The Sixth Station (45 page)

“That’s her!” Maureen cried. “Grethe. The mad scientist. Literally! She’s still wearing the Carmelite habit despite being defrocked decades ago.”

If ever anyone didn’t look like a mad scientist or defrocked nun, it was that lady standing on the porch. She looked, if anything, like a little old lady who’d given her life to Jesus.

Or maybe like a nonkilling version of Maureen. I opened the car door and again Maureen declined to join me as I walked up the path to her house. In fact, she ducked down in the seat.

Will the nun buy this cheesy nun outfit?

She looked me over carefully, not giving an inch, studying my face as I studied hers in turn.

I’ve seen that look before. Right. In every subway car in New York. A genuine nut job.

She leaned on the railing and simply said, in a
very
thick German accent, “The end has begun. Don’t you see? Oh, yes.”

Then she touched my face the way a blind person would—to “see” me with her fingers.

“Soon they’ll be here,
cara
Alazais. They’ll come for me.
Sie werden mein Junge bald töten!
”

“How do you know my name?”

It’s not your name—remember?
Not
your name.

The nun began to weep then. “They will kill my boy soon.” She looked down uncomprehendingly at the rosary hanging down the front of her habit and mumbled, “
Sie werden unser Gott bald töten …
They will kill our Lord.”

She squinted at the car, but Maureen was down enough so that she wasn’t visible. She moved to the threshold of her front door and gestured for me to enter.

The cottage was a tiny two-room affair. The front room was unfurnished save for a small cot, an easel with a painting-in-progress of Armageddon, and a table with a microscope on it. There were many large and small icons on the walls, floor, and on every available inch of space. They all had one theme: the Holy Face of Manoppello. It smelled of oil paint and turpentine.

She ushered me into the back room, which had a Pullman kitchen, a state-of-the-art computer, an electron microscope, and what looked like right-this-second medical testing equipment.

The back wall was made up of skinny metal drawers—the kind that hold medical slides or photos. Each was marked in symbols I’d never seen before.

Off the back of the house was an enclosed porch with candles and incense burning on a small altar.

“Did he give you the sample?” Grethe implored, still searching my face for—what?

“Who do you mean?”

“Jacobi. The priest. Did he give you anything?”

“You mean Father Paulo?”

“Ha. Lying scum,” she spit out, her German accent getting thicker by the second. “Almost ruined the entire Experiment. Him and that filthy soldier. Two badt ones—yes, very, very badt!”

How did this group ever spend time together without killing one another?

“Well, I had a test tube with blood.…”

“Yes! Yes! Give it now to me,” she sang almost like a little ditty, as she clapped her hands and began a little jig.

So nuts.

“I don’t have it. It broke.”

“What does this mean?” she wailed, and began keening in that “ululu” way the Iraqi women did over their dead during the war.

“It got crushed under, ah, a boot.”

She grabbed me by the sleeve and tugged violently. “Why were you so careless? Why did you let him have it?” Tears were pouring down her face, and she began rending the fabric of her habit.

“I didn’t. The test tube was in the safekeeping of a friend of his, in, ah, in a carpet shop. In Istanbul.”

The nun stopped dead and turned on her heel and stared at me.

“Headquarters entrusted that, that, drug-addict
pig
to hold on to the precious cord blood? Noooooo. Impossible. Quite impossible.” She ripped the top portion of her habit, and it hung down over her bodice while she rocked back and forth, crying and keening.

As quickly as it started, the hysteria stopped. Grethe wiped her eyes and stood up as though none of that had just happened.

“So you have other proof?” she asked crisply. “Didn’t Paulo give you anything else? Did he?” she asked hopefully.

“No, but see, I met Yusef Pantera and—”

She cut me off midsentence and menaced me with her balled-up fist, causing me to take a few steps back. Good thing, because the little old nun spat a big one right on the floor between us.

“Filthy! Filthy fornicator. Filthy.”

I don’t know about the filthy, but, yes, he was a helluva fornicator.

Grethe then took my hand and led me out to her little altar, knelt down, and began a fevered, fervent prayer.

She got up again and said, “You took the veil? When?”

I told her the truth, that no, I wasn’t a nun, and that a friend had given me the habit to help us slip through roadblocks.

Grethe ignored me and bade me to continue my story. When I told her that Pantera had taken the scarf with Demiel’s DNA on it, she calmed down.

“He is scum. But he loves the boy.”

“But he died. In a car accident this morning.”

She seemed to shrink before my eyes with sadness. Then, regaining her calm demeanor once again, she simply said, “Sit,” and pushed me down onto the chair at her computer. “Write.”

“Write what?”

“The greatest story ever told in modern times. It will remain somewhere in cyberspace after the end of days.”

“And you
are
convinced the world will end?”

“Yes, yes, maybe when they kill the Boy. The Boy will be executed in the next day.”

“I don’t understand. Haven’t you been listening to the news? It looks like a mistrial. He’s safe—at least for the moment.”

She leaned down and put her face an inch from mine at the computer. “No, no,
no!
He
will
die! But he will rise again. I will
make
him rise again. That is the next resurrection. Now you write it down, Alazais Roussel.”

“Can I ask you something? Why does everyone call me that?”

“Because that’s who you were and that’s who you are. A Cathar. Like the first Alazais Roussel. Saved the Veil. Escaped—bless her—with the Veil, the treasure, to Italy. Yah. That is you. You come from her—carry her DNA. You remember?”

The dream. It was a
recollection,
not a dream.

She pushed me from the keyboard, keyed in something, and a JPEG of the tapestry I’d seen in the Restaurant Costes popped up.

“Yah. You,” she said, pointing out the woman in the foreground with the sack at her waist and the knife in her belt.

That’s why I had déjà vu when I looked at it.

She leaned back down over my shoulder and began
her
version of the story of the birth of Demiel ben Yusef. Her version was at once similar and yet very different from the book that was still sitting in my red satchel.

I wonder if Maureen is taking this opportunity to go snooping. Of course she is. What the hell, we’re all in this together. I guess.

“Theotokos Meryemana Bienheureux, Mother of the new Jesus, Demiel ben Yusef, had been groomed for this honor from the time of her own birth, as had all girls born into the line of Mary since the beginning,” she began.

“The Girl, Theotokos, was the right age; she had already had her first bleeding and at twelve years old was small in stature but able to bring a pregnancy to full term.”

I could feel the bile rising in my throat at what this crazy nun was saying.

Twelve? Jee-sus Christ.

“I implanted the embryonic clone of Jesus into the Girl, and when it was determined to be a success, the filthy priest, and Pantera, Theotokos, and I all moved into the Virgin’s house in Selçuk. We stayed there during her confinement.” She made the double sign of the cross and looked to heaven.

I felt a fool even asking the next question but did anyway. “Where did the DNA of Jesus come from?”

“
Das Heiligen Gesicht, natürlich.
The Holy Face.”

It came from the so-called Veil of Veronica!

I didn’t ask
which
one of the existing Veils just yet, but since she was living up the mountain from the monastery where one was kept, I didn’t need to.

“But the Girl, Theotokos. Oh, what a stubborn girl. Wild and unruly. I felt—God and Headquarters, forgive me—I thought they might have made a mistake. But I never said this aloud of course. No, no, no, no…”

She looked to me for confirmation, so I nodded my head. “Of course not, no.”

“When the blessed day came,” she continued, breathing down my neck now as I typed, “the Girl, after much hysterical crying and unnecessary carryings-on, delivered our Lord!

“It was all gloriously planned—until three intruders came during the blackout—and then soon the whole world was hunting us like we were wild beasts or monsters.”

You are.

“What about the plane you were supposed to have escaped in?”

“Oh, no, that was a drone. Yusef took the girl to live with him. I was assigned to be her guardian, but he threw me to the curb when she was but seventeen years old.”

Bastard.

I kept writing and trying to look down at the keyboard. But as crazy as Grethe was, she spotted the look of disgust on my face and said, “I have nothing to apologize to the likes of you for—you are merely the worker. The worker!

“You are simpleminded, poor thing, simpleminded. Don’t you understand?”

No, not really. And you, lady, are a big nut job!

“We had to have everything
exactly
as it was the first time. To see if it was all destined to be the same again. Don’t you see? The Virgin Mother was most probably only thirteen when she delivered the Infant Jesus—and so was Theotokos. It was good, don’t you see?”

“Oh, of course,” I lied. “Please continue. I have one question, though. Why Yusef Pantera? He seems an unlikely Joseph in this scenario.”

“Oh, oh, oh. It
had
to be Pantera. Had to. Had to. You see, Pantera is from the line of Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera. But not like his ancestor at all. No, no, no.”

“Who?”

“Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera, a mercenary soldier that many of his kind still believe had been the one who impregnated the Virgin. But noooo, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s wrong. He was her protector, not an impregnator,
not
a fornicator!”

She’s so insane, I can’t believe it.

Grethe then shoved me aside hard and punched in a code on her computer. Photos from a locked archive popped up. First up was a JPEG of a little girl, nearly dead, nursing a sweet little brown baby.

Demiel?

Then came a photo of a young Paulo and Grethe looking rapturous as they leaned down and gazed upon the Baby. Other JPEGs showed Pantera, with flak jacket and guns, standing next to the Girl and the Baby, looking angry. Or at least distracted.

Much to my amazement, the next set of photos showed the three young astronomers who had made their way to the house: Gaspar, Mikaeel, and Balaaditya. I recognized them from those old photos in that faxed article Dona had sent.

They stood there stiffly in their religious garments inside the little house holding their boxes. There was a final photo: Theotokos, Yusef, and Demiel, twelve years later. The caption read: “Jerusalem, 1994.” Somehow they almost looked like a real family. Pantera looked almost the same, and the child had grown into a twenty-four-year-old woman—or so it seemed: She was in a burqa with everything but her bright blue eyes covered.

What is this? The second-greatest story ever told? For sure, it’s definitely the weirdest.

“The Veil,” I said. “Does it still exist?”

She looked at me as though I were the one who was crazy as a loon. “Of course it does. You must think me a fool!”

“Well, no, of course not. It’s just—”

“Tomorrow. I will take you tomorrow.” She looked at her watch and giggled in that crazy way again. “It already is tomorrow. But I will take you after seven o’clock mass.”

“I will see you at the church, then.”

She turned on me like I’d just cursed her and her entire family.

“It’s not just a church!” she seethed.

“I ah, I—”

“No, no, no, no. It is
Basilica
del Volto Santo. Pope Benedict XVI came and prayed before the Holy Face of our Lord Jesus and then two weeks later he elevated the little
santuario
to a papal basilica.”

“When was that?” I asked, surprised. I knew he’d visited, but to elevate this obscure church to a basilica? I mean, Saint Peter’s is a basilica.

“In 2006. Only the pope has the right to do that, you know. You know that—yah?”

When I looked perplexed, she narrowed her eyes at me and said, “How could you come here and know nothing?”

When she turned away, anger boiling over, I discreetly placed the cursor on the “send” tab of her computer, and sent the document to my Hotmail account.

I tried to change the subject. “The hotel is closed. Do you know where I can sleep?”

“Our Lord likes to sleep in his car.”

“Right.”

I heard another explosion in the distance.
The world is coming undone, and my last night is going to be spent with an ex-spy sleeping in a car in front of a crazy nun’s house in the mountains next to a monastery holding the greatest relic in all of Christendom.

OK. I can live with that. A reporter’s dream, really.

40

I made my way back down the dirt path to the car. Maureen, I wasn’t surprised to see, was sitting upright in the car, not even close to being asleep at the wheel. She had taken out her mobile device and was reading something or other.

I saw the light of the device go out as I approached the car. She unlocked the door and I got back in.

“Looks like we’ll be spending the night in the car,” I said.

She patted my hand. “No—I’ve managed to get them to open up a room at the hotel.”