Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (67 page)

January. February. The Ides of
March. A sky-lidded night plain. A star-loaded sky. A moon without a pond to
primp in. A wind without a leaf to tease. A nighthawk without a wire to rest
on. A couple without a corner to turn. Her sandals, his wheels, made a
popcorn-eating sound in the sand.

He watched as she squatted to pee.
She was matter-of-fact. He whistled a show tune. Although they never touched,
theirs was the radiating, maddening-to-others intimacy of longtime easy lovers.
If she made enough water, the moon might glimpse itself, after all.

Now that they no longer rendezvoused
in the tower room, Domino and Switters often strolled together at night.
Rather, she strolled, he rolled. (Stilting in tandem with a companion on foot
produced ridiculous rhythms.) Switters usually preferred to stroll and roll
outside of the compound, out in the desert, both because they could speak more freely
there and because he could check the perimeters for possible intruders. By
March, the Vatican had apparently given up on trying to pressure Syria to
deport the Pachomians: thanks to Sol Glissant, they held clear legal title to
their land. Army helicopters no longer buzzed the oasis, and the last police
raid, in early February, had failed for the third time to find an alien
American male on the premises. (“Just one pretty nun,” reported the
officer-in-charge, “and nine ugly ones, including an old abbess who can’t stop
rubbing her nose and a big burly mute one, confined to her bed.”) Still, it
paid to be alert. Switters remembered those Islamic militants from the closest
village, and it would not have surprised him if Roman agents incited them to
spy on, or even attack, the convent.

For more than two months, while the
abbess paced in her chambers, absentmindedly but compulsively polishing the
unfamiliar regularities of her newly planed proboscis, Domino had bargained
hard with Rome. Scanlani, who proved as verbose electronically as he was
taciturn in person, spoke for the Church. Initially, starting about a fortnight
after Switters had run him and Goncalves off the compound, his on-line
communiqués consisted of the kind of insidious intimidation—bully-boy menace
couched in oblique legalistic formalities—for which lawyers were universally
despised. When Domino failed to back down, when she intimated and then flatly
stated that her aunt might, indeed, attend the “New Catholic Women” conference,
disputed document in hand, Scanlani became gradually, reluctantly, more
conciliatory. Of course, at that time, Masked Beauty, still wary of its
presumed Islamic overtones, had absolutely no intention of publicizing the
Virgin’s message in Amsterdam or anywhere else, but she came to appreciate her
niece’s strategy: “If the Holy Father agrees to reinstate the Order of St.
Pachomius,” Domino would write again and again, “then the Order of St.
Pachomius will consent to turn over to the Vatican the sole extant text of the
third prophecy of Fatima.”

Eventually an industrial-strength
votive candle had flared in the old abbess’s mind. She chuckled. She stroked
her shockingly sleek snout.
“Chantage,”
she said.

“Yes.” Domino grinned back.
“Blackmail.”

They laughed. They bit their lips,
their tongues, the pulpy lining of their cheeks—and went right on laughing.
They were disgusted with themselves, guilt-ridden, ashamed; but they were,
momentarily, at least, forced into giggles by the very idea of it. Blackmailing
the pope!

And there had come a day, just past
the middle of March, when the pope blinked. Scanlani signaled that, in exchange
for the return of certain Church property, the Holy Father would officially
accept the Pachomian sisters back into the fold. There was a catch, naturally,
and it was the terms of the Roman offer that had occupied Domino and Switters
on their stroll and roll that night in the parched but cooling grit, where the
moon, as anticipated, had indeed examined its acne in the puddle that Domino
straddled like the primordial Mother of Oceans.

Because of her youth in Philadelphia,
perhaps, she’d never acquired the French habit of dabbing herself with the hem
of her skirt, so she squatted there, panties down, for a while, as if waiting
for the wind to dry her. To distract his thoughts, Switters tried to spin his
chair, but it was no use: you couldn’t pop a wheelie in the sand. Finally she
stood, affording him just a flash of what, in South Africa, the whites called
the
poes
and the
moer
, the coloreds called the
koek
, and
many blacks knew as
indlela eya esizalweni
(a mouthful any way you
looked at it): the cultural information latent in the different ways those
neighbors referred to the same commonplace and yet everlastingly mysterious
organ was fodder for a fascinating sociological thesis, though not from our man
Switters, who was happy just to have learned the names, in case an occasion
ever arose to address the thing in question in its proper local idiom. At any
rate, Domino was beside him again now, repeating the conditions of the Vatican
proposal.

“They’ll readmit us to the cloth, but
they won’t support us financially, which is okay, because we’re used to poverty
and we can take care of ourselves. However, they also demand that we stay out
of Church politics, keep our mouths shut, don’t rock any boats.”

“And you absolutely will not agree to
that?”

“
Mais non!
We have to speak
out. It’s our duty to life. Putting a stop to this rampant, irresponsible
procreation is like finding the cure for cancer. The ‘breeders,’ as you call
them, are rather similar to cancers, actually; tumors with legs. A cell becomes
malignant when it misinterprets or mishandles information from the DNA, and
then all it cares about is replication—at least that’s what I’ve read—and it
will go on blindly, selfishly replicating itself even though it smothers the
innocent, healthy cells around it. And, of course, it eventually dies itself
because it has destroyed its environment. Everything dies then. Yes? So, the egotistical
breeders misinterpret God’s word, or cultural definitions of manhood, and
they—”

“Yeah, I get the analogy, sister
love.” Moreover, he agreed with it, although it seemed harsh coming from her.
He wondered if some of his own cheerful cynicism had rubbed off on her. He
wondered, too, to what degree, if any, she’d ever entertained the fantasy of
bearing children of her own.

Now and again, one could detect in a
childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the
children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghosts of souls who
hadn’t lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X’s without Y’s. Y’s without
X’s. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one
else, they wouldn’t go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in
her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would
soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was
their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the
bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were
everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome—yet they no
more bore her resentment than a seed resents the uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats,
like a phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into
eternity.

Not every childless woman was so
accompanied—it may have been only those who at least partially, on some level,
wanted the girls and boys that they, for whatever reason, chose not to
conceive—but when Switters looked hard at Domino, as he did now, he saw her
saturated with other lives. He wondered if she was aware of her phantom brood,
but he wasn’t about to ask. If he broached that subject, his imp might start
messing with his coconut, and the next thing he knew, he could be inquiring
about what she thought of his potential as a father. He liked children and
children liked him, better than most adults liked him, but men such as Switters
didn’t breed in captivity. Oh, no. What he
was
going to ask, and not for
the first time, was why she and Masked Beauty, having slowly, steadily moved
away from much of the old patriarchal doctrine, still desired to be a part of
the traditional Church. The reasons she gave were never very clear, though he
surmised that they were not dissimilar to the emotions that caused him to
sometimes muse wistfully about the CIA.

Before he could raise the question,
however, they were distracted by a noise. It came from close to the compound,
there where the bud-weighted boughs of an orange tree overhung the wall. The
sound was that species of muffled hack related to an inverse yap, as if someone
were trying to suppress a cough. Switters exposed Mr. Beretta to the light of
the moon. In a whisper he asked Domino to push his chair toward the noise, and
she complied, tensely but calmly.

As they drew nearer, a form stirred
in the shadows. Grasping the pistol with both hands, Switters yelled something
in Arabic, wondering as he did so why he hadn’t chosen Italian. Instantly two
figures darted from the wall. Two short figures. Two small figures. Two doglike
figures. Loping off into the dunes, they unraveled a ribbon of musk behind
them.

Domino smiled with relief. “I—I don’t
know the English,” she said.

“Jackals,” Switters informed her.
“Rare to see one these days. We’ve had ourselves a lucky little nature ramble.”

His nose was turned up at the jackal
smell. Her nose was turned up at his pistol. She stood scowling at its
beautiful ugliness. She shook her head, and moonbeams exposed the underlying
red in her hair. “When you were a secret agent,” she asked, “did you have a
double-oh seven? License to kill?”

“Me? Double-oh seven?” He laughed.
“Negative, darling. I had a double-oh oh. License to wahoo.”

She knew that by wahoo he was
referring to a cry of exhilaration, an exclamation of nonsensical joy, and she
knew, also, that it had a basis in Scripture—”Make a joyful noise unto the
Lord”—but she was not so sure she could distinguish between that kind of
defiant exuberance and mere childish bravado. She continued to fix him with a
half-frown of affectionate disapproval.

Meanwhile, Switters’s attention was
focused long and hard in the direction of the fleeing jackals. After a while,
Domino said, “I didn’t know you were so interested in wildlife.” He might have
rejoined that wildlife was the only life that did interest him, but he just
kept looking and listening, saying nothing. Those jackals concerned him. They
gave him an evil feeling. He was aware that while few people kept jackals as
pets because of their odor, the animals were easily tamed. Conceivably, some
party could have trained the jackals to skulk around outside the compound
walls. A bug could have been concealed in the fur of one or both of them, a
listening device that would record any voice within fifty yards spoken above a
whisper. Vatican security might neither possess equipment that sophisticated
nor a mentality that ingenious or perverse, but the black-bag tekkies at the
pickle factory were capable of that and more. Much more.

If Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald had
been interested enough in him to have him tailed in Seattle, he quite likely
had had his name put on satellite. That meant that anytime anyone typed the
name Switters into an on-line computer or spoke the name Switters into a
telephone—anywhere in the world—it would be recorded and pinpointed
geographically and chronologically, by one of the covert satellites that the
company had had put in orbit around the planet.

As he considered that possibility,
sitting there beneath a granary of stars that were not all stars, he was struck
by the thought that the giant bulbs, the shiny black and copper pods that he’d
seen circling the globe when his consciousness was massively enlarged by yopo
and ayahuasca; the bulbs that called themselves our overlords and boasted that
they ran the show; the pods that the shaman dismissed as a bunch of big
blowhards . . . well, what if the master bulbs were just a more evolved
generation of intelligence satellites? The fact that Amazonian Indians had
apparently been familiar with them for decades, if not centuries, meant little
in a realm where the past was today and today was tomorrow: the connectedness
of electronic technology and primal mythology seemed not only plausible but
inevitable when one accepted the scientific theory and mystical principle of
the interpenetration of realities. Wasn’t advanced cybernetics a hell of a lot
closer to meditative and psychedelic states than to the meat-and-potatoes
commerce of everyday life?

“Hey! Where have you gone?” Domino
shook him, though rather timidly, for he still clasped the weapon that she now
called his “hisser.”

Switters cleared his thoughts. He
decided not to share his concerns about the jackals. It was probably silly,
anyway. So far, there had been no inkling that the company was involved in or
even interested in this dispute over the Fatima prophecy. Sure, the Vatican and
the CIA sometimes cooperated—after all, they both believed they had a huge
stake in controlling human behavior and maintaining the status quo—but, more
than likely, the Church would prefer to keep the Fatima fracas under its own
steeple. He reminded himself that it was easy to grow paranoid in the desert.
The absence of shadows caused the mind to invent them. History had proven this
a hundred times over in a landscape where one man’s mirage was another man’s
divine revelation.

No, he couldn’t permit himself to
start hallucinating company spooks with obedience-school jackals. One thing he
knew for certain, however, was that Scanlani and his bosses were going to be
infuriated when the Pachomians refused their offer. That meant he wasn’t going
to be leaving Syria anytime soon. And in the skeleton-dry wind, he could hear
the rift widening between him and three of the four human beings he cared about
most.