I even got to know the guy, Boniface himself, a little bit, and like I said, all things considered, he made a pretty good companion. I know it sounds like I’m kind of stretching it a little? But when you take two art lovers, a ton of amazing art, and an open bar stocked with the very best booze in the world—I mean, that Armagnac was incredible—well, shit. Of course tongues loosen up. You get to talking. You get over your hesitation about chatting with one of the scariest guys in the known universe, outside of Thanos.
So one night, when we had polished off a bottle or two and were looking through an amazing collection of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, I felt mellow enough to ask him something that had been bugging me. And probably more important, he looked mellow enough to answer.
“Patrick,” I said. Yeah, first names; like I said, mellow.
“Yes?” he said.
“Why The Liberation of St. Peter?” He didn’t say anything. “I mean, out of all the art in the world—and you know I could get you just about anything.” I couldn’t help it—the Armagnac. And anyway, it was true. “So why this?”
He looked at me without blinking, for just about long enough that I thought I’d made a mistake and maybe misjudged things. Then he got up and walked over to the bar. And God bless him, he opened another bottle and brought it back with him. He topped off my glass, poured himself some, and sat. He sipped. So did I. I figured maybe I really had crossed the line and I should just wait and see what happened.
That was a good move. When he’d whet his whistle, he gave me one of his tiny little smiles. “I have been a bad man for most of my life,” he said. I thought I could hear just a little bit of a French accent creeping into his voice. He kept it neutral all the time, so nobody could have guessed where he was from originally, but now—either the drinks or the memories colored his words just a little bit. “I have told myself, so, I have no choice, but I know this is not true. I chose it. And I have been . . . very bad.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I didn’t contradict him.
He shrugged. “So. I have been bad, and sometimes, I have paid the price.” He sipped. “Prison, hm? Not unknown to you, Riley?”
I shook my head. “Not unknown,” I admitted.
“Of course. It is the life we chose.” He frowned. “But the second time . . . Merde . . .” He drained his glass and refilled it. “La Santé,” he said. It wasn’t a toast. It was the name of one of the toughest prisons in France. I knew La Santé by reputation. It was supposed to be a very hard place.
“I was in solitary confinement. Because I was so very dangerous.” He smiled slightly. “Difficult, hm? But I had made plans—you must do the same? Plans?” I nodded again, but he was already going on. “Yes. But the plans were not for solitary, which is much more challenging. I did not know if my . . . instruments could adapt.”
I assumed that when he said “instruments” he meant his “people,” and not that he had planned a rescue led by the Tower of Power horn section.
“I had already been there too long, hm?” he said. “And I thought perhaps, this time, the plans would not work. And the days went on. And the months . . .”
He sipped again, and he smiled, which I thought was an odd thing to do when you’re remembering solitary in a very hard prison. “They let me have a book. Art of the Italian Renaissance. And in that book . . . No. I will show you.”
He got up again and went over to the bookshelf. He returned with a large but very battered book. It was dirty, smudged, and dog-eared. He opened it to an illustration. “Here. This is the book itself. There. You see?” He held it out to me, and there it was. The Liberation of St. Peter. I knew it, but I looked anyway, until Boniface began to speak again.
“There you see it all,” he said. “The entire story. I became fascinated with this work. Perhaps even obsessed, hm? I stared at it for hours, and I began to really see it and hear what it said. Its true message. Which is what, Riley?”
It startled me so I almost dropped the book. But I took a stab at it. “Uh—faith, of course. The power of faith opens all, um, doors?”
He beamed at me. A huge, nearly human smile. “Exactly. That is precisely right. Faith opens all doors. And I let that knowledge . . . sustain me. I had faith. And—I was delivered. My doors were opened. My instruments adapted.” He smiled again, but this time it was not quite as pleasant. “And my enemies paid the price,” he said.
He leaned over and pointed to the picture in the battered old book.
“You see it? You see the angel—she comes to him as he sleeps, and she leads him past the guards and out to freedom.” He smiled. “Just as it happened to me. Although my angel was perhaps not so . . . angelic? And the guards were not dazed by glory.” Shrug. “They were dead, of course. By the hand of my angel.”
“Bernadette,” I said.
He nodded. “Of course. Bernadette.”
Boniface smiled, like a proud parent remembering how their kid scored the winning goal for the state championship. “Bernadette,” he said again, softer, and he looked down. Not really looking at the book that rested on his knee, just pointing his eyes down, away from me, so he could remember better. “You must understand that Bernadette has always been different,” he said.
I thought that was probably an understatement, but it didn’t seem really smart to say so.
“Always. She was born with . . . gifts,” he said, and the smile was gone now. “Talents that are . . . what? Perhaps I should say, challenging, for a woman.” He took a large sip from his glass. “She is freakishly strong, stronger than most men. More physically gifted than any other human I have ever seen. And her reflexes, her movements. She is so fast—” He shook his head. “As I say, these things are not truly appreciated in a woman. I’m sure she had a quite unhappy childhood. Which may have—”
Boniface shook his head again. “Feh. We all had unhappy childhoods, eh? Why do so many fools seem to think childhood is a wonderful, magical time? If true, it is a very dark magic, mon ami. And even without early trauma, Bernadette was always— She has a . . . a what—a flair? She truly enjoys to—she actually craves . . .”
Boniface paused, still looking down. He seemed to see his glass for the first time, and drained it. He poured it half full again, sipped. “This is perhaps Bernadette’s greatest gift,” he said. He locked eyes with me. “I think the two of us, we have sometimes had to cause pain to other people? And even death?”
He waited for me to answer. So I did. “I guess that’s part of the life we live,” I said. Really clever answer, cribbed straight from The Godfather. Like I said, that Armagnac was good.
It seemed to satisfy Boniface. He nodded. “Just so. But it is not pleasant, hm? It leaves a bad taste. Most people find it difficult, even impossible.”