The Clowns of God (48 page)

He was sufficiently scared by the experience to mention it to the doctor when he looked in on his evening round. The doctor perched himself on the edge of the bed and talked round the subject.

“I was beginning to think you’d been lucky and sidestepped this particular crisis. It was clear to all of us that your religious background had given you resources which most people don’t possess. But there’s no telling how, or when, a depressive illness is going to strike.”

“You mean I have another sickness?”

“I mean,” the neurologist explained patiently, “you have just described the classic symptoms of acute depression. If these symptoms are allowed to pass untreated, the depression will develop into a chronic condition, constantly aggravated by your present handicaps. The departure of Mr. Atha was simply a trigger incident. So we’re going to intervene before things go too far. We’ll try you with moderate doses of a euphoric drug. If it works fine! If not, there are other prescriptions. However, if you can beat the black devils without too much psychotropic intervention, so much the better; but don’t try to be brave or bold. If you feel tearful, unable to cope, tell the nurse, tell me, immediately. Promise me!”

“I promise.” Jean Marie said it firmly and clearly.

“But it is hard for me to feel so dependent.”

“That’s also my biggest problem as a doctor. The patient is at odds with himself.” He hesitated and then offered a curious question.

“Do you believe man has a body and a soul, which get separated at the moment of death?”

Jean Marie pondered the question for a moment, fearful that a new fog-swirl might obscure the answer for which he was reaching; but God be thanked! the light held. He said with surprising fluency:

“That’s the way the Greeks expressed man: spirit and matter, dual and divisible. As a module it served very well for a very long time. But, after this experience, I don’t know…

I’m not aware of myself as two elements: a musician playing a piano with notes missing, or, conversely, a Stradivarius violin played badly by a schoolboy. I’m me one and undivided!

Part of me is half-dead; part of me is totally dead and will never work again. I’m … de … de …”

“Defective,” said the neurologist.

“Yes,” said Jean Marie.

“Defective.”

The doctor reached for the chart clipped to the end of the bed and scribbled a prescription for remedy against the black devils.

In a rare flash of his old humour, Jean Marie said: “Don’t you offer an incantation to go with the medicine?”

Against what happened to him next, no medicine and no incantation availed. Two days after Mr. Atha’s departure, an hour before noon, Waldo Pearson and Adrian Hennessy came to see him. Their enquiries about his progress were solicitous but brief. Waldo Pearson offered an apology.

“I’d hoped to spare you this; but it was impossible. We have to seek injunctions in Great Britain, on the Continent, in the United States wherever else we can get them. We need your signature on the bills of complaint.”

Jean Marie looked from one to the other in puzzlement.

He asked: “What am I complaining about?”

Adrian Hennessy unlocked his brief-case.

“Brace yourself for a shock, Monseigneur!”

He laid on the bed a large scrap-book and a paper-bound volume. The title was The Fraud. The author was one Luigi Marco. The jacket was stamped “Uncorrected Proof Copy’.

The publisher was Veritas S.p.a.” Panama. Hennessy held up the book.

“This little confection has been circulated to all international press agencies. It is due to be published world-wide, in twenty languages, on the day that we publish Last Letters in each country. We want to get injunctions to stop publication.

However and this is the nasty one! some of the gutter-press have already picked up the serial rights and are running the juicier sections of the story. The serious newspapers and the television networks can’t ignore the fact of publication. They stand on their right to comment on the material. We have to file libel suits to prevent a further spread of the scandal.”

“But what is the scandal?”

Waldo Pearson took up the burden of explanation.

“The book, appropriately titled The Fraud, purports to be the true story of your career, from your earliest youth until now. It is a careful and very skilful blend of fact, fiction and scurrilous innuendo. The author’s name is, of course, a pseudonym.

The whole thing is a highly professional smear job, like those so-called documentaries about spies and defectors or political scandals which rival propaganda services turn out to discredit each other. The publisher is a hollow corporation registered in Panama. The printing was done in Taiwan by one of the houses that produce such things on contract. Bound copies of the book were then air-freighted to major countries. Someone has laid out a mint of money on research, writing, translation and manufacture. Some of the photographs were taken with a telescopic lens, which indicates that you were under professional surveillance for a long time.”

“What sort of photographs?” Again Jean Marie had to explode past the phonic block.

“Show him!” said Waldo Pearson.

Hennessy, with obvious reluctance, flipped through the press cuttings in the scrap-book. There was a shot of Jean Marie with the twisted girl in the Place du Tertre. The angle was such that his face was close to hers and it was easy to assume that they were lovers tete-a-tete. There were several shots of Roberta Saracini and himself arm-in-arm, in Hyde Park, on the river boat, and strolling in the gardens at Hampton Court. There was one shot of himself and Alain emerging from Sophie’s restaurant, looking like a pair of elderly drunks. A black fury took possession of him and he almost choked on the question:

“What… what about the text?”

Waldo Pearson shrugged helplessly.

“What you might expect. They’ve done a very thorough job of research and a very clever job of muck-raking, so that you show -up as a thoroughly bad type who is also a little crazy. On that point they’ve managed to get hold of two reports from doctors who examined you before your abdication. There are also various other exotic details.”

“For instance,” Hennessy leafed through the volume.

“They found someone who served with you in the Maquis.

There was some story about you and a farmer’s wife who was later found raped and murdered. Of course, the locals blamed it on the Germans; but… They’re very good with the ‘buts’. Your best friend is Carl Mendelius of Tubingen but the suggestion is that you helped to procure his release from the priesthood because of a homosexual association. The fact that you defended him against charges of heresy and officiated at his wedding only reinforces the innuendo. That’s the horrible thing about this kind of job. The scandal-monger doesn’t have to prove anything. He just plants the dirty idea.

If you kiss your mother at a railway station it has to be incest.”

“What do they say about Roberta?”

Hennessy frowned with distaste.

“Her father swindled the Vatican Bank out of millions. The funds were never traced. You are known to have a substantial patrimony, of which Roberta Saracini is the trustee. Trusteeships in France are a matter of public record. When you went to Paris you lodged in her house. After that you’re photographed in England holding hands with her in the park and you’re living here under an assumed name. Do you want any more?”

“No. Who did all this? Whose idea was it? How did they get all this information? Why?”

“Let’s reason through it.” Waldo Pearson tried to calm him.

“Adrian and I have talked to a lot of well-informed people and we believe we’ve come up with an explanation that fits all the available evidence… Are you sure you’re up to this?”

“Yes!” Jean Marie was clearly under strain but he forced the words out.

“Take no notice of me! Just talk!”

Waldo Pearson talked on in the monotone of a man who brings bad news.

“From the moment you claimed a private revelation of the Last Things and made moves to publish it in a letter to the faithful, you were a dangerous man. You know what happened in the Church, and how bitter the Friends of Silence became. But outside, where the nations were actively preparing for a nuclear war, it was much worse. You, with your visions of horror and of judgment, became an instant threat to the myth-makers.

“They were preparing the public to participate in a competition of nuclear destruction, a game, a diabolical game, in which each side commits the same butchery for the same non reason

“Your vision, which made you seem a madman, was, in fact, the only available sanity. You saw the horror. You told it! Before the public grasped the thought, you had to be silenced.

“But that was not so easy. You were an active, contentious man. In Germany, you blew the cover of a C.I. A. operative, an important agent-in-place. In France, your own country, you were instantly in the Black Book, under Grade A surveillance. You were watched in England, too; but I was a fairly respectable patron; and I stood surety for you with our government.

“All the time, however, you were a burr in the breeches of the mighty; because just when the war drums were booming, you might shout out that the king had no clothes and after the first big bang, he might not have any subjects either.

“There was a question, as both Adrian and I discovered from different sources, of having you liquidated. It was a fairly unanimous recommendation. When it was known that your book was in preparation, the decision to liquidate you was rescinded. Another plan was made: to discredit you utterly. You have seen how it was done.”

“How did they manage to get all this material so quickly?”

“Money!” said Adrian Hennessy brusquely.

“Put enough operatives in the field at once, hand out enough spending money, and you can have anyone’s secret life in a month.

Given a hostile situation in the Church, given top-level cooperation from governments, the job is as easy as boiling an egg-” “But who organised it?”

“Dolman was the boy who put it together and he had a special reason for making it work. You knew he had tried to kill Carl Mendelius.”

“It makes sense, all of it.”

“It also raises a problem.”

“Please!” said Jean Marie with absolute clarity.

“Please do not hold anything back.”

“Even if we get restraining injunctions,” said Adrian Hennessy, “we’ll have only temporary relief. We’ll have to fight a series of court cases in the major countries. That will cost a lot of money. You’ll have to pay most of it out of your own resources. And, since we’re now in the dark ages and will soon be living under emergency regulations, there’s no guarantee, even in England, that you’ll get a fair trial from either the jury or the judiciary!”

Jean Marie thought for a moment and then said slowly:

“I have the funds. If it takes my last sou, we must fight this obscenity on any battleground we can find! I am not so naive as to believe we can win; but we have to be seen to fight and with my money and no one else’s. Waldo, I only hope this will not damage your publication of Last Letters, “No!” said Waldo Pearson.

“If anything we’ll get more press space, more lively debate. In the end it will come down to a private judgment in each reader’s mind: could the author of the Letters possibly be the same rascal who is portrayed in this piece of garbage?”

“Meantime, we should get the documents signed.”

Hennessy was fishing them out of his brief-case.

“Unless you want to read through a mountain of legalese, you’ll have to take our word that the papers are well drawn by the best legal talent in England, France and the United States.”

“I take your word.” Jean Marie was already signing the first pages.

“But look! To provide all the background for this libel, many people who knew me well must have supplied information.”

“Obviously! said Waldo Pearson.

“But the mere fact that they gave information to an interviewer doesn’t make them your enemies. You don’t know what fiction was employed to make them talk. They may have thought they were doing you a favour. They could have been simple gossips. The Vatican is full of those! Hennessy and I are your allies; but we talk about you! I’m sure we’ve dropped phrases and opinions that found their way into this false indictment! .. .I’m afraid you just have to accept what’s happened, make the best fight you can and then tell the bastards to go to hell. You can’t afford to become paranoid.”

“I am defective,” said Jean Marie.

“I am not paranoid. On the scale of the Last Catastrophe I am a minimal quantity.

What happens to me is a non-event. I am troubled for people like Roberta, who will suffer hurt because their names are linked with mine in this libel. When I was Pope, everyone I touched felt blessed. Now, I am truly a plague-carrier infecting even my closest friends …”

That night, for the first time, he asked for a drug to make him sleep. In the morning he woke later than usual, but refreshed and clear-headed. At the therapy session he found that he was walking more confidently, that his damaged arm was responding quite well to messages from the motor centres. His speech pattern was consistently clear and he had rarely to grope for a word. The therapist encouraged him.

“This is the way it happens in cases with a good prognosis.

They improve rapidly; they seem to drag for a long while;

then there is another major improvement which generally continues along a regular up-grade. I’ll report to your doctor.

He’ll probably order a series of new tests. Then… Well, let’s not rush things! The trick, now, is to enjoy the improvement, but not push yourself too hard. You’re still not ready to play football; but come to think of it! we could start you swimming!”

Jean Marie walked back, unaided, to his room. When he got there he was tired but triumphant. Whatever terrors he had to face now, at least he could confront them on his own two feet. He wished Mr. Atha were there to share this first, real victory. He lay on his bed and made a series of telephone calls to tell the good news. He drew a blank on every one.

Carl Mendelius’ phone was disconnected; Roberta Saracini was in Milan; Hennessy was back in New York; Waldo Pearson was in the country for a few days. Brother Alain was available, but preoccupied. He was happy to hear of Jean Marie’s progress. The family would be happy, too. Please, please, keep in touch! .. .