Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Bad thought that it would be unnecessarily provocative to point out that it was his job to do so.

  Gabrielle asked him if he had ever seen himself growing old with anyone.

  “I see myself not growing old with someone,” Bad said, then laughed. He was feverishly happy.

  “Brian?” Gabrielle said.

  “Yes,” Bad said. “I’ll go into hiding with someone. We will hide from time, together.”

  “But, Brian,” Gabrielle said, “it’s important to spend time together. We had that covered. I think we did. That’s what this trip was about—spending time together.”

  Bad was laughing.

  “Brian, please. Where are you?”

  “A piazza off 19 Septembre 1947.”

  “Please, Brian! I’m trying to make contact, to make peace, and you rebuff me with nonsense.”

  “I’m sorry.” Bad said. He told his girlfriend that he was their problem. “You can get a better deal.”

  “I’m not looking for a deal.” Gabrielle was crying. “Or a return on my investment. I care about you, Brian. I want you to talk to me, to tell me what I can do to fix things between us.”

  It was his fault. Bad knew he should try to explain to Gabrielle that, owing to his reticence, she had never known who she was talking to. Gabrielle believed in personality types. She’d run tests for employers who wanted to find out what they had in their staff, what each employee’s work habits and stress strategies might be, according to type. Gabrielle believed that how people took what happened to them depended on type. Bad had done Gabrielle’s tests, for fan and from vanity. He was a politician, an extrovert, the tests said. Bad concurred, could see himself in the results. But none of it had helped his girlfriend, to whom he never gave his fall history. What good did it do her to see a positive, politic, extroverted Brian and not to have pictured that same man as a boy who, despite teasing, was confident enough of his own judgment to step back off the platform at Dart Ridge? Bad had never told her about that. He hadn’t said, “I was alone on a mountain path. Suddenly, utterly alone—though there was a girl behind me shaking a stone from her shoe, and a boy nearby jammed into a thornbush and hanging on for dear life.” He hadn’t said, “I’m still alone on the mountain path. I’m still looking at the air.” Or: “I’m still alone at the foot of the crester run, staring at the black air above a waterfall at the top of a fifteen-meter pitch.” It was too late to tell now, to explain, because he wasn’t alone anymore, and the cave’s system lay open to him now, an animated cross section, full of figures and lights. There were the cavers in the Salle de la Nef, shawled in sleeping bags, waiting for the water to recede. Dawn and Jacques Palomba were lying in a cozy cavern, full of paintings and candles. The rescue teams pushed their threads of light through dark tunnels, Gino with them, his face warm behind his cold lamp. The Pilgrim’s Way was visible for all its length, vined with cable—speakers and monitors like fruit on those vines—crowded with pilgrims, the bishop at their head, in his purple and gold. Bad had found a different mountain path, too. A path that wasn’t the work of alpine guides, Parks and Reserves, or the Department of Conservation and that didn’t have a viewing platform above a glacier. It was a mule track, part of a network of tracks around the nexus of the Salt Route, the pass into Piedmont. Bad was standing on that path, watching a vampire, who was watching a soldier, who was watching a snake and watched by a butcher with a billhook. There was blood on the glacier still—but there was blood everywhere. Dawn’s eye fell out, and she put it back in.

  Gabrielle continued to cry, and Bad held her to his ear. He apologized again, then pressed the button that ended the call.

  The day after the Blessed Martine’s festival the bishop’s secretary offered Daniel a lift to Nice. The bishop had returned to the city the night before, but like Daniel, the secretary had stayed on for a postmortem of the pilgrimage.

  Daniel spent his morning talking with the secretary, the mayor and town clerk of Dardo, and the two priests from St. Barthelemy’s. They sat in the sun at one of the tables now restored to the terrace at the wide end of the piazza before the church. They discussed safety issues and possible improved access. They talked about the maintenance of “a sense of the sacred”—a discussion Daniel regarded as necessary but uncomfortable, since neither town officials nor clergy seemed to want to distinguish between preserving the pilgrimage as a sacred experience and improving its packaging as such. Daniel, meanwhile, was making plans and forming his position for another talk, one he’d have with the bishop in Nice, about the small clutch of testimonies the parish had gathered—reported sightings, as it were, of further miracles he would be called on to investigate. Miracles attributed to Martine Raimondi opened doors for Daniel Octave—the doors of other people’s homes, other people’s lives.

  Daniel listened to the talk and watched the dark space of the open basement below a house opposite the church. The basement was in use as a chicken coop, and three beige chickens were pressed against the wire in a patch of sun, making noises of broody contentment. Lunch was in an hour at the monastery where Daniel had spent the night as a guest of the brothers of a contemplative order. After lunch Daniel would catch his ride. In the morning he’d get on a train to Menton. Martine Dardo’s funeral was at La Conception, in Menton’s old town. He would light a candle for her.

  His friend Father Neske would say, scornfully, “What’s the use, Daniel, of lighting a candle when this pope has it that we’re all to be judged and cleansed by some purgatorial process in the instant after we expire? The pity and compassion of those we leave behind has no part in that process. They haven’t even had time to draw breath, let alone to pray, let alone to hold a flame to a clean wick. You see, Daniel, for God and His divine cleansing fires there is no duration. There is no time. And”—here Neske would give his characteristic lopsided shrug—“if that is so, then everything is settled already, and we are all either already damned or saved by predestination. So you see, Daniel, this pope wants us all to be Protestants.”

  Daniel remembered how he had answered the old man’s arguments. He remembered that he’d managed to be at once dismissive of Father Neske’s outrage and disloyal to the Church. He had said to Neske that the Church was only embarrassed by an untidy cosmology. Purgatory had always been something of a problem.

  Neske was acid. Yes, purification was more “in line” with the Presbyterians and Pentecostals. And—of course—all denominations were having enough difficulty in trying to figure out where to put Hell on a map of the universe. But should the Church give countenance to the difficulties of other denominations?

  Daniel’s stomach rumbled. He placed his hand on it and looked down with humorous displeasure. But no one at the table had heard. The other men were getting up out of their seats, responding at different speeds to the sight of the woman who cleaned St. Barthelemy’s coming down its steps, unsteady and bowlegged. She stopped and sat down, crying and calling out to the fathers. They hurried to her, and Daniel joined them.

  She said that she’d been dusting the high altar when she noticed that the smaller reliquary was missing.

  The fathers helped her to her feet and escorted her back into the church.

  The brass brackets that clipped the smaller reliquary to the back of the altar were broken—or rather, two were prized open and two snapped off.

  The priest of St. Barthelemy’s said that he hadn’t noticed the reliquary missing when he said mass that morning. He dropped his chin on his chest to think. He’d been looking up, he said, or looking at what he held in his hands.

  “With the volume of people through the church yesterday—” said the bishop’s secretary. But then he remembered that all the pilgrims had stayed on the other side of the rail.

  “Who was in the church when we were in the caves?” Daniel asked.

  There were police and paramedics in the piazza. And two technicians were in the crypt.

  “I’ll speak to them,” said one of the parish priests. “I’l
l get on to it now.” He went away, while his colleague soothed the cleaning woman and sent her home.

  Daniel was late for lunch. The brothers had waited to begin because the younger two wanted to ask him about the occasions on which he had spoken to the pope.

  While he ate, Daniel told the brothers about the sense of achievement he believed he shared with His Holiness—and others—at the mass to celebrate Martine Raimondi’s beatification. “I was very proud to have worked with God,” Daniel said, then laughed. “I think His Holiness could see that I was bursting with pride—of the right sort. However, the first time I was introduced to His Holiness, I was so overcome that my ears were ringing and I couldn’t hear a word he said.” Daniel didn’t tell the brothers that he often had that problem. He often found himself shut in a bell jar of shyness. Because of his shifty mother, it was always a shock for Daniel to look into another’s face. From infancy Daniel had sought to hold his mother’s gaze—and hadn’t been able to. By the time he was twelve Daniel understood that it was expected of everyone to look, if only for an instant, into other people’s eyes when they were speaking. He had made an effort, and terror forced his eyes to flutter or squint or dart about. His focus trembled, and people imagined he was angry. People to whom he spoke supposed that they had somehow frightened or offended him. They were often at pains to make him see that if he was hurt, it hadn’t been their intention to hurt him; they were being misunderstood. They would keep talking, defensive, into his burning silence. It made things worse. If ordinary, polite attention was too intimate, these pained reassurances were even more difficult for Daniel. Sometimes he would laugh and look away. Or he’d look at the ceiling and say his piece. When Daniel had his audience with the pope—in 1991, after the tomb in Turin was opened—he wasn’t able to remember their mutual interest in the matter they were to discuss and he forgot the Vatican’s long correspondence with the bishop in Nice. Instead, he was afraid that his eyes would start their startled dancing, their tics of fright. He made himself look—and was blinded by the haze of blood in his head. His ears rang and he barely kept his feet.

  Daniel went on to tell the brothers about the missing reliquary. They were sympathetic, but one said he’d often wondered whether that particular relic was—he shrugged—more appropriate than authentic. Martine Raimondi hadn’t ever held the match in her hand. It had remained in her grandfather’s pocket. Her grandfather had preserved it—slipped it under the leather lining of his cigarette case.

  “It commemorates a moment,” Daniel began, then stopped—vexed—because the brother was right; a relic should be holy, not merely commemorative. Martine’s grandfather’s last unlit match was a stored moment, a moment from a sterile world that had split off from the world they were all now in—the world in which Martine Raimondi’s prayers were answered. The unlit match was time cauterized, the means of a final human gesture in defiance of death, a splinter of sulphur-tipped wood. Its flame, if ignited, would have burned in a world in which Martine’s prayers went unanswered, in which perhaps there was no God to take her hand and lead her through the dark.

  “You’re right,” Daniel said.

  The brother blushed.

  “But of course the reliquary itself was valuable,” said another brother.

  “There were so many tourists,” said the first. Then he amended, “Pilgrims.”

  With all that equipment, they could easily add a security camera, Daniel thought. He’d mention it to the fathers at St. Barthelemy’s. He asked the brothers if he could make a call. (There was only one phone in the monastery. One phone and one radio—usually tuned to sports broadcasts.)

  Daniel was shown into the room with the phone. It rang just as his hand was approaching it.

  “Excuse me,” said the brother beside Daniel. He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then handed it to Daniel. “It’s for you, Father Octave.” He left the room.

  The phone wasn’t a cordless, and Daniel did what he always had and wound himself into its cord, tethered himself to the caller before he said a word.

  It was the detective.

  “You tracked me down.” Daniel was surprised. “I thought I might see you at the funeral tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have time to go, I’m afraid.”

  “Is there something further?” Daniel said.

  “No, there’s something else. Something you might be able to help me with.”

  Daniel heard a kind of menace in the detective’s voice.

  “Something has disturbed me,” the detective said. “I’m not often disturbed. Genoa is a big city, with a steady supply of bodies, blunders, atrocities.” The detective said that since the twenty-sixth—the day before he first spoke to Daniel—he’d been waiting for a body to be identified. The body was found on the twenty-fifth among the concrete piles of an open basement beneath a restaurant in Portofino. The basement opened onto a tunnel, which provided public access under a private beach.

  Get to it, thought Daniel. He had no idea where the detective was headed. Two brothers went by the open door and waved to Daniel. One hesitated, seeing Daniel’s expression—anxious, impatient. Daniel waved back, then signaled them away.

  “There were rats under the restaurant, and the body was in a bad way,” the detective said. “No fingerprints. And no matches with the dental records of missing persons—”

  “I can’t see why you want to keep me in suspense,” Daniel said. “Do you want to take me by surprise?”

  “Father, I want to share my surprise.”

  Daniel had turned to the window, further involving himself in the phone cord’s expanding coils. He saw the two brothers on their way down to the monastery’s terraces, where they had spent the morning suspending nets from the lower branches of the olive trees.

  “Fortunately,” the detective went on, “the victim had a dental abnormality. He had very good teeth—a fluoride baby—and he still had all of them, including his five wisdom teeth. He’d had some orthodontic work, and his orthodontist had X rays.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re going to tell me.” Daniel closed his eyes. He was exasperated. He was curious. He stood so still, the air seemed to flutter around him.

  The detective was saying, “When we got the records I thought, Where have I heard that name before?”

  “Showman,” said Daniel. It was an accusation and an acknowledgment of the detective’s power.

  “The body was of a male, twenty-two years of age. Death by decapitation. He was your Jacques Palomba.”

  Daniel lost everything for a moment, then found himself on the floor. He had pulled the phone off the desk when he fell. He lay, wound in its coils. The phone squawked: “Father? Father Octave?”

  Daniel retrieved the receiver. He put it to his ear and pinched his numb lips between its mouthpiece and his teeth. “Yes?” he said.

  Daniel had last seen Jacques Palomba—the boy saved by Raimondi’s second miracle—four years before, with his family, at the pilgrimage. Palomba was on antidepressants, his mother confided. Jacques found life difficult and disappointing. Nothing else had matched “the event.” “Not its excitement, nor its significance” Jacques’s mother said. She said that her son was a restless, dissatisfied boy. “He goes about as if he’s looking for something he’s lost.” She had famed with anxiety. She wanted Jacques to have a nice life. (She and her husband had nice lives. They had an apartment in Monaco, where she was an oral hygienist and he performed hair transplants—he’d done Sinatra. Their children had yachts, club memberships, the means to play tennis on the coveted clay courts and to go skiing four times a year.) “What would you say to Jacques, Father? Should he do something different? Something difficult? Perhaps God doesn’t spare anyone like that just so that he can lead an ordinary life.”

  “Father?” said the detective.

  Daniel sat up and wiped his eyes. He told the detective that he hadn’t seen Jacques Palomba for four years. Had the detective contacted Palomba’s family?

&
nbsp; “Not yet.”

  “You called me first?”

  “Yes.” The detective was silent for a long moment; then he said, “You see, Father, I don’t understand. I read your Life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, and I don’t understand.” The detective was embarrassed. “I don’t mean God’s will. I don’t expect to understand that. Because of my work there are times when I’ve thought about God’s will. Thought hard. But, Father, I don’t understand the coincidence.”

  Two people from the saint’s story were dead in suspicious circumstances, and it seemed to Daniel and the detective that a subsidence had appeared in the world, around the saint’s story. The kind of subsidence that first brings a hidden cave system to notice, to light.

  “I don’t understand it, either,” Daniel told the detective. He got up off the floor and disentangled himself from the phone cord. “Will you contact Jacques’s family now?”

  “Yes,” the detective said. “I’m sorry, Father. I had to share it—the coincidence. My colleagues think it’s creepy. And I was hoping it might mean something to you.”

  “In what way?” Daniel said. For how could he explain to the detective what it meant to him, who had always had the uncomfortable feeling that there were things in Martine Raimondi’s life that were, not exactly false, but wrongly attributed? Daniel said to the detective, “Look—long after you’ve finished calculating the statistical probability of Palomba and Dardo having lost their lives only a few days and kilometers apart, you’ll still be wondering, about Palomba at least, Why does God not go on protecting those He’s saved? I pray that in time, and with God’s guidance, I’ll be able to help you with that.”

  Daniel heard the detective sigh. He couldn’t tell what sort of sigh it was. He said, “I’ll be back in Nice from tomorrow, at the bishopric, if you need to reach me. While I’m there I’ll visit Palomba’s family in Monaco.”