Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

Her hair was now smooth and white and abundant, her dark skin unblemished by care or thought or emotions of any kind.

The park oppressed Correll. The scene conveyed only futility — the patient nuns wasting their gentleness on burnt-out women, meaningless repositories of forgotten loyalties, residues of spiritual exhaustion.

Yet many still played at living, waving at the boats on the water, smiling at birds and falling leaves, distracted like children by sudden movements and sounds. Some chattered to the nuns near them, remembering the names of long-dead pets, kittens, dogs and birds. Others held dolls and rocked them.

Senility was considered a harmless state, a time of comic antics and lapses, but Correll knew it was a living sentence to be served in the mine fields of distant childhoods, where any misstep could trigger explosions of buried guilts and terrors. Yet a kind of radar, an early warning system, guided these old people through the worst of it. Their shields, it seemed, were the deceit of memory, the blur of time...

“But your mother will fast when she’s receiving Communion,” Bishop Waring was saying. “Holier than the Church, you know. But Sister Clare is patient, and your mother is most happy with us.”

“I’m very grateful, Your Excellency.”

Bishop Waring led the talk into other areas. He was interested in politics and world affairs, and it gratified him to evaluate Simon Correll’s responses to his notions. He insisted on these exchanges; the bishop had too strong an ego and too wide an intellectual curiosity to be content in the role of a spiritual baby-sitter.

Bishop Waring spoke of the significance of human life. “... If we posit a God, we posit — do we not? — by the very nature of our longing, a perfect Creature...”

Correll’s attention was the price he paid for his mother’s security and well-being — an offering in kind, because one didn’t pay for spiritual comforts in the same coin one used for cellars of sacramental wines, new buildings and the like.

Marvin Quade appeared at an entrance to the cloisters, the wind stirring his light, sandy hair. Correll checked him with a slight headshake.

The bishop noticed Correll’s signal and was flattered to be given precedence over whatever Quade wanted to bring to Correll’s attention.

With a smile he said, “The important question, my son, is not whether God exists and will give us a sign to let us know He’s thinking of us. No, the important question is, has there been any discernible progress or true evolution over the ages? Is the lap dog an improvement over the extinct Siberian wolf? You liberals, or conservatives, or whatever you call yourselves, generally take the short view. You don’t see what’s already been accomplished. You consider social aggression to be an aberration. You believe in either bigger jails or bigger welfare budgets, or some other kind of behavioral engineering. But social violence serves a purpose.”

Brother Fabius couldn’t hear everything the bishop was saying, though he could follow the gist of it. His excellency was veering toward Herr Hegel. Oppression was therapeutic, it nourished revolt. Terrorists strengthened healthy middle-class values. The pendulum swung back and forth. Slaves created democracies, action and reaction, grains of sand in bivalves fashioning pearls.

But Correll was presently in no mood to play the bishop’s game. Something else was on his mind, and Fabius wasn’t surprised — although the bishop, he noted with satisfaction, was both surprised and disappointed — when Correll excused himself and returned with Quade to his quarters.

Correll took the call from Senator Rowan in his study, where there was a view of the trees and river. He was asked by an operator at St. Joseph’s to hold for a moment: a nurse was attending the senator.

Senator Mark Rowan was chairman of a joint subcommittee which screened military appropriations for the House and Senate. The function of his committee was thought to be largely clerical, an operation designed to control the endlessly proliferating flow of paper to the Congress.

But Rowan’s initials on a request for action in certain categories were the equivalent of an affirmative rubber stamp. His approval also guaranteed fiscal anonymity, since the senator’s special projects were so deeply buried in the appropriations of the full House committee that only a hostile in-depth audit would ever be likely to blast them to light. Even then, their destination and disposition — the sensitive questions of who got the money and what it was for — would be forever blanketed under security classifications.

The senator’s voice sounded weak with pain. “Mr. Correll, the doctors don’t want me to tire myself. It’s about a month, give or take a few days. That’s the word the path lab sent back.”

Correll had known this. Marvin Quade had been advised of the pathology report before it had gone to Rowan’s doctors.

“Senator, if there is anything you want for yourself or your family, please tell me.”

“Thanks to our long relationship with the Correll Group, I want for nothing, Mr. Correll. Except perhaps that those bloody doctors have misread my X-rays. So shall we get down to business? I took the king’s coin, I’m still the king’s man. By and large I’ve delivered what I was paid for. But my usefulness will be over in a week or so. Senator Lester will chair the committee then. He’s senior, there’s no way to prevent it. His people have already been zeroing in on Harlequin and the general’s operation at Saliaris. Most of their expenditures we’ve camouflaged, no seams showing, but somehow Lester managed to get a line on them. He has his own people, you know. We can’t touch them. Which is to say we can’t buy them.”

Quade came in and put a paper in front of Correll. It read, “Holding now: Van Pelt. Lord Conestain. Taggart. Thomson.”

Correll said, “Senator, you’ve earned a rest from our problems. Remember, if there’s anything you need, be sure to let us know.”

Afterward, Correll analyzed the conversation. A vacuum would exist with Rowan’s death, and Senator Lester was rushing in to fill it. But it was probable that someone was prodding him in that direction, possibly an important aide in the Oval Office. Or someone who moved with authority in other official areas. Bittermank perhaps, Ferdinand Bittermank, who also happened to be a social friend of Bishop Waring...

Jennifer came in then from the garden, carrying in each hand a shiny glass globe. She wore a white bathing suit, black sunglasses. Her blond hair was tied back with a ribbon.

Smiling at Correll, she placed the twin globes on his desk with a ceremonial gesture. “Gifts from your mother, Simon,” she said.

Each globe enclosed a statue of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue plaster robes and crowned with pink-and-white plastic chips set in wreaths of flowers.

“Fabius brought them by. The nuns helped, but your mother did the painting — the robes, those little red dots on the cheeks.”

The globes rested on heavy bases of polished black plastic, trimmed with silver and finished off with beveled edges. Tipping one gently, Correll watched a miniature storm of white flakes fly about the colorful statue.

“The Snow Virgin...” Jennifer shifted in her chair and the sunlight ran in a golden flash along her slimly molded legs.

“Now what can you tell me, my dear?”

“Jarrell Selby found me agreeable, I think. Certainly credible. I convinced him we’d met somewhere at a concert and that I was in Memphis on business.” She shrugged. “He was gentle and pleasant. To say he was grateful would be immodest, I guess. I suggested we’d have more time together if he asked his brother to stay at the motel in Memphis instead of with him at Summitt City.”