The Last Western (57 page)

The voice was husky. There was a pause now. Felder struck a match. Then the voice went on.

“The ticks come and go—like the flame of your match, even faster. And when I look at you, Mr. Felder, I feel that very pity I feel for the idiot—who is nothing but a tick to be succeeded by another tick. In the long day of the clock, he is nothing. And you, Mr. Felder, how can I be sensitive where you are concerned? For what part of the minute do you count? A second? Hardly. A fifth of a second, perhaps, or less. And what does that mean—the fifth of a tick? Who can hear a sound so quick, so soft? No one. No one at all.”

Felder said nothing for a moment. Then: “Suppose someone stole the clock?”

“No one can take it but he who made it.”

“We know who that is of course?”

“We of faith do. And with that same faith we also know we are sole keepers of the clock.”

“Still you are men. Other men can contend with you.”

The voice laughed. “It is a pity you know no history, Mr. Felder. We have known contenders in the past.”

“I speak of an inside job.”

“An inside job?” the other asked in mock surprise. “Mr. Felder, it may astonish you, but we have known inside jobs before. We even have a name for them. We call them heresies.”

“I’m not speaking of a conventional heresy.”

“What heretic thinks himself conventional? Is it not of the essence of heresy that it be unconventional?”

Felder ordered another morphini. There was nothing for a moment but the sound of mandolins and the high cackle of an old man’s laughter. Then Felder spoke again.

“It is good you are so secure. If you were wary or fearful, we should worry.”

“We fear things, as all men do,” said the other man. “But with divine guarantees, we do not fear defeat.”

“That is as secure as you can be, or pretend to be. Still, we think highly of our own strength and our own plan.”

“Permit me an observation, Mr. Felder. It is something you and your associates might consider when this affair is ended. Whatever you have dreamed up, we have seen it before.”

“Do I hear the cast of a fly on a trout stream?”

“Only simple advice.”

“Let me pass a little advice in exchange. You have never seen anything remotely similar to our plan.”

“The pride men take in their fantasies and visions.”

“The faith men place in a lie.”

“There is no need to be uncharitable, Mr. Felder.”

Felder laughed. “Here we sit, taking drinks, having shaken hands this very afternoon on an agreement that amounts to murder—”

A chair grated on the tiles.

“Do not use that word in my presence! Do not—”

“Calm yourself. Now, now sit down.”

“Fool! Fool! You prove yourself capable of the very stupidity I indicated this afternoon.”

“Please, please, sit down. We are alone here. We are talking only to ourselves.”

“Look, man,” the voice urgent, low, the chair scraping again, “whoever you are, whatever your group, we are out of it, all of us, we know
nothing
.”

“Agreed, agreed. Forget it—for God’s sake.”

“After it is over, we are shocked, we are ignorant of it, we are overcome. We deplore it. We call them criminals, the men who did it—whatever it is they will do—we cannot know, indeed we do not know. We are innocent—”

“Easy, easy.”

“This is our part simply and completely,” the other man said, as if he had practiced the words many times before. “A man sends a prearranged message to someone in the secret guard. The chief of the guard calls the men together for a special Mass of the Holy Spirit. The men leave their posts—to honor God in Holy Mass. What happens then—we are clear,
clear
of it. What you do, your people—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Felder. “Please don’t go on. I take it back, what I said. We are the sole organizers—and you have no knowledge. Be calm. Really.”

“I do not wish to hear any more, Mr. Felder, not a word.”

“Please, let’s not quarrel. Surely we can trust one another in what is truly a simple business.”

The other man said nothing.

Felder chuckled once more. “It seems you are a little sensitive after all.”

“We are human.”

“That is your weakness,” said Felder. “That part of you will one day bring you over to us.”

“There is as much chance of that as of our going along with the idiot.”

“You do not know the plan.”

“We know you. Besides, nothing would ever let us leave the Rock.”

“What makes you think we will leave her?”

“You left her long ago, Mr. Felder. No one in his right mind would call you a Catholic, or even a Christian.”

“I am breaking my rule in saying even this much,” said Felder in a passionate whisper. “But I cannot bear to lose this philosophic point to you—you who do not understand that you are already working on our side, that you are a blind follower even in this early phase of things. Let me speak plainly. You had a chance until this afternoon to go with him, instead of against him, one chance to rescue all that you had and to make even the very oldest things look new again.

“You had the chance and you turned away from it, the chance that is in him, I mean. He is ours now. We will make him our own—an immortal, a martyr for the ages. We will have him forever—a hero, a saint, beside whom your clock will seem—just a clock. In a little while, perhaps within our lifetimes, you will seem pitiful against him, you and your whole crowd, small and pitiful against a martyr whose blood—”

“Martyrs,” the man sighed. “You speak to us of martyrs? We invented martyrs, Mr. Felder. We have a book of a thousand martyrs. Have you not been to the Colosseum and the catacombs and heard the stories in Russia and England and France and Africa and even in your own country? Martyrs. Some of them we ourselves killed one way or another—and what difference did it make? When a martyr comes along, the world will pause for a moment with a sort of sigh, perhaps a momentary admiration, and then—tick—it goes on its way again. It is like going to one of your movies.”

Felder said something that could not be understood. The other man said, “I am a realist. I know the world in ways you and yours cannot even imagine. But—I must go now. Keep me informed of any problems.”

“What possible problems would there be? We go where he goes and on the night of the twenty-third—”

“I do not wish to listen to it.”

“Wait, I’ll go to the corner with you.”

“Go to the opposite corner—the other way.”

The chairs scraped again and now they passed him, Felder in trench coat and a shadow man.

When they walked out into the yellow light, they turned and muttered a farewell.

And he saw then the face of the other man. It was Orsini, the chess player who had come to look like a chessman.

He sat for a moment, then got up on legs of paper. He left a thousand-lire note on the table and began the long walk back to the Vatican.

He felt strange, as if his body had already been disengaged and he had left it and was dead.

He crossed an ancient bridge with lampposts that were held up by angels.

He looked down at the Tiber and saw his head and shoulders and arms reflected in the water. “So they are going to kill you,” he said to the image.

That night he dreamed he was flying above water. He had been flying for many days and he was weary and hungry. He was looking for land, but there was no land. He was flying in search not just of a place to come down but of something else—a message. He had been sent from a ship to find something—what? And then he awoke, in the dead of night, and he thought how the dream had changed, and he knew now that it was just the old story from the Bible.

He tried to concentrate on the story. The darkness of his room was like a curtain dropped over the bed.

Then he remembered the other dream, the real one at the café, and the fear came up to his mouth and he gagged and he went to the bathroom. But there was no use vomiting—there was nothing to vomit.

When he went back to his room, he knelt and raised his arms in the cross fashion and listened, but there was absolutely nothing to be heard except the buzzing monotone of a mosquito and, out in the distance, the drunken snore of the world.

In the first week
of November the world began to tense again, like an old fighter coming up for the bell in the last round of a long fight.

L-Day was only three weeks away now, and the television and radio began to increase the coverage of what people said and thought and what they were doing to be ready for it.

“L-MONTH—LAST MONTH!” said a headline in
Second Wind
. Every paper in the world carried features and picture stories of what was going on.

The President of the United States declared the day following L-Day to be a one-time national holiday.

Earl Cardinal Goldenblade, addressing a nationwide TV audience on the November 2 This Is Your Death program, called the President an unbelieving fool and sinner because he did not realize there would be no day after L-Day. In the studio audience that night, a group of Second Comers called for the immediate impeachment of the President, and Cardinal Goldenblade asked that the President set a personal example for the people of the country by starring on the This Is Your Death program.

Stocks on all the exchanges of the world went up and down crazily, but the money newspapers of the JERCUS nations expressed confidence in the future stability of the market, if there was a future for the market to exist in.

The United Nations entertained a motion by the ambassador from Etherea to make L-Day a truce day throughout the world. The Etherean minister said that the president or some other high-ranking official of any nation breaking the truce should be publicly hanged on live international TV as an example to the world.

Only this part of his motion carried in the U.N. The debate about the truce itself and how it should be arranged became very involved, each nation adding its own particular list of amendments, until there were sixty-five amendments to the motion, and the debate continued around the clock, twenty-four hours a day.

The Green Canary Expeditionary Force fighting in Peru had moved to within five miles of Lima.

The archbishop of Lima called upon the leader of the revolutionary army, General Clio Russell, to enter a truce agreement with the government forces for a twenty-four-hour period beginning at midnight on November 23.

General Russell sent back a telegram which recommended that the archbishop of Lima perform a difficult physiological function upon his own person.

The archbishop did not understand and he asked his secretary to explain and the secretary explained and the archbishop said, “But that is out of the question, I am seventy-eight years old.”

“Even if you were twenty-eight years old, it would be impossible, Your Excellency,” his secretary said.

“Why does he write such a thing?”

“He is angry.”

“What have I done to him?”

“What he recommends that you do to yourself,” said the secretary.

“He is mad. An insane atheistic monist or Marxist, or both.”

“Without a doubt.”

“Is there a chance he could be killed or captured before L-Day?”

“He is a most elusive fighter.”

“We must pray for victory. Order special masses said at every church in Peru next Sunday.”

“Yes Excellency.”

The archbishop read Clio’s telegram again. He had led a sheltered life and did not understand why men spoke such things. He was very old and did not know the world well, and the little he knew, he hated.

He called his canonist and asked him to find out where Clio Russell came from and whether he was a Catholic and if he was a Catholic what he, as an archbishop of the church, could do to interdict his person and his family and his followers and the place where he was and all the places he had been and all the places he might go.

“We will blast him with supernatural weapons,” said the archbishop, “the supernuclear bomb of God’s grace. That will finish him.”

“Something better,” said the canonist. “He has just taken your villa on the mountain.”

“He will defile the relic!” cried the archbishop and burst into tears.

“He wouldn’t know a relic from his—rifle,” the canonist assured him.

The archbishop went on a three-day retreat and prayed for the undoing of Clio Russell. The relic was a splinter of the true cross given him by a holy pope when he was a young priest, and he had carried it with him for many years and it had preserved him often from the world and he prized it above all that he owned, including his old and cursed body.

He was alone in the room that had been the library of his predecessor and the walls were made of books. It was afternoon of some day or other and he had come from the great hall where the audiences were held and the people had been calling him
papa
and he did not like being papa and he did not know why they had to have a papa forever and forever, and wasn’t it enough to have the one papa who art in heaven and what if the papa was a mama after all and papa or mama, what did it matter?

He could not think, and the truth was he had never been able to think—that was the one thing he knew in the room that was made of books.

You cannot think, he said to himself and then to the Other:
You have made one who cannot think
.

The walls were composed of four thousand books that were like the bricks or building stones of a dungeon, and yet there must be men who could take the dungeon apart, he thought, brick by brick, and would not that be freedom?

He picked out one of the books. It was heavy in his hand. It was a book that had been written by an American theologian of the last century. His eye fell upon a paragraph and his finger moved on the sentences:

We have rendered into absolute our own dualistic postulate. We have rejected any eschatology in which the dualism is transcended. We have trapped ourselves within an eschatology in which the objective environment remains forever unchanged and impenetrable. However mighty we may reckon God’s grace, we cannot attribute to it the requisite power to resolve the dualism we have posed. Such a resolution would require the recognition of some kind of cosmic event, an image of a coming cosmic denouement. But by definition such an event would violate the true historicity of man. It would give faith an objectivist crutch rather than instill in it an existentialist power. We are therefore, in the name of faith (and of our dualistic presuppositions), restricted to a form of eschatology in which all cosmological terms are completely transposed into anthropological categories. This transposition, when complete, gives us as the object of Christian hope only the permanent futurity of God.