The Sixth Station (24 page)

But I was too tired to concentrate, although I was glad I hadn’t gone on the offensive. That’s the last thing an interviewer should ever do, even though sometimes, like with a pedophile judge that I once interviewed and now this monster priest, you feel like there
is
only one side.

Cesur drew back the drapes that had surrounded us all night, opened the metal gates, and unlocked the door.

“There is a place you must see later,” the priest said, getting up wearily and rubbing his bloodshot eyes. He again began to genuflect before me. This time I was definitely too tired to do the Elizabeth and Essex thing, and so I just said, “Okay, then. Sleep tight.
Domani.
”

He handed me the diary, albeit reluctantly. “This now belongs to you.”

I took it, and stumbled out of the shop. Cesur took me out to an exit in the labyrinth of alleys that make up the massive Grand Bazaar. The market had not yet come back to life. Dawn was breaking over the city, and from the four corners of Istanbul I could hear the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. The sound was so beautiful, it was hard to believe that anything that sounded so glorious could have triggered so much violence from all sides over so many years.

22

Cesur drove me back to the hotel without saying anything. I was emotionally and physically spent, and you didn’t have to be a warrior/servant of God to have noticed.

He walked me up to my room and then went over the place like a detective, making sure no one was there. It was a tiny room, so it seemed more drama than necessity.

He asked me if I wanted to put the book in the room safe, but I indicated that I wanted to continue reading it.

“You are very tired, Miss Russo, and if anyone,
God forbid,
should want to break in, it becomes vulnerable.”

Forget
you, it
becomes vulnerable.

I got his point and put the book into the room safe, put in a good combination, and told him I wouldn’t open it until I was wide awake and on my guard.

With that he left and I double-bolted the door, rinsed off quickly in the shower, and fell on top of the bed in a heap.

The jangling of my room phone woke me. I reached for the clock—9:30!

I picked up the phone. “Miss Russo, Father Jacobi.” I sat up scratching my head as though this would somehow clear it.

“How long will it take you to get ready? We haven’t much time; the tribunal is winding down, and CNN reported that it should be done in a few days.”

“What? Why? I’ve been covering trials forever, and the big ones always last for months, sometimes years.”

“But not if there is no defense side, and our Lord refuses to defend Himself.”

No, Jacobi was not being a wiseass when he said it. He actually meant it.

“What am I supposed to do about that? From Istanbul?”

“You must get busy. Unfortunately there is no time to lose.
Salvare il ragazzo, salvare il mondo,
” he finished up in Italian.

“‘Save the boy, save the world’?”

He didn’t bother with a response. I still hadn’t made the connection about why he’d speak to me in Italian. Sorry, my brain was fried. Being a fugitive who hangs around with weirdo priests who claim to be present at the birth of Christ II can get to a girl.

“Let me turn on the TV. I’m still not comfortable using my tablet: I’ve had a few unnerving incidents since I arrived, and I don’t know if I’m somehow being traced through my online connections. Anyway, lemme catch up on the court proceedings first.”

“I’ll fill you in during the ride. I need for you to see something. Right now. Time is not on our side.”

Our?
“Okay, okay. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Bring the book. Put it in the plastic hotel laundry bag from your room. It will look like everyday junk. Don’t let anyone in your room. Especially not the cleaning staff or room service. Don’t mingle with guests down in the breakfast room, either. In fact, don’t go to the breakfast room.”

“I need coffee.”

“You need God. Coffee can wait.”

I packed up what few things I had and put the book in a laundry bag. Precisely twenty minutes later I walked down to the tiny lobby and saw that Cesur was already waiting for me. He escorted me to the car that was blocking the only lane on the tiny street. Father Jacobi was waiting inside, impatiently looking at his watch. I got a good glance at the breakfast room as I passed.
Now that’s what you call a continental breakfast!
Fresh croissants, honey, jams, butter, Nutella—my favorite thing—hard-boiled eggs, breads of all sorts, sliced mystery meat with giant globs of white stuff (who
eats
that stuff?), Turkish coffee, cappuccino—and not
one
thing in a cellophane bag. Heavenly. But heaven would have to wait. I was about to enter a territory somewhere between heaven and hell.

“Where are we going?” I asked Mr. Cesur, who suddenly didn’t understand English.

Okay.

We drove out of the city and seemed to be headed back toward the airport, but in fact we passed the national airport and drove onto a small private airfield.

“Huh?”

The priest led me into a sleek Gulfstream that had been waiting.

“So the exorcist thing pays well, then?” I said, hoping to catch him off guard with how much I already knew about him, but also wanting to check how much of Maureen’s info was correct.

He didn’t blink. “Yes, but I only do it for rich families. They can afford it and refuse to believe that their idiot children are simply drug addicts.” Then he slipped out of character for once and made a comical face and waved spooky arms at me as a joke.
Weirdo.

We boarded, strapped in, and took off. “Where are we going?”

“I prefer you see it for yourself without preamble.”

And I prefer not to be on a plane with a kidnapper slash child molester, but I am.

Again I held my tongue. Too bad I’d never learned that art when dealing with my editors.

Blessedly, there was a small buffet laid out for us, so I gobbled down some fruit and yogurt and carried my espresso back to my seat.

“Did you read at all last night?”

“The book? No.”

“Good.” He indicated the plastic bag, and I dug it out again.

As I did so, he tapped his jacket to indicate that he had the test tube on him, and then he pointed to the book. He handed the tube to me. It was out of the box but still surrounded by satin. “It may trigger some memory.”

“Of what?”

He didn’t answer. Obviously, the discussion was over.

I opened the diary to the second entry, which was written on small sheets of lined paper from what must have been a field book, and carefully glued onto sheets of vellum.

“The book was assembled by a master bookbinder in London in 1990,” he said. “These must have been the soldier’s field notes exactly as he recorded them at the time.”

I began to read aloud:

“Day One, Year One. The Log of Yusef Pantera.”

The priest exchanged a look with Cesur, who got up and relocated himself at the back of the cabin. He was packing. Looked like a Glock. Great.

The priest let out a sigh that somehow made me know that he thought I couldn’t have been more pedestrian.

“Continue, please.”

“Yusef Pantera? That’s the man who was named as Demiel ben Yusef’s father at the tribunal—no?”

Jacobi just pointed to the book. And so I continued:

“
The Girl, who had spent most of the past eleven months in one long fit of fearful, mournful crying, this day spilled tears of fear, and also of sorrow and of pain. Today the nun and the priest had spilled tears, too—of joy, as they trembled before the Baby.

“Even I, when faced with the wonder and power of the universe, was moved. But nonetheless I kept my own counsel, even as the successful completion of the experiment and the sight of the Child almost overcame me.

“The recording equipment was of course operational inside and out. No sigh, word, accident, gesture, meal, or even bathroom visit could be overlooked. How would history, we often wondered, judge the teenage mother this time, now that there was recorded proof instead of oral history to rely upon?

“Would She still be adored and glorified, or would She be scorned as a selfish, frightened, freakish, used-up kid?”

“He capitalizes ‘She,’ ‘Baby,’ and ‘Girl.’”

Father Jacobi brought me up short. “Yes, yes, please do not interrupt the narrative with questions.” Chastised, I continued:

“As we gathered the equipment, we all silently wondered if ‘it’ would be there. The sign. But, there were things to do first before we would be able to step outside to look.

“Sister Grethe woke the Infant, washed Him again, making Him squall so loudly that even the arrogant priest quipped, ‘He’s got a set of lungs on him, all right. We can probably hear him all the way to Jerusalem!’

“‘The cry heard ’round the world, eh, Father?’ I added. Yes, I was happy that day.

“We’d had a rough time of it, the four of us, during the confinement. I knew the others thought I was the wrong man chosen for the great task, the task of eventually marrying the Girl and becoming human father to the Child.

“And while the other two accepted the decision, they wished it had been different.

“But who were they to question Headquarters? I was appalled that Headquarters had chosen
them,
quite frankly. I understood their qualifications: She was a master geneticist, and he had wormed his way into the heart of the Vatican without them ever suspecting he was shilling for the other side. Brilliant both—to that I will admit.

“Grethe’s face revealed nothing—it never did—as the three of us admired the strange little light-skinned brown Baby boy with the giant black eyes, the strong little arms, the chubby little legs, and the patch of unruly black curls that sprouted on top of His head like a crown. The Girl was still asleep, which was a blessing in and of itself—even if a man-made one.

“I lifted the Baby’s basket and put it firmly at the center of the wooden rectangular altar that had been placed inside the wide, ancient, brick, arched chapel section of the room. It was in this tiny chapel, in this small house where Mary, the Mother of Jesus Herself, had prayed, had lived, perhaps had died.

“It was the spot for which I and the others before me had been bred so that one day when He returned, we would be ready to serve and protect. It fell to me to fulfill that destiny.

“The altar had been laid with a long white cloth embroidered with a dove carrying an olive branch, the Occitan Cross, the Star of David, the crescent moon and star—a symbol of Islam—which had originally been the symbol of the goddess Diana, whose temple lay about four kilometers from the house.

“While Paulo and Grethe were silently praying, I knelt on my prayer mat, made the double and inverted sign of the cross.

“Sister Grethe picked up Demiel and held Him before me as I sat up. I cradled him and sang into His ear in Arabic, the Muslim call to prayer. It is the first sound a Muslim infant should hear.

“Next Paulo sprinkled the Baby’s head with water and recited in English the traditional prayer of christening.

“He then dipped his fingers into a bowl of holy water on the altar and crossed the Baby on the forehead, on the lips, and on the heart with his wet fingers and recited the only prayer recognized by the Cathars:
‘Pater noster qui es in celis, sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in cello et in terra. Panem nostrum supersubstancialem da nobis hodie.…’”

I paused and thought,
That name again—Cathars—who the hell were they?
Fascinated with the narrative, er, gospel, as the freak priest called it, I put the book down a second and sipped the steaming espresso before continuing.

“Sister Grethe, still holding the Baby, then took over in Hebrew the Jewish prayer for the safety of travelers—to protect us on the coming journey.

“Paulo then rose and took the two chalices from the altar, handed them to me, and then painstakingly reached back for the bottle of exquisite, rare wine, the 1947 La Tâche, which he carried outside as delicately as if he’d been holding the Baby. Although it was the new moon, the sky was as bright as if it were a full moon on the clearest night.

“Then Sister Grethe and I, holding the Baby, followed him outside into the chilly night air. Father Paulo had already opened the bottle, and it was sitting atop the makeshift altar that I had built from rough-hewn planks

“We gazed into the night sky and saw that—yes!—it was there! A new star in the predawn sky that outshone all the others. It beamed down on us and lit up the whole outside of the house!

“And now here it was—undeniable proof. Frightening, glorious, undeniable proof.

“The priest then filled one chalice with water from one of the spigots on the front of the house, which flowed with the holy water of the Blessed Mother, and carried it back to the altar. Then with trembling hands he poured the exquisite wine into the second chalice, making sure not to stir up the sediment. It was exactly eight minutes since he’d opened it, and it had to have been drunk within ten.

“Exuberantly yet carefully I took the little brown nugget of a Baby and held Him up to the sky toward the star, whose light was nearly blinding if one looked at it directly. The Baby let out a cry whose sound was indefinable. It was not quite the cry of an infant—not quite that of a human, actually.”