Vivien stared at the screen, sick at heart.
Sitting in the middle of the stage in a small theatre, motionless under the lights, in front of a crowded auditorium, was a ventriloquist. He was young, but not so young as to be unrecognizable. On his knees he held a puppet, about three feet high. The puppet was of an elderly man in a white tunic, with long snowy white hair and a beard of the same colour.
Michael McKean turned to the puppet and asked him a question in an impatient tone. ‘But why won’t you tell me who you are?’
The puppet replied in a calm, deep voice, ‘Haven’t you guessed yet? You really are stupid, boy.’
Then, moved by the ventriloquist’s skilled hand, he turned his head towards the auditorium to savour the audience’s laughter. He was silent for a moment, raising his thick eyebrows over his blue glass eyes in an unnatural manner.
Finally he said the words the whole audience was waiting for.
‘I am God.’
CHAPTER 36
‘And when we got to Joy, we saw that John, Father McKean’s right-hand man, had killed him. That’s all we know for the moment.’
Vivien finished her account and shared the silence of the other people in the room. Some already knew the story, had gone through it stage by stage through her words and felt the bitter taste of confirmation in their mouths. Some had heard it for the first time from beginning to end, and couldn’t remove the incredulity from their faces.
It was 7 a.m. The morning light came in through the window and threw a pattern on the floor.
They were all exhausted.
Present in the mayor’s office in City Hall, apart from the mayor himself, were Police Commissioner Joby Willard, Captain Alan Bellew, Vivien, Russell and Doctor Albert Grosso, a psychologist chosen by Gollemberg as a consultant to the investigation, who had been hurriedly summoned to take care of John Kortighan in his confused state.
Given what Joy had in its walls, they had all agreed that it was impossible for the kids to spend the night there. They had been entrusted to the care of the community’s outside helpers and accommodated temporarily in a hotel in the Bronx that had agreed to take them in.
She had given Sundance a kiss, reserving the right to put off to the following day the news of her mother’s death. As she watched them get in the bus, it had struck Vivien that it would take a lot of time and effort before they forgot. She hoped that none of them lost their way as they confronted this new test.
Once the initial crime screen investigation was over, and Michael McKean’s body had been removed and his killer taken away in handcuffs, a car had brought Vivien and Russell to City Hall where they had arrived almost simultaneously with the captain and where Mayor Gollemberg was waiting for them.
First of all he had made sure that the danger of other explosions had been neutralized.
Bellew had explained that the bomb disposal experts had rendered the remote control that set off the explosions unusable and that, thanks to both the letter found in Father McKean’s possession and the map – the latter a brilliant intuition of Vivien’s – they now had a complete list of the buildings that had been mined. The clearance was scheduled to begin in a few hours.
Then Vivien had told the story in all its complexity and absurdity, right up to its dramatic conclusion.
At this point, Dr Grosso, a man in his mid-fifties who was the exact opposite of the stereotypical psychiatrist, realized that it was his turn. He got to his feet and began walking around the room, speaking in a calm voice that held everyone’s attention from the first words.
‘Based on what I’ve heard, I can hazard a diagnosis, though I reserve the right to modify it after I’ve had a closer look at the case. Unfortunately, not being able to talk directly to the person concerned, I have to rely on the testimony, which is why I suspect we’ll never be able to do anything other than hypothesize.’
He stroked his moustache, trying to express himself in terms that everyone could understand.
‘From what I’ve heard, I think Father McKean was severely disturbed. Firstly he had a split personality, and whenever his other persona, the man in the green jacket, entered him, he stopped being himself. To be clearer, when he put on that green jacket, he wasn’t pretending, he wasn’t playing a part like an actor, he really became a different man. But when that man left him, no memory remained. I’m sure his anguish at all those deaths was genuine. That’s proved by the fact that he decided to contravene one of the most important dogmas of his Church and violate the secrecy of the confessional if it would lead to the arrest of the culprit and the end of the attacks.’
Dr Grosso leaned on the desk and looked around. Maybe this was the way he acted when he lectured at the university.
‘This kind of syndrome is often accompanied by epilepsy. Let’s be clear what we mean by that word. I’m not talking about the disease we’re all familiar with, in other words, the eyes rolling up, the foaming at the mouth, the convulsions. Epilepsy sometimes presents itself in very different forms. During the attacks, the person affected may have hallucinations. So it isn’t unlikely that at such moments, Father McKean actually saw his own alter ego. The fact that he described him proves that. And at the same time it’s the proof of what I said earlier, that he was completely unaware of what was happening to him.’
He gave a shrug of his shoulders by way of introduction to what he next said.
‘The fact that he had a gift as a ventriloquist, and that in his youth he actually performed professionally, merely confirms this theory. There is often an identification between the ventriloquist and his puppet, at least where there’s some kind of predisposition. But as the puppet’s appeal to the public is the true source of the ventriloquist’s success, the ventriloquist may begin to feel envy or even aversion towards his puppet. A colleague of mine is treating a patient who was convinced that his puppet was having an affair with his wife.’
He smiled, but without mirth.
‘I realize that saying such things, may raise a smile. But I beg you to believe me that in a mental hospital they are far from uncommon.’
He moved away from the desk and again began pacing the room.
‘As for this John Kortighan, I think he was completely under the spell of Father McKean. He didn’t so much idealize him as idolize him. When he realized who he was and what he was doing, all he could do was strike down his idol. When I spoke with him, he actually suggested I tell everyone that he was responsible for the attacks, so that Father McKean’s good name and the memory of all the important things he had done in his life should remain intact. As you can see, the human mind is-’
The telephone on the mayor’s desk rang.
Gollemberg lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’