Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

I went into the closet and pulled out my scratched-up bomber jacket and checked through the pockets to be sure I had my black watch cap. All set.

On my way out the door, I told Miss Dashpebble to hold my calls.

SISTER MARY RYAN WAS SURPRISED TO SEE ME. SHE WAS IN HER STREET clothes again, and I wondered if she ever donned the penguin suit.

She cracked, “I don’t suppose you’re here to give us our million dollars back.”

“I would if I could, but I can’t.”

I had been told by the nun who answered the door to wait in the front hallway. Sister Mary showed me into the Great Room. I sat in the chair where Gary Harvey had sat while we were grilling him. From across the room, Jesus looked down at me wearily.

The sister offered me tea and I accepted. By a seemingly invisible signal, the young nun appeared, and Sister Mary put in the order for a pot of tea. I gave the nun a simple smile and she blushed.

“Natividad cannot stop talking about what took place here the other night,” Sister Mary said after the nun had left the room. “With every telling, the details get more and more exciting. The guns get bigger and bigger. She is especially glowing about your Irish friend.”

“Jigs. Yes. Women do glow.”

Sister Mary made a delicate tent of her fingers. “Sister Anne and I have been talking. We would like to contact Mr. Harvey. In the confusion of the other evening, we feel we didn’t tend terribly well to him. I believe very strongly in fate, Mr. Malone. I feel that fate led Mr. Harvey to Good Shepherd.”

“A cold-blooded killer is what led Mr. Harvey to Good Shepherd.”

“The Lord utilizes His agents.”

“No offense, Sister, but the Lord has lost control of that particular agent.”

Sister Natividad floated into the room with a tray and all the tea goodies. She set the tray down on the table in front of Sister Mary. She said, “You must let it sleep.”

“ Steep , Natividad.”

The nun’s blush was even richer than the last. She stole a glance at me as she left the room.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Natividad is twenty.”

“That seems young.”

“It is.” She smiled. “The older we get, the younger it becomes.”

“I mean to be a nun. I guess I don’t really know at what age a person can become a nun.”

“Technically speaking, there are no restrictions. Of course, with a person who is not yet a legal adult, there has to be complete agreement from the parents or from the legal guardian. In Natividad’s case, she became a nun in the Philippines when she was seventeen. Earlier this year, her family moved to America, and she wanted to remain near them.”

“I was under the impression that when you signed on, you became part of God’s family. So to speak.”

“That’s true. But it doesn’t mean you forsake your secular family. We’re still very much in the world, Mr. Malone. As you can see, many of us don’t wear habits anymore. Not to deny tradition, by any means, but we’re not relics, after all. At least we hope we’re not. We’re attempting to bridge the more traditional aspects of who and what we are with the fact of our being in the modern world. God is in my heart. He is not in my clothes.”

She had just started to lift the teapot and had to set it down swiftly as she burst into laughter. “Oh, my. Well, I surely didn’t mean it to sound that way!” She laughed again, then reached once more for the teapot. She shot me a look. “I think the tea has had time to sleep, don’t you?”

THE NAME ANGEL RAMOS MEANT NOTHING TO SISTER MARY RYAN. I showed her the picture. She studied it thoughtfully. “He’s a criminal,” she said. “That’s what these numbers mean. He’s been arrested.”

“That’s right.”

“What did he do?”

“As far as what they’ve nabbed him for? Robbery, assault, theft.”

She looked up from the picture. “And what he hasn’t been ‘nabbed’ for?”

“I believe he’s the person behind the Thanksgiving Day shootings and the bombing. I also think he’s kidnapped the deputy mayor. The package that Gary Harvey brought by. It contained… Someone cut off two of the deputy mayor’s fingers. I think the man in that picture did it.”

The nun paled. “Oh, my.”

“There’s an ultimatum: ten million dollars in exchange for Mr. Byron’s freedom. Everything’s pointing to Angel Ramos.”

Sister Mary glanced back at the photo. “He looks menacing.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”

“He must be in torment.”

“Maybe so. But what’s more important right now is that we stop him before he can put anyone else in torment.”

She set the picture faceup on the table, next to the tea tray, then changed her mind and turned it over. “We’ll do anything we can, Mr. Malone. But I don’t honestly know what that is. Besides to pray, of course.”

“We’ll take that. But what we really need is to locate Ramos. The piece that isn’t fitting in is why it is that Ramos went through the whole song and dance Saturday with having us drop the money at the Cloisters, then calling you in. At the end of it all, we still had the money. If it was all just to deliver the package and let us know that he had Philip Byron… it doesn’t make any sense. The convent is nowhere near Ramos’s territory. But there has to be some sort of connection. There has to be a link.”

“I can’t imagine what it could be,” Sister Mary said.

“How many nuns are in residence here?” I asked.

“Normally? Fifteen.”

“Why ‘normally’? You don’t have fifteen at the moment?”

“We had a loss recently.” She had picked up her teacup, but she didn’t take a sip. She looked past the cup, off into space. “You probably heard of it. Unfortunately, the papers played it up. More and more, that seems to be what they do.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, just last month. Near the end of October.”

“You don’t mean the Sister Suicide?”

Sister Mary lowered her teacup into her palm. “You might understand, we’re not exactly fond of that term. It’s terribly dehumanizing.”

We were referring to a story that the papers had made hay with for nearly a week, just before Halloween. A nun in full habit had been found by a morning jogger in a wooded section of Prospect Park. She had apparently slit both her wrists. A suicide note had been left next to the body. As Sister Mary said, the papers had jumped all over it. Sister Suicide . I recalled the photo that had accompanied the story. It was taken when the woman was in her early twenties, before she joined the sisterhood. She was pretty, and that helped give the story legs for a few extra days. Attractive young nuns slitting their wrists in a public place aren’t your everyday news story. The coverage had been typically sensational and morbid. I had to admit, it had hooked me a little.

Sister Mary Ryan said, “Margaret was a terribly troubled young woman. Of course, guilt is a useless emotion, but we’re only human. It’s there. All of us at the convent feel it. We can’t help but contemplate that we failed Margaret. Her difficulties were known to us. From the moment she arrived at Good Shepherd, it was a struggle for her. She had already suffered considerable tragedy.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.

“No, no. It’s fine. It helps, actually. It’s been especially hard on Natividad. Being so young. Until Natividad arrived, Sister Margaret had been our youngest. She was only thirty-three when she died. Natividad latched on to her immediately. I’d say she looked at Margaret as an older sister. We encouraged the friendship. For both their sakes, actually. Margaret… She had a drinking problem.”