The Darkest Evening of the Year (20 page)

Seventeen years later, recounting all of this to Brian, Amy felt a grief almost as sharp as the pain she had felt that awful twilight. Although in the intervening years she had held so many dogs as they were put down, she wept and her voice broke often as she described the scene on the quadrangle.

A week thereafter, Sister Jacinta, “Sister Mouse,” had given Amy the locket with the profile of a golden retriever. She had worn it ever since.

Now, in the center of that quadrangle, a flat granite plaque, polished and black, marks where an urn of ashes is buried. A cameo inset in the marker matches the one on Amy’s locket. Under the cameo are carved these words:

I
N MEMORY OF
N
ICKIE,
THE FIRST MASCOT OF
M
ATER
M
ISERICORDIÆ,
WHO WAS EVERYTHING A GOOD DOG SHOULD BE.

Brian said, “I understand you so much better now—the commitment to dogs, the risks you take. Your life was chaos, and Nickie brought order to it, order and hope. You’re repaying that debt.”

Everything he said was true, but the story she had set out to tell was not yet entirely told.

What came after that night in the quadrangle took far greater courage to discuss. She had not spoken of the next part to anyone in more than eight years.

In telling him of her first dog, Amy had discovered an intensity of emotion greater than she had expected. Shaken by the depth of that revisited grief, she didn’t feel that she could tell him the rest of it now.

She was tired, exhausted. So much had happened in—what?—maybe nineteen hours, and another busy and emotional day most likely lay ahead of them.

Although she had steeled herself to tell it all, she could not proceed to the end. Better to wait now until they had found Brian’s daughter and brought her into his life, where she belonged.

Chapter
47

G
unther Schloss, hired killer and pilot and happy anarchist, with a wife in Costa Rica and a second wife in San Francisco, had a girlfriend in Santa Barbara. Her name was Juliette Junke, pronounced
junkie,
which was ironic because she was so adamantly opposed to the use of illegal drugs that she had once castrated two small-time dope dealers who had sold marijuana to her niece.

Juliette Junke did business under the name Juliette Churchill. She was a mortician. She, her sister, and her two brothers owned and operated Churchill’s Funeral Home, an elegant and stately facility with four viewing rooms that were frequently in use at the same time.

Although the funeral business turned a profit, the Churchill clan moonlighted by smuggling terrorists—among other things—in and out of the United States in specially designed caskets that contained bottled oxygen and a clever system for collecting and storing the urine of the terrorists therein transported.

Many murderous thugs just hiked across the unprotected border or used international airlines and—wearing T-shirts that proclaimed
DEATH TO ALL JEWS
in Arabic—breezed through U.S. checkpoints, where highly suspicious federal security personnel strip-searched Irish grandmothers and Boy Scouts on field trips.

Juliette and her family specialized in the smuggling of those terrorists who were so notorious and whose faces were so well known to police organizations worldwide, they couldn’t even risk traveling in disguise and must be shipped on missions of jihad while posing as embalmed cadavers. These were the most successful of all terrorists, of course, and therefore the richest, and they paid well.

Arriving in Santa Barbara after viewing hours at the funeral home, Billy Pilgrim met Juliette at the garage entrance. He pulled the Shumpeter Cadillac into an empty bay in the row of black hearses.

Juliette Junke-Churchill was a good-looking woman, terrific-looking for a mortician. She reminded him of a young Jodie Foster: those fine cheekbones and those blue eyes that with just one wink could set your heart racing or, with one tear, break it.

Juliette probably did not cry much—or ever—and she would never do anything as coy as wink. She looked soft, but she was hard. If she claimed to be able to crack walnuts with her thighs, Billy would want to watch but only while wearing goggles to protect against walnut-shell shrapnel.

She greeted him with the nickname she had given him—“Bookworm, you are a sight for sore eyes”—and they hugged because everyone felt they had to hug Billy and because Billy didn’t mind hugging someone as delectable as Juliette.

They set right to work unloading the trunk of the Cadillac. Juliette carried the bag of shredded dog’s-eye drawings, and Billy toted the wastebasket full of e-mail files.

The funeral home had two superefficient Power-Pak II Cremation Systems, and one of them was ready to be fired up.

Billy left the wastebasket full of e-mails with Juliette, and by the time he returned with the brain to Brian McCarthy’s computer, she had fed all the papers into the cremator. He tossed in the bag of shredded drawings, and pointing to the computer logic unit, he said, “I want to pour something corrosive into it.”

“Why, if we’re going to burn it down to char and twisted scrap?”

“I like to be double sure.”

“Billy, I’m having a rotten day, don’t bust my chops.”

“Well, you know cremators better than I do. You say it’ll do the job, that’s good enough for me.”

Before he could move, she snared the logic unit with one hand, swung it up and into the cremator as if it weighed less than a dead cat. Juliette hated cats, and more than a few of them had most likely gone through this Power-Pak II.

She was a beautiful woman and hard and strong, but she was not a good person.

“What kind of rotten day?” he asked as she closed the cremator door and fired up the burner.

“Gunny wants it to get more serious between us.”

The thought of those two in bed seemed, to Billy, to be about as serious as sex could get, except maybe if a grizzly bear tried to get it on with a puma.

“He wants to dump the wife in San Francisco and marry me. She’s Chinese, has some connection to China’s military-security apparatus, and she collects knives. I don’t know what Gunny’s thinking.”

“Gunny has a hopeless romantic streak,” Billy said, which was true.

“Tell me about it. He says, just shacking up with me doesn’t fulfill him like marriage would. I’m his destiny, he says.”

“I could talk to him.”

“I’m nobody’s destiny, Billy, except mine. The thing is, I’ve been thinking of ending it with him even before this, but he’s as tight with Harrow as you are, and I don’t want Gunny getting pissy and bad-mouthing me to Harrow.”

“He’s maybe not as important to Harrow as you think.”

“Is that right? Well, anyway, he’s such a big sonofabitch, he scares me.”

“We go way back, Gunny and me. I can talk to him so he doesn’t get a mad-on for you.”

“Could you? Would you? That would be great. He’s up on the top floor, making dinner.”

She maintained a large and beautifully furnished apartment above the funeral home.

“I could go up there and see him,” Billy said, “or you could get on the intercom and ask him to come down here.”

“I just redid the kitchen cabinetry.”

“What was wrong with the old cabinets? They were beautiful.”

“Too dark,” Juliette said. “All that egg-and-dart crown molding. I wanted a lighter, more modern look.”

“Are you happy with it?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s gorgeous.”

“Good cabinetry can bust your bank these days.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So ask him to come down here.”

She used the intercom in the garage, just outside the door to the crematorium. “Hey, Big Gun,” she said, “are you there?”

Gunny’s voice issued from the intercom speaker: “What’s up?”

“I’ve got a really fat dead guy here I need some help with.”

“What about Herman and Werner?”

They were her brothers and business partners.

“Viewing hours are over. They went home,” she said. “We weren’t expecting a stiff.”

“I’ve got to keep an eye on the rack of lamb.”

“I just need help getting the stiff into the cooler. One minute. He’s a big old hog of a guy or I could do it myself.”

“Be right there.”

Because it had to accommodate a casket, the elevator was large, but quieter than Billy expected.

When the doors opened, Gunther Schloss looked as big as a steer in a rodeo pen.

He said, “Shit,” and Billy shot him three times while he was upright, once while he was falling, and four times as he lay half in and half out of the elevator.

“Is he dead?” Juliette asked.

“He ought to be.”

“You want to check for a pulse?”

“Not yet,” Billy said, and shot Gunny two more times.

He would have shot Gunny four more times, but no rounds remained in the pistol.

Billy ejected the empty magazine and snapped a full one into the pistol, and during that quarter of a minute, Gunny didn’t move.

“Okay, he’s dead. I guess that was the easy part, after all.”

“It could have gone different,” Juliette said.

“It could have, you’re right. But I’m fifty now, and the part that’s getting not so easy for me is this hauling-them-around part.”

“Piece of cake, Bookworm. In this business, I’m always moving dead weight.”

She went away and returned in less than a minute, rolling a state-of-the-art hydraulic gurney.

Only the push of a button was required to lower the stainless-steel bed of the gurney until it was two inches from the floor.

With little difficulty, Billy and Juliette wrestled the corpse facedown onto the stainless steel.

She pressed the button again, and the bed rose to its usual height, bearing the cadaver.

“Excellent,” Billy said.

They rolled the gurney into the crematorium. Juliette adjusted the height of the bed to match the door on the second cremator, and then the bed telescoped forward, carrying Gunny into the furnace.

Holding a toilet plunger by its long wooden handle, pressing the rubber suction cup against Gunny’s head, Juliette held the body in the crematorium while the telescoping bed retracted into its original position.

“That’s damn clever,” Billy said, indicating the plunger.

Hearing this simple praise, Juliette ducked her head almost shyly. “A technique I developed.”

As the woman closed the door and fired up the furnace, Billy said, “Gunny makes the best rack of lamb. Sorry if it’s overdone.”

“I’m sure it’ll be perfect. You want to stay for dinner?”

“I’d love to, but I can’t. My day isn’t done yet.”

“You work too hard, Billy.”

“I’m gonna slow down.”

“How long have you been saying that?”

“I mean it this time,” he assured her.

“All you do is work. You don’t take care of yourself.”

“I’m having a colonoscopy next week.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, I’m good. My internist just recommends it at my age.”

“Maybe he’s some kind of pervert.”

“No. He doesn’t do the exam. I go to a specialist for that.”

“Me, I’ve got high cholesterol.”

“Have an arterial scan. I did. My cholesterol’s high, too, but they didn’t find any plaque.”

“It’s all about genes, Billy. If you have good genes, you can eat nothing but fried cheese and doughnuts, live to be a hundred.”

“You look like good genes to me,” he told her.

From the funeral home, Billy drove the Shumpeter Cadillac to the hotel where he had previously booked luxurious accommodations in the name of Tyrone Slothrop.

He left the Cadillac with the valet, presented his Slothrop American Express card to the registration clerk, and got his key. He carried the white trash bag to the elevator and went up to his suite.

Harrow wanted to see everything in the bag, especially the snapshots from Amy Redwing’s previous life. Until Billy could turn the bag over to Harrow, he needed to keep it safe.

The suite consisted of an immense overfurnished living room, two large overfurnished bedrooms, and two baths. The bathrooms were glittering wonderments of marble and mirror.

He didn’t need the extra bedroom and bath. He didn’t need to drive a Hummer, either, but his personal collection of vehicles included three of them. He had time-shares in a private jet, and never traveled in scheduled airlines.

Billy believed in fun. Fun was the central doctrine of his philosophy. For him, having a giant carbon footprint was essential to having fun.

One of the businesses Billy had a piece of, through Harrow, was selling carbon offsets. He held binding commitments from three tribes in remote parts of Africa, which required them to plant huge numbers of trees and to continue living without running water, electricity, and oil-powered vehicles. The environmental damage they
didn’t
do could then be sold to movie stars, rock musicians, and others who were committed to reducing pollution but who were required, by the nature of their professions, to have humongous carbon footprints.

Billy also sold carbon offsets to himself through an elaborate structure of LLPs, LLCs, and trusts that afforded him tremendous tax advantages. Best of all, he didn’t have to share any of the carbon-offset income with the African tribes because they didn’t exist.

Two locked suitcases awaited him. He had packed them three days earlier and had sent them to the hotel by FedEx.

Also awaiting him were arrangements of fresh flowers in every room, silver bowls full of perfect fruit, a box of superb chocolates, a bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket—and on the nightstand in the primary bedroom, a just-released hardcover novel by one of his favorite writers, which the concierge had purchased at his request.

Billy Pilgrim—now passing as Tyrone Slothrop, a name he had waited literally
decades
to use—should have been in a fine mood, but he was not.

The events at the funeral home should have been fun. They had not tickled him at all.

He wasn’t depressed, but he wasn’t elated, either. Emotionally, he had slipped into neutral.

He had never been in neutral before. As he sat idling in his luxurious suite, the emptiness inside him—the void where fun had been—made him nervous.

Since the eerie incident with the drawings in Brian McCarthy’s kitchen, fun had eluded him. He had been moving at his usual fast pace, as always capering gaily—figuratively speaking—along the brink of the abyss, committing crimes as insouciantly as ever; but the magic was gone.

His life was a novel, a black comedy, a rollicking narrative that mocked all authority, an existential lark. He had just hit a bad chapter, that was all. He needed to turn the page, begin a new scene.

Maybe the new novel on the nightstand would shift him out of neutral. One of the suitcases contained clothes and personal effects, but the other one was packed with weapons; maybe playing with guns for a while would get him in gear.

He sat in an armchair in the bedroom, alternately staring at the book and at the suitcase filled with lethal devices.

He worried that if he tried the book and it didn’t lift him out of his funk, and then if he disassembled and reassembled the weapons with no improvement of mood, he would be at an impasse.

An impasse was a terrible place to be, a dead end, but in a truly existential life, it should be an
impossible
place to be. Since only he made the rules by which he lived, he could make new rules if the old ones began to bore him, and off he would go again, zipping along, having fun.

He was thinking too much, making himself nervous.

All that mattered were the motion and the act, not any meaning in the motion nor any consequences to the act. No meaning existed; no consequences were important.

He tried the book. That was his first mistake.