“I wonder if you’d be good enough to ask him to come down, child,” said the priest. He had the round, assured voice of a man who inspired confidence in women. “We have a most important matter to discuss with him in private.”
“I’ll go get him,” Gretchen said. The men came into the dark little hallway and shut the door behind them, as though unwilling to be observed from the street. Gretchen put the light on. She felt peculiar about leaving the two men standing crowded together in the dark. She hurried up the steps, knowing that the Tinker brothers were looking at her legs as she mounted.
Rudolph was cutting the cake as she went into the living room. Everybody looked at her inquiringly.
“What the hell was that about?” Jordache asked.
“Mr. Tinker’s down there,” Gretchen said. “With his brother, the priest. They want to speak to you, Pa.”
“Well, why didn’t you ask them to come up?” Jordache accepted a slice of cake on a plate from Rudolph and took a huge bite.
“They didn’t want to. They said they had a most important matter to discuss with you in private.”
Thomas made a little sucking sound, pulling his tongue over his teeth, as though he had a morsel of food caught between one tooth and another.
Jordache pushed back his chair. “Christ,” he said, “a priest. You’d think the bastards would at least leave a man in peace on a Sunday afternoon.” But he stood up and went out of the room. They could hear his heavy limping tread as he descended the staircase.
Jordache didn’t greet the two men standing in the feeble light of the forty-watt bulb in the hallway. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “what the hell is so important that you’ve got to take a working man away from his Sunday dinner to talk about?”
“Mr. Jordache,” Tinker said, “could we talk to you in private?”
“What’s wrong with right here?” Jordache asked, standing above them on the last step, still chewing on his cake. The hallway smelled of the goose.
Tinker looked up the stairway. “I wouldn’t like to be overheard,” he said.
“As far as I can tell,” Jordache said, “we got nothing to say to each other that the whole goddamn town can’t hear. I don’t owe you any money and you don’t owe me none.” Still, he took the step down into the hallway and opened the door to the street and unlocked the front door of the bakery with the key he always carried in his pocket.
The three men went into the bakery, its big window covered from within by a canvas blind for Sunday.
VI
Upstairs, Mary Jordache was waiting for the coffee to boil. Rudolph kept looking at his watch, worried that he’d be late for his date with Julie. Thomas sat slumped in his chair, humming tunelessly and tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with his fork.
“Stop that, please,” the mother said. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Sorry,” Thomas said. “I’ll take up the trumpet for my next concert.”
Never a courteous moment, Mary Jordache thought. “What’s keeping them down there?” she asked querulously. “The one day we’re having a normal family meal.” She turned accusingly on Gretchen. “You work with Mr. Tinker,” she said. “Have you done something disgraceful downtown?”
“Maybe they discovered I stole a brick,” Gretchen said.
“Even one day,” her mother said, “is too much for this family to be polite.” She went into the kitchen to get the coffee, her back a drama of martyrdom.
There was the sound of Jordache coming up the staircase. He came into the living room, his face expressionless. “Tom,” he said flatly, “come on downstairs.”
“I got nothing to say to the Tinker family,” Thomas said.
“They got something to say to you.” Jordache turned and went out of the room and down the stairs again. Thomas shrugged. He pulled at his fingers, tugging with one hand against the other, the way he did before a fight, and followed his father.
Gretchen frowned. “Do you know what it’s all about?” she asked Rudolph.
“Trouble,” Rudolph said gloomily. He knew he was going to be late for Julie.
VII
In the bakery the two Tinkers, one in a navy-blue suit and the other in his shiny, black, priest’s suit, looked like two ravens against the bare shelves and the gray marble counter. Thomas came in and Jordache closed the door behind him.
I’m going to have to kill him, Thomas thought. “Good afternoon, Mr. Tinker,” he said, smiling boyishly. “Good afternoon, Father.”
“My son,” the priest said portentously.
“Tell him what you told me,” Jordache said.
“We know all about it, son,” the priest said. “Claude confessed everything to his uncle, as was only right and natural. From confession flows repentance and from repentance forgiveness.”
“Save that crap for Sunday school,” Jordache said. He was leaning with his back against the door, as though to make sure nobody was going to escape.
Thomas didn’t say anything. He was wearing his little prefight smile.
“The shameful burning of the cross,” the priest said. “On a day consecrated to the memory of the brave young men who have fallen in the struggle. On a day when I celebrated a holy mass for the repose of their souls at the altar of my own church. And with all the trials and intolerance we Catholics have undergone in this country and our bitter efforts to be accepted by our bigoted countrymen. And to have the deed perpetrated by two Catholic boys.” He shook his head sorrowfully.
“He’s no Catholic,” Jordache said.
“His mother and father were-born in the Church,” the priest said. “I have made inquiries.”
“Did you do it or didn’t you do it?” Jordache asked.
“I did it,” Thomas said. That yellow, gutless son of a bitch Claude.
“Can you imagine, my son,” the priest went on, “what would happen to your family and Claude’s family if it ever became know who raised that flaming cross?”
“We’d be driven out of town,” Mr. Tinker said excitedly. “That’s what would happen. Your father wouldn’t be able to give away a loaf of bread in this town. The people of this town remember you’re foreigners, Germans, even if you’d like to forget it.”
“Oh, Christ, now,” Jordache said. “The red, white, and blue.”
“Facts are facts,” Mr. Tinker said. “You might as well face it. I’ll give you another fact. If Boylan ever finds out who it was that set fire to his greenhouse he’ll sue us for our lives. He’ll get a smart lawyer that’ll make that old greenhouse seem like the most valuable property between here and New York.” He shook his fist at Thomas. “Your father won’t have two pennies to rub against each other in his pocket. You’re minors. We’re responsible, your father and me. The savings of a lifetime …”
Thomas could see his father’s hands working, as though he would like to put them around Thomas’s neck and strangle him.
“Keep calm, John,” the priest said to Tinker. “There’s no sense in getting the boy too upset. We have to depend upon his good sense to save us all.” He turned to Thomas. “I will not ask you what devilish impulse moved you to incite our Claude to do this awful deed …”
“He said it was my idea?” Thomas asked.
“A boy like Claude,” the priest said, “growing up in a Christian home, going to Mass every Sunday, would never dream up a desperate scheme like that on his own.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. He sure as hell was going to be out looking for Claude.