Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Eve said she’d watch Grazide. And Tom said, “How typical, the writer always putting herself forward as a witness.” He shook his head: “Eve, Eve, Eve.” His tone was tender, and he moved toward Eve, put his arms around her, paternal and consoling. Then he turned her face-forward in his arms, gripped her hard, and bit her.

  Normal human reaction time—and it’s the same for all normal humans—is three-quarters of a second. Bad had seen Dawn move faster than that, and he’d failed to see Ila, who could move faster than Bad’s brain could follow him. Bad saw a series of movements without having time to move himself. Ila and Dawn went to Eve’s aid. But not before Bad saw Eve’s face soften, her lips part, head loll back, neck arch. He was looking at himself—Dawn’s spines in him—both swooning and stiffened by joy. Purely chemical joy, without discernment. It was sad and obscene. He didn’t want to see any more or know any more—or choose. He’d had enough. He saw Dawn and Ila separate Eve and Tom, quick but careful, and he guessed that it was possible that if Tom withdrew too swiftly, he would leave some spines in Eve. Bad backed away from them all, obliquely, across the aisle.

  Ila picked Eve up and carried her to the pew where Bad had been sitting and set her down. Dawn moved to follow Ila, but Tom and Grazide caught her, their actions so coordinated that they seemed moved by one mind. Tom folded Dawn in his long, sinewy arms and both vampires nuzzled into her neck, on either side, where it joined her shoulders. Dawn cried out, her cry cut off. The vampires were drinking, noisy, like children sucking juice from oranges. Dawn was rigid and trembling, her arms outflung. Bad saw the fat veins on Dawn’s splayed hands shrink, sink down flush to her skin, her tendons show instead, and each knuckle grow white. Then Tom and Grazide released Dawn, and she teetered for a moment, then dropped onto her knees. Tom and Grazide moved away, in unison, fast, and left the chapel. Again the door slapped to and fro, showing its padded exterior and cold nicotine brown twilight through the skylight on the dome of the hexagonal antechapel.

  Bad had backed up against a barrier. Something was digging into his thigh. He looked over his shoulder and saw a shiny black shoe, black-trousered legs, a body sprawled face-up along a pew. Bad saw pallid brown skin, glossy black hair, the line of white showing under Daniel Octave’s eyelids. He saw stillness, the abandon of the abandoned. Bad saw a corpse. He saw the corpse of Father Octave—and he fled the chapel.

  Eve looked up at Dawn, who was stroking her cheek. Dawn was white and wilted, her cheeks hollow. “Are you all right?” Eve asked—then answered Dawn’s question, which was identical. “Yes, I’m all right.”

  Ila said, “We should be gone.” He lifted Eve; he took the sisters on either arm and steered them to the chapel door.

  “Wait,” said Eve. She’d seen something, someone lying on a pew, one black-clad leg cocked, one arm trailing on the floor.

  “I’ll wait tomorrow night,” Ila said. “No more waiting tonight.”

  Eve nudged Ila and Dawn sideways till they, too, saw the man—who lay, a blood-crusted cannula sticking out of the skin in the crook of his arm and twitching in time to his heartbeat.

  Ila said, “It’s Father Octave.” He gave Eve to Dawn and crouched beside the priest, plucked the cannula out of his arm, pushed the rolled sleeve down over the bloody hole, and bent the arm, set Father Octave’s hand to his shoulder to stop the bleeding.

  Ila touched Daniel Octave’s cheek. “He’s cold,” he said. Ila took off his jacket and draped it over the man.

  Even woozy, Eve was intrigued. Not by Father Octave’s presence—Tom, always a thorough researcher himself, wouldn’t on first instinct rebuff anyone who came asking questions—no, what intrigued Eve was the fact that Father Daniel Octave wasn’t white. She hadn’t expected that. She saw Ila’s very pale hand on Father Octave’s brown skin and felt disoriented. Martine had never mentioned that Father Octave was Indian. It made Eve wonder about Marline—about how much else there was she hadn’t been told and should know.

  Dawn was plucking at her. Eve looked at her sister, who was looking at the window and moaning with fear. Eve saw blue sky. “Ila,” she said. She tugged at his shirt. Ila’s hand lingered on Daniel Octave’s face, then let go.

  Ila and Dawn left Eve behind. She crossed the hexagonal chapel hard on their heels but only saw a door swinging on the Chapel of the Vignerons. By the time she reached the main door she could only spot Dawn, just rounding the corner in the street.

  Eve found Bad leaning over the rail of the bridge, beside the waterwheel. Bad was sobbing, his face white with shock. Eve pulled at his arm and asked him to hurry. He came after her. Then, after a moment, he caught on and took off, sprinted up the street ahead of her.

  There was a car, a battered four-wheel-drive, a big vehicle with a wide wheelbase, parked over the manhole. Parked as Bad had observed cars in Italy, in no-parking zones, not parallel to the curb but at an angle, as though coy about their intentions, as if to say, I’m only stopped a moment and don’t really mean it.

  When Bad appeared, Ila was at the back bumper, braced to push. But his hands slipped. He dropped to his knees and struck his chin on the bumper.

  Dawn screamed, plucked at Ila, then hauled off and ran at the vehicle, jolted it with her shoulder—a rhino blindsiding a safari truck.

  The vehicle rocked and its alarm went off.

  Eve arrived behind Bad. Dawn rushed up to her sister, sobbed, “Eve! Eve!” like a child, hunched over, her fists clenched. She cowered behind her sister.

  Bad pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around his fist. He punched in the driver’s window, thrust his head inside, let the hand brake off, and put the car in neutral.

  The car whooped, bugled, and whistled.

  Bad ran around the car to Ila. He realized Ila had removed his jacket and the chisel was gone. Bad looked at Eve. Eve was no help. She stood, her arms around Dawn, Dawn’s face pressed into her chest. Eve was watching the sun come, its light lapping at the tops of the roofs.

  Bad ran back to the car window, leaned in, and found the button that popped its hood. He rushed to the front of the car and slipped his hand under the hood, found the catch, disengaged it, and heaved the hood up. He was after the lever that held the hood open. With his free hand he jerked it back and forth but couldn’t snap it off. Then Ila was beside him. Ila had the rod; he twisted it. The metal torqued, turned white in one place, and came apart like a snapped licorice stick.

  Bad dropped the hood and put his shoulder to the grille. Ila joined him—for a moment they were touching, face-to-face. Ila’s flesh was cold, and his eyes were closed against the daylight and streaming tears.

  The car rolled backward. The manhole appeared beneath Bad’s feet. Ila opened his eyes to bend the rod at its tip, to find the slot, insert the rod, to lever, lift, slide the cover.

  Eve hustled her sister over to the hole. Dawn was stumbling and stupid with terror. Eve prized herself free of Dawn’s embrace and forced her to look down, down at the darkness.

  Dawn gave a small grateful whimper and jumped into the drain. Ila jumped after her and looked up out of the hole, his hand on its lip, keeping him suspended above the drop. He motioned to Bad to push the cover into place.

  The rim of the sun appeared over the roofs—to Bad beautiful, instantly warming. Its light hit Ila’s fingers; the white skin went red, then white again with blisters. Ila let go of the lip of the drain and dropped into the dark. Bad repositioned the rod and hauled at the cover. The iron grated over the cobbles. But before its dull circle eclipsed the black drain mouth, Bad looked down and saw water gleaming, Ila lying in the wet curve of the pipe, and Dawn, standing, craning up to the opening, her face tearstained and desperate. She raised her hands, reached out to the daylight, and to him.

  The drain cover fell into place with a blunt clang. Bad straightened and dropped the bent steel rod. Beside them the car flashed and howled. It was impossible to speak over its noise. Bad looked at Eve—and Eve saw things breaking in him. Then he turned and walked brisk
ly away from her and the car, looking about, checking, patting his hair down, a smooth, practiced criminal hastening from the scene.

  Chapter 17

  A BOAT, FAR FROM LAND

  The bishop sent a car to fetch Daniel from Avignon. The priest who drove was young, barely out of the seminary, an attenuated giant whose Adam’s apple and round wristbones seemed to have burst out of the confines of his suit’s collar and cuffs. The driver perhaps had an overactive thyroid, which contributed to his air of pop-eyed wariness. The skeletal story the driver had about his charge had inclined him to treat this Father Octave he’d been sent to retrieve as a reprobate rather than an invalid. Father Octave wasn’t ill, hadn’t “collapsed”—though the bishop said he had. The word in the ranks, however, was that the bishop’s favorite annual visitor, the austere Jesuit historian, had been found in the Chapel of the Gray Penitents, unconscious and stinking of Branca Menta.

  Daniel slumped against the restraint of his seat belt. He was aware of the driver watching him in the rearview mirror. He was conscious that for a time this doubtful scrutiny would be his lot.

  Daniel, who had never tired easily, was exhausted. He wanted his room in the convent in Nice; he wanted its narrow bed. If he kept quiet, kept his eyes closed, all the way back, perhaps he’d be allowed to rest before having to explain himself. Daniel’s desire for respite was the nearest he had ever come to a feeling of homesickness. He had “come home” when his grandmother was alive and in her kitchen, creating a gravitational field of comfort, the only one whose pull Daniel had ever felt or fallen into. Since his grandmother had died, Daniel had obediently gone where he was expected to be—from school and into his evening and weekend incarceration with his mother and her fears—then, from the seminary on, he went wherever he was sent. He was scarcely ever sorry to leave a place or glad to arrive. Now, retrieved by the bishop, wanting his bed, Daniel for the first time felt bleak about the fact that he didn’t belong anywhere.

  The bishop already had a full account of how Father Octave was found, semiconscious, in the Chapel of the Gray Penitents, by the priest and altar boys who had come in for the six o’clock mass. Father Octave was wearing one jacket and was covered by another. When roused he’d insisted on retaining the other jacket and had also retrieved some bloody instruments—pieces of plastic, the priest reported—from the chapel floor. He’d squirreled them away in the pockets of his own jacket, with a knife or a screwdriver from the pocket of the other. Father Octave’s breath smelled of drink, but his dreamy disorientation had worried the priest because it wasn’t like drunkenness. He was very pale and had one blood-soaked cuff. They delivered him, under protest, to an emergency room—where he napped on a gurney in a cubicle for half an hour before anyone came to see him. He allowed the doctor to take his blood pressure but refused a blood test. The priest of the Gray Penitents took him back to the rectory and phoned the bishop in Nice.

  The bishop repeated this story while Daniel sat before him, slumped, in his crumpled suit and with his blood-browned shirtsleeve. Daniel considered how best to play himself—calm, contrite, forthcoming. He said he’d been trying to find out who had killed Jacques Palomba—he’d pursued what he thought were leads, though he knew it was really a matter for the police. “But I’d been told some things in confidence,” Daniel explained.

  “Confidence isn’t the sanctity of the confessional, Daniel. And keeping things to yourself is a habit you have.” The bishop said he’d been speaking to Daniel’s friend Father Neske.

  Daniel protested, impatient, that everyone knew about him. Because the bishop did know about his parentage, his mother’s troubles, and Gaston Groux—the bishop knew enough, at least.

  “We know as much as you know, Daniel,” the bishop said.

  Daniel was surly. “Meaning what?”

  “You’re possibly the least self-reflective person I know—of those who have any intelligence, or habit of reflection.” The bishop spread his palms. “So I ask you, do you know what you’ve been doing?”

  “I’ve been trying to find out why Jacques Palomba was murdered.”

  “Don’t you mean who murdered him?”

  Daniel scratched the back of his neck. He felt like hitting someone—not specifically this man, but someone.

  “If ‘why,’ then I imagine you’ve prayed for guidance,” the bishop said.

  “All right, who, then,” said Daniel, impolite. He said that he’d got a woman’s name and number from a coworker of Palomba’s. He had a rendezvous with a man—a friend of the woman he was looking for. They met in the Chapel of the Gray Penitents. The man had a flask and Daniel joined him in a drink. The drink was drugged. “But, as you see, here I am, alive and intact.”

  “So … no harm done,” said the bishop, dubious.

  “And contrite‚” Daniel added, annoyed.

  “Do you think I want contrition?” the bishop said. Then he told Daniel that he’d been recalled to Rome. The bishop had spoken to the Father General himself that morning. “What I want you to do right now, Daniel, is to phone the detective in charge of the investigation and give him names, numbers, descriptions. Then you can have something to eat and get some sleep.” The bishop got out of his chair to push the phone across the desk.

  Daniel called the detective. He surrendered everything—except Tom Hilxen’s name. He said, “He didn’t give a name.” Daniel gave the detective a description but neglected to mention that the man was an American. The bishop watched Daniel tender his story. Daniel was worried that the bishop would hear his omissions as the beat of silence in a badly spliced tape. So he told the detective more. He told the detective how the drug felt.

  “Rohypnol,” the detective said, in a pause, “the ‘date rape’ drug.”

  Daniel gave an account of the cannula and the tube and how the man had siphoned off his blood. The detective seemed less surprised than galvanized by the description and Daniel thought, He’s encountered this before.

  When Daniel got off the phone he stood up, without having been given leave to go.

  “Daniel,” the bishop said.

  Daniel stopped, but stayed half turned away toward the door.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why let me stand here and hear it all secondhand?”

  “I think it’s not, strictly speaking, secondhand if you’re listening in,” Daniel said.

  “Please stop making these hairsplitting distinctions,” said the bishop. “Daniel, that man assaulted you.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  The bishop waited.

  “I’m tired. I need to sleep,” Daniel said.

  “Will you please, just for a moment, do me the favor of looking me in the eye?” said the bishop.

  Daniel steeled himself, then turned to stare, blandly, at the bridge of the bishop’s nose.

  “What can we do for you?” the bishop said.

  “I need to sleep,” said Daniel.

  “Daniel, I know that you’ve borne real suffering as mere discomfort for a sizable and formative part of your life, without giving anything away—and yet, right now, I can see that you’re suffering. I want to help you.”

  The thing about sleep, Daniel said, that was both good and bad was that no one could go there with you.

  “What are you saying? I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Daniel sighed. “I’m saying that I refuse to think anymore about what has happened to me till fortified by rest. That’s only sensible. It’s like putting an ice pack on an injury to reduce the swelling. It’ll be less of a crisis if I postpone it with sleep.”

  “Very well,” said the bishop, and Daniel could hear that he was upset—upset that Daniel had rebuffed his offer of help—and unwilling to let Daniel out of his sight. But, “Very well,” he said, and let Daniel go.

  Sleep spat Daniel out hours before dawn, and he got out of bed to pace his small room, sometimes slapping the wall as he turned, like a prisoner in his first mad hours of solitary confinement.

  At
sunrise he showered and dressed in his other suit. Then he left the convent and walked down to the bus station, where he sold his watch for a third of its value in grubby cash.

  Two days later, Daniel sat indoors in a restaurant, opposite the high gates of Eve Moskelute’s Ventimiglia house. Daniel had ordered the set menu and could park himself for hours. He grazed his way through six courses. First the frittata, then stuffed zucchini flowers, then baked baby salmon, spaghetti frutti di mare, roast duck, and crème brûlée.

  The restaurant was fall and Daniel well concealed behind a window curtained by wisteria and by a party of Austrians at the long table on the terrace.

  Halfway through his meal, Daniel took his jacket off. It was hot, and the lunch was hard work, and the jacket pockets were full. Daniel had the mobile phone Martine had given him, and he had evidence—a clear plastic tube with deposits of dried black blood flecking its interior and a sculptor’s chisel with the name Ares burnt into its wooden handle.

  In the late afternoon Eve felt a migraine coming on and went to lie down in a darkened room. She got into bed, closed her eyes and, for a moment, was rewarded with blank darkness. Then the darkness filled with bright lines, then with facets, glowing geometries like the insides of clustered soap bubbles.

  The pain waited, wasn’t yet on the wing, was a treeful of roosting birds. Eve closed her eyes. The birds exploded into the air. They made a tree above the tree, turning together, a pain that billowed, but that had a shape and was still confined.

  Eve felt a cool, dry hand on her forehead.

  The birds alighted again, the shadow of a tree sinking back into the tree’s green branches.