Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (72 page)

After dessert and grappa, they
stopped back by the hotel to see if Masked Beauty had arrived. She had not,
alas, so they split up and took two minicabs to Vatican City. Switters rode
with Pippi, who was practically gnawing the freckles off her fingers with
nervous excitement. Pippi was wild to see the Holy Father, of course, but she
felt somehow that the timing was wrong. “This is supposed to be happening
tomorrow,” she whined.

“Today
is
tomorrow,” said
Switters. He took her hand and held it tightly until they reached the
half-hidden service entrance off Via di Porta Angelica, where, as instructed,
they were to meet Scanlani. Indeed, the Swiss Guardsman who answered Domino’s
ring ushered them inside immediately, and there Scanlani waited,
expressionless, smartly dressed, looking as if the Exxon
Valdez
had run
aground in his hair. He showed no surprise at seeing Switters.

The party was invited onto a minibus,
not much more than an oversize golfcart, which, having no provision for the
disabled, caused Switters a bit of difficulty. Apparently, Scanlani found this
amusing, although it was almost impossible to tell. Switters wanted to hold on
to the rear of the vehicle and be towed, but his host objected that it would
attract attention. Pippi and a Swiss Guardsman tipped him over and more or less
dumped him into the cart. His chair was folded and plopped awkwardly and
heavily in his lap. He patted the contraption. “It’s guaranteed fireproof,” he
said, and grinned at Scanlani.

Traveling the Vatican’s back streets,
out of sight of pilgrims and tourists, they passed through two security
checkpoints, at the second of which they were taken into separate cubicles and
searched so thoroughly that afterward Domino whispered in Switters’s ear that
she might as well have lost her virginity to him the night before. The guard
captain was highly alarmed by Switters’s pistol, but Scanlani said it was okay,
telling the captain that the crippled American “used to be one of us” (a
statement to which, under normal circumstances, Switters would have strenuously
objected). He was made to give up the weapon, however. They locked it in a
vault, assuring him that he could retrieve it on his way out. Without the gun
in his waistband, he had to tighten his belt. “How to eat a huge lunch and
still lose weight,” he mumbled.

“I warned you not to bring that thing
in the first place,” said Domino.

The captain and three other Swiss
Guards now accompanied them to the large building that stood at the northwest
of Piazzo San Pietro, the ugly old gray castle in which the pope had his
apartments. They entered through a side door and in a wood-paneled vestibule
were greeted with practiced courtesy by a cardinal—robe, red beanie, and all.
He was the prelate in charge of investigating miracles. “Do you do warts and
hymens?” asked Switters. Neither the cardinal nor Domino acknowledged his
remark, but there was a throb of unspoken menace in the almost imperceptible
curl of Scanlani’s upper lip.

With an air of aloof benevolence,
such as one might find in a kindergarten teacher whose interest in children was
strictly professional, the cardinal led the group down a long, dim hallway to a
door that opened onto a garden of unexpectedly large dimensions. Spring flowers
and spring-green shrubs were everywhere, and there were pines and chestnut
trees and scattered broken hunks of ancient columns that, relieved of their
burden of porticoes, lay about in decorative retirement. Birds were singing,
though with no more or no less religiosity than if they’d been at a New Jersey
landfill, while the afternoon sun fuzzed everything in a lazy chartreuse haze.
Gas of asparagus.

At the far end of the garden, perhaps
fifty yards’ distant, there was an ivy-covered pavilion, a raised gazebo of
sorts, made of ivory-painted latticed wood, and it was down a graveled path to
that gazebo that the cardinal led them, single file, after first briefing them
on the protocols of a papal reception.

Approximately five yards from the
gazebo, the cardinal stopped them. When Switters, who’d been propelling
himself, didn’t brake quickly enough, his wheelchair was jerked to a halt from
behind. He glanced over his shoulder to see the captain hovering there. “I
thought the Swiss Guard were all young bucks,” Switters said. “You look old
enough to remember John Foster Dulles.” His subsequent expectoration was
subdued, even delicate, but the Guardsman shook his chair forcefully and laid a
firm hand on his shoulder.

“The Holy Kielbasa witnessed not one
speck of my secular sputum,” Switters protested. He was correct. There was a
throne inside the shadowy gazebo, but as best he could tell, peering through
the ivy vines, it was presently unoccupied.

“You’ve been drinking alcohol, sir,”
the captain said.

“Merely boosting the ol’ immune
system,” explained Switters.

The party had spread out a bit in
front of the gazebo, and the ex-nuns were staring hard, straining to glimpse
the patriarch whom they might resist but whom they could not help but revere:
their conditioning would allow no other response. Not one papal blip had
appeared on their radar screens, however. Switters could make out two figures
in business suits to either side of the empty throne, but neither of them cast
a popish shadow. Scanlani entered the gazebo then and joined them. The trio
conversed briefly, then called to the cardinal. In turn, the cardinal beckoned
to Domino. “You have the paper of interest? Good. Please come.” He took her by
the elbow and steered her up the four short steps that led into the gazebo.
Mustang Sally and Pippi fell in behind her, bursting to genuflect, but a
Guardsman blocked each of their paths, and even though Switters hadn’t moved,
he felt the captain tighten his grip on the wheelchair.

A pair of songbirds flew over, making
songbird noises.

Domino paused at the top of the
steps. Although her back was to Switters, he could tell she was riveted on the
pavilion’s rear entrance, searching for some sign of a little white monkey with
china blue eyes and an aura of milky authority. She searched in vain,
proceeding no farther, clutching the dog-eared Fatima envelope to her bosom.
Gently the cardinal tried to nudge her inside, but she wouldn’t budge. At that
point, however, Scanlani and his two companions began, in a friendly, if
deliberate, fashion to edge toward her.

As they inched out of the deeper
shadows, into the confusing pattern of ivy leaf and sunlight, one of the men
proved to be good Dr. Goncalves, Fatima scholar and author of a biography of
Salazar, in which he portrayed the Portuguese dictator as a latter-day apostle.
There was something familiar about the second man as well. In a few clicks of
his biocomputer, Switters identified him as a company spook, a shrewd, rat-eyed
cowboy by the name of Seward, who was run by Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and who
apparently possessed some interest and expertise in religious affairs, having at
one point petitioned Mayflower to allow him to smack the Dalai Lama, whose
inner circle Seward had managed to penetrate. “The little sheet-wrapped
bastard’s promoting a destabilizing brand of happiness,” Seward was said to
have complained. Mayflower countered, “His emphasis on happiness is precisely
why nobody takes him seriously.”

Switters was taking Seward seriously.
It would be a major understatement to say he did not like the looks of this,
the sound of it, the smell of it.

Those in the gazebo were conversing
now. Even in the sweet green hush of the garden, he could hear nothing of the
men’s side of things, but every now and then, he caught a word or two of
Domino’s. He heard her say “no” a lot. He heard her say, “This isn’t right.” He
heard her say, “I can’t do that.” He heard her say, “I will have to consult the
abbess.” From the way her back muscles rippled under her best chador, he knew
she was squeezing the prophecy to her breast, like the child she’d never borne.
He glanced at Pippi. Her freckles were winking out like dying stars. He glanced
at Mustang Sally. Plastered by sweat to her forehead, her spit curl formed an
ominous question mark. “No,” he heard Domino say. Her voice was as firm as
cheddar. Then, “How will I know that it’s . . .”

With one of those effortless, swift
moves of his, Scanlani glided toward her. Something was clamped in his fist.
Something about the length of a small flashlight. Something as shiny black as a
licorice popsicle. Something obviously made from nonmetallic materials, perhaps
in order that it might pass unnoticed through airport metal detectors. Like
Switters’s Beretta. The Beretta that was locked now in a Vatican vault, as
though it were one of the Holy See’s legendary treasures.

His arm extended, Scanlani leveled
the sinister object at Domino’s head, intending—there was no doubt—to shoot her
point-blank, right between the eyes.

Switters screamed. “Stop,
motherfucker! You!”

The captain attempted to restrain
him, but the way Switters snapped the man’s wrist in half, it might as well
have been the wrist of a Barbie doll.

It is tempting to report that that
whole past year with Sister Domino was unfolding now before him in a
speed-parade of images—odd and endearing and frustrating; a hurricane of blurry
memories that blew past his inner eye as if it were tied halfway up a
middle-aged palm tree. In actual fact, there was nothing at all in his brain
but a clear, clean hum: the cultivated signal that, in men of his background,
transformed the primal siren of
wah-wah
panic into an articulated call
to action.

Switters leapt from the chair.

His left foot hit the ground first.
The instant it touched, it was as if an angry viper had sunk its fangs into the
instep. A severe jolt shot through his body. There was a deafening
pop
,
and a ball of white light—decidedly not a mystic coconut—exploded behind his
eyes.

He staggered sideways.

He pitched forward onto his face.

Switters had once read somewhere
that according to data accumulated from the black-box flight recorders of crashed
aircraft, the last words spoken by pilots, upon realization that they were
doomed, was most often, “Oh, shit!”

What did it say about human frailty,
about the transparent peel of civilization, about the state of evolution, about
the dominion of body over mind, when, at the moment of their imminent death,
modern, educated, affluent men were moved to an evocation of excrement? That as
the ax abruptly fell on their mortal lives, technologically sophisticated
commanders of multimillion-dollar flying machines usually uttered no
proclamation of sacred, familial, or romantic love; no patriotic sentiment, no
cry for forgiveness, no expression of gratitude or regret, but rather, a
scatological oath?

Quite likely, it said very little.
Almost certainly, the word
shit
was issued without the slightest
conscious regard for its literal meaning. On an unconscious level, the oath
might be significant, but one would have to be a fairly fanatical Freudian to
propose that it indicated the persistent domination of an infantile fixation on
feces.

In any event, though he might imagine
Bobby Case uttering something of the sort (Bobby was a Texan, after all),
Switters, mildly appalled by the information, vowed that no such phrase would
mark
his
final exit. “Oh, shit” lacked grace, lacked class, lacked
charm, lacked imagination, lacked any indication of full consciousness. It was
simply vulgar, simply crude, and while Switters appreciated profanity’s
occasional value as verbal punctuation, as a highly effective vehicle for emphasis,
he was scornful when louts swore as a substitute for vocabulary, youths as a
substitute for rebellion, stand-up comics as a substitute for wit.

When his end came, Switters had
always trusted that he would improvise something original if not profound; something
appropriate to the specific situation, which was to say, something dramatically
correct. If nothing else, should time be short and inspiration shorter, he
would, he had vowed, bellow
wahoo!
—one final, culminating,
roller-coaster-rider whoop of defiant exhilaration.

A noble ambition, perhaps. Yet when
the earth viper bit, when the internal fireball exploded, when he lost contact
with the world and went spiraling off into an electrified darkness, he hadn’t
cried
wahoo
or anything remotely resembling a famous last word. And had
there been a black box in the cockpit of his Invacare starship, it would have
recorded his last words before he was sent spiraling into that electrified
darkness as, “Stop, motherfucker.” How very déclassé, how very embarrassing.

Electrified
darkness because
it wasn’t passive. And it wasn’t really dark. Or rather, it was dark and it
wasn’t dark. It was a darkness that behaved like light. Or, maybe, it was light
that behaved like darkness. How was he supposed to know? Spiraling into it, out
of control, he was in no position to judge. The condition seemed, in a sense,
neutral—
yet,
as stated, it was far from static. Had he time to analyze it (which he did not,
being embedded in a trans-temporal state, where the linear pencil of analysis
had an eraser at both ends), he might have described it as an interface. As an
interface between darkness and light. As an imperceptibly thin crack between
yin and yang. A reality between
that
which is and
this
which is.
A number between one and zero. Spiraling.