“So she supported them, and followed her own agenda, unsupervised.”
“They didn’t want to supervise her. Found her way too unstable for terrorism. A kind of Fury. Who’s the mythological creature with the serpents for hair—? God, my memory. Methuselah doesn’t sound right. Too Biblical.”
“Medusa. That’s Greek.”
“Right. Miss O’Connor was a human Medusa to them. Every lock of her raven-black hair was sheer poison to touch. Apparently some of them tried.”
“Raven-black?”
“Yes. They say she was a beauty the way an honorable death is beautiful. A terrible beauty, to quote the poet. Were they right?”
“Maybe. Her eyes were plastic and her face was … eroded … at the end. It wasn’t a beautiful death.”
“Yes, we did use to say that in the church, didn’t we? `A beautiful death.’ I don’t see much of those in the FBI. I suppose one thinks of a very old person, fading away without pain and faithfully shriven. Does that much happen in our Alzheimer’s, post-HMO world anymore, do you think?”
“No,” Matt said. “Nothing much beautiful in the way of death happens out here in No Man’s Land at all.”
“Extreme Unction we used to call it. I loved that phrase. It put Death in a caliph’s tent with serving men and girls. Extreme. Unction. The Final Anointing. Extreme Unction. Now it’s called Last Rites. Loses in the translation, doesn’t it?”
“The church has lost a lot in the translation lately, including respect and dignity. Do you … let on what you used to be?”
“Not recently. Everyone’s eyebrows lift. ‘One of those.’ We were blind. I’m glad I left, and I’m glad you finally left, Matt. That you’re out of all that scandal.”
“Not quite,” he said ruefully. At the shocked silence on the phone line, he added, quickly, “Now I’m only suspected of adult heterosexual misconduct. What a relief. It’s all right, Frank. I’ll survive.”
“Better than Kathleen O’Connor.”
“So there was no report of her operating in the U.S.”
“She disappeared on them, after all these years. And, frankly, they were just as happy to have such a loose cannon out of the way. I’ll report her death, and your confirmation of it. She left no fingerprints anywhere, was just a rural County Clare girl who went north to Londonderry and found a cause. What made her so lethal, we’ll never know.”
“No.”
Matt hung up, thinking that Kitty the Cutter was still pretty lethal to his circle of acquaintances.
An image of her body on the autopsy table flashed into his mind, including the spidery tattoo on her naked hip. No final anointing for her, except with the medical examiner’s scalpel, and he probably used much more brutal instruments.
For a moment the official description of the sacrament of Extreme Unction flashed before Matt’s eyes too; he’d looked it up again only recently: the anointing with oil specially blessed by the bishop of the organs of the five external senses (eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands), of the feet, and, for men, of the loins or reins; while saying “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking, carnal delectation.” Carnal delectation. The phrase had always stuck with him, even though anointing the loins is generally omitted in English-speaking countries. He never forgot the section ending: “and it is of course everywhere forbidden in the case of women.”
Apparently anointing female loins was itself an occasion of sin. Now he would forever associate a tattoo of the worm Ouroboros with “carnal delectation.” He wondered if attending a woman’s autopsy was a confessable sin.
Having delved his own possible weaknesses, he returned to the living room to minister to Max Kinsella, possible self-confessed murderer, but the sofa was empty …
… except for Midnight Louie, who had taken Kinsella’s place.
Matt stared at the big black cat and the big black cat stared right back at him.
Was Kinsella a shape-shifter?
Or was it Midnight Louie who pulled all their strings? The tomcat yawned, showing pearly whites.
Oh, the shark, dear, waits closer than you think.
Chapter 47
Suitable for Mourning
Max so seldom called ahead to advertise one of his patented surprise appearances that Temple couldn’t help feeling a frisson of dread when she picked up the phone and it was not only Max speaking, but he was asking if he could come over.
Max? Asking? After all, he had once called the Circle Ritz and this apartment home. Temple really didn’t mind him popping in unannounced. Unpredictability was one of Max’s many charms, at least to her.
“I’ve been out carousing,” he warned her. “Carousing?” Another surprise. Max drank only with meals, and only with happy meals, like with her. “With Matt Devine.”
Surprise number three was a throat-choker.
Max. And Matt. Together. Over a friendly glass of … something? What could they possibly have in common to talk about? Besides her.
“You’re not coming over,” she asked, “with news I’m not going to like, are you?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, that Molina has eloped with Russell Crowe, or that Rafi Nadir is an undercover agent for the IRS, or that you’re going into the priesthood.”
“Would Molina eloping with Russell Crowe be good news or bad news, in your opinion?”
“Half and half. He is a major movie star, but he’s also spoiled and cranky and immature. Actually, it would be a heck of an entertaining match: Gladiator vs. Xena the Barbarian Princess Cop.”
“Sounds like a play card for the World Wrestling Federation. No, nothing that worthy of Access Hollywood. And why would I enter the priesthood at this scandal-ridden time?”
“For the surprise factor?”
“I’ve got enough surprises right now that I don’t need to go looking for trouble. And I’ve got a bottle of very good Irish whiskey, mostly full.”
“Max! You’re not driving with an open bottle! If the police—”
“Relax. My car is right in your very own parking lot and nudging up next to an extremely curvaceous little red Miata with its top disappointingly up.”
Temple ambled to her French doors and slipped out onto the patio, from where she could see her parked car, which was why she tried to park it there. A prized new possession needed to be always within easy view.
She glimpsed a new black car beside it, wondering how long it had been there. A while, if he had been visiting Matt. Why go back to the parked car to call her? she also wondered.
Max was in his favorite element now, the dark, and leaving other people in the dark too.
“Are you going to come up in the elevator like a Real Boy?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ll even knock.”
“No, ring the doorbell. It’s a lovely chime. I don’t hear it enough.”
“You might want to put some Leonard Cohen on.” Uh-oh. That was Max’s brooding black Irish music. They closed the conversation quickly. When Temple went back into her living room, Midnight Louie had pulled a Max and sat still as a statue in the middle of her coffee table, looking as if he had been there for generations.
She smoothed his black-satin head as she went to the kitchen and rooted out the heavy Baccarat crystal glasses suitable for premium Scotch, Irish whiskey, and terminally spicy Blood Mary mixes, yum-yum. Max didn’t call her his Paprika Girl for haircolor reasons only.
The doorbell rang through its leisurely melody. Like the era of the building, the fifties, it had time to slow dance through even a practical purpose. That was an era when women in high heels waltzed through domestic chores with vacuum cleaners and single strings of pearls around their necks.
Domestic chores didn’t have that quaint glamour anymore, but Temple swept open the door with the panache of that decade’s leading ladies, Loretta Young or Donna Reed.