Cat In A Leopard Spot

“That’s all I can tell you. She seems to want to replay that deadly summer in Londonderry, when my cousin Sean was blown up in a pub bombing by the IRA. I lived to tell the tale only because I was losing my innocence to Kathleen O’Connor at the very moment he died.”

“You realize,” Matt said, “that if she’s repeating a pattern, and if I’m right in suspecting that she sent your cousin into that pub bombing deliberately, that she’ll need to kill one of us…again?”

“Will she? What does she want now? Right now? From you. Best guess.”

“To torment me.” Matt thought that was obvious. “To force me to do what she says by threatening the people around me.”

“But not me.”

“She’s never mentioned you to me.”

“Hmmm.”

Matt hesitated. He couldn’t tell Kinsella Kitty’s stated price: Matt’s body and soul, i.e., his body would do because the soul went with it. Kinsella would probably laugh, and say, “Screw her, then, and save us all.” Kinsella would probably just laugh.

He wouldn’t understand the price Matt had paid, that his soul did ride on his priestly purity, even now that he was no longer a priest.

Especially, he couldn’t tell Kinsella that emotionally, spiritually, he was utterly married to Temple. That she was the only woman he could see sharing his first sexual moments with, that in his heart, reality aside, he was still saving himself for Temple.

He remembered teaching virginity to preteens, using Saint Maria Goretti, the forgiving rape victim, as a model. That was going too far; that was woman as eternal victim. But the violation of rape or molestation was real, for a child, and for an adult. For a woman, and for a man.

Matt still had innocence to lose, long beyond the age most people are permitted to be innocent.

If Kitty O’Connor coerced that hope and dream from him, she had done something worse to him than Cliff Effinger had managed in years of daily domestic tyranny. He couldn’t let her do it and still be whole.

And, of course, she knew that.

Max Kinsella could never understand that. Except possibly Matt’s hopeless devotion to Temple. That he would understand only too well, and too personally.

Where could Matt go, who could help him, who would understand what he was up against?

Which was a devil in human guise.

He looked at the serpentine ring.

Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts.

And old grudges.

And golden chains.

Chapter 29

Damage Control

As soon as Max left Devine’s apartment he ducked into another unit’s cul-de-sac hallway and pulled a small folding cell phone from his jacket pocket.

The unit was small enough to be overlooked in a cursory search, and certainly small enough to cause no unseemly lumps in his Italian tailoring.

Before he did anything else, though, he slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. He felt as drained as if he had just done his second two-hour show of the night at the Goliath.

“Master of Mystery” had been one of his billing sobriquets, but the Mystifying Max had never believed his own hype. The mysteries of life mastered us, we the people, the eternal actors and audience at one and the same time.

Right now he felt the exhaustion of a spy who had been in the camp of the enemy for too long.

The word “enemy” made his lips spasm in the impulse of a smile. Matt Devine would be astounded that anyone might regard him that way, but it wasn’t personal, at least not between Max and Devine.

It was just that Max knew quite well that whatever had happened between Temple and Devine during Max’s enforced absence—or whatever had almost happened—had not been trivial. Even a master of illusion couldn’t compete with substance.

And not that his and Temple’s relationship didn’t have substance, but circumstances kept forcing it to indulge the surfaces rather than get lost in the depths below.

So Max, who had lived and worked all over Europe in his twenties and knew the attractions and evils (and that sometimes they were the same) of many worlds, found himself momentarily Koed by his recent tour of one ex-priest’s apartment. Mentally knocked off his own self-certain foundation.

Maybe it was just the intimate glimpse into someone he had to regard as a rival.

As residences went, the place was pathetic: more unfurnished than not, with an air of undergraduate impermanence. Except for the slashing grin of the red suede couch in the living room—it reminded Max of some surreal Marilyn-mouth of a loveseat designed by some artist or other whose name he couldn’t remember—everything was strictly brick-and-board and borrowed looking.