The God Machine (12 page)

Sister Maria was disgraced by the murder, but her story came to Lacey in that roundabout kind of way that it does on occasion, one informer to the next to the next, like the crowing of roosters, and he had offered the young nun from Colombia a choice: stay with the Franciscan Sisters of Mary Immaculate, but remain a pariah, an outcast; return to the streets; or join with the Order of the Dames of Malta, the Knights' female auxiliary. She had skills, he insisted, which the Order could leverage.

Sister Maria glanced over her shoulder, as if sensing his presence, as Lacey approached the stone patio. She was a beautiful woman. Her traditional full-length navy blue habit and gray tunic could scarcely contain her womanly figure. Though in her mid-thirties, her dark unfathomable eyes, small buttonlike nose, round features,
and diminutive stature—she was barely five feet—made her seem significantly younger. Until you looked in her eyes.

As the archbishop drew near, he held out his hand and Sister Maria dipped down to kiss his ring. “How was your trip?” he inquired in Spanish.

“As expected,” she answered.

The archbishop sighed. To say that Sister Maria was laconic was a gross understatement. She was a nun of few words, but it was her actions that mattered to Lacey. He was used to this ritual. He simply needed to coax her.

“And how was our friend Bishop Muñoz?”

“Your Excellency, do you think that I need to confess?” Sister Maria moved to the edge of the patio and looked down. A slight smile played on her lips, surrounded by the starched rim of her wimple.

“My child, I am always here for you.”

“Of that, I am sure,” said the nun. And then the story slowly spilled out. She had met with the Brazilian bishop in São Paulo, where the prelate had grown a significant pro-Liberation Theology following, mostly from the city's dispossessed. To Bishop Muñoz, Christ was a political figure, one who championed the rights of the poor over the financial and political elite. Muñoz had fostered powerful alliances with the Socialist government. He was a man much in demand. And yet, despite his apparent reluctance, despite his false protestations, Sister Maria had somehow seduced him, one evening, in her convent cell. Muñoz was a man in demand—but a man. She had slowly disrobed him, and taken him up in her hand, and massaged him until he was hard. Then she had pushed him back down on her bed, and she had dropped to her knees at his feet.

“I don't need all the lurid details,” Lacey said.

“Yes, you do,” she replied. “And I took him right here
in my mouth, and I worked him, in the way I was trained on the streets of Tuquerres. And when he finally came, and I tasted the salt of his liquid communion, I stood up, and I hugged him, pressed his face to my breasts. And as I kissed him, I wrapped my black rosary beads round his neck. These here, that I'm wearing. I let him fall asleep in my arms. Just like that. Till the last breath escaped from his chest. Till the tongue that had been poking my mouth only moments before stuck out on his lips, like a piece of spoiled fruit. Is that what you wanted, Your Excellency? Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Lacey looked down at the small woman beside him. She seemed to glow in the warm Roman afternoon light. She was smiling at him.
“Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat,”
said Lacey.
“Et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges.”
He made the sign of the cross.
“Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

Sister Maria laughed. “You absolve me from every bond of excommunication and interdict, so far as your power allows. Believe me, it will take far more than your hand, Excellency, to cleanse me.” Then she looked out at the city beneath her, at the Circo Massimo and the Forum beyond. “Why did you call me here? It wasn't just to hear about Muñoz, as much as you enjoy my accounts. I'm sure you already heard of his passing.”

Lacey nodded. “Do you know why I love this city?” he asked as he followed her gaze. “Why I feel so at home here?”

Sister Maria said nothing.

“It's not because Rome is the center of the world. I'm afraid that its glorious past has long since been extinguished. The chariots no longer run,” he said, pointing below. “And it's not because Rome is the center of the Catholic Church. While the Pope may reside here, the
balance of power is shifting. No,” he continued. “It's because Rome is at the center of
time
. Here, one can feel the true meaninglessness of the temporal dimension. Here one can understand how each act—and each actor—is but one link in the long chain of the Faith.”

The nun remained silent.

“Something has been found,” Lacey said. “In Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Something that could deliver a great blow to the Church. Perhaps an insurmountable blow in this age of our struggle with Suleiman. I want you to retrieve it. It's a task that requires your particular skills.”

“All of them?” said the nun.

“Whatever's required, my child. And may the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the merits of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the saints obtain for you that whatever good you do or whatever evil you bear might merit for you the remission of your sins, the increase of grace and the reward of everlasting life.”

A
S THEY STEPPED THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR OF THE HOUSE
, it was Deborah who first noticed the chest overturned in the foyer, and the grandfather clock on the floor. She screamed, and Franklin caught her as she took a step back. “We've been robbed,” she exclaimed. Then she scuttled off down the hall toward the kitchen, and the few pieces of silver she kept hidden in the pantry.

The Franklins had just returned from attending a sermon by George Whitefield, the most stirring preacher they had seen since Sam Hemphill, and Franklin's spirit was not in the mood to be dashed by thoughts of ill will and larceny. He had been genuinely moved by the young English minister's fiery sermon. But it was not Whitefield's spiritual ministrations that had stirred him, nor the practical guidance the preacher had delivered on treating the poor. It was the size of that audience, the sheer mass of it.

All the way home Franklin had been counting his profits, adding up with each footstep his share in the publication of the minister's sermons. He was thinking
of revenues, not expenditures. And now this. A sudden fear gripped his entrails, and he looked at the door leading down to the basement.
The gospel!

Franklin dashed down the steps to the root cellar, to that cache in the floor, and that box. He dropped to his knees, scrabbling at the dirt with his hands. There it was. He reached for the box. The Gospel of Judas. He ripped open the top. Still safe and unharmed. Franklin uttered a sigh of relief.

Franky
, he thought.
Don't you worry, I'm coming
.

He caressed the volume, dropped it back in the box, then slipped the box back in the hole. It wouldn't be long now. He was working on it. He was making real progress. And in a decade or so, if he kept at this pace, he'd have the funds to retire, and the time to devote to his research.

But who, he considered, would have done such a thing? Who would violate his home in this manner?

Franklin pushed the dirt back with his hands. He was patting it down when he heard Deborah scream.

He leapt to his feet. Before Franklin even knew how he got there, he had ascended the stairwell and was on the last stair. He charged round the corner; he ran toward the kitchen when he heard Deborah scream once again. She was nowhere in sight. The kitchen and pantry were empty. “Where are you?” he shouted. He circled about. “Deborah!”

“I'm here. In my room.”

Upstairs! Franklin cursed and dashed back through the hallway, up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom. Deborah was standing on the far side of her bed. She looked white as a mainsail at sea. Then she pointed right at him. “There,” she began. “He was standing right there, where you're standing, God help me. Just a moment ago.”

Franklin spun about. He looked down the hall. It was
empty. Then, at the far end of the landing, he made out a face, though distorted and warped, rather cloudy, with a long pointed nose, jet-black eyes and black eyebrows. In the mirror. The mirror with the great concave lens. The stranger was standing right off to the side. In his study!

Franklin raced down the hall like a bull. He felt the blood pound in his temples as he came to a stop by his doorway. The stranger. He was gone! The study was empty, ransacked but most certainly empty. Nothing moved but the curtains. Then he noticed the window, and the two planks of wood that marked the top of a ladder.

Franklin ran to the window. The man was already half way down to the ground. He was getting away. A tall man, with long hair pulled back in a shiny black ribbon. He wore a long black minister's frock.

When he got to the ground, the stranger grabbed the two sides of the ladder and pulled it away from the house. It balanced precariously, pointed skyward, and then tumbled back down on the walk, next to Deborah's herb garden. The stranger looked up. He was smiling. Those black eyes and black eyebrows, and that long pointed chin. That wispy black beard. Then he waved, and he turned with a laugh and was halfway across the backyard before Franklin could even think to cry out. But it was too late by then. The stranger had vanished behind the old necessary. He had slipped over the neighbor's rear fence.

Franklin made his way from his study to Deborah's bedroom. His wife sat on her bed now, her hands in her lap. She was crying. “There, there, now,” he crooned. “He's gone.” He sat beside her. He patted her back, like he used to pat Franky. Long ago. When his son suffered from hiccups. “Don't worry.”

“Who… was he?”

“I don't know him. But I have my suspicions.”

“A lackey of Bradford's, I'd warrant. Or a thief on the prowl for loose silver?”

“Neither, Mrs. Franklin,” he answered. “Though if Bradford's not somehow involved, I'd be very surprised. He's not slept well since Spotswood ordered his system to carry my papers. At least now that I'm Postmaster, I'm no longer obliged to pay bribes to his drivers.”

“It was his own fault,” said Deborah. “He was sloppy in his bookkeeping. He didn't deserve his commission.”

“Perhaps so, but to lose it to me…” Franklin laughed. “The effrontery. His greatest of rivals.”

Andrew Bradford was Philadelphia's other great printer. Bradford boasted an unassailable pedigree, and his
Mercury
was aligned with the the Penn family and their insidious governors. But the decidedly middle-class Franklin and his
Pennsylvania Gazette
supported the elected Assembly. Only a few years before, Franklin's paper had endorsed Andrew Hamilton in his quest for reelection as Assembly speaker. Franklin called Hamilton the “poor man's friend,” while Bradford's
Mercury
attacked him vociferously. Hamilton had once helped Franklin strip Bradford of some government printing contracts, and when he won reelection, he named Franklin clerk of the Assembly. So, when Colonel Spotswood, the Postmaster of the colonies, found Bradford had not been forthright in his bookkeeping, he had offered, with Hamilton's urging, the title to Franklin. Now Franklin was thinking about starting the first magazine in the colonies, to augment his publishing empire, and he had no doubt Bradford would invent his own offering. But why would his business rival send someone to break into his house and steal his… what?

Much had been tossed about, as if the stranger had been searching for something in particular, but nothing appeared to be missing. At least, not at first glance. Had
they scared him away before he'd ventured down to the root cellar?

No, Franklin thought. It wasn't Andrew Bradford. It was the masters at the end of his leash. It was the Penn family—Thomas Penn in particular. And, perhaps, his other dog too—Presbyterian Church Elder Jedediah Andrews.

Franklin sighed. But why worry his Deborah? She had enough to contend with already. “Why don't you undress and get ready for bed,” Franklin said, standing up.

“I should help …” Deborah started to say.

“No, you rest. Don't worry, there'll be plenty to do in the morning.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “I'll look in on you later, perhaps. Try and sleep.”

Franklin closed the door softly behind him and made his way down the landing without waiting for his wife to respond. The man at the bottom of the ladder. He played the image over and over again in his head. With the dark eyes and dark eyebrows. With that wispy black beard and frock coat.

Franklin looked in at his study. Everything was chaos. Even the paintings had been stripped from the walls, his inventions disassembled, his desk drawers flung open and tossed to the floor. He picked his way carefully across the detritus of his life. The coat of a clergyman, he thought.

Franklin had already run afoul of Church Elder Andrews in his support of Sam Hemphill, that young preacher from Ireland. Now Franklin had made an arrangement with the English Evangelist Whitefield to publish his sermons as well. But he didn't support Whitefield simply because of their business arrangement. It was because, like Hamilton, Whitefield was a populist, and this let Franklin tweak his nose at the religious and political elite. They needed to be thwarted, kept in check. Since Penn's duplicitous “Walking Purchase,”
the resentful Indians had been cozying up to the French, who—according to Franklin's network of postal agents—were building forts all up and down the Ohio, from Louisiana to Canada. Franklin believed the colonists should reaffirm their alliance with the Indians before French and Spanish privateers began raiding towns on the Delaware. Unprotected by government, for their mutual defense, for the security of their wives and their children and estates, they needed to form an Alliance that could draw up some sort of militia. But the Quakers wouldn't fund it because of their pacifist leanings, and the Penns vigorously resisted any tax on their lands.