“There, you see?” enthused the undersecretary. “The very storm subsides for His Holiness’s safety!”
A massive roar of frigid air knocked the fuselage to an angle. Briefcases, blankets, pillows, and typewriters cascaded around the Jesuits and smashed into broken coffee cups.
The undersecretary and his assistant fumbled desperately through the pages of the spiral-bound Vatican directory. The assistant furiously banged the telephone contact and shouted into the crackling receiver.
The cockpit door opened.
“What is it?” the undersecretary said in a dread voice.
The copilot’s voice was drowned out by the storm. With great deliberation, the undersecretary made his way a final time to the papal cabin.
“Boston will take the jet.”
A cumulative sigh of relief floated through the forward cabin.
The undersecretary, perceiving a strange response in the Pope and the cardinal, bowed and discreetly retired.
“The letter was from Boston,” Francis Xavier said quietly.
“Yes,” said Cardinal Bellocchi.
“Perhaps we are answering it.”
At that moment, increased activity broke out in the forward cabin. The undersecretary had made contact with the cathedral of Boston.
An American military jet, bearing the star on its stubby wing, and then a second jet, banked through the clouds, wheeled closer, to escort them down to the storm-shattered seaboard of Massachusetts.
All three jets were streaming down now, angling quickly into the dense power of the storm. The radio and telephone crackled with flat American voices.
“I’m afraid a tragedy has occurred,” said a Jesuit, suddenly appearing at the rear cabin door.
“Tragedy?” Cardinal Bellocchi asked.
“The bishop of Boston, Bishop Lyons, is in intensive care.”
Cardinal Bellocchi’s jaw dropped.
“But I was with him only a few days ago!” he protested. “He was in the full vigor of health!”
“A cerebral disorder, Your Eminence. Not a stroke. The cranial cavity is being investigated for a malignancy.”
Cardinal Bellocchi crossed himself gently, saying an inaudible prayer for the bishop’s recovery. Outside, the wind howled like dogs yelping over the down-angled wings.
“Do not be so frightened, Cardinal Bellocchi,” Francis Xavier said softly. “All men are vulnerable.”
Cardinal Bellocchi tried to smile.
“I only regret that between birth and death, which is salvation in Christ, so much suffering is reserved for mankind.”
“It is the consequence of original sin.”
“Indeed.”
“Which shall endure until the Second Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
An immense clap of lightning bathed the cabins, so intense, so close, it turned the figures of the Jesuits into reverse shadows. For an instant the scene looked like a film negative.
Clouds parted, freighters were visible in the dark waters below, and then, much sooner than Cardinal Bellocchi believed possible, the long lights and concrete runway appeared as the jet floundered heavily downward.
Red revolving lights of fire trucks and ambulances lined the runways.
The military jets swooped up and away as the Vatican jet hit the concrete very fast.
The right wheel strut cracked. Everything was curiously suspended, and then a blast of screeching, protesting metal ripped through the fuselage. The Jesuits covered their ears with their hands.
“Oh, Dio . . . Dio . . . Jesu . . .” came the cries.
Cardinal Bellocchi stared, amazed, out the window. The control tower seemed to rotate lazily around them. Flesh turned green and yellow as airport lights flashed past. Foam flowed, buckled, and streamed from fire hoses toward the belly of the jet.
The Vatican jet nose dipped, rose, righted, and with a sickening lurch, as though a steel cable grabbed it from behind, stopped.
“Oh, Dio . . . Jesu . . .”
Cardinal Bellocchi vigorously mopped the sweat from his forehead. His heart was fluttering badly, the ventricles skipping pulses. A nervous tic separated his lips into a grotesque facsimile of a grin.
Limousines and police cars raced toward the stricken jet. The entire runway came alive with yellow-garbed crew in the rainstorm running toward the smoking right wheel.
The pilot and copilot emerged from the cockpit, badly shaken, but smiling, holding their thumbs up, and the Jesuits cheered.
“We have arrived, Your Holiness!” Cardinal Bellocchi said.
A strange calm made him turn to the figure in white and gold. Francis Xavier, the human being he loved more than himself, whose destiny he feared more than his own, said nothing, but the gray eyes were flashing and he was listening.
“Not yet, dear Nuncio,” he whispered intensely. “Not yet!”
The doubt, the melancholy, the introspection, were gone. A deep, charismatic assurance flowed almost palpably from Francis Xavier. Cardinal Bellocchi stared in amazement.
Rain squalls battered the airport. Francis Xavier saw the black clouds boiling over the city’s lights, and the immensities of rain on the black rolling ocean. The shrieking air screamed in voices of no known language.
Under the crimson flares, the red revolving lights, the streaming mercury floodlamps, men worked in the storm. Their eyes were dark, their uniforms drenched. Francis Xavier saw, in the blistering hard rain on the control tower, a presentiment of the greater storm that would end their tragic burdens.
Image out of the future: A skeleton, with fragments of black coat and wisps of light-colored hair, struggled from the grave, holding high its gold cross.
It was surely a sign.
Francis Xavier stirred restlessly as the wheeled stairs were pushed against the jet and the acting bishop of Boston arrived by black limousine between police lines.
“Not yet, dear Nuncio,” he whispered again, eyes deepened by vision beyond the ordinary. “Not yet!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rain squalls whirled down the long white Colonial houses of the Cambridge suburbs. The deep green shutters banged in the midnight storm and the street lanterns shook in the fierce rain. Branches rolled and broke apart down the immaculate broad streets.
Anita parked the white van at 355 Bilgaren Avenue. Through the windshield wipers, she looked at Dean Osborne’s broad-lawned and ivy-trimmed residence. A chandelier was lighted in the hall and a fireplace reflected through the partially drawn green velvet curtains of a bay window.
She covered her face with her hands. The rain drummed mercilessly on the metal roof. All she saw in her mind was Mario standing at the door of the church, holding the revolver, and then Eamon Malcolm flung from the van to the ground and groveling.
The police could not shut down the experiment. Mario was too far gone for that. He was just crazy enough to use that revolver on them. Who else? Who else in all God’s earth could ease Mario away from annihilating the priest? Anita knew, but she knew that by seeking that help, she might be destroying everything she had once been to Mario.
There was no alternative. Anita crossed the street, and a deep, booming thunder echoed down the deserted yards and wet, brown leaves snapped at her face. By the time she reached Dean Osborne’s door, her long, black hair was soaked and heavy with the cold rain.
She pressed a pearl-like doorbell, heard nothing, then struck the brass knocker over the nameplate, which read Osborne. She struck it again and again. The glass of the upper door brightened, footsteps were audible, and Emily Osborne, the dean’s wife, wearing a luxurious silk robe, opened the door cautiously.
“Why, Anita Wagner,” she whispered.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Anita fumbled. “I know it’s late. Is the dean awake?”
“Yes. In the study.”
Mrs. Osborne hesitated. In her scrutiny of the younger woman, daughter of an old rival, there was a trace of caution, even suspicion.
Then she smiled artificially
and let Anita in.
Anita waited, shivering, dripping water on the Aubusson carpet. The chandelier glittered in a sickly yellow reflection that recalled the altar lamp. Dean Osborne’s black umbrella rested in a wooden stand and his galoshes dried on a rubber mat. As the storm whistled through the arbor and garden behind the house, the trees creaked threateningly out on the street.
Mrs. Osborne returned from the study, smiled politely but coldly, and retired to a small den near the kitchen. Dean Osborne, wearing a heavy brown sweater and black slacks, came into the hall.
Immediately he knew that something terrible had driven Anita to his house alone.
“Please,” he said, gesturing toward his study.
Anita walked into the large, thickly carpeted room. A tall fireplace burned brightly under a marble mantel and several brass antique clocks soundlessly moved on exquisite miniature gears. Fine etchings, seascapes of the Massachusetts coast, lined the library walls, and a huge Frankenthaler dominated the area behind the black mahogany desk.
Dean Osborne self-consciously watched her. She stood dripping by the doorway.
It was the image of her mother, twenty years earlier, the ravenhaired, arrogant beauty that needed no one, nothing, to fulfill its own nature.
But something had changed. Anita was in need now.
“The fire will dry you,” he said gently.
She moved hesitantly in front of the leaping yellow flames. They, too, seemed to shed the same sickly pallor of the altar lamp.
“I’ve come for your help,” she said.
Dean Osborne considered. There were things he could not change, even to a personal appeal. He went to the shelf of his library wall, removed two snifters, and poured a small amount of Napoleon brandy into them.
He handed a snifter to Anita.
“I protected Mario for seven years,” he said softly. “I can’t do it anymore.”
“That isn’t what I came to see you about.”
Dean Osborne raised an eyebrow. He sat down in a black leather chair in front of the fireplace. On the table, in front of the lamp, was a signed group portrait of the genetics team that had developed the DNA model.
“Then what is it, Anita?”
Anita, refusing his gesture to sit in the chair opposite, sipped the brandy. Its heat caught her by surprise. She inhaled, unable to face him yet, staring into the suggestive metamorphoses of the fireplace.
“Mario is breaking down a good and decent man. A Jesuit,” she said slowly.
Dean Osborne’s face twitched and his eyes seemed to darken against the ruddy glow of the firelight.
“I know. It was one reason why I canceled the project.”
Abruptly, she drank the rest of the brandy, shivering.
“The problem, Dean Osborne,” she said in a strange, flat voice, “is that Mario is getting results by destroying the priest.”
“I don’t understand, Anita.”
“Mario has achieved direct psychic projection from the man. The same types of images on the tapes you’re holding.”
“Those images were not projections, Anita. They were some sort of pornography.”
“No. Not what you saw. What’s on the slides. It’s real, Dean Osborne. The real thing.”
Guiltily, Dean Osborne shifted his weight in his chair, trying to mask his feelings with a gracious smile. Anita was an enigma to him. A girl too lovely to stay with Mario, an intellect too fine to have gotten sucked into parapsychology. Now she had a secret stubborn obsession.
“I don’t believe it,” he said flatly.
“One of those images resembles the Crucifixion.”
“That’s the bill of goods Mario tried to peddle me. I threw him out of my office.”
“Well, it’s true.”
Dean Osborne held his silence. Anita moved slowly from the fireplace, running her finger over the glistening brass clocks, where the internal movements seemed too perfect, too refined, for the unbounded world that Mario had ripped open at Golgotha Falls.
“Friday morning another image appeared on the thermovision screen.”
Dean Osborne swallowed heavily. He searched in a carved Florentine box for a cigar. He rummaged among books and papers on his desk for a clipper.
“What kind of image?”
“A satanic image.”
Dean Osborne lighted the cigar, and the flare sent shadows up from his eyebrows.
“This priest seems to be some sort of holy conduit between heaven and hell,” he commented dryly, flicking ash into the fireplace. He leaned forward, conscious of the woman at the wall, and there was no need to look at her. A curious intimacy, born of conflict and sympathy, united them. Their shadows flew into the study, away from the firelight.
“Look, Anita,” he said, irritated. “I saw the images Mario showed at the lecture. They were incoherent. Embarrassing. Pornographic. There was no Christ in them. He claimed we all were hallucinating.” He turned to her. “You’re not going to tell me you agree with him, are you?” he added.
Her silence, her brooding, restless stare, was an affirmation he found disconcerting. This was the new breed, he reflected. A superior mind that refused to duck under the familiar wiles of femininity. It was will against will, intellect against intellect. It was a violation of the subtler codes Dean Osborne had grown up with.
He felt oddly at a loss. He began thinking fast, trying to determine how to control her.
“I can’t protect Mario,” he said again. “He’s washed up. Through. At least as far as Harvard is concerned.”
“It’s the priest I want you to protect.”
Dean Osborne turned to her again. The dimensions of the woman baffled him. What she had gone through at Golgotha Falls, what she was going through now, he could not begin to understand.
“The priest is one of the finest, truest men I’ve ever known,” she said softly. “Mario is tearing him to pieces.”
“I don’t see what I can do about it.”
She turned to him simply, not pleading, but demanding.
“Drive to Golgotha Falls. Tell Mario you accept his evidence. He doesn’t need to destroy the priest any further.”
Dean Osborne was gripped by confused and conflicting emotions.
“Tonight,” Anita said coldly.
“Tonight? I can’t. I won’t. It’s a gale out there. Anita—”
“The priest is on the edge of irrevocable breakdown.”
Dean Osborne clenched his jaw. A natural sense of mercy conflicted with that deep, indestructible hatred of Mario. Bleakly he stared at her, then into the wildly flaring fire.
“Tell Mario I accept his evidence?” he muttered. “Reinstate him? After the humiliation he has caused me? The rank and utter humiliation!”
Anita stepped closer, between the dean and the firelight, her eyes penetrating his defenses.
“As project supervisor, if anything happens to the priest you would be implicated.”
Dean Osborne paused, glared at her, and downed the rest of his brandy. He went to the decanter and poured more.
“I’m not going to drive to Golgotha Falls,” he said. “That’s two hours away and it’s a goddamn hurricane out there.”
“The priest is dissociating! Disoriented! For all I know, he’s already beyond help!”
“Telephone the cathedral. It’s their problem.”
“I can’t call the cathedral.”
Surprised, Dean Osborne turned back. “Why not?”
Anita avoided his glance. She was framed against the black bay window, and behind her, moaning, the storm threw leaves and rain glittering into the light.
“He fled his absolution. It may not seem much to us. But to the Church, it’s a mortal sin. He’d be disciplined.”
Dean Osborne shook his head in confusion.
“Maybe that’s what he needs.”
“He needs our help. And he needs it tonight.”
Dean Osborne walked slowly to his desk and stopped, sipping brandy.
“O
n one condition,” he said quietly.
Anita looked up, warily attuned to the change of his voice.
“What’s the condition?” she asked.
“Give up parapsychology.”
She stared at him angrily and curiously. He took a step toward her.
“Give it up, Anita. You see what it’s done to your priest. You see what a monster it’s made of Mario.”
“Mario is the most brilliant intellect at Harvard.”
“His science is machiavellianism,” Dean Osborne stated forcefully. “He plays dictator with other people’s minds.”
“Yes. He’s manipulative. He’s violent. He’s ill-mannered and offensive. Tonight he tried to shoot the tires out of the van to prevent my coming here.”
Dean Osborne, shocked, stared at her, the calm, matter-of-fact way she reported such violence. She was staring at him with a piercing gaze of such beauty, such assurance, that he felt violated by it.
“But he’s right about those tapes and slides!”
Dean Osborne turned away, disgusted.
“I don’t believe you.”
Dean Osborne sat obdurately on his desk. Anita trailed her fingers over the dark, dusty volumes of the library. A strange expression came into her eyes. Walking to a wall switch, she turned on the library lamps, one by one, until a series of amber lights in delicate upturned glass illuminated the massive rows of periodicals, texts, and collected essays.
“Dean Osborne, you were a scientist once.”
Astounded, angry, he began to say something, but then let it die. The dust on the books, drifting down from her fingers as she held the volumes in front of the amber light, was excruciatingly eloquent.
“Scientific aptitude is not genetically acquired,” he joked feebly.
The distinguished portraits on the wall caught his eye, and he looked guiltily away.
“The desire to know, to understand, never fades,” he said, almost as though addressing the portraits and not Anita. “But the drive . . . something inside . . . goes quickly . . .”
Anita picked up a bound volume that occupied a niche by itself. It was Osborne’s Ph.D. thesis. Behavioral psychology. Dean Osborne felt a piercing pain in his heart, seeing his old ambition, his once-fiery dream, resting in Anita’s lovely hands like a dead piece of antiquity.
Golgotha Falls Page 29