A Killer's Guide to Good Works Read online

  “Then make it Tanqueray, please.” She flashed Killian a sickly smile. “I just got out of a relationship.”

  He nodded, resting loose fists on the table, and waited.

  Val studied him. “Where do you live?” she asked after a moment.

  “Wherever I’m working,” said Killian, sipping. “I’m not one for a permanent address.”

  “Well, where did you grow up?”

  His face clouded. “On the Ohio River, actually. Which is surprisingly fast-moving,” he added. “Unless you’re a human.”

  “So you got out.”

  “There was nothing stopping me.”

  She shifted in her seat. “How long have you been writing?” The quality of her conversation was definitely slipping.

  “A few years. It’s my day job.” Suddenly, Killian seemed delighted. “Are you interviewing me?”

  “Just trying to get the picture,” she told him. That writing was his “day job” wouldn’t play well on the back cover of Plumb Lines. Words on Fire was certainly paying this man pretty well to do something that floated him until he sold his screenplay or scored a dance audition. “What would you rather be doing?”

  “I have other interests.” He pushed himself back from the table. “Don’t you?”

  Val fixed him with a blank look. She could tell him her work was her life, but it only that minute occurred to her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to lay bare any single other thing about herself. She changed the subject. “I’d like to get down to business now.”

  He smiled at her, then struck a match and held it to the votive candle the management had forgotten to light. “I’m sure you would.”

  “Thank you.” A slow tilt of her head. Why was he so maddening?

  Her drink arrived, and Killian raised his double. “Here’s to the woman sitting across from me. She is loyal, hard-working, trustworthy, thrifty, humble—”

  Never had a list of virtues seemed quite this disheartening. With a long sip of the gin and tonic, she sat back slightly. Fizzy juniper berries, that was a gin and tonic, her college drink—and Adrian’s. She had to admit, she liked the idea of it. And the taste. Reaching for her tote, she pulled out the manuscript of Plumb Lines and pushed it across the table.

  As Killian pulled out a pair of drugstore reading glasses and paged expressionlessly through her marginal comments, Val folded her hands and stared at nothing. All she had to do was make it through another hour or so, interrupted by some seared ahi tuna served over soba noodles with black sesame seeds and shredded kale, followed by a quick handshake and a half-shouted goodbye. The rest she and Killian could do through email.

  She would have to stay very far away from this handsome and unsettling man.

  3

  Norfolk, England, a day later

  A man called Alaric stood safely away from the entrance to Olde Bandylegs Pub, where he couldn’t be overheard, then looked at his phone. Eight p.m. here meant it was the middle of the afternoon in New York.

  The man he was calling was no doubt at his three o’clock private prayers in that inexpressibly sweet church on Gramercy Park West. The man known as Animus, the soul of their secret organization, called it the Chapel of Robus Christi. The Might of Christ.

  “Yes?”

  That one word, Alaric knew, spoke so much. “I have news,” he said evenly.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s disappeared.” There was no way around it.

  “Disappeared?” the other man repeated. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “The boy lost it.”

  “Lost it!”

  Alaric went on to explain what had happened. According to the boy monk, Fintan, the theft itself went off smoothly, but when he was coming to meet Alaric, out on the ridge trail, he was very nearly caught out by his mates. At that moment he secreted the holy relic in an empty urn, then led the others away, knowing he could retrieve it later. Only when he returned, the urn was gone, and with it, of course, the relic. He searched everywhere.

  “Has he been discreet?”

  The first, and in some ways the only question. “Not perfectly discreet, Animus.”

  The other man groaned. “What has he said?”

  “He asked the abbey maintenance crew. He asked the monks who tend the gardens, thinking maybe the urn was a planter. He even asked his mates.”

  “Has he put an ad in the London Times?” he cried.

  “Not yet,” said Alaric humorously.

  Through gritted teeth, he whispered, “The relic has to be there.”

  After a moment, Alaric murmured. “Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we have…a rival.”

  That possibility had actually never occurred to him. A rival. A competitor for the holy relic. A crusade that needs no knights and no equipment—no clanging public journey awash in the blood of reluctant converts. Oh, no. In this twenty-first century of sleek subterfuge, a lone operative could most certainly do the job. Hadn’t Alaric?

  In all the grand planning, all the years and crimes dedicated to the founding of Robus Christi, the elite organization with a holy prophecy at its core, had their leader been every bit as careless as that hapless boy? Was there a breach in the heart of the organization? A mole? All this operative would have to do is follow the boy in his holy mission, wait for an opportunity alone with the stolen object, and complete the task. A rival. A faceless and nameless rival with unknown motives.

  They both fell silent.

  Finally: “Alaric,” the man in Gramercy Park said softly into the phone.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get as much information as the boy can give you.”

  “I understand.”

  “After all,” he went on, “he may get a lead in the—disappearance.”

  “I agree.” Alaric waited.

  “When you’re sure he has no more information…” said the other man slowly.

  “Yes?”

  “Confess him.” The voice gained strength. “Be careful not to alarm him. Robus Christi does not deal in terror.” It seemed an important point.

  Alaric stood very still. “I see.”

  “Then kill him.”

  With that, Animus ended the call.

  After staring for a moment at his phone, Alaric took off down the road from the pub at a good pace. Kill him, but don’t alarm him. What counted as alarm? Anything from struggling to a quick flash of understanding in those young eyes now destined never to achieve cataracts?

  For all the planning ahead, murder, he had come to appreciate, had a large element of improvisation to it—which, of course, was where mere talent parts ways with brilliance. An unexpected witness, a weapon malfunction, even the vagaries of weather.

  If murder was the object, stay open to mischance. That much he knew.

  Alaric. A corruption of “wings,” because as Animus explained to him at his first meeting of the inner circle, the position required soaring above everything terrestrial—law, convention, memory, and personal history. Whatever it required. And he was suited to the work. With the piety he kept to himself, his great social ease—and no attachments. In another generation, he would have been a spy worth the hanging.

  For all of his life he had found no meaning in anything other than the Church, with its irreducible mysteries and its soaring hymns. The Church was the one thing he had never been able to get to the bottom of—and so he became Alaric, the winged spy, the agent, the effective killer.

  He sighed with the half-smoked American Spirit cigarette cupped in his steady hand. Nothing quite as good as a cigarette in the night air of Norfolk, perched on its cliff. Something barked twice in the woods. Nothing approached. And the slight breeze was warm on his cheeks. It was a perfect life, even with the instructions he had just heard from the soul of t
he organization, safely stowed in his personal chapel there in Gramercy Park.

  How easy murder must seem when you’re three thousand miles away in a fine Manhattan afternoon still lighted by the April sun. How many codicils you can apply when there’s an entire ocean between the desire and the act. Confess him, kill him, don’t scare him, use a three-inch knife, hum a few bars of something Gregorian, thank him for his efforts, be sure you’re wearing your scapular, stand on one goddamned foot.

  Robus Christi does not deal in terror.

  Maybe not. But terror, Alaric took a long final drag on his cigarette and tossed it over the cliff, the glowing tip disappearing in a sudden arc—terror was at the heart of everything we think we know for sure. Even Animus at his mid-afternoon prayers was terrified. Terrified he might fail in the mission, and terrified too that the mission may not be worth a good goddamn when it came right down to it. And all Alaric, the wings of the organization, could do was to keep those two points of terror as far away as possible from each other. Because if they ever touched each other, everything would fly violently apart.

  They had invested too much to have that happen.

  It was a matter of action—which, when it came right down to it, most things were. Here he was, about to confess, kill, and somehow not alarm an indiscreet boy who only ever wanted to earn a place in an organization very ill-suited to the ordinary man. In these final days before the theft, the boy had whispered to Alaric that by stealing the holy relic he would be living the body of Christ, touching what he had touched, becoming indistinguishable from history—and there was no one, not anywhere, he could tell. All the glory had to stay bottled up.

  There in the dark, Alaric could tell it felt painful to his young heart, and the boy had stammered he could only hope that over time it would enlarge him. His bones would reach up and out, his flesh would thicken, his blood would course that much harder. “Glory,” he’d said to Alaric, “will shine from my pores.” If it was what the boy Fintan needed to believe to perform his part, Alaric saw no lasting harm in it.

  And as they shared a smoke in the April midnight, Alaric thought he had made it very clear to the boy that their holy organization depended on absolute discretion. “From every single one of us,” added Alaric, his voice low. “Glory is not a public thing.” He thought the boy had understood.

  But now it was fatally clear.

  They never should have recruited him.

  New York

  “Look at this.” Greta Bistritz swiveled her red Macbook Air around to face Val where she sat on a high padded stool at Greta’s breakfast bar. Once every two weeks Val walked the fourteen blocks to her aunt’s apartment on E. 65th off Lexington for homemade chocolate croissants and designer espresso before they both headed off for work. Today her mother’s younger sister was wearing a ruffled white blouse and camel slacks, pulled together with a wide, soft leather brown belt with a gold clasp. Greta Bistritz had put on a few pounds in recent years, but not so many that she went in mortal fear of belts. She had artful blond hair that came in soft waves to her chin, a fine, long nose, a wide mouth that looked especially good when it was wry, and green eyes. Helplessly vain about her hands, Greta Bistritz sported about half a dozen rings on various fingers.

  Val peered at the screen. It was a bibliographic entry for holdings at the Morgan Library, thirty blocks south of where they sat next to each other peeling off the perfect layers of their pastries. Playing low in the background was Placido Domingo’s “Nessun Dorma,” one of Val’s favorite arias, piercing the simple air it touched and making all things everywhere suddenly and achingly important. Val read the heading on the screen and turned to her aunt. “A catalog of Inquisition materials?”

  Greta nodded. “Morgan has one of the finest collections of holdings from the Spanish Inquisition, which means,” she lifted her coffee cup, “everything in it is almost five hundred years old, which was when the Holy Office opened for business.” Greta Bistritz was the specialist—head of the office, in government-speak—at the Artifact Authentication Agency, an obscure branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce housed in a nondescript building on Seventh Avenue. The Agency was the gatekeeper for questionable pieces imported by reputable museums, galleries, auction houses, collectors, and other commercial interests.

  Greta leaned closer to Val. “Get anything from it?”

  Val scratched her cheek and read the page carefully. “This is a transcription from the original documents.”

  “Correct. A Morgan Library employee transcribed—and microfilmed—the original records of the documentary holdings.”

  “Where are the originals?”

  Greta laughed. “Not in the stacks.”

  Val studied the screen, scrolling down. Columns and rows, entry after entry, mostly a record of names of the accused, charges against them, date and place of trial by The Holy Office, disposition of the case, and any other descriptive notes. All the entries had been translated into English. Val pointed to one: a trial against Fr. José DeMarzo, S.J., 6 June 1594, for soliciting sex in the Confessional. “So they prosecuted their own.”

  “As well as Protestants, Jews, witches, bigamists, you name it. Yes.”

  “Very busy.”

  “Zealotry is what they had instead of Red Bull.”

  Val slid her a look. “Or, I’m pretty sure, Viagra.”

  Greta pushed the bright blue IKEA plate to Val. “Have another,” she said, waving first at the croissants, and then at the screen. “Read on.”

  From what Val could tell, this scrupulous recording of the official business of the Inquisition spanned hundreds of years. Mostly they were the procesos, the trial proceedings, but there were some entries that simply acknowledged receipt of royal decrees, Inquisitorial edicts, and the daily dealings of the Holy Office that had nothing to do with torture or execution. In terms of location, Sevilla, Spain saw the most action. And in terms of the procesos themselves, that terrifying business of the Inquisition, the formal accusations against the citizens unlucky enough to come to their attention were varied. Succinct. Even bizarre. A single row would contain the date, the place, the number of pages related to the matter, the name of the accused, and the accusation. Blasphemy, bigamy, polygamy, superstition, apostasy, heresy, practicing Judaism, witchcraft, misconduct with women, denying the sinfulness of paid fornication, being a priestess, an accomplice, a visionary, or an impostor.

  You could certainly get into a lot of trouble in medieval Spain.

  Down, down, down she scrolled, through the painstaking recorded rows, then back to the first page where Greta had begun. One entry caught her eye. A line item tucked in between an entry in 1594 for the proceso against Diego Mendez, tried for practicing Judaism, which Val knew probably ended in a trip to the stake—and an entry also in 1594 that was a receipt of two copies of an edict issued by the Inquisition listing “various forms” of sacrilege and heresy. Between the stake and the disobedience that could lead up to the stake was one little item. “Ah,” Val murmured, “interesting…”

  1595 Veracruz

  # of Leaves/Pages: 16

  Accusation/Subject: Satire

  Val turned to her aunt, who sat back, and sipped her coffee, eyeing her. “A satire?” When Greta nodded, Val held her mug between both hands and thought about it. “It’s the first work of—”

  Greta interrupted. “The only.”

  Val whistled softly. “The only work of actual literature that’s recorded,” she said, tapping the screen with the backs of her fingers. “I’m wondering—”

  “How bad can it be?”

  “How bad can it be.”

  “Apparently this work was turned in to the Holy Office as a suspected piece of seditious material, otherwise how did it come into their hands?”

  Greta’s point made sense to Val. “And then the Inquisition simply—” She rotated her hand, searching for the idea.
<
br />   “Filed it.” Raising an elegant eyebrow at her, Greta logged out.

  “That’s absolutely what they did. Did they even read it?”

  “We’ll never know.” Greta closed the lid of the laptop and set it at the end of her breakfast bar. “But the real question—” she said slowly, pulling her long, ringed fingers through her blond waves “—is why they kept it at all, wouldn’t you say?” She lifted her arm to check her watch, those beautiful fingers dangling. “Why didn’t they destroy it?”

  Val grabbed the plates and walked them into the kitchen. An interesting question. “Dangerous to keep it, dangerous to destroy it.”

  “Why do you say that?” Greta clipped her U.S. Department of Commerce laminated ID badge to her belt.

  “Because even if they didn’t know what to make of the satire—or what they called a satire because they didn’t know what to call it—it’s better to know what’s out there.” Val lifted her shoulders. “What if there were copies?” Distracted, Greta murmured, pulling on a belted white jacket. Val went on, “It’s better to keep the original out of reach. Filed away.”

  “They had enough else to keep them busy.”

  “Lucky for somebody they only had the satire,” said Val, slipping into her street-length black fleece. “And not the satirist.”

  “True.” For a moment, while Greta pointed the remote at her sound system and Placido Domingo disappeared into silence, they didn’t speak.

  Finally, Val slung her red tote over her shoulder, and it was then she was struck. “What’s all this have to do with you, Auntie?”

  Greta Bistritz closed her wooden shutters, angling what little seeping daylight was left to thin streaks on the ceiling. “I got a call at work yesterday from someone,” said Val’s aunt, turning slowly with her arms crossed. In the soft light of Greta’s stylish apartment, where the likes of Placido Domingo flavor the air and Kandinsky prints give the walls a small place in the world, Val watched as her aunt looked past her as she spoke. “He’s in the Romance Languages department at Hunter College. Says he’s writing a book on prose style during the Mexican Inquisition. I asked him how the Artifact Authentication Agency could help him.” Greta frowned at her shoes for a second, then went on. “He told me this is a book he’s been writing for about two years, and naturally he’s done a lot of his research at the Morgan Library because of the wealth of their holdings. Imagine his excitement, he told me, when he found the record of the satire from 1595. From what he could tell—”