Charisma (13 page)

Pat almost asked him what. Instead he unzipped his jacket and started heading back to the line. The snow that had started falling when he was still back at Headquarters had turned into something so fine it felt almost like rain, but not quite. It clung to the windshields of the cars parked on the sidewalk in thin sheets, making them look frosted.

Deaver caught up to him. “Are you going to do anything? Anything at all?”

“I’m going to do something.”

“What?”

“Do what I asked you to do first.”

“What?” Deaver insisted.

Pat looked at Dbro. He was standing next to one of the patrol cars, bundled up like an Eskimo, whacking his hand against the hood while he told one of the uniforms where to get off. Or something. Christ. Dbro was always telling somebody where to get off.

Pat stopped when he and Deaver were still far enough from the line not to be overheard.

“There’s going to be a meeting in my office tonight at ten o’clock. You, me, Anton Klemmer, then pick somebody you trust and bring him along. Pick somebody you like.”

“Not Dbro?”

Pat blew white breath into the air. “Not anybody who’s going to talk to the district attorney before I want him to.”

T
HAT MORNING, FRIDAY THE
13th, he stopped first on Edge Hill Road. He’d been stopping there first every day for a week. Now the rhythm of the neighborhood, so different from that of the rest of the city, was beginning to sink into him. He liked watching people in the not-quite-dawn. Downtown, morning reminded him of a conspiracy of pod people. The streets were empty and the buildings seemed uninhabited—and sometimes were—but every once in a while flat unmarked trucks pulled in and out of underground garages. Their grilles looked sentient and their drivers looked dead. Morning on Edge Hill Road was more like a ballet. Between five-thirty and six lights began to go on at the back of the biggest houses: maids getting up to clear living rooms of abandoned glassware and warm kitchens for the start of breakfast. Between six and six-thirty the street was full of women: maids who “lived out” coming in to work. The maids who lived out always looked cold. No buses ran on Edge Hill Road. The maids had to get off on Prospect and walk the rest of the way up. They wore black rubber-soled shoes and thin black cotton uniforms, no matter what the weather.

He was sitting in the tree closest to the house on the left side in the backyard of the house he knew best, cross-legged on a branch that hung closest to the kitchen’s corner window: the one that belonged to Daniel Murphy. This house was the exception, even though it was one of the biggest and best kept up. The Murphys had a maid who lived out, but she didn’t come in until nine. Instead, it was Susan Murphy herself who came to the kitchen at six. He could see her moving around in there, getting out the tea things, running her hands through her hair.

It was Susan Murphy who had started him toward his charism—the mention of her, and who she was the sister of, in the small diocesan newspaper that was scattered like leaves through the vestibule of every parish church. Up until then, he had felt the power without knowing what to do with it. He had seen the evil without knowing what could be done to defeat it. Then he had realized what was happening, all the nuns leaving their orders, bleeding the church white, a kind of willful hemophilia. They willed themselves out of the church and changed everything and everyone around them in the process. She had changed her brother Dan. She had been false as they were all false. Everything was jumbled up together and confused in his mind, but one thing at least was clear: it was wrong of them, the ones who were leaving. It was wrong of them and they had to be stopped. In the beginning, she had carried a lot of her convent with her. She had kept her arms close to her body and her head down. She had moved quickly but without any suggestion of haste. As the days passed, she became more like a normal person. Worse, she became more like a normal person as “normal” was defined on Edge Hill Road. He wondered what God thought of what she was doing: the immense amount of tea she put in the tea ball, always a waste, because she never drank more than two cups and nobody else drank tea at all; the thick dark cashmere sweaters she wore over her jeans, belonging to her brothers and much too large, that she treated as if they’d cost nothing at all; the food she made and didn’t eat and finally threw away. Like everyone else up here, she had become addicted to waste, and to casual luxury. Sometime while he wasn’t watching, she’d had her ears pierced. Now she wore a fat pearl in each one. On the days when he was much too tired, he thought she looked like those old pictures of Frankenstein, with knobs on the side of her head to cover the bolts that held her together.

The bark underneath him was iced-in and as hard as stone. Susan Murphy took her tea things to the kitchen table, sat down, and stretched her legs onto an opposite chair. Her hair had lost the dull flatness that came from years of being held down by a veil. She picked up the pad of paper and the pen she had put down on the table when she first came in. In the glare of the overhead kitchen light, the T of the Tiffany T-clip looked like a bar of gold.

Somewhere beyond the trees, in the house that belonged to the family called Burke, the pool house was being readied for a party. There was a floor in there over the pool that could be kept open for swimming or closed for dancing. It was closed now and covered with large round tables that seated eight people each. He had counted them. The Burkes were having a hundred and four people in to dinner.

It was getting late. He was always safe in the tree, but he wasn’t always safe out of it. If he waited too long, he would have to stay up here until dark. Unless he wanted to get caught.

He listened to the bells of the churches down on Church Street, ringing out their short codes for the half hour. Then he looked down at Susan Murphy again. He had sent her a rosary, but he didn’t know what she had done with it. Sometimes he was afraid she’d thrown it out. He didn’t know what he’d do if she had. He only had six more, and the damn things were hard to get.

She was staring into space, drinking her tea from a Royal Doulton cup. Royal Doulton cost two thousand dollars for a place setting, but he had once seen her take one of these cups and throw it in the garbage. It had had a chip the size of an atom in it.

He went a little farther up into the tree, then a little farther left. Then he started to come down. On that side he was far enough from the window so he wouldn’t be seen. He thought about God again and about the Royal Doulton cup. Sometimes he thought he knew about everything in the world and sometimes he thought he knew nothing at all.

He headed across the lawn and stopped at the board fence. There were a pair of boards there he had loosened himself, and he pulled them out. It was six thirty and just getting light, but it was all right. The maids who lived out were all at work now. Even if they saw him, they would treat him as if he were invisible.

Sometimes he thought he was invisible. God, sending him on another errand, made him transparent.

Once he got downtown, he began to feel a little better. The Green looked good. The bums had disappeared, as they did every once in a while, for no good reason he could see. Yale looked magical, like the kingdom in a fairy tale. He imagined a dragon in the Old College yard. If there was one, he would turn himself into a knight and slay it.

He crossed Chapel Street and walked uptown, faster and faster, until he could turn and then cross again and get himself on Clark. The rosary in his pocket clicked as he walked. The knife under his shirt pricked him only dully, because this time he had remembered to wrap its point in tissue paper.

Everything on earth was speaking to him in God’s voice.

She was alone when he came in, fussing around behind the counter with a big plastic bag full of sugar packets. It was quarter to seven. At seven thirty, the place would start to fill up. This was the only cheap place to eat for blocks and the neighborhood was full of working bachelors. They commuted to Sikorsky or the copper-plate plant in Bristol. They were men who would have drunk beer for breakfast, if it had been legal.

She looked up when he came in and smiled. She was a young woman—no more than twenty-five—but she seemed older. She lacked the energy other people had. She wore a blue glass Miraculous Medal around her neck and her dull brown hair pulled back by an elastic band. She had been out of her convent for over a year, but she was nothing like normal people at all.

He climbed up on the counter stool in front of her and she said, “I was wondering where you were. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’re always busy. Sometimes you’re busy eating here.”

He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid it on the counter. It was a good one, real leather, that he’d boosted out of Malley’s. You could boost style if it was the kind of style you concealed. Wearing fancy underwear was one way. Walking around with a six-hundred-dollar wallet in your pocket was another. He opened the wallet and pulled out the bills in the fold.

“Look,” he said. “I actually have money.”

“I see that.”

She was giving him a funny stare. He looked away. “I was just trying to let you know I didn’t always come just to get some free food.”

“I know you don’t,” she said.

“I come to see you,” he said.

“I know you do. I’m not going to let you pay for breakfast anyway.”

“You’ll get fired if you get caught.”

She shrugged. She had tucked the sugar packets neatly into wire holders. She swept the holders away with the side of one arm to clear the space in front of her.

“I’m not so sure it would be a tragedy if I did get fired. I’ve been walking around this morning wondering what I’m doing in this place, waiting tables by myself. Trying not to care that the only help I’ve got is reading
Rolling Stone
in the ladies’ room. It wasn’t exactly what I thought I’d be doing when I left the convent.”

“What did you think you’d be doing?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know that I know. I wasn’t in one of those orders where they lock you up all the time. I wore normal clothes and I got to go to restaurants. It all felt—pointless, somehow.” She laughed. “This feels pointless, too.”

“Do you ever think of going back?”

“To what?”

“To God.”

“I didn’t leave God. I left a lot of self-righteous social workers who wanted to get themselves ordained as priests.”

“You didn’t want to be ordained a priest?”

“No. Good Lord, no. That’s all I would have needed.”

She reached to the shelf over her head and brought down a paper place mat, then to the shelf at her knees for the silverware. The silverware was wrapped in a paper napkin that had
ARLIE’S RESTAURANT
printed on it in blue.

“I’m not going to get fired,” she told him. “Arlie’s wife left him. She went out to Oregon with her exercise teacher. He drinks himself under the furniture every night and doesn’t get in till ten.”

From the back, her hair looked like a tangle of spiderwebs made of wire. It sprung when she moved, and he sat watching it. Once she had sat him down in a booth in the back and showed him all the pictures she had of herself as a nun. The only difference in her between then and now was that now she wore a uniform. The nuns in her order all seemed to dress in jeans, with peace symbols instead of crosses around their necks.

“We took a vote when the Pope visited America and I was the only one who wanted to go see him,” she had said. “The rest of them wanted to picket. They were always picketing about something. South America. The death penalty. Catholics for Choice. There was a woman named Sister Jennifer Streem who kicked a parish priest in the knee because he told her she couldn’t distribute Communion.”

“Maybe you were sent there to bring them back to God. Like Theresa of Avila and the Carmelites.”

“I’m no Theresa of Avila. And nobody could bring them back to God. They don’t believe in God. Never mind the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

“What do they believe in?”

“Politics.”

“I know another nun who left her order,” he had told her. “She left because where she was they didn’t believe in politics.”

“Maybe it’s like being married through a matchmaker,” she’d said. “Maybe you don’t do so well when you marry something blind.”

Now he sat on his stool and thought: a vocation is a call from God that must not be ignored. Every nun in the world would tell you that, even the ones who believed in politics.

She had made eggs and toast and sausage and put them on a plate. She put the plate in front of him and turned around to get orange juice. She knew he didn’t like coffee. She’d asked him about it once and he’d told her.

“So,” she said, “what have you been busy with? Have you been sitting all day in the movies again?”

He hadn’t seen a movie in three months. “I went to
Batman
,” he lied, knowing she’d never see it herself. “They spent a lot of money on it but I didn’t think it was very good.”

“My nephew didn’t think it was very good, either. He liked something called
Roger Rabbit
.”

“I didn’t see that one.”

“At least you’re not spending all your time in dark rooms anymore. I used to worry about you. I used to think you’d go blind in those places.”

“You can’t go blind in the movies.”

“You can go blind anywhere. Aren’t you going to eat your breakfast?”

He looked at his plate, then at the clock on the wall to his right. It was ten minutes after seven, getting late. He wasn’t hungry. He was never hungry when he was filled with the Spirit. He looked at his hands and thought he saw them glowing.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

The knife nicked him. Its point was beginning to tear through the tissue paper.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Come in back with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

“Something I have to go all the way out back to see?”