Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Mark
I sit back in the pew, stretching my arm out along the back while I set the flowers to the side. We are far enough apart that either of us would have plenty of time to react if the other moves.
“I’m not here for you,” I reassure her. “I actually came for your sister, because I had some questions for her. I’m sorry about your loss, by the way.”
The woman watches me, the inborn wariness of a predator tempered by something else.
Grief maybe. “Thank you. We only had each other, you know. It feels like an amputation.” She turns her eyes toward the magnificent array of stained glass behind the dais where the altar used to be.
I notice a pile of beads in her lap—a rosary made of some dark, dull metal.
“What questions did you have for her? Maybe I can answer them.”
I abandon my earlier plan and decide on the truth. “Your sister was getting money from a trust fund managed by a Catholic cardinal named Mortimer Cashel. I want to know why.”
She laughs, a thick, wheezing noise that sounds like forty years of tobacco smoke. “Oh, I know why.”
I wait patiently while she finishes laughing and then takes another drag on her cigarette.
“They were never payments to her,” the woman says after she exhales. “They were payments to me .”
“Ah,” I say. “For…services rendered? Did your sister help?”
“Yes, services of a sort,” she replies. She taps more ash onto the floor and then explains, “I’ve spent most of my life trying not to exist. No bank account, no work history, no taxes filed. So Regina collects the money for me.” Then she corrects herself with a frown. “Collected.”
“You’ve gotten paid recently,” I remark. “Does this mean you’re still active?”
She shakes her head. “I guess you could say that I get royalties on a few of my larger projects. Or more accurately that I’m paid to keep quiet. Murder for hire isn’t exactly the kind of thing that helps a new pope’s reputation.”
“Given the Church’s history, I’d say that’s a pretty recent development. How long did you work for him?”
She pulls in a drag. “Started when I was nineteen. Last body was three years ago now.”
“Nineteen,” I repeat. I think of Isolde, brought to Rome to poison coffee and pierce flesh, not even to her second year of college.
“I ran away when I was sixteen. It was the seventies, you’ve got to understand.
It was so easy for the city to swallow me up, help me chew myself into a pulp.
There was a bad girlfriend, then some dope, then a boy I fell in love with.
That last part ended with two black eyes and me working a crew spot on a cargo ship to Spain.
I ended up in Ireland a couple years later, sleeping rough, living rougher, and that’s when Father Cashel found me trying to sleep in the doorway of his parish church.
He gave me dry clothes and something to eat and let me sleep in the office.
Started giving me odd jobs. He never leered at me or put his hands on me or made me feel small.
He listened and helped—the opposite of everyone I’d met since running away. ”
She looks down at her cigarette, which is now smoldering at the filter. She tosses it to the stone floor with a sigh and pulls the pack from her pocket.
“Cigarette?” she offers.
“I don’t smoke.”
“You young ones never do. What are you, private? Freelance? That’s too nice a suit for government work.”
I accept the compliment with a gracious nod. “I’m freelance, I suppose, but I only freelance for myself. I started in the agency though.”
“Ah,” she says, now digging for her lighter. “You do have a bit of an agency vibe.”
“What would that be?” I ask, curious.
She sticks a cigarette between her lips. “Old school, you know?” She lights the cigarette and inhales until I hear her leather jacket creak. The rest of her thought comes with a cloud of smoke. “Chatty. Genteel. You’ve got manners.”
“That’s flattering.”
She rolls her eyes. “Manners are a waste of time.”
“It depends on the time,” I say, crossing my legs and giving her a cordial smile. “This isn’t a waste at all.”
“You religious?” she asks suddenly.
“I dabble.”
She points the cigarette at the stained glass making up the better part of the apse of the building.
It’s the crucifixion writ large: Christ in the middle with the three Marys near his feet and John the Beloved looking ardently up at him, then the two criminals on either side, each in their own window.
“Jesus loves even the worst of thieves and vilest of sinners,” she says.
“Like us. At least that’s how the story goes.
Father Cashel made me feel like…like I could earn a fresh start.
I worked around the church. I went to Mass.
And I finally gathered up my courage to see him for confession. I told him everything.”
“You’d killed people by then?”
“Two. The boy who gave me the black eyes and then a guy smuggling hash into Europe who thought I tried to screw him on a deal. But that wasn’t the worst part of my confession.
The worst part was that I didn’t feel bad.
Not even a little.” She takes a thoughtful inhale and then looks at me.
“You ever feel bad about them? The ones you’ve killed? ”
“Some. Not very many.” I think for a moment. “But the some weigh on me. They died for vain and petty reasons. That irritates me.”
“Guessing that’s why you went freelance.”
I shrug. “I’d rather the vain and petty reasons be my own. So Cashel wasn’t troubled by your lack of remorse?”
“He told me that it was okay, that it was a good thing actually, a gift from God. That he’d been looking for someone like me whose sins could help save God’s kingdom.
Gave me this.” She hands me the rosary, and it’s as heavy and cold as it looks.
The crucifix is beveled and embellished, oddly baroque for being made of what looks an awful lot like gunmetal.
“This must have been before he was overseeing the saints,” I say, twisting the beads around my fingers to hold up the crucifix to the light.
“Much, much before,” the woman agrees. “Even after he became a cardinal and was in charge of the saints, he still had me do his more…extracurricular tasks. Things he didn’t want the saints doing or even knowing about. Like knocking off his sister.”
She says it so casually, one killer to another, as if she hasn’t made time slide sideways with just a handful of words.
“Pardon me?”
She glances over at me, and confusion gives way to something like pride. “You didn’t know? So people still don’t know. I’ve always thought I did a good job keeping that one clean. It’s one of my ‘royalties,’ actually. He really doesn’t want that one getting out.”
“Inis Laurence died in a car accident,” I say slowly. “Are you telling me that the car accident was staged?”
“The accident did happen,” the woman says.
“But it was made to happen. One of my best jobs, and it was also one of the easiest, because my dad owned the auto shop before Regina, and I grew up crawling over engine parts. I siphoned off some brake fluid, introduced a slow leak so the rest would drain on her drive home, and then I was there blocking the way to Cashel House on the coastal road when she came home that night. The brakes failed, and she swerved and went right over the ledge.”
“I apologize—I’m still caught on the fact that Cashel wanted his own sister dead. That is…staggering to me.”
Isolde’s uncle killed her mother.
The death that turned her father into a living profit-and-loss sheet and brought Isolde into Cashel’s influence was planned .
“It’s pretty dark when you think about it,” the woman agrees, like we’re talking about some atrocity she had no part in.
“They’d argued the night before. She’d learned something—I always thought she must have learned about me and what he’d had me do, but looking back, I think it must have been bigger than just me.
I only ever killed people who needed it, people who would have been righteously killed in the Old Testament, you know?
Creeps and killers and bad priests and a few of those sisters who ran Magdalene laundries.
No one would have missed them. No one would have really been sad they were dead.
Until his sister. She was the first one who—I guess I feel worse about her than the others is all. She had a little girl, I think.”
I’m staring at the penitent thief rendered in stained glass, ordering the timeline in my head.
So Cashel had people killed even back when he was a parish priest, long before he’d been promoted up to Rome.
If Ys has existed for centuries, like the rumors say, then it’s not impossible that he could have been working for Ys separately by then, climbing the ranks of the secret organization at the same time he climbed the ranks of the Church until he was at the top of both.
“Does the name Ys mean anything to you?” I ask her.
A plume of smoke. “No. Should it?”
I turn to study her face, the deep lines, hard features, eyes like stones. I don’t think she’s lying. I don’t think she’d even see the need to.
My phone rings, and the noise in the soaring stone vaults of the church is startlingly loud. A handful of pissed-off bats spring into a flapping nightmare, the noise of their wings echoing everywhere, almost as bad as the phone itself.
“So sorry,” I tell the woman and the bats. “One moment, please.”
I see Jago’s name as I accept the call. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says the minute I pick up. “I didn’t notice them if they were following us before, and I only just now saw them as I was circling the block?—”
As he’s explaining something that makes absolutely no sense to me, the door to the back of the church opens, and I see the glimmer of pearl-colored hair, the outline of broad shoulders.
“Thank you, Jago,” I say tiredly as I get to my feet and step out into the aisle between pews. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”