Rabid (74 page)

~~~~~

Dante descended the stairs of the Dublin Underground and scanned the room. Leila sat near the pool table in a long booth with Malcolm and Joe. Dante ordered two pitchers, a Guinness and a sweet pilsner, and carried the pitchers over. He edged past the burly, raucous men shooting pool. Joe scooted toward the wall as Dante approached, making room.

“Och.” Malcolm reached for the Guinness pitcher. “Beware of the Romans bearin’ gifts.”

“Far more treacherous than the Greeks.” Dante scooted in next to Joe, and they nodded at each other and resumed staring straight ahead. “
Buona sera,
Leila.”

“
Buenos noches
,” she said. Both her hands protected her pint glass.

Malcolm poured himself a pint and sipped. His face contorted as if someone had stuck a vacuum up his nose and sucked the skin inward. “The Americans screw up even Guinness. Padre, how is American beer like having sex in a canoe?”

Dante sipped and considered how a priest should answer that question. “I wouldn’t know.”

“They’re both fucking close to water.”

Dante watched Leila smile gently and glance at Joe, who glared at his beer as if it had insulted him. She looked down again.

Leila’s smooth black hair and dark eyes seemed to alleviate the pain of the world, even if she wouldn’t look at Dante and only stared plaintively at her beer.

~~~~~

Leila sat with the priest after Joe and Malcolm went home around eleven o’clock.

If she had left with Malcolm, he would interpret it as a sign she was finally going to bed him, even though the conservators had disassembled her grand bed that afternoon.

If she left with Joe, he would demand they
talk
.

Instead, she was alone with the Jesuit who knew things about her that she hated, and she hated his knowing them, and she wanted to run outside into the warm rain alone.

Dante lifted the half-full pitcher of pilsner. “I began the paperwork for the Dominicans.”

Leila nodded.

Dante ran his hands through his hair, combing it back with his fingers, an unconsciously sexy move that called attention to the wavy hair that skimmed his earlobes. He probably wasn’t aware.

“He should be in the Alps within a week.” The priest sipped his dark beer and one of his eyebrows tipped down. “I suppose it is what they deserve.” Dante turned his mug so the handle faced his other hand. “Well, it is not my problem. My job is to counsel the children and gather the evidence. The men are none of my concern.”

“Aren’t you just keeping them someplace, so they wouldn’t mess with kids anymore?” She didn’t like the way he was talking.

The priest rotated his mug in his hands again. He didn’t usually display nervous tics like that. “That monastery isn’t a very nice place.”

Worry worked itself into a knot in her chest. “How so?”

Dante’s head bobbed side to side.
Sort of.
“The Dominicans are a severe sect. The Dominicans ran the CDF, back in the bad old days of the Inquisition. I’m a Jesuit, so I’m an outsider, but I’m their shrink so they tolerate me.” He smiled. “They know I don’t have political aspirations, so I am harmless.”

“Hmmm,” Leila said. “More harmlessness.”

“Yes, indeed.” He chuckled and pressed a hand against the side of his face, embarrassed. “
Harmless
. My poker tell.”

“But the Dominicans?”

Dante sat back, uncomfortable, and rotated his glass between his palms again. “Sometimes I think the men would be better off in an American prison, even though sometimes pedophiles are murdered there by other inmates.” Dante scratched his eyebrow. “The Dominicans have harsh ideas about curing pedophiles. They believe that abusing children is sin, not a disease or a crime, which is the Vatican’s official position, too, and the Dominican brothers are dedicated to stamping out sin. They are industrious about it.” Dante frowned. “There have been suicides.”

Leila’s hand held the beer glass halfway to her mouth when his word
suicides
slipped in her ear and lodged in her throat like a sideways tortilla chip. She reversed the beer’s direction and it slopped on her knuckles as the mug thumped the table.

Dante wiped the corner of his mouth with a bar napkin and continued, “I shouldn’t be talking like this. I say more than I should, sometimes. It’s being away from fellow Jesuits, living alone in the rectory, no family near. It is not like this in Roma. I begin to understand how some priests take companionship anywhere they find it, or at least how they are undiscovered for so long. Not that that excuses them. Not at all.”

The worry knot writhed and tightened. “Why would they commit suicide?” Leila asked.

Dante stared at his beer. “The Dominicans’ ideas of sin and redemption can be harsh.”

Leila’s breath fluttered near her throat. “Like, what, torture?”

“I don’t think the Dominicans lay a hand on them. It’s penance. It’s not how I would run a treatment facility, but they did not ask for my opinion. They utilize solitary contemplation, all day, all night, for weeks, if necessary.” Dante said.

“Solitary
confinement
?” What had she done?

Dante leaned over his beer, crouching. “They expect the men to be heartily sorry for offending God. They make sure the men are heartily sorry.”

Leila’s heartbeat sped. “I thought it was just a place to keep them away from kids.”

The pool-playing thug broke the rack, the pool balls clattered, and the horde guffawed.

Dante shook his head. “It’s more like the camp the Americans housed terrorist prisoners in, Guantanamo Bay, but with overtones of conversion. Perhaps ‘re-education’ is a better word.”

“The Vatican can’t just toss people in a,” she struggled to think of a term that was strong enough, “a
concentration camp
.”

“We are a government and a country and a corporation,” Dante said. “The US has camps like this. Many governments do. It should not be shocking that the Vatican does, too.”

Hysteria, real hysteria, narrowed her vision.

The black-clothed Jesuit across the table leaned back in his seat and frowned as if he had mentioned that the Church was engaged in minor accounting indiscretions.

“Sean just won’t go. He’s too smart for that. He won’t go.”

“Then they’ll convince him. They are very persuasive. He will probably go willingly. If he does not,” Dante shrugged, “we just throw them on a Vatican plane and take them. The IEA is getting quite good at that. We enlisted the Mossad to work with us on logistics.” Dante shook his head. “One of the men who engineered the Eichmann kidnapping in Argentina has been helping us coordinate. Isn’t that ironic, considering we gave Eichmann the passport to get to Argentina in the first place?”

“You’re kidnapping them and taking them to
concentration camps
?”

“Lower your voice.” He turned his palms up on the bar table, begging holding. “There is only one place. After what that man did to you, what would you think is a just punishment?”

“Not this.” Leila’s voice rose. “I thought you were just going to put him some place where he can’t get at other girls, not some sort of Catholic Auschwitz.”

“It is not like the Shoah.” Dante glanced at the oblivious horde playing pool next to them, reached into his suit coat, removed his wallet, threw a twenty on the graffitied table and stood. “It is entirely different. Come on.”

“Where?”

“Elsewhere.” He unfurled his fingers toward her. She took his warm, smooth hand and scooted out of the booth. He held onto her fingers and asked, “Your apartment?”

She shook away his hand. “My apartment is being dismantled. I don’t even have chairs.”

His brows twitched. “Why is that?”

“I’m moving to New York this weekend.”

“You’re leaving?” His eyes expanded and his chin swiveled as if watching something rotate very fast. 

“I’m depositing my thesis on Friday. My postdoc starts in two weeks. I waited to defend until right before I testified so I wouldn’t have to come back.”

“I didn’t know.” His fingertips touched his forehead and inched back into his hair. “We could sit in my car.”

“No.” Leila stepped back. She didn’t sit with priests in cars in remote, dark spots, behind mini-malls, in the parking lots of city parks.

“My church is close.”

“I’ll drive myself.” She walked away. She watched the cobbled pedestrian mall sidewalk and rain-fed grout rivulets under her boots.

If he was lurking back there, watching her ass jiggle or staring mournfully, she couldn’t go to the church, and she needed to know what was going on.

Sean needed to know.

~~~~~

Dante paced the church’s center aisle, glancing at the wooden icon hanging on the cross where the long arms of the sanctuary crossed the nave. Backlights bounced from the rear wall of the church behind the icon in a fair approximation of a divine nimbus, and a cruciform shadow quadrisected the pews.

She was not coming. Almost half an hour had passed.

He paced to the communion rail, pivoted, and walked toward the doors. If she did not show up in five minutes, he would go to her apartment. He tossed his tiny cell phone in the air and caught it behind his back.

The rear doors opened.

Leila, a black-clothed sylph, trickled in.

He strode through the church toward her. “You told me the truth about the priest, yes?”

“Yes.” She stared at her feet.

He reached where she stood. “Then he should go to the Dominicans.”

She clasped her hands together in front of her chest. Her elbows clenched tight to her sides, vulnerable. “I can’t do that to him. He was my lover for five years.”

That word,
lover
, that she had denied existed for her two nights ago, rolled between them.

The things that pedophile must have told her when she was ten years old, in the fifth grade, until she was fifteen. “No, that man was an abuser, not your lover.”

Her contralto voice was tiny in the wood and plaster of the church. “I love him.”

His grip tightened around the pew. “He is a demon incarnate. I analyzed these men, treated them, medicated them, even exorcised them. Their souls are forfeit or twisted. No devil possesses them but they are legion among us. I think,
I believe
, that they are not sinners, but they are evil.
Evil
is the only word strong enough to describe the way they disregard the damage they inflict.”

Leila whipped her head sideways, dodging those words. Her hair swung sideways. “You’re rationalizing to make them less than human so you can treat them however you want. Hitler demonized people, stripped them of their humanity so he could kill them.”

“Ah, the Hitler card,” Dante countered. “
Reductio ad nazium
. When something offends you and yet you have no answer for it, compare it to one of Hitler’s policies.”

“They’re human beings. They’re not
evil
. It’s a disease. Or a predilection. Or a misdirection.”

“You’ve obviously read the literature. You know there is no cure for pedophilia.”