The Third Revelation (16 page)

“Bishop of Fort Elbow,” Hannibald said, as if the identification were not necessary, but he added, “Ohio.”

“Ah.”

“This is my first real shot at him, and I don't want it to look as if I'm sandbagging him.”

It was Hannibald's plan to lure Ascue to a reception with a number of American notables in Rome and then to pounce on him.

“He issues statements,” Hannibald said. “Minor encyclicals. But he has never given a one-on-one interview.”

“Press conferences?”

“Of course. You think Ferdinand the Bull is good?” This was a reference to the Spaniard who was the spokesman for the Holy See. “Ascue is the master of non-responsiveness.”

Meaning apparently that he rejected the premises of questions and discussed other matters he considered relevant.

“What's he doing in Rome?”

“He missed the
ad limina
. He'll see the Holy Father personally.”

Ascue had been appointed bishop of his home diocese by John Paul II in what Hannibald called Act III of the Polish papacy. The sort of appointment that would not have been made if only John Paul had had the decency to die, or retire. During the long Babylonian captivity—another of Hannibald's much used phrases—the journalist had lived in agony. The foes of progress held the levers of power, and all one could do was wait in the certainty that the pendulum had to swing the other way with a new pope. And then, as if to prove that there are always worse dreams than those that plague us, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope. Just like that, bingo, without anything like a last-ditch stand on the part of those Hannibald favored.

Since the election, Hannibald had been predicting disaster. The
Panzerkardinal
would not change just because the cassock he now wore was white. There would be some gaffe, some diplomatic indiscretion, perhaps a suppression that would rouse the dormant body of liberal Catholics. Instead, infuriatingly, the new pope seemed to be as popular as the old. He went home to Germany, where most of the sensible ideas rejected by Vatican II had been generated, and they poured into the streets to greet him. It might have been John Paul II and Warsaw. If ever Hannibald had come near despairing, it was then. If he were a praying man, he would have prayed. Instead he got drunk.

And then, as if his unsaid prayers were answered, the event came, and irony of ironies it came during a later visit to Germany. At Regensburg. Benedict XVI, lecturing at the university, made an allusion to the debates between a Byzantine and a Muslim. By quoting the Byzantine's objection, the pope made it seem that he was voicing his own opinion of Islam. To Hannibald, who had not gone on this papal junket but sat brooding in his Roman tent like Achilles, the first news of the gaffe seemed too good to be true. He had learned not to hope. But the reaction in the Muslim world was explosive. In the weeks that followed, clarifications of what the pope had meant were sought and issued, reactions to such explanations by the most radical of imams. Benedict had already lectured the European Union, chiding it for omitting from its proposed constitution any mention of the fact that Christianity had something to do with the making of Europe. But such clear indications that the man was a conservative had not struck a spark. Now Benedict was revealed as a medieval pope, ready to call a crusade. The difficulty was that the objects of the crusades now occupied Europe.

Benedict had planned a trip to Istanbul. Istanbul! In the wake of the reaction to his Regensburg speech, he was urged to cancel. His life would be in danger. He refused. The trip would go on. Hannibald tried not to formulate the thoughts that came unbidden. Hannibald went on the Istanbul trip as witnesses accompany the condemned to the place of execution.

Benedict had not been assassinated in Istanbul. He had been received civilly and then with warmth. He was a big hit with the patriarch. Hannibald went up the Bosporus on a little cruise and brooded. He almost thought he might become a Muslim, out of spite.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, and Benedict's rolled out once more with the publication of the
complete
third secret of Fatima, the accusation being that the Vatican (i.e., the then Cardinal Ratzinger) had withheld the significant part of it and claimed that the text released was the whole. If nothing else, Hannibald could appreciate the prudence of the suppression.

Look at the storm Regensburg had caused.

What if the Mother of God regarded them as marauding invaders who were destroying Christianity?

Any devotion Hannibald had had to the Blessed Virgin had faded and died under the influence of Vatican II. He understood the Protestant charge of Mariology. What need is there for an ombudsman, or ombudswoman, if Christ is our sole mediator with the Father?

Not that Hannibald found such theological niceties intrinsically important. They would be among the things jettisoned as religious belief moved toward full maturity. As for Marian apparitions, Lourdes, Fatima, allegedly all over the place, please hold Hannibald excused. But for anyone longing for the downfall of Benedict XVI, the third secret of Fatima promised to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Oh, how he looked forward to forcing Bishop Ascue to comment on the present mess! Bertone's book had stirred it all up again.

Neal Admirari found Hannibald's enthusiasm uninfectious.

“What can he say?”

“That's the point! No matter what he says it will be the wrong thing.” If QED were a facial expression, it would have been all over Hannibald's face. Neal looked toward the bar set up in a corner of the penthouse apartment overlooking the Forum.

“Gore Vidal once lived here,” Hannibald whispered.

“Did you have the place exorcised?”

“Oh, that's good,” Hannibald gushed, and went to greet other guests.

Both
Time
and
Newsweek
came, and the
New York Times
, the
Globe
, the
LA Times.
Archbishop Foley was there, as was a baby-faced Dominican in his white habit whose name Neal did not catch. A real doll representing
First Things
made the other women seem a third sex, which might not have been all that misleading. Ascue was a surprise.

Hannibald had made him expect a boy bishop, but Ascue was in his mid fifties, with gray hair and kind but wary eyes.

“I recognized the name,” Ascue said when Neal was introduced to Ascue by Hannibald.

“I've been around a long time,” he said, but the remark was flattering, not least because he felt Ascue wasn't just saying that.

“
Whither the Priesthood
,” Ascue said.

“You read it?”

“A compendium of bad arguments. Was that your point?”

Was Ascue insulting him with praise? Neal had written the book, his only book, in the excited certainty that it would blow the lid off things when it was published. It didn't. It sold five thousand copies. He never wrote another. Who reads books?

“Tell me about Fort Elbow, Bishop.”

“Do you want to buy a church?”

Ascue was under pressure to unload church property, consolidate parishes.

“Doesn't getting rid of them make sense?” Neal asked.

“Maybe. If you accept the present situation as final.”

“You don't?”

“Hardly.”

Hannibald joined them, and others gathered round. Ascue stole his host's thunder. “What do you think of this Fatima business?” Hannibald asked.

Ascue tucked in his chin. “Business?”

“The suppression of the third secret,” Hannibald burst out.

“The third secret was released in two thousand. All of it. You must read Cardinal Bertone's book.”

“But that begs the question.”

“Which question is that?”

Hannibald said in strangled tones, “Whether we can believe what was said in two thousand. Or in two thousand seven.”

Ascue laughed. A merry laugh, unforced. “If you disbelieve the Church in two thousand, you must disbelieve Her in two thousand seven. I refer you to Mr. Admirari for the logic of the matter.”

Neal found he didn't mind being invoked as an authority on logic. Who would? It also seemed to ally him with Ascue. He listened to the midwestern bishop handle questions that got sharper and sharper by parry and thrust. A dazzling performance. He said as much to Ascue when he got him alone later.

Ascue had a glass of orange juice; Neal, a glass of scotch undiluted by water or ice.

“The press never changes, does it?” Bishop Ascue said.

“How so?”

“Why the hostility and skepticism?”

“To get answers.”

“It doesn't work, does it?”

“Not tonight.”

Bishop Ascue nodded.

“Maybe I will buy a church,” Neal said.

“If I decide to sell any.”

Somehow Neal thought he wouldn't. The two of them went down in the elevator together. “You stayed out of it up there,” Ascue said.

“I don't like gang bangs.”

Whoops. But the bishop either ignored or didn't understand the phrase.

“If you want to talk about it seriously, come around to the Domus Sanctae Marthae. It is a serious matter.”

They settled on the day and time. As he watched Ascue go off in a taxi, Neal felt a little leap of hope. Would the bishop of Fort Elbow be the means of realizing his hope for a scoop?

“Gabriel Faust is an art historian.”

“Tell him we're engaged,” Ray Sinclair said when Laura warned him that her brother John must not be allowed to suspect them.

“Are we engaged, Ray?”

“Paris is worth a Mass.”

“Paris wanted Helen of Troy.”

Not long before, after they had watched the movie
From Here to Eternity
on DVD, Ray had picked up Lorene's reply to Prewitt when the soldier said that their arrangement was as good as being married. “It's better,” Lorene had replied. It became a kind of motto, gathering all the fun and sadness of their relationship into it.

“It's not better,” he said now, and it needed no explanation.

She wanted to feel happy, even flattered, but Ray's suggestion had a note of cynicism in it. Would he ever have proposed such a thing if she had not recommended a truce while John was here? And of course she wondered what Nate would say if they went to him and told him they were going to marry. It was her boss's remark about women and Chesterton that came back to her. As a married woman, she would of course no longer want to continue as his administrative assistant. Her place would be in the home; her mission, to have children. As a woman she could not be unaffected by that prospect, but after these exciting years as Nate's administrative assistant, the role of wife and mother seemed a precipitous drop in status.

“What do you say?” Ray had taken her in his arms. She stepped back.

“Ray . . .” she began, but she did not know how to go on. His expression would have stopped her in any case. He had the look of a man who had made a great gamble and not lost. He knew her too well, knew how addictive working for Ignatius Hannan was, but his very knowing made her almost hate him.

“We'll talk about it in better circumstances,” he said.

“Wait.”

His expression changed. Now she could read him as he had read her. He dreaded that she would say yes, let's, why not? But it was enough to have restored the balance. She put a hand on his arm.

“You're right. We'll talk about it later.”

 

 

Did she just imagine that Ray kept out of her way throughout the rest of John's visit? She and her brother had time together while Brendan Crowe gave Nate a crash course in sacred art. They drove to the nursing home to see their mother. Mrs. Burke sat slumped in a wheelchair, her hair just washed and fluffy, and looked at these two strangers who hugged her and called her Mom. John gave her his blessing before they left, and she traced the sign of the cross on her breast. How much did she remember? How much did she know?

“It's so sad,” Laura said, tears in her eyes, when they were crossing the parking lot to her car.

“Dante would have had to devise an anteroom for those in Mom's condition, neither living nor dead.”

“At least she's spared the fear of dying.”

“I suppose,” her little brother said.

But what did anyone really know about what went on in the mind of a victim of Alzheimer's?

“It's a pretty posh place,” John said.

“Thanks to Ignatius Hannan.”

“He's quite a fellow.”

“Faint praise.” Laura laughed. “John, he's generous as well as acquisitive. He gets what he wants. Father Crowe didn't put up much resistance.”

“He did say no.”

“I think Nate expected that.”

“But you proposed the chief consultant alternative.”

“John, I'm his alter ego.”

“What's Ray Sinclair's job?”

“Oh, he's money mainly. And general watchdog.”

“They were classmates at Boston College?”

“More or less. Nate never graduated of course. They've offered him an honorary degree, but he had heard tales of the theology taught there and took a pass.”

They drove in silence. Without having to decide, they went past the house where they had been raised. Laura made a U-turn at the corner and went back, parking in front of the house, and they looked at the scene of their childhood. It seemed as remote as their mother had.

John said, “Coming back makes me realize what an expatriate I am.”

“How long can you stay?”