Skin of the Wolf

by Sam Cabot

  “We spoke with him. A man in Riverdale by the name of Bradford Lane.”

  “Riverdale, in the north Bronx? Has Mr. Lane been approached by anyone other than yourselves? Does his situation seem secure?”

  “I’m a little worried about him, actually. No, no one’s been there, and I don’t know how Edward would learn his name, but it’s not impossible. I suggested he might take extra precautions until we know for sure whether the mask had anything to do with the murder but he refuses.”

  “I see. And on the subject of the mask itself?”

  “He’s convinced it’s real. Or at least, that the one he sent to Sotheby’s is the one he bought fifty years ago, that had been in the Hammill family since the French priest brought it to them in the seventeen hundreds. But that’s an interesting point.”

  “What is?”

  “The French priest, Père Ravenelle. Mr. Lane said someone came to see him a few years ago asking about Père Ravenelle and about the mask. Research into the early Church in North America. He turns out to have been Gerald Maxwell. Thomas’s department chair at Fordham.”

  “My,” Spencer said. “That’s an odd coincidence.”

  “Not necessarily. The early Church is his area. It may turn out to be convenient, though. We’ve just gotten to Fordham, on the other side of the Bronx. Thomas is going to go see him.”

  “How marvelous that we all find ourselves in the Bronx. Perhaps we can reconvene at my home in, say, an hour? We can compare notes. But before that, please know this: we’ve just had an encounter with two police detectives. When asked whether anyone had been at my home with us late last night, after the mugging in the park that accounts for Michael’s injuries, Michael replied that we were alone. He thought the coincidence of your having been with us and then at Sotheby’s was too much to bear.”

  “Spencer, that’s perfectly innocent and explainable. Why would it matter unless—”

  “—unless they were suspicious of us? I believe they may have formed that opinion, which would be why they wanted to know where we’d been.”

  “Formed that opinion, based on what?”

  “I’m not certain. Viewed from a certain angle, Michael’s responses may have appeared a bit evasive. Perhaps I did my part, also. In any case, I’m not asking you, and certainly not Father Kelly, to join in our deception. I’m just making you aware of what’s been said. No one, of course, has so far mentioned brother Edward.”

  “I understand. It’s possible the police won’t be interested in us anyway. Was it the same detectives I told you about last night?”

  “A young woman of Michael’s people, though apparently a different tribe—”

  “And a smiling, weird man? They were suspicious of us, too, just for being at Sotheby’s. It might not mean anything.”

  “The smiling man, who I believe is called Framingham, did mention the Vatican to me.”

  “Oh, Spencer, really? I thought all that had been wiped clean. Do you suppose it will be a problem?”

  “I have no idea. I’m rather annoyed, I must say. However, at the moment there are more pressing issues. It’s important to Michael that he be allowed to continue his search for his brother unhindered. And that no one else begin a similar search.”

  “All right, Spencer. I’ll tell Thomas. And we’ll see you at your place in an hour.”

  “Everything all right?” Michael asked as Spencer slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “Yes. Though Livia is uneasy about Mr. Lane.”

  “She’s worried Edward will find him.”

  “I don’t like to put it that way, but I’m afraid so.”

  “She may be right. And it may be a way to find Edward.” Michael turned his phone back on, scrolled through for a number. He thumbed it, waited, then, “Lou? It’s Doc. Give me a call. I need a favor.”

  When he lowered the phone Spencer said, “Lou—he’s one of the gentlemen I met last night?”

  “I’m going to ask him to keep an eye on Lane’s place. He’ll love it. He’s a hunter, grew up in the woods. The L’Anse rez in Michigan. Did two tours in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger. His father was Army, too. You must’ve noticed he looks Asian?”

  “I wouldn’t have inquired about it, but indeed I did.”

  “God, Spencer.” Michael grinned. “For a historian, you’re amazingly not nosy.”

  “On the contrary. I’m attempting a certain discretion, as I understand it to be an attribute valued by your people. In the normal way of things I’d be clamoring to have my questions answered.”

  “I can’t see you ever clamoring, but I’m flattered anyway. Lou’s dad is Potawatomi. He met his mom in Vietnam and brought her back to the rez. It hasn’t been easy for Lou, especially since the Army. He’s been in and out of trouble, kind of lost his way. But he’s a good guy.” Michael’s phone rang and he lifted it to his ear. “Lou? Thanks for calling. No, not yet. Listen, maybe you can help me out. I wouldn’t ask, but you heard Ivy— Yeah, okay, I know I don’t, sorry. It’s like this. There’s a guy in Riverdale, I think Edward might be headed his way. Any chance you could go up there, keep an eye on the place, call me if he shows up? Come to think of it, anyone. Whoever shows up there, let me know, okay? But not this number. I’ll call you with the number in a few minutes. Yeah, good.” Michael gave the particulars of Lane’s home. “Thanks, Lou.” He powered his phone down again and pocketed it. “Come on, Spencer. I need to pick up a pre-paid phone, and if we’re meeting Livia and Thomas in an hour, we just have time to stop by my place on the way. I appreciate the loan of your antique ski sweater, but it’s making me itch.”

  36

  Edward Bonnard walked with long strides through the fluorescent-lit expanse of Penn Station. The odors of burnt coffee, frying doughnuts, and disinfectant crowded the air, which itself had to be pummeled through metal ducts and fiberglass filters to force it down here. All around him, people looking miserable rushed to destinations he couldn’t imagine would make them any happier. What was wrong with white people that caused them to make places like this?

  Some of the elders went back to the stories. When the Creator baked the earth to make the people, they said, he’d kept each one—black, red, yellow, and white—in the oven for different lengths of time. Black, red, and yellow men, though they’d come out looking different, had all cooked thoroughly and were complete. The white man, though, was unfinished. White people were like children, unable to look ahead, not seeing the consequences of their actions. Children weren’t by nature malicious, but their heedlessness could cause great damage, great pain to themselves and others. They needed to be guided, instructed, reined in.

  Edward, though he didn’t contradict the elders, did not agree. Even children learned from their mistakes. They couldn’t see ahead, but they looked behind. Try too far a leap, sprain your ankle, next time you’d find a rope to swing from. If white people were like children, they might have built this sort of building once, maybe three times or ten times, but eventually they’d realize how horrible it was and stop. Edward spent as little time as he could manage in the white world, but “little” didn’t mean “none.” From what he could see, white people must like this sort of space and the life it gave them because it was these spaces and that life with which they covered Mother Earth.

  Even Abornazine, a white man who loved Edward’s people, wasn’t immune. His home, though beautifully made, was so huge that half the population of Akwesasne could live there and never bump into each other. No, of course that was an exaggeration. And Abornazine hadn’t built the house. His ancestors had, and he’d inherited it—a concept that only made sense if you believed that land could be owned like a pair of pants and that buildings were meant to last as long as the grass grew. Abornazine didn’t believe those things, but for now, he said, the house was necessary: for the number of people it could safeguard, for the land around it and the river you
could see from its porch. The people were Edward’s people; the land was where they would Awaken, and the river was Cahohatatea, called the Hudson by whites as though before they’d sailed up it no one had seen these waters and they had no name. Cahohatatea, the river that would carry the people back down to the island that had once been theirs.

  Edward searched the confusion of lights, signs, and advertising, looking for track numbers. He felt much better now than he had last night. Waking this morning to a strange dawn in an unfamiliar room had given him, not the disoriented jolt he might have expected, but a pause, a long blank moment that separated night from day. The smooth skin of the woman beside him had been warm and comforting, talking to him of what was to come, not what had been. As he gazed on her she woke. She touched her finger to his lips and slipped her leg over him. He was as ready and hungry as she, though their lovemaking last night had been long, powerful, and so complete that once they were both, finally, satisfied, Edward had fallen into a deep sleep without dreams he could remember. This morning had been like that also, in tune but syncopated, each action and reaction both surprising and inevitable.

  After, he lay in bed while Charlotte showered, then watched her emerge from the bathroom, a white towel tucked around her brown body, her hair a glistening dark tangle down her back. Wordless, she smiled and disappeared into the kitchen. He headed to the bathroom himself; when he came out she handed him coffee. By then she was dressed, already wearing the gun and holster that had thrown him last night when she took off her leather jacket. “I’m a cop,” she’d said, seeing his face, the words sounding half challenge and half invitation; and then she locked up the gun and her daily life with it. Edward had trouble understanding why an Indian would opt to live in the white world at all, and to choose, beyond that, to enforce that world’s laws, was beyond him. But Charlotte made it clear she didn’t want to talk about work, didn’t want his white name, didn’t want to speak much at all, and that suited him. Here in the frantic city he missed the quiet of the woods, of Indian companionship. White people seemed afraid of silence. They filled the air with talk, with music, with blare and buzz. Edward thought he knew why: in silence the ancestors’ voices could be heard. No matter how white people screamed and shouted, raced their cars and threw their towers up to the sky, their hearts must know how wrong the direction of their lives had become. They didn’t want to hear their ancestors, the anger and the disappointment. But the voices were not gone, not even stilled. They were speaking, and they wouldn’t tolerate this heedlessness for much longer. Nor would they need to. White people were part of the Creator’s plan, and they would be included in the world as it started to change, very soon.

  All this went through Edward’s mind when he was with Charlotte, but he said none of it, last night or this morning, asking only, as they walked to the subway, where her people lived.

  “I was born here in the city,” she said. “I was brought up Indian, we go home for Midwinter, stuff like that, but I’ve never lived on a rez.”

  “You said Lenape?”

  “Right. My dad’s people, they’re Mohawk, Tuscarora, and there’s my exotic Italian great-granddaddy but we don’t talk about him. What about you? Abenaki, you said?”

  “Yes. My father’s people are Mohawk. I live up there at Akwesasne.”

  “Come down to New York much?”

  “Not if I can help it. I’m leaving today.” For some reason he didn’t fully understand, he added, “I’ll be back soon, though.”

  “Call me,” she said.

  They’d parted with a nod and a smile, no kiss, no touch. She’d descended into the subway to go to work. He’d wanted to be out in the day, even as degraded as the day was in the city, and so had walked downtown to Penn Station, feeling energetic, feeling peaceful, feeling grateful to Charlotte.

  Because until he met her, last night had been a calamity, a series of disasters.

  He’d come to the city fully intending to return with the Ohtahyohnee mask, but they weren’t unrealistic, he and Abornazine. They’d planned for the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to obtain it. They had next steps prepared. But it had never crossed their minds, either of them, that the mask might not be real.

  Edward was sorry about the young woman he’d killed. She’d feared him, been repulsed, been outraged that he should have invaded a place she thought of as hers, but even in his rage and disappointment he wouldn’t have taken her life if there had been another way. There was not. If she’d lived she would have told what she’d seen. She might not have been believed; but the goal they were working toward was of such profound consequence that any risk was too great. Edward had killed her and offered prayers to the Creator, as hunters did when they shot a deer or farmers when they slaughtered chickens. He’d expressed his gratitude for the life she gave and his hope that this death would nourish the people equally with those.

  Encountering Michael after that had seemed at first just a colossal stroke of bad luck. Edward had left his clothes hidden in the park, to be recovered after he’d completed his task and returned to human form. That Michael should have chosen that same hour to walk through the park with his friend—that could never have been predicted. But as he thought about it later, Edward was forced to admit that he’d stayed in the park, racing, bounding, slinking, stalking, much longer than he’d needed to. That his fury over the mask, combined with the metallic tang of the young woman’s blood—a heady, disorienting taste he’d never known before—had caused his heart to speed, his nerves to buzz; that in this city he hated so much he felt powerful, safe, in his Shifted state and he’d been unwilling to return to his man-self prison.

  And he had to admit, also, that when, bounding through the icy night, he’d picked up Michael’s scent, he could have avoided the encounter. Instead, he’d sought it out.

  Michael, though, had done what he’d done many times since they were boys: kept Edward from an act he’d have regretted. He didn’t mean killing Michael’s friend. Unlike the young woman’s death, that one wouldn’t have been necessary, but Edward’s frustrated fury and the man’s obvious importance to Michael—and the man’s ridiculous bravado—goaded Edward on. For a man in his fifties he’d been staggeringly strong and the taste of his blood a searing, unpleasant sensation. It was something to smoke on, Edward thought, to consider, that in the space of a few hours he’d tasted his first human blood, and then tasted it again with such a different result. He wondered how much more of it he’d have to spill before their goal was reached.

  But no, the death of Michael’s friend wasn’t the act he was glad Michael had thwarted. Not for the first time, it was his failure to kill Michael himself that Edward was grateful for.

  Edward’s heart ached for Michael. It always had. The beat of Michael’s pulse was the sound he knew best, the first rhythm of his world. They were one-as-two, they completed each other: the dark and the light, the storm and the sun, the burn and the balm. But from the moment they’d come into the world Michael had drawn away. Edward saw their destiny clearly, even as a child, and embraced it though the path was difficult. Michael refused. Refused, Edward thought, the Creator’s will, though no one could be sure what the Creator intended and Edward thought those who spoke as though they knew sounded painfully like the priests of Christian churches. But in his heart he wondered, could it be otherwise? Twin Shifters, a birth as rare as that of the white buffalo—how could it not have a meaning as sacred? They’d been born to a vital task, a duty for the people. Edward welcomed it, thankful to have been chosen.

  Michael slipped away, away, into the white world.

  Edward didn’t long for Michael’s death. Not truly. He longed for Michael to awaken to their joint destiny as they’d both Awakened to their natures in their early years. But at times the pain and sadness of knowing that wouldn’t happen were overpowering. Then Edward’s rage and hurt consumed him and he wanted Michael gone. If Michael wouldn’t walk with h
im, Edward wanted to destroy his brother and then grieve for him, and walk in the world alone.

  That desire, though, like the ocean waters, ebbed and flowed. Last night he’d have killed Michael and exulted; this morning, he was relieved he hadn’t. It was possible, still, that once this task was complete, once the people were free, Michael would understand and take his true place.

  Edward would go back up north now, not all the way home, but to Abornazine’s grand house on the cliff overlooking Cahohatatea. They’d burn tobacco, and pray, and plan. The worthlessness of the mask was a setback but not, in the end, a disaster. He was sure of it.

  In the glare of the lights he found the gate to the train he was taking. He disliked travel by rail, but a train was preferable by far to the air-debasing, earth-destroying, soul-devouring automobile. He showed his ticket, went down the stairs, and took a seat on the river side, where he could watch the water and the cliffs as the train hurtled north.

  No, what had happened last night wouldn’t force them off the path they were walking.

  Tonight was the full moon, but they’d have to let it pass. Still, in a month there’d be another.

  They would be ready.

  37

  Thomas! Come in, come in.” The history department chair gestured from behind his desk. “Is there something you need?”

  “A few moments of your time, Father, if that’s possible.”

  “Of course.” The chubby and balding Monsignor Gerald Maxwell, wearing a clerical collar and a tweed jacket—badges of his dual professions, Thomas reflected—closed the manila folder he’d been reading and gave Thomas his attention as the younger man sat. “Is everything all right, Father Kelly? Are you enjoying your work here? I met with Andy Burns the other day and he couldn’t stop singing your praises. He said you found the organizing principle for the entire first section of his thesis.”

  “I didn’t have to look very hard. He’s a gifted scholar.”