by The Priest
“Violate your rights, is it? Your right to break and enter? I should inform you, Father, that the girls being cared for at this facility are here for their own protection, and for the protection of the unborn life within them.”
“A strange way to protect them, if I may say so.”
“I don’t know what was happening with the dog. I do know the girl shouldn’t have been loose on the grounds. The dogs are there for the protection of the Shrine. From those”—he gave Father Mabbley a sideways look—”who might try to break in.”
Father Mabbley felt he’d achieved no more than a stalemate. Cogling’s righteous indignation seemed equal to his own. So he changed course.
“Actually, my original purpose in coming here did not have to do with securing the release of Miss Sanders.”
“Oh,” said Father Cogling sarcastically. “She’s a Miss now, is she? A moment ago your friend had claimed her for his wife.”
“My original purpose,” Father Mabbley persisted, “was to speak with the purported director of BirthRight, Patrick Bryce.”
“Well, in that case, you’ll be disappointed in both your purposes.
Miss Sanders is not about to be released, and Father Bryce is not receiving visitors.”
“Shouldn’t Father Bryce be able to decide that for himself?”
Cogling made no reply, and Father Mabbley might well not have taken it in if he had, for he was wonderstruck. There ahead of them stood one of the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World, the Shrine of the infamous Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, the patron saint of antiSemites and one of the holy places of the Cold War. He’d seen photographs of the Shrine before, but photographs can never convey the nature of an atrocity. The Shrine was the perfect combination of a cathedral and a bunker, with a lead-gray dome of cast concrete that seemed to be sinking into the earth rather than soaring from it.
Every detail was expressive of the whole, though detail, as such, had not been the architect’s forte. It was, quite arrogantly, One Big Idea, and that idea was Authority. Authority that had no use for the landscape around it, or for the people who might enter it, but only for its own swollen and ill-conceived terribilità. It was, as the poets say, a sermon in stone (or ferroconcrete) and such an indictment of the institution that had erected it that Father Mabbley, for the first time since he had come to the decision that he would leave the priesthood, felt a sense of, if not exactly jubilation, joyful relief. What bliss it would be no longer to be implicated in what that building represented! To be a priest no more and a human being again.
Cogling brought his car to a stop and got out. Greg and Alison were standing at the foot of the steps leading to the entrance of the monstrosity, and Gerhardt was urging them to enter with motions of his lethal weapon. There was another dead dog lying on the steps, and— the topper—there were bats
flittering out of the lowering Romanesque doorway. In its own gothic way, it was almost beautiful.
Father Mabbley got out of the car. He wondered, as he did from time to time, if he was about to die. He hoped not, but it was always possible, and if he were to die, there was at least this consolation: that he couldn’t have done it in higher style. This place was the very entrance to the city of Dis.
Dante would have felt right at home.
He followed Cogling into the Shrine without demur, simply marveling. The dome, which was more oppressive from within than from without, was filled
with bats, circling about in anticlockwise gyres, like the souls of the lustful caught up in the cyclones of the second circle of the Inferno. Father Mabbley customarily felt a normative dread of bats, but these bats were so a propos that he could not but rejoice in them. And the noise they made as they whirled about—it was Bach and Richard Strauss and Philip Glass, all sent to hell in the same handbasket.
While Father Mabbley marveled, Cogling and his henchman were conferring, and the result of their conference was Cogling’s demanding to know of Alison Sanders what had become of a key that she had taken from the Shrine. Miss Sanders, after some equivocation, produced the key demanded of her, and Gerhardt, after closing and locking the central portal of the Shrine, led the way (Father Mabbley followed out of sheer fascination) toward the altar, and then around it, to stand before an object of art as wonderful in its way as the Shrine itself.
It was a parody of the sepulcher—squat and lumpy and obviously faux, with an effete angel posing off to one side like a gargoyle that had lost its way from Mussolini’s Rome.
Gerhardt opened the sepulcher with the key that Alison had given him, and then there was sheer pandemonium. The tomb virtually exploded. Bats streamed out of it like, what else, bats out of hell. Millions of bats!
Billions of bats! Father Cogling threw himself to the floor, and even his skull-faced henchman took cover behind the half-open door of the tomb as the bats streamed out and up and all about and filled the air around them.
Father Mabbley looked on, as at the burning bush of Moses. It didn’t occur to him to hit the deck, and the torrent of bats flew by without touching a thread of his clothes or a hair on his head.
Gradually they diminished, and Father Mabbley, as the only person still in possession of his faculties, approached the door of the sepulcher and pulled it open wider. The last and timidest bats departed the space within, and there, prostrate on the floor of the room within, with a few dead bats speckling the white marble floor about them, were the bodies of a man and a woman.
At first, entering, he supposed they were both dead, that seeming the most suitable fate for bodies found within a sepulcher. And the woman assuredly was. One could tell it without stooping to feel if there was a pulse (though he did, in common courtesy, do that). Astonishingly (if astonishment still was possible), she had the same face, in death, that Cogling’s henchman had in life, and it made Father Mabbley think, uncharitably, that perhaps her death had been deserved. But one should never judge by appearances.
The man was alive. His right hand was scrabbling, with weak convulsivity, at the marble floor. Father Mabbley got down on his knees and rolled him over on his back, intending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, if that seemed suitable. He realized, looking down at the face and the Roman collar, that this must be the very man he’d been looking for, Father Patrick Bryce. In the innocence of its unconsciousness, you could see what, years ago, Bing must have seen in that face. The simple need that could never be satisfied and that would call to those who were fated never to satisfy the needs of others. The poor doomed fool.
Father Bryce’s eyes opened. Eyes that had been transfigured by terror.
“I’m alive,” he said.
“Yes,” said Father Mabbley. “We both are. Let us thank God for that.”
“You’re a priest.”
Father Mabbley neither affirmed nor denied the assertion. He was, after all, wearing the collar.
“Will you hear my confession?”
“It can’t wait?”
“No. If you will. Please.”
Father Mabbley made the sign of the cross and waited for Bryce to begin.
“I have been… how can I say this… the slave of Satan.”
“We have all sinned, Father.”
“No. That isn’t what I mean. I’ll show you.” He began to pull off his collar and then to undo the snaps of his black tunic. He didn’t stop until he’d bared his chest.
“Why did you do that?” Father Mabbley demanded, disconcerted and even a little embarrassed.
“So that you could see the tattoo.”
Father Mabbley looked down at the man’s chest. “I don’t see any tattoo,”
said Father Mabbley. “There’s no tattoo there.”
The man looked up at him with such a look. Once Father Mabbley had had to tell a woman that her only child had died. It was a look like that.
Then Father Bryce’s face began to grow dark. Father Mabbley looked up.
Someone was closing the door of the sepulcher upon them. Well, he thought, let them.
“Go on,” he said to Father Bryce, “with your confession. How did you become the slave of Satan? Begin at the beginning.”
42
Father Cogling was in a state of barely suppressed fury. Gerhardt had let things at the Shrine get utterly out of hand. Just how much out of hand he didn’t realize until Gerhardt had pushed shut the door of the reliquarium, locking the two priests inside. Then he revealed that the situation was even worse than Father Cogling could have supposed. Two of the girls in the BirthRight program were dead—three, if one added the death of Tara Seberg, of which he’d already been apprised. The Seberg girl had died after a miscarriage, so her death, however regrettable, had been the sort of mischance that the program would probably have had to face eventually. The Obers could not reasonably be held to account for it.
The two other deaths were another matter. The Tyler girl had been attacked by one of the guard dogs when she had tried to escape with Alison Sanders from the Shrine. Gerhardt had discovered her body in the woods only a few minutes earlier. In a sense, even that death could be accounted accidental. The dog had not been directly incited to kill her.
It was the death of Raven Peck that was confounding, for Gerhardt had found her in her own cell, in restraints, the apparent victim of strangulation. She could not conceivably have committed suicide, but who would have done such a thing? Gerhardt had said with a perfectly straight face that he believed Father Pat was responsible. The only grounds for this suggestion was that another of the girls, the youngest, had told Hedwig that Father Pat had attempted to molest her, but the Obers had not believed the girl, who was an accomplished liar, and neither did Father Cogling.
Father Cogling was more inclined to believe that one of the Obers had killed Raven Peck than that Father Pat had done so. Father Pat’s sexual drive did not tend in the direction of teenage girls, and Father Cogling doubted whether that was the sort of thing that changed overnight. So the girl’s murder had to be accounted, at this point, a mystery—and one that there was not time, now, to investigate in the spirit of an amateur detective. For Gerhardt was determined to find where the Sanders girl and her meddling boyfriend had gone off to.
“We can’t just stand around gassing,” Gerhardt insisted, without any of his usual deference to Father Cogling’s authority. “If they manage to get away now, this whole thing could blow up.”
“It seems to have blown up already,” said Father Cogling acerbically.
“What I mean to say, Father, is that we could all of us end up in jail.
You and me and Father Pat, and even my poor sister, who has been another Mother Teresa toward these girls.”
“So what do you propose to do, Gerhardt? Hunt down the boy and girl like a pair of animals?”
Gerhardt’s reply was a steely silence. Father Cogling realized that that was exactly what Gerhardt intended.
“What about the priest who’s locked in the reliquarium?”
“Isn’t he the one you said was pestering you on the phone about his friend, the faggot who started this whole mess? You think he isn’t going to the police after what’s happened?”
This time it was Father Cogling who had no reply.
“We deal with him like we dealt with his friend,” said Gerhardt. “We deal with all of them that way. I honestly don’t see any alternative, Father.
We’ve discussed before what we’d do if one of the girls died. We’d tell her parents that she ran away from BirthRight and we don’t know where she went.
None of the parents know each other. All they know is that their kid is a runaway. It happens all the time.”
“And the priest, Mabbley? And the girl’s boyfriend? Mabbley says the Chancery knows that he was coming here. The Chancery, Gerhardt!”
“We say they never got here. Or maybe they helped the Sanders girl break out of here and ran off with her. By the time someone starts looking for them, we’ll have had a chance to get things back in order here.”
“And what about Father Pat?”
“What about him? You don’t think he’s going to go to the police, do you?
Fat chance of that happening. Father, this is not the time to be talking things over. We got to find those two kids. Am I right?”
Father Cogling nodded, and then added, prudentially, “But you’re not to hurt them.”
“Right, right. Now, here’s what I suggest. You stay here in front of the altar, where you can see most of the church, and I’ll check out all the nooks and crannies where they might be. Fortunately, the way the Shrine is built, there’s not that many possibilities for them. But if they try to scoot out of one while I’m checking into another, you’ll be able to see them.”
“I understand,” said Father Cogling.
It took Gerhardt no more than fifteen minutes to check out all the side chapels, starting with those behind the main altar, and the confessionals.
“No sign of them?” asked Father Cogling when Gerhardt returned to him.
“No, but that means I know where they’ve got to be. It’s the only place left. And it’s just where I want them. They’re up there.” He pointed with his shotgun at the bats circling in the dome.
Father Cogling snorted derisively. “And how did they get there? Did they fly?”
“There’s a stairway that goes up there. There’s no door on it. It goes all the way up to the base of the dome. See that railing that goes all around the bottom part of the dome, like a little fence?”
“The balustrade?”
“Mm-hm. Well, there’s a little walkway behind it, just wide enough for one person to go along it. Apparently, the idea was for tourists to be able to go up there and have a view of the whole Shrine.”
“Yes, it’s a common feature of churches that have impressive domes.”
“That’s where they must have gone. And that’s where we’re going after them.”
“No, Gerhardt, please leave me out of it.”
“Sorry, Father, but there has to be two of us. ‘Cause the pathway goes all around the dome. And there’s just the one way to enter or to leave. By the stairway that goes up there. So if I went up there by myself, and they were on the opposite side of the dome, I couldn’t flush them out. ‘Cause if I go to the side where they are, then they can just keep opposite me and get back to the door. Unless there’s somebody by the door. You see the logic, don’t you?”
Father Cogling hated having to keep taking his cues from Gerhardt, but he did see the logic.
“You’re certain that’s where they are?”
Gerhardt smiled and nodded. “In fact, Father, if you look up there right now, you can see the girl. Or a bit of her white dress. They’re crouched down behind the balustrade, looking at us and wondering if they fooled us.”
Father Cogling sighed. “I’m afraid your eyes are better than mine, Gerhardt.”
Gerhardt nodded. “They’re there. And they can probably see us looking at them. And where they are they’ll be able to see us heading to the stairwell.
So they’ll know we’re coming up there. Which means, since I’ve got a twelve-gauge pump, I should be ahead of you on the stairs.”
Father Cogling readily agreed.
It was a long climb. Gerhardt, despite his years, seemed indefatigable, and Father Cogling had to beg more than once for a respite. In his youth, on visits to various cathedrals in Europe, Father Cogling had been obliged, as a responsible tourist and a devout Catholic, to undertake similar ascents into domes and bell towers. Even then he’d considered it a form of pious madness.
But the long climb did give him an opportunity to think. Gerhardt had performed many services for him that Father Cogling did not like to think about. If the police began to examine him (as now seemed inevitable), Father Cogling doubted that the man, for all his proven loyalty, would have the courage to shoulder all the responsibility for everything that had happened.
Indeed, so much had happened that it would probably not be possible for Gerhardt, if he began to be aske
d questions, to avoid implicating Father Cogling—and (this was surely the most important consideration) compromising the Church.
The more Father Cogling pondered these matters, the clearer it seemed that the best service Gerhardt could perform would be to sacrifice himself before he was interrogated.
When they reached the top of the staircase and emerged into the bat-infested madness of the dome, Father Cogling had also reached his decision. And, thanks to the gun that he had appropriated from Father Mabbley, he was in a position to carry it out.
As Gerhardt had foreseen, the guilty couple had crawled along the walkway to the side of the dome opposite the doorway. Father Cogling was able to discern, once Gerhardt had pointed it out, the telltale white of the girl’s dress and the blue of the boy’s jeans through the massive balusters supporting the railing.
“You stay here by the door,” Gerhardt told him. “I’ll walk around this way and flush them out. And don’t let yourself be spooked by the bats.”
Father Cogling nodded. He did not have time to hesitate, but he wasn’t familiar with the operation of the handgun. He knew there was supposed to be some kind of mechanism called a safety that had to be released. Like cocking back the thingamajig on a cap pistol. He couldn’t discover any such device, however, and he decided that the gun was ready to be fired. But Gerhardt had already progressed too far along the walkway, and Father Cogling wanted to be sure of his aim. He followed after him as quickly as he could.
Gerhardt turned around. “I thought I told you—” he began.
Father Cogling took aim and pulled the trigger. There was only a muted click.
“Well, you goddamned son of a bitch,” said Gerhardt. He lifted the 12-gauge pump and aimed it at the priest.
Father Cogling pulled the trigger again. The gun had been used to kill the dog: There could not have been just a single bullet in it. But in fact (for Father Mabbley had had peculiar scruples in the matter of guns), such was the case. There was only a click.