worked as a crime reporter in Los Angeles.
The number of serious crimes was greater than the number of reporters available to cover them. Every week, scores of industrious thugs and motivated maniacs committed outrageous acts of mayhem, and discovered, to their disgruntlement, that they had been denied even so much as two inches of column space in the press.
One morning, Maxwell found himself having to choose between covering a kinky-sex murder, an extremely violent murder committed with an ax and a pick and a shovel, a murder involving cannibalism, and the assault upon and ritual disfigurement of four elderly Jewish women in a group home.
To his surprise as well as to the surprise of his colleagues, he barricaded himself in the coffee room and would not come out. He had vending machines stocked with candy bars and peanut-butter-filled cheese crackers, and he figured he could go at least a month before he might develop scurvy due to severe vitamin C deficiency.
When his editor arrived to negotiate through the barricaded door, Maxwell demanded either to have fresh orange juice delivered weekly by ladder through the third-story coffee-room window-or to be fired. After considering those options for exactly the length of time that the newspaper's vice president of employee relations deemed necessary to avoid a wrongful-termination lawsuit, the editor fired Maxwell.
Triumphant, Maxwell vacated the coffee room, and only later, at home, with a sudden gale of laughter, realized that he simply could have quit. Journalism had come to seem not like a career but like an incarceration.
By the time he finished laughing, he decided that his petit madness had been a divine gift, a call to leave Los Angeles and to go where he could find a greater sense of community and less gang graffiti. He had become a postulant fifteen years ago, then a novice, and for a decade he had been a monk under full vows.
Now he examined the window in Jacob's room and said, 'When this building was converted from the old abbey, some of the windows on the ground floor were enlarged and replaced. They have wood muntins. But on this level, the old windows remain. They're smaller, and they're solid bronze-rails, muntins, everything bronze.'
'Nothin's gonna chop or chew through those too easy,' Brother Knuckles declared.
'And the panes,' said Romanovich, 'are ten-inch squares. That brute we encountered in the storm would not fit through one. Indeed, if it managed to tear out the entire window, it would still be too large to get into the room.'
I said, 'The one in the cooling tower was smaller than the one that smacked down the SUV. It couldn't get through a ten-inch pane, but it'll fit through an open window this size.'
'Casement window, opens outward,' Brother Maxwell noted, tapping the crank handle. 'Even if it smashed a pane and reached through, it would be blocking the window it was trying to open.'
'While clinging to the side of the building,' said Romanovich.
'In high wind,' Brother Maxwell said.
'Which it might be able to do,' I said, 'while also keeping seven plates spinning atop seven bamboo poles.'
'Nah,' Brother Knuckles said. 'Maybe three plates but not seven. We're good here. This is good.'
Squatting beside Jacob, I said, 'That's beautiful embroidery.'
'Keeping busy,' he said, his head remaining bowed, his eyes on his work.
'Busy is good,' I said.
He said, 'Busy is happy,' and I suspected that his mother had counseled him about the satisfaction and the peace that come from giving to the world whatever you are capable of contributing.
Besides, his work gave him a reason to avoid eye contact. In his twenty-five years, he had probably seen shock, disgust, contempt, and sick curiosity in too many eyes. Better not to meet any eyes except those of the nuns, and those you drew with a pencil and into which you could shade the love, the tenderness, for which you yearned.
'You're going to be all right,' I said.
'He wants me dead.'
'What he wants and what he gets are not the same thing. Your mom called him the Neverwas because he was never there for the two of you when you needed him.'
'He's the Neverwas, and we don't care.'
'That's right. He's the Neverwas, but he's also the Neverwill. He never will hurt you, never will get at you, not as long as I'm here, not as long as one sister or one brother is here. And they're all here, Jacob, because you're special, you're precious to them, and to me.'
Raising his misshapen head, he met my eyes. He did not at once look shyly away, as always he had done previously.
'You all right?' he asked.
'I'm all right. Are you all right?'
'Yeah. I'm all right. You… you're in danger?'
Because he would know a lie, I said, 'Maybe a little.'
His eyes, one higher in his tragic face than the other, were pellucid, full of timidities and courage, beautiful even in their different elevations.
His gaze sharpened as I had never seen it, as his soft voice grew softer still: 'Did you accuse yourself?'
'Yes.'
'Absolution?'
'I received it.'
'When?'
'Yesterday.'
'So you're ready.'
'I hope I am, Jacob.'
He not only continued to meet my eyes but also seemed to search them. 'I'm sorry.'
'Sorry about what, Jacob?'
'Sorry about your girl.'
'Thank you, Jake.'
'I know what you don't know,' he said.
'What is that?'
'I know what she saw in you,' he said, and he leaned his head on my shoulder.
He had done what few other people have ever achieved, though many may have tried: He had rendered me speechless.
I put an arm around him, and we stayed like that for a minute, neither of us needing to say anything more, because we were both all right, we were ready.
CHAPTER 48
IN THE ONLY ROOM CURRENTLY WITHOUT children in residence, Rodion Romanovich put a large attache case on one of the beds.
The case belonged to him. Brother Leopold had earlier fetched it from the Russian's room in the guesthouse and had brought it back in the SUV.
He opened the case, which contained two pistols nestled in the custom-molded foam interior.
Picking up one of the weapons, he said, 'This is a Desert Eagle in fifty Magnum. In a forty-four Magnum or three-fifty-seven, it is a formidable beast, but the fifty Magnum makes an incredible noise. You will enjoy the noise.'
'Sir, with that in a cactus grove, you could do some heavy-duty meditation.'
'It does the job, but it has kick, Mr. Thomas, so I recommend that you take the other pistol.'
'Thank you, sir, but no thank you.'
'The other is a SIG Pro three-fifty-seven, quite manageable.'
'I don't like guns, sir.'
'You took down those shooters in the mall, Mr. Thomas.'
'Yes, sir, but that was the first time I ever pulled a trigger, and anyway it was someone else's gun.'
'This is someone else's gun. It is my gun. Go ahead, take it.'
'What I usually do is just improvise.'
