Dean Koontz - Innocence

“But why is it not stealing?”

“I’ll send him a generous check for them if you insist. But put them in the bag. Please .”

In a state of quasi-bewilderment, not quite able to believe that I was in this place and engaged upon such a task, I tried to lift one of the puppets, but it was secured to the metal brace that disappeared under its tuxedo jacket. When I tried to lift the brace, I discovered that it was screwed to the mantel.

“Hurry,” Gwyneth urged.

I worked the tuxedo jacket up the brace until I found the cord that tied the marionette in place. As I fumbled with the knot, the archbishop entered from the hallway.

He carried two suitcases and, upon seeing us, dropped them so abruptly that one of them fell over. He said, “Who’re you, what’re you—” Then Gwyneth turned toward him, and he recognized her.

“You.”

He wasn’t wearing a cassock, rochet, stole, pectoral cross, or Roman collar, nor was he wearing the simple black suit of a priest, nor robe and pajamas. In comfortable suede shoes, khaki slacks, and a dark-brown wool sweater over a beige shirt, he might have been anyone, a schoolteacher or accountant, preparing to catch an early flight and wing away on holiday.

Tall, fit, he had the handsome but pale and sharp-featured face of one of the tort lawyers who ran ads in certain magazines, seeking clients for class-action lawsuits. His hair was thick for his age, quite curly, still more blond than gray.

He didn’t at once approach us. If he began to step closer, I would back away. At this remove, he couldn’t clearly see the eyes in the holes of my ski mask. I remembered well the church by the river and the man with the kindly face, who had come at me with a baseball bat. Among other implements hanging from the rack of fireplace tools on the hearth was a long-handled poker, which would perhaps do more damage than a Louisville Slugger.

“There must be an agent of the devil among my confreres, and perhaps more than one,” he said.

“Your Eminence, Archbishop Wallache,” Gwyneth said and nodded to him, as if we had come calling by invitation.

Father and I never read the entire newspaper, and I did not keep up with ecclesiastical news, but the name resonated with me. I had heard it six years earlier, as I stood by the open drain in the crypt beneath the cathedral. Two men, never seen, met in the farther reaches of that place to share a secret that meant nothing to me at the time but that, I now realized, involved news of whom the Vatican had selected to be the next archbishop.

Please tell me it’s not Wallache .

But it is .

They’ve all gone mad .

Say nothing to anyone or I’m toast. This is übersecret .

But they must know —he must know—Wallache’s history .

They seem to believe Wallache’s version of it .

Now, Archbishop Wallache said, “I assume you haven’t come to me at this hour for a blessing.” His courtroom face produced a smile that I would not have thought it could, one warm enough to charm any jury. “Are you admirers of the marionettes?”

“Why would you have such a foul thing here?” Gwyneth asked.

“I grant you that the subject is macabre and their history is dark, but the workmanship is lovely. For another thing, they were a gift, and it is rude to turn down a sincerely offered gift.”

“A gift from Edmund Goddard,” she said, coloring the name with contempt.

“May I say also that, when one spends every day among people of faith, always bringing the hope of Christ to those who need it, there is a tendency to become too sunny in temperament, to lose track of the truth that Evil walks the Earth and that the battle against it remains always urgent and desperate. Having such a reminder of great wickedness keeps one alert to the possibility of error in one’s own life.”

Gwyneth said, “So you keep them on your mantel to remind you that evil is real and that anyone can be tempted.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“So have they been effective, have you avoided error since you’ve had them?”

He could hold a smile with the apparent effortlessness of a world-class high-wire walker maintaining balance far above a tense crowd of upturned faces. “If I may be allowed a question of my own, I should ask what you want with them.”

“I want to burn them. I’ve bought and burned the other four.”

“You wish to destroy icons of evil, and yet you make yourself up to resemble them.”

She did not respond.

Indicating me with a gesture, the archbishop said, “Who is your masked companion? Is he what would be called your muscle?”

Instead of answering him, Gwyneth said, “I’m taking these last two marionettes to burn them. If you want to call the police and tell them how you kept these things on your mantel as reminders to be on guard against evil and to avoid wickedness yourself, by all means do so. They might believe you. Most of them. So many years have passed, almost twenty-five, since those murders that a lot of people might have forgotten the most gruesome details of what Paladine did to his family. However, that’s the kind of thing cops don’t forget. I’m sure they’ll want to know why Goddard would think to give them to you.”

If he was a man who could take offense, he was too diplomatic to show it. If he had feathers, they would never ruffle. He consulted his wristwatch and said, “I’ve no use for the things anymore. You may burn them—but you may not take them. That’s a gas-log fireplace. The flue is open, and it draws well. You see the remote control lying by the rack of tools? You can switch on the flames with that.”

Gwyneth picked up the remote, clicked it, and blue-orange flames at once licked up around the realistic-looking ceramic logs.

“The wood of the yew tree,” the archbishop said, “is pliable because it retains its natural oils decades after it has been cut and shaped. They should burn well and quickly.”

I returned to the marionette that I had been trying to loosen from its brace.

“Not you,” Archbishop Wallache said.

“Sir?”

“Not you. She must take them down and consign them to the flames. Or I really will pick up the phone.”

“I’ll stop you,” I said.

“Will you really? I suspect not. I’m a good judge of people, masked or not, and you seem to me to be a lamb, not a lion.”

“I’ll do it,” Gwyneth said. “I’m not afraid to do it.”

I said, “He won’t stop me.”

“I don’t know what he might do. I’ll burn them myself.”

I thought I saw the marionette’s eyes turn sideways to regard me. But when I looked directly, it still stared across the mantel at its twin.

GWYNETH’S HANDS TREMBLED, SO THAT SHE HAD some difficulty slipping the knot in the cord securing the marionette to the metal stand that braced it upright. When she freed the thing, she held it by its arms and lifted it off the mantel with an obvious dread that infected me.

The archbishop said, “It won’t bite.”

As Gwyneth took a step backward and began to stoop to throw the puppet into the flames, she cried out as if stung, threw it down on the hearth, and backed up another step.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

“It moved.”

“I didn’t see.”

She rubbed the palm of her left hand over the back of her right, the palm of her right over the back of her left, as though she felt the blue lizards of her faux tattoos wriggling on her skin and meant to smooth them into stillness.

“I was holding it by its upper arms. I felt… its muscles tensed.”

“But it’s made of wood,” the archbishop said with a note of amusement. “It doesn’t have muscles.”