The Last Western (45 page)

Cardinal Profacci, the prefect of the conclave, watched the goings-on from a window of the papal apartment.

“So the miracle worker comes to us for safety.”

“A bad business,” said Cardinal Liderant, the world’s leading canon lawyer. “It will be bad for the conclave.”

“What is one vote to the conclave?” Profacci said, his eyes following the circle of men moving under the columns.

“It is a loud vote,” said Liderant. He passed a hand through his thick white hair. “It will be a distraction.”

“What is he? A young American with a sudden fame?”

“Look down there. They will tell you what he is.”

“They are only people,” said Cardinal Profacci. “They do not elect popes.”

“You forget, Ernesto, that cardinals and bishops are people also,” said the canonist.

Below them, Willie was being led into the marble hallway he had visited earlier. The gloomy weather had darkened everything and the art masterpieces and the statuary made an atmosphere so solemn and sacred and eternal that a human being felt himself an accident, an inconvenience.

At the entrance to the rich gallery where Willie had registered for the conclave, Monsignor Taroni met him, looking tired and worried.

“Maybe if you have a small room,” said Willie.

“You are hurt, Your Excellency,” said Taroni.

“It is all right, but I am tired,” said Willie.

Monsignor Taroni led Willie up a stairway. On the landing Taroni stopped and looked more closely at the cuts and scratches on Willie’s face and arms.

“I will get something,” he said.

Willie was standing under a statue of the emperor Constantine, which had been executed in the fifteenth century by a man who thought that a statue of the man who made Christianity useful would be a good thing to look at. Constantine, standing on a thick marble pedestal, was reading from a declaration and it was 313 A.D. and the declaration was the Edict of Milan and Constantine looked very pleased with the arrangement he had made.

At the feet of Constantine a drop of Willie’s blood fell on the burnished marble and Monsignor Taroni stared at the sight.

“You are bleeding,” he said with a little gasp.

“Just a small room, with a bed,” said Willie.

Monsignor Taroni led Willie into another great corridor and through a series of huge rooms, each filled with magnificent paintings from centuries past, masterpieces all, a thousand golden signatures of hands that now were dust.

In one of the great rooms the monsignor asked Willie to rest in a chair with arms that were carved to resemble the forepaws of a lion, and then he went away.

A moment later Cardinal Profacci, Cardinal Liderant, Cardinal Goldenblade, his conclavist, Bishop McCool, and a half dozen other officials came into the splendid room and welcomed Willie.

Willie said to Profacci, “In Angola the government lied to us.”

Monsignor Nervi, the man with bluish parchment skin, whispered something into Profacci’s ear.

“We are investigating the matter,” said Profacci.

“What does Bishop Brother mean?” said Cardinal Goldenblade. Then he saw Willie’s cuts and shrank back a little at the sight of the blood. “Why son, what are you bleeding for?”

Monsignor Taroni gave Willie a package of bandages.

“I need a room,” said Willie.

“He’s bleeding,” Goldenblade said. “That’s a disgrace here as anywhere.”

“You wish to enter the conclave early?” said Profacci.

“I need a room,” said Willie.

Profacci, Liderant and Nervi discussed the matter in rapid, solemn Italian. Bishop McCool offered Willie his hand.

“Gee whiz, I’m glad to see you again,” he said, smiling his most handsome smile. “This is something that arrived in Houston just before I left.” He handed Willie a telegram.

Willie opened it while the officials argued in Italian. His eyes became more slanted as he read.

WILLIE. HEARD ALL ABOUT ANGOLA. YOU NEVER TOLD ME YOU RAN WITH MURDERERS. WHAT SWEET WORDS DO YOU HAVE FOR THOSE WHO WERE KILLED? JUSTICE? LOVE? IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING I THOUGHT YOU WERE SINCERE.        YOUR EX-FRIEND. CLIO.

Willie read the telegram twice, then folded it and put it in his pocket over the red stain that was next to his heart.

“… American citizen,” Goldenblade was saying. “It’s a crime.”

Profacci spoke to Willie as if reciting Scripture.

“While one may enter the conclave cell at this time, one must understand that he is not yet a member of the conclave in the formal sense. The conclave in the formal sense is not yet convened.”

Willie tried to picture Clio, what he looked like now, and he tried to see him putting those words on paper.

“We understand your need for a secure place,” said Cardinal Liderant of the thick white hair. “We ask you, however, to understand our situation. We cannot have the conclave turned into a circus because of what happened at the hospital this morning.”

Outside, the name
Willie
could be heard rising in a sort of chant.

“Once one takes possession of his quarters, one may not leave,” said Profacci.

Willie, hearing the chant of the crowd in the piazza, suddenly saw the children in the bank basement where Truman danced.

Never knew you ran with murderers
.

“Don’t get so high and mighty, Henri,” said Goldenblade, flushing. “Who caused the circus but the people of Rome? Bishop Brother, who is an American citizen in good standing, cannot be blamed for the wild emotions of an Italian mob.”

What did any of them know or care about it?
he thought. Maybe they could not care. Clio in Brazil with his soldiers and his guns… .

A trickle of blood ran down his arm and fell upon the rich carpet.

“Take the bishop to his cell,” said Profacci to Taroni.

They watched him go in silence. As he went away, he seemed dazed.

“There will be those who will leap upon all this and call it a publicity stunt,” said Cardinal Liderant. “Which it probably is—the Madison Avenue approach.”

Cardinal Goldenblade, his face almost as red as his cassock, turned upon the French canonist.

“Henri, you are a very great scholar—I grant you that. But as a man, you are a conniving, suspicious, cynical jackass.”

Bishop McCool, looking surprised and embarrassed, followed Cardinal Goldenblade to the door.

At the door Goldenblade paused, turned slowly about. “That was temper, Henri. It was also uncharitable. I apologize.”

“We understand how sensitive you Americans are to just criticism,” said Profacci, smiling tolerantly. “We all lose our tempers when we are in the wrong.”

Goldenblade’s face flushed again. “I take it back. Henri, you are not a jackass, but Ernesto, you are a jackass until further notice.”

“
Fathers
,” said Liderant who believed in good manners. “Please.”

Goldenblade flounced out of the majestic room.

In his cell that night Willie slept deeply. He flew out to the limits of all arrangements and asked to be released forever. He wanted to keep flying until he was beyond everything ever created—into a world of pure becoming where anything could happen.

But faintly at first, then insistently, came the sound that made that impossible—the cries of the children dying in Etherea.

The children were below him somewhere, in a forest, and if he dropped down quickly—

He woke up and found himself out of bed, kneeling.

He went to the window. The roar of Rome continuously disturbed the night air. In the distance he could make out a cluster of cement silos that might have been a housing development. A green sign shone at the top of a very large hotel. Its message diffused itself like a vapor over the city, and the longer he looked at it, the larger and brighter the words seemed: REGENT WINE—AND THE WORLD IS FINE.

When the doll-body
of Pope Felix had been put into the stone crypt that had been prepared for it in the lower section of the great church of Saint Peter, the electors and the other officials of the conclave assembled in the illustrated Bible of the Sistine Chapel and there, under the shining art masterpieces of Michelangelo and Botticelli and Rosselli, they took oaths swearing that what they did in the conclave would be a secret forever, and after that, many doors were locked and Willie thought he could hear keys turning in the hallways and in the apartments adjoining the chapel and he felt tense and lonely as he gazed at the picture Michelangelo had made of God creating Adam.

He did not like the picture Michelangelo had made because the God Michelangelo had created was an angry, worried old man and Adam did not look happy at the prospect of life, and in his mind Willie tried to make the picture right but it was impossible—Michelangelo had made it impossible to make new pictures there.

Cardinal Prefect Profacci read many documents about the way the conclave would operate and he read about the many laws that governed the election of a pope and he seemed very serious and at the same time very self-confident speaking the Latin words, which were translated into English and French and other languages for those who, like Willie, could not understand Latin.

The cardinals and the other electors, men of all colors and nations, sat in their straight chairs and listened to their headsets wearing grave expressions, and there was an air of such serious business in the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo’s worrying God fitted in perfectly, and from time to time the men would look up at Him there on the ceiling and they could understand why His nerves were so bad.

Willie wished it was over, wished he could leave the city of Rome and go to some quiet place for perhaps two days, go with his brothers Benjamin and Truman and Joto and Herman and find other brothers and sisters of the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up and with them form a plan with regard to Angola and Etherea. For even as the Latin words of Cardinal Profacci floated up to the God Michelangelo had made into the likeness of a sixteenth century Italian landlord, Willie knew that a young man was turning his black body in the street and trying to find the strength to ask for food but did not have the strength to do that, only the strength to lift his eyes to the sky in order to die a little better. And as Cardinal Profacci read on, Willie saw another man, standing before a court, and the man was trying to explain why he wished not to be killed, but the court did not care because it had the need to kill him. The judges of the court pretended to listen, but they had already made up their minds and the man knew it and they knew the man knew it. And Willie, letting his gaze fall upon a cardinal sitting opposite him in the chapel, saw the tortured face of a black man he had never seen before—or had he?—and the cherub in one of the paintings of Michelangelo became a child grasping for milk who, finding none, had cried until its voice had worn out and now opened its mouth only to gasp, but there was no one there to hear it. And when he looked at the archangel Michael, in a fury over the sin of man and intent upon driving man from the garden of his happiness, Willie thought of Clio, though Clio was not a white man like the archangel Michael and didn’t resemble him except in the fury. And then Willie’s reverie deepened and he was in a waking dream and he saw Clio again, this time standing in some green and savage place. He was raising a rifle to the sky, and Willie called to him but Clio could not hear. Then Willie saw the telegram once more and he could hear Clio shouting the words of the telegram in the tangled green place where he stood with his rifle.

Willie did not know that as he stared at the faces of the men in the Sistine and at the faces Michelangelo had painted on its walls, he was being stared at in return. He had been stared at from Profacci’s opening words, and even before that. He was like a flame, and the eyes of men were moths that could not help going toward him wherever he went. For the news of what had happened at the hospital of Saint Pius X had by now swept across the world and swept back over it again. It had been on television and radio as the main story of every newscast in Europe, America and the Orient for three days. It had been the topic of a thousand interviews, analyses, explanations, interpretations. It had so dominated and colored and shaped the television coverage of the papal funeral rites that the cardinals, the electors and all the officials of the conclave and in fact of the entire Vatican establishment were shaken in ways they did not themselves understand, and their feelings had reached such extremes that any expression of them had the character of an outburst.

An hour before the conclave had convened, Cardinal Liderant, speaking for the prefect, released a terse announcement to the press:
This event, which is being investigated by the Holy Office, will of course have no influence on the conduct of the conclave
. But the conduct of the conclave had already been influenced. The influence was written upon those riveted faces in the Sistine, those staring eyes reflecting contempt, curiosity, pity, credulity, fear, exultation.

Over these four days lifelong friendships had been broken; rivalries and factions had formed, dissolved and formed again. Men spoke of great faith and grave scandal, of sanctity and madness, of a sinister group operating within the church, to undo the church or save her.

Every man in that illustration of a chapel had an opinion, but it was not the opinion he had had yesterday, and in truth his opinion had changed perhaps a dozen times in seventy-two hours. Every time the press spoke, a new opinion came into being, and the miracle itself, impacting on the world in continuously changing ways, kept begetting new opinions.

Twenty-four hours after Felder’s recovery, a man living in Buenos Aires who was suffering from terminal lung cancer reported that he had been suddenly cured when he asked the favor of God “in the name of Bishop Willie.”

A blind child recovered her sight in the same way in a small village in Poland.

There were similar cures and miracles reported in seventeen parts of the world the day before the conclave met.

Of all this Willie knew nothing. He had spent these days in his bare room, visited only by Benjamin, who refused to speak of events that were happening in the great world outside.