Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (59 page)

Working with extreme care, the bishop
of Leiria spent approximately two hours translating the few lines of neat, if
childlike, script. No sooner was the task completed to his satisfaction than
there was a discreet rap at the door, and a third man joined them in the study.
The newcomer was Pierre Cardinal Thiry.

Unsure of his own French, Pope John
had decided to entrust the Parisian red hat, whose Italian he knew to be
eccellente
,
with the job of moving the text perfectly from French into Italian.

With the bishop looking over his
shoulder, Cardinal Thiry went to work. The pope went next door to his
bedchamber to rest his nerves. In less than an hour, Thiry had produced a
translation that, while mystifying and somewhat disturbing, nonetheless
satisfied both him and the bishop with its accuracy. On the page, however, it
was aesthetically displeasing, so Thiry made a fresh, tidier copy for Pope
John, absentmindedly folding the messy copy and inserting it between the pages
of his Italian dictionary.

John XXIII, roused by a tiny silver
bell, returned to the study, where he shambled to the tall, leaded window to
read at last the notorious Marian prophecy by the fading light of the sun.
Moments later, he rotated slowly to face his subordinates with the look of a
man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother’s parrot. No, it was
worse than that. It was the look of a man who had just learned that he had
eaten his grandmother.

After being repeatedly assured by the
bishop and the cardinal that nothing, not a trace nor a tense nor a tinge, not
a prefix, a suffix, nor an inflection had been lost in translation, Pope John
again left the study, commanding the others to wait there. They did. They
waited all night, dozing in the voluminous leather armchairs that were said to
have been a gift to an earlier pope from Mussolini. A good twelve hours passed
before John burst into the room, as haggard and red-eyed as a Shanghai rat. The
pope obviously had not slept. The salt of dried tearwater streaked his cheeks.
A flunky followed him in and lit a fire in the fireplace before departing.

John crumpled up Thiry’s Italian
translation and dropped it into the flames. He ordered the bishop’s French
translation burned as well. Then, with some apparent misgiving, glancing
sorrowfully, almost appealingly, about the study, as if hoping the others might
dissuade him, he fed, with trembling white hands, Lucia Santos’s original to
the indifferent fire.

The bishop must have felt that a
portion of Portuguese history was going up in smoke, but he did not vocally
object. In a few minutes, after the ashes had been scattered in the grate, he
followed Cardinal Thiry out of the apartment. Pope John returned to his bed,
where, according to Vatican gossip, he wept for several days.

At that juncture, the alleged third
and final prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima existed in just two places: in the
memory of Sister Mary dos Dores (then aged fifty-three and cloistered in
Spain), and in a French translation concealed inside Pierre Cardinal Thiry’s
dog-eared old Italian dictionary. Whether the cardinal deliberately smuggled
the document out of the Vatican for reasons of his own, whether he acted on
sudden impulse, or whether he simply forgot about the extra copy in the swirl
of the moment, discovering it when he got home, Masked Beauty was never to
learn.

What
was
apparent was that the
cardinal had decided the Virgin’s words, as upsetting as they may have been,
needed to be preserved. He did not want them in his possession, however,
preferring that they be held outside of Europe altogether. Thus, he sealed the
sheet of papal stationery inside a heavy manila envelope and placed it in the
care of his Jordan-bound, headstrong but trustworthy, disturbingly pretty (“Get
thee behind me, Satan!”), young niece. For twenty-one years, Croetine hid the
envelope, unaware of its contents. Upon her uncle’s death in 1981, she thought
she ought to have a peek.

Quite probably, Croetine was
stunned—she never described her initial reaction—but a couple of years later,
under fire from Rome and having changed her name to Masked Beauty, she called
her renegade sisters, one by one, into her quarters, read to them the
cardinal’s account of how he came to obtain Mary’s prophecy, and then let each
nun read the message for herself. Now their shared and sacred secret, they bore
it like a cross and protected it like a covenant, to what end they didn’t
really know. What they did recognize was that it pasted them, all nine of them,
inseparably one to another, a miraculous Marian mucilage—until Fannie had pried
herself loose.

“You were never completely taken with
our Fannie,” Domino asserted. Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a
shipwrecked cello. As far as he could tell, there was neither accusation nor
rivalry in her remark.

“Not especially. Cute, but . . .”

“She was chaste, but she wasn’t
pure?” Domino thought she was starting to figure him out.

“She was strange, but she wasn’t
inexplicable.”

“Oh?
Du vrai?
So, then you can
explain why she ran away.”

“I cannot.”

“Then Fannie
is
inexplicable.”

He shook his head. “There’s an
explanation for her exodus. We just aren’t privy to it. Ignorance of the facts
is no more synonymous with inexplicability than technical chastity is
synonymous with purity.”

“Ooh-la-la. Does this mean you’re
going to write me another ticket?”

“No, my subjective semantic opinions
are not to be confused with the uniform rules impartially enforced by the brave
men and women of the Grammar Police.” He stroked her smooth, voluptuous rump.
“By the way, have I ever told you about the time Captain Case and I were
strip-searched at a roadblock inside Burma? Rubber gloves were unavailable
there, you see, and the militiamen, understandably not wishing to foul their
fingers in our . . . what you French sometimes call
l’entrée de artistes
,
had a pet monkey they’d trained to do the job for them. He was a smart little
fellow with tiny paws as red as valentine candy, and—”

“Switters! Why are you telling me
this thing?”

Good question. He was damned if he
knew. Was it because that day in Burma he’d been harboring a secret document
(though hardly a prophetic one) in his
entrée de artistes
? Or was it
because the proximity of Domino’s exposed fundament—as dreadfully inviting as
the entrance to an unexplored Egyptian tomb—was reminding him both of the
jitter-fingered monkey’s electrifying probe and the request he’d squeamishly
denied that uninhibited young woman down in Lima?

Dissatisfied with their exchange of
e-mail, Bobby Case finally took the risk of calling Switters on the satellite
phone. The date was November 22, 1998, which, incidentally, happened to be the
thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley. It was also the
thirty-fifth anniversary of what, in a more perfect world, would have been the
secondary and less newsworthy of the two events, the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy.

In truth, the call probably wasn’t
all that risky. The CIA liked to keep tabs on its former employees,
particularly those disemployed in an uncordial atmosphere, and even more
particularly those it suspected of continued unfavorable attitudes and
activities (if for no other reason, Switters’s association with Audubon Poe
qualified him as a person of interest), but as it scrambled to establish a new
identity, scrambled, indeed, to justify its existence in a so-called
post-Cold-War world, the agency would have assigned Switters an insultingly low
priority. Still, like every intelligence organization, the CIA was fueled by
paranoia, and one never knew when a cowboy might sprout a wild hair.

Bobby weighed those things, for his
own sake as well as his friend’s. Then, he made the call. Langley would have
pinpointed the Swit’s location months ago, he reasoned, and, besides, this
conversation was to be of a decidedly personal nature. Wasn’t it?

As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as
personal as Bobby might have liked. So evasive was Switters about his reasons
for postponing his return to the Amazon that Capt. Case began to imagine all
sorts of goings-on—political, mystical, and sexual—at the Syrian oasis. He
began to wonder if he hadn’t ought to be at the convent himself, joining in the
fun. In the end, however, he began to conclude, from things said and unsaid,
that Switters might actually have lost his head over one of the molting French
penguins or “some unhappy shit like that.”

So Bobby, who was well trained in the
art of firing rockets, let one fly. He mentioned that he’d contacted Maestra
recently from Hawaii, where he’d gone for a few days of R and R, just to see if
she had any insight into why her damn fool grandson wasn’t tending to business
(i.e., getting his legs back, in order that he might walk the Switters walk as
well as talk the Switters talk). Suzy had answered the phone. “Yep, son, I knew
the instant she said ‘hello’ it was your Suzy. Her voice was so hot and sweet I
damn near had to open a window and send out for insulin.” Bobby paused, and in
the silence he could picture Switters pinkening around the edges of what he
styled his “dueling scars,” could virtually hear, all the way from Okinawa, the
clenching of those teeth that Norman Rockwell might have loved (in an
eight-year-old boy; in a man Switters’s age, they would have scared the corny
illustrator half out of his smock).

After an effective interval, Bobby
continued. “We had us a nice little chat. She told me she’d been upset and
confused for a spell but that she was older now—she’s turned seventeen, you
know: where does the time go?—and she’d got a better handle on things. ‘I miss
him a lot,’ she said, and I could hear it in her voice like an upholsterer
who’s swallowed one too many tacks. She says she dreams about you—there’s folks
that’d consider that a bona fide nightmare—and worries about you, you being off
unsafe somewhere in a damn wheelchair.

“Of course, I informed her that you’d
soon be doing what was necessary to get up on your hind legs again like a man.
And that then you’d surely come and take her for a stroll downtown. She was so
pleased she near about squealed like a monkey. Say, do you remember that time
in Burma when—”

“Forget it, Bobby!”

“Listen, I put in for leave last
month so I could go down to Peru with you to fix things with your witch doctor,
and then had to cancel it. I’m putting in for another one, and I aim to take
it. Thirty days is too long to spend in Texas now that the golfers have got
ahold of the place, so iffen I’m not gonna be cruising the Amazon with you,
guess I’ll have to fall by Seattle, see what I can do for Maestra and Suzy in
your unexplained absence.”

Switters knew he was being
manipulated, but he didn’t hesitate. “Right after Christmas,” he said firmly.
“Ere the needles have browned upon the tree. Ere the reindeer dung has rolled
off the roof. Ere the egg has gone rancid in the last of the nog. Ere Baby
Jesus has been crammed back in the box.”

“I’m banking on it, podner,” said
Capt. Case.

But that afternoon, even as he
fondled the old rag of a training bra for the first time in nearly a year,
Switters had an eerie sensation that he’d made a pledge that couldn’t be kept.

Damascus is said to be the oldest
continuously inhabited city in the world.

It was on the road to Damascus (then
already six thousand years old) that the apostle Paul (formerly Saul) suffered
an epileptic seizure. Pounded to his knees by the relentless strobe of the sun,
an egg-white mousse of spittle sudsing from his baked lips, Paul imagined he
heard the big boom-boom voice of God (formerly Yahweh) admonishing him to scorn
sensuality, snub women, and subdue nature, instructions that he subsequently
incorporated into the foundation of the early Church (what came to be called
“Christianity” was really Paulinism).

It was on the road to Damascus, now a
paved highway lined with pizza parlors, car lots, and ice cream stands, that
Switters, too, experienced a painful pulsation of lights behind his eyes,
knocked sideways by his first migraine in eight months. Switters did not hear
God’s basso profundo. Above the horns, shouts, canned Arabic music, amplified
prayers, and ubiquitous unmuffled motors—the cacophony thickened dramatically
as they neared the city—he registered not a whisper of heavenly guidance,
although at that point he might have welcomed some succor if not some actual
advice.

If Switters’s head ached twice as
badly as usual, it may have been because he was of two minds.

Having rejected Deir ez-Zur as being
too close to the Turkish border troubles, and Palmyra as being too far from
anyplace useful, he had elected to ride the supply truck cum desert taxi all
the way to Damascus. From there, he would have to negotiate a stealthy entry
into Lebanon. (Maybe he’d drop in on Sol Glissant, take a dip in one of his
pools, have one last gander at Matisse’s
Blue Nude 1943
.) From Lebanon,
he figured it ought to be easy enough to scoot into Turkey. So—ahead of him,
somewhere down the line, there was Redhook ale and red-eye gravy; there was
air-conditioning and beaches, there were libraries and galleries and forests
and skylines, there were Maestra and Bobby and Today Is Tomorrow and the thing
that had always seduced him and pulled him forward: the promise of new
adventure. There might even have been—dare he consider it?—Suzy. Those things
and more waited at the farthest end of the Damascus road, and they put the
wahoo in him. But back at the other end, behind him, receding quickly now,
there was a compact little Eden, where the almonds were toasting and the
cuckoos were crooning. Back there was the infamous last prophecy of Our Lady of
Fatima. Back there was a magic wart and a magic hymen. Back there was Domino
Thiry.