Gospel (42 page)

He shrugged. A shared silence. O'Hanrahan took a step or two away toward the hallway, and Lucy called out: “Wait!”

He stuck his head back in the room, this white-haired, red-faced, beaming old wreck of a man with irresistible eyes. “Yessssss?”

“Is there an airport in Assisi?”

“Not really.”

“Where do we go after Assisi?”

“Rome and the Vatican libraries, I suspect, if we get the scroll.”

“Always wanted to see Rome.”

“The Whore of Babylon,” said O'Hanrahan gravely.

So a cab was called for the back entrance to the hotel, in the event the criminal element was waiting for them out front. Amid the scrapings and apologies and extreme unctuousness of the manager, they left in a huff, wound through a maze of alleys, and claimed their cab a block away.

“The train station's just right over there,” Lucy pointed out.

“We're taking the long route to see if anyone's interested in following us,” said O'Hanrahan, putting his suitcase in the back. “We won't have a very good night's sleep if some thug follows us onto the train.”

Lucy slid down onto the backseat. “I still don't know about this…”

O'Hanrahan hopped onto the backseat as well. “You'll like Rome, I promise.”

The driver: “Rome, yeys! It is a byootiful ceety, no?”

“Bellissima,”
said O'Hanrahan.
“Santa Croce, per favore, signore.”

And then the cab recklessly took off, rattling across the cobblestones of dirty, overcrowded, touristy, unfriendly, arrogant, philistine Florence, the greatest city in the world, darting at an unsafe speed through the old quarter to Santa Croce. O'Hanrahan steadily gazed out the back, but so far no sign of followers, no hope for a chase scene. Upon arriving at Piazza Santa Croce, O'Hanrahan explained to the driver that his daughter wanted a last look at the church, and redirected him to the train station.

“Santa Croce ees very byootiful, yeys?” said the taxi man.

“Yes, very byootiful,” said Lucy, before sinking lower in the seat, thoroughly ill at ease. “I guess my mother wouldn't forgive me if I got to Italy and didn't get the pope's blessing,” she said.

“Yeys,” said the driver. “Jahn Pool Two, ey?”

Said the professor, “You don't wanna miss that guy's act. He does a mean mass, I hear. Get your mother some kitsch souvenirs, some plastic crucifices.” O'Hanrahan's coinage of the plural with the second syllable accented made Lucy laugh. She nudged O'Hanrahan the next second, prompting him to notice the glove-compartment shrine of the taxi: John Paul's picture, a small nativity scene, a crucifix, the ubiquitous Mary, and hanging from the rearview mirror, numerous medallions and a crucifix. A rosary was suspended from the meter.

“Rome's so full of shuck,” said O'Hanrahan, “that you can get your mother a piece of the True Cross.”

“She'd like that.”

“Isn't it interesting, it's always a piece of the
True
Cross, and not merely a piece of the Cross. There were so many fakes around, even the Church had to insist on it.” Lucy rose up a bit and looked over at O'Hanrahan, looked at his face as he was off on another ramble: “Santa Croce del Gerusalemme, one of the Seven Pilgrimage Churches of Rome, built by Constantine's mother in 327, fresh from her Cross-finding mission to Jerusalem. I have this mental picture of Constantine sending his mother as far away as possible to get her out of his hair…” O'Hanrahan stretched in the seat, a slight yawn, relaxed and philosophical.

“You may get on a plane in Rome, Miss Dantan, but remember I said this. Thinking Christians, scholars like yourself and even old heathen reprobates like me, have a challenge this century. Some of what we know of Christianity is garbage, some is certainly true. Some of the quotes in the New Testament of Paul and Jesus are the work of an overzealous Early Church, some quotes are accurate. Some doctrines of Christianity have the essence of divinity, other practices are corrupt, rotten, and certainly evil. We search, you and I,” and here he put a hand on her shoulder, “scholars and wise men and wise women, we search through the toothpicks and the splinters and the driftwood and counterfeit kindling, because somewhere out there, some day, we may hold before us a piece of the True Cross.”

They were at the station.

O'Hanrahan bade Lucy linger in the ladies' restroom while he bought two tickets, waiting in the interminable lines. While waiting, the professor surveyed the populace: everyone looked kosher, scantily clad teenage tourists, a carpet of backpacks, kids too cheap or out too late to find a hotel, intending to camp on the station floor. O'Hanrahan returned to the ladies' toilet and Lucy anxiously peered around the doorway: “Is the coast clear, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

“What's the password?” hissed the professor.

Lucy emerged anxiously. “I'm scared and you think this is funny. Give me my ticket.”

He gave it to her, before launching into an imitation of some raspy spy-movie hero: “If I don't make it, Lucy … you'll tell headquarters that Little Miss Muffet will have her hand in the cookie jar at ten o'clock singing ‘There'll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.'”

Then Lucy dug her fingernails into O'Hanrahan's arm:
“Oh my God…”

“What?”

Lucy pulled her companion behind a newspaper stall, ducking down. “That man there…” she whispered, “in the tacky suit.”

O'Hanrahan, not ducking, scanned the terminal. “This is Italy, Luce, you'll have to give me a little more to go on.”

Lucy hit him in the elbow, annoyed. “The tall man, blondish. Pink-checked jacket. Yellow pants, a bolo tie.”

O'Hanrahan observed him, reading a paper. “So?”

“That's the guy who drove away after the safe at the Crown was robbed! The guy with the German car.”

“You're sure?”

“Who could forget that suit?”

O'Hanrahan calmly announced: “C'mon, let him see us.”

They walked audaciously right in front of him. O'Hanrahan faked a sneeze so the man would look up from his magazine, which he did, then O'Hanrahan took a sharp turn at
binario
14, the track for Rome, the train sitting right there.

Lucy: “We're going to Rome now?”

“We'll get on the train just long enough to make our friend get on it too.”

They boarded with their suitcases on the uncrowded first-class carriage and lingered near the door. O'Hanrahan walked into a compartment, put down the window and looked out to see when the train was ready to leave. Mr. Cheap Suit hurried to the train, presumably without a ticket, and hopped on several cars down. The conductor on the platform looked at his watch—one minute to go. Get ready, said O'Hanrahan, who had Lucy move their suitcases to the carriage door
not
facing the platform.

The conductor blew the whistle.

“Now!” said O'Hanrahan, and Lucy opened the train door that met the neighboring tracks, and she and her winded, huffing companion scrambled down to the ground. O'Hanrahan reached back for their luggage as the starting train clunked forward, then he and Lucy ran across the tracks to the next platform.

“Hide behind the schedule board…” wheezed O'Hanrahan, as Lucy ahead of him stepped up onto the platform, a foot off the ground, to the amused stares of the travelers watching this last-minute change of itinerary. He joined her behind the
arrivi
and
partenze
board which listed rail timetables, safely out of view of the departing train.

Soon, the Rome train was gone.

O'Hanrahan and Lucy searched the opposite platform for some sign of the Man in the Cheap Suit. Apparently, he was bound for Rome.

“What next?” asked Lucy as the red-faced O'Hanrahan caught his breath.

“After my heart attack,” he coughed, finding a bench to sit down upon, “I'd say a drink is in order.”

“I don't think,” Lucy said absently, “a drink would be good for my digestion, sir…”

After a swing past the cafe for O'Hanrahan's shot, the next destination was the
locale
train to Assisi, making every stop between Firenze and Arezzo. From Arezzo, at 2:30
A.M.
they were to transfer to the Perugia line, which would take them to Assisi by dawn. It was so slow and unpractical, this train, that no one would suspect they were on it. They found a first-class compartment to themselves and O'Hanrahan got out his cherished bottle of grappa.

“We made it,” he said as the local train pulled out. “Say good-bye to Florence.”

“Ciao,”
she said quietly, staring out the window intently, not that there was anything pretty to see.

“Let's get the Tuscan accent up to snuff,” said O'Hanrahan, taking a swig of grappa, then shuddering. “Whoa baby,” he said in response. “
Ciao
is fine, but don't think
c-h.
Can you say the
ci
like it's a
t?
Tiao.
Like that?”

After O'Hanrahan's Italian lesson, he turned off the compartment light, drew the curtains, then stretched out and joined his hands on his belly and closed his eyes. Lucy, to calm herself, had been persuaded to drink a shot of grappa and, boy, was she feeling it now. She felt sleep coming on and she stared out the window as the lights of metropolitan Florence receded. On this bright moonlit night she could see the black silhouettes of the Apennines, and on these hillsides there was the occasional light from a peasant home, from a luxurious villa—she longed to see the scenery but her imagination was just as good. What am I doing here? she laughed to herself. And the next minute, looking over at O'Hanrahan, a slumbering Jupiter, she thought: should I ever go home? Have I ever been alive until these last weeks?

And she began a prayer that trailed into sleep and the sound of the plodding
locale
train, with a mix of relics, frescoes, postcards, saints, legends, and beautiful Tuscan faces mingling freely in her dreams. And for tonight, she had no need of prayer because, like so many before her, in her heart had been spoken the Blessed Name:
Italia.

ASSISI

J
ULY
3
RD

O'Hanrahan returned from the first-class compartment lavatory, all shaven and cologned, red-faced and awake as dawn was breaking.

“So,” Lucy asked through a yawn, “Assisi's a nice place?”

“One of the greatest things in the country. The Basilica of San Francesco is a palace of a church. Spectacular.”

(Even so, is there any of Us acquainted with Francis who, looking upon this palace of churches, does not hear him say: “All that money to build this church! Think of the poor it might have fed!” Jesus, after all, did say
the poor will be with us always
but one imagines Francis persisting, “Even so. All the more reason it shouldn't have been built.”)

“In any event,” O'Hanrahan lectured, full of incomprehensible energy at 5:57
A.M.
, “other venerated Franciscans have not fared as well as this. Are you listening?”

“Hmm,” she nodded herself alert, “yes, I'm awake.”

“Across the Apennines in Padova you can see the cathedral-pile erected for St. Anthony, a Franciscan who died five years after Francis. Anthony appeared in his native Lisbon and back in Italy at the same time, in order to get his father off a murder charge. He raised the murdered corpse up from the dead, had it accuse the true murderer, and then Anthony let him fall dead again.”

(The most ungentlemanly miracle of the great saints.)

“Anthony was exhumed by Bonaventura, that tiresome hack, in 1263.” O'Hanrahan knew this would enliven Lucy: “Only the tongue and upper bridge of Anthony remained incorrupt amid the putrefaction of the corpse.”

“I can't believe you're doing this before breakfast,” said Lucy.

“And Bonaventure took these fragments of Anthony's blessed mouth and brought the dried, swollen tongue to his lips to cover with kisses—”

“I had a feeling this would work itself around to something Italian and foul,” said Lucy, as the train slowed down for the station.

“It gives a new spin to the French kiss, wouldn't you say?
Il bacio alla francescana,
so to speak, hm?”

The train slowly rumbled into the Assisi station.

Lucy and he stepped from their old-fashioned train car, lugging suitcases behind them. Lucy observed that they were two of only five people to disembark at Assisi this early morning. The station was dead, fog covered the green fields around the tracks. The conductor whistled and the train lurched forward, destined for Spoleto.

O'Hanrahan nodded his head in the direction of the north. “Over these mountains, Luce, is Loreto and the Sacred House of the Translation.”

Lucy had heard of that one. “Mary's house, right? That flew over from Nazareth and ended up in Italy.”

In 1294. The house in which the Blessed Virgin received the announcement that she would bear the Christchild began that year hopping around the Mediterranean. The
Casa Santa,
after touching down in Yugoslavia, picked up again and landed on a hillside outside of Ancona. Despite its suspiciously Italian appearance and construction from Italian bricks, a fact-finding team was dispatched from Rome to corroborate the story and sure enough, in Nazareth there was a gap where Mary's house used to be, and measurements were made to show there was no doubt.

(Pilgrims take heart from the Vatican:
“It is the House of Our Lady, the House in which she received the Annunciation. It is filled with the Holy Spirit. Mary lived there and dwelt here in Her holiness.”
That was John Paul II. In 1984.)

“And without a hint, an infinitessima of irony,” O'Hanrahan went on, “Rome has made the Lauretian flying house and its madonna the patron saint of aviators.” He chuckled. “You have to develop an affection for this kind of nonsense or you'd go crazy as a Catholic. It makes the empty triumphalism of Pius IX, worst pope since the Middle Ages, all the more damning. Did I ever go into—”