Jack 1939 (14 page)

TWENTY-FIVE.
A GIRL NAMED DAISY

THE GATEWAY WAS WIDE ENOUGH
to admit a truck. In the past it had probably allowed the passage of carts full of supplies, or a dignitary’s coach. Today it had opened for the morgue.

Jack stopped short in the convent courtyard as he registered the black van. It had slewed crazily sideways before the arched colonnade that ran around the building. Like the courtyard, it was empty. But the wailing he’d heard grew steadily louder, and with it came the clatter of poorly fitted shoes. A moment later a figure in a long black habit hurtled down a flight of stairs opposite Jack and turned abruptly to her right, running full tilt toward a door at the far end of the colonnade. Her fists were pressed to her red cheeks and her mouth was open in a continuous scream.

The sound of her wooden heels echoed around the stone walls; then the nun pushed wildly through the door and disappeared into darkness.

Jack drew a deep breath and walked past the black van, toward the stairs.

As he mounted the last step, his foot slid out unexpectedly. He clutched for a banister, saved himself from falling, and glanced down.

He was standing in a pool of blood.

* * *

THE WOMAN WHOSE LIFE
had dripped away on the paving of the corridor was rather young, he thought. She lay as she fell, on her back, her arms flung wide, as if in supplication. Her eyes stared upward, searching for God. Her fingers were slightly cupped, her lips parted. Her habit had been cut to the waist, and her left breast glowed like a perfect pearl against the black serge. Perfect but for the crouching spider.

Blood crusted blackly along the lines sketched by the knife.

Jack’s vision blurred and he felt his throat convulse; he turned away, forcing himself to master the sickness. A knot of people—more nuns, the men from the black van—were moving toward him, their voices raised in rapid and questioning Italian. He could not understand a word of it. Somebody grasped his arm and started to pull him back down the stairs but he managed to say something. The only Italian phrase he knew.

“Parla inglese?”

“I speak English.” One of the nuns—no longer young, with snapping black eyes and a hooked nose—stepped forward and stared at him. “You are not welcome. It is not convenient.”

“Sister Mary Joseph,” he said, shaking the whirling haze out of his eyes. “I must speak to Sister Mary Joseph.”

Her mouth tightened.
“Idiota!
You see what has happened—the . . . the
sacrilege . . .”

It was the same word in both languages.

Jack took a step forward and stared down at the dead girl. A Little Sister of Clemency. The Spider had shown her none.

“What do you want with her?”

Another voice this time; a second nun came forward. Older, more stately, with a simple silver cross at her neck.

“You’re Sister Mary Joseph?”

“I am the Mother Superior.” Her eyes strayed to the body at their feet. “
This
is Sister Mary Joseph.”

Of course it
was.

Jack scrounged in his jacket for his card, the one with the London embassy’s address, and handed it to the Mother Superior. “I’d like to talk to you. I think I know who killed her.”

The nun held his card at arm’s length, the better to read the fine writing. “Ken-ne-dy,” she said. “You will be some relation of the famous ambassador from America?”

“His son.”

“A good Catholic boy.” She nodded once to convince herself. As if she really knew. “I will see you. But first, I think, you must talk to
la polizia
.”

* * *

THE POLICE WERE TWO SMALL
dark men in well-tailored uniforms. Neither of them spoke English. Jack’s grudging translator—whose name, he learned, was Sister Immaculata—agreed with a sigh to lend her services while the men from the morgue took the corpse away.

She led them back downstairs to the courtyard, where they sat on one of the hard wooden benches that lined the colonnade. And watched Sister Mary Joseph as she was loaded into the van.

“Don’t you bury her on the convent grounds?” Jack asked.

“She is not Italian,” Sister Immaculata said indifferently. “She will be given a mass, of course, and sent home to her people. Once the police are done with her.”

There was no love lost between Sister Immaculata and Sister Mary Joseph, it seemed. Jack would liked to have asked why, but one of the policemen—he had a stripe of authority on his shoulder—was peppering him with impatient Italian, and the nun was gesturing ferociously with her hands. Then she turned to Jack.

“He asks why you are here. An American. A stranger. A
man
in the holy convent of holy women.”

“I came to see Sister Mary Joseph.”

This time, the policeman didn’t wait for Immaculata’s translation. He grabbed the front of Jack’s sweater and twisted it menacingly.

“To see her—or to
kill
her?” Immaculata supplied helpfully. “
Il ispettore
wishes to know who you are,
immediatamente
, and why we found you with the murdered sister.”

“I told you—I’m Jack Kennedy. My father is the American ambassador to England.
Joseph
Kennedy. Look, here’s my passport.” He rose abruptly from the bench, shaking free of the inspector.
He hated to be touched.
Alarmed, the man pulled a truncheon out of his belt.

“Easy.” Jack raised his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I was just going for my passport. So you can see for yourself who I am.”

The nun muttered to the policeman and after an instant, he nodded grudgingly. With careful slowness, Jack eased his right hand into the back pocket of his flannels and withdrew his passport. The inspector took it. His colleague seized the moment to frisk Jack in a style he could only have learned from a gangster movie.

“You’ve got the wrong guy, mister,” Jack said. “No bloody knife in my pocket, I promise you. I didn’t even know the dead woman. And the murderer’s getting away while you’re wasting my time.”

Immaculata frowned at him menacingly. “A little respect, if you know what is good for you,
idiota
,” she hissed. “The inspector asks why you came to the Via Giulia, asking for Sister Mary Joseph, if you did not know her?”

“A mutual friend from the States asked me to drop by. She went to school with the sister many years ago.”

“The name of this friend?” his translator demanded.

“Eileen Dunne,” he improvised, his eyes on the inspector. “From Boston. I’m in college there. At Harvard. You’ve heard of Harvard?”

The policeman was studying the photograph. Comparing it to Jack’s face.

“He asks,” Immaculata said, “why you are in Rome.”

“I’m working as my father-the-ambassador’s secretary in London,” Jack said swiftly. “My father is President Franklin Roosevelt’s official representative to the Pope’s coronation.”

“
Il ispettore
wishes to know of your movements today. Did you go to St. Peter’s alone?”

Jack frowned. “No, I was with
my father the ambassador
. And the rest of my family. There are ten of us. We swiped Count Ciano’s seats, if you want to know.”

At the mention of Mussolini’s son-in-law, the policeman’s face hardened. He spat in the courtyard dirt. “Ciano!”

Immaculata shrugged her contempt. “Ciano is a violator of women and of Mother Church. When did you leave St. Peter’s?”

“At noon. I was driven in an official embassy car with four of my brothers and sisters straight to the Hotel d’Inghilterra, where my family is staying.”

“And then you came here? Why?”

“I told you—to pay a visit to Sister Mary Joseph.”

“And you came alone? Nobody saw you?”

Jack gave an exasperated sigh. “My cabdriver dropped me outside a minute before you found me at the top of the stairs. I doubt we’ll be able to find him. But
I didn’t kill Sister Mary Joseph
. How could I? I didn’t even know what she looked like!”

“There is only your word for this.”

The policeman conferred with his subordinate. Sister Immaculata yawned.

“Look,” Jack suggested. “You can talk to my father. Ambassador Kennedy. He’ll tell you I was with him all day. Ask Ciano himself if I was at the Vatican, for chrissake.”

Immaculata hissed again at his sacrilege.

Unexpectedly, the police inspector said in perfect English, “You have something to tell us, signore?”

“I do.” He eyed the man with renewed interest. “The mark cut into the nun’s breast.”

“The . . .” the inspector halted, confounded by the word.

“It looks like a spider,” Jack said helpfully. “There are a string of bodies from New York to London with the same mark. The killer’s a German named Hans Obst.”

“How you know this?” the policeman demanded.

“I read the newspapers. But you might want to call Scotland Yard. They’ll be able to help. Could I talk to the Mother Superior now, please?”

* * *

HE’D NEVER BEEN TAUGHT BY NUNS,
as most Catholic boys growing up in America were. His father’s social and political ambitions demanded that Jack and his brothers fight for an equal place in America’s power structure—and that meant shedding the appearance of a Boston mick and graduating from the right WASP schools. Kennedy money bought them berths at Choate, and then Harvard, where the Irish was almost scrubbed out of them. Jack’s brother Joe was a rousing success at Choate and won its coveted Harvard Trophy; a football star with perfect features, he was always better at looking the part of Brahmin than Jack. But despite his privileged education, Jack was no stranger to convents; his sisters spent most of their lives in schools like this. Only J. P. Kennedy’s
boys
got the best education money could buy. The girls were simply expected to marry well—and marry Catholics.

Jack followed Sister Immaculata’s swaying black gown along the colonnade to the far door—the one the screaming nun had vanished through—and into the heart of the building.

It was probably several hundred years old. The stone walls were roughly plastered and the hallways smelled of wax. They smelled, too, of linen pressed under hot irons; disinfecting soap; and ancient drains. As Jack passed certain closed doors he thought he could smell sickness—of body or mind. It was not, after all, very different from Mayo.

He hadn’t thought of the pain in his leg since he’d paid off the taxi. That was what the nuns would call a blessing. He wasn’t sure what he’d call it.

Sister Immaculata stopped before a thick oak door and rapped sharply on it.

“Entrato.”

They went in.

The Mother Superior was just rising from her knees. Had she been praying for the soul of the departed, or for herself?

“Mr. Ken-ne-dy,” she said. “Please. Sit down. You may leave us, Sister Immaculata.”

The nun bowed her head and vanished through the door—but not before throwing a malevolent look at Jack. She suspected him of something. If not murder, then every one of the other deadly sins in the book.

“You have seen
la polizia
. You have told them what you know.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She settled herself behind a handsome desk: a wide-hipped, large-featured woman of middle years, with liquid black eyes. She was studying him frankly, and Jack schooled himself not to look away. “It is a horrible thing, this kind of death. A violence without reason. She was a good girl.”

“You have my deepest sympathy,” Jack said. “But how was she murdered? This place”—he glanced around the windowless room—“seems tough to break into. Did anybody see what happened?”

“Nobody saw nothing,” the Mother Superior said with a grand indifference to English grammar. “She was alone. She must have opened the outer door to the one who killed her. Perhaps she tried to run away—she reached the upper floor—but after that . . .”

He could imagine it: The Spider at the small entrance cut into the gate; the bell ringing as it had for Diana yesterday; the bulky shape forcing an entry—the terrified woman tripping in her long skirts—and then the knife. . . .

“We found her when we returned from the coronation,” the Mother Superior said matter-of-factly, “and it was terrible. Sister Agnes Ruth had the hysterics. One had to slap her. And still she screamed. One cannot blame her.”

“Why didn’t Sister Mary Joseph attend?”

“She had much to do. The packing of the baggage and the writing of letters. She was to travel to Paris tomorrow.”

“Paris?” He was startled.

“
Certamente
, Paris.” The Mother Superior scrutinized him. “The head of our charity is there. Herr Helmuth Wohlthat.”

Göring’s banker.
Helmuth Wohlthat, who liked to dine at the Tour d’Argent with men who were supposed to be elsewhere.

“What is your interest in Sister Mary Joseph?”

Jack fell back on his first lie, with variations.

“I’m in Rome for a few days for the Pope’s coronation. A friend asked me to visit.”

The Mother Superior nodded. “Mary Joseph had many friends, no? She came to us only a year ago, from Boston in America.”

Jesus. He’d guessed right.

And with the thought came uneasiness. The dead hatcheck girl had been from Boston, too.
Little Katie . . .

“Her body must be sent there,” the Mother Superior observed. “You will help us, perhaps?”

“I could,” Jack said slowly. “My father’s dining with Bill Phillips—he’s our ambassador here in Rome—right now. I can make a phone call to the embassy. The consular section will have to get the paperwork rolling. But I’d need Sister Mary Joseph’s
original
name—before she took vows.”

“That is most necessary, I comprehend.” The Mother Superior rose and went to a cabinet in the corner of the room, where she kept her files. A drawer slid open; her fingers shifted among the documents. “Such a strange and lovely name.
Daisy.
Daisy Corcoran. She was only twenty-seven.”

Jack’s heart seemed to stop for an instant; then resumed its beating with a painful thud. The Corcoran name was common enough in Boston. But that wasn’t why it had sputtered his pulse. What had Diana said, after calling in the Via Giulia yesterday?
Witness Daisy’s pending sainthood. I drop over from time to time in the hope she’ll save my
soul.