The Three Sisters (39 page)

Unswayed by any of the media’s opinions was Benny Ditkus who wanted to visit Regina again, but had to worship her from afar, both because his mother objected to Benny going to the air force base and because Detective Hole had told Bernard that he would speak with the authorities to ensure that the three would get no more opportunities to
corrupt Bernard.

“It was like we were rated R,” Regina said. “No one under
17
admitted unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.” Benny wanted to do something for Regina, to save her if possible and make up for the misdeed he had done; however, he knew of no way of helping her. He had already offered her his $
10
,
000
, but Regina had refused to take it, leaving him powerless to stop the inevitable. All Benny could do was keep his scrapbook of Regina up to date so that after December
25
, he could preserve her
memory forever.

Since his visit with Regina, Benny had emboldened himself enough to mail the letters he had written her, hoping that the letters might cheer her up. Before mailing the love letters, however, Benny xeroxed each of them so he could read his promises of faithful duty to her again and again. His efforts were rewarded when he received a letter from his beloved. It was not a long letter, but the important thing was that it was a personal letter. She had thought of and written to him. Regina cared about Benny and that was all he wanted
to know.

The person who cared the least about the three’s fates visited them only once before the Festivities commenced. Detective Hole, or “
le premiere bête noire du monde
” as K called him, made one last attempt to steer Coito, Regina, and Theodora from their Hell-bent path and into the arms of Christ. His apotropaic protests, however, were in vain. Each of the three remained steadfast in their religious accidie and refused to grant Detective Hole the promise of conversion he so desired. With their final rejection of his offer of eternal salvation, Detective Hole knew he had done everything in his power to save the erstwhile nuns and gave them up
for lost.

On December
4
, John Hotchkiss received his
long-awaited promotion.

The stories circulated about Benny, Detective Hole, and others visiting the three sisters at the air force base gave thousands of others the hope of possibly seeing the three segregated sisters before they died. The reasons why people wanted to visit the three was as varied as the people who came to see them, as one Ph. D. candidate was able to prove. (See John Askew,
Psychological Motivations for Dianoetic Cynosure to the Egregrious in a Democracy
. Ph. D. Dissertation, Georgetown Univ.,
1981
.)

Some came to convert, others out of curiosity, some for vain reasons of publicity (
People
magazine kept a running record of every celebrity who approached the air force base’s gates), others to try and understand what the three felt and thought, and so forth. The three sisters became a mirror of the
nation itself.

The majority of the potential visitors were turned away at the
gates; some got through to the waiting room, but only a few privileged souls were lucky enough to visit the three sisters. Movie stars and government officials, professors and preachers, businessmen and artists, criminals and politicians, insurance salesmen and reporters, Europeans and Antarcticans, Muslims and Zoroastrians, Republicans and Democrats, whores and virgins, rock musicians and baroque masters, all came, and the sacrilegious trinity, paying no attention to race, color or creed saw the few who
interested them.

Someone unfamiliar with the organization of the three’s lives prior to the Great National Sororicide, as K referred to it, might wonder why criminals condemned to death might be allowed to live lives of such freedom and opportunity in prison, being allowed more visitors, friends, publicists, reporters, and celebrities than the average person receives in a lifetime. The answer is that without these activities, the economic and political success of the festivities could have been jeopardized. “Publicity! Publicity! That is Moses and the Prophets,” declared Victor Virga. But all publicity did not lead
to profits.

One consequence of the three sisters’ plight was the emergence of a number of fanatical cults which yearned to rise from the hateful heresiarchs’ ashes. This is not as incredible as it may seem, for if people can be convinced that a distant comet which they have never beheld (as recently as Kohoutek in
1975
) might herald the end of life on earth, then one can imagine how much easier it must have been to convince unstable minds that three persecuted females who were on every TV set and in every magazine and newspaper in America were the final prophetesses of God’s (or Satan’s)
imminent return.

Creative Christians began the apocalyptic fun in mid-November. On TVs and radios across the nation, religious leaders proclaimed the three the Antichrists who would herald the final Satanic days of Tribulation before the Rapture, the end of the world, and Christ’s return to Earth. The seven weeks between the three’s sentencing and their scheduled crucifixion was seen as symbolizing the seven years of tribulation promised by the Book of Revelation which would soon follow the three’s crucifixion, or had already come (opinion was divided on this matter).

Those who held that the Tribulation had already come said it had started with the
1973
Yom Kippur war and the oil embargo that followed, and so would end very soon. Additional signs which substantiated the prophets’ prognostications could be found by anyone who looked for them. Some even maintained, without the slightest bit of doubt, that Jesus Christ Himself would return to Earth on December
25
after allowing the three to die. After the Apocatastisis occurred, He would establish His Millennial Reign and rule the planet from His throne in
Washington, D.C.

Each prophet varied his version of the upcoming events slightly form other prophets’ visions to distinguish himself from those who lacked their own divine inspiration. Some prophets were even rash enough to suggest that Coito, Theodora and Regina would die during the Festivities, then rise from the dead three days later. The more amazing and incredible the predictions were, the more successful the prognosticators were in gaining adherents.

Some envisioned the end of the Catholic Church, the death of all Communists and members of the PLO, the destruction of the Vatican (or was it Mecca?) by God, the raising of Atlantis as Christ’s throne to rule the Earth from, and a hundred other imaginative ideas which astounded the three sisters and the public by their inanity. Paradoxically, the more reporters covered these prophets and their beliefs, usually not in a favorable light, the more people actually began to believe that God would return on December
25
. Distraught by this, some government officials favored moving up the date of the crucifixion just to rid the world of its most recent excess of fanatics by proving them wrong. The bureaucracy, however, could not
be budged.

Despite the arguments posed to counter the prophets’ visions, the number of people accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and the number of people attending Mass increased dramatically while the three sisters were in jail, much to Coito’s chagrin. Contributions to the Church rose substantially in the final months of
1979
as pious souls desirous of being on God’s good side should He return, mended their evil ways with tribute to the Lord.

As Theodora pointed out to one reporter, in
1000
A.D. many Christians had given all their lands to the Church, hoping to reserve a nice place in heaven for themselves, but Christ did not return and as a result, legal battles to nullify the donations ensued which lasted for decades to determine who had rights to the bequeathed lands. Learning from the past, lawyers became bullish on
the future.

In the weeks prior to the crucifixion, the whole world turned its eyes toward Washington, D.C. Every day news events, readily reported by the media and the government, kept Americans and foreigners (now also taken up with or shocked by America’s crucifixion fever) in a state of constant frenzy as the fateful day approached. International conflicts and disasters suddenly disappeared from the newspapers. There were few important events occurring abroad to begin with, and none of them seemed as important to the news media as America’s first crucifixion.

On the domestic front, there were no important elections, no major scandals, nor any other political problems. The economy had taken off, partially in response to the economic opportunities the Festivities opened up to entrepreneurs, and some economists, quick to jump on the bandwagon of economic trends, promised that the
1980
s would be a decade of prosperity. As a result, the Festivities and the three sisters dominated headlines for most of November and December. A Rip van Winkle from the past would have thought the whole world had stopped to prepare for
the Festivities.

Fraught with activity, Washington was like a volcano, seething beneath the surface, but ready to explode any day. Both behind the scenes and in plain sight, thousands of private and public employees worked day and night coordinating and preparing for the scheduled events of the Festivities: receiving incoming guests, cleaning up the city, and getting ready for the largest celebration Washington had ever seen.

Government employees were working in every part of the nation’s capital to extend bureaucracy’s already ubiquitous reach. Most members of the executive, congressional, and legislative branches found some part of the Festivities’ activities which fell within their committee’s or their department’s responsibilities and sent any employees they could spare to meet the needs they had discovered. Even when some government department seemingly found itself left out of the Festivities’ preparations, it succeeded in finding a need for either supervising or reviewing the actions of others. Thus, the Food and Drug Administration hired extra workers to ensure that Washington area restaurants and food vendors were following federal regulations, and the Civil Aeronautics Board made sure Washington’s airports would not be undersupplied by the incoming rush
of visitors.

Quite naturally, the government’s extra activities stretched the various departments’ and committees’ budgets ’till there were no funds left to be spent. Pleas went out to Congress to relieve the government’s financial problems, and on December
6
,
1979
, Congress amended a supplemental appropriations bill to another bill which was immediately passed by both chambers’ members, just in time for Congress to recess for the rest of the year.

Almost as common in Washington, D.C. as government workers was the plague of newspaper and TV reporters and their crews. The nation’s three commercial TV networks labored twenty-five hours a day, setting up television booths, planning camera shots, selling commercial time, lining up interviews, coaxing celebrities into being announcers, and advertising their twenty-four hour nonstop live coverage of the Festivities. Furthermore, each network hired specialists who had an intimate knowledge of Catholicism, criminals, sexual degeneracy, religion, or any other fields associated with the three to advise and gather trivia for the celebrity announcers who would host
the Festivities.

Beneath the PR blitz, however, there was a subtle war being fought by each network as it tried to better the other networks’ latest exclusive about the Festivities or the three.

Every day a new coup by one network or another was announced — some change in the Festivities’ scheduling, the action of some politician, something the three said, or anything else the media deemed important. One subject which received particular attention was the Seven Blasphemous Last Sayings — the three sisters’ ultimate defiance of their persecutors. No one knew what the three’s seven last pronouncements on life on Earth would be, but everyone was willing to guess. The most repeated last blasphemous saying was “Forgive them, Father, for they know what they are doing,” “I’m horny, oh God, I’m horny” instead of “I thirst,” and various versions of the other sayings were daily leaked or revealed by newsmen. But by Festivities’ Eve, about fifty blasphemous sayings had been proffered and the three sage sisters had refused to confirm or deny whether any were correct. The world had to wait until December
25
to find out how many newsmen had lied about
their leaks.

While native Washingtonians who were preparing the Festivities tired under the flurry of activity, tourists (some arriving two weeks in advance of the designated day) were having the time of their lives. The Washington, D.C. area was inundated by thousands of visitors from every state of the Union, every continent on the planet, and most of the countries of the world. They came to celebrate the three’s upcoming crucifixion by partying and filled the city with so much sin and iniquity that missionaries from around the globe were dispatched to the nation’s capital to convert the wicked. Hotel rooms were booked up in Baltimore and beyond until there was barely a vacancy left within a hundred miles of Washington, D.C. Thousands of Washingtonians rented out rooms in their own homes, or entire houses, to reap fortunes from
free-spending visitors.

Because no inauguration or funeral had ever drawn so many people and so many dignitaries to the city, all stops were pulled out to accommodate the visitors and their money. Motel suites went for as much as $
2
,
000
a night and an outhouse could not be had for under $
100
. As if there were no tomorrow, as if
1979
were suddenly
1929
, visitors spent money with no consideration of costs and threw parties which lasted from dawn to dusk ’till dawn again, and then had just begun. Lavish meals, fine wines, sparkling cocktail conversation, buxom women, and mentulate men were the order of
the day.