The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  Through it all Toad remained motionless, lounging on the big green bench. The show was over; the media packed up as quickly as they had come. As the march dispersed, Levinsky made his arthritic way past him, walking a little more jerkily than before, his guards in tow; Catriel Levine, her arms around Rachel, came within three paces of where Toad sat and noticed him not at all. Her face was wooden, torn, angry; and it set his dormant nerves on fire.

  Near Al-Aziyah Village, East Jerusalem, 0900h

  At the Bethel checkpoint dozens of Arabs worked their way slowly through the warren of queues and barbed wire to go to their jobs on the other side of the wall. Soldiers leisurely checked their documents before letting them pass. Hot dust and diesel smoke from passing buses obscured their faces, but Talal Bukmun knew each one. He looked down at them through his gun sight from the ragged brick house. It would be so easy to pick off the Zionist soldiers from here, one by one, and free his brothers.

  But his task was to sight in a new consignment of guns, not to bring an Israeli gunship down on this house. His skill in navigating their anti-terror systems had kept him alive but on the run for nearly thirty years. Since the attack on the Great Synagogue he had stayed underground, inching his way through the maze of safe places between Baghdad and Damascus and Jerusalem, moving only when he was as sure as he could be that the darkness around him was total. He had wasted years of his life waiting out the enemy. For him it was a simple matter—the patient ones survived.

  At last he was back in this house that had been built by a dead auto mechanic. It was surrounded by black stubs of palms and the wreckage of old cars whose owners had long forgotten them. Outside his window, a lone donkey scavenged for vegetation in the dust. He picked up another gunsight and examined the distant checkpoint again; a few adjustments and he could clearly see the down on the shorn neck of a Jewish soldier fifty meters away. A tourist bus, painted sky blue and white, its windows inked out, rolled past the checkpoints. He knew that the bus was full of American devils on their way to Jerusalem from the Tomb of Lazarus. He also knew he could put their eyes out rapid-fire, smashing the tinted glass and exposing their white, naked faces that now gazed down on his countrymen from the air-conditioned heights of the bus.

  But he must remain quiet, and the house must remain safe, he thought. They wouldn’t look here for him. Only the mechanic’s widow and her donkey lived here—an old lady with a scarf on her head and a handloom for making intricate rugs out of rags and odd lengths of yarn and twine. He could see her now, sitting just outside the window, her rumpled fingers passing scraps of blue and white yarn, and now fragments of red, green, and black, through the strings of the loom, salvaging again what had been the pieces of an older rug worn and beaten by time. The donkey browsed past her into a clump of green poking from an old wheel hub rusting on the ground. No, no one would ever look here for him, and the woman would not betray him. He knew too much.

  In a limestone cave under the house, he kept a small arsenal of weapons that were more often used on his fellow Palestinian refugees than on the Zionists. Traitors he could not abide. He put them quickly and cleanly to death. There were too many of his countrymen who thought they could deal with the Zionists, live with them, work with them. A million Palestinian Arabs who did not even feel their own humiliation—these he had no interest in. But the ones who wavered, who knowingly dishonored themselves—it was more than he could bear. For them, he would not wait for the yaum id-din, the Day of Requital, and he had sent dozens of them to their punishment.

  He tossed the next gunsight away—it was rubbish. Old Iraqi army materiel, scavenged and then hidden for years. Rotten. His own people sold him their trash mingled with a few good pieces. This was the thing that hurt him. The Zionists were a cold reality that he understood—like the glaciers he had seen as a boy in Switzerland, the Zionists could only be chipped at, blasted away piece by piece until the land was clear of them. But the corrupt Arabs he dealt with…they were like warmish meat left in the sun, with a sickening odor he could no longer stand. They knew he would come back for them, but they could not resist the temptation to exploit him. And they also knew he was patient—it might be years away.

  The widow’s son sold olive wood trinkets to the tourists in the Old City. He was one for whom patience was no longer necessary—the old woman’s safe house had bought him peace. The son had decided he wanted money more than he wanted the Requital, although he had tried to keep this desire of his from Talal. But the mother was shrewd. “Talal Bukmun has big ears,” she always said, which was absolutely true. His huge ears and vast mustache had made him a popular portrait on the walls of the Zionist police stations. When her son had finally suggested to him that the Zionists really only wanted peace, Talal knew that he was touched by the dajjal and that the Quran was fulfilled: When it is said to them, be not wicked on the earth, they say, why, we only want to make peace. But they are themselves the ones who are wicked.

  Someday he would have under his boot the pig who had sold him two Hawkeye missiles looted from the Iraqis and buried for twenty years. He had checked them personally. He had believed they were still good. Why one of them had misfired, he could not tell. Like the widow’s son, the pig must have had a foot in both camps.

  Under his other boot he would have the pig he had given them to. The man had refused to give his name, said he was from the faction; he had the responses to prove it. And when the Great Synagogue blew up, Talal thanked Allah and honored the man in his heart. But within a few hours the second Hawkeye was used to pierce Al-Aqsa. It was totally baffling. A curse was on his heart now. As a boy he had worked alongside his father in a spotless Swiss gun factory, as “guest workers” who learned to despise the sterile charity of the West. The people there had clucked over the poor Palestinian refugee boy. He understood them and their cold, bustling compassion, and their smiles and their food that was so good but never sufficient, and their desire to get rid of him when the time came.

  What he did not understand was the squawking of his own people, bickering like chickens in the heat and dirt, uneducated, full of mad theories. He had heard of Muslims who wanted to bring down Al-Aqsa in order to inflame the Islamic world to the point of marching in force on the Zionist Entity and erasing it from the earth. Why else would the same man strike at the Great Synagogue and at Al-Aqsa on the same day, except to re-ignite a fire that had nearly burned itself out in misery and was no longer intense enough to bring Requital to the land.

  It was time for sleep. The day was his night. He put the guns and sights back under the floor and carefully re-attached the trapdoor and the hairy, many-colored carpet that covered it. The heat forced him to take off his clothes before he lay down on the widow’s bed, and as he did so he inspected his solid, bushy body that was white from the months underground. Fifty difficult years were engraved on it—a long scar from a barbed wire rip in the flesh, four dimples caused by gunshot wounds, edematous ankles from bad food and no exercise. He was a soldier and his body knew it, so it had made little trouble for him until recently. Now his nerves were growing slack; his heart and brain were no longer so aligned. What had been cold in him was slowly melting in unseen ways, perhaps from the accumulated emotional friction of so many lonely executions.

  He drew a curtain across the window and lay down to sleep. But it wouldn’t work. He was so tired he could no longer make out the colors in the old tapestries on the walls, hung by the widow to keep the house insulated in winter; still, the war went on in his head. Finally, out of frustration he turned on the widow’s battered TV. Even the Arab channels were all about the assassination of the Christian Pope. He cared nothing about this and was about to switch it off when a new picture came up. The Arab announcer was talking about a visit to the Vatican from a Palestinian delegation just prior to the assassination.

  There on the screen was a small crowd of people, and among them three men identified by the caption: an Italian policeman named B
evo, the priest who was now the accused assassin, and a Palestinian security official named Nasir al-Ayoub.

  One of them was the unnamed pig who had purchased the Hawkeyes from him. There was no mistake.

  He fumbled for the widow’s GeM phone and put through a call.

  Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs, Piazza San Giovanni, Rome, 0800h

  Cardinal Tyrell struggled up the stairway adjacent to the Scala Santa, his red cassock enclosed in a black robe against the cold autumn rain and the view of the onlookers outside. His guard had driven him to the sanctuary and offered to come upstairs with him, but he wanted to be alone in the chapel. So the car waited.

  At the top of the stairs he paused to take a few demanding breaths and nodded at the soldier on guard at the new gate of the Sancta Sanctorum. Saluting, the guard made a move to open the gate for him, but the Cardinal shook his head and turned into the adjacent Chapel of San Lorenzo. He would not walk into the Holy of Holies through that gate.

  Out of sight of the guard, the Cardinal sat down on a cane bench and lowered his eyes before the altarpiece. Gray light from the windows barely flickered on the dark gold of the room. No service had been held here for some time; no red candle indicating the Presence softened the gloom of the altar. No matter. Prayer came effortlessly to him, almost as curses do to other men. And today the prayer need was intense. It was already the third day of the Novemdiali, the nine canonical days of mourning for the death of the pope, and he had never felt before such urgent force in his heart. He trembled with prayer.

  Perhaps now the abominations could end. Zacharias had released a deluge of filth—homosexual priests living openly together, a flood of divorce across the Catholic world, women streaming from the convents to stand in the place of Christ and perform the Sacrifice of the Mass. Sacred vows of chastity ruptured.

  It was to save the Church, the Pope had said. It was to refill the great empty cathedral he constantly evoked, the basilica of Christ that had been, in his words, turned over to “museum curators and tourists”; to replenish the seminaries; to open the Church to the poor in spirit and the excluded hearts. But in trying to save the Church, he had nearly destroyed it.

  For years the Cardinal had asked God to reverse the dizzying changes that Zacharias was forcing on the Church. Sin was no longer confessed; it was celebrated, with the Pope as chief celebrant. Now God had ended it, and Tyrell cursed himself in his heart even as he exulted over the end of it.

  For the Pope was the successor to St. Peter. Ecce Petrus. Tyrell had made a vow to obey this man, to submit to this infallible voice of Christ on earth without question. As a small boy he had found comfort in the portrait of Pope John XXIII high on the wall of his austere school. His vows were kindled in the soothing eyes and smile of Blessed John—the grandfather he dreamed of—and became real in the reign of Paul VI. Obedience was peace, confidence was absolute. Deviates, liberalizers, postmodern nihilists raged around the Church, but the barriers held. Peter was the immovable rock in the storm.

  Tyrell kept the shell of the vow, but its hard nucleus was gone. For decades he had taught the theology of the Church, for additional decades he honed and burnished the theology of the Church at Armagh, at Cambridge, at Beit Jala in Palestine, and the Pontifical University. And then as designated guardian of the dogma, in the Holy Office itself. These years he had spent exploring its facets, uncovering deep wells of logic to draw from.… Now the thing he feared the most—would never even admit the possibility of it—was on him. His handhold was crumbling.

  Once before in his life he had felt the iron of his vows soften and melt. Profound blue eyes. A fragrance of mountains and cedars. Only once. And he had paid for it—how he had paid for it in caverns of penance like this one. How many times he had answered for it—and not just to God.

  Pulling his robes around himself against the cold, the Cardinal stood and fled from these thoughts by swinging open the hasp on a bronze door in the wall and, stepping through it, entered the corridor to the Sancta Sanctorum. Soon he emerged into the grayish light of the Holy of Holies. He worked his way around the aimless grid of police tape on the floor and made for the only chair in the room. Seated, he gazed up at the paintings over the door he had just come through. He could not count the times he had prayed in this room with the popes, pondering the martyrdom of Peter in fresco, the beheading of St. Paul, the symmetry of the twenty-eight doctors, saints, and martyrs arrayed like pillars circumscribing the cubical chapel. He remembered. There was John Paul II bent nearly double and leaning on his cross, his lips tight against it, his eyes closed. Benedict XVI richly robed and smiling like a small boy, blinking at the blue and gold heaven overhead. Pope Francis in plain, unambiguous white. Each of the holy fathers had passed humbly before him in procession through the bronze door.

  But he had refused to come here with Zacharias II, the pope who locked the bronze door to this chapel and pulled down the wall that kept out the curious, the sacrilegious, the tourists, and the flacks who thronged every other holy place in Rome. For centuries, the pilgrims who climbed the Holy Stairs had been satisfied to bow before the barred windows that allowed only a distant view of the silver Christ. Then Zacharias had ordered the windows removed and the wall torn out to be replaced with a golden gate that allowed anyone to enter the chapel directly from the Holy Stairs and hosted a “Celebration of Inclusiveness” to mark the occasion. Hundreds of guests from various “action groups” had crowded the chapel. Though invited, Tyrell had declined and watched the broadcast in his flat.

  Fragments of the pope’s speech on that occasion rested like splinters in his mind. “Catholicism has lost its heart… Our churches are cold, empty museums… The pews are vacant…the seminaries drained… We have shut the children of God out of the house of God… Today we invite the poor in spirit, the maimed, the lame, the blind into the wedding feast. Today the marginalized and excluded are welcomed.” And then Zacharias had opened the gate—to gay activists, radical feminists, the pornographers of Hollywood, abortion peddlers, Marxists, priests with “wives” or “husbands,” apostate Catholics.

  At one time this chapel had contained the holiest of relics—the tokens of John the Baptist, of the Savior, of the Virgin. But on that day homosexuals thronged through the new gate, making a Sodom of the Sancta Sanctorum. Behind the altar, the silver Christ looked dull under the television lights.

  At length the Cardinal turned to look at what he could hardly bear to face—the gap in the wall. Two porphyry columns and two cabinet doors plated with leaden engravings of apostles framed the space where the Savior had hung. The Acheropita was gone. The glory had departed the temple. It was a fitting judgment, he thought, for a Church that had chosen to embrace sin instead of fighting it. A Church that had found its way voluntarily to Babylon.

  Was there more than one way to be true? No, it wasn’t possible. The vicar of God had betrayed his trust, and God Himself had put an end to it through Peter Chandos, here, with unbearable irony, in the holiest of holy places. The Cardinal groaned at the memory of Peter Chandos, the young scholar, so articulate in the faith, so promising. He had supported him practically from infancy. From the time he had first seen the boy, from his first remembrance of the mother during his teaching year at Beit Jala. He had levered the boy through the hierarchy and watched him step forward on his own, winning the confidence of the Curia. Stunned, delighted, after the battle for the papacy had been lost, when Zacharias named his own protégé to the Secretariat, Tyrell was so disoriented he wavered for nearly a year as the new pope’s offenses mounted. But the bull In Salutem Ecclesiae, which allowed for the ordination of deviates and women and marriage for priests, had awakened him like a crack of thunder in the ear. This was clearly error, pure and simple. And the only way an inerrant institution could recover from error was to rescind it, renounce it. Peter Chandos had been a necessary sacrifice.

  Still, the floodgates were open; to undo the work of Zachar
ias II would require a Pope capable of channeling the forces he had released and draining them off into less harmful pathways. At length it could all be reversed. But it was by no means sure that such a Pope would be chosen. The college of cardinals were gathering now for the funeral on Friday and then deliberations would begin. The wrestle of years before had left Tyrell exhausted; the partisans of the French archbishop had outmaneuvered him. Now he was so much older and the challenge so much greater that he shuddered at it. His allies were aging, too. By contrast, the ten cardinals named by Zacharias were young, strong, and full of determination—especially their undoubted candidate, the Cardinal Archpriest, the American John Paul Stone. They would have to be opposed, and vigorously. It would be a struggle for the very heart of the Church.

  He would be equal to it. He must be. He had not contrived against Zacharias II for so long to give in to exhaustion. Tyrell’s namesake, Leo XIII, had been the age he was now when elected Pope in 1878. Everyone had discounted him, but Leo prevailed and reigned for a quarter century. One day, Pope Leo had stiffened and turned white at the altar while celebrating mass in the Sistine Chapel; he had, he said, just then overheard a conversation between God and Satan. The devil had said to God, “I can destroy your church.” God replied, “I give you leave to try,” and Satan had hurled back the challenge: “Give me time and I will.” God replied, “I will grant you the time.” Now was the time, Tyrell was convinced—now was the time.

  Rue Percheron, Chartres, France, 0815h

  In his light summer jacket, Ari was not ready for the cold that sliced through him as he and Interpol climbed the street. She walked ahead with her chin tucked down against the wind. The gray little neighborhood on his left suddenly opened into a grassy park and there, brooding against the sky, was the cathedral. He walked onto the grass. The great church drew him magnetically and soon he was standing under the Gothic cliff of the façade, gauging the difficulty of the climb; the wrinkles and crenellations in the stone would make perfect handholds.