Shadow Man: A Novel Read Free

of saffron and held it up like gold. Marrakesh, what a word. Three syllables of music. Mar-ra-kesh. I think I heard it once in a Lizabeth Scott movie, or maybe it was a film with Humphrey Bogart, whom Kurt wasn’t crazy about, but I found him believable in most roles. Marrakesh. Tripoli. Carthage. Vera was lucky, and I felt lucky, too, just listening. I looked over at Kurt, and he was following Vera’s stories. She was chattering, yes, but Kurt was enthralled and every now and then he looked for a spot to interject something. He’d fill with air, but then he’d hold it as if wondering how a guy who paints ships in Philly can spin out something as remarkable as Marrakesh. But finally, after Vera had trekked us across the Maghreb — I had to look that one up — Kurt couldn’t hold it in any longer.
    “I play tennis on grass,” he said.
    A pause. A too-long pause.
    Vera laughed and reached out for Kurt’s hand. He pulled it back, not fast or startling but in a way a plate is cleared from a table. Vera laughed again, but she clipped it. Kurt smiled one of his famous half smiles that kept you guessing, and I think Vera caught this, too. The conversation changed to things more American, closer to home and graspable (a word that looks funny but does exist), but I thought Vera had a lot more desert stories in her and I hoped to hear them all.
    The light was warm over the kitchen table. A sixty-watt yellow glow that obscured the exactness of things not directly in the light; they lingered in the shadowy edges the way actors stand in the wingsbefore a cue leads them into the floodlights. I could hear rain falling in the alleys. It rattled over our stoop and set the neighborhood dogs running. They barked close and then distant and then I heard children sloshing near the manhole covers that bubble up when it storms. Lightning flashed, but there wasn’t much thunder and soon the storm passed, leaving soaked kids and a coolness behind. I left Kurt and Vera in the kitchen and walked down the alley to St. Jude’s. The streets were slick and pure, black mirrors reflecting the gray ghosts of clouds racing overhead in the wind and, every now and then, a break in the clouds and a glimmer of moon. The rain had cleaned the dust from the church’s stained-glass windows; I studied the deep, rich colors of the saints, the artistry of their beards and hands and their eyes, the way they followed you, watching you from up there, frozen, but at night, after a rain, they seemed alive. I walked to the front of the church; water poured from the drain spouts and made mud beneath the holly bushes. The stairs were slippery, the railings rusty.
    Father Heaney’s head was bowed in the rectory window. He was likely reading one of his mystery novels. He once told Kurt they cleared his head after tending the sick and hearing confessions littered with “misdemeanors and a few felonies from the unexpected.” Russet-haired with a pink Irish face, Fr. Heaney had given me my first communion years earlier. There is a lot to think about in that second when Jesus hovers before you, crisp and hard and then softening on your tongue and melting into you and becoming part of you in a slow dissolve as you cross yourself and walk back to your pew, tasting cardboard and grain, but knowing it’s Jesus who rose from the dead to save your soul. I like that moment of believing. Fr. Heaney told Kurt — he was always pulling Kurt aside after Saturday-evening mass — that the act of communion was “transcendence of the spirit.” Transcendence was one of my first dictionary words. Transcendence will lead you through the dictionary, which isreally a book of clues, to spirit, revelation, and redemption. The only problem with communion was that you had to go to confession first, whisper your sins through a web of cheesecloth to the silhouette of Fr. Heaney, who knew who you were no matter how hard you tried to disguise your voice. Once I tried a Peter Lorre imitation and