Rabid (75 page)

Leila’s voice rose, speaking over his. “Or something they have to work through to become fully human.”

“That’s Nietzsche, that there is no sin but only selves needing to reach the fullness of themselves. It’s a lie. It is impossible to reach fullness for oneself while destroying other human beings.”

“I’m surprised
you’ve
read Nietzsche.” Her angry voice tore through the church.

“We read him in seminary. The professors consider it a vaccination against atheism.”

“Didn’t work for you, did it?”

“It was too late for me.” He rubbed the oiled wood of the pew.

“You can’t kidnap him.” Her voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s. Her hand dipped into her purse. “Sean’s not going to be ‘heartily sorry,’ no matter what you do to him.”

He wanted to wrap his arms around her because she was hunched over, her arms and elbows clamped, protecting her torso from incoming body blows, but if he approached her, she might run. She might attack. Dante didn’t want to restrain her hands. Holding her fists would connote when she resisted that terrible man,
Sean
, when he had held her down and raped her.

Sometimes, Leila had said, Father Sean had laughed at her ineffectual attempts to defend her body from him, but he grew angry at resistance, and he enjoyed being angry at her.

Angry was worse.

Submission was less violent.

Dante said, “Sometimes, force must be used in the service of truth.”

The Inquisition’s own words, utilized for centuries, soured on his tongue.

He paced faster. “They must be locked up, forever, every one of them. They are like rabid dogs or starving lions. They cannot stop themselves, especially the primary pedophiles, the ones who prefer children under thirteen and for whom gender is less important than age. They will offend again. They will rape children every chance they get. There is no cure or treatment or penance for it.”

Leila shot back at him, “You don’t believe in free will. How very Calvinist of you.”

“Calvin thought that some souls are predestined to go to Hell. His theories do not apply to psychosexual behavior or psychopaths.”

“Bullshit. You’re a drug dealer of opium for the masses and you don’t even sample your own wares.”

He shook his head, but she was right. “Nietzsche, Calvin, and Marx. No wonder you left the Church.”

“And Jim Jones. You guys are drinking your own Kool-Aid. ”

Dante grabbed the back of the pew and squeezed it hard. “I grew up under John Paul the Second, who was a mystic, but most men in the Vatican are not like him. Vatican politics and how far they rise and what they control and who is in their influence comprise their whole lives. They have nothing else. These pedophiles threaten the Curia and the Church. They will do anything to protect themselves.” And he was in it too deeply to leave.

“You can’t have Sean! You can’t take him to a place like that just to save your own hides.” 

Frustration rose. This Sean was just another psychopathic, narcissistic pedophile. Dante had seen too many of them to be sympathetic. “Why are you trying to protect him?”

“I loved him. He was my lover for five years. How can you ask such things?” Her voice choked. “You must never have loved anyone in your whole life.”

Ridiculously, horribly true. Dante’s breath caught under his rib cage. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Define ‘love.’”

She whipped her head around and glared. Tears smeared her dark irises. Her wet cheekbones shone silver. Her hand dipped into her purse, and she blocked her body by holding her purse in front of her, a classic defensive posture. “It’s like God. You either feel it or you don’t. I loved Sean, and I love science because it fills the void God left when He deserted the world. Any divine spark behind creation wouldn’t want to be worshipped. It would want to be understood. Love is being understood at a cellular level. I understand the universe, the stars, and the world and people and cells and viruses and DNA and atoms and quarks and strings, and It understands me back. Science knows the mind of God.”

Wonder dropped his jaw. “You aren’t an atheist.”

“Sure I am.
If
there is a God,
since
there
isn’t
a God, I want to understand creation.”

Dante’s heart tumbled under his palm pressed against his chest. “You’ve read Newman.”

“Yeah, and you’ve been reading that other Catholic anti-Semite, Hitler.” Her breath caught in a sob when she inhaled.

“They aren’t death camps,” he said. “Hitler was trying to kill people. The Dominicans are trying to convert them.”

“So it’s like Dachau rather than Auschwitz.” 

“I’ve told you, it’s more complicated than that.”

“No, it’s not.”

She pulled the blued-steel gun out of her purse.

Ah, he had not seen the last of that gun. His heartbeat raced counterpoint to his mortality.

Disturbing associations of that gun with her body curving around him lapped his mind.

The gun’s deep barrel stretched away from him toward infinity. His hands unwove themselves and splayed in front of his chest, as if he had the ecclesiastical authority to ward off bullets. “Leila, don’t.”

Leila held the gun straight out in front of her, her shoulders and arms forming a triangle with her hands and the gun at the apex. Her voice rasped. “I want you to write a letter to the Vatican and tell them to leave Sean alone. Tell them I lied. Tell them I’m a psychopath. I don’t care what you say, just call them off.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that you had lied?”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.”

He nodded. No one could make up such horrors.

A tear fell on her cheek. The gun quivered in her shaking hands. She squinted her eyes shut and more tears dripped from her eyelashes. She bowed her head over her outstretched arms.

“How did he manipulate you so?” Even though he knew.

“
Stop it.
Just
stop
all the psychobabble and
write
the goddamned letter.”

“My computer is in the library, over there.” He pointed to the door camouflaged in the rightward wall of the church just before one long arm of the cruciform shadow.

“Let’s go.” She bobbed the gun muzzle toward the door.

Going to a secluded location with an armed woman might seem foolhardy, but as a priest, he was vow-bound. She was his poisoned communion wine, and he brought the proverbial chalice to his lips.

Ah, her lips, her lips on his, and his lips flushed sensitive, remembering.

She said, “Tell me what they’re going to do, how they’re going to look for him.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m holding a gun, Dante. The first rule of guns is that you don’t point a gun at something unless you intend to destroy it. Tell me how they’re going to kidnap him.” Her footfalls clacked on the wood floor behind him.

“They will talk to him first, try to convince him to go willingly.”

“It won’t work. Sean won’t go. He’ll know.”

“A van will pull up beside him. Someone strong will grab him and throw him in. He will be sedated. His Church superior will be informed that he was transferred and will not call the police. Someone else will pack his belongings. They will hold him in a safe house, then put him on a Vatican plane for Roma. From there, vans. With priests, it is easier than you think. No one asks questions. When Nicolai and Samual both disappeared from OLPH, a few people asked questions, and I said they were transferred. No one reported anything. Nicolai went willingly after Father Domingo discussed it with him. Samual tried to hide from us and was picked up.”

He turned his doorknob and pushed open the door of the library. It was still swollen from the humidity and opened with a loud crack. “After you?”

She hesitated and watched the door as if something might leap out at her. Her arms holding the gun drooped. “You go first.”

He walked inside and sat down in his computer chair. He crossed his legs, resting one ankle on his other knee, an unstable position for lunging.

She followed him into the library and kicked the door closed. It stuck against the frame, and she pushed it with one hand, not enough to latch the mechanism but enough to keep it from creaking open. Her other slim hand held the gun, which listed away from him toward the books.

He touched the laptop’s switch, and it whirred and clicked.

He asked, “Is there something specific you want me to tell them?”

“Just tell them to leave him alone.”

Dante started the word processor and typed a letter to the Vatican detailing the unreliability of the original witness and the recent recanting of her testimony. He concluded that, in the absence of other substantiation, the file should be placed on indefinite hold. He printed the letter and swiveled in the office chair to hold it out. “Is this what you want?”

She advanced, holding the gun low and away, beyond his reach. He held out the letter. The paper didn’t quiver in his grasp.

She snagged it and stepped back. She read it and glanced at him, watching him in case he moved to grab her.

Dante leaned back in the office chair and stretched his legs, another unstable position for jumping.

“Okay,” she said.

Dante found stationery in a desk file drawer, reprinted the letter on the creamy, thick ragstock, and sealed it in a labeled overnight delivery envelope.

Leila said, “I’ll mail it.”

He held it out to her, and she took it from his hand in the halting way that a beaten animal accepts food.

She lowered the gun until it pointed at the blue carpeting, though she held it stiffly out from her side and in front of her toes, ready.

Dante dragged his hair out of his eyes. “If you want to talk,” he said, “call me.”

“After the other night?” She flapped the stiff envelope at the gun. “After
this
?”

Dante’s throat closed at the thought of never seeing her again. “Any time. I am here for you, any time.”

Tears flipped over her mascara-smudged lower eyelid and slid down the contours of her cheekbones. She stepped over to the door, yanked twice to jerk it open, and was gone. Her sprinting footsteps in the church echoed through the open door.

Dante turned back to the computer to type an email to the acting head of the CDF, warning him to disregard the express letter concerning Sean Gelineau and to proceed with forming an extraction team because Gelineau would not be persuaded.

Gelineau would learn what it felt like to be helpless, defenseless, at the strong hands of the IEA.

~~~~~

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” Heath Sheldon leaned on the table beside Beverly Sloan.

Bev flicked through her Rosary beads under the table, hardly registering their movement through her hands, and her tongue and upper palate twitched around the silent syllables inside her mouth. The fingering motions of pinching the beads and progressing to the next decade were comforting, like playing the piano. The positions and attitudes of her fingers corresponded to tones in her head, though there were words instead of pitches. She played the Rosary.