Richard Montanari: Rosary girls

One night Byrne parked outside Morris's dorm room, just beneath the window on the Swarthmore campus. Every twenty minutes, for eight straight hours, Morris had parted the curtains to see if Byrne was still there. Byrne had made sure the window of the Taurus was open, and the glow of his cigarettes provided a beacon in the darkness. Morris made sure that every time he peeked he would offer his middle finger through the slightly parted curtains.

The game continued until dawn. Then, at about seven thirty that morning, instead of attending class, instead of running down the stairs and throwing himself on Byrne's mercy, babbling a confession, Morris Blanchard decided to hang himself. He threw a length of towrope over a pipe in the basement of his dorm, stripped off all his clothes, then kicked out the sawhorse beneath him. One last fuck you to the system. Taped to his chest had been a note naming Kevin Byrne as his tormentor.

A week later the Blanchard's gardener was found in a motel in Atlantic City, Robert Blanchard's credit cards in his possession, bloody clothes stuffed into his duffel bag. He immediately confessed to the double homicide.

The door in Byrne's mind had been locked.

For the first time in fifteen years, he had been wrong.

The cop-haters came out in full force. Morris's sister Janice filed a wrongful death civil suit against Byrne, the department, the city. None of the litigation amounted to much, but the weight increased exponentially until it threatened to break him.

The newspapers had taken their shots at him, vilifying him for weeks with editorials and features. And while the Inquirer and Daily News and CityPaper had dragged him over the coals, they had eventually moved on. It was The Report-a yellow rag that fancied itself alternative press, but in reality was little more than a supermarket tabloid-and a particularly fragrant piece-of-shit columnist named Simon Close, who had made it personal beyond reason. For weeks after Morris Blanchard's suicide, Simon Close wrote polemic after polemic about Byrne, the department, the police state in America, finally closing with a profile of the man Morris Blanchard would have become: a combination Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, and Jonas Salk, if one were to believe.

Before the Blanchard case, Byrne had given serious consideration to taking his twenty and heading to Myrtle Beach, maybe starting his own security firm like all the other burned-out cops whose will had been cracked by the savagery of inner-city life. He had done his time as interlocutor of the Bonehead Circus. But when he saw the pickets in front of the Roundhouse-including clever bons mots such as BURN BYRNE! — he knew he couldn't. He couldn't go out like that. He had given far too much to the city to be remembered that way.

So he stayed.

And he waited.

There would be another case to take him back to the top.

Byrne drained his Irish, got comfortable in his seat. There was no reason to head home. He had a full tour ahead of him, starting in just a few hours. Besides, he was all but a ghost in his own apartment these days, a dull spirit haunting two empty rooms. There was no one there to miss him.

He looked at the windows of the police administration building, the amber glow of the ever-burning light of justice.

Gideon Pratt was in that building.

Byrne smiled, closed his eyes. He had his man, the lab would confirm it, and another stain would be washed from the sidewalks of Philadelphia.

Kevin Francis Byrne wasn't a prince of the city.

He was king.

MONDAY, 5:15 AM

This is the other city, the one William Penn never envisioned when he surveyed his "green countrie town" between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, dreaming of Greek columns and marble halls rising majesticallyfrom the pines. This is not the city of pride and history and vision, the place where the soul of a great nation was created, but rather a part of North Philadelphia where living ghosts hover in darkness, hollow-eyed and craven. This is a low place, a place of soot and feces and ashes and blood, a place where men hide from the eyes of their children, and remit their dignity for a life of relentless sorrow. A place where young animals become old.

If there are slums in hell, they will surely look like this.

But in this hideous place, something beautiful will grow. A Gethsemane amid the cracked concrete and rotted wood and ruined dreams.

I cut the engine. It is quiet.

She sits next to me, motionless, as if suspended in this, the penultimate moment of her youth. In profile, she looks like a child. Her eyes are open, but she does not stir.

There is a time in adolescence when the little girl who once skipped and sang with abandon finally dispatches these ways with a claim on womanhood, a time when secrets are born, a body of clandestine knowledge never to be revealed. It happens at different times with different girls-sometimes at a mere twelve or thirteen, sometimes not until sixteen or older-but happen it does, in every culture, to every race. It is a time not heralded by the coming of the blood, as many believe, but rather by the awareness that the rest of the world, especially the male of the species, suddenly sees them differently.

And, from that moment on, the balance of power shifts, and is never the same.

No, she is no longer a virgin, but she will be a virgin once again.At the pillar there will be a scourge and from this blight will come resurrection.

I exit the vehicle and look east and west. We are alone. The night air is chilled, even though the days have been unseasonably warm.

I open the passenger door and take her hand in mine. Not a woman, nor a child. Certainly not an angel.Angels do not have free will.

But a calm-shattering beauty nonetheless.

Her name is Tessa Ann Wells.

Her name is Magdalene.

She is the second.

She will not be the last.

MONDAY, 5:20 AM

Dark.

A breeze brought exhaust fumes and something else. A paint smell. Kerosene, maybe. Beneath it, garbage and human sweat. A cat shrieked, then- Quiet.

He was carrying her down a deserted street.

She could not scream. She could not move. He had injected her with a drug that made her limbs feel leaden and frail; her mind, thick with a gauzy gray fog.

For Tessa Wells, the world passed by in a churning rush of muted colors and glimpsed geometric shapes.

Time stalled. Froze. She opened her eyes.

They were inside. Descending wooden steps. The smell of urine and rotting lunch meat. She hadn't eaten in a long time and the smell made her stomach lurch and a trickle of bile rise in her throat.

He placed her at the foot of a column, arranging her body and limbs as if she were some sort of doll.

He put something in her hands.

The rosary.

Time passed. Her mind swam away again. She opened her eyes once more as he touched her forehead. She could sense the cruciform shape he inscribed there.

My God, is he anointing me?

Suddenly, memories shimmered silver in her mind, a mercurial reflection of her childhood. She recalled-

— horseback riding in Chester County and the way the wind would sting my face and Christmas morning and the way Mom's crystal captured the colored lights from the enormous tree Dad bought every year and Bing Crosby and that silly song about Hawaiian Christmas and its-

He stood in front of her, now, threading a huge needle. He spoke in a slow monotone-

Latin?

— as he tied a knot in the thick black thread and pulled it tight.

She knew she would not leave this place.

Who would take care of her father?

Holy Mary, mother of God…

He had made her pray in that small room for a long time. He had whispered the most horrible words in her ear. She had prayed for it to end.