by Farris, John
Yolande had died in Jonas's arms only a few miles from the castle, a pathetic blue lump, in the torn fleece which he stripped from his own back in a last futile attempt to keep her warm. Despite the medicinal tea she coughed her lungs out, bits of bloody tissue at a time. Had Jonas accidentally smothered her, a hand over her face to muffle the sounds in the sifting-down night while spotlights raked the-trees? For almost a full day after they reached shelter he refused to let them take Yolande from him. Karl slept and slept, exhausted. On waking he attacked his big brother in a frenzy partly caused by fever. Yoan-ash! Yoan-ash! Why didn't you save her?
He would never forget the look of bewilderment and anguish on Jonas's face, the tears that didn't quite flow. Bad luck, Karl. It was all Jonas said. The next day he went back to join the Resistance in Brno.
He killed a lot of Nazis in the war, perhaps some S.S. who had been responsible for the horror of Drbal.
Let me now make amends, Karl thought. He put down the cool cloth and reached for his glasses and the rosary of heavy handcrafted silver, a luxury that sometimes embarrassed him. His ordination gift from Jonas. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit . . .
But it had been longer than a minute since the last breath, almost two minutes. The nurse was standing beside the bed, a hand on Jonas's wrist. Karl rose wearily himself, unable to believe that it could be over. The nurse picked up the receiver of the telephone. Karl hesitated a few moments longer, his eyes on the motionless chest. Then he sighed and kneeled.
Lord, accept the soul of Thy repentant servant Jonas . . .
Jonas had performed his Act of Perfect Contrition several days ago, and he had received Extreme Unction, the Last Rites of the Church. Now there would be a wake for the few who cared to come, and a Mass for the Dead. In two days, three at the most, Father Karl could return to his parish duties in England.
The young resident doctor, a woman, was at bedside in under three minutes. She pronounced Jonas dead. Karl packed the reliquary and the eighteenth-century statue of St. Florian, patron saint of a once-formidable family now all but extinct, and went out into the hall.
Cosima was there, wiping tears from her cheeks. She had been waiting since two o'clock in the visitors' lounge opposite the nurses' station. She looked admirably fresh and resilient despite the tears, sustained, no doubt, by her dancer's vitality.
"I know he didn't want anyone to see him, but . . ."
Karl nodded. "He was your father. Go in."
He waited for Cosima in the lounge. One of the floor nurses gave him a cup of coffee. When Cosima rejoined him she was more pale than before, but dry-eyed. She bummed a cigarette from Karl. They walked to the elevators.
"You must be starved," she said.
"I'm all right." His voice was hoarse from the hours of reading aloud. "A little sleepy."
"A drink, then."
"That would be welcome."
"Would you like to spend the night? Jessica's gone home for a brief visit. There's plenty of room."
"No, thank you, Cosima. I'm comfortable at the rectory. Tomorrow is a Holy Day of Obligation; I'm celebrating the six-thirty mass for Father Pannell."
She toyed with the big square horn buttons on her lambskin greatcoat.
"I should call Charles and John. No, it can wait until tomorrow. So now the fighting starts in earnest. All the hate comes out."
"But you won't be a part of it."
"I do not care about one cent of my father's money! I have a good life. Pardon me for even mentioning our . . . sibling inadequacies. I know this has been a terrible experience for you, Uncle Karl. Now there's no one left."
He smiled tiredly. Jonas had been a stranger to him for more than twenty years. He thought of the Jonas Krasno who had died, a rich suspicious alienated man, despised by his associates and all but one of his children. And how had Jonas come to that? How had he changed so? Of course he had been embittered by the war; gradually his hatred of the Germans was transmuted into a scathing intolerance for all the failings humanity is prey to. He had lived this long, perhaps, by becoming a driven man, interested only in the accumulation of riches and power. A tragically familiar story. Father Karl preferred to remember the boy who had fearlessly hurled lye in the face of the Gestapo chief, survived a bullet in the back, lugged two helpless children across a wilderness of snow. . . .
When he and Cosima left the elevator on the first floor of Herlands West he was thinking of the occupation of Drbal, of the men in black leather trench coats who came first in their powerful cars and killed his father. Cosima was preoccupied with her own memories. Neither of them was immediately aware of the two men who walked through the sliding glass doors at the entrance.
"Hold it right there!"
Father Karl looked up in surprise and saw guns aimed at them. The dark gray trench coats these men wore caused a single thought to flash through his mind: Gestapo.
Classical conditioning theory argues that all behavior is a response to, and dominated by, stimuli occurring in the external environment. If he had not been so profoundly tired, if his long vigil had not prompted total recall of the sacking of Drbal that began with machine-gunnings in the square and ended, hours later, in a ghastly firestorm, Father Karl might have stood flatfooted and unresisting. But the impressive stimulus of the thought-form Gestapo had the double effect of disassociating him from the here and now; at the same time it shut down the reticular activating system of the brain with almost surgical precision, thus making imperative the primitive and most natural response to the danger that threatened him. The Gestapo had found them at last, and the hero-brother lay dead.
Father Karl bolted, pulling the startled Cosima along by the hand.
"Run! Run! Run!"
So bright everywhere; he had to go to his room now and quickly pull the shades over the glaring noon windows so that they, so nothing could look in. He would be safe on the floor in the airless hot corner by the shelves where he kept his sailing ship models. Yolande would not make a sound, they would hold each other tightly while the stalking boots went back and forth and then faded away down the crickety stairs. The boots could not come in—ever—because the Archangel Michael had once paid him a sickbed visit and smiled his blessing. Therefore his room was a consecrated place and protected from evil by the powers of a guardian angel, if he could—
—only
Father Karl had the stairwell door half open when two more of them came around a corner at him. One of the MORG agents kicked the door out of the priest's hand and when he reached inside his coat for his rosary another agent shot him twice in the stomach from six feet away with a revolver loaded with wadcutters. The flattened slugs dealt him heavy mortal blows; Karl sat down stunned by their force, robbed of breath.
Cosima fell screaming across him but he wasn't aware of her weight, suddenly he had almost no sensation from the chest down. They pulled Cosima off him almost immediately, but her sheepskin coat was stained like a slaughterhouse pelt. Karl felt very sorry for her: she was always so clean and tidy and delightful in her movements and now she was forced to struggle like a wild thing, haywire and screaming, to get back to him. Oh my child, don't worry about me. He had lost aural perspective; voices had a way-out, end-of-the-tunnel ring. Men, more men everywhere. Men going through Cosima's tote, men with walkie-talkies. Got him! Me? Karl thought. Preposterous. I am simply not worth all this fuss. Men in white smocks broke through the ranks and kneeled beside him; they opened his coat and the rosary fell out. Others were bearing Cosima away; her eyes rolled toward him a final time and cords stood out in her neck.
Karl opened his mouth to speak to her, but he couldn't speak and his jaw sagged. He regretted that he would not, after all, be able to see her dance in London in the spring. One of the interns put the precious rosary in his fist and held it up so he could see and Father Karl was grateful, he died with his gratitude frozen eternally in his eyes.
In the grounded elevator in the basement of Herlands North, Peter
took off the priest's collar and the black suit, bundled the clothing and put the bundle on the roof. He slid the elevator hatch cover closed and got down from the sawhorse. He was now wearing a white short-sleeved cotton shirt and wrinkled white trousers and white shoes. From his valuable black bag he took a different pair of glasses, mod half lenses that perched half way down his nose. He rumpled his hair and filled his shirt pocket with ballpoint pens and a pocket flashlight. He hung a stethoscope around his neck. It looked a little wrong, carrying the bag around, but it was Peter's security blanket. It held his .38 Beretta automatic and two additional full magazines.
He by-passed the elevator core common to the three wings of Herlands Pavilion and proceeded to the basement of Herlands South, which contained the giant laundry for the complex. As he'd expected, the laundry was deserted. He found a selection of hand-pressed smocks that were segregated, for the power elite of the hospital, on one rack. He chose a smock ticketed for a Dr. Chen.
It had been a while since he'd heard voices but he heard several now, following the dungeon-like slam of a metal door.
MORG or Hospital Security, he didn't know which. Peter picked up his bag and walked unhurriedly into the locker room provided for the laundresses and then into the adjacent shower room where four nozzles dripped slowly. By using the shower knobs for footholds he climbed to the oblong clamshell windows near the ceiling and opened one, propping it open with a steel rod. He wriggled through and dropped, damp and grimy, into a short humid passageway with locked black doors at either end and another door midway which was marked DANGER! HIGH TEMPERATURES. He noted the door with the green chalk mark in the upper right hand corner, went to his bag for tools and picked the lock.
On the other side of the door he found himself in the old hospital, specifically an area that included the morgue, the crematorium and an autopsy room. The paint job here was Barbizon green, dusky as a landscape by Corot. The brass gates of the dim elevator devoted to transport of the dead were standing open: there was an occupied gurney inside. Peter rolled the shrouded corpse out into the hall and took the elevator to the third floor. There he got off and crossed the hall to a lab.
Inside a round young black man with a bottle of root beer in one hand was tapping out a query on a computer terminal. A centrifuge was on. The pathologist glanced at Peter but didn't speak.
Peter nodded and smiled and walked up beside him. He put the bag on a counter top, took out the Beretta automatic and placed the muzzle against the black man's head. The pathologist put down his beer and tried to come to attention, but his belly was wedged tight against the computer console. He grew more and more tense but he didn't say a word.
"Don't you talk?" Peter asked him.
"Talk about what, dude? You here to steal, just help yourself."
"Turn the centrifuge off."
"Spoils the batch, you know? I can hear okay."
"I might miss something that's happening out in the hall."
The pathologist gave him a sideways speculative look, then reached out and turned the machine off.
"How does it go from here on?"
"We walk out of here and down the stairs to the Emergency Ward and walk through to the ambulance bay. You talk. Talk about anything you please. Tell me all about your fascinating life. But if you stop talking for even one second you'll lose my interest, and if I lose interest in you, Dr. —"
"Paradies. Sydney Paradies."
"I will fucking do you the honors, my man. There are no alternatives. Don't try to find one."
"What you want is out, right?"
"You said it, Dr. Paradise. So let's go see what Emergency looks like tonight."
Chief of Security at Washington Heights Hospital was a former Fifth Division precinct captain named Adam Hazell, who lived with his wife and two of his four children in a five-room apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan. The Hazells were having a rollicking evening with a few old friends, everybody getting slowly lit but not too rowdy, when the call came through at four minutes past eleven. It was his senior man on the four to midnight shift, Tony Megna. Tony spoke to him over the phone as if somebody was standing right beside him telling him every word to say. There was a lot of trouble, lobby floor of Herlands West, but Megna wouldn't spell it out, he just kept repeating in a strained voice that Hazell should get down there right away.
Adam Hazell drove down Broadway from Dyckman Street, his head throbbing in the cold polluted air. He found the Fort Washington entrance to Herlands West blockaded by three of the type of sedan known as SGI, for Standard Government Issue, and a lot of men in identical dark gray trench coats. They had parked their sedans on the plaza directly in front of the low steps.
All the city cops were out in the slushy street. Three blue-and-white radio cars and a Three-Four sergeant's car, all flashers off. The cops were just standing around breathing clouds and looking at the stalwart men in gray.
On the inside the hospital lobby was teeming; Hazell saw at least six more of the gray coats and a couple of his own uniformed men. Hazell approached the sergeant, the only superior on the scene, who was leaning against the side of his car with his arms folded.
"Adam."
"Cass. What the hell?"
"I don't know, Adam. A shooting. They won't let us in."
"Who won't let you in?"
"Those guys. Feds of some kind."
"Are they narks ?"
"Hell, I don't know, but there's dozens of them, it's like they've took over the goddamn hospital."
"If there's been a shooting, it's city property and you have—"
"Adam, I tried. They read me some kind of directive, for Christ's sake."
"What?"
Sgt. Casden looked at the patrolman next to him, who flipped open his notebook and recited in a gritty voice, "National Security Decision Memorandum number MI8, gives them precedence over all local, state and federal authorities in matters judged to be vital to the security of the United States."
"Matters? Judged? By who?"
One of the men in gray approached them. "Mr. Hazell?"
"Yeh."
"Would you come with me, please?"
"Just a minute," Hazell said rudely, and he turned to Sgt. Casden. "It was me, Joe, I'd start rousting brass. Buck this thing up through Division, and right now."
"On New Year's Eve?"
Hazell said grimly, "It's called covering your ass, Sergeant." He went along with the man in gray, who was not talkative.
It was obvious where someone had had his guts shot out, hard by the stairwell door. Across the hall in an improvised trauma room they'd brought in a shock cart and a team of doctors and nurses were working in a controlled frenzy over the gunshot victim. They had stripped him to his underwear. His black suit had been ripped or cut from his body, there were pieces of it all over the floor. Hazell, as he went past the room, took in the discarded clerical collar and the rosary dangling from a clenched fist.
Mother of God, he thought, horrified. They've shot a priest!
The Feds had set up their command center in a first-floor conference room. Two of them were looking through the priest's wallet and his passport. The head man, some breed of scalp-lifter, was using a radio/ telephone contained in an attaché case. Another agent yelled into a walkie-talkie, getting nothing back but a weak burst of static. The entire hospital was a dead area for most police frequencies, but Hazell didn't say a word, he wasn't doing these people any favors.
"Okay," the Indian said calmly. "It appears we made a mistake." He hung up. "You Hazell?"
"Yeah."
"I'm Darkfeather."
He offered an ID folder with his picture on an embossed plastic card. All five prints from the right hand, not just a thumb-print. Some kind of magnetic code below the latents and the signature tape. On the reverse side a curt directive from the Chief Executive, his seal and signature.
"What is all this, Darkfeather? The cops outside—"
"Will stay outside. Can't have NYPD complicat
in' our procedures."
As an ex-cop Hazell was familiar with most of the clandestine intelligence organizations in the U.S., such as USAINTC and the DCDPO, which were aggressively accumulating dossiers on citizens who remained blissfully unaware that such agencies existed. But MORG was a new one; MORG had Hazell puzzled as well as a little frightened.
"What're you, some cowshit branch of the Treasury? I never heard of this agency!"
"We don't put a whole lot of coin into public relations, Hazell."
Hazell handed the weighty folder back and said in exasperation, "Okay, Chief, so do I get told what you’re doing here?"
"We're lookin' for a very dangerous man. He slipped into the hospital tonight, dressed as a priest. He looked a hell of a lot like that bona fide priest, Father Krasno, out there. A very natural, human mistake was made. But our man is still kickin' around in here. He can't get out. Nobody gets out unless I say. We'll track over every inch of the hospital and flush him. I want you standin' by in case we need instant verification of personnel or a fix on layout. That's it."
"That's it? You shot the wrong man? You shot a priest dead in the lobby of this hospital, and that's all you have to say? Don't you know how this looks?"
Darkfeather just stared at him. Maybe he wowed the women with his hawklike eye and tooth enamel, but Hazell wasn't impressed.
"We have a whole bunch of people who are only concerned with how things look. Now they go to work. I expect those cops on the street will be hearin' from their borough commander just anytime now."
An agent, who sounded as if he'd run several blocks, came into the conference room.
"Sir, I think we. Spotted. Sandza. Emergency, Old Heights. Broadway and. Hundred Sixty-fifth. Lousy radio, so I—"
"Positive ID this time?" Darkfeather asked, not turning a hair.
