Innocence: A Novel (30 page)

The stairs were behind a corner door in the drawing room, and we climbed to the third floor. At the head of the stairs, another door opened onto an antechamber that offered two chairs. It was lighted only by a flickering electric candle in a glass chimney that stood before a shrine to Mary.

I whispered, “We shouldn’t be here.”

“But we are.”

“Why?”

“We have two things to do before we can go back to my guardian.”

I remembered then that he had asked her if he would see her in a little while, and she said that was the plan.

“What two things?” I asked.

“Trust me,” she said, and turned to the apartment door.

I thought the door would be locked, that we would be foiled by the lack of a second key. But it was not locked.

When we crossed the threshold, I expected darkness, but a couple of lamps glowed. The light made Gwyneth hesitate, but then we
stepped into a different world from the ground-floor rooms, which had clearly been part of the residence of a prince of the church.

Here, the living room reminded me of pictures of homes furnished by interior designers who specialized in soft contemporary style. The upholstered furniture, covered in rich golden silk except for two red chairs, featured waterfall edges and round plump arms, and the legs were tucked back out of sight, so that each piece seemed to float an inch off the floor. Tables laminated in exotic lacquered woods in shades varying from silver to gold, scarlet accent pillows, and large canvases of bold abstract art finished a space very like those that, in magazines, belonged to au courant novelists, avant-garde artists, and movie stars who described their taste as “simple glamour.”

I was surprised that the living room contained no smallest representation of things sacred. But the most striking thing about it was the pair of marionettes on the fireplace mantel. They sat with the support of decorative metal stands, facing each other from opposite ends of a painting in which several black arcs made with a wide brush were stark against a white backdrop, spattered across with blue like the blood of some extraterrestrial species.

AT THE END OF THE LIVING ROOM, ON THE RIGHT, A
hallway led to the rest of the apartment. Although the hall was mostly dark, a rectangle of light issued from an open door, catching the tight nap of the pale-gray wool carpet at such an angle as to make it appear pebbled. From that room came two solemn male voices.

Sensing my trepidation, Gwyneth whispered, “Talking heads.”

Baffled, I whispered, “What?”

Because she was more familiar with TV than I would ever be, she said with quiet certainty, “Just TV. News or late-night talk.”

Obviously, the archbishop remained awake, and I thought we should leave at once.

She thought differently, returned to the cold fireplace, and whispered, “Come on. Hurry. Help me.”

As I went to her, she opened the cloth laundry bag and put it on the hearth.

I said, “But this is stealing.”

“No. This is a cleansing.”

Although I believed that she didn’t lie, I assumed that she could be misguided.

“They know I’m here,” she whispered. “They know.”

The marionettes still faced each other from opposite ends of the mantel. Their striated eyes had not turned toward us.

“I don’t think I should touch them, Addison. Will you take them down and put them in the bag?”

“But why is it not stealing?”

“I’ll send him a generous check for them if you insist. But put them in the bag.
Please
.”

In a state of quasi-bewilderment, not quite able to believe that I was in this place and engaged upon such a task, I tried to lift one of the puppets, but it was secured to the metal brace that disappeared under its tuxedo jacket. When I tried to lift the brace, I discovered that it was screwed to the mantel.

“Hurry,”
Gwyneth urged.

I worked the tuxedo jacket up the brace until I found the cord that
tied the marionette in place. As I fumbled with the knot, the archbishop entered from the hallway.

He carried two suitcases and, upon seeing us, dropped them so abruptly that one of them fell over. He said, “Who’re you, what’re you—” Then Gwyneth turned toward him, and he recognized her.

“You.”

He wasn’t wearing a cassock, rochet, stole, pectoral cross, or Roman collar, nor was he wearing the simple black suit of a priest, nor robe and pajamas. In comfortable suede shoes, khaki slacks, and a dark-brown wool sweater over a beige shirt, he might have been anyone, a schoolteacher or accountant, preparing to catch an early flight and wing away on holiday.

Tall, fit, he had the handsome but pale and sharp-featured face of one of the tort lawyers who ran ads in certain magazines, seeking clients for class-action lawsuits. His hair was thick for his age, quite curly, still more blond than gray.

He didn’t at once approach us. If he began to step closer, I would back away. At this remove, he couldn’t clearly see the eyes in the holes of my ski mask. I remembered well the church by the river and the man with the kindly face, who had come at me with a baseball bat. Among other implements hanging from the rack of fireplace tools on the hearth was a long-handled poker, which would perhaps do more damage than a Louisville Slugger.

“There must be an agent of the devil among my confreres, and perhaps more than one,” he said.

“Your Eminence, Archbishop Wallache,” Gwyneth said and nodded to him, as if we had come calling by invitation.

Father and I never read the entire newspaper, and I did not keep up with ecclesiastical news, but the name resonated with me. I had heard
it six years earlier, as I stood by the open drain in the crypt beneath the cathedral. Two men, never seen, met in the farther reaches of that place to share a secret that meant nothing to me at the time but that, I now realized, involved news of whom the Vatican had selected to be the next archbishop.

Please tell me it’s not Wallache
.

But it is
.

They’ve all gone mad
.

Say nothing to anyone or I’m toast. This is übersecret
.

But they must know
—he
must know—Wallache’s history
.

They seem to believe Wallache’s version of it
.

Now, Archbishop Wallache said, “I assume you haven’t come to me at this hour for a blessing.” His courtroom face produced a smile that I would not have thought it could, one warm enough to charm any jury. “Are you admirers of the marionettes?”

“Why would you have such a foul thing here?” Gwyneth asked.

“I grant you that the subject is macabre and their history is dark, but the workmanship is lovely. For another thing, they were a gift, and it is rude to turn down a sincerely offered gift.”

“A gift from Edmund Goddard,” she said, coloring the name with contempt.

“May I say also that, when one spends every day among people of faith, always bringing the hope of Christ to those who need it, there is a tendency to become too sunny in temperament, to lose track of the truth that Evil walks the Earth and that the battle against it remains always urgent and desperate. Having such a reminder of great wickedness keeps one alert to the possibility of error in one’s own life.”

Gwyneth said, “So you keep them on your mantel to remind you that evil is real and that anyone can be tempted.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“So have they been effective, have you avoided error since you’ve had them?”

He could hold a smile with the apparent effortlessness of a world-class high-wire walker maintaining balance far above a tense crowd of upturned faces. “If I may be allowed a question of my own, I should ask what you want with them.”

“I want to burn them. I’ve bought and burned the other four.”

“You wish to destroy icons of evil, and yet you make yourself up to resemble them.”

She did not respond.

Indicating me with a gesture, the archbishop said, “Who is your masked companion? Is he what would be called your muscle?”

Instead of answering him, Gwyneth said, “I’m taking these last two marionettes to burn them. If you want to call the police and tell them how you kept these things on your mantel as reminders to be on guard against evil and to avoid wickedness yourself, by all means do so. They might believe you. Most of them. So many years have passed, almost twenty-five, since those murders that a lot of people might have forgotten the most gruesome details of what Paladine did to his family. However, that’s the kind of thing cops don’t forget. I’m sure they’ll want to know why Goddard would think to give them to you.”

If he was a man who could take offense, he was too diplomatic to show it. If he had feathers, they would never ruffle. He consulted his wristwatch and said, “I’ve no use for the things anymore. You may burn them—but you may not take them. That’s a gas-log fireplace. The flue is open, and it draws well. You see the remote control lying by the rack of tools? You can switch on the flames with that.”

Gwyneth picked up the remote, clicked it, and blue-orange flames at once licked up around the realistic-looking ceramic logs.

“The wood of the yew tree,” the archbishop said, “is pliable because it retains its natural oils decades after it has been cut and shaped. They should burn well and quickly.”

I returned to the marionette that I had been trying to loosen from its brace.

“Not you,” Archbishop Wallache said.

“Sir?”

“Not you.
She
must take them down and consign them to the flames. Or I really will pick up the phone.”

“I’ll stop you,” I said.

“Will you really? I suspect not. I’m a good judge of people, masked or not, and you seem to me to be a lamb, not a lion.”

“I’ll do it,” Gwyneth said. “I’m not afraid to do it.”

I said, “He won’t stop me.”

“I don’t know what he might do. I’ll burn them myself.”

I thought I saw the marionette’s eyes turn sideways to regard me. But when I looked directly, it still stared across the mantel at its twin.

GWYNETH’S HANDS TREMBLED, SO THAT SHE HAD
some difficulty slipping the knot in the cord securing the marionette to the metal stand that braced it upright. When she freed the thing, she held it by its arms and lifted it off the mantel with an obvious dread that infected me.

The archbishop said, “It won’t bite.”

As Gwyneth took a step backward and began to stoop to throw the puppet into the flames, she cried out as if stung, threw it down on the hearth, and backed up another step.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

“It moved.”

“I didn’t see.”

She rubbed the palm of her left hand over the back of her right, the palm of her right over the back of her left, as though she felt the blue lizards of her faux tattoos wriggling on her skin and meant to smooth them into stillness.

“I was holding it by its upper arms. I felt … its muscles tensed.”

“But it’s made of wood,” the archbishop said with a note of amusement. “It doesn’t have muscles.”

The marionette was lying on its back, one arm at its side and the other across its chest, one leg bent. The top hat had fallen off, revealing carved and painted hair. Its hinged mouth sagged open, the square chisel-blade teeth like the jaws of an unsprung trap.

Gwyneth cautiously extended her right leg to kick the hateful thing up and into the firebox.

“No, no. That isn’t permissible,” said the archbishop.

“There aren’t any rules.”

“My rules,” he said, and held up a cell phone, which he had evidently taken from a pocket of his slacks. “I’ve already entered 911. I need only press
SEND
. Use your hands, girl.”

With no intention other than persuasion, I took a step toward Wallache, but Gwyneth said, “Addison, no. Your eyes.”

As I lowered my head and eased back, the archbishop said, “What about your eyes?”

Gwyneth withdrew her gloves from a jacket pocket.

“Bare hands,” the archbishop instructed.

In response to the look of contempt that she turned upon him, he only brandished the cell phone.

Gwyneth put the gloves away, hesitated, hesitated, hesitated, suddenly bent down and snatched the hateful icon off the hearth. For a moment, she seemed to be struggling to shake it loose of her, and I couldn’t tell if one of the thing’s hands had in fact closed tightly around her thumb or if that was a detail conjured by my imagination, but then she flung it into the firebox, and the gas flames at once ignited the puppet’s costume.

Perhaps the effect was a consequence of the pliancy of the oil-rich yew wood, but the marionette appeared to writhe in agony, flexed and twisted and seemed to seek handholds on the ceramic logs, as if it might clamber out of the fireplace and carry the consuming flames to us, setting the entire room ablaze.

A sound like the wooden heels of wooden shoes drumming hard against marble broke the spell that the sight of the twitching puppet cast over me. I looked at its twin, which still sat upon the mantel. Although I was certain of the source of the sound, the abomination sat motionless, its legs stretched out in front of it, hands upon its knees, as it had been posed previously. Because the mantel was somewhat high, if I hadn’t been tall enough, I wouldn’t have noticed, scattered on the stone, a few chips of the high-gloss black paint with which the puppet’s shoes were made to look like patent leather.

In the firebox, the marionette lay still across the logs, and tendrils of foul-smelling black smoke seethed like spirits from its shrinking form and were either drawn up the chimney by a draft or escaped through it into the night and storm.

When I looked at Gwyneth, she was squeezing her right thumb with her left hand, and when she opened the hand, blood glistened, oozing from a cut on the pad of the thumb.

“She needs a bandage,” I told the archbishop.

“No, Addison. I’m okay. It’s not much of a cut.”

In spite of Wallache and his cell phone, I went to the remaining marionette, snapped the cord that bound it to the metal brace, and lifted it off the mantel.

An ink spot appeared in the center of my vision and spread to the perimeter, but I hadn’t gone blind, because in that darkness floated the music box from which Father had plucked and pocketed the winding key years earlier. As bright as a stage, illuminated by a light that had no source, the lid offered four dancers, as before. The prince and princess were dethroned, and in their place were Gwyneth and I, but dressed as they had been. She danced with the man-goat Pan, I held in my arms the goggle-eyed frog, and the four tiny figures waltzed along the inlaid tracks to cold and brittle music. The goatish god halted in the dance to bury his face in his partner’s cleavage, she threw back her head as if in ecstasy, the frog grinned to reveal teeth as pointed as needles, which no real frog had ever possessed, and flickering from the grin came a snaky black tongue, which the figurine of me bent forward to capture in its mouth.