The Last Western (56 page)

“It dented the painting,” said Profacci, looking at the portrait of Pope Pius IX.

“Filthy,” said Nervi, twisting his hands. “They carry pestilence and filth. Wash your hands, Orsini. You don’t know the diseases it carries.”

Orsini laughed, then idly tossed the bird out the window.

Liderant, lost in his thoughts and oblivious to the incident of the bird, said, “Perhaps someone close to him can persuade him to resign. He is a man of faith after all.”

The bird fell at the feet of one of the Swiss guards, a spirit man who looked continually for signs of the end.

When he saw the bird, he dropped his spear and shouted to his fellow guard: “O mi logo tegurithi!”

“It’s only a sparrow,” his fellow guard assured him.

But the man ran home to his wife and children, and that very night he and his family moved to the mountains to await the coming of the Lord.

“We go
when, Willie brother?” Joto asked.

“Soon.”

“Where?” said Benjamin.

“To New York, the United States, and then to Illinois,” said Willie.

Why?
Truman asked with the question sign.

Before he thought of it, Willie started to give the sign of a word that began with
d
. They stared at him.

“It is in Illinois that I must make amends with my brother,” he said then.

It was evening and they were eating dinner. The Vatican apartments were almost empty. That day Willie had given many things away, things that people had given him in audiences or sent to him through the mail, including much cash. He had tried to give away the pictures in one of the large galleries, but Cardinal Profacci had stopped him.

It had been a week since his meeting with the officials and Rome buzzed with rumors of secrets, plots, betrayals.

Through Joto, Felder, Benjamin and Truman, Willie had heard some of the rumors, but not the worst ones. He was tired now, and sad. The morning mail had brought a one-sentence letter from Clio, the first since he had become pope.

Do you think you will change any of this

with your stupid plan?

Your Ex-friend. Clio

The envelope contained a group of pictures that showed children such as Willie had seen before, the matchstick children with bloated bellies.

There was no return address on the envelope. It had been sent from New Orleans by some anonymous intermediary. But Willie knew that Clio was in Peru, fighting. Reports of violence in that country and of the activities of the rebel army there came into the Vatican daily and he had followed the fighting carefully.

The brothers seemed happy; there was food on the table, wine, bread.

Willie pretended to eat, as he had been pretending for two weeks, but tonight they noticed that he ate nothing.

“You are not feeling well?” said Joto.

“I had something earlier,” said Willie. He had had nothing but coffee and water in five days, and the first pains were going away, and the new ones coming.

They talked again of leaving Rome and Willie could see the faces of the children again and the food was there and the conversation was lively and they were happy together, except for Willie. He asked where Felder was.

“Brother Herman answers questions before grand court,” said Joto.

“They wish to see if he believes in God,” said Benjamin. “I went before them this morning. It is called the Congregation for Preserving the Purity of Doctrine. They wanted me to take an oath of allegiance, to swear that I believe and teach what they call the traditional teachings.”

“And did you sign?” Joto asked.

“Of course. I signed it as I would sign a manifesto in favor of communism or monism or anything. I will sign anything as a way of confounding the powers and principalities of paper.”

“Once signed into four opposing armies,” said Joto. “Was pacifist at time.”

Truman laughed in his silent way. They all laughed.

Willie listened to their laughter and lighthearted banter, but he kept seeing the pictures of the children, and there was a buzzing in the back of his head.

Thatcher Grayson handed him a piece of bread. He shook his head.

“But you haven’t touched your food,” said Grayson.

“I am not really hungry,” Willie said.

In sign language Truman said,
You must have strength for the day
, and made a sunburst with his hands,
the day of glory
.

Willie signaled yes and thank you with a tired smile.

Later, after they had gone, Willie put on some clothes a workman had left in a closet of his apartment and went out into the streets of Rome. He wore a woolen stocking cap over his red hair and dark glasses to hide his eyes.

The city was in its usual nightly riot and L-Day did not exist and life went on as it had always gone on. The things that happened had always happened, the nights did not change, and whatever it was that men and women felt was the product of an emotional froth that had been 3,000 years in the making, and nothing was any different, not even the things that happened in certain hotels, that had been invented in this city.

Willie knew nothing of Rome’s long history and did not understand why she was as she was, but walking through the streets, past the trattoria signs and the drugstore fronts with the ruins and the churches looming back of them, he could smell and feel and see and hear what he did not know from books. He sensed the unhealthiness and the pride and the excitability that was like a fever, and he could smell the stink of rotten ambitions and he could hear the slow death songs.

His melancholy deepened because wherever he looked, the children were there, and when the children weren’t there, then he saw the white fields again, though he had worked hard and had almost convinced himself that the white fields were false and not to be taken seriously—that part of his dream had been only an echo of the white dream Felder himself had dreamed when he died.

He came upon a dingy American bar that had been a popular gathering place after one of the great wars, when the conquering peoples had come to the old parent nations to see how magnanimous they had been to their enemies. It was a dark triangular cave cut into a 300-year-old building in which a saint had once lived. The saint’s name was Lisa Loretti, and she had died at the age of fifteen rather than surrender her virginity to a janitor at the Vatican. The bar, lit with yellow neon signs advertising supreme hamburgers and Regent wine, was called The Virgin’s Spot even now, 200 years after Lisa had been martyred.

There were a few tables set out on the darkened street, and Willie sat down at one of them and ordered a cup of bitter Italian coffee.

He sat in the shadow of a little hedge so that he could not be seen, and he tried to put away the hunger and the fear and the shapes that moved on the white fields.

The people came and went, men from the neighborhood mostly, boisterous fellows whose laughter, rising in easy bursts, began to cheer Willie a little.

“This will be number seven!” a man roared inside. “A boy I promise you—and I drink to number eight!”

“Old man, number seven has taken half your life—eight would finish you off!” came an answering voice.

Laughter. It was that casual laughter that people could always have when they were only themselves, and it came to him and entered him, and it warmed him as the coffee warmed him.

For a little while the world was precious again. The yellow glow of the neon sign spread out along the street and the old stones looked cheerful and the motor scooters zooming past were fine toys and people were out for fun, like children at games, and absolutely at their best and all that he had felt only moments before was gone.

He felt that rush of tenderness that overtook him whenever he saw people being people, forgetful of everything else, even their own names, abandoned to the secret they could not admit in words—that life was magical after all.

Bemused, half-tranced, he did not see the two figures gliding across the terrace of The Virgin’s Spot from the other side, and even if he had been looking, they would have been only shadows moving noiselessly behind him.

Nor did they see him when they glanced up, even if their minds had permitted them to see what they looked at, and even if they could have seen clearly, with human eyes, they would have noticed only the back of some laborer having a drink on his way home.

They had crisscrossed Rome a dozen ways, each man, to come to this place, losing the detectives they had hired to follow each other, moving from taxi to monorail to taxi again and tourist hack and private car, their bodies driven like parts of an intricate machine that must come together at one point in an elaborate process, and touch, and lock.

This was the touch point, this forlorn café, where no one would find them, no one but that shadow that was the reason for their meeting and the reason for the thousand other meetings that would be necessary in coming days in so many other places of shadow and darkness, to make the machine produce its single commodity.

At first, held happily to his vision, melting into it and gliding through it like a painted bark to the bright waters of the world, Willie did not even hear their voices. Caught up in what he took to be the carefree play of the race, listening to the music of the scooters and the toy cars and the trains that brought people swaying into the imaginary festival, listening to the joking talk and the clowning words and the ordinary music of ordinary speech, he could not have heard his own name shouted in his ear.

But he could hear the voice of a friend, especially if the friend were in suffering and especially if the friend had stopped in the sojourn and crossed a bridge and now called back in a language that was different, so different that you knew that something had gone wrong in the dead inside center, the essential heartmeat of his spirit—he could hear that voice if the voice were only a whisper.

What he heard was the voice of Herman Felder ordering a morphini—that was all and that was everything.

He froze. His pretty dream dissolved. The laughter and the music stopped, and out on the street he saw only vehicles that were going too fast, ugly vehicles roaring and spewing gaseous fumes, showing gray faces, like
papier-mâché
masks, behind their window panes.

The other voice—
whose
? He dared not turn, he dared not move, he dared not even listen, but the voices had frozen him and he was helpless to move.

“…Of course any loss of control,” the other voice said, and Felder interrupted.

“You used that expression before the group this afternoon. What right do you have to criticize me?”

“One recalls the past stories.”

Whose voice?
He knew it but from where?

“That was all part of the strategy,” said Felder. “Ask the Head, he knows about it. Do you think I would hazard something of this importance by a silly drink?”

“One recalls the African journey.”

“That was different. I could explain it, but you wouldn’t comprehend.”

“It could happen again, Mr. Felder. That is what I
do
comprehend.”

“Anything could happen, Your Excellency. You could die for example, well-connected as you are.”

“With a man like me, Mr. Felder, sarcasm is wasted.”

It was not Profacci or Liderant. It was not Nervi. Who?

“That I should have to explain the matter to you bothers me a little,” said Felder. “Do you realize where you and the whole group would be without me and my associates in America?”

“Please, Mr. Felder. Surely you are too sensitive. I do trust your sense—your sense of organization.”

The clink of glasses.

It was not Taroni. It was not Tisch. It was not Guilfoy.

“You know definitely the place and the time.”

“A small town in Illinois on the night of the—”

“Please.
I
cannot know the details. Only that you know them.”

Felder laughed. “I keep forgetting your sinlessness and incorruptibility.”

“I ask, Mr. Felder, only that we keep to our agreement. We are not involved in any sense.”

“Of course not. How could you be?”

“We are applying the ancient principle of the twofold effect—tolerating an evil which cannot be prevented anyway—”

“Cardinal, can we skip that part? I ate too much of that when I was very young so that even a little taste of it now makes me sick.”

“We do not go in for political crimes, no matter what you think, Mr. Felder.”

“You only sleep with the criminals. Like me.”

Felder laughed. A sigh from the other man.

“Mr. Felder, if I were sensitive like yourself, I should probably take offense at that. But my business does not permit me to be sensitive.”

Felder laughed again. Patiently the voice went on.

“What
is
my business, you ask? My business, my concern is the church, the continuation of its life, the safeguarding of its principle— all of which you scoff at, as you are scoffing now.

“But who are you, Mr. Felder? A man. A single individual mortal. Forgive me for saying it, but a single individual mortal who is not even very important—not the president of a great nation for instance, not an economic king, though I understand at one point that opportunity was available to you. Who are you? A forty-five-year-old man, an eccentric and a dreamer, who thinks that he has an idea or lesson or program to give to the world. What is such a man to us? What is such a man in the scheme of things, against the reality of the church?

“Many images come to mind. I think of a clock, Mr. Felder—an enormous clock, a clock that has been running for twenty-one centuries and more and that never requires winding because it was wound perfectly in the beginning and its parts are all perfect, designed never to go wrong, and it cannot make mistakes. If you were the most powerful man in the world, you and the energy of your lifetime and the influence of all your power and wealth and intelligence might disrupt the tick of one second in the running of that clock. Comprehend? One tick. That is, if you were the most powerful man in the world. If you caused the clock to tick wrongly, foolishly, tick out of time, the great clock would correct your mistake—because it is regulated with internal mechanisms that keep it free from error. Should it be false for the span of even one second, the next tick would correct it.”