CHAPTER 54

BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT AS THE STORM began to wane, the initial contingent of National Security agents — twenty of them — arrived in snow-eating monster trucks. With the phones down, I had no idea how Romanovich contacted them, but by then I had conceded that the clouds of mystery gathered around him made my clouds of mystery look like a light mist by comparison.

By Friday afternoon, the twenty agents had grown to fifty, and the grounds of the abbey and all buildings lay under their authority. The brothers, the sisters, and one shaken guest were exhaustively debriefed, though the children, at the insistence of the nuns, were not disturbed with questions.

The NSA concocted cover stories regarding the deaths of Brother Timothy, Brother Maxwell, and John Heineman. Timothy’s and Maxwell’s families would be told that they had perished in an SUV accident and that their remains were too grisly to allow open-casket funerals.

Already, a funeral Mass had been said for each of them. In the spring, though there were no remains to bury, headstones would be erected in the cemetery by the edge of the forest. At least their names in stone would stand with those whom they had known and loved, and by whom they themselves had been loved.

John Heineman, for whom also a Mass had been offered, would be kept in cold storage. After a year, when his death would not seem coincidental with those of Timothy and Maxwell, an announcement would be made to the effect that he had died of a massive heart attack.

He had no family except the son he had never accepted. In spite of the terror and grief that Heineman had brought to St. Bartholomew’s, the brothers and sisters were agreed that in a spirit of forgiveness, he should be buried in their cemetery, though at a discreet distance from the others who were at rest in that place.

Heineman’s array of supercomputers were impounded by the NSA. They would eventually be removed from John’s Mew and trucked away. All the strange rooms and the creation machine would be studied, meticulously disassembled, and removed.

The brothers and sisters — and yours truly — were required to sign oaths of silence, and we understood that the carefully spelled-out penalties for violation would be strictly enforced. I don’t think the feds were worried about the monks and nuns, whose lives are about the fulfillment of oaths, but they spent a lot of time vividly explaining to me all the nuances of suffering embodied in the words “rot in prison.”

I wrote this manuscript nonetheless, as writing is my therapy and a kind of penance. If ever, my story will be published only when I have moved on from this world to glory or damnation, where even the NSA cannot reach me.

Although Abbot Bernard had no responsibility for John Heineman’s research or actions, he insisted that he would step down from his position between Christmas and the new year.

He had called John’s Mew the adytum, which is the most sacred part of a place of worship, shrine of shrines. He had embraced the false idea that God can be known through science, which pained him considerably, but his greatest remorse arose from the fact that he had been unable to see that John Heineman had been motivated not by a wholesome pride in his God-given genius but by a vanity and a secret simmering anger that corrupted his every achievement.

A sadness settled over the community of St. Bartholomew’s, and I doubted that it would lift for a year, if even then. Because the beasts of bone that breached the second-floor defenses of the school had collapsed into diminishing cubes at the moment of Heineman’s demise, as had the figure of Death, only Brother Maxwell had perished in the battle. But Maxwell, Timothy, and again poor Constantine would be mourned anew in each season that life here went on without them.

Saturday evening, three days after the crisis, Rodion Romanovich came to my room in the guesthouse, bringing two bottles of good red wine, fresh bread, cheese, cold roast beef, and various condiments, none of which he had poisoned.

Boo spent much of the evening lying on my feet, as if he feared they might be cold.

Elvis stopped by for a while. I thought he might have moved on by now, as Constantine appeared to have done, but the King remained. He worried about me. I suspected also that he might be choosing his moment with a sense of the drama and style that had made him famous.

Near midnight, as we sat at a small table by the window at which a few days earlier I had been waiting for the snow, Rodion said, “You will be free to leave Monday if you wish. Or will you stay?”

“I may come back one day,” I said, “but now this isn’t the place for me.”

“I believe without exception the brothers and the sisters feel this will forever be the place for you. You saved them all, son.”

“No, sir. Not all.”

“All of the children. Timothy was killed within the hour you saw the first bodach. There was nothing you could have done for him. And I am more at fault for Maxwell than you are. If I had understood the situation and had shot Heineman sooner, Maxwell might have lived.”

“Sir, you’re surprisingly kind for a man who prepares people for death.”

“Well, you know, in some cases, death is a kindness not only to the person who receives it but to the people he himself might have destroyed. When will you leave?”

“Next week.”

“Where will you go, son?”

“Home to Pico Mundo. You? Back to your beloved Indianapolis?”

“I am sadly certain that the Indiana State Library at one-forty North Senate Avenue has become a shambles in my absence. But I will be going, instead, to the high desert in California, to meet Mrs. Romanovich on her return from space.”

We had a certain rhythm for these things that required me to take a sip of wine and savor it before asking, “From space — do you mean like the moon, sir?”

“Not so far away as the moon this time. For a month, the lovely Mrs. Romanovich has been doing work for this wonderful country aboard a certain orbiting platform about which I can say no more.”

“Will she make America safe forever, sir?”

“Nothing is forever, son. But if I had to commend the fate of the nation to a single pair of hands, I could think of none I would trust more than hers.”

“I wish I could meet her, sir.”

“Perhaps one day you will.”

Elvis lured Boo away for a belly rub, and I said, “I do worry about the data in Dr. Heineman’s computers. In the wrong hands …”

Leaning close, he whispered, “Worry not, my boy. The data in those computers is applesauce. I made sure of that before I called in my posse.”

I raised my glass in a toast. “To the sons of assassins and the husbands of space heroes.”

“And to your lost girl,” he said, clinking my glass with his, “who, in her new adventure, holds you in her heart as you hold her.”

CHAPTER 55

THE EARLY SKY WAS CLEAR AND DEEP. THE snow-mantled meadow lay as bright and clean as the morning after death, when time will have defeated time and all will have been redeemed.

I had said my good-byes the night before and had chosen to leave while the brothers were at Mass and the sisters busy with the waking children.

The roads were clear and dry, and the customized Cadillac purred into view without a clank of chains. He pulled up at the steps to the guesthouse, where I waited.

I hurried to advise him not to get out, but he refused to remain behind the wheel.

My friend and mentor, Ozzie Boone, the famous mystery writer of whom I have written much in my first two manuscripts, is a gloriously fat man, four hundred pounds at his slimmest. He insists that he is in better condition than most sumo wrestlers, and perhaps he is, but I worry every time he gets up from a chair, as it seems this will be one demand too many on his great heart.

“Dear Odd,” he said as he gave me a fierce bear hug by the open driver’s door. “You have lost weight, I fear. You are a wisp.”

“No, sir.

I weigh the same as when you dropped me off here. It may be that I seem smaller to you because you’ve gotten larger.”

“I have a colossal bag of fine dark chocolates in the car. With the proper commitment, you can gain five pounds by the time we get back to Pico Mundo. Let me put your luggage in the trunk.”

“No, no, sir. I can manage.”

“Dear Odd, you have been trembling in anticipation of my death for years, and you will be trembling in anticipation of my death ten years from now. I will be such a massive inconvenience to all who will handle my body that God, if he has any mercy for morticians, will keep me alive perhaps forever.”

“Sir, let’s not talk about death. Christmas is coming. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.”

“By all means, we shall talk about silver bells roasting on an open fire and all things Christmas.”

While he watched, and no doubt schemed to snatch up one of my bags and load it, I stowed my belongings in the trunk. When I slammed the lid and looked up, I discovered that all the brothers, who should have been at Mass, had gathered silently on the guesthouse steps.

Sister Angela and a dozen of the nuns were there as well. She said, “Oddie, may I show you something?”

I went to her as she unrolled a tube that proved to be a large sheet of drawing paper. Jacob had executed a perfect portrait of me.

“This is very good. And very sweet of him.”

“But it’s not for you,” she said. “It’s for my office wall.”

“That company is too rarefied for me, ma’am.”

“Young man, it’s not for you to say whose likeness I wish to look upon each day. The riddle?”

I had already tried on her the fortitude answer that Rodion Romanovich had made sound so convincing.

“Ma’am, intellectually I’ve run dry.”

She said, “Did you know that after the Revolutionary War, the founders of our country offered to make George Washington king, and that he declined?”

“No, ma’am.

I didn’t know that.”

“Did you know that Flannery O’Connor lived so quietly in her community that many of her fellow townspeople did not know that she was one of the greatest writers of her time?”

“A Southern eccentric, I suppose.”

“Is that what you suppose?”

“I guess if there’s going to be a test on this material, I will fail it. I never was much good in school.”

“Harper Lee,” said Sister Angela, “who was offered a thousand honorary doctorates and untold prizes for her fine book, did not accept them. And she politely turned away the adoring reporters and professors who made pilgrimages to her door.”

“You shouldn’t blame her for that, ma’am. So much uninvited company would be a terrible annoyance.”

I don’t think her periwinkle eyes had ever sparkled brighter than they did on the guesthouse steps that morning.

“Dominus vobiscum, Oddie.”

“And also with you, Sister.”

I had never been kissed by a nun before. I had never kissed one, either. Her cheek was so soft.

When I got into the Cadillac, I saw that Boo and Elvis were sitting in the backseat.

The brothers and sisters stood there on the guesthouse steps in silence, and as we drove away, I more than once looked back at them, looked back until the road descended and turned out of sight of St. Bartholomew’s.

CHAPTER 56

THE CADILLAC HAD BEEN STRUCTURALLY reinforced to support Ozzie’s weight without listing, and the driver’s seat had been handcrafted to his dimensions.

He handled his Cadillac as sweet as a NASCAR driver, and we flew out of the mountains into lower lands with a grace that should not have been possible at those speeds.

After a while, I said to him, “Sir, you are a wealthy man by any standard.”

“I have been both fortunate and industrious,” he agreed.

“I want to ask you for a favor so big that I’m ashamed to say it.”

Grinning with delight, he said, “You never allow anything to be done for you. Yet you’re like a son to me. Who am I going to leave all this money to? Terrible Chester will never need all of it.”

Terrible Chester was his cat, who had not been born with the name but had earned it.

“There is a little girl at the school.”

“St. Bartholomew’s?”

“Yes. Her name is Flossie Bodenblatt.”

“Oh, my.”

“She has suffered, sir, but she shines.”

“What is it that you want?”

“Could you open a trust fund for her, sir, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars, after tax?”

“Consider it done.”

“For the purpose of establishing her in life when she leaves the school, for establishing her in a life where she can work with dogs.”

“I shall have the attorney specify it exactly that way. And shall I be the one to personally oversee her transition from the school to the outside world, when the time comes?”

“I would be forever grateful, sir, if you would.”

“Well,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel just long enough to dust them briskly together, “that was as easy as eating cream pie. Who shall we set up a trust for next?”

Justine’s profound brain damage could not be restored by a trust fund. Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world, but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

We cruised awhile, talking of Christmas, when suddenly I was struck by intuition more powerful by far than I had ever experienced before.

“Sir, could you pull off the road?”

The tone of my voice caused his generous, jowly face to form a frown of overlapping layers. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not anything wrong. But something … very important.”

He piloted the Cadillac into a lay-by, in the shade of several majestic pines, and switched off the engine.

“Oddie?”

“Give me a moment, sir.”

We sat in silence as pinions of sunlight and the feathered shadows of the pines fluttered on the windshield.

The intuition became so intense that to ignore it would be to deny who and what I am.

My life is not mine. I would have given my life to save my lost girl’s, but that trade had not been on Fate’s agenda. Now I live a life I don’t need, and know that the day will come when I will give it in the right cause.

“I have to get out here, sir.”

“What — don’t you feel well?”

“I feel fine, sir. Psychic magnetism. I have to walk from here.”

“But you’re coming home for Christmas.”