Crucified (16 page)

"An orangutan did it," said Sweaty.

"And then we have Sherlock Holmes. 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band.' Probably the most famous story. The victim is frightened to death in a locked room."

"A snake dunit," said Liz.

"Uh-huh. A swamp adder. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained how to solve such a puzzle. 'It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning,' he wrote, 'that when the impossible has been eliminated, the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.' Here's a sneaky example: The cops convict a killer of murder, but they can't send him to jail or execute him. Why?"

"Beats me," said Liz.

"Because he's inextricably joined to his Siamese twin. One half is guilty. The other half is innocent."

"Why turn to Carr?" asked Lenny.

"Because he wrote the book on solving locked-room puzzles.

The Three Coffins,
or
The Hollow Man,
as it was called in Britain.

In it, Carr offers the seven ways to solve a locked-room puzzle.

Explanation one: The crime isn't murder but a series of coincidences ending in an accident that looks like murder. For example, the victim's skull is cracked as if by a bludgeoning, but in fact, he fell from a book-shelf ladder and struck his head on the furniture, then crawled across the room before he died."

"Stabbed three times in the back," said Lenny. "That can't be what happened to Ack-Ack."

"I agree. Explanation two: It's murder committed by someone impelling the victim to kill himself or die in an accident. Here, the example is death by autosuggestion—a film with subliminal messages urges the fatal action. Years back, a test was done with split-second 'Buy Popcorn' ads spliced into a drive-in mov
ie.
The popcorn stand was mobbed by the audience in the intermission."

"Doesn't fit either," said Liz.

"I agree. Explanation three: It's actually death by suicide, made to look like murder."

"Example?" asked Lenny.

Wyatt grinned. "A man stabs himself with an icicle, which melts and evaporates."

"The rear gunner's seat," Sweaty said, "had no back support. So Ack-Ack couldn't have stabbed himself three times on a knife attached to the seat."

"Could the knife have been fixed to the doors?" asked Liz.

"No," said Wyatt. "I checked. Besides, someone removed the knife's handle from the turret after the blade snapped off."

"Why?" asked Lenny.

"I have no idea. Presumably so nobody would find it. But why would that matter once Ack-Ack was dead in the turret?"

"Explanation four?" asked Liz.

"It's murder complicated by illusion or impersonation.

The victim lies dead in a watched room. With witnesses by his side, the killer shines a flashlight through the window.

Inside, they see a shadowy figure move. But when they enter, all they find is the corpse. The witnesses didn't know it, but the killer had taped a small silhouette to the lens of the flashlight."

"Forget that," Sweaty said. "It doesn't fit here. Ack-Ack was alive when the Junkers attacked. I'll swear to that, and to the fact that no one went back to the turret between the time of the attack and our bail-out."

"Strike four," said Lenny. "What's next, Coach?"

"Explanation five: The victim is thought to be dead long before he actually dies. A drugged man passes out after locking himself in a room. When the door is broken down, the first person in stabs the victim while those who follow him are distracted."

"Strike five," said Lenny.

"Okay. Explanation six: It's murder committed by a killer outside the room, although it seems as if the killer was inside.

For example, the victim is stabbed through the keyhole while peering out."

"No cigar," said Sweaty.

"You're down to your final means," said Liz. "What's explanation seven?"

"Murder by a mechanical device planted in the room."

"Example?"

"How do you hide a razor in plain view of everyone in a room?"

Liz shrugged.

"Attach it to the blade of a whirling fan."

"That's ingenious."

"The killers in Wilkie Collins's 'A Terribly Strange Bed'

smother their sleeping victims by screwing down the canopy of a four-poster bed from the room above."

"Wicked."

"Locks and keys aren't essential for a locked-room puzzle.

All that's needed is an isolated space. How do you cut a victim's throat and leave him sprawled in virgin snow with no footprints but his own? Hurl a knife-edged boomerang. Crack a bullwhip with a razor tied to the end. What could explain a body with fresh stab wounds found on a beach with no footprints in the sand? The victim's a hemophiliac whose blood didn't clot while the tide came in and ebbed."

"So where does that leave us?" Lenny asked.

"If explanation seven is the only one that fits, we must determine what kind of mechanical device stabbed Ack-Ack three times in the back in his turret, then vanished into thin air with the handle of the knife, leaving the blade wedged in his spine."

It looked as though the Legionary was driving the second-hand Fiat, but actually, Satan was behind the wheel. The car passed in front of the hotel window through which the possessed priest had spied on Wyatt and Liz that morning. Tonight, they dined by candlelight at the same table, but each was so engrossed with the other that neither glanced out at the masked hearse. By the time the priest regained his mind, the car was snaking along a dark rural road that hugged the bank of a river. Not only could he not account for his memory gap, but the Legionary was unaware that Satan's latest harvest was hog-tied in the trunk.

Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

Stones clanged in the wheel wells of the Fiat, for this road was used as a detour to the end of the valley by trucks from the highway construction crew. The noise reminded the priest of Good Friday in the Philippines when he was a boy . . .

"Father?"

"Yes?" said the priest who would become the Secret Cardinal.

"Why does my father hate me?"

"He doesn't hate you. He's just a busy man. He must work hard as the ambassador, so he sends you to boarding school.

My task is to teach you the lessons of the Bible."

"I'm not his."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That's what my mother yelled. I heard my parents arguing before she died. My father said my mother was screwing around, so she yelled that I wasn't his."

The priest sat down and cupped the boy's hand. "Remember what I taught you about the Garden of Eden?"

"Adam and Eve. The apple and the snake."

"Yes. Original sin. That's why parents fight and shout such things. Jesus died for our sins, so your mother is in heaven and your father loves you."

"My father loves the women he sleeps with at the embassy.

I'm in the way. That's why I'm at boarding school. I wish
you
were my father."

"I am. In a sacred way."

"Why are you a priest? To stop original sin?"

"No, to keep from sinning."

"Did Jesus save you?"

"Yes, he did."

"When I grow up, I want to be a priest."

The missionary wrapped his arms around the boy and hugged him a mite too long.

"May I see it?"

"See what, my son?"

"How Jesus saved my mother. Tomorrow is Good Friday.

Boys in my dorm say they crucify Jesus in San Pedro Cutud.

Will you take me to see?"

And so they ventured north on that brutally hot day, the man and the boy who seemed to be father and son, to watch the crucifixions in the village's dusty rice field. The boy had to break away from the priest and push hard through a throng of sweaty onlookers to see.

Clang!

The sound of the hammer striking the head of the first nail sent a jolt of electricity up the boy's nerves. It felt as if the spike had pierced
his
hand.

Clang . . . clang . . .

The executioner gave the nail a double tap to sink it into the wood, then positioned another nail over the soft part of the
Kristo''
s other palm.

Clang!

Clang . . . clang . . .

Jesus stifled a cry and bit his lip. A pack of photojournalists called out for the Romans to clear the way so they could capture the grimace on his face for readers back home. With a heave and a haul, three attendants erected the cross, then the executioner pounded nails through the soft tissue between his toes. His feet were nailed individually, instead of overlapped, so the
Kristo
could support his body weight on the shelf of the cross.

Jesus seemed sublime as he whispered to himself.

Was he dreaming?

Was he praying to God?

The boy felt the hands of the priest on his shoulders, giving him a massage.

In less than fifteen minutes, they took Jesus down.

Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

The executioner nailed another
Kristo
to that cross.

Thirteen men were crucified before the Passion was done, and that burst of faith would stay with the boy for the rest of his life. Was being crucified not the ultimate affirmation of the sacred narrative at the heart of the Church?

And as he was to learn, Father felt just like he did.

The heat soared to a scorch the following day, and the blazing sun beat down like a hammer on a nail. To cool off, the priest took the boy to a swimming hole at a lonely mission outpost.

"Well?" said the priest. "Who are you? Tom Sawyer?

Huckleberry Finn?"

The boy grinned. "My mom read me those books."

"Of course she did. All American boys read about Tom and Huck. Shall we swim?"

"I don't have trunks."

"No need for swimsuits. Tom and Huck skinny-dip. Is this not the Garden of Eden? No fig leaves here."

And so the boy shucked off his clothes and dashed for the inviting water, expecting the priest to follow. Instead, he found himself alone in the pool, and when he looked back to see why, there was the priest, on the edge of the pit, with tears stream-ing down his cheeks.

"What's wrong, Father?"

"Come here," summoned the priest.

From the look on his face as he gazed at his reflection in the pool, you'd think he was staring at himself burning in the depths of hell. As the boy emerged from the water, the priest averted his eyes.

"Get dressed," he said. "I have sinned. We
do
need fig leaves. The snake is loose in Eden. Satan is trying to possess me. He's after my soul, son. I need help to exorcise the demon."

"What can I do?"

"The
cross,"
sobbed the priest.

It took the rest of the day to gather what they required. On the way to Cutud to purchase one of the whips sold to tourists as souvenirs, the missionary told the boy about the Jesuit priest who was martyred by Iroquois Indians in the 1600s. "What faith!" he said. "They stripped his flesh to the bones on his arms and legs.

They blistered him with boiling water to mock our baptism. They roasted him in a belt of blazing bark soaked in pitch. They hung red-hot hatchets from a ring around his neck. They scalped him and pressed burning coals into his eyes, but still Father de Brebeuf kept praying to God. So they cut off his lips and tore out his heart. That, my son, is how a Catholic suffers for his faith."

Next, they drove to a hardware store for tools and beams of wood. On returning to the mission, the priest told the boy about mortification of the flesh—modern monks who whip themselves raw in monasteries; Opus Dei faithful who wear the cilice, a metal chain with spikes, locked around the thigh; and believers who bear stigmata, bleeding wounds that correspond to Christ's.

'"And they that are Christ's have crucified their flesh,'" quoted the priest. "That's St. Paul's letter to the Galatians. After Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square, he wrote on our need to suffer. 'As the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ,' he explained, 'the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him.'

"Are you strong?" he asked the boy.

"Yes," the boy replied.

Early Easter morning, the priest set things up. The boy helped him build a whipping post in the yard and watched him join the beams as a cross. The top of the crucifix angled up to rest on a stone wall.

"Here," he said, handing the boy the bamboo-tipped scourge. "Hit my back as hard as you can until it bleeds like the backs of the men you saw in Cutud."

Stripping off his shirt, the priest hugged the pole. "Do it!" he said.

So the boy skinned him alive.

"Take that, Satan!" the priest wailed again and again, his voice so raspy that it frightened birds out of the trees. The ground around him was red with blood when he finally groaned for the boy to stop.

Soaked with sweat, the boy panted from exertion.

Too weak to walk, the priest crawled to the cross on his hands and knees. The boy trailed him with the hammer and several nails. The flayed priest slowly climbed the slanted beam, then struggled to reverse himself. He gasped when his shredded back made contact with the wood.