A Great Day for the Deadly(23)

Reverend Mother General wasn’t looking at him, even though he was human and large and taking up a good deal of space in her office. She was looking at her desk, and when Gregor looked too he understood why. The small package that had been lying under the envelopes was no longer where he had first found it, but further along the desk top near the brass base for the pen and pencil set. What was more, it was moving.

Gregor stepped up to the desk, picked the package up, and shook it close to his ear. He could hear the bump and shudder of something trying to get out. He brought the package down and turned to Reverend Mother General.

“Do you mind?” he said. “There’s something alive in there.”

“Is it safe for you to open it?”

“Relatively safe,” Gregor said. “I suppose if it’s a rabid bat, I’ll be in for a lot of pain with the series injections, but I don’t think it’s that.”

“No,” Reverend Mother General agreed, “I don’t think it’s that, either. The other ones had had their poison glands removed, did you know that?”

“Yes, Reverend Mother. The Cardinal told me.”

“Well, if that’s what this is, let’s just hope it’s got its glands removed, too. Go ahead. Open it.”

Gregor returned his attention to the box. It had been taped shut at both ends and along its seams, and it was small. He had a big hand and it would just fit across it, without jutting out at either end. He found the letter opener on Reverend Mother General’s desk and used that, cutting along a fold that looked weak but wasn’t. It took him a good minute of hacking to get it undone.

“Here we go,” he said, when he got a slit carved in the tape. He started to pull back the flap and felt Reverend Mother General move closer to him. He gave her points for that. Gregor Demarkian had never been a man who liked wimpiness in women. He got the flap all the way back and reached for the tabs inside.

What happened next happened so fast he almost didn’t see it. There was a snake inside the package, but it wasn’t a water moccasin, rendered harmless or otherwise. It was a garden variety black snake, about a foot and a half long. With the box closed it had been coiled. As soon as the tabs came open, it lunged as if to strike—even though black snakes don’t strike. What it did do was to shoot itself out of the box. For a split second, it seemed suspended in air. Then it was on the floor and headed in the direction of the open door. Reverend Mother jumped away from it instinctively. Gregor just watched it go. Then he looked down at the package in his hand and the floor beyond it and saw what he had missed in the excitement of the snake.

It was a piece of paper about twelve inches long and six inches wide. It must have been wrapped up in a tube around the snake inside the box and fallen out when the snake escaped. It was now lying face up on the floor. Gregor recognized the printing—it was the same letter-quality computer typeface of the anonymous letters in John O’Bannion’s file. The graphics were new. They were also very, very graphic. Gregor had no trouble at all recognizing them for what they were, which was not very abstract abstractions of the female genitalia.

    NUNS OPEN THEIR LEGS AND PUMP FOR PRIESTS



the printing said, and then:

    ALL WHORES DESERVE TO DIE.



Reverend Mother General looked down at the paper, picked up her skirts, and walked over it. Then she sat down behind her desk and said, “I’d better get Alice Marie down here to set the novices looking for that reptile. We can’t have it wandering around the convent no matter how harmless it is.”





Five


[1]


SISTER MARY SCHOLASTICA HAD entered her order well after Vatican II had changed it. Unlike Sister Alice Marie, or Reverend Mother General, she had never worn full habit or begged her soup after Chapter of Faults or recited the Little Office in Latin. To say she was a thoroughly modern nun, however, was not quite accurate. Some of her postulants would be thoroughly modern nuns. No matter how carefully she trained them, they would come out of formation thinking that all this ritual stuff was a little silly and that it might make more sense if Sisters wore lay clothes and were much more open about the way the convent was run. Scholastica was of a generation that believed—and was encouraged to believe—that what went on in a convent was the concern of the Sisters who lived there, and no one else. If there was a crisis of suitably apocalyptic proportions, Reverend Mother General might decide to call the Chancery, or even the Congregation for Clergy and Religious in Rome. Laypeople were simply out of bounds. You didn’t tell laypeople anything, not even what the convent served for lunch. You certainly didn’t ask their help in a matter that should have been between you and your superiors. From the moment that Sister Mary Scholastica had first mentioned her doubts about Brigit Ann Reilly’s vocation to Gregor Demarkian, she had been feeling guilty. From the first moment afterward when she’d had a chance to think, she’d been feeling worse: like a traitor.