Page 12 of Bitter Burn
The blood pointing the way to the back of the apartment is dark and still shining in trails rather than drops, and I prepare myself to find any number of things when I duck around the curtain.
What I do not prepare for, however, is finding Father Minch alive.
Alive is being generous, I suppose, because the only reason he’s upright is that he’s propped against a wall. Blood is still dripping from the wounds in his wrists, but feebly, and when he rolls his head against the wall to look at me, there is almost no life left in his expression, no fear left for him to give.
A rosary dangles from one hand.
“Father,” I say, kneeling next to him, careful of the blood puddling on the floor. “I’m sorry.”
He draws in a weak breath, tries to lick his lips. “Do I know you?” he whispers.
“No,” I say as I pull a sheet down from his bed and start wrapping one of his wrists as tightly as I can. I think it might be too late, but I hate the idea of Cashel claiming him, giving Father Minch a lonely, ugly death just because this poor priest had a conscience. “I know the one who tried to kill you.”
“Not tried to,” the priest says, and every word is a struggle of concentration and air. “I’m already dead.”
I’m wrapping his other wrist now. “We’ll get you to a hospital, and you’re going to be fine, and we’ll find an even better place to hide, somewhere the cardinal can’t find you.”
His eyes meet mine under weighted lids. “So you know then. Cashel.”
“Yes, Father. I know.”
“His saint wouldn’t let me die in a state of grace,” the priest murmurs. “But he did allow me the rosary. To try to atone for as much as I could.”
“You have nothing to atone for,” I say firmly. “You left the Vatican because you couldn’t make yourself sin for Cashel. That is courage. That is holiness.”
This last part is something of a guess, but the relief in his eyes tells me I’ve hit the mark. Good. I’m about to reach for my phone to call for medical help—they won’t be able to get an ambulance into the medina, but maybe the paramedics would get here in time anyway—when he says faintly, “The archives.”
I nod at him as I pull out my phone. Minch had been an archivist in the Vatican before he fled, and while I’m not sure of the exact circumstances, the bishop who delivered the information to me as part of his Lyonesse payment knew that Minch’s flight had something to do with Mortimer Cashel. That there was something in the archives.
“It’s not real,” Minch whispers. “It’s not real.”
“Shh. You can tell me all about it once they help you.” I dial 150 and hit the Call button.
“It’s not real.” The words are slurred, sleepy almost. Not a good sign.
He looks at me and then behind my shoulder to the kitchen, then to me again. His eyes move slowly, the lids fluttering. “Take it,” he mumbles. “Inside…I wrote them down.”
His eyes close, his lips going slack.
The dispatcher picks up the phone, and somewhere between my only-just-serviceable Arabic and the dispatcher’s French, I’m able to convey that there’s an emergency, that we’re in the small apartment on the east side of Place Seffarine, that we need a hospital.
By the time I’m done talking, Father Minch is dead.
I hang up the phone and stare at him a moment. He is such a small man, someone who started going bald early, someone whose beard would never entirely behave. He was meant to be scuffling around dusty books and fussing with metadata; he should never have had to show the kind of courage he showed, refusing to be part of whatever Cashel was keeping hidden in the archives.
That is the beauty of bravery, I suppose. It doesn’t care what we look like or the lives we should have led.
I make the sign of the cross over his body, hoping that God will feel as I do—that Minch has more than earned his place in the house with many rooms—and then stand up and look around. I might have twenty minutes before the medical services team gets here, or I might have five. I can’t search the entire apartment and still be conveniently elsewhere when the authorities show up, so I’ll need to be quick.
I check the spots that seem the most obvious to me—the inside of the leather pouf, the underside of the ancient sink, the backs of the drawers of his dresser—but I think the saint who killed Minch went through everything too, given the lumps in the pouf’s filling and the crookedness of the drawers. I found nothing on the saint after I killed him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t destroy whatever he found…
My eyes stray to Minch’s Bible. It’s the Bible of a faithful man, highlighted and worn, the gold on the edges worn off from frequent thumbing and turning. I go over and look at what it’s open to: Genesis, Jacob and Esau. I know the story well; it was one of Grandad’s favorites, and he would read it aloud in his rumbling voice whenever we asked him to read a story to us.
And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother…
Cheerful stuff.
And then I think of Father Minch’s eyes, moving behind my shoulder.
