Rabid (49 page)

Joe held her shoulder, and the warmth of his hand permeated the fibers of her sweater to her hot skin. Adrenaline soured in her blood because she had neither fought nor fled. She bopped her cigarette pack against her palm, plucked a cigarette, and busied herself lighting it. Smoke lapped her lungs.

The priest sipped the last of his soda around the ice chunks. “I should call a cab,” he said and slipped around the edge of the table. He touched the oak table with his fingertips for balance.

Leila couldn’t look at him. Carving scarred the blonde wooden table, years of drunk bar-goers happily chiseling their initials and names and profanities and hearts and, in a few cases, chipping them out again. Knife marks, half-filled with wax and grunge, mangled a heart bearing the initials
H.P. + H.G
.

Joe patted Leila’s shoulder to get by. “Come on, Padre. I’ll call you a cab.”

“Wait,” Leila said.

Joe stopped patting her shoulder. Dante held his glass.

“I’m sorry. Don’t go,” she said. Spiked lines gouged the initials
V.W. + V.S.W.
in the wood. “I was out of line.”

“It is all right, Leila,” the priest said. “I have had enough of this soda tonight.”

“Sit down.” She rotated her glass. “Joe hasn’t finished his beer. Nobody needs to leave.”

The priest settled into the booth like a flock of ravens landing. He asked gently, “Are you sure you are all right?”

“Sure,” she said.

Attila and the Horde, disappointed that they weren’t going to see anyone’s eyes scratched out, turned back to their pool table.

The priest said, “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s fine.” She sucked on the cigarette. The initials inlaid in the table read:
T.J., T.C.B., F.C.
The letters’ edges were sanded smooth. They had been there for years, decades, maybe when her father was alive, before she was born, and now after Conroy.

Time was a blindfolded bitch.

Dante flicked his fingers at a waitress and asked for a pitcher of Guinness.

Joe frowned. “You sure you should drink more, Father?”

Dante shrugged. “It’s just American beer. Not the real thing.”

~~~~~

Monty drew the Guinness slowly.

Tithia loitered at the bar for a few minutes while the black brew filled the pitcher.

“They okay?” Monty asked, gesturing toward Leila’s table with his head.

“Hmmm? Sure.” Tithia scrubbed a spot on the bar with one of the bleach-reeking rags.

Monty shook his head. “I can’t believe Leila is hanging out with that guy.”

“The priest?” Tithia looked over. She was Methodist herself, and it did seem weird to her, a minister in a bar, drinking. Heck, in her synod, playing cards was a devil-tempting sin, and Catholics were considered idolaters for their saints’ statues and gory crucifixes.

Monty nodded. “You should hear her talk about religion.”

Leila had been tipsy one night, a rare event, and pretty much everyone else left in the bar had declared their own freedom from religion. They had pressed Leila, and she had responded in good fun, but when she felt comfortable that they were a full house of agnostics over atheists, Leila had reiterated that old phrase about opium of the masses, and the one about men not being free until the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest, and then she had launched into a diatribe, staring at her beer the whole time, about priests who were above being prosecuted for crimes. Brittleness had quaked in her voice, and she had used the words
priest
and
parish
and
Vatican
, not
minister
, not
clergyman
.

Traces of Catholicism, Monty’s own disbelieved past, haunted her words.

“Maybe she’s converting,” Tithia said.

Monty guffawed. “Maybe she’ll convert him.”

Nathaniel, sitting two seats away, said, “This is the second time she’s been drinking with the priest.”

Monty said, “Tithia, keep an eye on her. She’s fragile, that one.”

Nathanial smirked but remembered the tenderness in Leila’s hands as she had drawn eyeliner near his eyelashes, and how she had taken time to do it right, that Halloween that he had gone in drag. She had mentioned her dead father, which had seemed odd, and then she had said that Nathanial made a beautiful woman.

Nathanial glanced behind him, at the three of them sitting on the upper level near the pool table. Leila’s back was toward him, and she held her cigarette away from the table but cupped in. Joe’s hand rested on her shoulder.

Her gold neck curved toward the black swirl on the back of her head.

~~~~~

Leila exhaled smoke. “It’s your funeral, Just-ah Dante. I hope you have some aspirin at the rectory.”

Dante shrugged. He had aspirin, but his hangovers always seemed so well-deserved that he was loathe to medicate them away. He scooted the ashtray with the remains of his cigarette in it toward her. “What did you want to know about the Vatican?”

“I don’t know.” Leila tapped off her cigarette ash with a thumb-flick. Dove-gray smoke streamed from the coal at the end of her cigarette, found turbulence, and raged in the air.

Dante touched his forehead, an abbreviated genuflect. The alcohol coating on his mind was wearing thin, and a patch was necessary for threadbare spots. He was acting like an unattached man again, searching out friends in a bar, lonely without trysts.

He almost felt like himself again, drunk, with a beautiful woman, and so very empty inside.

The girl Leila still stared at her beer and the table. She glanced at him before looking away, and the capillaries in her eyes were dilated to a pink haze across her sclerae. She didn’t look drunk. Her eyes shimmered with tears.

Some psychiatrist, he scoffed at himself. She had been jumpy from the first time she had met him. She had been twitchy at Mass. He had assumed that she was hiding her relationship with Conroy and then what she had told the police about that night in the condo.

When he had reached across the table for her, she recoiled like he had slapped her. Fear shimmered in her, and horror, and something more.

Perhaps his first opinion, outside the church after that first Mass, when he had seen fragility and damage commensurate with an abuse survivor, perhaps that assessment had been correct.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he so wanted to be wrong.

To help her, he had to gain her trust. That was always first. He could give her the information she had asked for, as far as he could. “What do you want to know about the Vatican?”

She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “I don’t know.”

The waitress brought the pitcher of dark Guinness. He poured. “The Vatican has within it several Congregations, or divisions, like the State Department.”

Joe removed his hand from Leila’s shoulder to drink his beer. “You don’t think of a church as needing that kind of thing.”

“It’s a semi-elected, theocratic, oligarchic dictatorship and an independent state.” His beer tasted of yeast. “I’m a consultor for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

“Thought you were a Jesuit,” she said around her cigarette.

Dante half-smiled and laid his palms around his glass of beer. “Divided loyalties.”

“And a scientist.”

He acknowledged, “Further divided.”

“Bloody schizophrenic, aren’t you?” She flicked her glass with her large, green-stoned ring, and a
ping
tolled.

He sipped the beer and his alcohol buzz swarmed. He had to concentrate, even though he was far too drunk, but he might never see this girl again. If he helped her, as a priest, as a religious, then maybe he wasn’t reverting back to his old, bad habits. Maybe he could help this young woman. “It is difficult, sometimes, to keep track of whom I am with and where I am.”

Leila lifted an eyebrow and resumed studying her beer.

“It sounds hypocritical,” Dante said. “It feels hypocritical to monitor everything you say because people’s world-views are so easily challenged.”

Leila exhaled cool, blue smoke. “You didn’t challenge my world-view.”

Another blunder. “I meant other people. My English, it’s-ah not so good.”

Leila’s shoulders twitched, a suppressed chuckle.

He continued, “I meant within the Vatican and the University. Even in Roma, people are sensitive. Both sides assume I’m a spy.”

“Oh?”

He smiled at her casual conversational punctuation. Maybe they could talk. Maybe he could help her. “Every Congregation guards its own territory. When the IEA returned to the CDF, the Secretariat of State had-ah, how do you call it, puppies.”

Leila smiled and toyed with the foam on her beer.

He had amused her again.
Good.
Her champagne-colored lipstick was fading, and a half-ring of it marked her beer glass above the foam line.

“So this Congregation of yours,” she said.

She was listening. Alcohol relaxed the neural connections from his brain to his tongue.
“
According to Article 48 of the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, the ‘Pastor Bonus,’ which was promulgated by John Paul the Second in 1988,” Dante recited, “‘The duty proper to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to promote and safeguard the doctrine of the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world: for this reason everything which in any way touches such matters falls within its competence.’ And after His Holiness ascended to sit with God, and then Benedict had his short papacy, and then the current Pope was elected, and he is one of us. The CDF controls the Vatican now. John Paul the Second started to reform the morals of his priests, and Pope Benedict tried to continue his work, and His current Holiness will finish that work with an iron staff.”

“So you’re the morals police. How Orwellian.” Leila wiped her foamy finger on an unadorned cocktail napkin. “I thought only Islamic theocracies had morals police.”

“But, again,” he waggled an unsteady finger, “we are a theocratic dictatorship.”

She inhaled smoke from her cigarette. “So what do you do for this thing?”

Dante shrugged. “I used to read books to determine if they contained heresy. I met with priests who were accused of heresy to distinguish the mentally ill from those committing apostasy. Occasionally, I stripped a priest of his Holy Orders and excommunicated him if he was expounding heresy. Mostly, I did research and studied neuroscience at the university.”

Leila shifted in her seat. “You determine what is heresy. You excommunicate heretics.” She said offhandedly, a throwaway remark, “Sounds like you’re in the Inquisition.”

She had guessed it, and it wasn’t a secret
per se
, so Dante nodded. “There were several name changes over the years, but yes.” He sipped his beer and watched her disbelieving eyes. “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the Roman Inquisition.”

“The Inquisition doesn’t exist anymore,” she said and turned to Joe. “The Inquisition does not exist anymore.”

Joe shrugged and sipped his beer.

Leila swiveled back to face Dante. “Oh, come on.”