‘Shut up and listen. Behave normally and do as I tell you.’
Sundance realized immediately that this was no joke.
‘Do what I tell you, both of you. Get everyone together and get as far away from the building as possible. Do you understand? As far away as possible.’
‘OK.’
‘Where’s Father McKean?’
Sundance pointed to the attic. ‘In his room, with John.’
‘Oh, no!’
As if to reinforce that instinctive cry, there suddenly came from the house the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Vivien leaped to her feet.
‘Go. Run as fast as you can.’
Vivien ran quickly to the house. Russell followed her. She could hear their steps crunching on the gravel, and at that moment it was an unbearable noise. She went in through the glass-fronted door and found a group of kids looking up at the top of the stairs, where the shot had come from.
Stunned faces. Curious faces. Faces scared at seeing her come in with a gun. Even though they knew her, Vivien thought it best to identify herself in a way that would inspire confidence in them.
‘Police. I’m dealing with this. All of you, out and away from the house. Now!’
The kids didn’t need to be asked twice. They ran out, with terrified faces. Vivien hoped that Sundance, who was still outside, would have the strength and charisma to calm them down and lead them to safety.
She headed up the stairs, keeping the gun pointed in front of her.
Russell was behind her. Russell was with her.
Step by step they got to the second floor, where the kids’ rooms were. There was no one on the landing. They must all have been outside, otherwise she would have found some of them drawn by the sound of the gunshot. She looked out the window and saw a group of kids running along the road and disappearing from view.
The relief did not make her drop her guard.
She listened. No voice, no moaning. Only the echo of that shot seemed to linger like a living presence in the stairwell. Vivien carried on up the final flight of stairs to the attic. At the top, they could see an open door.
As silent as cats, they reached the top landing. Vivien stood for a moment with her back against the wall. She took a deep breath and slipped inside the room with her gun aimed.
What she saw filled her with horror and made her react in an instant. Father McKean was lying on the floor with a gunshot wound in the middle of his forehead. His open eyes stared up at the ceiling as if dazed. Under his head a pool of blood was spreading over the floor. John was sitting on a stool, looking at him with empty eyes, clutching a pistol in his hand.
‘Throw the gun away. Now.’
Vivien had shouted instinctively, but John was clearly in shock. He did not look as if he was going to react, or even as if he was able to do so. In spite of this, Vivien tightened her grip on the stock of her gun.
‘Throw the gun away, John. Now.’
The man looked down at the hand clutching the revolver, as if he had only just realized that he was holding it. Then his fingers opened and the weapon fell to the floor. Vivien kicked it away.
John looked up at her with tear-filled eyes. His voice was a moan. ‘We’ll say it was me. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll say it was me.’
Vivien took the handcuffs from her belt and put them around his wrists, immobilizing him with his arms behind his back. Only then did she allow herself to breathe.
Russell was standing in the doorway, looking at the body lying on the floor in its pool of blood. Vivien wondered if he was here at this moment, or reliving some scene from his past. She gave him the time to recover.
John was sitting on the stool, looking down at the floor, still murmuring his incomprehensible litany. Vivien did not think there would be any unexpected moves from him. She became aware of the place where she was. An austere room with no concessions to vanity except for a Van Gogh poster on the wall.
And on the floor, next to the closet, an open suitcase.
From the wide-open lid, three things stuck out: a thick, dog-eared brown envelope, a photograph album and a green military jacket.
It was only now that she realized that the TV set was on. A freeze-frame was up on the screen. She saw Russell come in, take the remote control from the desk and restart the old video recorder. The figures on the screen began moving again. The image was so grainy, it might well be a conversion to VHS of an old Super8. And along with the image came the voice.
Vivien stared at the screen, sick at heart.
Sitting in the middle of the stage in a small theatre, motionless under the lights, in front of a crowded auditorium, was a ventriloquist. He was young, but not so young as to be unrecognizable. On his knees he held a puppet, about three feet high. The puppet was of an elderly man in a white tunic, with long snowy white hair and a beard of the same colour.
Michael McKean turned to the puppet and asked him a question in an impatient tone. ‘But why won’t you tell me who you are?’
The puppet replied in a calm, deep voice, ‘Haven’t you guessed yet? You really are stupid, boy.’
Then, moved by the ventriloquist’s skilled hand, he turned his head towards the auditorium to savour the audience’s laughter. He was silent for a moment, raising his thick eyebrows over his blue glass eyes in an unnatural manner.
Finally he said the words the whole audience was waiting for.
‘I am God.’
CHAPTER 36
‘And when we got to Joy, we saw that John, Father McKean’s right-hand man, had killed him. That’s all we know for the moment.’
Vivien finished her account and shared the silence of the other people in the room. Some already knew the story, had gone through it stage by stage through her words and felt the bitter taste of confirmation in their mouths. Some had heard it for the first time from beginning to end, and couldn’t remove the incredulity from their faces.
It was 7 a.m. The morning light came in through the window and threw a pattern on the floor.
They were all exhausted.
Present in the mayor’s office in City Hall, apart from the mayor himself, were Police Commissioner Joby Willard, Captain Alan Bellew, Vivien, Russell and Doctor Albert Grosso, a psychologist chosen by Gollemberg as a consultant to the investigation, who had been hurriedly summoned to take care of John Kortighan in his confused state.
Given what Joy had in its walls, they had all agreed that it was impossible for the kids to spend the night there. They had been entrusted to the care of the community’s outside helpers and accommodated temporarily in a hotel in the Bronx that had agreed to take them in.
She had given Sundance a kiss, reserving the right to put off to the following day the news of her mother’s death. As she watched them get in the bus, it had struck Vivien that it would take a lot of time and effort before they forgot. She hoped that none of them lost their way as they confronted this new test.
