“I suspect,” he said, “that your family and mine were equally unconventional.”
“I’ve never met my mother’s sister, Aunt Cymry, but my father says she’s a dangerous mutant they’ve locked away somewhere.”
The Russian shrugged. “I would nevertheless wager heavily on the equivalency of our families. Should I lead the way or follow you?”
If he contained chaos on some level below wardrobe and face and eyes, it must be in his mind. I wondered what kind of strange order might underlie it.
“Sir, I’ve never driven in snow before. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to tell, under all the drifts, exactly where the driveway runs between here and the abbey. I’d have to plow by intuition—though I usually do all right that way.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Thomas, I believe that experience trumps intuition. Russia is a world of snow, and in fact I was born during a blizzard.”
“During a blizzard, in a mortuary?”
“Actually, in a library.”
“Was your mother a librarian?”
“No,” he said. “She was an assassin.”
“An assassin.”
“That is correct.”
“Do you mean assassin figuratively or literally, sir?”
“Both, Mr. Thomas. When driving behind me, please remain at a safe distance. Even with four-wheel drive and chains, there is some danger of sliding.”
“I feel like I’ve been sliding all day. I’ll be careful, sir.”
“If you do start to slide, turn the wheel into the direction of the slide. Do not try to pull out of it. And use the brakes gently.” He walked to the other SUV and opened the driver’s door.
Before he climbed behind the wheel, I said, “Sir, lock your doors. And if you see anything unusual in the storm, don’t get out of the truck to have a closer look at it. Keep driving.”
“Unusual? Such as?”
“Oh, you know, anything unusual. Say like a snowman with three heads or someone who looks like she might be my Aunt Cymry.”
Romanovich could peel an apple with his stare.
With a little good-luck wave, I got into my truck, and after a moment, he got into his.
After he drove around me to the foot of the ramp, I pulled in behind him.
He used his remote opener, and at the top of the incline, the big door began to roll up.
Beyond the garage lay a chaos of bleak light, shrieking wind, and a perpetual avalanche of falling snow.
CHAPTER 35
IN FRONT OF ME, RODION ROMANOVICH DROVE out of the garage into hammers of wind and shatters of snow, and I switched on my headlamps. The drowned daylight required them in this feathered rain.
Even as those beams brought sparkle to the dull white curtains of snow, Elvis materialized in the passenger seat as though I had switched him on, as well.
He was dressed in his navy-frogman scuba suit from Easy Come, Easy Go, possibly because he thought I needed a laugh.
The black neoprene hood fitted tightly to his head, covering his hair, his ears, and his forehead to the eyebrows. With his face thus isolated, the sensuous quality of his features was weirdly enhanced, but not to good effect. He looked not like a navy frogman but rather like a sweet little bow-lipped Kewpie doll that some pervert had dressed in a bondage costume.
“Oh, man, that movie,” I said. “With that one, you gave new meaning to the word ridiculous.”
He laughed soundlessly, pretended to shoot me with a spear gun, and phased from the scuba suit into the Arabian costume he had worn in Harum Scarum.
“You’re right,” I agreed, “that one was even worse.”
When making his music, he had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scripts for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.
I drove out of the garage, stopped, and thumbed the remote to put down the door behind me.
Using the rearview mirror, I watched until the door had closed entirely, prepared to shift into reverse and run down any fugitive from a nightmare that tried to enter the garage.
Apparently calculating the correct path of the driveway by a logical analysis of the topography, Romanovich plowed without error north-by-northwest, exposing blacktop as he ascended in a gentle curve.
Some of the scooped-away snow spilled back onto the pavement in his wake. I lowered my plow until it barely skimmed the blacktop, and cleaned up after him. I remained at the requested safe distance, both out of respect for his experience and because I didn’t want him to report me to his mother, the assassin.
Wind skirled as though a dozen Scottish funerals were under way. Concussive blasts rocked the SUV, and I was grateful that it was an extended model with a lower point of gravity, further anchored by the heavy plow.
The snow was so dry and the blow so relentlessly scolding that nothing stuck to the windshield. I didn’t turn on the wipers.
Scanning the slope ahead, left and right, checking the mirrors, I expected to see one or more of the bone beasts out for a lark in the blizzard. The white torrents foiled vision almost as effectively as a sandstorm in the Mojave, but the stark geometric lines of the creatures, by contrast, ought to draw the eye in this comparatively soft sweep of stormscape.
Except for the SUVs, nothing moved other than what the wind harried. Even a few big trees along the route, pines and firs, were so heavily weighed down by the snow already plastered on them that their boughs barely shivered in deference to the gale.
In the passenger seat, Elvis, having gone blond, had also phased into the work boots, peg-legged jeans, and plaid shirt he had worn in Kissin’ Cousins. He played two roles in that one: a dark-haired air-force officer and a yellow-haired hillbilly.
“You don’t see many blond hillbillies in real life,” I said, “especially not with perfect teeth, black eyebrows, and teased hair.”
He pretended to have a buck-toothed overbite and crossed his eyes to try to give the role more of a Deliverance edge.
I laughed. “Son, you’ve been going through some changes lately. You were never able to laugh this easily about your bad choices.”
For a moment he seemed to consider what I had said, and then he pointed at me.
“What?”
He grinned and nodded.
“You think I’m funny?”
He nodded again, then shook his head no, as if to say he thought I was funny but that wasn’t what he had meant. He pulled on a serious expression and pointed at me again, then at himself.
If he meant what I thought he did, I was flattered. “The one who taught me how to laugh at my foolishness was Stormy.”
He looked at his blond hair in the rearview mirror, shook his head, laughed silently again.
“When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone but yourself—well, you can forgive yourself for those.”
After thinking about that for a moment, he gave me one thumb up as a sign of agreement.
“You know what? Everyone who crosses over to the Other Side, if he didn’t know it before he went, suddenly understands the thousand ways he was a fool in this world. So everyone over there understands everyone over here better than we understand ourselves—and forgives us our foolishness.”
He knew that I meant his beloved mother would greet him with delighted laughter, not with disappointment and certainly not with shame. Tears welled in his eyes.
“Just think about it,” I said.
He bit his lower lip and nodded.
Peripherally, I glimpsed a swift presence in the storm. My heart jumped, and I turned toward the movement, but it was only Boo.
With canine exuberance, he appeared almost to skate up the hill, glorying in the winter spectacle, neither troubled by nor troubling the hostile landscape, a white dog racing through a white world.
After roundi
ng the back of the church, we drove toward the entrance to the guesthouse, where the brothers would meet us.
Elvis had phased from carefully coiffed hillbilly to physician. He wore a white lab coat, and a stethoscope hung around his neck.
“Hey, that’s right. You were in a movie with nuns. You played a doctor. Change of Habit. Mary Tyler Moore was a nun. Not immortal cinema, maybe not up there with the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez oeuvre, but not egregiously silly.”
He put his right hand over his heart and made a patting motion to suggest a rapid beat.
“You loved Mary Tyler Moore?” When he nodded, I said, “Everybody loved Mary Tyler Moore. But you were just friends with her in real life, right?”
He nodded. Just friends. He made the patting motion again. Just friends, but he loved her.
Rodion Romanovich braked to a stop in front of the guesthouse entrance.
As I pulled up slowly behind the Russian, Elvis put the ear tips of the stethoscope in his ears and pressed the diaphragm to my chest, as though listening to my heart. His stare was meaningful and colored with sorrow.
I shifted into park, tramped the emergency brake, and said, “Son, don’t you worry about me. You hear? No matter what happens, I’ll be all right. When my day comes, I’ll be even better, but in the meantime, I’ll be all right. You do what you need to do, and don’t you worry about me.”
He kept the stethoscope to my chest.
“You’ve been a blessing to me in a hard time,” I told him, “and nothing would please me more than if I proved to be a blessing to you.”
He put one hand on the back of my neck and squeezed, the way a brother might express himself when he has no adequate words.
I opened the door and got out of the SUV, and the wind was so cold.
CHAPTER 36
BAKED BY BITTER COLD, HALF THE FLUFF OF THE falling snow had been seared away. The flakes were almost grains now, and they stung my face as I waded through twenty inches of powder to meet Rodion Romanovich when he got out of his SUV. He had left the engine running and the lights on, as I had done.
I raised my voice above the wind: “The brothers will need help with their gear. Let them know we’re here. The back row of seats in my truck are folded down. I’ll come in as soon as I’ve put them up.”
In the school garage, this son of an assassin had looked a bit theatrical in his bearskin hat and fur-trimmed leather coat, but in the storm he appeared imperial and in his element, as if he were the king of winter and could halt the falling snow with a gesture if he chose to do so.
He did not hunch forward and tuck his head to escape the bite of the wind, but stood tall and straight, and strode into the guesthouse with all the swagger you would expect of a man who had once prepared people for death.
The moment he had gone inside, I opened the driver’s door of his SUV, killed the headlights, switched off the engine, and pocketed the keys.
I hurried back to the second vehicle to shut off its lights and engine as well. I pocketed those keys, too, assuring that Romanovich could not drive either SUV back to the school.
When I followed my favorite Hoosier into the guesthouse, I found sixteen brothers ready to rumble.
Practicality had required them to trade their usual habits for storm suits. These were not, however, the flashy kind of storm suits you would see on the slopes of Aspen and Vail. They did not hug the contours of the body to enhance aerodynamics and après-ski seduction, or feature vivid colors in bold designs.
The habits and ceremonial garments worn by the monks were cut and sewn by four brothers who had learned tailoring. These four had also created the storm suits.
Every suit was a dull blue-gray, without ornamentation. They were finely crafted, with foldaway hoods, ballistic-nylon scuff guards, and insulated snowcuffs with rubberized strippers: perfect gear for shoveling sidewalks and other foul-weather tasks.
Upon Romanovich’s arrival, the brothers had begun to put on Thermoloft-insulated vests over their storm suits. The vests had elasticized gussets and reinforced shoulders, and like the storm suits, they offered a number of zippered pockets.
In this uniform, with their kind faces framed in snugly fitted hoods, they looked like sixteen spacemen who had just arrived from a planet so benign that its anthem must be “Teddy Bears on Parade.”
Brother Victor, the former marine, moved among his troops, making sure that all the needed tools had been brought to this staging area.
Two steps inside the door, I spotted Brother Knuckles, and he nodded conspiratorially, and we rendezvoused immediately at the end of the reception lounge that was farthest from the marshaled forces of righteousness.
As I handed him the keys to the SUV that Romanovich had driven, Knuckles said, “Fortify and defend against who, son? When you gotta go to the mattresses, it’s kinda traditional to know who’s the mugs you’re at war with.”
“These are some epic bad mugs, sir. I don’t have time to explain here. I’ll lay it out when we get to the school. My biggest problem is how to explain it to the brothers, because it is mondo weird.”
“I’ll vouch for you, kid. When Knuckles says a guy’s word is gold, there ain’t no doubters.”
“There’s going to be some doubters this time.”
“Better not be.” His block-and-slab features fell into a hard expression suitable for a stone-temple god who didn’t lightly suffer disbelievers. “There better be no doubters of you. Besides, maybe they don’t know God’s got a hand on your head, but they like you and they got a hunch somethin’s special about you.”
“And they’re crazy about my pancakes.”
“That don’t hurt.”
“I found Brother Timothy,” I said.
The stone face broke a little. “Found poor Tim just the way I said he’d be, didn’t you?”
“Not just the way, sir. But, yeah, he’s with God now.”
Making the sign of the cross, he murmured a prayer for Brother Timothy, and then said, “We got proof now—Tim, he didn’t slip around to Reno for some R and R. The sheriff’s gonna have to get real, give the kids the protection you want.”
“Wish he would, but he won’t. We still don’t have a body.”
“Maybe all those times I got my ears boxed is catchin’ up with me, ’cause what I thought you said was you found his body.”
“Yes, sir, I did, I found his body, but all that’s left now is maybe the first couple centimeters of his face rolled up like on a sardine-can key.”
Intensely eye to eye, he considered my words. Then: “That don’t make no sense of no kind, son.”
“No, sir, no sense. I’ll tell you the whole thing when we get to the school, and when you hear it all, it’ll make even less sense.”
“And you think this Russian guy, he’s in it somehow?”
“He’s no librarian, and if he was ever a mortician, he didn’t wait for business, he went out and made it.”
“I can’t puzzle the full sense of that one, neither. How’s your shoulder from last night?”
“Still a little sore, but not bad. My head’s okay, sir, I’m not concussed, I assure you.”
Half the storm-suited monks had taken their gear outside to the SUVs and others were filing out of the door when Brother Saul, who was not going to the school, came to inform us that the abbey phones had gone dead.
“Do you usually lose the phones in a big storm?” I asked.
Brother Knuckles shook his head. “Maybe once in all the years I remember.”
“There’s still cell phones,” I said.
“Somethin’ tells me no, son.”
Even in good weather, cell service wasn’t reliable in this area. I fished my phone from a jacket pocket, switched it on, and we waited for the screen to give us bad news, which it did.
Whenever the crisis arrived, we wouldn’t have easy communication between the abbey and the school.
“Back when I worked for the Eggbeater, we had a thing we said when there was too many funn
y coincidences.”
“‘There are no coincidences,’” I quoted.
“No, that ain’t it. We said, ‘Somebody amongst us musta let the FBI put a bug up his rectum.’”
“That’s colorful, sir, but I’d be happy if this were the FBI.”
“Well, I was on the dark side back then. You better tell the Russian he don’t have a round-trip ticket.”
“You’ve got his keys.”
Carrying a toolbox in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, the last of the storm-suited brothers shouldered through the front door. The Russian wasn’t in the room.
As Brother Knuckles and I stepped out into the snow, Rodion Romanovich drove away in the first SUV, which was fully loaded with monks.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Whoa. Careful with that, son.”
“He took both sets of keys off the peg,” I said.
Romanovich drove halfway back along the side of the church and then stopped, as though waiting for me to follow.
“This is bad,” I said.
“Maybe this is God at work, son, and you just can’t see the good in it yet.”
“Is that confident faith talking, or is it the warm-and-fuzzy optimism of the mouse who saved the princess?”
“They’re sort of one and the same, son. You want to drive?”
I handed him the keys to the second SUV. “No. I just want to sit quietly and stew in my stupidity.”
CHAPTER 37
THE LINT-WHITE SKY SEEMED TO BRIGHTEN THE day less than did the blanketed land, as if the sun were dying and the earth were evolving into a new sun, though a cold one, that would illuminate little and warm nothing.
Brother Knuckles drove, following the devious faux librarian at a safe distance, and I rode shotgun without a shotgun. Eight brothers and their gear occupied the second, third, and fourth rows of seats in the extended SUV.
You might expect that a truckful of monks would be quiet, all the passengers in silent prayer or meditating on the state of their souls, or scheming each in his own way to conceal from humankind that the Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.