Beyond the Chocolate War

  Lounging in the shade of a maple tree in front of Trinity, inhaling the zesty spring air, Ray manipulated the deck as he waited for the school bus to take him home. He watched the other guys coming and going, ignoring him as usual. Screw them all, Ray thought.

  He removed the ace of spades from the deck, reversed it, and riffled the cards. As he blew on his fingertips, he looked up to see a kid standing nearby, hands on his hips, watching him with small, squinting eyes.

  Ray waved a greeting.

  The kid ignored the greeting but advanced toward him, face neutral, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  “You a card sharp?” the kid asked, hovering over him now.

  Feeling suddenly vulnerable, Ray scrambled to his feet. “No, I just like to fool around with cards,” he said.

  “What do you mean, fool around?” the kid asked. Ray changed his mind: The kid’s face wasn’t neutral. The small eyes were watchful, challenging. His lips were thick, poised on the edge of a sneer. He wasn’t particularly big or muscle-bound, but he gave an impression of strength. Brute strength, maybe.

  “Tricks. I do tricks,” Ray said, putting the cards in his pocket, shuffling his feet, looking away, searching the distance for the bus.

  “Do one,” the kid said quietly. His hands were still on his hips. He barely moved his lips when he talked. Like a ventriloquist.

  Ray hesitated, having only performed before a mirror. He knew he would goof it up if he attempted to strip the deck before an audience. A hostile audience of one, at that.

  “Well, I’m not too good yet,” he said lamely, feeling his heart quicken. “I’m still at the practicing stage.”

  “Do one,” the kid said, lips still not moving, voice still quiet except for a slight demand, a slight menace in the words. A caricature of a tough guy. But still menacing.

  “Look, when I really get good at it, I’ll do one.” Keep it light. “In fact, I’ll see that you get a complimentary ticket for opening night.…”

  No response from the kid except that aura of menace his presence created.

  “Hello, Emile.”

  Both Ray and the kid turned at the greeting.

  “Hi, Obie,” the kid said, disgust in his voice, his menace evaporating. He was suddenly just a slightly overweight guy.

  “Introducing yourself to the new student?” the kid called Obie inquired.

  A kind of secret signal seemed to pass between them, an unspoken understanding. Ray looked away, kicking at a stone on the grass. Sometimes Trinity gave him the creeps. Something in the air, in the attitude of the kids, something he couldn’t pin down or put his finger on. A mood, a sense of mysterious goings-on. Like now: the kid called Obie intervening as if challenging the kid called Emile. And Emile backing off, backing down although he looked as if he could pick up Obie and throw him against a wall. “Hell, I was just curious, Obie. I saw him playing with those cards and thought he might do a trick or two. I thought he might be a magician.…” Voice trailing off.

  Obie ignored him, turning away as if he hadn’t heard his words or, if he had heard them, didn’t consider them worthy of attention. “You’re Ray Bannister, aren’t you?” he asked. As if Ray was a long-lost friend.

  “That’s me.” Surprised and trying not to appear surprised.

  “I’m Obie.” Extending his hand. Ray took it.

  “I’d like to see those tricks sometime,” Emile called, lingering at a distance, directing his remarks to Ray, the menace back in his voice. Ray felt as though he had made an enemy. Cripes, he thought, I was better off when nobody paid any attention to me.

  As Emile finally left the scene, Obie chuckled. “You’ve just encountered the one and only Emile Janza,” he said.

  “I’m glad he’s the one and only,” Ray replied. “Two of him would be too much.”

  “He’s an animal,” Obie said. “He thinks the world is out to put the screws to him. So he tries to put the screws to everyone else.” Shifting gears: “How are things going, Ray?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  Obie pulled out a small frayed spiral pad, flipped the pages. “Ray Bannister. From Caleb on the Cape. Height, five ten. One hundred forty-two pounds. Father an insurance executive. Doesn’t make friends easy. Likes to play with cards.”

  “You seem to know a lot about me,” Ray said, feeling positively spooky, as if somebody had been spying on him all this time. “This school is weird.”

  “Not really,” Obie said. Suddenly Obie hated what he was doing and wanted to turn on his heel and get the hell away from Trinity and everybody here. He had approached guys like this too many times. For Archie. Setting up yet another assignment. Carrying out orders. Like some …stooge. He hadn’t always felt this way: he used to enjoy Archie’s schemes and strategies. Now other things seemed more important. All because of Laurie, of course. But more than Laurie. A name surfaced from the depths of his brain and memory. He denied the name, concentrating on the notebook and then looking up at Ray Bannister. The name came anyway—Renault.

  “Look, Ray. Trinity isn’t as weird as it seems. We had a rough first term—hell, our football team lost more games than it won, and our boxing squad—boxing used to be the big thing here—folded up. And then the Headmaster got sick and retired and somebody new took over—”

  “Brother Leon?” Ray asked. Leon gave him the willies.

  “Right.” Obie seemed about to say something about Leon but didn’t. After a pause: “Anyway, it’s been a tough year. Actually, Trinity is a great place, a great school.” He tried to inject enthusiasm, heartiness, into the words, but they sounded unconvincing to his ears, and he wondered if Ray Bannister heard the phoniness in his voice. Ray merely nodded as if his real thoughts were elsewhere.

  “You waiting for a bus?” Obie asked, knowing that he had to stop acting like a press agent for Trinity and get down to business.

  Ray nodded.

  “I’ll drive you home. My car’s in the parking lot.”

  Suspicion ran like a chill through Ray’s bones. After weeks of being ignored, why this sudden attention?

  “Come on,” Obie said, plastering his friendliest smile on his face. Like a label, he felt, on a stick of dynamite.

  Ray shrugged and picked up his books. What the hell. He’d been alone too long. Maybe he was getting paranoid about the school. Actually he should be grateful for this kid called Obie. Trudging behind him now, Ray thought wistfully of Caleb and the Cape, and the sea lapping the shore like the tongue of an old and friendly dog. No sea here, no benevolent sun. No girls lounging on the beach. He’d better make do with what he had: at the moment, a ride home with a guy who might become a friend.

  Obie was properly impressed by Ray Bannister’s manipulation of the Stripper Deck, watching in awe as the card Obie had selected, the queen of hearts, appeared magically before him, unerringly drawn from the deck although Ray had not known its identity. Ray did it again—although magicians should never repeat their tricks, he said—with the three of diamonds and the ace of clubs, and Obie was fooled each time.

  “The hand is quicker than the eye, to coin a cliché,” Ray said, laughing, obviously delighted with the effect on Obie. He had been hesitant about performing for Obie at first, but the kid had seemed so genuinely interested and friendly that he had taken a chance. His nervousness had disappeared as he shuffled the deck. He was pleasantly surprised to see his fingers behaving so beautifully.

  “Wow,” Obie said, sincere in his admiration. But his mind was also working. Here was a kid with an obvious talent: how could it be used for the Vigils? “Do you do anything else?” he asked.

  Ray hesitated once more. He was not as skilled with the Cups and Balls, but the effects were simpler to attain. Frowning, studying Obie, trying to judge if Obie was really being sincere, Ray thought: Why not give it a whirl?

  So he took out the cups, balls, and a small table and was amazed once more at his performance, making the red balls appear, it seemed, at will from under the cup
of his choice. Palming one ball, he passed it swiftly to his other hand and then appeared to be taking it out of Obie’s ear.

  Obie looked thunderstruck, his mouth open in astonishment.

  “What’s the matter?” Ray asked, puzzled. Hadn’t Obie ever seen the ball trick before?

  “Will you do that again, Ray? I mean, make the ball disappear in your hand and then appear someplace else?”

  “I’m not supposed to do it twice,” Ray said. But did it anyway, because he liked the challenge. Obie would be watching him closely now, anticipating his every move. And anticipation was fatal to illusion, making it difficult for Ray to use misdirection, a magician’s most powerful tool. He wondered if he should tell him about the guillotine.

  The red ball, no larger than a marble, flashed in the air. Obie watched closely. Ray’s hands moved, open-palmed; fingers wiggled and then nothing—the ball vanished. Ray reached out with his right hand—Obie could swear the hand was empty—and popped the ball into view, as if he had removed it from Obie’s shirt pocket.

  Turning away, blinking into the sunlight that slanted into the bedroom, Obie whistled softly, thinking of Archie. Had Archie all these years used sleight of hand when he drew the white marble from the box? Was that how he had avoided the assignments he would have had to take on if the black marble had appeared in his hand? The possibility dazzled Obie. Nothing was beyond Archie. Archie was always one step ahead of everybody else. The members of the Vigils had always been amazed at Archie’s luck, resented, in fact, the way he laughed mockingly when the white marble appeared in his hand time after time. Archie had been taken by surprise only once, last fall during the chocolate fracas. That time Archie had also pulled out the white marble, but sweat had danced on his forehead—Archie, who never perspired—and he had looked apprehensive.

  Obie regarded Ray Bannister once more. “Great, Ray,” he said, “simply great.” Then, carefully: “How long did it take to learn the ball trick?” Trying to sound only casually interested.

  “Not long. A few weeks. I’ve had time on my hands,” Ray said. “Frankly, Obie, Trinity isn’t the friendliest place on earth.” Rolling the red ball between thumb and forefinger as Obie watched fascinated. “In fact, the school is kind of spooky. Is there something wrong with the place?”

  Obie snapped out of his contemplation of the ball, wondering how much he should tell Ray Bannister about Trinity.

  “Like I said, we’ve had a tough year,” he began. A perception formed itself in his mind: Ray Bannister and his sleight of hand, something Archie didn’t know about, a secret weapon Obie might be able to employ in the future. Maybe he should level with Bannister, let him know what was really going on at Trinity. What had gone on.…

  “It’s like this,” Obie said. “We had our usual chocolate sale last fall. Our biggest fund-raiser. And a kid by the name of Jerry Renault, a freshman for crissake, refused to sell any. The only kid in school who refused to participate …”

  Ray Bannister lifted both hands in a so what? gesture.

  “The problem is that one rotten apple can spoil the barrel. And this kid became a kind of symbol. Other kids started to follow his lead. Everybody hates school sales to begin with. Brother Leon was ready to have a nervous breakdown. The Headmaster was in the hospital, Leon was in charge of the place …”

  “All over chocolates?”

  “It was twenty thousand boxes of chocolates.”

  Ray whistled.

  “Right,” Obie went on. “Leon bought them on the cheap. They were left over from Mother’s Day. He bought them for a dollar a box. Which sounds okay except that means he spent twenty thousand dollars of school money—which he wasn’t authorized to spend—for the chocolates. Which also means that each kid had to sell fifty boxes at two dollars to make a killing.”

  Obie was reluctant to say more, had been avoiding thoughts about the chocolate sale and Jerry Renault for months, sorry he had started to tell Ray Bannister the story. But he couldn’t stop now.

  “Anyway. The school was in an uproar. The guys were in an uproar. And the Vigils—”

  “The Vigils?” Ray asked. “What’s the Vigils?”

  “Oh, boy.” Obie sighed. How do you begin to explain the Vigils? The word was seldom spoken aloud on the Trinity campus. The brothers knew the organization existed but preferred to ignore it, allowing it to function because it served a purpose: kept peace at Trinity during a time when unrest and violence were sweeping the nation’s schools and colleges. How to explain all that to a newcomer, someone who didn’t know of the long tradition of the Vigils?

  “Well, the Vigils is, like, a secret organization at Trinity. A guy by the name of Archie Costello is the Assigner. The Vigils has officers like any club—a jock named Carter is president and I’m secretary—but the Assigner is the key officer. In fact, the Assigner, Archie Costello, is the Vigils.”

  Ray turned away, puzzled. He didn’t like this kind of stuff. Secret organizations. Assigners … “What the hell is an assigner?” he asked. And had a feeling that he really didn’t want to know.

  “Well, he assigns kids to certain … duties,” Obie said, his words limping as if on crutches. “They have to perform certain acts—”

  “Like in a college fraternity? Staying all night in the woods, stuff like that? Pranks? Stunts?”

  Obie nodded, knowing that Archie would be furious to hear his meticulous assignments described as fraternity pranks and stunts. But he let the description stand. He couldn’t tell Ray everything about the Vigils: in fact, he had probably told him too much already.

  “Anyway, Brother Leon asked the Vigils to support the chocolate sale,” Obie went on. “The first time Leon or any other faculty member acknowledged the existence of the club. That’s how the Vigils got mixed up in it.…”

  “What about that kid? Jerry What’s-his-name?” Ray asked.

  “Renault,” Obie supplied. As if he could ever forget that name or that kid. “Renault still refused to sell the chocolates. Despite … pressure.”

  “What kind of pressure?”

  “The usual,” Obie said. How to describe Archie’s methods to a stranger? “Archie Costello doesn’t like physical violence. But in this case—”

  “Violence was used, right?” Ray said, dismayed, head in a whirl. A couple of hours ago he hadn’t known anything about Trinity, was a complete outsider. And now this kid named Obie was here in his home, telling him crazy things about the place.

  Obie shrugged. “A kind of violence. A boxing match. Between Renault and Emile Janza—”

  “The animal I just met at school?” Ray asked. Mimicking Janza’s tight-lipped delivery: “Show me a card trick, kid.”

  “Right,” Obie said, a flicker of amusement in his eyes.

  “And the Renault kid got beat up, right?” Ray asked.

  “Right,” Obie said reluctantly. “Look, the kid was hurt, but he survived. Actually, he was a tough little character. They say he went to Canada to recuperate.” Obie paused. “Anyway, that’s all over now. The chocolate sale was a success. The Headmaster retired. And Brother Leon became top man.…”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Ray Bannister said, wondering if Obie detected the sarcasm in his voice.

  “Right,” Obie said heartily, slapping his hands against his sides. Then frowned. “But …”

  “But what?” Ray prompted.

  “The thing rocked the school,” Obie said, putting into words what he had avoided for so long. “That night. The kids calling for blood. Renault’s blood. The chocolates became more important than anything else, more important than a kid’s blood.…”

  I wish we had stayed in Caleb, Ray Bannister thought.

  “And now,” Obie continued, “it’s as if those chocolates exploded last fall and we’re walking around in the leftovers, the crap. See what I mean? Everybody being careful, playing it cool.”

  “Like you’ve all got a guilty conscience?” Ray offered.

  “Right,” Obie agreed. B
ut uncomfortable now, wondering if he had said too much.

  “How about that club—the Vigils? They still playing it cool?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Obie said.

  Which brought him to his reason for being here in Ray Bannister’s house. To introduce him to the Vigils and how it worked.

  Poor Jerry Renault, Obie thought suddenly.

  And now poor Ray Bannister. About to learn the facts of life at Trinity High School.

  In this corner, Archie Costello, five feet nine and a half inches tall, one hundred forty pounds, unchallenged champion of Trinity High School. Champion of what? Of all he surveyed—the classrooms, the corridors, the campus, his power extending even into the residence where Brother Leon and the other faculty members lived.

  In that corner, the opposite corner, Brother Leon, formerly Assistant Headmaster of Trinity High School, now full-fledged Headmaster, ruler of the school, the faculty, the curriculum, the extracurricular activities, responsible for (and ruling) 387 students between the ages of thirteen and eighteen (with the exception of Richard O’Brien, who had turned nineteen on the fourth of April). Brother Leon of the pale face, the quick and sudden classroom movements in which a student was usually the loser, struck with a teacher’s pointer or a piece of chalk flying across the room faster than a speeding bullet. Brother Leon. Whose eyes could flash with malice or quicken with a cold intelligence in which there wasn’t an ounce of pity or mercy. Brother Leon of the swift short steps, who had gone moderately mod these days. His thinning hair threatened to cover his collar at the back. Sideburns dropped to his earlobes. He wore a silver chain, from which dangled a cross so fancy that you had to squint to make certain it was a cross. Brother Leon, who sometimes seemed a bit ridiculous to Archie. Which didn’t deny the fact that Leon could also be dangerous.