brew.” With five solemn blinks, the bartender drew the draft in ceremonial silence.
Melanie set glasses on a tray and started toward the kitchen. “Crispin, I’m off.”
“Right, Mels.”
As she started to shoulder her way through the door, Bale heard her humming a piano étude he remembered from his own lessons thirty years before.
“Melanie?” he called after her as Crispin carefully set down the pint of Jig and glided over to serve an old man with a black watch plaid muffler wound up to his chin.
“Yeah?” She turned, her large green eyes settling on him. Bale was wearing jeans, a light sweater and the jacket that was known around town as “abbey wear.” Navy blue with the gold insignia of Burnham Norton. He hated it, but it was what he invariably wore when he wanted to hit a particular note with outsiders: a small piece of abbey wear would make him seem trustworthy but not too terribly set apart. Not too intimidating. For a monk, a regular guy. But with Melanie Ruskin he wasn’t sure what registered. Besides his age.
“I’m Antony Bale,” he told her as she moved closer, setting down the tray, “from the abbey.”
She cocked her head, a wary look crossing her face. “Okay…”
Bale took a quick sip of the Wee People’s Jig and motioned toward the empty stool beside him. “Can I buy you a drink? I need to talk to you about Fintan McGregor.” At that, the girl’s shoulders jolted, like a long and weary exhale was finally letting go of her. But she didn’t move. To Bale, she looked unbearably young in that moment, before a time of blue bangs and an earlobe stacked with silver studs. “I know he was your friend,” Bale added quietly, “and I’m trying to figure out what happened to him. I’m hoping you can help.”
Melanie Ruskin chewed her lip, then came to a decision. With a tense nod, she swung a leg over the bar stool next to Bale and took a seat, tucking her scuffed shoes behind a rung. “Crispin,” she called to the bartender, “I’ll have my lime cordial with a water chaser.” To Bale, she slid a quick look. “I’m my own designated driver,” she explained, pushing up the sleeves of her yellow sweater. A pink tattoo curved its way across her left wrist. Chapter Forty-Two, over a stylized ocean wave and a breaching white whale. Inked in a place Melanie would see throughout her day, rasping along on her pink Vespa or setting down pints in front of customers or tucking into her mac and cheese. Bale felt he had just been handed the secret code.
He pointed in a small way to the tat. “Moby Dick.”
A beat. But it had won him a closer look by the girl next to him. “Yes,” she breathed, waiting to see what else he would flourish unbidden in front of her startled and staring eyes. Somehow the quality of her disclosures about poor thieving Fintan would depend on what kind of connection he could make. What would a smart, literary girl, twenty years old and yearning for identity, with blue bangs and multiple piercings and a dark side she flogs to offset her pert nose, find meaningful enough to wear inked on her wrist? Chapter Forty-Two was right about the place in the book for Melville’s clanging note of existential terror, so Bale took a shot. Turning from her, he made himself gaze thoughtfully into the Wee Folks Jig. Finally, he uttered, “‘The Whiteness of the Whale.’”
“Yes,” said Melanie. “Of course.”
Bale narrowed his eyes at nothing in particular, drawing on smoky college memories. “‘A dumb blankness full of meaning.’”
In silence the two of them, their forearms braced against the bar, drank companionably. His thumbs slid through the cold condensation on his glass. It was a good beer, if a little on the hoppy side. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Melanie tucking her blue bangs behind her ear with trembling fingers. He could tell she was going to try him on something simple first. “So you’re a monk?”
He nodded without looking directly at her. “A lay brother.”
“What’s the difference?”
He smiled at her. “The scope and quality of the vows.”
She chugged enough lime cordial to add a good helping of water to the glass. “Plus you talk.”
“We’re not a silent order.”
Melanie Ruskin grunted. “Sounds like a nice gig. Food, shelter, hanging with your friends all the time.”
“Well,” said Bale, “there’s the whole God part of it too.”
“Oh, I suppose,” she muttered.
“Ah.” Bale searched the aged tin ceiling of the pub, bringing out the only other line from Melville that he remembered, maybe because it pinned him, writhing, on the specimen board of his own mind. “‘The colorless, all-color of atheism.’”
Melanie turned sharply toward him. “No,” she corrected him, with a pout that suddenly stripped her of the last five years, “not necessarily.” Then: “Not at all necessarily.” With that, she began to pick at the label on the lime cordial bottle with a ragged fingernail. “At least I’m still trying to figure it out,” she blurted. Both Bale and the girl realized at the same moment how it sounded— an abbey full of monks had long since given up the noble effort—and they looked closely at each other. “Sorry,” she said, her lips barely moving.
Bale shot her a small smile. “Believe m
e, doubt slinks around many of us.” Then he shrugged. “Maybe it’s what sharpens faith.”
“Could go either way, Mr. Bale,” she observed serenely.
“Could go either way.”
Melanie seemed to relax and enjoyed a long, slow sip, her pert little nose high in the air. She seemed to be considering, and Bale let her take her time. It was, he sensed, the only way.
Finally, she burped discreetly and stared at herself in the mirror behind the bar. “Fintan was kind of like that,” she told him. “Sharpening his faith on something, but I couldn’t tell you what.” Turning to face Bale, her sweater tugged across her breast. “It wasn’t doubt, that much I know.”
“What makes you say that?”
She sat up straighter, restlessly crossing her legs. “Oh, I’d say Fintan McGregor was more about absolute certainty than much of anything else, sad to say, but,” here she shook her head, “even so, he wasn’t someone who needed to persuade you, if you know what I mean. Whatever he believed, he wasn’t the kind who wanted to,” she squeezed her hands together imploringly, “share it with you.” Bale let out a laugh. “In fact,” the girl went on, “I’d say he very much wanted to keep it all to himself, no sharesies. Except for the occasional slip. Do you know,” she dropped her voice, shooting a quick look around the empty pub, “it wasn’t until the third time we were together before I even knew he was a monk.” The word monk came out sounding a lot like psychopath. “It really kind of freaked me out, to tell you the truth. Then there was just one more time after that, when I had pretty much decided I couldn’t take it anymore—”
“Take what?”
“Oh, the sneaking around, the secret meetings, what he called our ‘trysts’ out in some damn field or the other—”
“Fields?”
“I’ve got a tent some locals let me pitch when I can’t take living with the fine Norfolk family who puts me up. Some space, know what I mean?”
“Right.”
“And Fintan was kind of a drama queen, if you really want to know. If he wasn’t avoiding our being seen together, he was letting little hints drop that he was destined for great things. Things he was working on in secret. Prophecies, yada yada.”
Bale kept a straight face. “Any specifics?”
Melanie wiggled her fingers mid-air. “No, but I could tell if I pressed him he’d spill the beans.” She sniffed. “Here’s how I saw it. I wanted a fling with a Brit, right, something simple and fun I could share with my friends over Mojitos when we all got back from our study abroad. But Fintan was way more intense than I bargained for. Everything mattered so damn much to him it finally wore me out. Even,” she added, as she clinked Bale’s glass of Wee People’s Jig, “even if I was the least of all the things that mattered.”
He said softly, “Did that hurt?”
She gave it her world-weary best. “No, some affairs are like that.”
The sagacity of the twenty-year-old.
He was careful to nod quietly when she slung him a look, gauging his reaction. Or maybe just trying out the theory. Then she made a quick study of him and seemed to decide that whatever Bale might have to say on that score, it couldn’t possibly be from personal experience. “But that was it for the secret meetings.” He wanted to keep her talking.
She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You mentioned your secret meetings with him.”
Her head pulled back, one hand clamping her chest. “Not with me. We were strictly about what he called ‘shagging’ in my tent in a field, and that was about all the privacy we could find, what with his
no money and my tight budget.”
“Then…” Bale gave her a sidelong look, trying to follow the conversation.
She leaned closer with a funny little smile. “No, his secret meetings with some guy.”
Bale kept it casual. “Fintan ever mention a name?”
“No, but to hear him need to clear out of the tent to get to a rendezvous with this dude, you’d swear it was totally like Mission: Impossible stuff.” Melanie, thought Bale, was closer than she could ever possibly know to the truth. Stealing a holy relic for what Bale was coming to believe was some dark purpose devised by others—a dark purpose made darker when the boy was hurled over the cliff—had, in the end, turned out to be a final impossible mission for the pious young monk. Melanie went on, imitating the dead Fintan: “‘I must go, he’s meeting me,’ that sort of thing. Really preoccupied.”
“I wish you had heard a name.”
Her face fell. “It wasn’t really misadventure, was it, Mr. Bale?” And then, as if he might not have caught her meaning, “Fintan’s death?” She chewed her lip and, past the blue bangs and tattoos and multiple piercings, there was such fragile sadness in the girl’s face that Bale felt himself slump.
He wanted suddenly with a kind of raging desperation at the world to pack her off—to pack them all off—to someplace safe where they could contemplate the likes of Melville and God and each other in perfect peace and safety.
“I don’t believe so, Melanie.”
And as she tried not to break down, all she managed to say was, “I guess it all caught up with him finally, then, didn’t it?”
“At nineteen. Just a boy in a monastery. Not such a long life. Not such a far way for…whatever it was…to come.” As he watched the girl with the pink Vespa try to shake it off, he asked, “Did Fintan ever tell you anything concrete about the guy from the secret meetings? How he looked, how he sounded, how he dressed—”
She brightened. “No, but I caught sight of him one time.”
Bale set down his glass. In that moment, even the hoppy little Jig held no interest. “Tell me,” was all he said.
“I was driving us back to the pub one time and suddenly Fintan’s clutching me tighter, right? I tell him quit it, he’s strangling me, and he gets up close to my ear and practically spits in it telling me, ‘That’s him. There. Out there, crossing the field.’ So I looked and caught sight of the guy crossing the field, but away from us, wearing one of those sleeveless field jackets with lots of pockets and a khaki colored Tilley hat. I know because it’s exactly the one I want but it costs a bundle.”
“What else do you remember?”
“I asked Fintan where’s the guy going, and Fintan said all he knew was that he was living kind of rough, maybe in a tent like us, but not to ask him anymore because he wasn’t at liberty to say.” Melanie smiled. “That’s the way he talked, sort of stilted but in a charming kind of way. ‘Not at liberty to say.’”
Where could Bale go with it? “And that was the only time you saw this guy?” A one-time chance sighting wasn’t going to get him any farther in the investigation. Even if Melanie had seen more of the mystery man of Fintan McGregor’s secret meetings, there was no proof he was involved with the boy’s death. Nothing to say a man striding across a perfectly public field wearing a Tilley hat and a sleeveless vest was up to anything at all criminal. Just a tourist spending a beautiful April day in Norfolk doing a walkabout. Frustrated, he gave the bar a kick.
“Actually,” Melanie said, “I did see him one more time. At Olde Bandylegs.”
Bale turned so quickly he nearly overturned his glass. “When was this?”
She mused, “Oh, week and a half ago, maybe. Fintan wasn’t around. The place was crowded, and I overheard these two guys talking just down the way from where you’re sitting right now. One was old Mr. Devlin, a retired lawyer of some sort, from Norwich, likes his Jameson’s, and the other was…Fintan’s guy.”
“What were they talking about?”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Birds,” she said with a little shrug. “Fintan’s guy was a birder, it turned out, from what he was telling old Mr. Devlin, who kept pressing him for more info just to keep the conversation going, I could tell. And Fintan’s guy was going on about shrikes and warblers and hawks
and whatnot, so I couldn’t help but listen. How he was tramping around Norfolk recording the mating behavior of the Red-backed Shrike, right?”
Bale couldn’t see where she was going, but suddenly Melanie messed up her blue bangs with both hands in pure enjoyment. “And?” was all Bale could say.
“Ah, Mr. Bale,” she laughed, “it’s always fun when you know someone’s full of shit, isn’t it? Like when you really know for sure, like poor Fintan and his faith and his mission impossible. I knew this guy was no birder.”
Bale felt dazed. “What makes you say that?” he managed to get out.
With that, Melanie raised both her arms straight overhead in a quick stretch. “I’m a Zo major back home,” she explained. “Zoology. Heading toward marine biology, probably cetology,” she was speaking so rapidly Bale could hardly keep up, “hence the Melville, right? But I get my share of birds. And about Fintan’s guy, no matter how cool the Tilley hat, which between you and me he was using as some kind of costume, I can tell you—” she motioned to a hovering Crispin for another round of lime cordial with a water chaser “—I can tell you for shit sure he couldn’t tell a woodcock from,” she gave it a quick think, then sang out, “his own.”
19
New York
By the end of the day, when Val emerged from the Flatiron Building with a sigh that may have fractured a rib or two, the wind had picked up and what clouds she could see over Broadway were gathering, blotted by the sky into one general overcast. Even though she had switched out of her heels and slipped on a pair of sensible Keens, she teetered as she set off uptown in one of her rare spurts of exercise. Bad day to decide to hoof it home. Bale had left a cryptic voicemail message that he was beginning to think it was all his fault. He had just gotten back to the city—call him—he’ll fill her in. There was the wryness in his voice that was coming to sound familiar to her, but there were so many pauses in that simple message that the only thing that could explain it, to her mind, was pain. How could Adrian’s murder, and possibly the boy Fintan’s, in any way be Bale’s fault?
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 13