Deacon King Kong(59)
Also, there was the intrigue of the whole business.
And of course, the money.
Was it about the money? he asked himself.
He glanced at the folded paper on the car seat next to him. It was the paper that the Governor had placed in his fist when they spoke of Poppa.
“A man who does not trust cannot be trusted.”
Elefante swung the big Lincoln to the off ramp of the FDR just past Houston Street. The silhouette of the Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead. He thought of their conversation again, and the Governor’s story.
“I’m losing my mind,” he murmured.
* * *
It had been late afternoon and the Governor was nearly asleep when he told Elefante the story of the “soap” he’d given to the younger man’s father. Lying on the couch, he spoke to the ceiling while a fan overhead creaked ceaselessly:
“For almost a thousand years, the Church of the Visitation in Vienna, Austria, had these precious treasures,” he said. “Manuscripts, candleholders, altar cups. Most of it would be biscuits to a bear to you and me. Stuff used during mass, altar cup to drink our savior’s blood, candleholders, that sort of thing. Some gold coins. All of it was made to last. It’s hundreds of years old, this stuff. Passed down through generations. When World War II came, the church hid it from the Allies.
“That’s where my younger brother Macy was stationed. He was sent there in forty-five during the war. America kept troops there after the war and Macy stayed on. Macy was eight years younger than me, a lieutenant in the army, an odd fellow. He was, um . . .” The Governor thought a moment. “A ponce,” he said.
“A ponce?” Elefante repeated.
“Light as a feather. They’d call him a sissy today, I guess. He had a taste for the finer things in life. Always liked art. Even when he was little. He knew all about it. He read books on art. Just had a taste for it. Well, the city was all torn up after the war, patrolled by different armies here and there, and somehow Macy found this stash of stuff. It had been hidden by the Nazis. In a cave near a place called Altenburg.”
The Governor paused, thoughtful.
“How Macy found that cave, I never knew. But there was valuable stuff in there. A lot of it. And he helped himself to it: manuscripts, tiny little boxes decorated with diamonds, with little panels of ivory. And some reliquaries.”
“What’s that?”
“I had to look it up five times before I understood it,” the Governor said. “They’re tiny boxes like coffins, made of gold and silver. Some are trimmed with diamonds. The priests kept jewelry, art, relics, even old bones of saints in them. This stuff was heavy loot. The spoils of war, m’lad. Macy got hold of a good gob of it.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it. He had them in his house.”
“How’d he get all of it home?”
The Governor smiled. “He used his noodle and shipped it to himself by the US Military Postal Service. Little by little. I guess that’s why he stayed in the service so long. The stuff was small. Then after the war, he got a job at the post office so he could move it when he wanted without nobody making a stink. Simple as that.”
He chuckled, and had to raise himself as he coughed a large amount of phlegm into his handkerchief. When he was done, he folded the handkerchief, put it back into his pocket, and continued.
“It always seemed odd to me that Macy lived too well to work at the post office,” the Governor admitted. “He had an apartment in the Village the size of a rugby field. Full of fancy things. I never asked. He had no kids, so I figured it wasn’t anything. My poppa couldn’t stand Macy. He used to say, ‘Macy likes boys.’ I told Poppa, ‘There was a priest at Saint Andrew’s who’s said to like boys.’ But he didn’t want to hear it. I was a young man back then, fast on my feet and a bit of a wanker, but even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men. I knew because Macy talked me out of killing that half-langered Rale Bulgarian priest at Saint Andrew’s who acted the maggot with a lot of kids in the parish. I found out about him when Macy grew up and we started adding up crib notes on him. But Macy said, ‘He’s a sick man. Don’t go to jail for him.’ He was my kid brother and he was smarter than me in a lot of ways. So I listened, and went to jail on my own! Even in prison, Macy’s smarts helped me. If you walk into the slammer not looking for a hop on, knowing that what a man does in his private time is his own damn business so long as he doesn’t make things worse for you, well, you’re all right. So I loved Macy for what he showed me. And he trusted me.”
The Governor sighed and rubbed his head as he plowed through the memory. “He didn’t live long after the war. First our mother died. Then a couple of years later, cancer got him. That and a broken heart, poor lad, because his father didn’t want him. Toward the end of his life, he came to me and confessed everything. He took me to a closet in his house and showed me what he had. He kept all those things from the cave in a closet, imagine that. Wonderful things: Bibles with solid-gold covers. Relics. Manuscripts rolled into tubes made of gold. Gold coins. Diamond reliquaries with the bones of old saints inside. He said, ‘This stuff is a thousand years old.’ I said, ‘You’re a millionaire.’
“He said, ‘I hardly sold any of it. I made a good living at the Postal Service.’