Innocence: A Novel (20 page)

If the two cops paid another visit to the block of Cathedral Avenue where Father had sacrificed himself, they did not get there by East Halberg, nor did they use a siren.

I returned to Father and sat beside him. The last dark hours of the night were cold, but the bitter air didn’t sting as much as the grief that I could not unwind and pay out, that like a woven vine of thorns cinched my heart. Self-control was essential, and I tried to think of nothing, but into the nothing came the marionette and the music box and the way the little mountain house had looked when the shotgun roared within, which wasn’t good, not good at all.

Moments in advance of the earliest blush of light, the monks daily proceeded from their monastery through the large cloister that surrounded a formal garden, unlocking the north and south doors in the
great wall, at the same time that other priests turned on the cathedral lights and opened the street doors for another day.

I stiffened when I heard the clack of the lock bolt disengaged, and prepared to identify myself as a humble homeless man, head low, beside my sleeping friend. Fortunately, the door was unlocked, but the monk with the key did not linger in the cold to see if anyone had camped out, which I suppose happened from time to time.

Even we of the hidden, who have every reason—but no inclination—to be cynical, tend to believe that we are to a degree safer when unexpectedly encountering a member of the clergy than when coming face-to-face with anyone else. We are wise, however, not to expect universal mercy from the devout. All these years later, I vividly remembered the white-clapboard blue-trimmed church by the river, where one of the faithful, perhaps a deacon, had gone after me with a baseball bat—and the minister who had broken Father’s fingers.

After a minute or so, when I felt that all of the confreres would have proceeded into the church, I opened the door inward. Beyond the nearer length of the cloister immediately before me, glimpsed between the columns that encircled it, lay the garden. In the first pale light, the evergreen hedges draped in snow looked like sheet-covered furniture in a house closed for the season.

I leaned through the doorway and confirmed that the cloister was deserted. Because the vestibule offered insufficient space for me to maneuver Father onto my shoulders, I dragged him across the threshold into the cloister, closed the door, and lifted him, and went to the right along the covered walk.

The only entrance to the cathedral I dared use was the north porch, which offered four doors. I hunched farther forward to keep the ungainly weight balanced on my back while I let go of the body with one hand to open the door to my left.

From inside came chanting as sweet as song. The monks were observing matins, the first of seven hours in the Divine Office.

With the hope that they would be too involved with their prayers to notice me, I entered the north transept. During the night, I had scraped the caked snow off my boots; now I left only wet footprints on the marble floor.

Since first seeing them on a secret visit, I have always admired the fan vaults in the transept ceiling, sixty feet overhead, but burdened as I was and afraid of being noticed, I didn’t even try to look up that high.

The cathedral was large, the transept long. When I strained to raise my head a little way, I saw no one in the crossing, where the shorter transepts met the longer nave. Whether they were gathered in the choir or elsewhere, I didn’t know.

The body across my back seemed heavier by the moment. My calf muscles began to burn.

Immediately to my left, this side of the baptismal, beyond a columned archway lay a chamber that served a great spiral staircase with limestone treads six or seven feet wide, leading only down. Between two bronze stanchions hung a thick red-velvet rope, blocking entrance to the stairs, and when I managed to push aside one of the stanchions, it scraped loudly against the floor.

The chanting did not cease, and like some medieval body snatcher returning with remorse what he had taken earlier, I carried my dead father down the stairs to the crypt deep under the church, which would provide covert passage off Cathedral Hill and into the lower reaches of the city. At the foot of the stairs, under a carved-limestone tympanum featuring Christ the Redeemer, an ornate bronze gate blocked the way, but it was not locked.

At the moment, the crypt was lighted only by several torchères crowned with gas flames that burned 24/7 to attest to the eternal nature of the souls of those interred here. The space was divided into sections separated from one another only by arcades of columns, and overhead were groin vaults painted with murals. Here the bishops and the cardinals and perhaps some of the most worthy parishioners from the generations of the city were laid to rest.

The floors of the various chambers, all open to one another, had been constructed with subtle integrated slopes, which Father had pointed out to me when long ago we had entered along the route by which I would now leave with him. I passed among columns, accompanied by cowled figures in flaring black cassocks that were really shadows flung about by the leaping gas flames, enhanced by my imagination. I quickly came to the corner toward which the floors would direct the water if the crypt was ever flooded.

After putting Father down, I used the gate key and then hooked the large cover off the drain, leaving a few inches overhanging. Now and then a partial passage of a psalm sung down from the church, but I knew the monks couldn’t hear me.

A vertical shaft, four feet in diameter, dropped sixty feet to a drain line large enough for a man to pass through easily in a stoop. These were among the earliest drains in the system, made of brick and mortar but still enduring.

The shaft featured embedded iron rungs for those who needed to service it, but a few of them were loose, and caution was required to avoid losing one’s grip or footing. The hole was not wide enough for me to sling the body from my back and go down with it. Anyway, I had no way to sling it.

I had one option, grim as it was, and I hesitated only briefly before
sliding Father feet-first into the hole. I turned away but did not cover my ears, because I felt that I should bear witness to every detail of his journey from point of death to his final rest.

The friction whistle of raincoat fabric against brick rose as he fell. He impacted with the larger drain far below and spilled into it, but the slope was too minimal for him to travel farther.

For perhaps a minute, I stood shuddering, forcing back my tears and steeling myself for the descent.

From elsewhere in the crypt, I heard footsteps on stone and then voices echoing along the groin vaults.

AS OUR STRANGE COURTSHIP REQUIRED, IF IT WAS A
courtship, the dining area was barely lighted: three candles in blue-glass cups on a sideboard, six others at more distance in the open kitchen, none upon the table at which we ate. I had taken off my ski mask but not my jacket, and I ate with my hood still up.

A simple glass chandelier hung by a chain above us, left dark in consideration of me, but its chrome arms were faintly traced by fluttery reflections of the blue candlelight, and the small glass bowls containing its light bulbs took the blue glow and made rings of it around their rims. Our wineglasses and the flatware likewise glimmered, and on the wall behind the sideboard, soft blue light quivered as the flames danced.

She had prepared crab cakes with a slaw of peppers and cabbage, and tiny potatoes sautéed first and then roasted in the oven. All of it
was delicious, and I couldn’t tell what had been frozen and what was fresh.

I asked, “Who might be the partner that Telford mentioned?”

“I have no way of knowing. He lies as easily as he breathes, so there might not be any partner.”

“I think there is one.”

After a silence, Gwyneth said, “So do I.”

“What did he mean—your guardian is on a leash?”

“We’re going to meet him later. Then you’ll know.”

“You said even he doesn’t know about this place.”

“He doesn’t. We’re going out again to meet him.”

“Is that safe?”

“Not entirely. But it’s necessary.”

I liked the pinot grigio. I’d never tasted it before. I liked the shadow of her at the farther end of the table, too, her hands like the graceful hands of a mermaid in a pale-blue dream.

“He sounds entirely wicked,” I said.

She laughed softly. “I won’t disagree.”

“Five years ago, when he …”

When I hesitated, she completed my question for me. “When he tried to rape me?”

“You were only thirteen. You said you lived secluded on the top floor of your father’s house then.”

“Do you have a worst night of your life, Addison?”

I thought of Father shot and bludgeoned on Cathedral Hill. “Yes. I have a worst night.”

“Me too. I was living alone on the fourth floor of my father’s house when Telford came after me, but Daddy was murdered minutes before, in the kitchen.”

I said, “I didn’t realize both in the same night.”

A sharp knocking came from overhead, three pairs of quick but not heavy raps, like a percussionist in an orchestra striking a hollow wood block with a small wooden hammer.

I’ve never known the Clears to make a sound, but looking up at the ceiling, I said, “Someone on the roof?”

“There’s an attic. But it’s nothing. Probably just a water line.”

The sound came again:
rap-rap, rap-rap, rap-rap
. She said, “Probably just air in the water pipes.”

Rap-rap, rap-rap, rap-rap
.

“Always six raps in pairs? How can that be?”

“It’s not always the same. Sometimes a rap or two, sometimes a long stutter of them. Nothing to worry about. Just air in the pipes. How are the crab cakes?”

In the gloom, her face was no more revealed to me than mine was visible to her.

“Delicious. You’re quite a cook.”

“I’m quite a reheater.”

I picked up my wineglass, hesitated, waiting for another spate of knocking, which did not come.

After a sip of wine, I said, “Gwyneth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so happy to be here.”

“I’m happy, too,” she said. “My life has always been so limited. But it doesn’t feel limited right now.”

SIX YEARS EARLIER, IN THE CRYPT OF THE CATHEDRAL
, standing by the open drain, in the farthest corner from the entrance, I dared not move because the slightest sound would resonate along the curves of the groin vaults and announce my presence with a choir of echoes.

The four chambers were open to one another, delineated only by the colonnades. Although sound traveled well, getting a clear line of sight to any point would be difficult. I was reminded of the pine barrens through which I’d made my way as a boy, before coming to the church by the river. Those trees, with their lowest limbs high above my head and no underbrush competing with them, were so plentiful that I’d had no long views, and I had none here, especially by the lambent light of the torchères and through the pooling shadows.

I could have gone into the shaft, but when they came to see the cause of the noise, the manhole cover would be lying beside the hole. They would know someone other than a city worker came and went by this route, and I would never be able to return here, where sometimes in the deep of night I found a certain peace.

Whoever they might be, there were two of them. If the tone of their conversation was not conspiratorial, it was at least that of men with opinions that they evidently kept secret between them.

“The announcement won’t be for five days, but the word has been received. It’s been decided.”

“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.”

“He’s been lucky not to be exposed like the others.”

“Perhaps it’s more than luck.”

“You know my feelings in that regard.”

“And yet it’s known. It’s
known
.”

“It’s not known widely.”

“We have two duties now. One to Wallache, which we should fulfill only to the minimum possible, and one to what is right.”

“There are others who feel as we do. Many others.”

“Yes, but that’s cold comfort when such a decision has been made and you know there’s a long darkness coming down.”

As suddenly as they had arrived, they departed.

I couldn’t make much sense of what they had said, and at the time I didn’t have any interest in puzzling through the meaning of it. With Father dead, the seams of my life were split, and I didn’t believe that I could sew them up again. My entire life was a secret, and the small secrets of others seemed to be none of my business.

Alone, I went into the hole, from the crypt to what lay far beneath it, as if I were of the dead yet tasked with my own burial. Holding fast to a rung with my left hand, I secured myself to another with the six-inch tether that I had long ago stitched securely to the belt of my raincoat. That short safety line ended in a large snap link that I inspected often enough to entrust my life to it. Feet on a lower rung, tethered at the waist, I had both hands free to use the prybar/hook to snare the overhanging drain lid and muscle it into place, though with considerable noise.

After releasing the tether, I descended in darkness so thick that I breathed it in with the cool air. Although it was nothing but imagination,
I felt that the inhaled darkness was not expelled with the exhaled breath.

I knew the number of rungs from top to base of the sixty-foot shaft, and I counted them as I went down to where Father lay tumbled and broken. When I drew near the bottom, I stopped, took a flashlight from a coat pocket, and searched below. At my back, the last four feet on the farther side of the shaft formed an open arch to the larger drain, providing a four-by-four curved opening, through which the momentum of the falling body had carried it feet-first. He had turned on his side, and only the hooded, scarf-wrapped head remained within the vertical shaft.