When Charlie was about six, Jojola had gone to a medicine man and told him about the spirits who haunted him. The old man advised him to go to Blue Lake. “Bathe in the waters. Fast and pray. Sleep beneath the stars, and we shall see.”
Leaving Charlie with an aunt, he’d done as advised but nothing much happened until the last night after he fell asleep beside the fire. The howling of a coyote woke him and when he rose, he saw the creature sitting on its haunches across the still-glowing embers, the red coals reflected in its eyes.
Jojola was cautious. The coyote was known in many tribes as the Trickster, an animal with powerful medicine who wandered the night and saw things that were not readily apparent to others, including much from the spirit world. They could fight savagely when cornered, but preferred to live by their wits. Although generally good-natured, and often helpful to humans—such as by eating rodents that would have otherwise destroyed crops and spread disease—they were also mischievous, a trait that sometimes inadvertently caused harm.
So, aware of the coyote’s penchant for tricks, Jojola was careful as he addressed the animal. “Good evening, Brother Coyote,” he said. “How is the hunting?”
“The hunting is good, thank you for asking,” the coyote replied, not in so many words but rather as thoughts that came to Jojola’s mind. “I appreciated the rabbit you left for me the last time you were in the desert, so I have come to help you. I have talked to the spirits of your old enemies and they are angry and refuse to be quiet because you try to deny that they ever existed.”
“But I want to forget them,” Jojola said, though he figured that he was dreaming because coyotes do not speak to humans. “I did not want to kill them—not most of them anyway—but it was kill or be killed.”
The coyote grinned. “They understand that. They understand that there is a certain economy to the world. Some die so that others live, whether that is the rabbit who feeds me, or my death that will feed the vultures…or even the soldier who kills or else will die. Things are the way they are in the world for a purpose, including that you lived while others did not. However, you do not live in peace with the past by simply ignoring it. If you would quiet your old enemies, you must weave for them a place in the fabric of your life.”
When he awoke the next morning, Jojola was sure he had been dreaming. But when he cleaned up his campsite, there on the other side of the fire were the unmistakable tracks of a coyote.
So returning to the pueblo, he no longer tried to shut the ghosts out of his mind. Instead, he invited them in and found that the shades of men were content to be just memories and not ghosts. Charlie Many Horses was another story.
For more than thirty years he’d lived with the guilt of not being able to save or avenge his friend. Often he talked to Charlie when he went on walks in the desert at night when the veil that separated this world from the spirit world was thin. I am sorry my brother, he would think.
“There is no reason,” Charlie always answered. “It was my time to die. This is your time to live, make the most of it.”
“But if I had been there.”
“We would have both died, and it would have rippled into the future like the waves made by a stone thrown into a calm pool. Your son, Charlie, would not have been born. Whatever you were intended to accomplish in the future would have died, too.”
Jojola was thinking of the conversation as he danced.
“Let it go,” the kachina said.
I cannot, Jojola thought; his hand strayed to his chest where he could still feel hard thin scars he’d made with his knife. I swore a blood oath.
The other dancer swooped past him like an eagle soaring on a thermal updraft. “I do not need blood shed for me, my brother. I would rather you remembered me as the boy who hunted deer and fished for trout in Blue Lake with you.”
“I cannot.”
“You must. An evil stalks our children, yet here you are thinking of an enemy from long ago who no longer matters. You cannot change the past, my brother, but you can change the future by focusing on the present.”
“You’re speaking in riddles, Charlie.”
“I’m a ghost, John,” Charlie’s spirit said with his recognizable humor. “I’m supposed to speak in riddles. But I’m also telling you the truth.”
Many Horses was, of course, right, Jojola realized. And now is not the time to argue with a ghost over philosophy. Three young boys, only slightly younger than his son, Charlie, had disappeared without a trace. Foul play was suspected and it was more than his spiritual duty to stop it…John Jojola was the chief of the pueblo’s police department.
10
THE TWO YOUNGER MEN ROSE TO THEIR FEET AS THE ARCHBISHOP stood to leave the meeting. “You coming, Riley?” Fey asked. “Perhaps a game of chess before noon prayers?”
“In a minute, your eminence,” Father O’Callahan said. “Go on without me, I have a few small matters to discuss with Mr. Kane.” He paused and smirked at the old man’s back before adding in a sarcastic tone, “Matters having to do with…St. Ignatius?”
“Oh well, that, yes, well, best leave all of that to you,” Fey stammered without looking back and picked up speed for the exit. “Whatever you think is right.”
“Yes, your eminence,” O’Callahan said and smiled. “Whatever is right for the Holy Church.”
Fey stopped for a moment at the doorway as if to say something; then he was gone and the door to the large meeting room at the archdiocese clicked shut. Kane leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the long wooden conference table. He studied the stained-glass renditions of a half-dozen saints that ringed the skylight in the ceiling, wondering absently why anyone would become a martyr. Why get shot full of arrows, or stoned, or burned, or pulled apart by wild horses for a God that doesn’t give a damn? Hell, better to die at least trying to be someone or make a buck like ML Rex—he could respect that—than giving it up for some silly notion like a Holy Ghost. Still, martyrs could be dangerous people; they were so damn self-righteous.
“Perhaps, it’s best that you not challenge Fey like that,” he said on further reflection. “His conscience might goad him into doing something…irrational.”
O’Callahan snorted. “The old geezer wouldn’t dare. It could bring down his precious church, and there’d certainly be no Saint Timothy’s Cathedral.”
Kane sat forward and fixed the priest with a chilly blue glare. “Perhaps it’s best not to challenge him,” he said again, his voice grown tight and dangerous.
O’Callahan blanched and nodded quickly. “Of course, you’re right. No sense pushing any buttons.”
Kane ignored the priest’s groveling. He was used to getting his way, as he could be quite unpleasant if he didn’t.
The truth of the matter was, the faux Kane, the one everyone loved, was no more than the eggshell of a personality that the real Kane had created around his true self. For all the media coverage he received, very little was known about his private life, and he paid millions to ensure that it stayed that way.
• • •
His biggest secret was that he wasn’t really an orphan. The whole story had been concocted by his father, Michael Kane, a prominent Manhattan lawyer who had knocked up his own daughter, Kane’s mother, Kathleen, when she was sixteen. The girl had been sent away to “school” in Switzerland until the child was born.
Most men in Michael Kane’s position would have forced their daughter to give the baby up for adoption. But he had always wanted a son, and his scrawny, blue-blooded bitch of a wife had been unable to give him one following the difficult birth of their daughter. So after the boy’s birth, he arranged to have Kathleen and her infant spirited back home, where the boy was “found” in a Dumpster by a man who worked for him and taken to a Catholic adoption agency.
A lot of money exchanged hands, and the child was then handed over to Michael and Elizabeth Kane with no one the wiser. In fact, they were widely lauded in the Mount Vernon community for opening their home to th
e unfortunate little bastard. Only the incredibly insensitive visitor ever dared note the remarkable resemblance young Andy bore to his blond-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed adoptive father.
Young Andrew had sometimes wondered why he seemed so “different” from other people. Nothing seemed quite right. Not in his mind, not in his house. He had been ten years old when he walked in from school one afternoon and saw his father, Michael, and sister, Kathleen, in her bedroom doing what he’d seen the family Labrador retrievers doing. A few days later, he’d tried the same thing with one of the little neighborhood girls. When she cried and threatened to tell her mother, he’d hit her on the leg with a stick and promised to “poke your eye out” if she ever told. Her silence in the matter taught him the value of backing up words with the fear of extreme violence.
Of course, there were psychological ramifications for the boy, one of them incessant bed-wetting. His father and “mother,” Elizabeth, tried to make him feel bad about it. “Big boys don’t pee-pee on themselves,” they’d lecture. But he rather enjoyed the feeling of warm urine running between his legs and seeping into the mattress beneath him. Then when it got cold and uncomfortable, he’d buzz for the nanny to clean him up and change the sheets. He even took pleasure in seeing how angry the nanny would get to be roused from her sleep in the middle of the night. If she was mean to him, he’d do it again an hour later. He went through a lot of nannies.
The bed-wetting might have alarmed a psychiatrist, if one had ever been consulted, especially if it had also come out that young Andrew enjoyed setting fires and torturing animals. Bed-wetting, fires, animal torture—the three-point checklist for the budding sociopath. Yet, the only time counseling had been considered was after he drowned a puppy he’d been given for his twelfth birthday in the backyard pool. He’d admitted that he’d used the pool cleaner’s pole to keep the animal away from the edge “to see how long he could swim.” But he was so contrite and tearful that his father decided it was a secret better kept among the Kanes.
Instead of seeking psychiatric help, Michael Kane sent Andrew to a military academy “to teach you to behave like a man.” In the first month, the boy was repeatedly raped by one of the older cadets, until the night he brought a steak knife from the cafeteria back to the dormitory. When the older boy demanded oral sex, Andrew pretended to oblige but then sliced off his antagonist’s penis neat as a surgeon. The whole incident was, of course, hushed up with lots more money, and from that moment forward, there were no more sexual assaults involving Andrew Kane, except for those in which he was the perpetrator.
Still, he was no mere brute. Andrew preferred to have his personable alter ego win the hearts and minds of the people around him, no matter how much money, blackmail, or coercion it took. Usually he resorted to violence only “when necessary” or to set an example, although the urge for revenge sometimes got the better of his discretion. He considered that a weakness, but it was also such fun that he allowed himself the occasional indulgence.
When he was fifteen, Andrew was home for Christmas vacation when his “sister” Kathleen stumbled into his bedroom. She had a bottle of Chivas in one hand and was loaded to the gills on the prescription drugs she gobbled by the handful. She’d decided that it was time to tell him the sordid truth of his conception. When she was through, she asked if he had any questions.
“No,” he replied honestly. “Should I?”
Kathleen burst into tears and fled the room. Two hours later, she was discovered floating facedown in the family Jacuzzi. The autopsy determined she’d swallowed a month’s supply of Valium and drowned.
Andrew accepted the news of his paternity and Kathleen’s death with an equal lack of emotion, unless it was a touch of elation because, at last, the world was making some sense. He had not cried at her funeral, but instead stared at the man he now realized was his biological father. He’d then gone back to school and thought about what he’d learned and what he should do about it.
It wasn’t that he’d loved Kathleen—in fact, he had no real notion of what might constitute love. But he took great umbrage at his father and the Catholic Church. They had conspired to let him believe that he was the unwanted garbage of some teenage whore who’d left him in a Dumpster. It was their duplicity that really galled him.
Michael Kane was the same man who dragged him to Mass every week, then beat his bare ass with a riding crop until it bled if the priest didn’t give him a high sign after visiting the confessional.
“Evil little sinner,” the priest would say if he confessed what he’d truly been thinking.
“Evil little sinner,” his old man would sputter as he laid into him afterward.
When Andrew returned home that summer after Kathleen’s suicide, he confronted the old man, who was sitting at his big mahogany desk in the family library. The youth said he thought that the New York Times might be interested in a story about how one of the senior law partners of Plucker, Bucknell and Kane had impregnated his own daughter and then cooked up a lie about adopting a poor little orphan boy.
“There are really only two options, ‘Dad,’ ” he said. “Either way, it’s time to face the music. You could suffer through the looks from your country club pals, until they kick you out that is…and the comments from the women at church…and the damage to the firm’s reputation or…” The teenager stopped talking and circled around to where his father sat trembling and sweating, his mouth opening and closing. Rather like a fish, thought his son, who pulled open the desk drawer where he knew the old man kept the .357 Smith and Wesson revolver. “I suppose there’s always this possibility,” the boy said.
Andrew Kane then stepped back and gave his father one of his warmest smiles. A moment later, however, his smile turned to a frown as he sniffed the air. “Oh come now, Dad, big boys don’t pee-pee on themselves.”
“Andy, I…,” the old man finally blurted. His son held up his hand to silence him.
“You might want to write a note about how depressed you’ve been since the death of your daughter, blah blah blah,” Andrew said, smiled again, and left the room. He then went to fetch something cold to drink from the refrigerator and was enjoying a tall glass of milk when he heard a muffled report of the shot that blew his father’s brains all over a prized bound edition of the Federalist Papers.
Andrew waited for the maid to find the old man and start screaming before he strolled into the library, pleased to see that his father had taken his suggestion about writing a note. He figured that their score was settled.
Nearly four decades later, everyone who knew the secret of his paternity was dead, except his “mother,” Elizabeth. But she was in a Connecticut mental hospital for the immensely wealthy, knitting small, pink baby sweaters for her “lost” daughter and reciting nursery rhymes ad nauseam. He never visited, and paid the doctors well to see that she never regained her mental health.
That left only the Catholic Church to pay for the insult. But he was taking his time, enjoying the game he was playing to bring it down from the inside.
• • •
Andrew Kane was, in a word, a sociopath, a medically convenient term to describe what in the days before Freud and Jung would have simply been thought of as evil incarnate. As a young man shortly after his father’s suicide, he had taken an interest in self-analysis and diagnosed himself as having a narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial tendencies.
Like some housewife looking up her horoscope in a magazine, he’d eagerly read a handbook of forensic psychiatry, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which described his particular way of looking at the world as “having a grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; exhibitionistic need for constant attention and admiration; and characteristic disturbances in interpersonal relationships, such as feelings of entitlement, interpersonal exploitiveness, relationships that alternate between extremes of overidealization and devaluation, and lack of empathy.
Kane had no problem with the descriptions. Like the housewife with her horoscope, he chose to ignore anything negative and focused on the positives—“achieving unlimited ability, power, wealth, brilliance, and beauty.” He didn’t give a fig about ideal love, but he’d dedicated his life to the rest.
After the military academy, Kane had gone on to college and then the Harvard School of Law. Graduating magna cum laude and passing the bar with flying colors, he’d announced that he was ready to assume his rightful place as a young, but full, partner in Plucker, Bucknell and Kane.
Partner Ernest Plucker complained at the time that young Mr. Kane hadn’t paid his dues and at most should begin as a junior partner. The next day, Plucker received a large manila envelope in the office mail containing several photographs showing him inflagrante delicto with a pockmarked Forty-second Street prostitute. After that “Uncle Ernie” was mum on the subject of young Kane’s quick rise to the top.
Shortly thereafter, partner Robert Bucknell, the law firm’s bean counter, was confronted with proof that he had been embezzling from the firm for years. He and Plucker decided to retire a few weeks later. The two former partners had since died, and Kane had never seen a reason to take on any more. Instead, he kept a cadre of young, hand-picked associates whose reputation in the New York courts was that they’d push any ethical boundary in order to win at any cost. He paid them so well that the small matter of partnership was moot for most. Those who chose to leave to advance elsewhere were encouraged to do so in other states.
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