Beyond the Chocolate War

“Assault,” Archie said. “I was going to say assault with a deadly weapon.” He looked down at Bunting. “But I don’t think the weapon’s very deadly.…”

  Bunting flushed but didn’t reply, willing to take this abuse if he got what he wanted from Archie.

  “Thing is,” Bunting said after a pause, knowing the plunge he was taking, “we could use an alibi—”

  “Alibi,” Archie scoffed. “What is this—Saturday Night at the Movies?”

  “I mean, in case they saw us. Caught a glimpse. I figure the Vigils could cover us.…”

  “I thought you said they didn’t see you. Or anything else. The girl’s sweater over her head, Obie under the car. That you didn’t touch her—”

  “But just in case … I think it’s better to be prepared,” Bunting said stubbornly. Then played his ace. “In fact …” Letting the words dangle there.

  “In fact what?” Archie asked, immediately suspicious. Until this moment, he had been half amused by Bunting’s dilemma.

  “I was thinking,” Bunting said, choosing his words carefully, “that maybe Obie thinks this was a Vigil assignment.”

  “Are you crazy, Bunting? Obie is part of the Vigils. We always protect our members. Never touch them. He’s at all the meetings.…”

  Bunting sighed, then plunged.

  “The other day when I told you about Obie and the girl at the Chasm—remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I asked if you wanted anything done about them.”

  “I didn’t tell you to do anything.”

  “You didn’t tell me not to do anything,” Bunting said, speaking deliberately.

  “Christ, Bunting, what are you saying?”

  “I figured you wanted us to do something. That you were being … subtle.” Subtle: a beautiful word, Bunting thought, ready and waiting when he needed it.

  “I don’t have to be subtle,” Archie responded, voice cold. “When I want something done, I say: Do it.”

  “But you’re a subtle guy, Archie,” Bunting said, pressing on, knowing that if he could make Archie a part of what had happened last night, his troubles were over. “Last night we were driving around and went to the Chasm and I saw Obie’s car there. Then I remembered our conversation. How you seemed to want something done about Obie. And the girl. And we figured we’d throw a little scare into them. Then …”

  “Then what?” Archie asked, realizing how dangerous this little bastard was. Had to be cautious. This was not assignment stuff, or fun and games on campus. This was assault. Attempted rape. Suppose the girl went to the police?

  “Then …” Bunting began. And halted. Because what had started out as a dare, a threat, a bit of fun, had turned into something else once he’d approached the car and seen Laurie Gundarson there. “Then … what happened, happened.” A bit panicky now, he said: “But it wouldn’t have happened at all, Archie, if I’d thought you didn’t want it to happen.”

  Archie drew a deep sharp breath. Then sank inside himself, as he often did when he needed to pull back, think things through, assess a situation, make a decision. Bunting was apparently shrewder than he had thought, trying to make Archie an accessory both before and after the fact. Obie, of course, was the key figure. All depended on what Obie and the girl had done after the attack, whether they had decided to remain quiet or report the incident. Archie didn’t think they had gone to the police. That kind of news traveled fast, and all seemed peaceful this morning at Trinity: no police cruisers, no sign of unusual activity on the campus. With the police not involved, the case became much simpler. First of all, the assault did not have any Vigil trademarks. Obie knew that Archie did not operate on the level of assaults and rapes. Yet this stupid incident could have repercussions. The problem was that he did not know what effect the attack had had on Obie, what Obie was thinking at this minute, what he suspected. His first step was a confrontation with Obie. Obie had always been transparent to Archie, could hide no secrets.

  “Bunting,” he said, voice sharp and cold. “Here’s the deal. A Vigil meeting today. The usual time …”

  Doubt formed a frown on Bunting’s face.

  “Dig into your notebook and find somebody for an assignment. Pick a name from the list I gave you the other day.”

  “But Obie will be at the meeting,” Bunting said. The last thing he wanted was to meet Obie face to face.

  “Exactly.”

  Let Bunting stew awhile. Let him worry through the day.

  “Problems are never solved by delay,” Archie said in his best lecturing tone, enjoying Bunting’s growing discomfort. “We have a problem here, and the best way to solve it is to take action. So we meet today. Bring everybody together. Business as usual. That’s why we need a kid for an assignment. Everything must look normal. And then let me read between the lines.” This is what Archie loved. Showdowns, sixguns at sunset, adversaries coming face to face. To see what would happen, what explosions would be touched off or, if not explosions, what emotional collisions would occur.

  There was an even more important reason for calling a meeting, however. The Obie-Bunting showdown was only a screen for Archie’s real purpose—searching for the traitor. He suspected that the traitor was a member of the Vigils. More than suspected. Few kids outside the Vigils knew that the day off from school was to have coincided with the Bishop’s visit. And the letter to Leon had focused on the visit. Thus, the meeting was a place to begin his pursuit of the traitor, and instinct—instinct that never failed him—dictated that he would find his betrayer there.

  He turned again to Bunting, saw his troubled countenance, the beads of sweat dancing on his upper lip.

  “And Bunting …”

  “Yes?”

  “Forget the alibi. The Vigils don’t provide alibis,” Archie said. The words final, like a trapdoor slamming shut.

  Notices for Vigil meetings were always posted on the main bulletin board in the first-floor corridor, directly across from the Headmaster’s office. Archie was entertained by the location of the notice right under Leon’s nose. The notice was simple, involving the words TRINITY HIGH SCHOOL at the top of the board. On the day of the meeting, the Y of Trinity was inverted: . Which made it look, as Archie said, like an upright finger. Thus, the Vigils giving the finger to the world while calling a meeting. That’s what the upside-down Y was called: the Finger.

  Bunting inverted the Y shortly before the bell sounded for the start of classes. Stepping away from the bulletin board, he pondered his next move: delivering the invitation, without being spotted, to the victim selected for today’s meeting. The invitation was usually a crudely written note left in the victim’s desk in his homeroom, or in his locker, sometime during the day. Bunting delivered the note without difficulty a few minutes later—the victim’s homeroom was empty, and he slipped the sheet of paper into the desk without risk of being seen.

  As he headed for his first class, Bunting’s mind was dark with doubts and forebodings. He wondered whether his confession to Archie this morning had been a mistake. He knew he could control Cornacchio and Harley. But Archie was different, so different that Bunting sometimes woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, almost sorry that he had ever gotten involved with Archie and the Vigils.

  Obie had gotten into the habit of checking the bulletin board for a possible Vigil meeting ever since Bunting had come on the scene. There had been a time, only a short while ago, when Obie had controlled the meetings and inverted the Y. But Archie had been carrying on his own relationship with Bunting for a few weeks, obviously grooming him for the role of Assigner, and Obie had accepted the situation. Because Laurie had become more important than calling Vigil meetings.

  Now he was like all the other Vigil members, at Archie’s mercy, unable to plan what to do after school until he learned whether a meeting was scheduled. This morning, like all mornings, he headed for the board before going to his locker. Did it automatically. Still numb from the events of the night before, he trudged wearily
down the corridor, feeling dull, eyes burning from lack of sleep, an anger he had never known before smoldering within him, consuming him, taking away his appetite, making him sleepless, feeding his thoughts—and his thoughts were agonizing as he played over in his mind last night’s events.

  Laurie. Her cries. The assault upon her body. The devastation to her—her being. As if they had violated the thing that made her a person, a girl, a woman. When he finally confronted her after scrambling to his feet, the echo of the departing car deafening in his ears, she had looked at him with such an expression of—what? Fear, loathing, revulsion. Eyes wide with panic, injury, and the most terrible thing of all—accusation. As if he himself had been the attacker.

  In short hysterical bursts, she told him what had happened while he had been a helpless prisoner under the car. She had not been raped. It took her a long time to get the words out, and Obie winced as he saw how hard it was for her to talk. She was like a child crying in the dark, horrified, in the middle of the night. Not raped, no, but he, whoever he was, had touched her. Touched. As she said the word, the sobs began again. Obie was unable to comfort her. All the time that she was telling him what had happened, she kept herself shriveled away from him, huddled pathetically against the door. And then silence, snifflings, a sigh now and then. She refused to speak after that first outburst, sat silent and immobile as Obie drove her home. He felt hopeless, helpless.

  In an attempt to provide reassurance, he reached out to touch her, hold her hand, caress her shoulder. She shrank away from him, shuddered a bit. He tried to apologize for what had happened, felt responsible, guilty, knew that he had failed to protect her. Christ, he thought as he drove carefully through the darkened streets, if only he’d had some warning. If only he was the macho type, knew karate, how to defend himself instead of being so easily, effortlessly subdued.

  His arm still ached from the way the guy had pushed it far up his back. Would ache forever, it seemed. But it was not as bad as the ache he felt in his soul, his spirit, whatever it was in him that had suddenly come into existence in order to hold his anguish.

  Now, in the corridor, he saw in dismay the Finger on the bulletin board. Could he face a meeting today? He only wanted to get through the classes somehow and then drive to Laurie’s house this afternoon.

  She had sent him away last night in silence. She was calm by the time they reached her house, in control, but a deadly calm, a part of her elsewhere, not in the car, out of his reach, beyond his presence.

  “You okay?” he asked, frowning, emotions in a whirl, wanting to say something, the right thing, but confused, not knowing what to do or say.

  “Yes,” she answered. But the yes was unconvincing.

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They agreed to do nothing about the assault, decided not to report it to the police. After all, there had been no rape and no injuries inflicted: they had not really seen the assailants, had no evidence, no clues to their identities. What’s more, Laurie said she did not want to talk about the attack, not to the police, not to anybody.

  “Talking about it makes me feel dirty,” she said. After a long pause: “I don’t feel clean anymore.”

  He kissed her lightly on the cheek, not daring anything else. She didn’t flinch but did not respond. “I’ll call you tomorrow after school,” he whispered. She did not reply. Then she went into the house, walking slowly, robotlike. Watching her go up the steps, he dreaded the possibility that he had somehow lost her, that things would never be the same again. And told himself: Tomorrow everything will be different, will be better. He clung to that thought. That’s all he had.

  Now, on top of all that, a Vigil meeting. The last thing in the world he needed.

  Carter saw the Finger and swore.

  He’d avoided Archie this morning, feared somehow that Archie would look into his eyes and know immediately that he had sent the letter to Brother Leon. Carter knew his strengths and weaknesses, knew what he was good at and what he lacked. Confident about his prowess as an athlete, he was no great shakes when it came to Archie’s specialties: intimidation, outguessing people, anticipating their thoughts and actions. Archie was always one step ahead.

  Frowning at the bulletin board, as if the would disappear if he stared long enough, he wondered whether he had made a mistake. He’d taken a terrible chance when he’d decided to tip off Brother Leon about the visit. That kind of thing was outside his experience. He had painstakingly written the letter in fourth-period study, printing with his left hand. Delivering it to Leon had been easy—he had merely slipped it into the letter box inside his office door. The agony came after the letter had been delivered. The realization of what he had done. The possibility that Leon would know through some shrewdness who had written it. And would inform Archie. Leaving the school, looking over his shoulder, feeling as if unseen watchers were stalking him, Carter was filled with regret. He should have minded his own business, let the Bishop come, let the chips fall. Jeez. Head down, moving in his muscular, athletic way—movements that always kept people out of his path—Carter began hours of torment. Found it hard to concentrate on his homework. Pushed his food around on his plate at supper. Finally plunged into dreamless sleep. But didn’t feel rested or refreshed when he woke up.

  He turned away from the bulletin board, blinking away the afterimage of the inverted Y that remained printed on his brain. He spotted Archie Costello heading in his direction, surrounded by stooges, as usual. Carter looked around in panic, spotted the door to the janitor’s storage room. He stepped into the room, closed the door softly behind him, didn’t turn on the light. Listening to the hammering of his heart, he waited, picturing Archie passing by in all his swagger and insolence. What’s happened to me? he thought.

  Ah, but he knew what had happened to him. Why he was hiding here in the storage room among the mops and brooms and buckets.

  Writing the letter had been the action of a rat.

  An informer.

  A traitor.

  He had become one of the things he’d always hated, a thing hiding in the dark now, afraid to face the world.

  And all because of Archie Costello.

  A German shepherd sat, silent and still, beneath a hovering tree on the sidewalk in front of the white cottage with black shutters on Hale Street, watching the Goober’s progress with baleful yellow eyes. He had seen the dog before, and always hurried past. He felt that someday the dog would strike, attacking him swiftly and viciously, without barking, without warning.

  This morning he had more than the German shepherd to worry about, however. As he left the dog behind on Hale Street and turned into George Street, he felt as if he were running away from a ghost, the ghost of Brother Eugene, and he shivered in the morning air even though his body pulsed with the exertion of running. He had still not fully absorbed the fact of Brother Eugene’s death, although the announcement over the intercom and the memorial mass had taken place days ago. Leon’s voice on the intercom was still fresh in his mind. Death, after a lengthy illness. How long was lengthy? As long as the time between last fall’s destruction of Room Nineteen and the moment Brother Eugene took his last breath?

  Cut it out, he told himself now, as he almost twisted his ankle on a corner of sidewalk jutting slightly higher than the rest of the pavement. You had nothing to do with Eugene’s death. It’s a coincidence, that’s all. Okay, a terrible coincidence, but a coincidence all the same. He had shouted the word coincidence in his mind a thousand times in the last few days. The scene in Brother Eugene’s classroom, the clutter of collapsed desks and chairs, and Eugene in the middle of the rubble, tears streaming down his cheeks, his chin wobbling like an infant’s, was burned into the Goober’s mind.

  The Goober had been the student assigned to take Brother Eugene’s room apart. Archie Costello had given the orders: to loosen the screws in the chairs and desks—including Eugene’s chair and desk—to the point where the furniture would collapse at the slightest touch
. He was assisted in the job by masked members of the Vigils during the long night he spent in the classroom. The next morning he had witnessed the destruction of Brother Eugene, a shy and sensitive teacher who often read poetry aloud in the final moments of class, despite certain snickers and smirks. Brother Eugene had stood devastated in the midst of the classroom’s debris, unable to believe the assault on his beloved room. Shocked, crying—the Goober had never before seen a grown man crying—shaking his head in a refusal to believe what his eyes told him must be so. He had immediately gone on sick leave. Had never returned to Trinity after that shambles of a day. He had died last week in New Hampshire, but the Goober knew that his death had really taken place last fall. And the Goober was responsible, as if he had held a gun to the teacher’s temple and pulled the trigger. No, it wasn’t like that at all, a small voice within him protested. A collapsing classroom is not fatal, doesn’t bring on a heart attack or whatever physical illness caused Eugene’s death. But who knows? He repeated the words now, gasping them out of the depths of his guilt and despair, as he ran blindly through the morning. Who knows?

  I know. I should have refused the assignment from the Vigils. But nobody refused Vigil assignments, nobody denied whatever Archie Costello demanded.

  He found himself on Market Street, with its rows of high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums. His arrival here was not accidental. Jerry Renault lived in one of the apartment buildings. The Goober refused to look up at the building, kept his eyes riveted on the pavement. The ghost of Brother Eugene following him down the street was bad enough; he didn’t need another ghost joining the pursuit. Jerry Renault wasn’t dead, of course. Yet something of him had died. Although he looked like the friend he had known last year, that Jerry Renault was now gone. The guy who had been subdued and distant the other day was someone else altogether. Which was just as well. He had betrayed that other Jerry Renault. Just as he had betrayed Brother Eugene.…