by Morris West
“How does he look?”
“Ragged! He’s under enormous strain.”
“I wonder how long he can hold up,” said Jean Marie thoughtfully. “When you get back, arrange another face-to-face meeting with him. Tell him of my engagement to speak at the Carlton Club. Explain that it may give me an opportunity to explore the situation on the grain embargo with people in positions of influence. At least they will tell me whether it is possible to reopen a dialogue.… How much success has Petrov had with Duhamel?”
“He thinks it may be possible for Duhamel to divert a Canadian shipment of about a quarter of a million bushels of hard wheat, originally intended for France. That’s a drop in the bucket and the ship is still in mid-Atlantic. So, who knows if it’s just a delaying tactic. Duhamel is a champion at that game.”
“Have you spoken with Duhamel?”
“Briefly, to let him know I was coming to visit you. He sent round a note which he asked me to put into your hands.”
He handed an envelope across the table. Jean Marie opened it. The message was written in Duhamel’s impatient script.
My friend,
Each day we come closer to the Rubicon. Our plans for the day of the crossing are unchanged, even though Paulette’s remission continues and we are able to enjoy more together. We are grateful beyond words for this privilege. We cannot, however, accept it as a bribe for an act of submission which we are not yet prepared to make.
You are still listed for Grade A surveillance in France. The Americans have also become interested in you. Our people have had requests for information from a C.I.A. operator named Alvin Dolman. He left last week for the United Kingdom. His cover is that of personal assistant to former Secretary of State Morrow, who now works for Morgan Guaranty.
I asked a friend of mine in British intelligence to run a check on Dolman, as I thought he might be a double. We know he isn’t; but it helps to muddy the waters.
Paulette sends her love. Take care,
Pierre
Jean Marie folded the note and shoved it in his breast pocket. Alain watched him with somber, brooding eyes.
“Bad news?”
“I’m afraid so. The man who tried to kill Mendelius is in London. He’s a C.I.A. man called Dolman. They have planted him with Morrow of Morgan Guaranty.”
“I shall call Morgan Guaranty and tell them about it.” He announced it so pompously that it sounded like a line of bad comedy. Jean Marie noted, with some surprise, that brother Alain was getting drunk. He said with a laugh, “Truly, little brother, I don’t recommend it.”
Alain’s sensibilities were wounded. “I don’t want to find myself sitting-next to a killer at a bankers’ conference.”
“I wonder how often you’ve done it, unaware.”
“Touché.” Alain acknowledged the point with a salute and then signalled the waiter for more wine. He asked, “And what are you going to do about the Dolman fellow, Jean?”
“Tell Hennessy and Waldo Pearson—then forget it.”
“Hoping that one or the other will provide you with some protection—or remove Dolman from the scene.”
“In some fashion, yes.”
“So, when he is found dead in his apartment or run down by an automobile, how much guilt will you carry? Or will you turn away like Pilate and wash your hands?”
“You’re playing rough games tonight.”
“I’m trying to see what you’re made of—after all, we haven’t spent much time together these last thirty years.” Again there was a surprise for Jean Marie. Brother Alain could be morose and maudlin in his cups. “You’ve always been the high one—parish priest, bishop, Cardinal, Pope! Even now, people defer to you because of what you used to be. I see it all the time in my business. Prince Cul de Lapin, who’s never done a day’s work in his life, gets better treatment than a successful tradesman with half a million francs in his account.” He was having a little difficulty now, getting the words out. “What I mean is, it’s like ancestor worship! Great-grandpa is the wise one, he’s dead! You’re not dead; but—God!—you do pronounce on a lot of things you don’t really understand.”
“I’m going to pronounce on you, brother mine! T’es soûl comme une grive! You’re drunk as a thrush. I’m taking you back to the hotel.”
Alain was near toppling as Jean Marie paid the check and hurried him outside. They walked two blocks before Alain was able at last to get his feet in rhythm. Back at the hotel, Jean Marie helped him to his room, undressed him down to his underthings, rolled him onto the bed and covered him with the counterpane. Alain submitted to the whole performance without a word; but, as Jean Marie was about to let himself out, he opened his eyes and announced, apropos of nothing at all:
“I am drunk; therefore I am. The only time I can prove it is when I’m away from Odette. Don’t you find that curious, Jean?”
“Much too curious to debate at midnight. Go to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Just one thing…”
“What?”
“You’ve got to understand Roberta’s problem.”
“I do.”
“You don’t. She had to believe her father was some kind of saint, doing penance for other people’s sins. Fact is, he was a real bastard. He never had a thought for anybody but himself. He ruined a lot of people, Jean. Don’t let him ruin her from the other side of the grave.”
“I won’t. Good night, little brother. You’re going to have a beautiful hangover in the morning.”
He tiptoed out and went downstairs to wait for Roberta Saracini.
Her appearance shocked him. Her skin was dry and opaque. Her eyes were red, her features pinched tight over the bone structure. Her movements were jerky, her speech hurried and voluble as if silence were a trap to be avoided at all costs.
He had reserved a small suite for her on the same floor as his own. He ordered coffee for two and waited in the salon while she freshened herself after the journey. She came back on a new floodtide of talk.
“… You were right, of course. It’s crazy to stay shut up in that big house! It’s amazing the number of people who take those late-night flights. Where’s Alain? How long is he staying? He’s worried as we all are about the fluctuation in the currency market. I suppose he’s told you that.…”
“He told me,” said Jean Marie gravely, “that you were in deep distress. I see that you are. I want to help. Will you let me, please?”
“My father’s dead—murdered! You can’t change that. Nobody can. I have to get used to the idea, that’s all!”
She said it defiantly, as if daring him to pity her. She was tight as a fiddle string, ready to snap under the first touch of the bow. Jean Marie poured coffee and passed her a cup. He talked on, gentling her down from the high pitch of near-hysteria.
“I was so grateful when you agreed to come. It told me you were prepared to trust me. It gave me the opportunity to say my thanks for what you are doing, also to share with you some exciting things: the last stages of the Letters, the speech I’m to make at the Carlton Club, and new friends I’ve made in London.… I want to go to the Tate and the Royal Academy and the Tower of London, and Cardinal Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court and oh, so many other places. We’ll do it together.…”
She gave him an odd, wary look.
“You talk as if I were a little girl. I’m not. I’m a grown woman, whose father was stabbed in a jail corridor. That makes me bad company for man or beast.”
“You’re hurt and lonely,” said Jean Marie firmly. “I have no practice with women; so I’m probably going about this all the wrong way. I’m not trying to pat you on the head like a bishop or give you a papal blessing—which I’m not entitled to do anyway. I’m offering you an arm to hold when you cross the street and a shoulder to cry on when you feel like it.”
“I haven’t shed a tear since I heard the news,” said Roberta Saracini. “Does that make me an unnatural daughter?”
“No, it does not.”
; “But I’m glad he’s dead! I hope he’s burning in hell!”
“Because you’ve already judged him,” said Jean Marie with crisp authority. “And you have no right to do that! As for burning in hell, that’s always bothered me, like a pebble in my shoe. Sometimes in the press I’d read about parents maltreating little children, breaking their bones, burning them on hot stoves, for some naughtiness, real or imagined. I’ve never been able to imagine God our Father, or His so-human Son, damning his children to burn in eternal fire. If your father were here now for judgment, and his fate were in your hands, what would you decide for him, forever and a day?”
Roberta Saracini said nothing. She sat, tight-lipped, eyes downcast, clasping her hands together to stop their trembling. Jean Marie pressed her.
“Think of the worst crimes that have ever been committed—the massacres of the Holocaust, the genocide in Kampuchea and Brazil.… Can they ever be expiated, even by an infinity of similar terrors? They cannot. The prisons of this world and the next could not accommodate the malefactors. I believe—and I have been shown only the faintest glimmer of what is to be—that the final Coming and the final Judgment itself must be acts of love. If they are not, then we inhabit a chaos created by a mad spirit, and the sooner we are released from it into nothingness, the better.”
Still she did not answer. He went and sat beside her on the floor. He took her hand and held it firmly in his palm and said, “You haven’t been sleeping very well, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“You should go to bed now. We’ll meet at breakfast and start our holiday immediately after.”
“I’m not sure I want to stay.”
“Will you say a small prayer with me?”
“I’ll try.” The answer was low and tremulous.
Jean Marie gathered himself for a moment and then, still holding her hand, intoned the prayer for the departed.
“God, our Father,
We believe that your Son died and rose to life.
We pray for our brother Vittorio Malavolti,
Who has died in Christ.
Raise him at the last
To share the glory of the Risen Christ.
Eternal rest give to him, O Lord,
And let perpetual light shine upon him.”
“Amen,” said Roberta Saracini, and began to weep, quiet healing tears.
For the next five days they played tourists, gorging themselves on the simpler pleasures of London. They strolled by the Serpentine, watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, spent a morning at the Tate, an afternoon at the British Museum, an evening at a Beethoven concert in the Albert Hall. They took a river excursion to Greenwich and another to Hampton Court. They went window-shopping in Bond Street, spent a morning with Angelo Vittucci, who promised to design Jean Marie a suit “so discreet that a cherub could not be scandalized, yet so beautifully fitted you will think you have grown a new skin!”
Roberta Saracini was, at first, desperately moody—happy as a child one moment, the next, buried in a deep pit of depression. He learned quickly that logical talk made no impression on her: that gentleness, distraction and an occasional curt chiding were the best remedies. He made discoveries about himself, too: how far he had travelled from Vatican Hill, how many small joys had passed him by when he was the puzzled shepherd of a faceless flock. The Letters, on which he worked late at night, became more poignant, as each Arcadian day made time and tenderness and the tears of things more precious.
Roberta had decided that she would stay out the week, leaving London late on Sunday evening so that she could be back at work on Monday morning. The forecast promised fine weather—a brief extension of the Indian summer before the first frosts came in. Roberta suggested a picnic. She would hire a car, pack her luggage in the trunk. They could spend the whole day in the country. Jean Marie could drop her off at the airport on the way back to London. So, it was agreed.
Early on Sunday morning, Jean Marie said Mass at a side chapel in the Oratory Church, where the sacristan had come to know him simply as Père Grégoire, an elderly French priest who wore a beret and looked rather like a benevolent rabbit. Then, with Roberta at the wheel and a picnic basket made up by the hotel, they drove out to Oxford, Woodstock and the Cotswold country beyond.
It was still early and the Sunday traffic had not yet begun to build up; so they were able to turn off the highway and meander through small villages still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, and rolling farmland brown with the last stubble or dark after the first plowing. Their pleasure was in the small wonders: the ribbon of mist that lay along a hillside, the grey tower of a Norman church, climbing out of the huddle of a tiny hamlet, an apple tree by the roadside laden with red-ripe fruit, free to the passerby, a child perched on an ancient milestone, nursing a doll.
Somehow, it was easier to talk while they were driving. They did not have to look at each other. There was always a new distraction to bridge the betraying silence.
Roberta Saracini touched his arm and said, “I feel so much better than when I arrived. Things make more sense. I can cope better. I have you to thank for that.”
“You’ve been good for me, too.”
“I don’t know how; but I’m glad anyway.”
“How do you feel about your father now?”
“I’m not sure. It’s all a sad kind of mess; but I know I don’t hate him.”
“What holds you back?” He prompted her firmly. “You love him; no matter what he was or what he did, he paid his own price—and he gave you enough to get started, too. Say it! Say you love him!”
“I love him.” She resigned herself to the proposition with a smile and a sigh which might have been relief or regret. Then she added the postscript. “I love you, too, Monsieur Grégoire.”
“And I love you,” said Jean Marie gently. “That’s good. That’s what it’s all about. ‘My little children, love one another.’”
“I hope,” said Roberta Saracini, “you didn’t have to be commanded to it.”
“On the contrary,” said Jean Marie—and left the rest of it unsaid.
“How do you feel about women—not necessarily me, in particular? I mean, you’ve been a celibate all these years and…”
“I’ve had a lot of practice at it.” Jean Marie was douce but very firm. “And part of the practice is that you don’t flirt and you don’t play dangerous games and, most important of all, you never tell lies to yourself. I feel about you as any man feels about an attractive woman. I’ve been happy in your company and flattered to have you on my arm. There could be more; but precisely because I love you, there won’t be. We were set to walk on separate paths. We’ve met most pleasantly at the crossroads. We’ll part, each a little richer.”
“That’s quite a sermon, Monseigneur,” said Roberta Saracini. “I wish I could believe half of it.”
He glanced across at her. She was driving steadily, eyes fixed on the road, but there were tears on her cheeks. She turned to him and asked bluntly:
“What made you become a priest in the beginning?”
“That’s a long story.”
“We’ve got all day.”
“Well!…” Immediately he was closed-in and reluctant. “The only person to whom I’ve ever told that was my confessor. It’s still a painful subject.”
“It was tactless of me to ask. I’m sorry.”
They drove the next half-mile in silence; then, without further prompting, Jean Marie began to talk, slowly, musingly, as if he were putting together in his mind the pieces of a puzzle.
“… When I first joined the Maquis I was very young—just arrived at military age. I wasn’t religious. I was baptized, communicated and confirmed in the Church; but there it stopped. There was a war; life was catch-me-if-you-can. With the Maquis I was a man overnight. I carried a rifle, a pistol and a killing knife. Unlike the older ones who could sometimes slip into town, I was forced to stay out in the hills and the countryside; because if I got picked
up in a city raid I’d be shipped out to forced labour in Germany. I did courier duty at night, of course; because I was young and could move fast and outrun the curfew patrols.… Before, I had had girl friends and some experience of sex—just enough to make me want more. Now I was without a woman and my companions mocked me, as older men do, calling me the little virgin and the choirboy.… Old, bawdy stuff, harmless enough, but very difficult for a youth who knew he might never live to enjoy a manhood.…
“Well, one of my regular courier routes took me to a farmhouse near a main road. All troop movements in the area had to pass the place; so the farmer’s wife kept a list, which we collected every three days, and passed on to Allied intelligence. I never went to the house. There was a shepherd’s hut and a sheep pen about half a mile away, on the brow of a hill. I’d lie up there and tie a rag to a sapling for a signal. After dark, the woman would come up with the messages and food for me and for the boys in the hills. Her name was Adèle, she was somewhere in her thirties, childless; and her husband was missing since the first days of the Blitzkrieg.… She ran the farm with two old men and a couple of sturdy girls from nearby families.…
“On this particular day I arrived late. I was scared and shaken. There were lots of German patrols out and twice I was nearly picked up. To make matters worse, I’d gashed my leg on some barbed wire, and I was scared of tetanus. An hour after sunset Adèle came. I was never so glad to see anyone in my life. She, too, had had a bad day, no less than three raids with troops stamping in and turning over the place. She washed my leg with wine, and bandaged it with strips from her petticoat. Then we drank the rest of the wine and ate supper together and afterwards made love on the straw mattress.…
“That I remember as the most wonderful experience of my life—a mature passionate woman and a frightened youth, in a single ecstatic hour, in a world full of monsters. Whenever afterwards I have talked about charity, the love of God for man and man for God and woman for man, I have done it in the light of that single hour. From curate to Pope I have remembered Adèle every morning in my Mass. Whenever I have sat in the confessional box and heard sad people tell the sins of their love lives, I have remembered her and tried to offer my penitents the gift of knowing that she gave to me.”