Charisma (4 page)

“On a nine-year-old kid?”

“Yes.”

“On Edge Hill Road?”

“Yes.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“I know.” Deaver pulled on his jacket. He turned his back on the scene and looked down into the heavy brownstone Victorian buildings that blocked his view into the center of town.

“There’s something else you ought to know,” he said.

Pat wanted to say “now what?” He left off the “now.”

“Dbro knew him,” Deaver said.

“Dbro knew the kid.”

“That’s right.”

“Fucking shit,” Pat said.

“You know what it means that Dbro knew him? You know?”

“I know.”

“His name was Billy Hare,” Deaver said. “Dbro drives me crazy. Someday he’s going to drive me crazy enough.”

Pat unbuttoned his own jacket. “Don’t let him. Let him drive Dan Murphy crazy enough.”

“Nothing drives Dan Murphy crazy. Except us. And those.” Deaver pointed down the hill toward the television cameras, parked at the line, going full blast, and waiting for their chance.

Already.

Usually, Pat Mallory did a lot to avoid television cameras. He didn’t like them, and they didn’t like him. Today he barely noticed them, although there were two that seemed to be hanging out of the sky right over the stake and another with a light aimed right for his eyes. For the next fifteen minutes he didn’t notice much of anything, not even if Conran and Deaver were right about the hit. What he noticed when he got to the body was the clothes.

In the time he had been talking to Deaver, the wind had risen. It was blowing down the hill at him, unobstructed, forging streams of ice under his hair. He stopped just outside the chalk outline and looked down.

The boy was delicate, small-boned and fine, the kind of boy who had trouble in school playgrounds and on the rougher city streets. He was blond and small and gentle, even covered with blood and broken into pieces of bone. He had no coat.

What he did have was a heavy wool sweater and a button-down cotton shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, all perfectly matched, all taken straight out of an ad for Ralph Lauren Polo for Boys. Expensive clothes, but the wrong kind of expensive clothes, the kind that made you feel the kid had been dressed up as a preppy for a round of trick or treat. There was only one place in this city where the boys wore this kind of clothes and wore them new and always neat. The words that came into his mind and that he couldn’t get rid of were: hooker’s clothes.

It took him a while to understand why he was so sure of the hooker part, even though it was right in front of him. The clothes had been a little tight. When the kid had been bent over to take the hit, his pants had ripped along the seam. Now the seam was gaping. Through it, Pat could see a pair of bikini underpants.

They were bright red silk, almost translucent, and stretched as tight as skin. On the hump of the boy’s right cheek, the logo winked through a thin film of blood and snow.

It said
CHRISTIAN DIOR
.

S
OMETIMES, BISHOP JOHN MARTIN
Kelly thought he knew more than he ought to about schizophrenia. Sometimes he simply thought he had two souls operating in one body: the one he was aware of, and the one that sneaked up on him when he wasn’t paying attention. For the past thirty-six hours, he had been living with that other one. Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of the Thursday after the first Sunday in Advent and he was standing at his office windows, looking out over the city of New Haven, feeling dizzy and exhilarated and scared to death. Spread out in front of him was Yale, its spires and crenellated towers, its turrets and air of always being safe. When he’d first seen it, he’d thought he’d wandered into Oz. It was even better than the Jesuit seminary, maybe because it was older. And richer. There were people who talked about the great wealth of the Catholic Church, but John Kelly knew it couldn’t begin to compare with the wealth of the Protestant Establishment. Those people ran the world. Besides, being Catholic had its drawbacks. It could be dangerous. Being a Jesuit could be more dangerous still. It always surprised him that he hadn’t thought of that when he joined the order. In those days, he’d been very hardhearted about his search for security.

His search for security. He got his cigarettes out of the long center drawer of his desk and lit up. He hadn’t slept at all the last two nights. His brain was reeling, and when it reeled it tended to give him flash-picture shows that made him unbearably uncomfortable. One minute, he saw pictures of the future: Bishop John Martin Kelly, a real bishop instead of just an auxiliary, plastered across television screens from one end of the country to the other. The next, he got pictures of the past, of the place he had left to accept the embrace of Holy Mother Church. That place had been a single two-bed room in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Elyria, Ohio. His father had just gone into bankruptcy for the fourth time.

His cigarette had burned down to a long column of ash. He tapped it into the ashtray and took a deep drag. His father had been a man of enthusiasms, a manic without a depressive phase, and because of that John Kelly distrusted enthusiasm in himself. His childhood had been an epic nightmare of instability and insecurity. First they would have a house. Then the house would be foreclosed on and they would have an apartment. Then the apartment would be snatched away for nonpayment of rent and they would have a motel room. Then the cycle would start all over again, or not. He could remember once or twice when he’d thought they were going to die. They had spent a memorable Christmas Eve sleeping in boxes on the streets of Chicago, curled up against the wind behind a warehouse near the stockyards. For weeks afterward, he’d imagined the smell of blood.

It was after that Christmas Eve that he’d started to go to church. On Christmas Day, his father found another sucker. She was an old woman with a big house and rooms to rent on Chicago’s South Side. She took pity not on the man, but on his wife and children. By then, John’s mother was a kind of ambulatory catatonic. She literally walked into walls. His brothers were well on their way to what seemed then like their inevitable ends. Charlie was a proto-delinquent, criminal already at the age of eight. Bobby was coughing with the start of the tuberculosis that would kill him before his seventh birthday. His father was hale and hearty and full of plans. They were disintegrating around him and he didn’t see it.

The rooms the old lady let them have were small and on the third floor. They had to climb three flights of steep back stairs to get to them. When they did get there, John’s mother went into the smallest of the bedrooms and curled up on the cot that had been shoved under the one small window. John knew she was going to stay just like that for a day or more. He went into the kitchen and looked through the empty cupboard, the clean, unstocked refrigerator, the oven with its polished metal racks. The whole place smelled of ammonia and his father. His own clothes smelled of dirt. Through the high window over the kitchen sink, he could see the city, black buildings and even blacker snow, grime and noise and mindless machinery. Everything was moving and moving and moving, moving without end. Someday they would be caught up in it again, swept out into the sea of cold.

His father was in the shower, splashing water and singing. After a while, the water shut off and the plastic shower curtain rattled over its hollow tin rod. The walls up there were so thin, you could have heard a butterfly fart from two rooms away. John even heard the towel coming off the rack, a fat slap of cotton like a backbeat. His father was singing “Peg o’ My Heart.”

Then the bathroom door opened, and John realized his father was about to come out into the kitchen, wrapped in a towel and singing. He panicked. He was only ten years old. He had no idea how to deal with this man or the woman in the back bedroom or the two boys who always seemed to be getting sick or acting crazy. They’d been on the run this time for two months. He was tired and scared and sick himself. He was very nearly starving.

The door to the stairs was in a hallway off the kitchen. He ran back there and then down, down and down and down, going so fast and so fluidly that when he hit the cold of the street it almost didn’t touch him. He kept running, too. Usually he was worried about getting lost. They’d been in a few shelters in their travels, places where bodies were stashed when they were too poor to afford places to live, too sober to be dismissed as bums, and too stupid to be dead. In those places, he had learned to fear one thing more than he feared the amusement park ride of his own life: the Department of Welfare. To his ten-year-old mind, Those People were the Gestapo, the Devil, and the Wicked Witch of the West all rolled into one.

He ran anyway, down streets and up avenues, through small parks that looked cramped and overcrowded even without any people in them. The South Side was a rough section of the city. It always had been. In 1961, it was a rough section that happened to be white. After a while, he began to realize he was being watched. The buildings around him were shabbier than the ones he’d left, marked with paint and dotted with splinters. The stoops were full of men and teenage boys, out on the watch no matter how cold it was. His flesh started to crawl.

In spite of the way his family lived, their roots were in the middle, not the working, class—and they looked it. One of John’s grandfathers had been an engineer. The other had been a teacher. John himself was growing into a body that was almost stereotypically “bookish.” He was thin and tall and delicate, and if they’d had the money for it he’d have been wearing glasses. The boys around him now, even the boys his own age, were altogether different. They were bulked up in the shoulders and thighs. They had a lot of energy. They were watching him and he didn’t think they liked what they saw.

He knew he was going to have to do something when he started to be afraid. When he was afraid he couldn’t think, and thinking was all he had. Being afraid was what had gotten him into this mess to begin with.

He didn’t know where he was, so he didn’t know where to go. He didn’t want to turn around. That would only make the boys think they’d gotten to him, which was a bad idea. He kept looking for a side street to turn into. All the side streets were narrow and dark. The street he was on at least had Christmas decorations.

He had gone two blocks when he saw the church. Unlike the buildings around it, it had a lawn, two small squares of snow on either side of a narrow concrete walk. He was surprised to see its doors were open. His father had been baptized Catholic and his mother had once been devout, but it had been years since either of them had seen the inside of a church. They’d certainly never taken him to one. He stopped at the edge of the walk and tried to see through the peaked double doors to whatever was inside, but all he got was the impression of tiny flickering lights. Candles, he thought, and then: at least it would be warm.

He went up the walk, then up the steps, then into what seemed to be a vestibule. He didn’t know what to call the parts of a church. There was another set of double doors inside and he went through those, too. The ceiling seemed to lift off above his head like a rocket ship. The building seemed to stretch all the way to California. It was the biggest room he had ever seen, and for a while that was all he was able to take in. Height, width, breadth: it was a room for multitudes or giants.

Then he began to calm down—he thought of it as his brain beginning to thaw out—and he started to notice what was around him. The flickering lights were a bank of candles in front of a tall statue of a woman in blue-and-white robes. He thought she must be the Virgin Mary. In the back where he was were tall curtained boxes with panels between each set of curtains and crosses embossed on the panels. He had no idea what those were. He counted pews and came up with twenty-six on each side.

At the front, on the other side of the altar from the statue of the Virgin, there was a small curtained cabinet with a light hanging over it, a candle burning in a little red jar. It fascinated him. He went up the aisle toward it, ignoring the pictures that had been placed at intervals along the walls. They were all pictures of Jesus Christ in terrible agony: carrying his cross; falling on stones; bleeding. It hurt him to look at them.

He got to the rail that divided the pews from the things at the front—the statue, the altar, the candles, the little curtained cabinet—and stopped. He told himself he wasn’t allowed to go any farther. The truth was, he didn’t want to. It was scary up there. There was a crucifix on the wall behind the altar, a dozen times larger than life size, made out of stone, and carved with every detail. His eyes kept going back and forth between it and the little red light. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. He kept thinking it was trying to tell him something.

A Catholic with any training at all would have knelt down. He didn’t know enough to do that, so he was still standing at the rail when a man came through the side door, threw his right hand around in front of his face and chest, then did a quick bobbing kneel in front of the altar. John almost laughed. The man was wearing a robe that only sort-of fitted him. The sleeves were too long and fell down over his hands. It gave them something in common. John’s shirt was too long, too. His clothes were always the wrong sizes, because they were always picked off the rag tables at Goodwill.

That’s a priest, John thought. Just as he thought it, the man held out his hand and said:

“I’m Father Carnetti. Can I do something for you?”

Later, he would think of all the answers he could have made to that question. God only knew, he had enough that needed to be done. Standing there in the church, he could only think of one thing to say, and it didn’t make any sense.

“What was that you were doing with your hand?” he asked the priest. “That thing when you first came in.”

“You mean the Sign of the Cross?”

“I don’t know.”

Father Carnetti made the Sign of the Cross again, slowly this time, so that John could see exactly what he was doing.