Kinderman wondered if it were possible for a man to be a man without pain, or at least the possibility of pain. Would he not be no more than a chess-playing panda bear? Could there be honor or courage or kindness? A god who was good could not help but intervene upon hearing the cry of one suffering child. Yet He didn’t. He looked on. But was that because man had asked Him to look on? Because man had deliberately chosen the crucible in order to be able to be man, before time began and the fiery firmaments had been flung?
A hospital. Doctor angels. “Yes, all of us are treated here.” Of course, thought Kinderman. It fits. After life comes a week at the Golden Door. Maybe also some Florida. Couldn’t hurt.
Kinderman fondled his thoughts for a while, and decided that the theory of the dream collapsed when confronted by the suffering of the higher animals. The wildebeest certainly hadn’t chosen the pain, and the loyalest dog had no life to come. But there is something there, he thought; it’s close. It needed a final, startling leap to make it all make sense and preserve God’s goodness. He was certain he was close to tracking it down.
Footsteps on the staircase, quick and light. Kinderman looked aside and grimaced. The footsteps padded up to the table. He looked up. Mary’s mother stood above him. She was eighty and short and her silvery hair was done up in a bun. Kinderman examined her. Never before had he seen a bathrobe that was black. “I didn’t know you were up,” she said inscrutably. Her entire face was pursed.
“I’m up,” said Kinderman. “It’s a fact.”
She seemed to be thinking that over for a while. Then she padded to the stove and said, “I’ll make you some tea.”
“I have some.”
“Have more.”
Abruptly she came over and felt at his cup, and then gave him a look such as God had given Cain upon receiving the news. “It’s cold,” she said. “I’ll make hot.”
Kinderman looked at his watch. Almost seven. What had happened to the time? he wondered. “How was Richmond?” he asked.
“All schvartzers. Don’t ever force me to go there again.” She slapped a kettle on the stove and started mumbling in Yiddish. A phone on the breakfast counter chimed. “Never mind, I’ll get it,” said Mary’s mother. She moved swiftly and picked up the phone. She said, “Nu?”
Kinderman watched her as she listened and then held the receiver out with a scowl. “It’s for you. Some more of your gangster friends.”
Kinderman sighed. He stood up and took the phone. “Kinderman,” he said wearily.
He listened. His expression turned numb. “I’ll be there right away,” he said. He hung up.
At the six thirty Mass at Holy Trinity, a Catholic priest had been murdered. He’d been decapitated in the box while in the act of hearing someone’s confession.
MONDAY, MARCH 14
6
The existence of life on earth was dependent on a certain pressure of the atmosphere. This pressure, in turn, was dependent on the constant operation of physical forces which in turn were dependent upon the earth’s position in space which in turn was dependent upon a certain constitution of the universe. And what caused that? wondered Kinderman.
“Lieutenant?”
“I am with you, Horatio Hornblower. What is our present situation?”
“No one saw anything unusual at all,” said Atkins. “Can we let the parishioners go?”
Kinderman was seated in a pew near the crime scene, one of the confessionals at the back. They had closed the door of the confessor’s box, but the blood still seeped into the aisle, where it branched into separate pools, indifferently, while the crime lab crew moved around it. All the doors of Holy Trinity Church had been locked and a uniformed officer guarded each entry. The pastor of the church had been allowed to come in, and Kinderman saw him listening to Stedman. They were standing near the left side-altar of the church in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. The old priest nodded now and then, and was biting down on his lower lip. His face had a look of stifled grief. “Yes, all right, let them go,” the detective told Atkins. “Hold the four who were witnesses. I have a thought.”
Atkins nodded, then looked for a prominence from which to announce the dismissal of the scattering of worshippers still in the church. He decided on the choir loft and headed in that direction.
Kinderman retreated into his thoughts. Was the universe eternal? Could be. Who knows? An immortal dentist could fill cavities forever. But what was it that sustained the universe now? Was the universe the cause of its own constitution? Would it matter if the links in the chain of causation were extended indefinitely? Wouldn’t help, the detective concluded. He envisioned a freight train carrying dresses to Abraham and Straus from the small munitions plant near Cleveland where he’d always imagined they were manufactured. Each freight car was moved by the one in front of it. No car could move of itself. Proceeding to infinity in cars would not give to any car what it lacked, which was motion. Zero times infinity equaled zero. The train could not move unless pulled by an engine, something that was totally different from a car.
Prime Mover Unmoved. First Cause Uncaused. Was that a contradiction? Kinderman wondered. If everything had to have a cause, why not God? The detective was merely going through an exercise, and he answered himself immediately that the principle of causality derived from observation of the material universe, a particular kind of stuff. Was that stuff the only garment on the rack of possibility? Why not another kind of stuff altogether, a stuff outside of time and of space and of matter? The tea kettle thinks it is all there is?
“I was thinking, Lieutenant.”
Kinderman turned to look up at Ryan. “Do you want I should call United Press or should we keep this little miracle here in the church?”
“We ought to have some prints from those sliding panels inside the confessional box.”
“Why else have we called this meeting? Look for prints on the outside part of the panels, and also the inside part as well, in particular those little metal pulls that they have.”
“All you’d get from inside is the prints of the priest,” said Ryan. “What’s the point?”
“I am padding the job. The department has put me on an hourly wage. Keep an eye on your plumber and you wouldn’t now be asking me ridiculous questions.”
Ryan stood his ground. “I can’t see what the prints of the priest would have to do with it.”
“Take it on faith, then. This is the place.”
“Okay,” said Ryan. He walked away, and with him went Kinderman’s respite from the sense of sickness, the feeling of despair welling up within him. He returned to the struggle to regroup his beliefs. Yes, this is the place, he thought. And the time. He heard the shuffling of parishioners leaving the church and walking out into the ordinary daylight streets. An American astronaut lands on Mars, he thought, and on its surface he discovers a camera. How would he explain its presence there? He might think that his landing had not been the first, he guessed. Not the Russians. It’s a Nikon. Too expensive. But perhaps there’d been a landing by some other nation, or even, conceivably, alien beings who had first made a visit to the planet Earth and taken the camera aboard for study. He might think that his government had lied to him, had sent other Americans before him. He might even conclude that he was hallucinating, or dreaming the entire event. But the one thing he wouldn’t do, Kinderman knew, was to think that since Mars had been bombarded by meteorites and churned by volcanic eruptions, it was reasonable that over many billions of years almost any imaginable arrangement of its materials could have happened, and the camera was one of those chance combinations. They would tell him he was totally meshugge from exposure to some kind of cosmic ray, and then put him away in a special home with a bagful of matzohs and a Space Cadet badge. Shutter, lens, shutter speed regulator, diaphragm, automatic focus, automatic exposure. Could such a device come about by chance?
In the human eye, there were tens of millions of electrical connections that could handle two million simultaneous messages, ye
t see the light of just one photon.
A human eye is found on Mars.
The human brain, three pounds of tissue, held more than a hundred billion brain cells and five hundred trillion synaptic connections. It dreamed and wrote music and Einstein’s equations, it created the language and the geometry and the engines that probed the stars, and it cradled a mother asleep through a storm while it woke her at the faintest cry from her child. A computer that could handle all of its functions would cover the surface of the earth.
A human brain is found on Mars.
The brain could detect one unit of mercaptan amid fifty billion units of air, and if the human ear were any more sensitive, it would hear air molecules colliding. Blood cells lined up one at a time when faced with the constriction of a tiny vein, and the cells of the heart beat at different rhythms until they came in contact with another cell. When they touched, they began to beat as one.
A human body is found on Mars.
The hundreds of millions of years of evolution from paramecium to man didn’t solve the mystery, thought Kinderman. The mystery was evolution itself. The fundamental tendency of matter was toward a total disorganization, toward a final state of utter randomness from which the universe would never recover. Each moment its connections were coming unthreaded as it flung itself headlong into the void in a reckless scattering of itself, impatient for the death of its cooling suns. And yet here was evolution, Kinderman marveled, a hurricane piling up straws into haystacks, bundles of ever-increasing complexity that denied the very nature of their stuff. Evolution was a theorem written on a leaf that was floating against the direction of the river. A Designer was at work. So what else? It’s as plain as can be. When a man hears hoofbeats in Central Park, he shouldn’t be looking around for zebras.
“We’ve cleared the church, Lieutenant.”
Kinderman’s gaze flicked up at Atkins, then he stared at the confessional box with the body of the priest still inside it. “Have we now, Atkins? Have we really?”
Ryan was dusting the exterior panels and Kinderman watched him for a time, his eyelids gradually beginning to droop. “Get the inside parts,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
“I won’t forget,” Ryan muttered.
“Wonderful.”
Kinderman heaved himself up with a sigh and then followed Atkins to another confessional at the back and to the right of the doors. Sitting in the back two pews of the church were the people whom Atkins had detained. Kinderman paused to look them over. Richard Coleman, a lawyer in his forties, worked in the Attorney General’s office. Susan Volpe, an attractive twenty-year-old, was a student at Georgetown College. George Paterno was the football coach at Bullis Prep in Maryland. He was short and strongly built and Kinderman gauged him to be in his thirties. Beside him sat a well-dressed man in his fifties. He was Richard McCooey, a Georgetown graduate, and owner of the 1789, a restaurant a short block away from the church. Kinderman knew him, for he also owned The Tombs, a popular rathskeller where the detective had often met with a friend who had died many years before.
“One or two more questions, please,” said Kinderman. “It will only take a minute. I’ll hurry. First, Mister Paterno. Would you kindly step back inside the box?”
The confessional was divided into three distinct sections. In a middle compartment equipped with a door, a confessor sat in darkness, with perhaps a small amount of light seeping in through a grille at the top of the door. The other two compartments, one on each side of the confessor, were equipped with kneelers and, again, a door. There was a sliding panel on each side. When a penitent was making his confession, the priest had the panel in the open position. That confession finished, he slid the panel shut and then opened the panel on the other side, where the other penitent was waiting.
At approximately six thirty-five that morning, a man in his twenties, as yet unidentified but described as having pale green eyes, a shaven head and wearing a heavy blue turtleneck sweater, exited the penitent’s box on the left after making a fairly long confession, and his place was then taken by George Paterno. At that time, the deceased, Father Kenneth Bermingham, once the president of Georgetown University, had turned to confess a man on the right, also still unidentified, but described as wearing white cloth trousers and a black woolen windbreaker with a hood. After six or seven minutes, this man emerged, and his place was taken by an elderly man with a shopping bag. Then, after a period of time described as “long,” the old man emerged, apparently without having made his confession, inasmuch as Paterno’s turn for confession should have come before his; yet Paterno wasn’t seen to come out of the box. The old man’s place had been taken by McCooey and both he and Paterno had then waited in the darkness, with McCooey asserting he’d assumed that the priest was busy with Paterno, while Paterno’s story was that he’d assumed that the man in the windbreaker hadn’t finished. Whatever the truth of their averrals, neither Volpe’s nor Coleman’s turn ever came. It was Coleman who had noticed the blood flowing out from under the door.
“Mister Paterno?”
Paterno was kneeling in the left-hand penitent’s box. The color was gradually coming back to what appeared to be a dark olive complexion. He stared back at Kinderman and blinked.
“While you were in the box,” the detective continued, “the man in the windbreaker was on the other side, and then after that the elderly man and then Mister McCooey. And you said you heard the panel sliding shut and into place on the opposite side at some point. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“And you said that you presumed that the man in the windbreaker had finished.”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear the panel sliding again? Like maybe the priest had forgotten something that he wanted to tell him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Kinderman nodded, then he closed Paterno’s door and stepped into the confessor’s box and sat. “I will close the panel on your side,” he told Paterno. “After that, listen carefully, please.” He closed the panel on Paterno’s side, and then slowly slid open the panel on the other. He opened Paterno’s panel again. “Did you hear something?”
“No.”
Kinderman considered this answer thoughtfully. When Paterno started to get up, he said, “Stay where you are, please, Mister Paterno.”
Kinderman stepped out of the confessor’s compartment and knelt in the penitent’s box on the right. He slid the panel open and looked over at Paterno. “Close your panel and then listen once again,” he instructed. Paterno closed his panel. Kinderman reached inside the confessor’s box, found the pull on the back of the panel and slid the panel closed as far as he could before his wrist got in the way and he could close it no further. At that point, he released the metal pull and, using the pressure of his fingertips against the facing of the panel on his side, he slid the panel the rest of the way until it closed with a muffled thud.
Kinderman got up and walked over to the penitent’s box on the left, where he opened the door and looked down at Paterno. “Did you hear something?” Kinderman asked him.
“Yes. You shut the panel.”
“Did it sound just the same as when you waited for the priest to come over to your side?”
“Yes, exactly the same.”
“Exactly the same?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Please describe it.”
“Describe it?”
“Yes, describe it. What did it sound like?”
Paterno looked hesitant. Then he said, “Well, it slides for a way and then it stops; then it slides again until it’s closed.”
“So a little hesitation in the sliding?”
“Just exactly the way you just did it.”
“And how can you be certain it was shut all the way?”
“There was a thud at the end. It was loud.”
“You mean louder than normally?”
“It was loud.”
“More than usual?”
“Yes. Very loud.” br />
“I see. And didn’t you wonder why your turn didn’t come right after that?”
“Did I wonder?”
“Why your turn didn’t come.”
“I guess I did.”
“And when did you hear this sound? How long before the body was found?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Five minutes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ten minutes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it longer than ten minutes?”
“I’m not sure.”
Kinderman digested this for a while. Then he asked, “Were there any other sounds while you were in there?”
“You mean talking?”
“Whatever.”
“No, I didn’t hear talking.”
“Do you hear that at times in the confessional?”
“Sometimes. Only if it’s loud, though, like sometimes the Act of Contrition at the end.”
“But you didn’t hear it this time?”
“No.”
“No talking whatever?”
“No talking whatever.”
“No murmuring?”
“No.”
“Thank you. Now you may go back to your seat.”
Averting his gaze from Kinderman, Paterno got up quickly from the kneeler, and then sat down again with the others. Kinderman faced them. The attorney was glancing at his watch. The detective addressed him. “The old man with the shopping bag, Mister Coleman.”