Skin of the Wolf

by Sam Cabot

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he dedicates the book to you. Or names his firstborn ‘Thomas.’ How’s your own work coming?”

  “It’s completely fascinating. I suppose you knew it would be, but besides the facts themselves, to me it’s so entirely different—like a whole new cuisine, I suppose. Or a new language. Different emphases, different rhythms. I’m enjoying learning so much.”

  “I’m delighted. So, tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I’ve come across a man I’d like to know more about, and I’ve been told you researched him once yourself. I thought perhaps you could point me in the right direction.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Père Etienne Ravenelle.”

  Maxwell twirled a heavy silver ring on his left hand, a habit when he was thinking. It bore a crest Thomas didn’t recognize, a cross on a full moon. Some society within their own order. More than once, Thomas had meditated on that curious inevitability of human endeavor, that nations break into states, cities into boroughs, faiths into orders and sects and societies. As though the totality of human experience were too much to encompass.

  “Ravenelle?” said Maxwell. “He’s far afield for your work, isn’t he? He was here a full century after Kateri Tekakwitha. What brought you to him?”

  “Just following my nose, I suppose. Kateri’s relationships with the Jesuits and with her own people were tangled, and Ravenelle seems to be the end of one of the threads.” When did I learn to do that? Thomas wondered. Give an answer that tells nothing, even borders on actually lying?

  “He is that,” Maxwell agreed. “The end of a thread, I mean. Ravenelle came to New France in 1742. He’d read the biography Claude Chauchetière had written of Tekakwitha—I imagine you got that far?”

  “I’ve read it, yes.” Not exactly the answer, but apparently the Monsignor, knowing the answer he expected, assumed he’d gotten it and went on.

  “Ravenelle arrived certain of what it had taken Chauchetière years to come to believe—that there was value in the Native way of life, and that saving Native souls involved nothing more than introducing them to—revealing to them, really—the mystery of the Savior. They would, he thought, find their own way to Him.” Father Maxwell smiled. “A touch apostate, even now. You can imagine what his superiors thought two hundred and fifty years ago. But you understand, New France in the mid-eighteenth century was what we’d call today a difficult posting. Not every priest was willing to go.”

  “Yes, I can see that. By then the thrill of first contact would have been long gone and both the Iroquois and the Huron had turned on the Jesuits.”

  “Because of the behavior of Europeans—including some Jesuits—toward them, and because of the European diseases that were decimating them.” Father Maxwell focused a stern eye on Thomas, to make sure his point had been taken. Thomas nodded. The Monsignor continued, “In any case, Ravenelle was decades too late for the romantic missionary work he’d imagined himself doing. All the missions in Native territory had been abandoned and the priests withdrawn to Quebec, Montreal, or Ottawa. Ravenelle reportedly did venture out among the Iroquois against the orders of the Superior General. He seems to have gone more than once, with the tacit approval of his Father Provincial, so it’s likely he was well received. But there are no records of his meetings with the tribes.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “Why there are no records?”

  “Well, yes, but also why he went, and why, at that point, he’d have been well received.”

  “It’s a good question. I couldn’t say. In any case Ravenelle seems to have made the mistake of staying on after the British dissolved the Jesuit order in New France. He must not have kept his head down because he became a hunted man. He headed south, perhaps to find a ship to take him home to Europe. I never found any evidence that he’d made it back, though. He did get as far as New York. I suspect he died here. As you know—or maybe not, since you’ve been concentrating on Italy until now, but as you’ll find, missionary records from that period are quite sketchy, the more so the farther south you go, into British-held territory. Especially Jesuits. Anyone still here was hiding, running, desperate to escape the British. They were hanging priests, you know.”

  “Yes, sir, I do know.”

  Maxwell took a brief moment of silence, perhaps to consider the dangers once inherent in being a Jesuit priest in the New World. Thomas offered a prayer for the souls of those who had not escaped.

  “Well, Thomas,” said the Monsignor, “there you have all the news I could find of Father Ravenelle. He’s really a little outside my area, too, and quite outside yours. I understand the lure of new knowledge, those secrets that glow just beyond the horizon. But I’m not sure you have time to, as you say, follow your nose every place it tries to lead you. I’m told Pope Francis is very much looking forward to the results of your original charge. All’s coming along well with that work, is it?”

  “Yes, thank you. And I’m sure you’re right. I should be narrowing my beam instead of widening it.”

  “Exactly. Tell me, Thomas, how did you come to know I’d looked into Père Ravenelle in the first place?”

  “My Italian historian friend, Dr. Pietro? She’s in town for the Indigenous Arts conference. We were talking about this Ohtahyohnee mask that’s such a sensation, and someone said you’d once been interested in it and in Père Ravenelle.”

  “Really? That was years ago. Who remembers that, I wonder?”

  “A man called Bradford Lane. He’s a collector.”

  “He was at the conference?”

  “We spoke with him.” All right, Thomas thought, that’s not an outright lie, but close enough that I should probably jump up and run to the nearest confessional. Or maybe Father Maxwell will hear my confession. Forgive me, Father, for I’ve shaded the truth, because if I didn’t you’d know two of my friends are vampires and the gay one has a shapeshifter boyfriend. . . .

  “Thomas? Are you all right?”

  “Oh! I’m sorry, Father. I just—remembered something I’d forgotten.” Which is that I’m different from my brothers and sisters in the Church now, and I always will be from here on, since I’ve been granted access to some of those secrets glowing beyond the horizon—knowledge I never asked for, can’t share, and seem to continue to accumulate at an alarming rate. “Did you ask me something?”

  “I wondered how Mr. Lane is doing.”

  “Sadly, he’s lost almost all of his sight.”

  “Yes, that deterioration was under way by the time I saw him four years ago. I’m sorry to hear it. Is he otherwise well?”

  “Creaky. But mentally he certainly seems sharp.”

  “I’m glad of that, anyway. Well, I’m sorry I can’t be more help to you, Thomas. Ravenelle was—how did you put it?—the end of a thread for me, too. And the Ohtahyohnee, I never saw it.”

  Thomas smiled. “You don’t have to keep that secret any longer, Father. Mr. Lane said you and he sat admiring it, and then he swore you to secrecy.”

  The Monsignor paused. “He told you that?”

  “He said you even photographed it.”

  “Oh.” Father Maxwell shrugged. “I suppose now that he’s selling it he doesn’t mind people knowing about it. Yes, I saw it and I took photographs. I thought they might be useful if I ever found any mention of it or Father Ravenelle in any other records. I never did, though.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Thomas said. “I can’t say my curiosity’s been satisfied, but as you point out, my own work calls. Let me ask you one more thing, if I might. I understand you were looking at Ravenelle, but what did you think of the Ohtahyohnee? There’s been some talk at the conference that it’s not authentic.”

  “Really? Well, art’s not my area, but I thought it was beautiful. Powerful. People think it’s a fake?”

  “People are unsure.”

&nb
sp; “Because it’s the only one anyone’s ever seen, maybe. Because no one was even certain they ever existed, much less still exist. Or”—he raised his eyebrows—“I suppose, because it’s a fake. Myself, I really don’t know.”

  “It’s going on display this morning, for tomorrow’s auction. Will you go over to see it?”

  “I think I will. Something like that, the last of its kind—yes, I think I’ll have to take one more look.”

  38

  As Charlotte and Framingham trotted back down Donna’s front steps, Framingham said, “Do I get the feeling your friend Donna was hiding something, or is she just being an Indian?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I hate to admit it but I agree with you. Michael Bonnard felt so lousy after he was mugged that he didn’t go to work, but instead of staying home in bed he decided to come up to the effing Bronx on a crappy cold morning like this—and all he wanted to do was to introduce his friend to Donna? And all they did was sit around and chat? Bullshit.”

  “Why aren’t we taking her downtown?”

  “Donna? Based on what? That we think she’s lying about what she talked about with a guy we have no reason to suspect of anything? I mean, no reason besides his cultural curiosity and our racial profiling. And have you ever tried to lean on an Indian? We close up tighter than a duck’s ass. I need to get some angle on what she’s hiding and then I can take it to her. She won’t respond to a fishing expedition, and God knows, not to intimidation. But if I ask her straight on she might talk to me. Anyway, I want to ask you something.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” Framingham asked innocently.

  “‘Do what.’ You knew Spencer George was an art collector and what he collects. You couldn’t have found that out between when he told us his name and when you came back and sprang it on him.”

  “You don’t think I’m just good like that?”

  “You may be, but the department system isn’t. It might have told you if he was known to us, but not anything else about him. Did you Google him?”

  They stepped over a pile of last week’s snow. Framingham grinned. “Yes, and no, and that’s what’s interesting. I Googled him before and got nothing. That e-mail I just got? That was Interpol.”

  “Before what? Interpol? What are you talking about?”

  “After Dr. Warner told me about Michael Bonnard, I thought I’d check him out.” Framingham slid into the car. “I found two photos of him at events with this Spencer George. So I thought I’d check him out.”

  “I didn’t find anything like that. All I saw was the Rockefeller U. links.”

  “You probably didn’t look for misspellings of his name.”

  They reached the car and got in. Charlotte started it and steered out onto the Bronx street. “Not too shabby,” she admitted.

  Framingham snapped his fingers. “See, I am all that. Spelled with one n, with a t, all kinds of things. Told you I was bored. I found him twice with this Spencer George guy and that was enough to get me interested. You have to admit, they don’t look like they belong together.”

  “Love is blind.”

  “You got that feeling, too?”

  “I did, and by the way, it makes Bonnard less of a suspect in our killing.”

  “If you’re still thinking crime of passion, sure. But that wasn’t what interested me.”

  “What was?”

  “At first, I was just bored. Like you said, I was fishing. But I didn’t catch anything. I couldn’t find a thing on Spencer George anywhere. No Wikipedia entry, no Google hits, no nothin’. He has no online presence. The photos with Bonnard were it and both of them get his name wrong, too. One spells ‘Spenser’ with an s and the other gets it backwards. George Spencer. He probably doesn’t know they exist or he’d make them go away, too.”

  “He’s scrubbed out?”

  “Thoroughly. He must pay a service to do it, untag photos and so on, though I’ll bet there wasn’t much to begin with. That kind of thing’s expensive. Now I ask myself, why would someone do that?”

  “To protect their privacy?”

  “That’s a lot of trouble to go to so no one knows you went to an art opening. So on a hunch I ran him through Interpol.”

  “And?”

  “He’s almost invisible there, too.”

  “Almost?”

  “Now, you can’t laugh at me.”

  “Matt, laughing at you makes my life worth living.”

  “When will you learn?” Framingham paused dramatically. “He’s been scrubbed from Interpol, too.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t think so. My guy there—a Brit, by the way, a fifteenth cousin on the Framingham side—”

  “A cousin? Really?”

  “Who knows? But it’s like Indians, like your clan system. We upper-class Brits are all related and since we’re under attack from all sides—”

  “Jesus, Matt!”

  “We stick together, I’m trying to say. Please don’t crash this department vehicle. He just e-mailed me, my cousin whose name isn’t Framingham. He found a short obscure line in a long obscure bulletin alerting departments worldwide to an endless list of persons of interest, including one Spencer George, a collector on the run from Rome after the bust-up of a scheme to rob the Vatican.”

  “Rob the Vatican? Matt, you’re insane!”

  “I’m just reporting. Come on, Charlotte, think about it. Even if there was no such plot, if some agency ever thought there was, shouldn’t there be more paperwork? A cybertrail, I mean. One little bulletin, that’s it? Interpol’s just a fancy cop shop. Cops are all alike. Everything in triplicate, nothing thrown away. If the guy was referred to once, he was referred to a dozen times. If there’s a bulletin, there are lists the bulletin’s on. There’d be surveillance shots, photo arrays, progress reports, false sightings. Something. And”—he thrust a triumphant finger in the air—“there’d be a record of his arrival here.”

  “Here? The U.S.? There isn’t?”

  “No, there isn’t. But he seems to be here, doesn’t he? This guy who got himself erased from the Interpol system. Here, and hanging around with a man who was disappointed in a seven-million-dollar mask a few hours before a woman was killed in a violent and unexplained way in a room with same. Admit it. Something strange is going on.”

  “All right,” said Charlotte slowly. “You might have a point. We should look into it. As long as you don’t put the flying leap across Seventy-first Street back on the table.”

  “You know”—Framingham put on the innocent face again—“there are some animals that could make that leap. Not regular normal animals, of course.”

  “Oh, no. No, no, I know you don’t mean—”

  “Just sayin’. Special ones. A special kind of wolf, or deer. An eagle could have flown.”

  “Special ones. Matt. Please tell me you’re not saying what I know you are. My God, you are. You think she was killed by a werewolf. Shit. You are out of control.”

  “Your people say shapeshifter, don’t you? Now, Dr. Bonnard, he looks like a normal human specimen, but Spencer George strikes me as a guy with sharp pointy teeth. I should’ve told him a knock-knock joke, so he’d have smiled and we could’ve seen them.”

  “The jokes you tell, that would never work.” Charlotte looked over at him. “Oh, crap. You’re pulling my chain, aren’t you?”

  “Well, hell.” Framingham grinned broadly. “You make it so easy.” He settled back with a satisfied air. “Really, I’m just asking you to keep an open mind.”

  “The fact that I haven’t chucked your skinny white-boy upper-class Brit ass into the East River proves how open my mind is.”

  “Of course it does. But Charlotte? About that leap being back on the table? As far as I’m concerned, it was never
off.”

  39

  His long gray braids drawn back by the wind, Abornazine stood on the bluff looking over the river. The Hudson, he’d learned as a child to call these magnificent waters, this river that flowed two ways. He’d called it that before he’d understood the mortifying arrogance of naming things that had names already.

  He’d been born Peter van Vliet, to the descendants of colonizers, a child of power and privilege. And wealth: oh yes, a good deal of wealth. The injustice of his position had disquieted him from the time he understood it. As he grew so did his shame in what he had and his guilt in the ways his ancestors had acquired it. His family lived the empty life of the idle rich: travel and parties and fretting about the delicate parsing of their ranking among other equally meaningless people. No one paid any regard to the young boy, cringing at every gift of gem-encrusted jewelry and each invitation to a benefit gala in aid of some group trampled by those dancing and dining on its behalf.

  Sent away to school with others of his caste, he was repelled by the easy certitude of his fellows that they did, indeed, own and rule, and that it was right and just that they should. He was drawn to solitude, to the forests. Spreading tracts of woodlands surrounded his home, others encircled the school, and what time he could steal he spent among the trees and the creatures who lived there, learning their ways. Often he’d sleep in the woods; the school did not approve, but his mother, who in the general way showed no particular interest in her son, coolly informed the institution that she would prefer if they left him to pass his time however he pleased, including the time he spent sleeping, providing he fulfilled his academic obligations. He therefore made a point of succeeding in his course work on a high level, and his athletic skills also grew, if only in the solitary sports: running, swimming, riding, shooting.

  He spoke little, but became a magnet for the few others like himself who understood the catastrophically wrong course on which the entire world had been set when Europeans conquered this beautiful land. His small group would sit in clearings in the forest, telling tales of the people who used to walk these woods, live easily on this earth; and tales of what the world should be like, what it would be like if the afternoons they were spending could stretch to encompass their entire lives.