Forty Words for Sorrow

A bulky man edged his way past Cardinal into the pew- pretty annoying with the place utterly empty, but people had their favorite pews, and Cardinal was, after all, an interloper, not a regular.

"Nice little church you got here."

The man was almost exactly square. He perched beside Cardinal like a perfect cube of meat, a solid mass devoid of neck or waist or hips. He pointed to the medallion of the Assumption. "Cool medal. I like churches, don't you?" He turned to Cardinal and smiled, if you could call that sort of mirthless display of teeth smiling. Two gold incisors gleaming for an instant, then gone. The man's face, flat and round as an Eskimo's, was harrowed by four symmetrical scars, vivid white grooves that ran across the forehead and chin, and vertically down each cheek. The nose had the misshapen, imploded look of a pepper. The man had to turn a full ninety degrees to face Cardinal, because his right eye was covered by a black leather patch. On this, some wit had stenciled the word Closed.

Was he someone Cardinal had put in jail? Surely he would have remembered this creature molded from the clay of pure thug.

"Warm for February." The man slid a black watch cap from his skull, revealing a perfectly shaved scalp. Then, with surprising delicacy, he removed first one leather glove and then the other, resting his hands on his knees. The knuckles of one hand were tattooed with the word fuck, the knuckles of the other said you.

"Kiki," Cardinal said.

The gold incisors flashed again. "I thought you'd never remember. Long time no see, huh?"

"Sorry I didn't visit you in Kingston, but you know how it is. You get busy…"

"Ten years busy, right. I been busy, too."

"I see that. Been doing some decorating. I love what you've done with the patch."

"No, I been working out. I can bench-press three hundred, now. What about you?"

"I don't know. Around one seventy last time I checked." It was closer to one fifty, but he was talking to a Visigoth; ruthless honesty was not called for.

"Doesn't that make you a little nervous?"

"Why should it? Unless you're threatening me. I hope you are- given that you're a paroled felon and all."

The gold incisors shone wetly. Kiki Baldassaro, better known to his circle of intimates as Kiki B., or Kiki Babe. His father was a mid-level Mafioso who had been stoutly protecting the Toronto construction industry from labor problems for decades. One of the ways he did this was to insert his rhomboidal son into a company's payroll as a "welder." And welding paid very well indeed, especially when you considered that Kiki B. was not expected to actually show up at the site. God forbid.

Despite the guaranteed income, Kiki B. was not one to sit at home idle. He liked to work with his hands, and when the indebted needed encouragement, or the forgetful needed reminding, he was happy to help out with a bit of pressure in the right place. In fact, Cardinal was recalling now, that was how Kiki B. had met his boss and spiritual adviser, Rick Bouchard. On a routine assignment for Baldassaro pиre, he had put a Bouchard henchman in traction. Bouchard showed up at Kiki's door and explained his position to him with a crowbar. They had been friends ever since.

"Musta taken a crane to get that thing up there." Kiki had returned his attention to Our Lady of the Assumption, aloft on her medallion.

"You didn't hear about that?" Cardinal unbuttoned his coat. It may have been fear or it may have been the church's heating system, but sweat was running down his rib cage in cold rivulets. "Night before they were supposed to hoist Our Lady in place, the crane operator skids off the highway down at Burke's Falls and breaks his arm. This is the day before Easter, thirty years ago or so. They're in despair because the next day's Easter and the Bishop is coming all the way from the Soo to say Mass. Big occasion, and it looks for sure like Our Lady's gonna sit it out in a crate. So they rush around calling for crane operators- they don't exactly grow on trees up here the way they do in Toronto- and finally they get one. He agrees to come in at five A.M. to hang the medallion."

"Sure he does. Five A.M., that's triple time."

"The point, Kiki, is he never got to do it."

"Okay. 'Nother accident, right?"

"No accident. Next day he comes into the church, five A.M. Rest of the crew is already here. He finds them all kneeling in the front row, and these are not Catholics, you understand, not all of them. But they're all kneeling in the front row and their mouths are hanging open. And then the new crane operator looks up and sees the reason why they're all so ga-ga." Cardinal pointed.

"She was already up there."

Cardinal nodded. "She was already up there. How? When? Nobody knows. Clearly several natural laws were broken- gravity, for a start."

"So somebody came in at night and hoisted her up there."