The Last Western (47 page)

Profacci asked the question again, and Willie had the fleeting impression of being one with the Israelites on a far wall and the man before him was a king of Egypt.

For once in his life the past seemed more real to him than the present or the future—it pulled him, sucking the breath out of his lungs and at the same time hoisting him into the dusk of a sky that the world had known a thousand years earlier.

Profacci, who had accepted the pained yes of four previous popes, studied him like a botanist looking at a sick plant.

“The name you wish to use as pope,” he said very slowly.

Willie came back with all his senses to the absurdity of the moment.

For just a second he entered the conclave of his heart. Then with the sad eyes turning slowly over the multitude of electors, he said, “So this is what you meant?”

“I did not vote,” said Profacci coldly.

Willie heard a distant thunder, the slow tearing and breaking of a vast bulk.

Stretching out his arms, he turned to the electors, his fellow pilgrims—at that moment so trustful and, he thought, so filled with faith that they looked like the altar boys they all had been once, in an uncomplicated world that had been wrecked forever.

“Peace, my brothers,” he said softly.

“Peace be with you,” they replied in a surprised, ragged chorus.

“What name?” Profacci said.

Willie clasped his hands together. He had begun to weep suddenly.

“Willie,” he said. “What difference if the—”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

“We have a pope,” said Profacci to the assembly. “His name is—William.” He stopped, looked curiously at Willie, then added in a lower tone, “Willie.”

The electors regarded their pope. In his worn suit borrowed from Herman Felder, with his broken smile, face streaked with tears, he looked less like a pope than a man of the streets, a multihued hobo beset with innumerable vaguely comic misfortunes.

“Let us make our obedience,” said Profacci.

Then they put the great jewel-encrusted tiara on his head, and they put the ring of Saint Peter on his finger, and they put a heavy golden cope over his shoulders.

They knelt before him, one after the other, each man pledging love and fidelity, while Willie wept and tried to reassure them.

Then they led him to the balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica and showed him to the people of Rome, gathered 100,000 strong in the piazza, and the roar went up, an astonishing explosion of sound that was unusual even on that hill that had once been a circus.

It was six in the morning in New York as the pope stood before the people. Thatcher Grayson, manager of the New York Hawks, sat in his hotel room and watched the camera zoom in on the thin figure bending under the weight of more than the golden vestments.

“Eli moto tu marilithi o sugoso!” shouted Grayson, and grabbed the telephone.

“Mi ogo lu telemethi do nusima?”

“A few minutes after six, sir.”

“They have made him pope of the entire universe. Morgo marilithi eli.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mi lu telemethi.”

“Would he be a guest here in the hotel?”

“I’m resigning,” said Mr. Grayson. “The Hawks and I are finished. The Spirit has come to ring down the curtain!”

“Perhaps our chief engineer—or room service—”

“Mi ogo le nimi totarami!”

The people shouted
Viva Papa! Viva Papa!
with a rhythm and force that rocked the pillars of centuries.

Willie spread out his arms and wept.

VIVA, VIVA, VIVA!

The stone saints shook with the vibration. VIVA, VIVA

PAPA WILLEEEEE!

A microphone swung toward him, and the world heard that first strange nonword of his reign.

“…uuuuv?”

The voice was unnatural, pitched above its normal tone. Holding out his arms, he seemed to be choking. He said the nonword again… uuuvvv?”

The people picked up the nonword and made a chant of it, and a new roar began.

On the tapes later, some people thought the word was love. Others said that the word was a mystic code known only to a few others about the world.

No one heard the question mark.

BOOK FIVE

Dragged a black Sgt. named Pitt from

under flaming jeep overturned on Hwy.

3. His hands burned off. Kept asking if

Jesus would come. “Will he? Will he?”

Over and over, repeating it. I told him,

By and by.

From the journal of

Major Milton Felder, USAF

April 9, 1969

My Lai, South Vietnam

They dressed him
in a white cassock and they put a white cap on his head.

They explained to him the numerous lofty titles he possessed as bishop of Rome.

They showed him the apartments where he would live, his dining room and bedroom, the place where, they said, he would study.

They took him to his offices and introduced him to the heads of the Vatican congregations and bureaus and special departments which conducted the daily affairs of the Roman Catholic church.

The diplomats came to see him, bringing presents of gold and jade and silk. Most of the countries of the world had representatives in the Vatican, and they were anxious to meet Willie and have their pictures taken with him, posing as if they were old, dear friends.

Everyone called him Holiness, and it did not make any difference that he asked not to be called that name. They kept right on with it anyway.

They showed him the Vatican grounds, elegant gardens that were too trimmed and too neat. They showed him the Vatican post office. They took him around to the Vatican radio and TV studios.

“Holiness. Holiness.”

“Willie’s okay.”

“Yes, Holiness.”

They took him to the Vatican library and showed him the hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts that were kept there and the rare documents that men had written centuries before and Bibles that were elaborately scrolled, huge tomes that had been made by monks back in the eleventh century.

The scholars in the library rooms looked at the pope as he came through, and some of them smiled and some of them frowned. Vague whispers followed him as he went.

There were thousands of scholars in the Vatican, ransacking the past for various proofs positive.

They took him to the new glass building which housed the RevCon office and the computers which were writing the documents issued by the recent computerized council.

Cardinal Tisch was in charge here. He tried to explain to Willie and Felder what the computers were capable of doing. “These council documents, you see—”

Felder said, “The pope is interested in Etherea at the moment—in getting food there.”

“We can run the problem through,” said Tisch.

“We want planes,” said Felder.

“That is another department, Herr Felder.”

Excitedly Willie said, “Do you really think you could organize something, Herman?”

“I’d like to try,” said Felder.

It took him three weeks to do it—three weeks of phone calls, telegrams, press releases and what Profacci called unseemly pressure on JERCUS diplomats—but Felder succeeded in organizing an airlift of fifty-nine planeloads of food and other supplies to Etherea.

The planes were turned back, but Felder moved into the RevCon office to organize whatever could be organized using the computers.

Willie, though saddened by the news of the planes, rejoiced in the Herman Felder who had been born into the world.

*  *  *

One fine afternoon the officials drove him to the palace at Castel Gandolfo where the popes of many years had spent their summers.

On the way they passed an old gate where the legions of the Caesars had once entered the city and which the government of Italy had spent a great deal of money trying to restore.

Monsignor Taroni and Cardinal Liderant and Cardinal Profacci explained the meaning of the gate to Willie.

But Willie did not hear their explanation. He was looking at the sprawling gold-tinted slums that rose on every side, an enormous crumbling jungle of tenements which had been built ten years earlier for the poor of Rome.

“This housing—” he began.

“Our urban renewal program,” said Profacci. “Considered exemplary.”

“Beyond the hill there,” said Liderant, “is the catacomb of Priscilla. Perhaps you would be interested in a visit?”

The slums gave way to newer public housing, which featured much glass so that the poor could look at one another and also see the older slums they had left and the even poorer people who still lived there with the rats.

They were not the worst slums Willie had seen, but they were slums all the same, gold-tinted slums, with glass.

When they came to Castel Gandolfo, they were in the ancient times suddenly: flowers, little shops, quaint, cobbled streets, a sparkling sixteenth century village.

They showed Willie his castle.

Willie sighed. “It’s very nice,” he said, and made little circles with his hands.

“Perhaps you would wish to spend some time here?”

Willie said no but asked if Cardinal Profacci could arrange that the castle be turned into a playhouse for the children of the slums they had passed through.

“This is the
papal
palace,” said Profacci.

“The children could pretend many things,” Willie said, a little excited by his idea. “I’m sure we can make it a nice place to play.”

“The value of this estate—” Profacci began, but Liderant cut him off.

“Let us go to the catacomb of Priscilla. His Holiness would find that interesting I am sure.”

But Willie found the catacomb full of staleness and death. There was something in the depths that frightened him, and he wanted to leave as soon as they had descended.

“The heroism of the first ones,” said Liderant.

Willie felt the chill of the place, the damp hand of the enemy reaching out.

“Let us go up, please,” he said.

So they went up into the sunshine where hundreds of tourists stood about in bright summer clothes. When they saw the pope, they applauded and cheered and took pictures. Willie tried to smile, but it was sad to see them there. He could not understand the attraction of the catacomb of Priscilla.

On another day they showed him the works of art that belonged to the Vatican—sculptures and jewels and chalices and splendid paintings and gold mosaics.

They went from gallery to gallery, looking at it all until the art was a blur to Willie.

The paintings were of Jesus and the saints and the Virgin Mary and the Fathers of the Church and emperors and popes and kings and queens and the heads of families from Florence and Naples and Milan.

Cardinal Liderant did much of the explaining, and Willie listened politely, but as Profacci said later, “It was all lost on him.”

All the while Liderant talked, Willie made those same little circles with his hands that the three men puzzled over.

What Willie thought when he looked at those treasures concerned things the cardinals had no understanding of, the ways men have of trying to save things, of making something for after school that the professor could not claim.

At noon each day they led him to a window of his apartment that looked out over the piazza of Saint Peter, where the obelisk pointed a finger to the sun and the fountains splashed and where thousands of people were gathered, all looking up at the window.

Willie would wave to the people and then bless them and wish them happiness and ask them to help the poor a little more.

VIVA PAPA! VIVA PAPA!

Every two days there would be a public audience held in a huge room that looked like a hall out of an old-time movie dealing with kings and knights.

Willie liked the audiences because he could see the people and hear them sometimes individually, and they looked happy and exceedingly good to him as they stood cheering and waving their handkerchiefs and sometimes calling out the names of their hometowns.

They carried him into this hall in a chair that was fun to ride in, but Willie did not want to be carried around by men, so he took to walking down the long length of the corridor, though the security guards advised against it, and the journey often took thirty to forty minutes because everyone wanted to touch the pope or give him a white cap in exchange for the one he was wearing, and he would chat with the people as much as he could, though he could not understand anything not spoken in English.

The people were happy and excited to see him, and it made him happy to see them that way.

“Viva!” they would shout. And, “Wee-leeee!”

Always and everywhere they wanted to take his picture with their shiny miniature TV cameras or their self-developing movie cameras and they would ask him to speak certain things and bless them or walk or motion to them in some way so that what they filmed would be personal to them, and though he tried to do all that they asked, there was never enough time to make a movie for everyone; and when the audiences ended an hour, sometimes two hours late, the men who were to keep him on schedule were always upset. Profacci told him that the audiences were not the main job of a pope, and Willie always promised to try to do better but instead, at the next audience, he would do worse.

He took to celebrating Mass in the evenings, at about six o’clock, with Father Benjamin and Felder, Truman and Joto, who were with him now almost constantly.

Felder had taken rooms in a small pension not far from the Vatican, but he spent most nights at the RevCon office. The other Servants lived at the Vatican with Willie.

The presence of the Servants in the Vatican bothered the officials, especially Profacci and Liderant.

“Who are they?” asked the vice-prefect of the Congregation of Rites.

“Strange, deluded, perhaps dangerous men,” his companion replied. “Cardinal Profacci has warned the pope about associating with such people.”

“Felder is not a lawful person,” another official said in another office on another day. “Yet he controls RevCon.”

“He killed a man once, it is said,” his friend replied. “Cardinal Orsini is conducting an investigation.”