From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 67

As the Wulfstan party was being seated at a window table, slowly tumbling masses of cottony fog rolled across the black water, as if the bay had awakened and, rising from its bed, had tossed off great mounds of sheets and blankets.

To the waiter, Nolly was Nolly, Kathleen was Mrs. Wulfstan, and Tom Vanadium was sir-though not the usual perfunctorily polite sir, but sir with deferential emphasis. Tom was unknown to the waiter, but his shattered face gave him gravitas; besides, he possessed a quality, quite separate from carriage and demeanor and attitude, an ineffable something, that inspired respect and even trust.

Martinis were ordered all around. None here observed a vow of absolute sobriety.

Tom caused less of a stir in the restaurant than Kathleen had expected. Other diners noticed him, of course, but after one or two looks of shock or pity, they appeared indifferent, though this was undoubtedly the thinnest pretense of indifference. The same quality in him that elicited deferential regard from the waiter apparently ensured that others would be courteous enough to respect his privacy.

"I'm wondering," Nolly said, "if you're not an officer of the law anymore, in what capacity are you going to pursue Cain?"

Tom Vanadium merely arched one eyebrow, as if to say that more than a single answer ought to be obvious.

"I wouldn't have figured you for a vigilante," Nolly said.

"I'm not. I'm just going to be the conscience that Enoch Cain seems to have been born without."

"Are you carrying a piece?" Nolly asked.

"I won't lie to you."

So you are. Legal?"

Tom said nothing.

Nolly sighed. "Well, I guess if you were going to just plug him, you could've done that already, soon as you got to town."

"I wouldn't just whack anyone, not even a worm bucket like Cain, any more than I would commit suicide. Remember, I believe in eternal consequences."

To Nolly, Kathleen said, "This is why I married you. To be around talk like this."

" Eternal consequences, you mean?"

"No,whack."'

So smoothly did the waiter move, that three martinis on a corklined mahogany tray seemed to float across the room in front of him and then hover beside their table while he served the cocktails to the lady first, the guest second, and the host third.

When the waiter had gone, — Tom said, "Don't worry about abetting a crime. If I had to pop Cain to prevent him from hurting someone, I wouldn't hesitate. But I'd never act as judge and jury otherwise."

Nudging Nolly, Kathleen said, " 'Pop.' This is wonderful."

Nolly raised his glass. "To justice rough or smooth."

Kathleen savored her martini. "Mmmm… as cold as a hit man's heart and as crisp as a hundred-dollar bill from the devil's wallet."

This encouraged Tom to raise both eyebrows.

"She reads too much hard-boiled detective fiction," Nolly said. "And lately, she's talking about writing it."

"Bet I could, and sell it, too," she said. "I might not be as good at it as I am at teeth, but I'd be better than some I've read."

"I suspect," Tom said, "that any job you set your mind to, you'd be as good as you are at teeth."

"No question about it," Nolly agreed, flashing his choppers.

"Tom," Kathleen said, "I know why you became a cop, I guess. St. Anselmo's Orphanage… the murders of those children."

He nodded. "I was a doubting Thomas after that."

"You wonder," Nolly said, "why God lets the innocent suffer."

"I doubted myself more than God, though Him, too. I had those boys' blood on my hands. They were mine to protect, and I failed."

"You're too young to have been in charge of the orphanage back then."

"I was twenty-three. At St. Anselmo's I was the prefect of one dormitory floor. The floor on which all the murders occurred. After that… I decided maybe I could better protect the innocent if I were a cop. For a while, the law gave me more to hold on to than faith did."

"It's easy to see you as a cop," Kathleen said. All the whacks, pops, and worm buckets just trip off your tongue, so to speak. But it takes some effort to remember you're a priest, too."

"Was a priest," he corrected. "Might be again. At my request, I've been under a dispensation from vows and suspension from duties for twenty-seven years. Ever since those kids were killed."

"But what made you choose that life? You must have committed to the seminary awfully young."

"Fourteen. It's usually the family that's behind an expression of the calling at such a young age, but in my case, I had to argue my folks into it."

He stared I out at the congregated ghosts of fog, white multitudes that entirely obscured the bay, as if all the sailors ever lost at sea had gathered here, pressing at the window, eyeless forms that nevertheless saw everything.

"Even when I was a young boy," Tom continued, "the world felt a lot different to me from the way it looked to other people. I don't mean I was smarter. I've got maybe a little better than average IQ, but nothing I could brag about. Flunked geography twice and history once. No one would ever confuse me and Einstein. It's just, I felt… such complexity and mystery that other people didn't appreciate, such layered beauty, layers upon layers like phyllo pastry, each new layer more amazing than the last. I can't explain it to you without sounding like a holy fool, but even as a boy, I wanted to serve the God who had created so much wonder, regardless of how strange and perhaps even beyond all understanding He might be."

Kathleen had never heard a religious calling described in such odd words as these, and she was surprised, indeed, to hear a priest refer to God as "strange."

Turning away from the window, Tom met her gaze. His smoke-gray eyes looked frosted, as though the fog ghosts had passed through the window and possessed him. But then the flame on the table candle flared in a draft; lambent light melted the chill from his eyes, and she saw again the warmth and the beautiful sorrow that had impressed her before.

"I'm a less philosophical sort than Kathleen," Nolly said, "so what I've been wondering is where you learned the tricks with the quarter. How is it you're priest, cop-and amateur magician?"

"Well, there was this magician-"

Tom pointed to the nearly finished martini that stood on the table before him. Balanced on the thin rim of the glass: impossibly, precariously-the coin.

"— called himself King Obadiah, Pharaoh of the Fantastic. He traveled all over the country playing nightclubs-"

Tom plucked the quarter off the glass, folded it into his right fist, and then at once opened his hand, which was now empty.

"— and wherever he went, between his shows, he always gave free performances at nursing homes, schools for the deaf-"

Kathleen and Nolly shifted their attention to Tom's clenched left hand, although the quarter could not possibly have traveled from one fist to the other.

"— and whenever the good Pharaoh was here in San Francisco, a few times each year, he always stopped by St. Anselmo's to entertain the boys-"

Instead of opening his left fist, Tom lifted his martini with his right, and on the tablecloth under the glass lay the coin.

"— so I persuaded him to teach me a few simple tricks."

Finally his left hand sprang open, palm up, revealing two dimes and a nickel.

"Simple, my ass," said Nolly,

Tom smiled. "I've practiced a lot over the years."

He briefly closed his hand around the three coins, then with a snap of his wrist, flung them at Nolly, who flinched. But either the coins were never flung or they vanished in midair-and his hand was empty.

Kathleen hadn't noticed Tom replace his glass on the table, over the quarter. When he lifted it to drain the last of the martini, two dimes and a nickel glittered on the tablecloth, where previously the quarter had been.

After staring at the coins for a long moment, Kathleen said, "I don't think any mystery writer has ever done a series of novels about a priest detective who's also a magician."

Lifting his martini, theatrically gesturing to the tablecloth where the glass had stood, as though the lack of coins proved that he, too, had sorcerous power, Nolly said, "Another round of this magical concoction? "

Everyone agreed, and the order was placed when their waiter brought appetizers: crab cakes for Nolly, scampi for Kathleen, and calamari for Tom.

"You know," Tom said when the second round of drinks arrived, "hard as it is to believe, some places never heard of martinis."

Nolly shuddered. "The wilds of Oregon. I don't intend ever to go there until it's civilized."

"Not just Oregon. Even San Francisco, some places."

"May God keep us," Nolly said, "from such blighted neighborhoods as those."

They clinked their glasses in a toast.