What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

John put one hand on Billy’s forehead, expecting to find him feverish. But though greasy with a scrim of sweat, the pale skin felt cold.

“If you find a way to talk and if you want to talk, tell them to call me,” John said, without much hope that it would happen. “I’ll come back. I’ll come back right away.”

He could see himself reflected in the boy’s flat blue eyes, seeming to be transparent as he floated upon those irises, as if he were a man who had two spirits and was engaged in a double haunting.

Smoothing the lank hair away from Billy’s brow, he whispered, “God help you. God help me.”

In the third-floor corridor, after Coleman Hanes closed the door to the room, he said, “What the hell was that about?”

Heading toward the security vestibule, John said, “How long has he been like that?”

“Since late yesterday afternoon. What’s this glove and hand business?”

“He became like that immediately after I left? An hour after, two hours?” John pressed.

“Soon after. What is this, what did you want in there?”

“Like twenty minutes after, ten after, five?” John rapped on the window in the security-vestibule door.

Hanes said, “Right after, I guess. I don’t know to the minute. Are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”

As the guard buzzed them into the vestibule, John said, “I don’t talk about evidence in an open case.”

“This is an open-and-shut case.”

“It’s technically open.”

Hanes’s usually pleasant face became a storm warning. He kept the pending thunder out of his voice, making a conscious effort to speak more softly. “Nine times he stabbed his sister.”

John retrieved his pistol from the guard and holstered it. “If he comes out of the trance or whatever it is, if he wants to talk to me, I’ll come back.”

Hanes loomed, intimidating. “He doesn’t belong out there. Not ever.”

“That’s not what this is about,” John said as he pushed the elevator-call button.

“It sure sounded like that’s what it’s about.”

“Well, it’s not. Call me if he comes around. Call me whether he asks for me or not.” The elevator door slid open, and John stepped into the cab. “I can find my way out.”

“That’s not the rules,” the big man said, staying close behind him, crowding him. “I have to escort you.”

After a silence, between the second and the ground floors, John said, “My son wants to be a marine. Any advice for him?”

“You remember her picture?” Hanes asked.

“Your sister? I do. I remember.”

“I don’t guess you’d remember her name?”

“I remember all their names. She was Angela, Angela Denise.”

John’s memory and his words clearly did not allay the orderly’s suspicion.

In the lobby, as they walked past the reception desk toward the main entrance, Hanes said, “Twenty-two years, she’s still dead—and the guy who did her, he’s got this woman admirer, she writes a blog about him. He’s got followers.”

“Billy Lucas is never going to have followers.”

“Oh, yes, he will. They all do. Every last sick damn one of them.”

Hanes spoke the truth.

John said, “I can only tell you that isn’t what this is about. I’m not his champion. He’ll never be freed either from these walls or from what he saw himself do.”

Still unappeased, Hanes followed John through the front doors, jostling him—perhaps unintentionally—when he fished his car keys from a sport-coat pocket.

The dropped keys rang off the pavement, and Hanes snatched them up. He held them in a clenched fist.

The orderly’s eyes narrowed in his bleak brown face. “ ‘What he saw himself do’? That’s a strange choice of words.”

John met the other man’s stare but only shrugged.

“The way you were with him in there,” Hanes said.

“What way was that?”

“Sad. No. Not sad. Almost … tender.”

John stared at the fist that held the keys, the fist of a man who had been to war and no doubt killed in self- defense.

Then he looked at his own hands, with which he had killed Alton Turner Blackwood twenty years earlier, with which he had wounded two men and killed another during his years of police work.

He said, “There was a brilliant artist, Caravaggio, he died back in 1610, when he was only thirty-nine years old. In his time, he was arguably the greatest painter in the world.”

“What’s he to me?”

“What are you to me or me to you? Caravaggio led a troubled life, brought to trial eleven times. He murdered a man, had to go on the run. Yet he was profoundly religious. He painted masterpiece after masterpiece on Christian themes, among other things.”

“A hypocrite,” the orderly said.

“No. He knew his faults, despised them. He was a tormented man. Maybe because he was tormented, he rejected the classical idealism of Michelangelo that other painters still embraced. He portrayed the human body and the human condition with a realism no one before him ever dared. The figures in his religious paintings aren’t ethereal and idealized. They’re deeply human, their suffering explicit.”

“What’s the point of this?” Hanes asked impatiently.

“I need my car keys. I’m explaining why you should give them back to me. One of Caravaggio’s paintings is called The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Peter is shown as a post-middle-aged man with a thick body and a worn face. There’s Peter nailed to a cross, three men lifting it, hauling it erect. There’s darkness and menace in the picture, such violence. The expression on Peter’s face is complex, compelling, you can’t stop staring at it. A man like you or me … we should see that painting for the first time alone, no one watching. Study it, give it an hour, and Caravaggio will show you the horror of what we are but the glory of what we could be, he’ll take you from despair to hope and back again. If you let him … he’ll reduce you to tears.”

“Maybe not,” Hanes said.

“Maybe not. But maybe so. Here’s the thing. I admire Caravaggio’s talent, the genius and hard work he brought to it. I admire the faith he tried—and often failed—to live by. But if I’d been a cop in his time, I would’ve chased him from one end of Europe to the other till I caught him, and I’d have seen him hanged. A hundred works of genius aren’t compensation for the murder of a single innocent.”

Hanes had a searchlight stare, and after a silent assessment, he relinquished the keys.

John rounded the car to the driver’s door.

The orderly said, “Your son, he wants to be a marine—what’s his name?”

“Zachary. Zach.”

“Tell him, it’ll be the best thing he’ll ever do.”

“I will.”

“Tell him, he’ll never regret one moment of it, except maybe the moment he retires from it. And one more thing.”

John waited at the open car door.

“Someday I’d like to know what that was about in there.”

“If I’m around at Christmas, come have dinner with us.”

“Deal. How do you spell ‘Caravaggio’?”

After spelling it, John got in the car and drove away.

In a few weeks, the purple beeches in the median strip between the two lanes would change to a rich shade of copper.

By Christmas, these trees would be bare.

He remembered other purple beeches in a park, their copper-leafed limbs draped with an early snow, a dazzling display.