Cover Him with Darkness (9 page)

I put the book back on the shelf. Then I returned to close and bar the blast door in the passage. I set the timer, thumbed the ignition and walked out of the church.

I was halfway down the two hundred steps when I heard the crack and thud of the explosive. It was more muffled than I'd expected, but after the first detonations the great gruff sound of falling rocks seemed to go on for an age. Tiny pebbles danced as the ground vibrated around my feet.

I didn't look back.

In the village, the dogs that used to follow me about now barked at me and howled in distress. The earthquake the night before had cracked several walls and collapsed the dome on the tower of the church, but at least no one had been hurt. I paid American dollars, the bulk of my own cash, for a beat-up Zaštava that must have rolled off the auto-line back when Marshal Tito was in power, along with a tankful of gas.

That automobile got me all the way to Podgorica, though it shed its exhaust muffler en route.

I didn't dare look back. Not once.

Father had been put in a private room in the hospital, on the same corridor as the chapel so that he might go and pray there when he felt strong enough. The room was bare and ugly, like the rest of the hospital, but it was quiet and I was grateful: the public wards with their mumbling old men and their smell of urine and despair—never quite masked by the chemical reek of bleach—made my heart ache. How was my strong, wise father with his love of machinery and his pure baritone reduced to this pitiful state? What had gone wrong in the world that this was the end for us all?

“His heart is under a lot of strain,” the doctor told me as Father slept. “We are running tests but it looks like his whole system…his kidneys aren't working properly. We'd be looking at a transplant…if we could find a donor.”

“I'll donate one of mine,” I said. “I only need one, don't I?”

The doctor tilted his head. He looked tired, I thought, even though it wasn't yet midnight. “Don't be too hasty. We will certainly run tests. Tissue compatibility, you understand?”

“I'm his daughter, aren't I?” The hope of being able to do
something
to fix this terrible situation made me loud.

“But even if you are a suitable donor, it's not at all clear that he's strong enough for surgery of that magnitude at the moment. I'd need to be happier with his overall condition before agreeing to that.”

“But he might get worse while we wait!”

He sighed. “For the moment we need to be patient.”

Left alone, I circled to the bed. Vera and Uncle Josif had gone to the hotel room she'd found across the street, once I'd promised I'd stay the night. I sat myself in the lumpy leatherette chair by the head of the bed and took my father's hand.

“Little chick.” His voice was no louder than a murmur but his smile was sweet. I saw the glint of his eyes under half-raised lids.

“Did I wake you? Go back to sleep, Papa; it's okay.”

“I could always hear your voice, even with a whole school of children shouting.”

I thought I'd been mousy-quiet at school. I squeezed his hand reprovingly. “You'd better not have been listening in just now.”

“Of course not. I didn't hear a word.”

“Good!” I kissed his temple, hard.

“Milja…why are you here?”

I took a deep breath. “Some men from the village…they came up and wanted to come into the church. I didn't trust them. I was afraid.” It was hard to lie to my father, but much easier than confessing my true guilt. “I did what you said, Papa. The switch in the passage. I brought down the roof of the cave.”

“He's buried then?”

“Gone. Forever.” My heart was beating so loud that I was sure he must be able to hear it.

My father sighed. Perhaps if he'd felt stronger he would have been more agitated, but he just looked at me sadly, his eyes wet. “Well then. It is done. Our family is free of its obligation.”

I nodded, biting my lip. For a long time there was silence. My father's eyes closed and I started to think he was asleep again.

“Milja.”

My head jerked up, my whole body startling as only someone with a guilty conscience does. “Papa?”

“This room…the hospital bills. You need to take an icon or two to Branko.”

“How do I find him?”

“You brought the money from under the window stone?”

“Yes.”

“And the book that was there too?”

He meant the tiny black address book bound about with elastic bands. I nodded. “Yes.”

“Branko is here in Podgorica. His phone number is on the first page, but you must add two to each digit written. He will buy off you.”

I'd stashed the duffle bag in a lockup at the public station, paying for a month's rent. “No problem.”

“Milja…”

“What?”

“Be careful.”

Podgorica is not a pretty tourist-trade city. Its old buildings were bombed almost flat in the War Against Fascism, and its modern architecture cannot dream of matching the high-rise glass-and-steel majesty of Boston, though there's a lot of building work going on right now. I insisted on meeting Branko in a public space, one of my own choosing, and I chose a park that was shaded by scruffy trees and surrounded by ugly pastel-painted apartment blocks. I was grateful the sky was partly overcast and lazily threatening a summer downpour. Summer in the capital wasn't humid, not like the Boston I'd left behind, but I'd heard it could be insanely hot. Even now I stuck to the shade.

As I walked across the worn earth in the dusty shadow of the plane trees I remembered the story Father had told me of King Xerxes, who on his way to invade Greece had fallen hopelessly in love with a plane tree and bedecked it like a royal bride in gold ornaments. Strange to think of a man conceiving a passion for a tree, I thought—but then at least both
were creatures of the Earth, bound by their material nature. Wasn't it more unnatural for a denizen of the highest Heaven, a being of pure spirit, to take on flesh and indulge the basest human appetites?

The comparison—and the memories it roused—made heat rise to my cheeks. I stuffed the thoughts back down in my mind, out of sight.

I was nervous. The unlicensed selling of antiquities was strictly illegal of course, not to mention the small factor that the objects from the cave did not, strictly speaking, belong to my family. They were property of the Church itself, I supposed, if only the Church knew. It was too late now to feel the prick of conscience—my emigration and college fees had been paid by these black-market transactions—but it did make me walk cautiously, looking around for policemen. I hadn't been able to shake off the feeling, since blowing up the cave, that I was being watched.

So I'd been cautious in my dealings with Branko. I'd bought a local SIM off a street vendor for my phone, taken pictures of my chosen artifact (an icon of St. Stefan) and sent them for inspection. Branko had sounded wary at first about dealing with me instead of Father. But he'd made an offer that seemed to me to be reasonable—not that I really had any idea how much such things were worth, but it was a gratifying number of euros—and we'd agreed to meet. I'd bought a plastic bag of oranges and the palm-sized picture, wrapped in newspaper, now nested among them.

I reached the central fountain, which wasn't playing at that time and didn't even have any water in the basin, and glanced around, trying to look as casual as if I were only expecting to meet some boyfriend. Children skateboarded on the concrete slopes and old people sat in the sun. Three priests sat on a bench and threw bread to the pigeons, talking earnestly to one another.

I thought of the red-brick church I'd passed on the road to the park. I'd wondered whether to go in and make confession, but I hadn't dared. It was funny really—brought up in a priestly family, I'd simply assumed throughout my childhood that I was included among the sheep rather than the goats. Faith had never seemed something that needed a lot of work and sin never seemed a burden; not even my furtive visits to the prisoner, which I'd privately counted as acts of compassion. In America I'd gone to church when Vera took me, without either resentment or pleasure. Now—oh
now
—I knew what guilt felt like at last, and uncertainty too.
My place among the saved could no longer be taken for granted. I needed to make sure I was forgiven, but I balked at the thought. What confessor would believe me if I told him the whole truth? He'd assume I was out of my mind.

I looked away from the priests, shivering. I was alone, without the sympathy of either God or man. My transgression, in fact, must be entirely unique. Nobody else in human history had screwed up quite the same way I had.

A man was looking at me from the other side of the fountain. He was bald and middle-aged and wore a jacket over a stripy sweater-vest. Was that what a black-market antiques dealer looked like? I double-looped the plastic bag around my wrist and fished my phone out of my jeans pocket.

Here waiting
, I texted Branko.

The man looked at his own phone, got up from his bench and sauntered over to me. I could feel the plastic bag growing clammy against my hand.

“Miss Milja?” he asked. He didn't know my surname. Father had used a nom de guerre.

“Uh-huh.”

“Branko. You've got the picture?”

I nodded. He looked fussy and down-in-the-mouth, and there was something so tawdry and dull about him that it was hard to believe we were doing anything criminal.

“Come over here, and let's have a look at it.” He touched me on the shoulder, steering me around the basin of the fountain.

“Come where?”

“Just over here out of the way.”

I followed him a few paces, then stopped. I liked it right here in the middle of the park, where there were lots of witnesses. He wasn't a big man, but he was bigger than me. “This is fine,” I said, teeth gritted.

He sighed down his nose. “You think I should hand over a stack of notes where anyone could be watching?”

Personally I preferred
anyone
to
nobody
, but I got his point. “On the wall there,” I suggested, pointing my chin at the fountain. “There's no one close by.”

He shrugged and we found a point on the low wall where we could
turn our backs to the world. Drifts of litter stared up at us from the tiled basin. “Want an orange?” I asked, opening the bag.

He smirked. I passed him the small square parcel.

“Have a cigarette,” he told me, offering a pack from his jacket pocket.

“I don't smoke.”

“Have,” he said, “a
cigarette
. You don't have to inhale, eh? Make like a president.”

I accepted the cigarette and a lighter and lit the one clumsily from the other while he unwrapped the little wooden icon and looked it over critically.

“Keep the pack,” he said. I looked down to see a little wodge of colored euro notes folded inside the cigarette packet, and I realized that I'd been expecting a brown paper envelope like in the movies.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

He slipped the painting into his inside pocket where the cigarettes had rested. I bowed my head as I tried to casually pocket my own pack. A shadow came between me and the sun.

“Selling Church property is a grievous sin,” said a voice.

When I looked around, the three priests from the park bench were lined up behind us.

With an uneasy smile, Branko sidled out of their direct line of attention.

“Good afternoon, Miss Milja,” said the one in the middle. They were all bearded, of course, and all wearing black cassocks, but he was the oldest and the slightest, his long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. The other two were big—one with a rufous beard, one with a badger-striped black one—and I realized that they both looked a lot like they'd been brought along for their muscle.

My heart and my stomach collided with a clang.

“There's no need to worry,” said the one with the gray hair and the spectacles, seeing the look of panic that widened my eyes. “We just want to talk to you about this photograph.” Reaching into the leather bag that hung at his shoulder, he held out a black-and-white print. “My name is Father Velimir,” he said pleasantly. “What's yours?”

“Milja,” I said numbly, my brain a blank. It was a picture of some sort
of statuette, but I was mostly wondering what sort of awful trouble I was in and how to get out of it. Screaming at the top of my lungs seemed an option.

“I meant your surname, of course. Your father's name. We know you're working on behalf of your father. Why didn't he come himself, this time?”

I opened my mouth, looked him in the face—and said nothing. His expression hardened for a moment, then relaxed. “Look at the picture, Milja,” he said gently, as if talking to a simpleton—which was probably the impression I'd managed to give him. “Do you recognize it?”

It was a crudely worked female form, very pale and with almond-shaped eyes, cupping its breasts for the viewer. Her pubic area was nothing more than a hatched triangle. There was no scale in the picture but the lack of detail made me think it was quite small. I shook my head, reasonably truthfully. There'd been several similar idols in the tunnel, before I looted them out, but I didn't recognize this one in particular.