Brother Odd (18 page)

CHAPTER 36

B
AKED BY BITTER COLD, HALF THE FLUFF OF THE falling snow had been seared away. The flakes were almost grains now, and they stung my face as I waded through twenty inches of powder to meet Rodion Romanovich when he got out of his SUV. He had left the engine running and the lights on, as I had done.

I raised my voice above the wind: “The brothers will need help with their gear. Let them know we’re here. The back row of seats in my truck are folded down. I’ll come in as soon as I’ve put them up.”

In the school garage, this son of an assassin had looked a bit theatrical in his bearskin hat and fur-trimmed leather coat, but in the storm he appeared imperial and in his element, as if he were the king of winter and could halt the falling snow with a gesture if he chose to do so.

He did not hunch forward and tuck his head to escape the bite of the wind, but stood tall and straight, and strode into the guesthouse with all the swagger you would expect of a man who had once prepared people for death.

The moment he had gone inside, I opened the driver’s door of his SUV, killed the headlights, switched off the engine, and pocketed the keys.

I hurried back to the second vehicle to shut off its lights and engine as well. I pocketed those keys, too, assuring that Romanovich could not drive either SUV back to the school.

When I followed my favorite Hoosier into the guesthouse, I found sixteen brothers ready to rumble.

Practicality had required them to trade their usual habits for storm suits. These were not, however, the flashy kind of storm suits you would see on the slopes of Aspen and Vail. They did not hug the contours of the body to enhance aerodynamics and après-ski seduction, or feature vivid colors in bold designs.

The habits and ceremonial garments worn by the monks were cut and sewn by four brothers who had learned tailoring. These four had also created the storm suits.

Every suit was a dull blue-gray, without ornamentation. They were finely crafted, with foldaway hoods, ballistic-nylon scuff guards, and insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers: perfect gear for shoveling sidewalks and other foul-weather tasks.

Upon Romanovich’s arrival, the brothers had begun to put on Thermoloft-insulated vests over their storm suits. The vests had elasticized gussets and reinforced shoulders, and like the storm suits, they offered a number of zippered pockets.

In this uniform, with their kind faces framed in snugly fitted hoods, they looked like sixteen spacemen who had just arrived from a planet so benign that its anthem must be “Teddy Bears on Parade.”

Brother Victor, the former marine, moved among his troops, making sure that all the needed tools had been brought to this staging area.

Two steps inside the door, I spotted Brother Knuckles, and he nodded conspiratorially, and we rendezvoused immediately at the end of the reception lounge that was farthest from the marshaled forces of righteousness.

As I handed him the keys to the SUV that Romanovich had driven, Knuckles said, “Fortify and defend against who, son? When you gotta go to the mattresses, it’s kinda traditional to know who’s the mugs you’re at war with.”

“These are some epic bad mugs, sir. I don’t have time to explain here. I’ll lay it out when we get to the school. My biggest problem is how to explain it to the brothers, because it is mondo weird.”

“I’ll vouch for you, kid. When Knuckles says a guy’s word is gold, there ain’t no doubters.”

“There’s going to be some doubters this time.”

“Better not be.” His block-and-slab features fell into a hard expression suitable for a stone-temple god who didn’t lightly suffer disbelievers. “There better be no doubters of you. Besides, maybe they don’t know God’s got a hand on your head, but they like you and they got a hunch somethin’s special about you.”

“And they’re crazy about my pancakes.”

“That don’t hurt.”

“I found Brother Timothy,” I said.

The stone face broke a little. “Found poor Tim just the way I said he’d be, didn’t you?”

“Not just the way, sir. But, yeah, he’s with God now.”

Making the sign of the cross, he murmured a prayer for Brother Timothy, and then said, “We got proof now—Tim, he didn’t slip around to Reno for some R and R. The sheriff’s gonna have to get real, give the kids the protection you want.”

“Wish he would, but he won’t. We still don’t have a body.”

“Maybe all those times I got my ears boxed is catchin’ up with me, ’cause what I thought you said was you found his body.”

“Yes, sir, I did, I found his body, but all that’s left now is maybe the first couple centimeters of his face rolled up like on a sardine-can key.”

Intensely eye to eye, he considered my words. Then: “That don’t make no sense of no kind, son.”

“No, sir, no sense. I’ll tell you the whole thing when we get to the school, and when you hear it all, it’ll make even less sense.”

“And you think this Russian guy, he’s in it somehow?”

“He’s no librarian, and if he was ever a mortician, he didn’t wait for business, he went out and made it.”

“I can’t puzzle the full sense of that one, neither. How’s your shoulder from last night?”

“Still a little sore, but not bad. My head’s okay, sir, I’m not concussed, I assure you.”

Half the storm-suited monks had taken their gear outside to the SUVs and others were filing out of the door when Brother Saul, who was not going to the school, came to inform us that the abbey phones had gone dead.

“Do you usually lose the phones in a big storm?” I asked.

Brother Knuckles shook his head. “Maybe once in all the years I remember.”

“There’s still cell phones,” I said.

“Somethin’ tells me no, son.”

Even in good weather, cell service wasn’t reliable in this area. I fished my phone from a jacket pocket, switched it on, and we waited for the screen to give us bad news, which it did.

Whenever the crisis arrived, we wouldn’t have easy communication between the abbey and the school.

“Back when I worked for the Eggbeater, we had a thing we said when there was too many funny coincidences.”

“ ‘There are no coincidences,’ ” I quoted.

“No, that ain’t it. We said, ‘Somebody amongst us musta let the FBI put a bug up his rectum.’ ”

“That’s colorful, sir, but I’d be happy if this were the FBI.”

“Well, I was on the dark side back then. You better tell the Russian he don’t have a round-trip ticket.”

“You’ve got his keys.”

Carrying a toolbox in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, the last of the storm-suited brothers shouldered through the front door. The Russian wasn’t in the room.

As Brother Knuckles and I stepped out into the snow, Rodion Romanovich drove away in the first SUV, which was fully loaded with monks.

“I’ll be damned.”

“Whoa. Careful with that, son.”

“He took both sets of keys off the peg,” I said.

Romanovich drove halfway back along the side of the church and then stopped, as though waiting for me to follow.

“This is bad,” I said.

“Maybe this is God at work, son, and you just can’t see the good in it yet.”

“Is that confident faith talking, or is it the warm-and-fuzzy optimism of the mouse who saved the princess?”

“They’re sort of one and the same, son. You want to drive?”

I handed him the keys to the second SUV. “No. I just want to sit quietly and stew in my stupidity.”

CHAPTER 37

T
HE LINT-WHITE SKY SEEMED TO BRIGHTEN THE day less than did the blanketed land, as if the sun were dying and the earth were evolving into a new sun, though a cold one, that would illuminate little and warm nothing.

Brother Knuckles drove, following the devious faux librarian at a safe distance, and I rode shotgun without a shotgun. Eight brothers and their gear occupied the second, third, and fourth rows of seats in the extended SUV.

You might expect that a truckful of monks would be quiet, all the passengers in silent prayer or meditating on the state of their souls, or scheming each in his own way to conceal from humankind that the Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.

Here in the early afternoon, the Lesser Silence should have been observed to the extent that work allowed, but the monks were voluble. They worried about their missing brother, Timothy, and were alarmed by the possibility that persons unknown intended to harm the children at the school. They sounded fearful, humbled, yet exhilarated that they might be called upon to be brave defenders of the innocent.

Brother Alfonse asked, “Odd, are all of us going to die?”

“I hope none of us is going to die,” I replied.

“If all of us died, the sheriff would be disgraced.”

“I fail to understand,” said Brother Rupert, “the moral calculus that all of us dying would be balanced by the sheriff’s disgrace.”

“I assure you, Brother,” Alfonse said, “I didn’t mean to imply that mass death would be an acceptable price for the sheriff’s defeat in the next election.”

Brother Quentin, who had been a police officer at one time, first a beat patrolman and then a robbery-and-homicide detective, said, “Odd, who are these kid-killer wannabes?”

“We don’t know for sure,” I said, turning in my seat to look back at him. “But we know something’s coming.”

“What’s the evidence? Obviously something that’s not concrete enough to impress the sheriff. Threatening phone calls, like that?”

“The phones have gone down,” I said evasively, “so there won’t be any threatening calls now.”

“Are you being evasive?” Brother Quentin asked.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“You’re terrible at being evasive.”

“Well, I do my best, sir.”

“We need to know the name of our enemy,” said Brother Quentin.

Brother Alfonse said, “We know the name. His name is legion.”

“I don’t mean our
ultimate
enemy,” said Quentin. “Odd, we aren’t going up against Satan with baseball bats, are we?”

“If it’s Satan, I haven’t noticed a sulfurous smell.”

“You’re being evasive again.”

“Yes, sir.”

From the third row, Brother Augustine said, “Why would you have to be evasive about whether or not it’s Satan? We all know it’s not Satan himself, it’s got to be some anti-faith zealots or something, doesn’t it?”

“Militant atheists,” said someone at the back of the vehicle.

Another fourth-row passenger chimed in: “Islamofascists. The president of Iran said, ‘The world will be cleaner when there’s no one whose day of worship is Saturday. When they’re all dead, we’ll kill the Sunday crowd.’ ”

Brother Knuckles, behind the wheel, said, “No reason to work yourselves up about it. We get to the school—Abbot Bernard, he’s gonna give you the straight poop, as far as we know it.”

Surprised, indicating the SUV ahead of us, I said, “Is the abbot with them?”

Knuckles shrugged. “He insisted, son. Maybe he don’t weigh more than a wet cat, but he’s a plus to the team. There’s not a thing in this world could scare the abbot.”

I said, “There might be a thing.”

From the second row, Brother Quentin put a hand on my shoulder, returning to his main issue with the persistence of a cop skilled at interrogation. “All I’m saying, Odd, is we need to know the name of our enemy. We don’t exactly have a crew of trained warriors here. When push comes to shove, if they don’t know who they’re supposed to be defending against, they’ll get so jittery, they’ll start swinging baseball bats at one another.”

Brother Augustine gently admonished, “Do not underestimate us, Brother Quentin.”

“Maybe the abbot will bless the baseball bats,” said Brother Kevin from the third row.

Brother Rupert said, “I doubt the abbot would think it proper to bless a baseball bat to ensure a game-winning home run, let alone to make it a more effective weapon for braining someone.”

“I certainly hope,” said Brother Kevin, “we don’t have to brain anyone. The thought sickens me.”

“Swing low,” Brother Knuckles advised, “and take ’em out at the knees. Some guy with his knees all busted ain’t an immediate threat, but the damage ain’t permanent, neither. He’s gonna heal back to normal. Mostly.”

“We have a profound moral dilemma here,” Brother Kevin said. “We must, of course, protect the children, but busting knees is not by any stretch of theology a Christian response.”

“Christ,” Brother Augustine reminded him, “physically threw the money changers out of the temple.”

“Indeed, but I’ve seen nowhere in Scripture where our Lord busted their knees in the process.”

Brother Alfonse said, “Perhaps we really are all going to die.”

His hand still on my shoulder, Brother Quentin said, “Something more than a threatening call has you alarmed. Maybe…did you find Brother Timothy? Did you, Odd? Dead or alive?”

At this point, I wasn’t going to say that I had found him dead
and
alive, and that he had suddenly transformed from Tim to something not Tim. Instead, I replied, “No, sir, not dead or alive.”

Quentin’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being evasive again.”

“How could you possibly know, sir?”

“You’ve got a tell.”

“A what?”

“Every time you’re being evasive, your left eye twitches ever so slightly. You have an eye-twitch tell that betrays your intention to be evasive.”

As I turned front to deny Brother Quentin a view of my twitchy eye, I saw Boo bounding gleefully downhill through the snow.

Behind the grinning dog came Elvis, capering as if he were a child, leaving no prints behind himself, arms raised above his head, waving both hands high as some inspired evangelicals do when they shout
Hallelujah
.

Boo turned away from the plowed pavement and sprinted friskily across the meadow. Laughing and jubilant, Elvis ran after him. The rocker and the rollicking dog receded from view, neither troubled by the stormscape nor troubling it.

Most days, I wish that my special powers of vision and intuition had never been bestowed on me, that the grief they have brought to me could be lifted from my heart, that everything I have seen of the supernatural could be expunged from memory, and that I could be what, but for this gift, I otherwise am—no one special, just one soul in a sea of souls, swimming through the days toward a hope of that final sanctuary beyond all fear and pain.

Once in a while, however, there are moments for which the burden seems worth carrying: moments of transcendent joy, of inexpressible beauty, of wonder that overwhelms the mind with awe, or in this case a moment of such piercing charm that the world seems more right than it really is and offers a glimpse of what Eden might have been before we pulled it down.

Although Boo would remain at my side for days to come, Elvis would not be with me much longer. But I know that the image of them racing through the storm in rapturous delight will be with me vividly through all my days in this world, and forever after.

“Son?” Knuckles said, curious.

I realized that, although a smile was not appropriate to the moment, I was smiling.

“Sir, I think the King is about ready to move out of that place down at the end of Lonely Street.”

“Heartbreak Hotel,” said Knuckles.

“Yeah. It was never the five-star kind of joint where he should be booked to play.”

Knuckles brightened. “Hey, that’s swell, ain’t it.”

“It’s swell,” I agreed.

“Must feel good that you opened the big door for him.”

“I didn’t open the door,” I said. “I just showed him where the knob was and which way it turned.”

Behind me, Brother Quentin said, “What’re you two talking about? I don’t follow.”

Without turning in my seat, I said, “In time, sir. You’ll follow him in time. We’ll all follow him in time.”

“Him who?”

“Elvis Presley, sir.”

“I’ll bet your left eye is twitching like crazy,” said Brother Quentin.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Knuckles shook his head. “No twitch.”

We had covered two-thirds of the distance between the new abbey and the school when out of the storm came a scissoring, scuttling, serpentine bewilderment of bones.