“What possible problems would there be? We go where he goes and on the night of the twenty-third—”
“I do not wish to listen to it.”
“Wait, I’ll go to the corner with you.”
“Go to the opposite corner—the other way.”
The chairs scraped again and now they passed him, Felder in trench coat and a shadow man.
When they walked out into the yellow light, they turned and muttered a farewell.
And he saw then the face of the other man. It was Orsini, the chess player who had come to look like a chessman.
He sat for a moment, then got up on legs of paper. He left a thousand-lire note on the table and began the long walk back to the Vatican.
He felt strange, as if his body had already been disengaged and he had left it and was dead.
He crossed an ancient bridge with lampposts that were held up by angels.
He looked down at the Tiber and saw his head and shoulders and arms reflected in the water. “So they are going to kill you,” he said to the image.
That night he dreamed he was flying above water. He had been flying for many days and he was weary and hungry. He was looking for land, but there was no land. He was flying in search not just of a place to come down but of something else—a message. He had been sent from a ship to find something—what? And then he awoke, in the dead of night, and he thought how the dream had changed, and he knew now that it was just the old story from the Bible.
He tried to concentrate on the story. The darkness of his room was like a curtain dropped over the bed.
Then he remembered the other dream, the real one at the café, and the fear came up to his mouth and he gagged and he went to the bathroom. But there was no use vomiting—there was nothing to vomit.
When he went back to his room, he knelt and raised his arms in the cross fashion and listened, but there was absolutely nothing to be heard except the buzzing monotone of a mosquito and, out in the distance, the drunken snore of the world.
Chapter eight
In the first week of November the world began to tense again, like an old fighter coming up for the bell in the last round of a long fight.
L-Day was only three weeks away now, and the television and radio began to increase the coverage of what people said and thought and what they were doing to be ready for it.
“L-MONTH—LAST MONTH!” said a headline in Second Wind. Every paper in the world carried features and picture stories of what was going on.
The President of the United States declared the day following L-Day to be a one-time national holiday.
Earl Cardinal Goldenblade, addressing a nationwide TV audience on the November 2 This Is Your Death program, called the President an unbelieving fool and sinner because he did not realize there would be no day after L-Day. In the studio audience that night, a group of Second Comers called for the immediate impeachment of the President, and Cardinal Goldenblade asked that the President set a personal example for the people of the country by starring on the This Is Your Death program.
Stocks on all the exchanges of the world went up and down crazily, but the money newspapers of the JERCUS nations expressed confidence in the future stability of the market, if there was a future for the market to exist in.
The United Nations entertained a motion by the ambassador from Etherea to make L-Day a truce day throughout the world. The Etherean minister said that the president or some other high-ranking official of any nation breaking the truce should be publicly hanged on live international TV as an example to the world.
Only this part of his motion carried in the U.N. The debate about the truce itself and how it should be arranged became very involved, each nation adding its own particular list of amendments, until there were sixty-five amendments to the motion, and the debate continued around the clock, twenty-four hours a day.
The Green Canary Expeditionary Force fighting in Peru had moved to within five miles of Lima.
The archbishop of Lima called upon the leader of the revolutionary army, General Clio Russell, to enter a truce agreement with the government forces for a twenty-four-hour period beginning at midnight on November 23.
General Russell sent back a telegram which recommended that the archbishop of Lima perform a difficult physiological function upon his own person.
The archbishop did not understand and he asked his secretary to explain and the secretary explained and the archbishop said, “But that is out of the question, I am seventy-eight years old.”
“Even if you were twenty-eight years old, it would be impossible, Your Excellency,” his secretary said.
“Why does he write such a thing?”
“He is angry.”
“What have I done to him?”
“What he recommends that you do to yourself,” said the secretary.
“He is mad. An insane atheistic monist or Marxist, or both.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Is there a chance he could be killed or captured before L-Day?”
“He is a most elusive fighter.”
“We must pray for victory. Order special masses said at every church in Peru next Sunday.”
“Yes Excellency.”
The archbishop read Clio’s telegram again. He had led a sheltered life and did not understand why men spoke such things. He was very old and did not know the world well, and the little he knew, he hated.
He called his canonist and asked him to find out where Clio Russell came from and whether he was a Catholic and if he was a Catholic what he, as an archbishop of the church, could do to interdict his person and his family and his followers and the place where he was and all the places he had been and all the places he might go.
“We will blast him with supernatural weapons,” said the archbishop, “the supernuclear bomb of God’s grace. That will finish him.”
“Something better,” said the canonist. “He has just taken your villa on the mountain.”
“He will defile the relic!” cried the archbishop and burst into tears.
“He wouldn’t know a relic from his—rifle,” the canonist assured him.
The archbishop went on a three-day retreat and prayed for the undoing of Clio Russell. The relic was a splinter of the true cross given him by a holy pope when he was a young priest, and he had carried it with him for many years and it had preserved him often from the world and he prized it above all that he owned, including his old and cursed body.
He was alone in the room that had been the library of his predecessor and the walls were made of books. It was afternoon of some day or other and he had come from the great hall where the audiences were held and the people had been calling him papa and he did not like being papa and he did not know why they had to have a papa forever and forever, and wasn’t it enough to have the one papa who art in heaven and what if the papa was a mama after all and papa or mama, what did it matter?
He could not think, and the truth was he had never been able to think—that was the one thing he knew in the room that was made of books.
You cannot think, he said to himself and then to the Other: You have made one who cannot think.
The walls were composed of four thousand books that were like the bricks or building stones of a dungeon, and yet there must be men who could take the dungeon apart, he thought, brick by brick, and would not that be freedom?
He picked out one of the books. It was heavy in his hand. It was a book that had been written by an American theologian of the last century. His eye fell upon a paragraph and his finger moved on the sentences:
We have rendered into absolute our own dualistic postulate. We have rejected any eschatology in which the dualism is transcended. We have trapped ourselves within an eschatology in which the objective environment remains forever unchanged and impenetrable. However mighty we may reckon God’s grace, we cannot attribute to it the requisite power to resolve the dualism we have posed. Such a resolution would require the recognition of some kind of cosmic even
t, an image of a coming cosmic denouement. But by definition such an event would violate the true historicity of man. It would give faith an objectivist crutch rather than instill in it an existentialist power. We are therefore, in the name of faith (and of our dualistic presuppositions), restricted to a form of eschatology in which all cosmological terms are completely transposed into anthropological categories. This transposition, when complete, gives us as the object of Christian hope only the permanent futurity of God.
He read it again and a third time and he did not understand it and he thought it might just as well be in another language. Then he thought, It is already in another language. He wondered what it was like to know that language and use it, what it was like to understand things in an orderly way and not to have to depend on dreams and silence and things that had no explanation.
Through the window he could see the people pouring out into the piazza, and he knew they would go home now and tell their children and their neighbors and their friends that they had talked to papa and they would not be able to say why it meant whatever it meant to them.
He pitied them in the cold light because they looked very small from this place of books and because they seemed to need to come and see him and call him papa and because they hungered for more than all the things that were kept in this place, and whatever it was they got from seeing him and calling him papa, that too would go very soon, and they would hunger again, perhaps worse than before.
His mind spun around for a while and he started to fall asleep. He had not eaten in many days now and the hunger had gone into a new phase and he was weak and lightheaded. He was like one of those little candy men that his father had given him one Christmas, that looked like solid chocolate but were hollow inside so that you had to be careful how you picked them up or they broke between your fingers.
He put the book by the American theologian back in the niche of the dungeon wall and then he saw a clock sitting among the books, under a glass dome. A card in English said that this clock, made by the Pemberly Clock Firm of Rochester, New York and presented by Mr. Roger Pemberly to His Holiness Pope Felix VII, would run for 1,000 years without error and was as perfect a clock as man had ever made.
He leaned close to the face of the clock to hear the ticking but instead of ticking, there was only a tiny hum. He listened a long time to the humming and put the glass dome back over the clock, and he considered how some things endured and how things would go on after it was over—and those people out there in the piazza—how they would come back to call another man papa, and then he felt faint.
He sat down and closed his eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep that was almost a coma, and Joto had a hard time waking him an hour later.
“Urgent, most urgent, Brother Will. That Mr. Golden from America on videophone. Says most important.”
So he went sleepily to the next room where the videophone showed Goldenblade on the lawn of his Houston house with the golden statue of the Lady of Fatima behind him.
“Holiness Father Brother, can you see me all right? George Doveland Goldenblade, of course, Goldenblade Communications?”
“Yes, Mr. Goldenblade?”
“Turn your contrast a little will you, Father Brother, Excellency? You’re coming in yellow.”
Willie adjusted the knob on the side of the phone.
“Now you’re greenish—my god, er, goodness—like a freakish monster out of the depths, ha ha ha, of the sea, ha.”
Willie turned the knob once more.
“Why, Brother Holiness, you look like a godd—you don’t look right. Hold up your hand.”
Willie held up his hand.
“The color is off, but it appears to be you.”
“It’s me,” said Willie.
Goldenblade brought Willie’s face to close-up.
“There’s been a lot of impersonating here in the States on the videophone—Communist and pervert monists and such, dressed up and pretending to be citizens. Or else they’re clones. It is a threat to every American home I can tell you. But I see you really are Your Holiness even if your color is so putrid. What is it you have been eating, that crummy wop slop?”
“It is me,” said Willie, almost blinded by the glare of the sun on the shrine behind Goldenblade.
“That’s what sent Uncle Eminence Earl out of his switch—eating that Roman matter over there, which is outright slop, and not taking our new product, Goldenblade Hydrofood, which would have built up his blood, such as I told him time after time, till his godd—stupid head exploded, which it did.”
“Sir?”
“The edibles did it!” Goldenblade roared, switching to close-up, so that only his eyes and nose were visible. “Right after that fu—that conclave when he was over there slopping it up, that’s when his blood went. The tongues came on. Tongues of the Holy Spirit! Holy Chr—Holy Spirit! Don’t you think I believe in the Holy Spirit, Holiness? Spirit!” Goldenblade was shouting at the top of his voice.
“It’s me,” said Willie.
“Walking around like an insane pervert, my own brother, my own Eminence Earl, who used to be a levelheaded businessman and still would be if his blood hadn’t run to chicken soup. Chicken soup, Father Brother Holy! Chick chick chick! I could cry! Jeeeee—” Goldenblade, halfway through the name of the Savior, saw Willie’s face on the screen, “pers! Forgive me, Your Brother, I haven’t been myself since that man lost his computer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Goldenblade,” said Willie.
“You’re forgiven, Pope,” said Goldenblade. Then leaning closer to the phone-camera: “You are quite alone, Brother Holiness?”
“Yes.”
“I have important news to give you.”
“Yes.”
“Bob Regent has been in contact with me.”
Willie felt his body jerk in the chair.
“Bob Regent,” said Goldenblade, “your former owner.”
“What did he want? What did he—”
“Well, Bob and I chatted quite awhile about this L-Day Plan of yours. We both had given a lot of thought to this particular operation. To tell you the truth, Brother Father, I was opposed to it at the beginning. In fact right up to the time Bob called, I thought it was one of the most asinine capers that ever came down the pike, no disrespect to your nationality intended.”
“Will Mr. Reg—”
“Please, please, Holiness, let me finish what I was saying. This plan has been creating havoc throughout our industry and has caused many numbskull workers and shiftless nig—personnel—dolts for the most part—to strike us and demand unreasonable pension settlements and the like. It has set off panic everywhere else too. Well, you must see the news over there. I don’t have to tell you what this thing has done to people. Because of all these screwed-up happenings, I have been opposed to the plan all along, and frankly, I tried to do something about it, about stopping it, I mean, and then this call from Bob came in.”
“Will Mr. Regent—”
“If,” Goldenblade cried, “if you’ll bear with me, Father Holy, I’ll try to tell you about it. Bob called night before last, using the old audio, because as you know he has an abhor-ence of getting himself seen. This was about four a.m. and Bob did not want to say what country he was in—if he was in a country—because of his feeling about being in any one country at any one time, if you follow. He identified himself in that twenty-word drill he has been using the last few years so that there was no question it was Bob who was calling, from somewhere.
“Bob told me how the plan struck him. To my surprise he told me he thought it was wonderful, though as a human being he did regret so many people were taking it the wrong way, blowing their chicken-hearted brains out, and so on. He called it a splendid gesture and said he truly believed it would make the world a finer place to do business in.”
“Did he—”
“Your Brother Holy,” said Goldenblade, “I don’t want to be impertinent or disrespectful, but I can’t tell my story when you are constantly t
alking, not giving me a chance. Granted you are the pope, granted you are used to monopolizing the conversation, granted you are infallible, still with all that, don’t you agree just as fellow Christian to fellow Christian, we all have to be silent once in a while and let the other man speak?”
“Yes, Mr. Goldenblade.”
“Good,” said Goldenblade. He lighted a cigar. “Well, Bob Regent is just delighted, just thrilled spiritually by this whole promotional thing of L-Day and especially by some message which you sent to him—about some meeting with him? Through some Grayson?”
Willie nodded to the camera.
“He has asked me to acknowledge that message for him and also to invite you to meet him and join him for the hunting party which he holds each fall up near Springfield, Illinois. He wants you to join him there, if that is possible—I mean join him and a few of his friends for the plove hunting. Now, Father Holy, I can tell you, this is a sport you will truly enjoy. These aren’t your mechanical birds, you understand, but live birds, very fast, which Bob himself breeds for the hunt. The hunt lasts four, five days and is always held the last week of November. Bob thinks this would be a perfect manly American place and setting for you and him to get together, and I agree.”
“Yes, Mr. Golden—”
“You accept then?”
“Yes.”
“Splendid. Now Bob will be at his lodge during that time, you understand. He has a regular mansion right near this little town on the river, Babylon Bend it’s called, a village of 200 or 300 yokels. You’ll meet him there?”
“I will not be there for the hunt because I will be busy just before and just after,” said Willie carefully. “But I will come up to the lodge at the earliest hour of November 24.”
“Delightful! Brother Holiness, you are a man with true business intelligence. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. And I know Bob will be happy too.”
The Last Western Page 46