The Last Western

by Thomas S. Klise

“I—I’ll see you then on the twenty-third, that night.”

  “We’ll provide the press coverage if—”

  “No,” said Willie. “No press. I want to keep this personal, just between me and Mr. Regent. The press will find us anyway, but I don’t want a public announcement of where I will be.”

  “That is absolutely insane public relations, Brother Holy, if you’ll forgive the personal opinion. No one but a jackass would throw away such an opportunity, not that you personally are a jackass, if you understand. But—you’re the boss, ha ha ha ha. Now I’ve got to get back to business.”

  “Yes, Mr. Goldenblade.”

  Goldenblade motioned to the shrine behind him and turned a knob on the phone-camera so that the golden Lady of Fatima came up huge on the screen.

  “That’s my mom,” said Goldenblade. “When everything tears apart in business, when a pacification goes bust, when Earl makes a fool of himself, I come out here and talk to mom, and then—then I feel better. Maybe you would like to say something to mom.”

  Willie could think of nothing.

  “Tell her you love her,” said Goldenblade. “It’s my mom.”

  “I—had a mother once.”

  “So?”

  “I loved her.”

  “But my mom is the real mom, even you know that.”

  The statue got bigger and bigger as the camera slowly zoomed in, the eyes peering straight ahead, and the eyes getting larger.

  “Sweet mama,” said Goldenblade. “Sweet mama says get your color straight and lay off the wop slop or you’ll rot your guts. Right mama?”

  The camera got closer and closer, until finally there was only one eye, looking like a crater of the moon, staring at Willie, and then the screen went black.

  * * *

  The tension of the world grew and the world was coming up to a still later round and the late chill winds of November blew the leaves along the streets of Berlin and London and Paris and New York. The first snows had fallen, and Willie grew weaker, and the time was coming, and so he called them together again—the spokesmen and the officials of the Vatican—and he called them to the same great marble room where they had met before, but this time they appeared to be of firm pink flesh and he had become the gray man.

  Even they noticed it, seeing the blotch of white that had appeared on the side of the red head, as if some chemical had been thrown upon that shock of hair while he slept.

  They saw how thin he was and how his cheekbones stuck out and how the slanted eyes had receded farther into his head, and they heard how his voice had thinned.

  “What is wrong with him?” Cardinal Liderant whispered.

  “He’s ill, obviously,” said Profacci, eyeing Willie closely. “The cooks say he cannot hold food. And he will not see a doctor.”

  “Why, he is a changed man,” said Liderant.

  Orsini said in a slow, curious way, “Perhaps men have gone to a great deal of trouble for nothing.”

  “What men?” said Liderant.

  “Never mind,” said Orsini.

  Willie stood a little apart from them. He seemed very weak and the colors of his skin had paled and he was like a poor watercolor painting of himself.

  Liderant, surprising the other officials, moved toward him as if to help.

  Willie saw this gesture and smiled but waved the help aside. Then he spoke to them.

  “My brothers. In a short time now I shall leave Rome to go to the United States to celebrate the day of love. I must go there to ask the forgiveness of a man I once wronged. But last night I could not sleep because I thought of all you who will remain here in the city, though many of you, I am sure, will also make a journey to meet persons whom in your past lives you wronged.

  “It came to me during the night that I have wronged many of you by the things that I have done. And I cannot leave you now,” he looked at their faces—Liderant, Nervi, Profacci, “without saying that I think of you as my brothers and that if I have hurt you, I ask your forgiveness, even as I forgive anything you have done to harm me.”

  They stirred uneasily before him.

  “You are my brothers. Is it so important,” he whispered, unable to turn away from the eyes of Orsini, “is it so important that we agree on everything, each and every policy, each and every doctrine? What are ideas that they should separate brothers and stand in the way of life joining life?

  “I was wrong, I know it now, not to have told you before, shown you before, that I truly do love you, my brothers, that I need you and that I will keep on loving you to the end.”

  His eyes fell on Liderant now, and Liderant in an instant became the young man he had once been and felt the sensation that he said later was like a knife wound, everything he had always thought important suddenly becoming useless and all that he held precious breaking and dissolving into slag.

  He sighed deeply, as if something trapped in him had succeeded after a long struggle in getting out.

  It was at once very fast and very slow, he said later in that strange interview that would appear with the rest of the story in tomorrow’s paper. He did not know, he could not say what had happened, though he spoke of Willie’s face, something he saw there, and of the words that Willie had spoken, reminding him of something he had once known and valued and then thrown away, and the coming of this knowledge, of the older knowledge he once had, overpowered him, he said, and that was all he knew.

  No one perceived any of this. They saw and heard only the cardinal falling, pitching forward in a faint.

  There was a cry, a rush of scarlet; then they were bending over the prone, still body of the champion canon lawyer of the world, fearing that a stroke had killed him.

  When his lips moved slightly, they fell back a little, one calling for cognac, others for red wine, water, holy oil.

  Then Willie put his hand on Liderant’s forehead, and the old man opened his eyes and asked a question about birth that made no sense to them, but Willie’s heart welled up with joy for the first time in many days.

  “He will be okay,” Willie assured the officials who had called a doctor.

  The Vatican doctor could find nothing wrong with the cardinal.

  “Nothing wrong except all that went before,” said Liderant to the doctor, and he got to his feet.

  Among themselves, the officials said that Liderant had broken under the strain of the L-Day affair and had become disarranged, but Willie rejoiced because he had seen a man reborn.

  The sad creases left the places around the slanted eyes, and the old smile came back once more. He did not know that when the cardinal had fallen, his head had struck hard upon the pedestal of the statue of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, who had received many promises from the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the year 1675, and that in the head of the newborn man, as a result of the fall, a group of blood cells declared war on the being of the cardinal so that his new life would last not even a day but only long enough to fix that final scandal that Willie would leave as his Roman legacy.

  Chapter nine

  Late that night in a gallery where the masterpieces of art were only shadows, they talked, Willie and the new convert.

  Over in the papal apartment, the Servants were packing their few belongings.

  Felder’s plane was ready at the airfield; they would be leaving at six in the morning.

  Liderant had spent the afternoon in the crypt of Saint Peter’s, where the popes of many centuries were buried. There he had read Willie’s copy of the Guidebook.

  When he had come up from the tombs, one of Orsini’s detectives had written in his notepad: Subject’s face streaked with tears. Hands trembling. Disarranged. Now in the gallery his hands still trembled and his whole body trembled because he had too suddenly left one world and too suddenly come into another, and the rebel cells in his body were beginning their war in earnest.

  “What does a man do when he knows his whole life has been for the wrong reason?”

  “Not think about it,” said Willie. “Wh
en we let the past tell us what to do, we play death’s game. We must go from here, from now.”

  “I do not know if I can do it,” said the old man, shaking his white head.

  “Brother Henri, think how far you have come this day alone. You are the youngest man in Rome at this hour. You have dropped all that heavy luggage you used to drag around and now you’re ready for anything.”

  “But what can I do? They will think I am crazy if I now fight the law—the law!” he cried. “I’ve given my whole life to the forces of death.”

  “You are too hard, much too hard on yourself, dear brother. There are good laws, life-promoting laws, and surely you stood for many of those.”

  “I did not care for life,” the cardinal said sorrowfully. “Never.”

  “Once you did, I know. Then maybe you forgot a little, but so have we all. You care now. That is the important thing. Think of what you can do in your work here to make new laws that serve life and love.”

  “Oh no, I must leave all that behind. I want to serve the poor!”

  “You can serve the poor wonderfully well by making better laws.”

  They walked now in the great reception hall where Willie held his public audiences.

  “You loved once,” Willie said. “Then other things came along and made you forget. But God finally broke through those things; so now you love again and now—now you can make good laws. And you know, Brother Henri, what happened to you today—I expect that very same thing to happen to many people throughout the world on L-Day in spite of everything. Do you believe to this degree?”

  “I did not until this morning. Now I believe anything can happen.”

  “God loves you very much, Brother Henri. Think of what he did today. Shall we praist him?”

  The cardinal and Willie, walking along, prayed Psalm 146 and while they prayed, the mad blood cells in the cardinal’s head began to mount their great attack.

  When they had finished the psalm, Willie said, “Now let us listen for a while.” And so they listened and walked on through the dark marble rooms trying to hear what God might say.

  Willie was very tired but he did not know it, so great was his joy at the conversion of Cardinal Liderant, and his hunger had reached what the great fasters once called the white point, so that when he looked at things he saw them stand out very clearly as if they had been backlighted, and his fingers, when they touched surfaces, felt the little ridges and hills and valleys that made up the outsides of things, and though his body was running in low gear, the senses were in high, and things outside him seemed luminous and living and more than the matter they held.

  They entered a strange, dark room, Liderant still trembling and trying to listen, and there were stones dimly lit along a wall, and suddenly statues, many statues, loomed up before them, at first startling them until Willie remembered that these statues had been loaned to the Vatican by the Primate of Russia a few weeks earlier as a personal favor to the pope, though Willie had not taken time to inspect them, and until this very moment hadn’t seen them at all.

  The icons were of gold, silver, bronze and other metals. They pictured Eastern saints and patriarchs, and some were figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary with gems for eyes, and there was one huge icon of Saint John Chrysostom, who seemed to gaze at Willie as if he had asked an important question and expected Willie to answer. There were lamps hanging before the icons casting a flickering orange glow over their faces, heightening the sense Willie had of their substantiality and making them seem alive.

  Just beyond the arrangements of icons were two thick bronze stanzes, or screens, standing upright like huge museum doors. The screens were most ornate and intricate and they told stories of Christ and of men before Christ—Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah.

  The screens had once served as shields in a great church in Moscow, but Willie did not see them as shields, only as wonderful stories told in metal, and the black and gold and yellow faces of the icons spoke to him in a way that statues never had, and he heard for the first and only time in his life those voices that certain well-made things possess and that speak the language men call art.

  A black-robed, bearded Eastern priest appeared out of the shadows behind the great storied screens and bowed and then knelt to kiss Willie’s ring.

  “Stand, please, brother,” said Willie. “We were only looking at these—these statues.”

  “Holy icons. Return to Holy Russia tomorrow. It is good His Holiness wishes to see them before they go back.”

  Willie’s eyes feasted on the beauty of the icons. His mind raced and played on into the future. He saw the past clearly and much of the present, and he saw calmly and clearly the pieces of a new mosaic and then it was as if he had left himself and become a part of this same story that flickered and moved and told itself before him.

  The lamps, casting a constantly changing mist of light over the whole ensemble, contributed to this strange effect. As he looked at them, the figures dissolved and became other figures so that at one moment, where there were great teachers and scholars of the church of the East, there in the next moment were Liderant and Herman Felder and even the indistinct figure of Robert Regent. And a portion of the screen where Jesus fed the multitudes with two fish and five bread loaves became the white plains he had seen in his dream, and he came forward a little to see that dark, thin shape advancing out of the center of the screen, and perhaps in one more second he might have seen the figure clearly, but that one more second was denied.

  A sudden strangled cry came from Liderant, that cry Willie would now forever hear, a sharp, fierce cry that had no humanity in it but was rather the sound of an animal being tortured to death.

  Instinctively, Willie’s arms flew out, but too late to stop what was going to happen, and he could only think with that abstracted clarity induced by the hunger, How fast he moves.

  The Russian priest shouted something, but the shout was not going to stop anything either.

  Liderant was already clawing at the screen, and the cry came again, conveying no thought or idea that could be understood but only the fury and the madness of the act itself.

  He was halfway up one of the bronze screens, his feet moving from miracle to miracle, and Willie heard him use a French word that Father Benjamin told him the next day meant “spite fence,” and then finally he and the Russian moved forward.

  But the screen had already tilted under Liderant’s weight and now as his foot flailed against the shoulder of Gregory of Nyssa, the screen began to come back, falling fast.

  If they had advanced one foot farther, they too would have been crushed under 3,676 pounds of Christian history.

  Dazed, rooted to the place where he stood, the Russian priest set to screaming.

  Willie, fruitlessly trying to lift the screen, could see the bulging eyes, rimmed with blood, of his new convert.

  He searched through the twisted metal of the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor and put his hand on Liderant’s broken skull.

  “Death,” he moaned. “I bring death, my God, to them all!”

  It took ten men with pulleys and a hoist to lift the bronze stanze up again, and two Swiss guards came with a cot and took away what was left of Henri Liderant.

  The Russian priest could be heard crying hysterically through the dim corridors.

  Policemen came and went.

  Cardinal Profacci came and stood staring at Willie without saying a word. He went away and returned shortly with Nervi and Orsini.

  Father Benjamin offered Willie a sleeping tablet, but Willie did not hear him.

  The coroner did not know what questions to ask.

  One of the Swiss guards, the first to have reached the scene, tried to explain how the accident happened, but the coroner only shook his head.

  Truman, Joto and Herman Felder led Willie into a side room off the gallery where the icons flickered and they said various things to him which he did not hear.

  Then the brothers began to pray silently, but Willi
e was unaware of their praying or anything else that was going on.

  A brown and white cat came meowing into their midst.

  Willie looked at the animal as if it were a strange and marvelous beast.

  He picked the cat up.

  The brothers watched him sadly.

  Holding the cat, Willie wandered back into the gallery where now many men were milling about—police, reporters, churchmen. The brothers, too, came back into the gallery.

  Willie did not hear any of the things that were said to him, but after a while, quite suddenly, he came to recognize Cardinal Orsini. He walked up to him and said, “You are right to do what you plan.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Men need clocks. Without clocks they cannot measure things. If there is nothing to limit things, men cannot stand it—so they destroy themselves.”

  Monsignor Taroni, coming up to Willie with grieving eyes, said, “You are disturbed, Your Holiness, you should rest.”

  Willie was still peering into Orsini’s eyes.

  “Your plan is for the best.”

  “I do not have a plan,” Orsini protested.

  Profacci said, “The situation is plain enough. The man is mad.”

  Willie went to the Russian priest, who stepped back hurriedly as he approached with the cat in his arms.

  “The Annunciation, the Raising of Lazarus and the Transfiguration are ruined,” said the priest.

  Willie drew nearer.

  “Keep him away,” said the priest to one of the guards.

  The cat meowed at the priest.

  “The cat also keep away!” cried the Russian priest.

  The cat jumped out of Willie’s arms and bounded up the stanze.

  The gallery fell into a hush as the cat crawled through Moses and the Prophets and the reign of David and up through the Old Testament entirely, fixing its claws on the slaying of the Holy Innocents and stopping to consider how far it wished to travel into the Gospels. The Russian priest began to scream again.

  A spirit-minded guard, interpreting the cat’s movements as an evil sign, fell on his knees and asked forgiveness for his many sins of the flesh.