On the Fifth Day Page 3

  luded. But Thomas suspected that his brother had known ex

  actly what he was getting himself into and, perhaps more tellingly, what he wasn't.

  Thomas picked up one of the boxes and emptied it care

  fully onto the bed. Most of what spilled out looked like junk (a ticket stub from a Cubs game, a few faded and unframed photographs, a dusty cassette tape, some weird little silver trinket shaped like a fish, a stub of pencil), but it all felt saved somehow, hoarded as if it had all once been special, meaning

  ful. The thought depressed him.

  He flipped one of the photographs over and his breath caught. His own face looked up at him from the paper, a smil

  ing, confident face Thomas had searched for in the mirror for the last six years. Next to Thomas was his brother in full cler

  ical array--vestments, collar, the works--but somehow still looking like his brother as he had been when he taught him how to read a curveball or showed him the best comic books. And beside Ed was Kumi, her long black hair up and knotted in a suitably Japanese arrangement, the white of her wedding dress almost too bright for the camera to capture. They were all beaming, glowing with happiness, standing in the weedy garden only yards from where he now sat. Thomas closed his eyes, permitting himself to remember her as he so rarely did, suddenly feeling her absence as he had done when she first left.

  The picture was almost ten years old, but she'd been gone for more than half of that. It struck Thomas that his wedding day had been the beginning of the end of his relationship with 19

  O n t h e F i f t h D a y

  his brother. They had always been a little different, but that day, the sheer rightness of it--in spite of everything that had followed--had been their last moment of harmony. The next time he'd seen Ed, things were already unraveling. The three of them would never be caught smiling like that together again.

  When the doorbell rang the first time, he ignored it, but when it rang twice more it occurred to him that he might be the only one in the building. Then he remembered the lawyer who was coming to meet with him about what was laughably referred to as his brother's "estate." He moved swiftly down the narrow hall and rickety staircase, only pausing for a sec

  ond to wonder what he would do if it was a homeless person as Jim had assumed him to be, or someone with some pressing spiritual crisis. He opened the door and gasped as the cold wind struck him forcibly in the face.

  The man outside had taken a few steps back as if to look up to the windows for signs of life. He looked at Thomas for a second without moving, one hand holding a black attache

  case, the other thrust deep into his pocket.

  "You Knight?" he said.

  "Yes," said Thomas, a little taken aback by the man's brusque manner. "Come in."

  "Parks," he said.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Parks," he repeated. "Ben Parks."

  He stepped past Thomas without extending a hand. He was maybe thirty, thin-faced with curly hair, a goatee, and hard eyes that didn't meet Thomas's when he spoke. The coat he wore looked old and a size or two too large. He didn't look like a lawyer.

  Thomas led him back into the spartan kitchen.

  "Do you want to go straight to his room or what?"

  The look on the lawyer's face was reminiscent of Jim's when he had realized that Thomas wasn't looking for a handout.

  "His room?"

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  "I'm sorry," said Thomas. "You are the lawyer come to see about Ed's stuff, right?"

  "Ed?"

  "Ed Knight, my brother. The priest who died."

  There was another split second of uncertainty and the man's eyes tightened. For a moment he was silent, and then his demeanor changed, lightened so that he looked like a dif

  ferent person entirely.

  "Oh, you're his brother. I'm so sorry. I've never actually met Father Knight and I didn't know him by his first name. I assumed you were a priest."

  Thomas laughed at that.

  "No," he said. "My brother got the spiritual gene. Or the Catholic gene. Something. Me, it skipped. So," he said, mov

  ing quickly in case his confession had made the lawyer un

  comfortable, and because it was bravado and not really true at all, "you want to look over his room?"

  "Sure," said the lawyer. "That would be great."

  Thomas led the way.

  "Been in town long?" said Parks.

  "I live here. Well, Evanston," he said, adding for no partic

  ular reason, "the cheap end. I came as soon as I heard. I fig

  ured I'd need to be here a few days, but Ed seems to have owned so little--unless you know something about assets I don't--that that might not be necessary. And no doubt Mother Church will make sure everything is in order."

  "Right," said the lawyer.

  Thomas opened the door to the miserable little bedroom.

  "Chateau Knight," he said.

  The lawyer stood in the doorway and looked carefully around without moving, as if he were afraid of disturbing a crime scene.

  "I don't think there's much I'm going to want," said Thomas. "Unless he turns out to have had some offshore ac

  count worth millions, I think the order will get the lot."

  "Do you know much about your brother's life, any assets we might not immediately find?"

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  "The car outside is his, I think," said Thomas, "though it's only worth a few hundred bucks at most. Maybe it belongs to the parish or the Jesuits. He probably had a suitcase or two with him. I don't know."

  "Anything else?"

  "Look," said Thomas, "we weren't what you'd call close. Didn't really see eye to eye on a lot of stuff."

  "I see. I'm sorry."

  "I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm just saying that if you talk to people here, people he worked with, I mean, you'll find out a hell of a lot more about him than you will if you ask me. I didn't know anything about him."

  He was angry and ashamed to say it, but there it was. It was the truth.

  "Where did he die?"

  "I'm sorry?" said Thomas.

  "You said he had a case or two with him. He was on vaca

  tion somewhere?"

  "Kind of," said Thomas, glancing out of the window, "I don't really know."

  "And you don't know where?" Parks sounded faintly in

  credulous, even irritated.

  "No," said Thomas, weary and with a swelling sense of failure and humiliation. "Overseas somewhere. I'm sorry. Does it matter?"

  The lawyer hesitated for a second, his eyes uncertain, and then the smile snapped back on, reassuring and dismissive.

  "I shouldn't think so," he said.

  "Do you mind if I just leave you to it?" said Thomas. "I'm just going to get in the way."

  "Sure," said the lawyer. "If I need you, I'll holler."

  Gratefully, Thomas descended.

  Thomas sat at the kitchen table for twenty minutes, staring at his chipped mug, wishing there were something to fill the si

  lence, wishing he could go home. There was, after all, nothing 22

  A. J. Hartley

  for him here. It was as he had expected. If this was closure it was amorphous and deeply unsatisfying, though what else he could have hoped for he really didn't know. Abruptly he got up, snatched a pen from inside his jacket, and fished for some

  thing to write on in his pockets. He spread a creased napkin onto the tabletop and scribbled quickly:

  "Jim. Gone home. Barring anything surprising, see that Ed's stuff goes to the people and causes he cared for. Neither include me, and you are a better judge of what he would have wanted. Sorry about the game. Thanks, TK."

  He looked at the note. It would do. It felt a little cheap, a little easy, but this was not the time to be his brother's keeper. He hadn't been so for the last six years; why pretend other

  wise now?

  He was on his w
ay to the front door when he heard it open and men's voices drifted through to him from the windswept street: Jim, and someone else. Thomas grabbed the note and stuffed it quickly into his pocket as the priest entered the kitchen.

  "All right, Thomas?" said Jim. "This is Father Bill Mor

  retti. We met on the street."

  The other man was sixty and stooped, but his eyes were bright and shrewd.

  "I'm very sorry for your loss," he said, extending his hand.

  "Thank you," said Thomas.

  "Do you want to get started right away?" said Jim, looking expectantly from Thomas to the other man, who was shrug

  ging out of a heavy, old-fashioned overcoat.

  "Started with what?" said Thomas.

  "I'm sorry," said Jim, grinning at his absentmindedness.

  "This is the lawyer who has come to go through your brother's possessions with you."

  For a second Thomas just stood there.

  "If you're the lawyer," he said, at last, "who's upstairs?"

  CHAPTER 4

  Thomas was the first to move, but even so he was halfway up the stairs before he hit his stride, driven by a vague outrage he couldn't explain. Jim followed, the lawyer a slow third at his back. At his brother's bedroom door, Thomas twisted the han

  dle as he crashed his shoulder against the timber, but the door did not give. For a second he thought he could hear movement on the other side, and then he was slamming repeatedly against it with all his weight and strength, suddenly angry.

  "Thomas, wait!" said Jim, grasping his arm. "He could be armed. He could be . . ."

  But Thomas wasn't listening. He gritted his teeth and rammed the door again. Distantly through the noise of his ef

  forts Thomas heard Jim tell the lawyer to go and call the police, and then the jamb splintered and the door shuddered open. The room was deserted, the window open. He blundered in with Jim at his heels, grabbed the window frame and looked out, but could see no sign of tracks in the snow. It all happened in a second: movement behind him, a muffled crunch, and a groan as Jim slipped to the floor. Parks--if that was his name--had been behind the door waiting for them. With Jim down, he now took a menacing step toward Thomas.

  "Hold it," said Thomas, raising one hand defensively, "what do you want?"

  But the other man said nothing. He raised his right arm and Thomas saw that the fist was large and clublike, as if he were wearing an absurdly large glove or had wrapped something heavy around his hand.

  Thomas backed up against the window, feeling the ledge against the backs of his thighs. He raised his fists and splayed his legs, waiting for the other man to come at him. Jim was still down and silent.

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  Parks now showed his other hand and Thomas felt his heart skip with panic that was as much alarm at the strangeness of the thing as it was fear for his own safety. The man was hold

  ing what could only be described as a sword, short--only eighteen inches or so--the blade leaf-shaped, sweeping to a point long and lethal-looking. It was the weapon of a psy

  chopath or a cultist. Thomas faltered, unsure which way to go.

  "We don't have to do this," he said, his voice unsteady.

  "Au contraire," said the other with a grim smile. He took a step forward and swung the sword in a broad arc toward Thomas's face.

  Thomas reacted instinctively, ducking back, swatting at the blade with his left hand as he closed to punch wildly with his right. He felt the stinging thwack of the sword's cold steel against his splayed palm, a pain so sharp and sudden that it was a moment before he could be sure that he had caught the flat of the blade and not its edge. Parks pivoted his shoulder toward him, dodging his punch, and that was when he brought his right hand crashing down on the side of Thomas's head. It was no glove, no fabric wrapped around his fist. It was as hard and unyielding as iron, and it sent Thomas to the floor as if his legs had been cut from under him. For a second he saw only blackness, and while he knew he was falling he could do noth

  ing to prevent it.

  He barely made a sound as he crumpled to the carpet, and though he didn't completely lose consciousness he was, for a few moments, so completely disoriented that he could not move at all. He sensed Parks only vaguely as he clambered over Thomas's stricken body, knowing only that he had gotten out the window to freedom long before Thomas was in any shape to do anything about it.

  Even when he felt fully alert Thomas stayed where he was, gingerly testing with his hand the back of his head where he had been hit, and only then hunching himself into a cautious squat. A few feet away, Jim groaned.

  "That went well," said Thomas.

  "What the hell was that thing?"

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  "The sword?"

  "Sword? What sword?" said Jim. "I didn't see a sword."

  "I think you were already down for the count by then," said Thomas, resting his weight against the wall and sitting flat on the floor.

  "You didn't do so well yourself, Rocky," said Jim. "Hell

  fire, what did he hit me with?"

  "Same thing he hit me with," said Thomas. "It was like a glove made of metal. Something between a gauntlet and the world's biggest knuckle duster. You okay?"

  "I think so. You?"

  Thomas rose slowly, nodding only when he was com

  pletely upright and didn't find the floor swimming back up at him.

  "That thing could have cracked my skull," he said. "I pre

  fer not to think what he could have done with the sword."

  Jim was running his fingers over his left temple. There was a thin trail of blood where the blow had broken the skin, but the cut was nothing to the lump that was already rising.

  " 'Wait,' I said," he intoned. " 'He could be armed,' I said. But no. In the red corner we have Thomas Knight, all the way from Idiot's Landing."

  "Thanks," said Thomas. "Sorry."

  He turned and looked out the window to where footprints in the snow on the porch roof ended in a confused scraping at the edge. He leaned out to look down the street, but the im

  postor was nowhere in sight. He couldn't even make sense of where the footprints led.

  Goddamn it.

  He wasn't sure why he was so furious, and as he stood there leaning out into the cold the rage seemed to blow off him so that he felt only stupidly ineffectual and hard done by. He cursed under his breath and turned back to Jim, who was now perching gingerly on the bed, still cradling his temple. The lawyer had appeared in the doorway.

  "Everything okay?" he said.

  Thomas shot him a baleful look.

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  "Brilliant," said Jim, sardonically upbeat.

  "He was looking for something," said Thomas, sitting be

  side him on the edge of the bed and taking in the carnage that had been visited upon the room: its papers scattered, its books strewn about, the meager remnants of his brother's life hurled around with no remorse or respect . . .

  "He asked me if I was Knight, " he said, thinking it through, trying to remember. "I assumed he meant me, but I think he meant my brother. He said his name was Parks, and I assumed he was the lawyer, but I think . . . I'm not sure. He didn't know Ed personally, but I think he came specifically to see him. I think," he added, troubled by the realization, "that he didn't know my brother was dead."

  Jim frowned.

  "I don't know what to do with that," he said, massaging his head.

  "Neither do I," said Thomas.

  "Is anything missing?" asked Jim, picking up one of the books and considering it.

  "I have no idea," said Thomas. "There wasn't much to steal except for papers, and if some of those are gone, I'd never know."

  He stooped, righted an overturned box, and saw the wed

  ding picture lying there, bent slightly now.

  "Wait," he said. "Something is missing. A little silver fish. You know the one I mean?
"

  Jim shook his head.

  "The police are sending someone over," said the lawyer.

  "They said we should touch nothing."

  "He asked me where Ed died," said Thomas, half to him

  self. "I told him I didn't know. I felt bad about it . . . that I didn't know, I mean. I think he really wanted to know. I'm not sure why, but . . ."

  "I don't know where he was," said Jim. "Far East some

  where. He had been in Italy, then went to Japan, but I don't think he died there."

  "Japan?" said Thomas, all the old mixed feelings flooding 27

  O n t h e F i f t h D a y

  back as they did when anyone mentioned Japan. It was a bit like being hit again, though it turned into a cold numbness edged with apprehension. It was like waking up and knowing that something terrible had happened the day before but being un

  able to remember what it was. "What was he doing in Japan?"

  "No idea," said Jim. "We could call the order. The Jesuits, I mean."

  Thomas looked at him, and then nodded, which made his head ring again with pain.

  CHAPTER 5

  "He said his name was Parks," said Thomas, for the second time in as many minutes.

  "And this silver fish thing is all you're sure is missing?"

  The cop who had introduced himself as Officer Campbell looked bored, as if he had been sent on a wild-goose chase. Now that the initial outrage had subsided, Thomas couldn't re

  ally blame him.

  "Yes," he said. "I didn't really get chance to look at the pa

  pers before he arrived . . ."

  "You think it was valuable?"

  "Probably not. I suppose it depends what it was made of. If it was silver it might be worth a couple of hundred bucks."

  "Could you describe the fish, sir?" said the cop, blowing out a sigh and scribbling on a pad with a black pen.

  "Three or four inches long, kind of funny shaped, detailed scales . . . I don't know what else."

  "Funny shaped?" said Campbell.

  "Crudely modeled, I guess. Fat tail. Big, clumsy-looking fins."

  "And it was just a model fish, not, you know, a container or something? Did it open up?"

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  "I don't know."

  "You think it was, like, symbolic or something? You know, him being a priest and all."