Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (66 page)

“I’ve had my fling,” she said, “and
escaped relatively unscathed. I believe I can safely state that should I ever
enjoy such acts again, it will be under the auspices of matrimony.”

“And I’m not a candidate to share
your marriage bed?”

In spite of herself, she smiled. “If
that is a proposal, I will give it due consideration.”

Perhaps fearful of arousing his imp,
he elected not to pursue the matter, and that seemed okay with her. They had a
great many other things to talk about, and over the next four months—during
which lengthy and, at times, acrimonious negotiations with the Vatican took
place almost weekly via e-mail—they talked as fervently as they once had
kissed. If either or both of them regarded conversation an unsatisfactory
substitute, they did not let on.

The talking had begun the morning
after the incident, when, in the shade of one of the walnut trees, she had
briefed him on the reasons why the Church had sent Dr. Goncalves and Scanlani
to retrieve the Fatima prophecy in the first place.

A lot of the briefing was pure
conjecture—the piecing together of tidbits of information that Goncalves had
let slip, combined with an intuitive feel for the situation—but in weeks to
come, when more facts became available, Domino’s assessment proved quite
accurate, although it should be noted that the full story unfolded slowly over
time and may never be completely known.

For whatever reason, Fannie, after
she fled the oasis, had made a pilgrimage to Fatima in rural Portugal. There,
under the spell of the very place where the Virgin Mother had allegedly made
her most dramatic historical appearances, Fannie had requested an audience with
the nearby bishop of Leiria. Eventually, an interview was granted. The bishop
was aware of his predecessor’s involvement with the Lady’s third prophecy, how
he had concealed it in his safe from 1940 until 1957, when, under the direction
of Pope Pius XII, he’d hand-carried it to Rome; and then, three years later,
how he’d gone to assist Pope John XXIII with its translation. What the current
bishop didn’t know was why the Vatican powers had never revealed the contents
of the prophecy. He’d heard the rumors, but felt it was none of his business.
Still, he was intrigued by the defrocked Irish nun’s story, allowing that it
was at least feasible that the Church believed the prophecy destroyed, and even
that the infamous Pachomian abbess, Croetine Thiry, might, through her late
uncle, have ended up with the only extant copy.

It was one thing to be intrigued,
quite another to take action. If Pope John had, indeed, burned the prophecy and
what he believed to be the only copies thereof, he must have done so for a very
sound reason. The Vatican undoubtedly would concur with that reasoning. The
news that Cardinal Thiry’s translation had escaped the flames might hold a
minimum of delight for it. And Rome had a long tradition of killing, literally
or figuratively, the messenger. On the other hand, if a surviving copy did exist,
wouldn’t it want to be apprised? Especially if the copy was in the possession
of a loose cannon such as Abbess Croetine?

In the end, the bishop nervously
telephoned that cardinal in Rome whose duties included the investigation of
miracles and visitations. He relayed Fannie’s story and awaited official
reaction. It was not long in coming. Less than a week after the phone call, the
cardinal rang up the bishop and instructed him that Fannie’s tale was a
blasphemous hoax and should be dismissed as such and forgotten.

Feisty Fannie, however, was not so
easily deterred. She went to see Sister Lucia, now nearly ninety-two years old
and living again in Portugal. To the surprise of those around her, the normally
reclusive Lucia received the Irishwoman. In private, Fannie told her story, and
as she recited the words of the third prophecy (over the years, all of the
Pachomians had unintentionally memorized it), cerebral calcification cracked,
rust flaked away from axon terminals of mnemonic neurons, and in the old
woman’s brain, synapses that hadn’t fired in years—decades, perhaps—commenced
to shudder, sputter, and send off sparks. They shook hands with other synapses,
and the crone found herself recycling each and every word of that fateful
prognostication that she’d received over miraculous meadowland airwaves in 1917
and written down for presumed posterity in 1940, the words that she had
cautioned would “bring joy to some and sorrow to others.”

On a couple of occasions in the past,
Sister Lucia had voiced polite disappointment that the Church had not even
attempted to consecrate Russia, as the Lady of Fatima had directed in the
second prophecy, and that the third prophecy hadn’t been acknowledged at all.
But Lucia was nothing if not an obedient handmaiden. She had always submitted
docilely, thoroughly, to the authority of Vatican fathers. Even in her advanced
age, however, she was not unaware of the worldwide resurgence of Marianism in
general, and of interest in the Fatima Virgin in particular. Like Switters, moreover,
she was susceptible to Fannie’s Irish charm. It hadn’t taken the fugitive
Pachomian more than an afternoon sipping watered-down port in a sunny
Portuguese garden to convince the nonagenarian nun that the time had come to
honor the Holy Virgin’s wishes, to present her exhortations and warnings to
humankind, with or without Vatican cooperation.

Both Fannie and Lucia were aware that
a significant conference was scheduled for early June in Amsterdam. Entitled
“New Catholic Women,” it was to be a gathering of nuns, laywomen, teachers,
writers, and concerned parishioners who had in common a growing spirit of
resistance toward the repressively sexist practices and attitudes that
persisted within their church. It was the premise of conference organizers that
the Church’s continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious
lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their
physical lives. Representatives of the Blue Army, the largest and best known of
the contemporary Fatima cults, had announced their intentions to attend the
gathering, and Fannie experienced little difficulty in persuading Lucia that
Amsterdam in June was the ideal place and time to disclose the contents of the
secret third prophecy to the masses for whom Mother Mary had intended it. For
reasons as political as spiritual, regular conferees would be receptive to an
airing of Marian information that had been supposedly suppressed by the
patriarchs. They would be receptive to the airing whether or not they as individuals
believed Mary had actually appeared at Fatima, and the Blue Army would be
overjoyed, since it regarded the longreticent Sister Lucia as only slightly
less saintly than Mary herself. The frosting on the Communion wafer was that
the conference was bound to attract global media coverage.

Some media members were, as early as
December, already paying attention, for when word leaked out of the “New
Catholic Women” organization office that the legendary Sister Lucia would
surface in Amsterdam to personally unveil the third prophecy of Fatima, the
news popped up in papers and on broadcast stations around the world. As is
often the case, buzz begat buzzsaw. The phone calls and faxes that the bishop
of Leiria began suddenly to receive from Rome were uniformly lacking in any
shade of tickled pink.

Within seventy-two hours of the leak,
a helicopter deposited a Vatican cardinal in Leiria. The red hat was
accompanied by his secretary and two members of the Holy See’s legal affairs
team, one of whom, not surprisingly, was the mysterious Scanlani. Portugal’s
foremost Fatima expert, the scholarly theologian and fascist apologist, Dr.
Antonio Goncalves, also joined the discussions in the bishop’s study. The
following day, Goncalves, the bishop, and the cardinal descended on Sister
Lucia and browbeat the frail old nun into publicly announcing that she would
not under any circumstances appear at the Amsterdam confab, that she was not at
all certain that any text of Fatima’s third prophecy existed, and that if one
did exist, it rightfully was in safekeeping at the Vatican.

As for Fannie, she slipped out of
Portugal as stealthily as she had slipped out of the Pachomian oasis. No
matter. The Vatican team was not particularly worried about her. Not only was
the defrocked Irishwoman deficient in ecclesiastical cachet, she was a known
sexual deviant, having, as a matter of record, undergone a number of exorcisms
in an attempt to purge her of the Asmodeus that had continued to corrupt her
well into her thirties. It would be easy to denounce and discredit her,
particularly since she did not possess the copy of the prophecy but only
claimed to have read it and memorized it under dubious circumstances somewhere
in Syria. Given the facts, the Amsterdam conference quite probably would not
even allow her a forum.

So much for that. But suppose, Dr.
Goncalves asked, that a copy of the third prophecy was, indeed, held in a
maverick desert convent; suppose it was in Cardinal Thiry’s verifiable
handwriting; and suppose, just suppose, it did, as the wench Fannie had
intimated, call the future of Roman Catholic influence into question? Shouldn’t
an effort be made to secure the document and turn it over to the Holy Father,
the single personage with the authority to determine its fate? What if,
inspired by Fannie’s efforts, that troublesome Abbess Croetine should decide to
carry her uncle’s translation to Amsterdam in June?

The cardinal was a practical man. “I
hear the desert is pleasant this time of year,” he said. He winked at Scanlani.
He winked so hard it jiggled his velvet cap.

January. February. March. It was a
period of flat suspense. Alfred Hitchcock on a grapefruit diet. A clock that
ticked but did not advance: every time you looked, it said five minutes to
midnight. A bomb with a damp fuse. The other shoe that drops and drops and
keeps on dropping. Ice fishing as an Olympic sport. The tension was so steady,
the pressure so uniform, there were weeks when it might have been boring were
it not on the verge of being desperate.

It was the threat of serious danger
that kept Switters in Syria. True, the sisters relied on his computer, but he
could have left it with them and gone on to South America adequately served by
his flip phone. They would have accepted the computer, all right, but they
wanted no part of the government-customized Beretta Cougar 8040G, no matter how
he Tom Clancyed its light weight, negligible recoil, side-mounted magazine
release button, and all-around athleticism. (“I’m not gun-happy by any means,”
he assured Masked Beauty, “but we angels can’t let the cowboys have all the
fun.”) So, he remained at the oasis, committed to its protection until matters
were somehow resolved. He had a sense of responsibility, of loyalty, Switters
did, but it must be mentioned that he was also motivated by simple curiosity.

Not that Switters would have deemed
curiosity an inferior or even ordinary motive.
Au contraire.
On his very
first field assignment for the CIA, he had, undercover, accompanied a champion
high-school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin, on a trip to Moscow.
There had never been anything in Russia even remotely resembling the
eighty-piece, high-stepping, plume-bedecked ensemble that, fronted by a
baton-twirling, short-skirted, white-booted drum majorette, paraded from Gorky
Park to Red Square, booming a brassy, sassy rendition of “Jesus Christ,
Superstar”; and Switters, when he could pry his gaze off the majorette (any
hope on his part to get in her pants was ruthlessly squashed by a sizable
phalanx of mother hens from the New Richmond PTA), couldn’t help but notice how
many Russians simply turned their backs on the spectacle and went about their
dreary business in the streets.
Even if you were fiercely anti-American,
he thought,
wouldn’t you at least be curious?
In later years, when he
would find himself the only outsider, the first Caucasian, in a remote African
or Asian village, he would notice that some inhabitants gaped openly, grinning
at him with itch and relish, while others looked right past him or turned away,
expressionless. And so he came to recognize that there were two kinds of
people: those who were curious about the world and those whose shallow
attentions were pretty much limited to those things that pertained to their own
personal well-being. He concluded further that Curiosity might have to be added
to that list of traits—Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality,
Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics—that, according to his grandmother, separated
full-fledged humans from the less evolved. Of course, curiosity was not
entirely lacking among four-footed beasts, as many a dying cat would attest,
and Maestra’s narrow-focused “missing links” were occasionally capable of being
intrigued by trifles like the domestic affairs of film stars and royalty; but
such displays of interest were feeble, even pathetic, when compared to the
inquisitive marveling of the wonderstruck, the obsessive questing of scientists
and artists, or even to the all but squealy speculations of those who could
barely wait to see what was going to happen next.

In that regard, the Vatican also
could be assumed to be partially motivated by curiosity. The pope, naturally,
was curious about the augury that had set his predecessor to throwing off tears
like an ice sculpture in a wind tunnel. Dr. Goncalves was curious for academic
reasons. Even the blandly arrogant Scanlani must have been curious. The Church
undoubtedly wanted possession of the Fatima prophecy because it worried that it
might encourage the feminist bent of the new Marianism and because of the rumor
that the Virgin had foretold of a spiritual renaissance in which the Christian
establishment, unthinkably, was not a major player. Every bit as much as it
feared and resented the prophecy, however, the Church was curious about it.
Domino, with the help of Switters, both stoked and thwarted that curiosity. And
they and the sisterhood lived with the consequences.