The Third Revelation (33 page)

 

Riots erupted in the Arab world, where the streets were filled with half-crazed crowds, demanding jihad. The fury focused on the pope. Benedict had weathered the storm of protests over his lecture at the University of Regensburg when he had alluded to the debate between a Byzantine and a Muslim. The point had been to underscore that religious faith did not destroy reason, that beliefs could not be in manifest conflict with reason, that members of different faiths could communicate despite their doctrinal differences on the basis of their common possession of reason.

This recherché and subtle argument was not the stuff of street oratory and agitation. That storm had abated largely thanks to the passage of time, and the Holy Father's visit to Istanbul.

Now the rage was renewed and intensified. The pope was burned in effigy in one Arab capital after another. All the mosques of Rome and of the Continent seethed with fury. A march of Muslims began in the Piazza del Popolo and went up the Corso to the great white monument commemorating fallen warriors, gathering members as it went. It turned onto the Vittorio Emanuele and, screaming, shouting, lamenting, praying, too, perhaps, continued across the Tiber. Police cars blocked access to the Via della Conciliazione, but they were simply pushed aside as the marchers surged forward, the sight of the basilica dome eliciting a deep, guttural roar as of anguish.

That Sunday the pope was not allowed to appear at his study window.

In the great square below, the pilgrims who had been gathering for hours in anticipation of the Angelus address at noon were engulfed by the new arrivals as by a tidal wave.
Viva il papa!
banners disappeared, torn from their bearers' hands, trampled on the cobblestones. Others in Arabic replaced them. Christians scampered to safety, leaving the square to the howling mob.

The great bells of the basilica began to toll. Twelve measured strokes. With each stroke the noise in the square diminished until gradually there was silence. Then, with a great swishing sound, most of those in the square turned to the east, dropped on their knees, and lowered their foreheads to the pavement.

A suicide bomber tried unsuccessfully to gain entrance to the basilica. When the metal detector responded in alarm to the corset of explosives she wore, she detonated them. There were fourteen causalities, including the bomber.

At a special emergency session of the European Union, a motion was passed demanding that the Vatican repudiate this alleged heavenly message and apologize to Islam for all present and past outrages against this peaceful world religion.

The Security Council of the United Nations, by unanimous vote, joined its protest to those of the many countries that had been maligned by the so-called third secret of Fatima. The age of religious wars is over. The age of the nation-state is fading. In the new world there will be but one world with no more room for intolerance of any kind.

In Baghdad, twenty-four Christians were stoned to death as they emerged from Mass.

The World Council of Churches begged their Muslim brothers not to confuse Roman idolatry with Christianity. Were not Islam and Christianity two outgrowths of the Abrahamic tradition?

The Episcopalian archbishop of Jasper, Wyoming, thumped her crosier on the floor of the sanctuary as her voice rose in lamentation over this unthinkable insult to our Muslim sisters and brothers. Her brother bishop in New England was driven to the downtown square by his companion and expressed his solidarity with her.

A committee of the American Catholic Theological Society suggested as the topic for its next national meeting “Mary in Islam.”

The Major League Baseball schedule was disrupted when Muslim players refused to take the field. The Muslim members of the United States Congress called for sanctions against the Vatican.

At the Vatican a steady stream of long black cars with tinted windows slid through the various gates and their occupants were brought eventually to the acting secretary of state to present the protests of their governments.

Cardinal Piacere received them all with his accustomed grace, listened with bowed head while they read their communications, accepted the documents, offered refreshments, gave no indication that he had been at this for hours, and that hours more still lay ahead. Before the ordeal had begun, he had met with the Holy Father.

“This is nonsense, Piacere.” He held a transcript of the Trepanier bombshell. “None of this is in the letter.”

“The letter of Sister Lucia, Your Holiness?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I myself have never read the letter, Holiness.”

A twinkle appeared in the papal eye. “You do not read the important documents released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?”

He meant the publication of 2000. Piacere made a fluttering gesture with his hands as he nodded. Touché.

“All one need do is put side by side the letter from Sister Lucia and this . . .” For a moment he seemed not to be so much searching for a word, as discarding an inappropriate one. He left it as “this.” “The sooner that is done, the better.”

“There is a problem, Holiness,” Piacere said.

His hands parted, and snow-white eyebrows lifted. “A problem?”

“The letter from Sister Lucia is missing from the archives.”

“Missing?”

“Stolen.”

The great Bavarian shoulders seemed to slump under the white cape covering them. His fingers moved to his pectoral cross as he realized that the simple and decisive response to the alleged missing portions of the third secret was denied them.

“God help us.

“God and His Holy Mother.

“Amen.”

 

 

It was like the Holy Father to think that human beings, rational animals, confronted with the same evidence, would come to the same conclusion. Sometimes Piacere thought that the audience the pope envisaged in his mental eye when he prepared an address was a university lecture hall, they the students, he the professor.

The talk he had given at Regensburg was masterful, as a professorial lecture. The reaction could not have surprised the Holy Father more than if, in the old days, a student had stood and attempted to shout down his lecture.

Quite apart from the irrational response, Piacere knew that a cool, documented, measured statement could be drawn up that would indicate that the Holy Father shared many of the assumptions of the alleged new words of Mary.

Had he not met with Oriana Fallaci before the woman died?

Had he not warned the European Union that it must not lose sight of the Christian roots of Europe? Hilaire Belloc had once said that Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe. Taken historically, and Belloc was a historian, the claim made sense. Some version of it clearly made sense to the Holy Father.

Was it intolerance and fanaticism to point out that the number of Arabs immigrating into Europe combined with the falling birthrate of the natives—far below replacement rate, as it had been for half a century—pointed to a Muslim Europe, and not in the distant future? Already the tensions were familiar.

Demands for exemption from such narrow-minded restrictions as monogamy.

Demands for the lifting of the medical prohibition against female circumcision.

Demands that had already been met, however surreptitiously.

Down the Tiber from the Vatican was the huge dome of the largest mosque in Rome, in Europe. More than one imam in Rome had predicted that the time would come when Saint Peter's Basilica, like Santa Sophia long ago in Istanbul, would be converted to the true faith.

A major global crisis was at hand.

“What's wrong?”

Carlos had suggested the same restaurant in Trastevere. “It may be safer than the Vatican,” he added with a straight face.

Traeger had been waiting outside the door of the Casa when Carlos drove up. Was it fanciful to feel that the very atmosphere of Rome had changed? From the Piazza Navona a few short blocks away a roar of rage rose rhythmically, pulsing through the narrow streets. Visible from where he stood was the central office of the municipal police. Armored cars Traeger had never noticed before were now in evidence, and pedestrians were turned away from their normal passage down the street. He saw the car with VC plates get stopped as it tried to swing into the area before the police station. A moment's delay and it was admitted. Carlos hopped from it and hurried toward Traeger.

“Walking will be quicker, Vincent.”

Walking was not easy. Crossing Vittorio Emanuele called forth the half-forgotten skills of a prep school lineman, and Traeger led interference for Carlos to the far side of the street. They changed their minds and settled for a Chinese restaurant just off the Torre Argentina. The linen-covered tables, the vases of flowers, the exaggerated politeness with which they were welcomed contrasted with the surly scene outside. When they were seated, Carlos asked for hot tea immediately. They would order eventually. Then he said, “The exchange you proposed? We've got to do it.”

“Have you made contact with Anatoly?”

Carlos hesitated.

“What's wrong?”

“Think about it. Rome, Europe, the whole damned world, is erupting because of the publication of that new passage from the third letter of Fatima. Anatoly has that letter. Now he wonders if he has any more negotiating power.”

“Tell him the revelation was bogus.”

Carlos fell silent. “We don't know that. That is, we can't prove it.”

Traeger saw the point. Only the document Anatoly had would provide the means of showing that what Trepanier had released was not in it.

“You think that will quiet the mob?”

“Eventually. Eventually.” The repetition seemed to convey his doubt. “What else do we have?”

Traeger was wishing he had read the document when he had it. But he had treated it with the respect due a supposed communication from the Mother of Jesus. He remembered a conversation with Heather.

“Are you Catholic?” she asked with her disarming directness.

He looked at her, rejecting possible answers. “Sort of.”

“Ah.”

“It's been a while.”

“Someone described faith as water held in our cupped hands. How easily the fingers can separate and faith drain away.”

Is that what had happened to him? Traeger found a certain kind of self-reflection uncomfortable. Maybe everyone does. Well, not Heather. She seemed to thrive on it. Sometimes while staying with her he had joined her in her oratory, sitting just inside while she knelt on her prie-dieu and time became a different dimension. Time measures motion, and what is there to measure when there is only stillness, immobility, silence? He grew used to it. He found himself envying Heather.

“What do you say?” he had asked her.

“Oh, I don't speak. I listen.”

Layers of life had covered over any such simplicity Traeger may once have had. Images of operations, duplicity, killings, an endless battle to the death with a great adversary that had surprisingly and, admit it, disappointingly ended.

“ ‘Not with a bang but a whimper,' ” Dortmund had commented.

“Yeah.”

So the two of them had gone into a sullen retirement, Traeger to concentrate on the activities that previously had provided merely a cover, Dortmund to his isolated house by the shore of Chesapeake Bay to read the books he had always meant to read and pamper Marvin his golden retriever. No wonder they had responded like old fire horses when Dortmund had been contacted by Vatican security about the murders in the curial palace. He also remembered his surprise when Dortmund said he had always assumed Traeger was Catholic.

“Where else would you learn the opposition of good and evil?”

But how opposed had they been in the lives the two of them had led?

So Traeger had sat in the oratory while Heather prayed and tried to listen. He hadn't heard anything. He could not rid his mind of all the conflicting thoughts and images.

“Go to confession,” she said when he told her this.

Confession. To kneel and whisper through the grille all the terrible sins of which he had been guilty? To tell all that to some priest who probably was used to penitents with nothing more weighty on their consciences than impatience, lack of charity, intemperance, maybe from time to time a little sexual dalliance? She seemed to read his mind.

“Father Krucek.”

Krucek said the Mass to which Heather went off each morning, returning before Traeger was shaved and showered, hungry for breakfast. One morning he went with her and sat in the pew behind her and watched the once familiar ritual, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it, gone through at the altar. Krucek was like an old soldier who knew the drill and went through it with a briskness immune to doubt. Confessions were heard after the Mass, in the sacristy. Heather turned to Traeger when Krucek made this announcement, before marching out of the sacristy. Traeger felt panic, fear, he actually trembled at the thought of going up the aisle and into the sanctuary. But something of Heather's untroubled certainty communicated itself to him. He rose and went up the aisle and into the sacristy.

Krucek was hanging a chasuble in a closet. He still wore his alb and stole. He looked at Traeger almost impatiently, then nodded toward a kneeler separated from a chair by a screen. When Traeger hesitated, Krucek said, “Come on.” He himself settled into the chair. Traeger lowered himself to his knees on the other side of the screen.

He stared at the weblike screen. It was like an optical illusion, convex or concave as you wished. “I don't know how to begin,” he began.

“How long has it been?”