32
When the squad cars pulled away and the rain started to let up, Val turned to see Bale jumping out of a cab on the other side of Second Avenue and run easily across the street. Shaking the rain from his head, he gave Val a quick nod and pulled her back under the awning. As she filled him in on the arrest, and she realized she was shivering and it wasn’t even that cold. After a few wordless minutes, Val and Bale ambled up the block without a direction. Val could tell she was weaving, at first, but then it passed, and her legs felt stronger. It happened right around the time she had let go of the pity. Twice she turned to look at Bale, who seemed off in his own thoughts, and finally she came to a stop under the red awning at BXL East bar, where she told Bale she wanted to stand quietly and listen to the spatter of the raindrops.
Finally, he spoke. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“In that case,” she said, feeling strangely sacked. Not knowing how to finish the sentence. “In that case, I’d better get the bag I left at the Iroquois. The raffia tote,” she reminded him, as though it could possibly matter, “you remember, with Key West on one side, and…” she trailed off, “the Conch Republic on the other.”
Bale looked down. “Right.” His smile was grim. “We’d better go get it.”
“And then I guess it’s goodbye,” she managed with some bravado. No better fortification on the face of this Earth, she thought, with disappointment.
Bale lifted his shoulders. “I’ll be back at the end of the month,” he reminded her. When he asked, “Can I call you, Val?” she heard how tentative he sounded.
“Of course,” she said, more pained at the alternative than she could possibly say. His eyes were on something else, reflecting the red, yellow, white of Manhattan streets after a good rain. Bale was looking west, so Val looked east, and added in a strange monotone, “I can help you close up Adrian’s place.” A shared task…and then what? Boxes get shipped or given away. Keys get returned. Followed by goodbyes more final than either of them can ever pretend otherwise. The easy, easy reasons for getting together finally gone.
Without a word, the two of them started walking west, dodging trash bags glistening curbside from the rain. A pedicab flew by, unaffected by yellow cabs and delivery vans, kicking up a playful spray in its wake. At Lexington Avenue, as the light started to change, Bale grabbed her arm lightly. They darted around a nightfall crowd heading east for some curry, and Bale said, “Val, at some point, you know—” They hit the curb and slowed down, and he released her arm. Suddenly Bale stopped dead and turned to her, his long coat held open by the hands in his pockets. “At some point it has to stop being about Adrian.”
She was struck by how completely true it felt. What had brought them together was gone. No, it was only because it was gone that these two stubborn people had been brought together in the first place. My sister had lousy taste in friends, he had said. And she had brought all her own prejudices to the table, putting off her beloved Adrian, whose brother was a monk or something that passed for a monk—Val couldn’t possibly have cared less—just how interesting could that be to anyone not a blood relative? She nodded tightly a few times at Bale, who seemed to be studying her, and Val pulled her jacket around her as snugly as she could without cutting off her circulation, holding it in place with her crossed arms. In silence, the two of them walked briskly to Fifth Avenue and headed downtown.
At 44th Street, they turned the corner, nearly colliding with two leashed German Shepherds and a dozen middle-aged alumni wearing Harvard ties and trying to remember the words and the tune to the Alma Mater. Mid-block, Val and Bale entered the Hotel Iroquois, brushing a few straggling raindrops out of their hair and heading for the elevator. On the third floor, he held the door open for Val, and when she moved ahead of him into the dark, Bale pressed the light switch.
Val saw her raffia tote first thing on the desk chair. For some reason she felt like an old soldier when she declared, “I will miss you.”
Bale hung up his coat, then turned with a smile. “I will more than miss you.”
“I was going to say the same thing,” Val admitted, glancing around the same room that two nights ago had felt lovely, but empty of Bale himself. “But then,” she shook her head slowly, “I edited it.”
He set his hands on his hips. “A skill that splashes over to your personal life.”
“Sometimes I think it’s all my personal life, Antony.”
After a long look, he took in a noisy breath. “You’re thinking you should go.”
“No.”
Neither of them moved.
He smiled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Ice keeps having to get broken, doesn’t it?” She watched him roll up his sleeves because he didn’t know what else to do.
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.” For a woman who was there to collect a tote with a change of clothes, she noticed with detachment that she was taking off her jacket. The light was old and golden, and someone had turned down the bed. She gave him a frank look she knew he couldn’t possibly appreciate was rare. “You said at some point it has to stop being about Adrian.” Bale said nothing, but bit his lip in a way, she thought fondly, he must have been doing since he was a kid. “You should know,” she said slowly, listening to herself speak the truth, “it already has.” As she stepped up to him, she handed him her jacket, which he folded with care and set across the back of a chair.
Then with no hesitation at all, he pulled her into his arms and they held each other close in a declaration that had nothing at all to do with words. Val pulled back only far enough to turn his face toward her, and she kissed him hard as his hands tightened down around her back and slid to her hips. “No editing,” he whispered.
“No praying,” she whispered back. “Unless it helps.”
“Christ, I hope not,” he muttered, leaning his forehead against hers. As she started to unbutton his shirt, she nearly hummed, thinking what a very fine thing it was to do with a set of human hands.
33
It was a woman named Malka Prager, a concert violinist, who had made some important connections for Lieutenant Cleary. A benighted member of the Robus Christi High Council, she had turned up on Gramercy Park West while the FDNY fought the blaze. Greta pegged her right away as someone with more than normal human interest in the fire and approached her. When Greta scrolled through the photos of Killian that Val had sent her, Malka, who by then was tugging at her hair, cried, “That—that’s our Alaric!” Alaric, for all the High Council knew, did special assignments for the head of the organization.
With that, the link had been made between Guy Everett and the theft of the ancient fragment, and Alaric—James Killian—who had killed at least two people to get their hands on the Crown of Thorns. But as she watched the firefighters at work, Malka Prager cried for the collapse of the organization—Everett’s visionary edifice—founded on the promises of a prophecy pipelined straight to them from Jesus Christ himself. Swords into ploughshares, lion and lamb, a messianic age that proves—here Greta thought the violinist’s eyes were especially bright—we are each of us our own messiah. And yes, Malka Prager could provide a list of the names of the entire High Council.
In the few days since Antony Bale had left New York, Val had taken Ivy Breshears, Ivy League Ivy, out to dinner—a work dinner with a bottle of long overdue champagne toasting Ivy’s promotion—during which they scrambled to plug the hole in the Fall list caused by axing Plumb Lines by James Killian. Val discovered Ivy was only four years younger than she was and had served as president of the International Socialists Club at Brown. And Cleary had doffed the pearls and called Val with the news that the cell phone records had narrowed down the neighborhood where Killian was staying. Inquiries finally led them to Leo House, a Christian Guesthouse on 23rd Street, west of Eighth Avenue, where they recovered the murder weapon, a Glock P18 pistol.
Cleary was exuberant. The pistol upgraded their detent
ion of Killian from reasonable suspicion to probable cause. Now that she was out of the realm of asshole, she could breathe. And she added that right after the fire at number 46, a fellow named Millard Mackey, from 44, identified the charred remains as those of Guy Everett, his employer. According to the ME, this Everett was dead at the time of the blaze. Mackey, who was not considered a suspect in the fire, had since disappeared. When Greta inquired about a wooden Bible box, she was told nothing had turned up—old wood, was it? More tinder.
Val had cleaned her mother’s Millefiori paperweight and set it back just right. She had called a furniture repairman to fix the folding lid on her secretary desk. She made a batch of cannoli for her doorman and accepted a pint of Mrs. Dellarosa’s homemade pomodoro sauce. She framed a photo of her and Adrian at twenty-three on the beach at Siphnos in the Adriatic, beautiful in their bikinis, their teeth white and ready for life, whatever it held there in the Adriatic sunshine, their eyes glistening with youth, their arms around each other in what they had felt sure would be a lifetime. The framed photo would never be enough, but when it came to Adrian, nothing would ever change that loss for Val. It was beyond the skills of a furniture repairman to fix.
She was even sleeping well at night, which she knew had more to do with Antony, in the home that felt like its old self before violation. Whenever Val felt her mind drifting to the violations of James Killian, she remembered the feel of Bale lying pressed up against her, and she wondered how she’d get through the next two weeks until he returned. She was beginning to think that her heart was a simple thing after all. She still hadn’t brought it up with Greta, who was busy kashering this and that in her own kitchen. “Oh, in the interest of saving time,” she had said by way of some wacky explanation for her hopes about the Hunter College professor.
The first day after Antony Bale left the city, the night together at the Iroquois was still so fresh that she could forgive herself her tingling skin and forgive herself for watching every video she could find on YouTube of the paso doble. But as the days stretched on, the longing was becoming acute. Even Ivy, who sensed something was up and returned after her lunch hour with another offering from Bouchon Bakery, couldn’t help. It explained why Val was on the 1 train uptown, first having made a trip to the Lower East Side for a small package in a white paper bag. The white paper bag felt perfect to her.
She emerged from the subway station and walked to the address she had been given on West End Avenue. The late afternoon was a lambent thing, slightly still, slightly warm, the city clamor oddly distant for those few minutes. Buzzed in, Val took the elevator up to the third floor and knocked on the door. Voices rose, feet bounded, and the front door was flung open so hard it hit the wall. “Val,” cried Tali Korngold, catching Val in a breathless hug. Over the girl’s shoulder Val saw a tall, smiling woman in a colorful headscarf heading toward them. “I’m glad you’re here!” Tali took the package of kosher cream cheese pastries.
“Tali,” said Val, content she was right where she should be, touched her friend’s head with affection. “I have a Situation I’d like to discuss.”
34
Norfolk
Since he returned from New York, Bale had fallen asleep twice during Mass. Not from any real fatigue, but because it all felt terribly remote. When the brothers spoke to him, it was as if he was listening through a wall to some other conversation that didn’t concern him at all. The choir monks, through every gallant section of the Daily Office, sounded as though they were transmitting across a wasteland. And Bale only ate his meals because it would excite too much comment if he didn’t. By the fifth day, he was wondering whether he was coming down with some degenerative disease, something where the five senses disappear practically all at the same time.
Restless, he barreled out of the abbey near midnight, and was struck by how beautiful the moon still was, even heading toward its crescent. Startling and white and pure. He found himself wishing Val was there with him, warm and substantial, there to see what was still fine in this old firmament. As they had clung to each other in bed that night, that single night, he saw for the very first time that human beings were part of that firmament, too, and it had nothing to do with eternity, and everything to do with what was just as mysterious, certainly more perishable, and inexpressibly dear.
It was then Bale heard voices, raised in a tumble of distant laughter. As he headed in that direction, it felt delightfully strange that he smelled the campfire before he saw any light from it. Where the woods started to open up, and Bale was still safely hidden by the abiding trees and scant moon, he caught sight of a pink Vespa parked by the ridge trail. Around the campfire sat Melanie Ruskin and the three boy monks, their robes hanging open like casual undergrads after graduation.
Bale felt his heart lift when he realized the boys were teaching the Compline service to the American girl. Maybe the half-blue hair and small, literary tattoo was Melanie’s equivalent of the boys’ loose robes. “Compline?” she snorted in a charming way. “Sounds like farm equipment,” at which the boys fell back laughing. One mooed. Another baaed. It was Eli, the clever Eli, who didn’t know any better than to provide the Latin root for the word. When she pushed him over, they all laughed again, then a flask got passed, flashing in the thin moonlight. A smoke got passed in the other direction, and Melanie started to tell them about her friendship with Fintan McGregor. She didn’t call it an affair this time, Bale noticed, and she didn’t call it a relationship. A literary girl, despite the watery path to cetology, she had found just the right word. The others fell silent and listened, their eyes big in the moonlight that caught the scuddering waves below.
Bale turned without a sound and found his way back to the abbey, where he headed for the kitchen. In the weak moonlight slanting through the windows, he made his way down the narrow hallway to the storeroom. There he turned on the single overhead light, then headed to the very back of the room, where they kept whatever they needed less frequent access to—bins of brown rice, canisters of salt, ten-pound cans of tomato paste. And this—he stopped at the thirty-pound tub of semolina flour. You’re crazy! Brother Sebastian had blustered. We’ll never eat that much pizza. Why in the name of the Holy Mother did you order this much?
Bale removed the lid from the tub, smiling slightly at the unchanging vat of flour. No better place, as it turned out. Thrusting his hands deep into the fine semolina, Bale carefully drew out the object he had hidden there maybe four years ago—and for this one, not even Martin or Berthold knew the whereabouts. They had agreed it was the safest way. Dusting off the plastic airtight shell, he opened it and gazed at the finest example of Euphorbia milii he would ever in this lifetime see. It was as if he was holding an epochal event two thousand years old in his careful hands, marveling that in touching the Crown he was somehow connecting to the flesh of the Crucified Christ.
He had felt a pang when he learned that everything in the Robus Christi Chapel had burned up in the fire—that one had certainly been a nice later example of the Crown of Thorns, which had come to the Carmelites back in 825 A.D. As a splendid early fake, one of the many floating around across the centuries, it had been worth a place in its cache in the crypt where the first Prior of the rebuilt Burnham Norton Abbey was installed. Truly, Bale thought, how could that poor boy Fintan have known that the object he stole was not the true holy relic? Or that Robus Christi’s murderous pursuit of prophecy depended on a fake? In the end, it didn’t matter whether the Crown the boy stole was the genuine article or not. Either way, it would lead to the identity of the killer.
And it had.
Inside the cheap plastic shell was what was left of this two-thousand-year-old relic, and it was, in its own way, beautiful. Barbs had fallen off and been lost, but some still clung to the brittle, intertwining vine of a coronet. As a younger man, all Antony Bale had seen were the thorns. But when it had come into his care, his feelings had changed. And so had he. Now, really, all he saw was th
e intertwining vine that through two thousand years had never lost its shape and held onto what thorns it could. It was the vine that struck Bale with awe. That struck him to his heart with what went beyond words and murderous plans and simple yearning. As he closed the airtight shell and lowered it carefully into the waiting flour, that what he was really looking for in his life was a way to become the vine.
Epilogue
Terre Haute, Indiana, one month later
On a hot day in May, the dealer who owned Foxie’s Den of Collectibles was sitting half-asleep on the milking stool with the sign she had taped to it many years ago. NFS—Not For Sale. Altogether too nice a collectible to sell, and as she aged, it strangely fit her contours well. As she sat drowsily, surrounded by her life’s work, she fanned herself with one of the colorful paper fans from her collection of World’s Fair fans dating back to the very first fair in Paris in 1874.
She had chamber pots and fox stoles and a gen-u-ine antique Pepsi machine—even an old Philco nine-inch TV that still worked. She had glass and pewter and silver and a little bit of gold. She had papers of all sorts, stacked with beautiful crumbling edges, and christening gowns with lace dissolving into dust. Smells of decay more advanced than her own, always good to remember. Tastes she wouldn’t even dare to try—like the licorice drops she had found unwrapped from some seller’s great-grandmother’s silver dresser jar.
Every day something new joined her in the Den, and it was what kept her there, open, seven days a week, and turning herself out of bed each morning at the age of eighty-nine. Why, just that very morning, there was that poor disfigured fellow who came in to sell her a few little things, things he brought with him when he moved back home to Terre Haute from New York. Not much passed between them, but she saw him fingering a WWII sergeant’s uniform as she counted out his cash. As he left, the dealer felt suddenly quite tired and found her way over to her milking stool, grabbing her fan.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 24