Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Dawn bit him under his ear. But it was as though her appetite and his blood volume were at different unequal pressures. He was too much for her. She pumped in only a little venom, and he was scarcely moved, felt only a tingle of delight, before she wrenched herself free and vomited on his shoulder, a pint of maroon liquid, blood and blood clots.

  Bad burst into tears. He wrapped his arms around her and held her hard, his murderous vampire. “I love you,” he said, desperate. “Please help me.”

  It was late afternoon when Daniel Octave ran into Bad Phelan and his slovenly, drug-dazed female friend. They were sitting on a low wall at the entrance to the garden behind the cathedral, he perched, she slumped. There was a pack beside them, smaller than the one Daniel remembered Bad carrying. If memory served—and it generally did—Bad’s was festooned with coiled nylon rope and steel climbing equipment.

  Bad seemed to be watching the children pedaling their sulkies—pedalcars, low to the ground, with a bobbing horse in front and shaded by fringed canopies.

  Daniel stopped before the couple. “Have you never seen these?” he asked.

  Bad looked up. “Father Octave,” he said. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see Daniel.

  The woman wore a baggy T-shirt over a very attractive pleated skirt and sandals. There was a fresh blood spot on the shirt, over one breast. She sat, knock-kneed, with her head resting on Bad’s upper arm.

  Bad introduced her. “This is Miss McKone. Gabrielle. She’s sick and I’m trying to find her a hotel room.”

  “Not a doctor?”

  “The hotel can find a doctor. Don’t they always have doctors on call?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Can I be of any assistance?”

  Bad was very grateful. He said that they’d traipsed about asking, but it was proving difficult. He didn’t have his phone or guidebook, so they were just asking at places they passed. Gabrielle was tired. They had to find somewhere soon. Bad said he wondered if it might be possible for Father Octave to sit here with her in the shade while Bad covered ground and found a place. Then he’d be back to take her off Father Octave’s hands.

  Gabrielle stirred, said, “I thought we had a room.”

  “We don’t.” Bad met Daniel’s eyes and shook his head.

  There was some story here, Daniel thought, something about unreciprocated love, the woman not letting the man go.

  “Where are you staying?” Daniel asked Bad.

  “Oh … it isn’t suitable.”

  “She really does seem to need a doctor, as a priority.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks, Father. She’s just having one of her turns.”

  He got up and took Daniel’s hands, set them on the woman’s shoulders. Daniel sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders—took her weight.

  “I won’t be long,” Bad said.

  “Just a minute. First tell me where you’re staying.”

  Bad blushed. He said he was taking turns in the back of someone’s van, in a camping ground outside the city walls.

  “And how are you getting on with your investigations?” Daniel said. He could see that Phelan had been living rough—and only drinking with Eve Moskelute. Bad had lost condition, was pasty-faced and bruised under the eyes. But at Daniel’s question Bad lit up and laughed.

  “Father, there’s always more than one solution to a problem. Let me tell you a little story. How I solved my Rubik’s Cube.

  “My dad loves puzzles, and he’s good at them. When the cube came out he couldn’t wait to impose the bugger on us—me and my brother—and we were just little fellas. Me, I’ve always hated puzzles, with answers built into them, puzzles at which you have to look and look. My gaze would always wander, even when my hands were fiddling, working the creaking plastic, twisting it this way and that. I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, and Dad was teasing me, and I didn’t want to be beaten. So do you know what I did? I steamed my cube and peeled off all its little colored squares and glued them on again so that it had all six planes the same. Solved! And as far as I was concerned I had solved the real problem, the problem of appearances. I hadn’t wanted it to appear that I couldn’t solve the cube.”

  “Have you been saving that up for me?” Daniel asked. Then, “I suppose I deserve it, after my albinos.”

  “That’s right,” said Bad, then, scornful, “Statistical probability.”

  Daniel lifted a hand and waved to Bad. “Don’t be gone long,” he said.

  The sun moved on and Daniel and the sick woman lost their shade. Daniel checked his watch every so often and squinted down the cobbled slope at all the tourists. After forty minutes Daniel concluded that Bad wasn’t coming back. He’d bolted, leaving Daniel holding the baby.

  Daniel asked the woman whether she was well enough to walk.

  She began to cry. She was clearly exhausted.

  “I’ll take you to the nearest hotel. We can find a doctor.”

  The woman said she wasn’t sick. She’d been attacked. Why had Brian attacked her?

  Daniel didn’t press for further details. Nor did he ask if she wanted the police. Instead, he picked up her pack, strapped it on, and wrestled her up off the wall where she’d been slumped. He walked her across the square. He told her that they would go in the first place, take the first vacancy—never mind the expense. He assessed her—her jewelry, jacket, shoes, pack, all good quality. She could afford it. He wanted to be rid of the woman and her delirious complaints.

  Gabrielle told him that there was someone else in Brian’s room. “She stabbed me.”

  There was blood on her blouse.

  “I bashed my head on a table,” she said. “When she pushed me over. She held me down on the floor.”

  Daniel spotted a five-star hotel, situated between the Palace of the Popes and the river. Daniel asked her could she afford this—short-term.

  She said she could and, furthermore, from now on she’d do things her way, not on the cheap to humor men who made a virtue of having no ambition.

  Daniel ushered her into the hotel lobby. She was immediately in her element. She fished a credit card out of her money belt and slid it across the granite counter. The gesture was self-possessed—but once she’d completed it she stood sobbing. She told Daniel that, from now on, she was sticking with her own kind. “The girl Brian had in his room—she stabbed me. What kind of person does a thing like that?”

  Daniel told the man behind the counter that this young woman would want a doctor and might want the police.

  The woman seemed to be feeling a little better—more indignant, less unhappy. She said to Daniel and the hotel proprietor that if a man tells you he loves adventure you can be sure it means that one day he’s going to go off with some head case. “I think the woman in Brian’s room stabbed me with the pocketknife I gave him for his birthday. It was perfect, a Marmout, with all the tools.”

  The hotel proprietor made noises of sympathy.

  “Brian likes to think he’s a hero, but he’s just a thrill seeker,” she confided. “Well—I’ve got his number.”

  “Will you file a complaint?” the proprietor asked.

  She shook her head, ground both fists into her eyes—bawling, touchingly babyish. She said to Daniel, “When you see him next—”

  “I scarcely know Mr. Phelan. We met twice, on a train and at the pilgrimage in Dardo. He only entrusted you to me because I’m a priest.”

  The woman looked astonished, took a step back, and looked at Daniel. She said, “Oh.”

  “Please get her a doctor,” said Daniel to the proprietor.

  “A doctor and a room,” she said. “I smell of the cleaning stuff in the carpet.” She began to sob again. “He made me admire him and he’s mad.”

  The proprietor tutted, tapped a bell to summon the bell captain, and gave Bad’s girlfriend forms to sign.

  Daniel wrote out his mobile number and offered it to her. “I must go.”

  She thanked him, said, “If you do see him, tell him …”


  “Yes?”

  “Oh … tell him that it just isn’t acceptable.”

  Daniel nodded, said all right, he’d convey that to Mr. Phelan should they meet again. “Take care,” he said.

  “You bet I will,” she said. “I’ve learned my lesson—real men are really unreliable.”

  At dusk Daniel found his way to the Rue des Teinturiers. Its cafés were crowded, its clubs only just turning on their lights. The street was packed, narrow, the sky overhead a crooked black crack. The activity was confined to one side of the street; on the other, a stream ran through a stone-lined channel, tamed by masonry, and driving waterwheels, the turning blades of perpetually wet timber reflecting the strings of colored lights on the awnings of the cafés and purple fluorescents outlining the entrances to clubs.

  The Chapel of the Gray Penitents was part of Louis the Thirteenth’s spiritual capital. It was built to pay penance for a massacre some hundred years before. Daniel recognized the stark, simple fresco of kneeling figures, the penitents in cassocks and hoods, only their eyes visible. The iron gates were open—iron like pulled strands of burnt toffee. Daniel went through them, challenged only by cicadas that studded the trunk of a plane tree, small vibrating shadows. He crossed the bridge and entered the building.

  Daniel found a series of chapels leading into the main nave, all at angles to one another—the whole building a complicated piece of jigsaw shaped to fit among older buildings and along the channeled stream. Daniel passed through the first chapel, a long gallery whose walls were painted to look like stone with fat shallow veins, through the Chapel of the Vignerons, and into a larger domed hexagonal room. All the rooms were empty. When he entered the main nave its wooden floor complained loudly. This room, too, was empty, though a haze of bluish incense smoke hung near the ceiling, a layer of pollution between Daniel and its roof, a starry firmament. The church was well lit but somber. Daniel paced the aisle slowly toward the gilded ironwork gates before the main tabernacle. The gates were closed, though candles burned beyond them. Above the tabernacle was a huge gilded, carved plaque, of storm clouds, and a sunburst, cherubim sporting in its breaking light.

  Behind Daniel the floor stirred, with a soft, rustling crackle, as though someone were moving in a wickerwork chair. He turned around. There was no one near him, but he saw a figure he hadn’t noticed before, a man sitting in a pew with both arms spread out along its back. Daniel approached him. “Are you the man I spoke to on the phone? The man in Martine Dardo’s apartment?”

  “Have a seat,” the man said. He was American.

  The man didn’t move, so Daniel perched on the pew at arm’s length and faced him. The man didn’t even turn his head. Daniel said, “I was given a name at Jacques Palomba’s last place of employment. The name and number of a woman. Was it you who answered her phone, too?”

  The man smiled, leaned toward Daniel, and put out a hand. “Tom Hilxen,” he said, and gave Daniel a firm, collegial handshake. His smile was wry. “I suppose this all looks a little cloak-and-dagger. The fact is, this was where I planned to be. I have another appointment here, later tonight. Like most novel places of rendezvous it’s a choice dictated by sentiment—nothing sinister.”

  He tucked his chin in and looked at Daniel from under his eyebrows, a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  Daniel asked Tom Hilxen how he had known Jacques Palomba.

  “How? Intimately.” Tom’s smile was positively scintillating. “I hope that doesn’t offend you, Father.”

  The man didn’t seem at all disturbed by the murder of someone he had known intimately. Perhaps he didn’t know any details. Daniel told Mr. Hilxen how Jacques had been found and how the detective—disturbed by the coincidental relationship between Jacques Palomba’s murder and the accidental death of Martine Dardo—had called Daniel. Daniel explained his connection to both people—that he was the postulator who had written the Process.

  “Yes, I did know all that,” Tom Hilxen said. He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and produced a flat silver flask. He shook it at Daniel. It made a high-pitched slopping sound.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Please. I find it difficult to talk about Jacques. I have so many regrets. I find it distasteful even to describe the company he got into, latterly. I’d taken that boy under my wing. I undertook to teach him to manage his talents. I told myself that he was only adventurous, and lacked imagination. That it was only a matter of stimulating his imagination to teach him a little more caution. But what a folly it is—don’t you think?—to feel you can pass on experience. Our talk conveys nothing to the young. They think we’re telling stories to entertain them. They take it as flattery. Flattering attention. We think we’re imparting something that might save their lives, but all we are really doing is whiling away an hour or two. Please,” Hilxen said again, and proffered the flask. “Join me.”

  Daniel took the flask. His cooperation would please the man. The man wanted a show of conviviality. The man wanted Daniel to see him as wise and weary, patient and disillusioned. A friend and guide to young Jacques Palomba—who had disappointed him. Disappointed him by dying. Daniel decided that he would humor Mr. Hilxen, would put up with his coldhearted pomposity, in order to discover if this man, who had known Jacques, had any idea who had killed him.

  Daniel unscrewed the lid of the flask. He took a swig. He expected scotch, but it was amaro—bitter and medicinal.

  “Good,” said Tom Hilxen. He motioned to Daniel that he should keep the flask for now.

  Daniel asked him if he was a friend of Grazide—Palomba’s client at the spa.

  “Yes. I expect her to join me soon. We arranged to meet some people here. Under the mark of inundation.” Hilxen pointed across the nave. “It’s on that column there. A line scored on the stone, as though some giant stood its child there to measure the progress of its growth. It marks how high the waters rose in the flood of 1821. Few French churches have timber floors—have you noticed? This floor is timber so that they can cut through it to let the water in, so that the water won’t float the building off its foundations.”

  Daniel asked who Tom and his friend Grazide were meeting and whether it had anything to do with Jacques Palomba.

  “Yes, it does. But, Father,” said Tom, “why don’t you fill me in on what you know, so that we won’t cover the same ground twice?”

  Daniel replaced the flask’s cap and heard how it grated on the sugar in its threads. The liquor hadn’t seemed sweet enough to leave a sugary deposit. “I hate to seem ridiculous,” Daniel admitted to Tom Hilxen. “I’ve been pussyfooting around my concerns for weeks now.”

  “We all do,” the man said consolingly. “We hate to seem ridiculous, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than desire—don’t you think? Even if it’s only desire for the truth.”

  Daniel told Tom Hilxen about the detective’s call and his trip to Genoa, to the spa where Jacques had worked. He told Mr. Hilxen about the name he was given—Grazide—and how, in comforting Palomba’s family, he had missed the funeral of his friend Martine Dardo. He talked about Martine’s connection to Jacques. About the Blessed Martine Raimondi. He told him how he had arranged to meet Martine’s friend Eve Moskelute. And how, in preparation for that meeting, he had read Ms. Moskelute’s translation of Chambord’s Daylight. How he had discovered that the heroine of Daylight had the same name as Jacques Palomba’s client, Grazide. Chambord had said that, in his hour of darkness, God sent him a devil as his guide—a dusty incoherence. And Martine Raimondi—the saint to whom Jacques Palomba prayed when he was lost in a flooded cave in 1992—her very last words to her partisan friend were to the effect that when she prayed for God’s help in the caves of Dardo, God sent her a devil.

  Daniel said all this without embarrassment, without feeling ridiculous. He found that, lacking these feelings, he felt unexpectedly serene. Calm, and careless. At last he felt that he could talk about all this—to himself or to an
yone else. The improbable connections—between people in the past, the near and distant past, and the present—which had been a torment to him, were no more. The whole problem seemed rather remote. He looked up at the wavering light of the candles in the red glass of the lamps hanging on either side of the tabernacle. The light stirred. The shadows fluttered—not like the bodies of insects behind glass, but like the distortions on an LCD screen on a computer when it’s touched. The chapel, its opulent gilded carving, its cherubs and sunburst, all seemed a projection, an image made of many bits, like 256-bit color. Someone was lightly pressing Daniel’s view of the chapel, here and there, so that the light distorted, and the images in the light, as though bending around invisible dabbling fingertips.

  Daniel put his hand to his head. He placed the flask down on the pew between himself and Mr. Hilxen. Mr. Hilxen was smiling at him. A gentle, expectant smile.

  Daniel tried to gather his thoughts, to remember what he’d meant to ask. He hadn’t yet asked anything, had only laid out the pattern of his paranoid connections. All he could think to say was, “How does all that strike you?”

  Hilxen relaxed and spread his arms along the back of the pew again so that Daniel could feel one, warm against the top of his shoulders. “It seems like a code that lacks its key.” Hilxen turned his head and smiled again at Daniel, proprietorial. “Can you imagine what its key might be? Perhaps it’s only one word.”

  Daniel didn’t bother to shake his head. A moment before he had needed to know, but he found he was losing interest in knowledge. It was hard to care about something that made his head hurt. Though his head wasn’t actually hurting. It felt more stuffed, muffled. He watched Tom Hilxen put a hand into a jacket pocket. Tom produced a piece of coiled plastic tubing. Daniel wondered what it was for. Tom Hilxen put the tube down on his knees. From the other pocket he produced a flat plastic Ziploc bag containing several small instruments Daniel was unable to recognize. Tom shook one of these out of the bag and put it between his teeth to free his hands. He picked up Daniel’s now very heavy hand, the nearest, and turned it over to unbutton the shirt cuff.