When it comes to tragic figures, I’ve got a much greater talent for slapstick than Hamlet did, and whereas King Lear would step over a banana peel in his path, my foot will find it every time.

CHAPTER 9

THE COMFORTABLE BUT SIMPLE GUEST SUITE had a shower so small that I felt as if I were standing in a coffin.

For ten minutes I let the hot water beat on my left shoulder, which had been tenderized by the mysterious assailant’s club. The muscles relaxed, but the ache remained.

The pain wasn’t severe. It didn’t concern me. Physical pain, unlike some other kinds, eventually goes away.

When I turned off the water, big white Boo was staring at me through the steam-clouded glass door.

After I had toweled dry and pulled on a pair of briefs, I knelt on the bathroom floor and rubbed the dog behind the ears, which made him grin with pleasure.

“Where were you hiding?” I asked him. “Where were you when some miscreant tried to make my brain squirt out my ears? Huh?”

He didn’t answer. He only grinned. I like old Marx Brothers movies, and Boo is the Harpo Marx of dogs in more ways than one.

My toothbrush seemed to weigh five pounds. Even in exhaustion, I am diligent about brushing my teeth.

A few years previously, I had witnessed an autopsy in which the medical examiner, during a preliminary review of the corpse, remarked for his recorder that the deceased was guilty of poor dental hygiene. I had been embarrassed for the dead man, who had been a friend of mine.

I hope that no attendants at my autopsy will have any reason to be embarrassed for me.

You might think this is pride of a particularly foolish kind. You’re probably right.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

I have persuaded myself, however, that brushing my teeth in anticipation of my untimely demise is simply consideration for the feelings of any autopsy witness who might have known me when I was alive. Embarrassment for a friend, arising from his shortcomings, is never as awful as being mortified by the exposure of your own faults, but it is piercing.

Boo was in bed, curled up against the footboard, when I came out of the bathroom.

“No belly rub, no more ear scratching,” I told him. “I’m coming down like a plane that’s lost all engines.”

His yawn was superfluous for a dog like him; he was here for companionship, not for sleep.

Lacking enough energy to put on pajamas, I fell into bed in my briefs. The coroner always strips the body, anyway.

After pulling the covers to my chin, I realized that I had left the light on in the adjacent bathroom.

In spite of John Heineman’s four-billion-dollar endowment, the brothers at the abbey live frugally, in respect of their vows of poverty. They do not waste resources.

The light seemed far away, growing more distant by the second, and the blankets were turning to stone. To hell with it. I wasn’t a monk yet, not even a novice.

I wasn’t a fry cook anymore, either — except when I made pancakes on Sundays — or a tire salesman, or much of anything. We not-much-of-anything types don’t worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.

Nevertheless, I worried. In spite of worrying, I slept.

I dreamed, but not about exploding boilers. Not about nuns on fire, screaming through a snowy night, either.

In the dream, I was sleeping but then awoke to see a bodach standing at the foot of my bed. This dream bodach, unlike those in the waking world, had fierce eyes that glistered with reflections of the light from the half-open bathroom door.

As always, I pretended that I did not see the beast. I watched it through half-closed eyes.

When it moved, it morphed, as things do in dreams, and became not a bodach any longer. At the foot of my bed stood the glowering Russian, Rodion Romanovich, the only other visitor currently staying in the guesthouse.

Boo was in the dream, standing on the bed, baring his teeth at the intruder, but silent.

Romanovich went around the bed to the nightstand.

Boo sprang from the bed to the wall, as though he were a cat, and clung there on the vertical, defying gravity, glaring at the Russian.

Interesting.

Romanovich picked up the picture frame that stood beside the nightstand clock.

The frame protects a small card from a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy. It declares YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

In my first manuscript, I recounted the curious history of this object, which is sacred to me. Suffice to say that Stormy Llewellyn and I received it in return for the first coin we fed the machine, after a guy and his fiancée, in line before us, got nothing but bad news for their eight quarters.

Because Gypsy Mummy did not accurately forecast events in this world, because Stormy is dead and I am alone, I know the card means that we will be together forever in the next world. This promise is more important than food to me, than air.

Although the light from the bathroom did not reach far enough to allow Romanovich to read the words on the framed card, he read them anyway because, being a dream Russian, he could do anything that he wanted, just as dream horses can fly and dream spiders can have the heads of human babies.

In a murmur, in accented speech, he spoke the words aloud: “You are destined to be together forever.”

His solemn yet mellifluous voice was suitable for a poet, and those seven words sounded like a line of lyrical verse.

I saw Stormy as she’d been that evening at the carnival, and the dream became about her, about us, about a sweet past beyond recovery

After less than four hours of troubled sleep, I woke before dawn.

The leaded window showed a black sky, and snow fairies danced down the glass. In the bottom panes, a few ferns of frost twinkled with a strange light, alternately red and blue.

The digital clock on the nightstand was where it had been when I’d fallen into bed, but the framed fortune-teller’s card appeared to have been moved. I felt certain it had been standing upright in front of the lamp. Now it lay flat.

I threw aside the bedclothes and got up. I walked out to the living room, turned on a lamp.

The straight-backed chair remained wedged under the knob of the door to the third-floor hallway. I tested it. Secure.

Before communism bled them of so much of their faith, the Russian people had a history of both Christian and Judaic mysticism. They weren’t known, however, for walking through locked doors or solid walls.

The living-room window was three stories above the ground and not approachable by a ledge. I checked the latch anyhow, and found it engaged.

Although lacking nuns on fire, lacking spiders with the heads of human babies, the night disturbance had been a dream. Nothing but a dream.

Looking down from the latch, I discovered the source of the pulsing light that throbbed in the filigree of frost along the edges of the glass. A thick blanket of snow had been drawn over the land while I slept, and three Ford Explorers, each with the word SHERIFF on its roof, stood idling on the driveway, clouds of exhaust pluming from their tailpipes, emergency beacons flashing.

Although still windless, the storm had not relented. Through the screening cold confetti, I glimpsed six widely separated flashlights wielded by unseen men moving in coordinated fashion, as if quartering the meadow in search of something.

CHAPTER 10

BY THE TIME I CHANGED INTO THERMAL LONG Johns, pulled on jeans and a crewneck sweater, got feet into ski boots, grabbed my Gore-Tex/ Thermolite jacket, rushed downstairs, crossed the parlor, and pushed through the oak door into the guesthouse cloister, dawn had come.

Sullen light brushed a gray veneer over the limestone columns encircling the courtyard. Under the cloister ceiling, darkness held fast, as if the night were so unimpressed by the dreary morning that it might not retreat.

In the courtyard, without ski boots, St. Bartholomew stood in fresh powder, offering a winterized pumpkin in his outstretched hand.

On the east side of the cloister, directly across from the point at which I burst into it, was the guesthouse entrance to the abbatial church. Voices raised in prayer and a tolling bell echoed to me not from the church but instead along a passageway ahead and to my right.

Four steps led up to that barrel-vaulted stone corridor, which itself led twenty feet into the grand cloister. Here a courtyard four times larger than the first was framed by an even more impressive colonnade.

The forty-six brothers and five novices were gathered in this open courtyard in full habit, facing Abbot Bernard, who stood on the bell dais, with one hand rhythmically drawing upon the toll rope.

Matins had concluded, and near the end of Lauds, they had come out of the church for the final prayer and the abbot’s address.

The prayer was the Angelus, which is beautiful in Latin, when raised with many voices.

A chanted response rose from the brothers as I arrived: “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.” Then abbot and all said, “Ave Maria.”

Two sheriff’s deputies waited in the shelter of the cloister as the brothers in the courtyard finished the prayer. The cops were big men and more solemn than the monks.

They stared at me. Clearly I was not a cop, and apparently I was not a monk. My indeterminate status made me a person of interest.

Their stares were so intense that I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in the bitter air, their eyes had begun to steam as did their every exhalation.

Having had much experience of police, I knew better than to approach them with the suggestion that their suspicions would best be directed at the glowering Russian, wherever he might coil at this moment. As a consequence, their interest in me would only intensify.

Although anxious to know the reason that the sheriff had been called, I resisted the urge to ask them. They would be inclined to view my ignorance as merely a pretense of ignorance, and they would regard me with greater suspicion than they did now.

Once a cop has found you of even passing interest, regarding a criminal matter, you can do nothing to remove yourself from his list of potential suspects. Only events beyond your control can clear you. Like being stabbed, shot, or strangled by the real villain.

“Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi,”

said the brothers, and the abbot said, “Oremus” which meant “Let us pray.”

Less than half a minute later, the Angelus concluded.

Usually, after the Angelus, the abbot’s address consists of a brief commentary on some sacred text and its application to monastic life. Then he does a soft-shoe number while singing “Tea for Two.”

All right, I made up the soft-shoe and “Tea for Two.” Abbot Bernard does resemble Fred Astaire, which is why I’ve never been able to get this irreverent image out of my head.

Instead of his usual address, the abbot announced a dispensation from attendance at morning Mass to all those who might be needed to assist the sheriff’s deputies in a thorough search of the buildings.

The time was 6:28. Mass would begin at seven o’clock.

Those essential to the conduct of Mass were to attend and, after the service, were to make themselves available to the authorities to answer questions and to assist as needed.

Mass would be over at about 7:50. Breakfast, which is taken in silence, always begins at eight o’clock.

The abbot also excused those assisting the police from Terce, the third of seven periods of daily prayer. Terce is at 8:40 and lasts for about fifteen minutes. The fourth period in the Divine Office is Sext, at eleven-thirty, before lunch.

When most laymen learn that a monk’s life is so regimented and that the same routine is followed day after day, they grimace. They think this life must be boring, even tedious.

From my months among the monks, I had learned that, quite the contrary, these men are energized by worship and meditation. During the recreation hours, between dinner and Compline, which is the night prayer, they are a lively bunch, intellectually engaging and amusing.

Well, most of them are as I’ve described, but a handful are shy. And a couple are too pleased by their selfless offering of their lives to make the offering seem entirely selfless.

One of them, Brother Matthias, has such encyclopedic knowledge of — and such strong opinions about — the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan that he can bore your ass off.

Monks are not necessarily holy by virtue of being monks. And they are always and entirely human.

At the end of the abbot’s remarks, many brothers hurried to the deputies waiting in the shelter of the cloister, eager to assist.

I became aware of one novice lingering in the courtyard, in the descending snow. Although his face was shadowed by his hood, I could see that he was staring at me.

This was Brother Leopold, who had finished his postulancy only in October and had worn the habit of a novice less than two months. He had a wholesome Midwestern face, with freckles and a winning smile.

Of the five current novices, I distrusted only him. My reason for not trusting him eluded me. It was a gut feeling, nothing more.

Brother Knuckles approached me, stopped, shook himself rather like a dog might, and cast the clinging snow from his habit. Pushing back his hood, he said softly, “Brother Timothy is missing.”

Brother Timothy, master of the mechanical systems that kept the abbey and school habitable, wasn’t one to arrive late for Matins, and certainly wasn’t a man who would run off for a secular adventure, in violation of his vows. His greatest weakness was Kit Kat bars.

“He must’ve been the one I nearly fell over last night, at the corner of the library. I have to speak to the police.”

“Not yet. Walk with me,” said Brother Knuckles. “We need a place don’t have a hundred ears.”

I glanced toward the courtyard. Brother Leopold had vanished.

With his fresh face and Midwestern directness, Leopold in no way seems calculating or sly, furtive or deceitful.

Yet he has an unsettling way of arriving and departing with a suddenness that sometimes reminds me of a ghost materializing and dematerializing. He is there, then isn’t. Isn’t, then is.

With Knuckles, I left the grand cloister and followed the stone passage to the guest cloister, from there through the oak door into the main parlor on the ground floor of the guesthouse.

We went to the fireplace at the north end of the room, though no fire was burning, and sat forward on armchairs, facing each other.

“After we talked last night,” Knuckles said, “I did a bed check. Don’t have no authority. Felt sneaky. But it seemed the right thing.”

“You made an executive decision.”

“That’s just what I done. Even back when I was dumb muscle and lost to God, I sometimes made executive decisions. Like, the boss sends me to break a guy’s legs, but the guy gets the point after I break one, so I don’t do the second. Things like that.”

“Sir, I’m just curious…. When you presented yourself as a postulant to the Brothers of St. Bartholomew, how long did your first confession last?”