‘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.
Once the initial crime screen investigation was over, and Michael McKean’s body had been removed and his killer taken away in handcuffs, a car had brought Vivien and Russell to City Hall where they had arrived almost simultaneously with the captain and where Mayor Gollemberg was waiting for them.
First of all he had made sure that the danger of other explosions had been neutralized.
Bellew had explained that the bomb disposal experts had rendered the remote control that set off the explosions unusable and that, thanks to both the letter found in Father McKean’s possession and the map – the latter a brilliant intuition of Vivien’s – they now had a complete list of the buildings that had been mined. The clearance was scheduled to begin in a few hours.
Then Vivien had told the story in all its complexity and absurdity, right up to its dramatic conclusion.
At this point, Dr Grosso, a man in his mid-fifties who was the exact opposite of the stereotypical psychiatrist, realized that it was his turn. He got to his feet and began walking around the room, speaking in a calm voice that held ever
yone’s attention from the first words.
‘Based on what I’ve heard, I can hazard a diagnosis, though I reserve the right to modify it after I’ve had a closer look at the case. Unfortunately, not being able to talk directly to the person concerned, I have to rely on the testimony, which is why I suspect we’ll never be able to do anything other than hypothesize.’
He stroked his moustache, trying to express himself in terms that everyone could understand.
‘From what I’ve heard, I think Father McKean was severely disturbed. Firstly he had a split personality, and whenever his other persona, the man in the green jacket, entered him, he stopped being himself. To be clearer, when he put on that green jacket, he wasn’t pretending, he wasn’t playing a part like an actor, he really became a different man. But when that man left him, no memory remained. I’m sure his anguish at all those deaths was genuine. That’s proved by the fact that he decided to contravene one of the most important dogmas of his Church and violate the secrecy of the confessional if it would lead to the arrest of the culprit and the end of the attacks.’
Dr Grosso leaned on the desk and looked around. Maybe this was the way he acted when he lectured at the university.
‘This kind of syndrome is often accompanied by epilepsy. Let’s be clear what we mean by that word. I’m not talking about the disease we’re all familiar with, in other words, the eyes rolling up, the foaming at the mouth, the convulsions. Epilepsy sometimes presents itself in very different forms. During the attacks, the person affected may have hallucinations. So it isn’t unlikely that at such moments, Father McKean actually saw his own alter ego. The fact that he described him proves that. And at the same time it’s the proof of what I said earlier, that he was completely unaware of what was happening to him.’
He gave a shrug of his shoulders by way of introduction to what he next said.
‘The fact that he had a gift as a ventriloquist, and that in his youth he actually performed professionally, merely confirms this theory. There is often an identification between the ventriloquist and his puppet, at least where there’s some kind of predisposition. But as the puppet’s appeal to the public is the true source of the ventriloquist’s success, the ventriloquist may begin to feel envy or even aversion towards his puppet. A colleague of mine is treating a patient who was convinced that his puppet was having an affair with his wife.’
He smiled, but without mirth.
‘I realize that saying such things, may raise a smile. But I beg you to believe me that in a mental hospital they are far from uncommon.’
He moved away from the desk and again began pacing the room.
‘As for this John Kortighan, I think he was completely under the spell of Father McKean. He didn’t so much idealize him as idolize him. When he realized who he was and what he was doing, all he could do was strike down his idol. When I spoke with him, he actually suggested I tell everyone that he was responsible for the attacks, so that Father McKean’s good name and the memory of all the important things he had done in his life should remain intact. As you can see, the human mind is—’
The telephone on the mayor’s desk rang.
Gollemberg lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’
He listened for a moment, without changing expression.
‘Good morning, sir. Yes, it’s all over. I can confirm that the city is no longer at risk. There are other explosive devices, but we’ve located them and are rendering them harmless.’
There was a reply at the other end, which the mayor appeared to accept with pleasure.
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll make sure you get a detailed report of this whole crazy business as soon as possible. That’s as soon as we’ve understood it.’
He listened again.
‘Yes, I can confirm that. Vivien Light.’
He smiled, presumably at something the other person was saying.
‘Of course, sir.’
The mayor looked up: ‘It’s for you’ – to her surprise held out the receiver to her.
Vivien lifted the receiver to her ear as if it was an unfamiliar object she had never touched before. ‘Hello?’
The voice she heard at the other end was one of the best known in the world.
‘Hello, Miss Light. My name’s Stuart Bredford. They tell me I’m the President of the United States.’
Vivien resisted the impulse to stand to attention but couldn’t restrain her emotion. ‘It’s an honour to speak with you, sir.’
‘The honour’s all mine. Before anything else, allow me to express my condolences on the loss of your sister. When a loved one dies, it’s as if part of us disappears with them. The gap can never really be filled. I know the two of you were close.’
‘Yes, sir. Very close.’
Vivien wondered how he had found out about Greta’s death. Then she reminded himself that he was the President of the United States and that he could probably find out about anything or anyone in a few minutes.
‘All the more credit to you. Even though you were grieving, you still managed to see this investigation through to its conclusion and in the process saved hundreds of innocent people from certain death.’
‘I did my job, sir.’
‘And I thank you for that, personally and on behalf of all those people. Now I’m the one who has a job to do.’
A pause.
‘First of all, I guarantee you that, in spite of what’s happened, Joy won’t close. As of now, I’m making that a special commitment. You have the president’s word.’
Vivien remembered the bewildered faces of the kids as they climbed in the bus taking them away. Knowing they would still have a home filled her heart with peace.
‘That’s wonderful, sir. Those young people will be happy.’
‘And as far as you’re concerned, there’s something I’d like to ask you.’
‘Go ahead, sir.’
A small pause, perhaps for reflection.
‘Are you free on the Fourth of July?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘It’s my intention to propose you for the Congressional Gold Medal. It will be conferred here in Washington on the Fourth of July. Do you think you could keep that date free?’
Vivien smiled as if the president could see her. ‘I’ll cancel all my other engagements right away.’
‘Good. You’re a great person, Vivien.’
‘You, too, sir.’
‘I’m going to be president for another four years. You, fortunately, will stay the way you are for the rest of your life. I’ll see you soon.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The voice disappeared and Vivien stood for a few moments at the desk, not knowing what to say or do. She put the receiver down and looked around. She read curiosity on the faces of those present. And she had no desire to satisfy it. This was her moment she had no intention of sharing it with anybody.
A knock at the door came to the aid of her decision.
The mayor turned in that direction. ‘Come in.’
A man of about thirty appeared in the doorway. In his hand was a newspaper.
‘What is it, Trent?’
‘There’s something you ought to see, Mr Mayor.’
Gollemberg gestured, and Trent approached the desk. On it he placed a copy of the New York Times. The mayor looked at it briefly, then picked it up and turned it so that everyone in the room could see it.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’
Vivien, like all the others, stared open mouthed.
The front page was entirely taken up with a huge headline.
THE TRUE STORY OF A FALSE NAME
by Russell Wade
Beneath it were two photographs, quite sharp despite the limitations of newspaper reproduction. The first showed a young man holding a big black cat. In the second John Kortighan, his face turned slightly away from the camera, was sitting on a stool, clutching a gun, and staring with empty, absent eyes at a point somewhere to his right.
Everyone present turn
ed to look at Russell, who as usual had chosen the chair furthest from the centre of the action. Feeling their eyes on him, he assumed an innocent expression.
‘We had an agreement, didn’t we?’
Vivien found herself smiling. It was true, of course. He was within his rights, and nobody at this point could accuse him of breaking his word. All the same, looking at that front page, she was puzzled by one thing. She decided to satisfy her curiosity.
‘Russell, there’s something I’d like to know.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘How did you manage to get that shot of John, if in all the time we were together I never saw you with a camera in your hand?’
Russell stood up and went to the desk. ‘There’s something I inherited from my brother. He taught me how and when to use it.’
He put a hand in his pocket and took it out, fist closed. Then he held out his arm. When he opened his fingers and allowed everyone to see what he had in his hand, Vivien could barely stop herself laughing. There on his palm was a miniature camera.
The True Story of a False Name
It was raining at my mother’s funeral and Vivien held my hand.
As I heard the rain beating down on the umbrella, I saw the coffin enter the grave in the small cemetery in Brooklyn where my grandparents are already buried, and felt sorry that I’d never really known Greta Light. But I think I’ll make up for that in time, thanks to the memory of all the words we said to each other and the games we played and the happy moments we shared. Even though I tried to ruin everything, I’ll be able to get through with the help of my aunt, who’s an incredible woman, and a strong woman, in spite of the tears she was crying – but then everyone cries at the thought of death.
The priest talked about dust and earth and resurrection.
When I saw him, and heard those words, I thought about Father McKean and everything he’d meant to me and others like me. It was terrible to find out what was behind those eyes and what he was capable of doing, terrible to discover how evil can even reach places you’d think it could never reach.
They explained to me that his conscious mind wasn’t responsible for his actions, but only that part of him that was in the grip of something wicked that he had no control over.