“What are you sorry for?”
“For my language,” I said.
“I speak English.”
“You do, yes, and so well. Better than I speak Russian, for sure.”
“Do you speak Russian?”
“No, sir. Not a word.”
“You are a peculiar young man.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
At perhaps fifty, Romanovich did not appear old, but time had battered his face with much experience. Across his broad forehead lay a stitchery of tiny white scars. His laugh lines did not suggest that he had spent a life smiling; they were deep, severe, like old wounds sustained in a sword fight.
Clarifying, I said, “I meant I was sorry for my bad language.”
“Why would I frighten you?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“I did not realize you were here, either,” he said, “but you did not frighten me.”
“I don’t have the equipment.”
“What equipment?”
“I mean, I’m not a scary guy. I’m innocuous.”
“And I am a scary guy?” he asked.
“No, sir. Not really. No. Imposing.”
“I am imposing?”
“Yes, sir. Quite imposing.”
“Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them? Or do you know what innocuous means?”
“It means ‘harmless,’ sir.”
“Yes. And you are certainly not innocuous.”
“It’s just the black ski boots, sir. They tend to make anybody look like he could kick butt.”
“You appear clear, direct, even simple.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you are complex, complicated, even intricate, I suspect.”
“What you see is what you get,” I assured him. “I’m just a fry cook.”
“Yes, you make that quite plausible, with your exceptionally fluffy pancakes. And I am a librarian from Indianapolis.”
I indicated the book in his hand, which he held in such a way that I could not see the title. “What do you like to read?”
“It is about poisons and the great poisoners in history.”
“Not the uplifting stuff you’d expect in an abbey library.”
“It is an important aspect of Church history,” said Romanovich. “Throughout the centuries, clergymen have been poisoned by royals and politicians. Catherine de’ Medicis murdered the Cardinal of Lorraine with poison-saturated money. The toxin penetrated through his skin, and he was dead within five minutes.”
“I guess it’s good we’re moving toward a cashless economy.”
“Why,” Romanovich asked, “would just-a-fry-cook spend months in a monastery guesthouse?”
“No rent. Griddle exhaustion. Carpal tunnel syndrome from bad spatula technique. A need for spiritual revitalization.”
“Is that common to fry cooks—a periodic quest for spiritual revitalization?”
“It might be the defining characteristic of the profession, sir. Poke Barnett has to go out to a shack in the desert twice a year to meditate.”
Layering a frown over his glower, Romanovich said, “What is Poke Barnett?”
“He’s the other fry cook at the diner where I used to work. He buys like two hundred boxes of ammunition for his pistol, drives out in the Mojave fifty miles from anyone, and spends a few days blasting the living hell out of cactuses.”
“He shoots cactuses?”
“Poke has many fine qualities, sir, but he’s not much of an environmentalist.”
“You said that he went into the desert to meditate.”
“While shooting the cactuses, Poke says he thinks about the meaning of life.”
The Russian stared at me.
He had the least readable eyes of anyone I had ever met. From his eyes, I could learn nothing more about him than a paramecium on a glass slide, gazing up at the lens of a microscope, would be able to learn about the examining scientist’s opinion of it.
After a silence, Rodion Romanovich changed the subject: “What book are you looking for, Mr. Thomas?”
“Anything with a china bunny on a magical journey, or mice who save princesses.”
“I doubt you will find that kind of thing in this section.”
“You’re probably right. Bunnies and mice generally don’t go around poisoning people.”
That statement earned another brief silence from the Russian. I don’t believe that he was pondering his own opinion of the homicidal tendencies of bunnies and mice. I think, instead, he was trying to decide whether my words implied that I might be suspicious of him.
“You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t try to be, sir.”
“And droll.”
“But not grotesque,” I hoped.
“No. Not grotesque. But droll.”
He turned and walked away with his book, which might have been about poisons and famous poisoners in history. Or not.
At the far end
of the aisle, Elvis appeared, still dressed as a flamenco dancer. He approached as Romanovich receded, slouching his shoulders and imitating the Russian’s hulking, troll-like shamble, scowling at the man as he passed him.
When Rodion Romanovich reached the end of these stacks, before turning out of sight, he paused, looked back, and said, “I do not judge you by your name, Odd Thomas. You should not judge me by mine.”
He departed, leaving me to wonder what he had meant. He had not, after all, been named for the mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
By the time Elvis reached me, he had contorted his face into a recognizable and comic impression of the Russian.
Watching the King as he mugged for me, I realized how unusual it was that neither I nor Romanovich had mentioned either Brother Timothy being missing or the deputies swarming the grounds in search of him. In the closed world of a monastery, where deviations from routine are rare, the disturbing events of the morning ought to have been the first subject of which we spoke.
Our mutual failure to remark on Brother Timothy’s disappearance, even in passing, seemed to suggest some shared perception of events, or at least a shared attitude, that made us in some important way alike. I had no idea what I meant by that, but I intuited the truth of it.
When Elvis couldn’t tease a smile from me with his impression of the somber Russian, he stuck one finger up his left nostril all the way to the third knuckle, pretending to be mining deep for boogers.
Death had not relieved him of his compulsion to entertain. As a voiceless spirit, he could no longer sing or tell jokes. Sometimes he danced, remembering a simple routine from one of his movies or from his Las Vegas act, though he was no more Fred Astaire than was Abbot Bernard. Sadly, in his desperation, he sometimes resorted to juvenile humor that was not worthy of him.