James Burke - Crusader's Cross

I turned my attention back to the paperwork on my desk. I thought he would be gone by the time I looked up again. Instead, he stood in the center of the room, breathing loudly, emanating an odor that was close to eye-watering. "My son by my first marriage was a private first class in the United States Marine Corps. He was killed two months ago outside Baghdad. What was left of his Humvee wouldn't make a bucket of bolts. He was nineteen fucking years old."

He stared into space, as though he were trying to puzzle out the implication of his own words.

At 10:00 a.m., Helen and I and the Jeanerette chief of police and two St. Mary Parish detectives watched the videotape from the surveillance camera that had been mounted on an oak tree in the Chalonses' backyard. The frames from Saturday night showed Honoria Chalons going to and coming from the guesthouse several times. The footage was grainy, the images and sense of movement elliptic, lit intermittently by the electricity in the clouds, the lens sometimes obscured by rain and blowing leaves. At 9:04 p.m. a man wearing an abbreviated rain slicker with a hood entered the guesthouse. What occurred next would remain a matter of conjecture.

The camera had been positioned so that its lens covered most of the yard but only part of the house. Shadows seemed to break across the house's windows, indicating activity inside but little else. At 9:09 the figure in the raincoat left by the French doors and disappeared from the film. There was a momentary glint of light on metal inside the figure's open raincoat, but the reflection could have been from a belt buckle.

Then, at 11:05 p.m., a second figure crossed the yard, tapped on the door, and entered the house. The figure wore a dark hat with a brim wilted by rainwater, and a coat with a hood that hung loosely down the back. At 11:13 the figure left. It was impossible to tell the gender of either visitor. Neither had looked up at the camera. The hand of the second visitor, who had tapped on the door, appeared to be white.

Doogie Dugas, the Jeanerette chief of police, clicked on the overhead light. He was a middle-aged, close-cropped, gray-haired man who affected the dress and manner of a western lawman. The fact that he was wise enough to avoid speaking in front of microphones had allowed him a long administrative career in small-town law enforcement. But now his taciturnity was of no service to him and it was obvious he was having trouble dealing with the magnitude of the case that had been dropped into his lap. It was also obvious he had not talked to his own forensic pathologist.

"Koko Hebert told you the killer cut a cross in Miss Honoria's head?" he said.

"Right," Helen said.

" 'Cause maybe the killer don't like the Chalonses and he put the cross on Miss Honoria 'cause the cross is on Mr. Raphael's family seal?" he said.

"Right," Helen said.

Doogie pursed his mouth and closed and opened his eyes, like a man for whom the world was simply too much. "Cooh," he said, using the favorite Cajun expression for surprise or awe. "Know how many people that might be?"

Then he winced at his own show of candor about the people whom he loyally served.

But I didn't care about the problems Doogie Dugas might be experiencing. I could not get out of my mind the type of raincoat worn by both visitors to Val Chalons's guesthouse, nor the wilted flop hat the second figure had worn. They were exactly of the kind stuffed behind the front seat of my truck.

I went to an AA meeting at noon and another after work. But by sunset I was back into my problems regarding Molly Boyle. For the first time in my life I felt the abiding sense of shame and hypocrisy that I suspect accompanies the ethos of the occasional adulterer. But desire and need, coupled with genuine love of another, are not easily argued out of the room by morality.

If I genuinely loved Molly Boyle, why had I taken her to an off-road motel that almost advertised itself as the perfect situation for a sweaty tryst? If you loved a woman, you didn't make her a partner in what others would inevitably deem a seedy and scandalous affair, I told myself. Most women have a level of trust in the men whom they love that men seldom earn or deserve. As a rule, we do not appreciate that level of trust until it's destroyed. In my case, the fact that I had put Molly's career and reputation at risk indicated that desire and need had not only trumped morality but also concern for the woman I said I loved.

I kept those lofty thoughts in my mind for about fifteen minutes, then picked up the phone and called her. I talked about the meetings I had attended that day, about the fine weather we were having, about the fact my system seemed to be free of booze. But it was quickly apparent that neither of us was entirely focused on what I was saying. "Do you want me to come over?" she said.

"Yes," I said, my voice weak.

"If you don't feel comfortable with that, we can go to the motel in Morgan City," she said.

"No," I said.

"Are you sure?"

What I was doing was no good. It was foolish to try and convince myself that it was. "I'll see you tomorrow," I said.

"I'm leaving the Order, Dave. I've already talked with the bishop. My leaving doesn't have anything to do with us. It's been coming a long time. Stay there. I'll be over shortly."

She hung up before I could reply. But I was out front, in the yard, when she arrived a half hour later, happy in a way that perhaps I shouldn't have been. She looked beautiful stepping out of her car, too, in straw sandals and pleated khakis and a blouse stitched with cacti and flowers, a big hand-tooled leather purse slung over her shoulder.

"Hi, big stuff," she said.

"Hi, yourself," I replied.

I fixed coffee and hot milk and slices of pound cake for us, and served it on a tray in the living room. We sat on the couch and watched part of a movie on television, while the streetlights came on outside and kids sailed by on bicycles. I touched the back of her neck and clasped her hand, and we sat there like married people do, with no sense of urgency about the passage of time.

She told me about her missionary years in Nicaragua and Guatemala. But without being told I already knew the nature of her experience there, in the same way you intuitively know when people have seen organized murder on a large scale, or have stood with hundreds of others inside a barbed-wire compound or languished in a cell run by individuals who are probably not made from the same glue as the rest of us. Their eyes contain memories they seldom share; they seem to exemplify Herodotus' depiction of man's greatest burden, namely, that foreknowledge of human folly never saves us from its consequences.

But why brood upon the bloody work of neocolonial empires on a summer night on a leaf-blown street that belongs back in the year 1945? Why not fall in love with the world all over again and not contend so vigorously with it? Outside, the night was unseasonably cool, scented with shade-blooming flowers, the giant live oaks along the sidewalks lit by streetlamps, Spanish moss lifting in the breeze. Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together, have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves? Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.

I never asked Molly about other men or other lives she might have led. But her attitudes and manner reminded me of other nuns I had known over the years, particularly those who had gone to jail for their political beliefs or been exposed to the risk of martyrdom in Central America. They seem to have no fear, or least none that I could see. As a consequence, they didn't argue or defend, and the church to which they belonged was one they carried silently inside themselves.