'Maybe a bag of lime,' Edie offered. 'To obliterate his features after we kill him. Maybe even before we kill him.'
'Edie, you have such an interesting take on things. Don't you just love that about her, prisoner? The youth of Toronto agrees, Edie: You have a very interesting take on things.'
47
CANDLE wax, wood polish, and old incense. The smells in the cathedral never changed. Cardinal sat in a pew near the back and let the memories come: There was the altar where he had served Mass as a boy in surplice and soutane, there the confessionals where he had owned up to some but by no means all of his first sexual adventures, there the rail where his mother had lain in her coffin, there the font where Kelly had been baptized, a doll-faced banshee whose shrieks had unnerved everybody, especially the young priest who had anointed her.
Cardinal's faith had left him sometime in his early twenties and it had never come back. He had attended Mass regularly throughout Kelly's girlhood only because Catherine had wanted it and unlike, say, McLeod, who had nothing but contempt for Rome and all her works, Cardinal had no strong feelings against the Church. Or in favor of it. So he wasn't sure why he had stopped by the cathedral this Thursday afternoon. One minute he had been in D'Anunzio's eating a ham and Swiss, next minute he's in the back row of the church.
Gratitude? Certainly, he was glad Delorme's investigation was over. And, as for Dyson, he felt terribly sad, almost a kind of heartbreak. McLeod had heaped scorn on their fallen boss all morning. 'Good riddance,'- barking across the squad room to anyone available. 'It's not enough he's an arrogant fuck? He also has to be dirty? Some people don't know when to stop.' But Cardinal felt no moral superiority; it could just as easily have been him hauled off to the district jail in cuffs.
A gigantic gold-fringed medallion of Mary being assumed into heaven hung above the altar. As a boy, Cardinal had often prayed to her to help him be a better student, a better hockey player, a better person, but he didn't pray now. Sitting in the fragrant expanse of the cathedral was enough to evoke that sense of wholeness he had known as a boy, and as a young man. He knew to the hour when he had lost that wholeness. Just because Delorme had stopped investigating him didn't mean his own conscience was going to grant him a reprieve.
'Excuse me.'
A bulky man edged his way past Cardinal into the pew- pretty annoying with the place utterly empty, but people had their favorite pews, and Cardinal was, after all, an interloper, not a regular.
'Nice little church you got here.'
The man was almost exactly square. He perched beside Cardinal like a perfect cube of meat, a solid mass devoid of neck or waist or hips. He pointed to the medallion of the Assumption. 'Cool medal. I like churches, don't you?' He turned to Cardinal and smiled, if you could call that sort of mirthless display of teeth smiling. Two gold incisors gleaming for an instant, then gone. The man's face, flat and round as an Eskimo's, was harrowed by four symmetrical scars, vivid white grooves that ran across the forehead and chin, and vertically down each cheek. The nose had the misshapen, imploded look of a pepper. The man had to turn a full ninety degrees to face Cardinal, because his right eye was covered by a black leather patch. On this, some wit had stenciled the word Closed.
Was he someone Cardinal had put in jail? Surely he would have remembered this creature molded from the clay of pure thug.
'Warm for February.' The man slid a black watch cap from his skull, revealing a perfectly shaved scalp. Then, with surprising delicacy, he removed first one leather glove and then the other, resting his hands on his knees. The knuckles of one hand were tattooed with the word fuck, the knuckles of the other said you.
'Kiki,' Cardinal said.
The gold incisors flashed again. 'I thought you'd never remember. Long time no see, huh?'
'Sorry I didn't visit you in Kingston, but you know how it is. You get busy…'
'Ten years busy, right. I been busy, too.'
'I see that. Been doing some decorating. I love what you've done with the patch.'
'No, I been working out. I can bench-press three hundred, now. What about you?'
'I don't know. Around one seventy last time I checked.' It was closer to one fifty, but he was talking to a Visigoth; ruthless honesty was not called for.
'Doesn't that make you a little nervous?'
'Why should it? Unless you're threatening me. I hope you are- given that you're a paroled felon and all.'
The gold incisors shone wetly. Kiki Baldassaro, better known to his circle of intimates as Kiki B., or Kiki Babe. His father was a mid-level Mafioso who had been stoutly protecting the Toronto construction industry from labor problems for decades. One of the ways he did this was to insert his rhomboidal son into a company's payroll as a 'welder.' And welding paid very well indeed, especially when you considered that Kiki B. was not expected to actually show up at the site. God forbid.
Despite the guaranteed income, Kiki B. was not one to sit at home idle. He liked to work with his hands, and when the indebted needed encouragement, or the forgetful needed reminding, he was happy to help out with a bit of pressure in the right place. In fact, Cardinal was recalling now, that was how Kiki B. had met his boss and spiritual adviser, Rick Bouchard. On a routine assignment for Baldassaro pиre, he had put a Bouchard henchman in traction. Bouchard showed up at Kiki's door and explained his position to him with a crowbar. They had been friends ever since.
'Musta taken a crane to get that thing up there.' Kiki had returned his attention to Our Lady of the Assumption, aloft on her medallion.
'You didn't hear about that?' Cardinal unbuttoned his coat. It may have been fear or it may have been the church's heating system, but sweat was running down his rib cage in cold rivulets. 'Night before they were supposed to hoist Our Lady in place, the crane operator skids off the highway down at Burke's Falls and breaks his arm. This is the day before Easter, thirty years ago or so. They're in despair because the next day's Easter and the Bishop is coming all the way from the Soo to say Mass. Big occasion, and it looks for sure like Our Lady's gonna sit it out in a crate. So they rush around calling for crane operators- they don't exactly grow on trees up here the way they do in Toronto- and finally they get one. He agrees to come in at five A.M. to hang the medallion.'
'Sure he does. Five A.M., that's triple time.'
'The point, Kiki, is he never got to do it.'
'Okay. 'Nother accident, right?'
'No accident. Next day he comes into the church, five A.M. Rest of the crew is already here. He finds them all kneeling in the front row, and these are not Catholics, you understand, not all of them. But they're all kneeling in the front row and their mouths are hanging open. And then the new crane operator looks up and sees the reason why they're all so ga-ga.' Cardinal pointed.
'She was already up there.'
Cardinal nodded. 'She was already up there. How? When? Nobody knows. Clearly several natural laws were broken- gravity, for a start.'
'So somebody came in at night and hoisted her up there.'
'Well, yeah, that's what everybody figured. But they never figured out who. Place was locked up tight. Crane's sitting outside, no keys in it. Foreman had the keys. It was spooky. They kept it really quiet and everything, but- maybe I shouldn't tell you…'
'Tell me what? Go on, tell me. You can't start a story and then quit halfway.'
'It's a long time ago, I guess I can tell you. The Vatican sent one of their investigators over here. A priest who was also a scientist. Only reason I know, they had to tell us. It was a professional courtesy.'
'The Vatican. They find anything?'
'Nope. It's a mystery. They do call her Our Lady of Mysteries.'
'That's right. I forgot that. That's a good story, Cardinal. I think you made it up, though.'
'Why would I do a thing like that? I'm sitting in a church, I'm not about to start blaspheming. Who knows what could happen?'
'It's a good story. You could tell it to Peter Gzowsky. He's a good listener. That's what got him on the air.'
'That show's not on anymore, Kiki. You miss things like that in prison. Are you aware of the legal concept of
