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.