He stared at the weblike screen. It was like an optical illusion, convex or concave as you wished. “I don’t know how to begin,” he began.
“How long has it been?”
“Years.”
“We’ll make it easy. What sins haven’t you committed?”
Traeger couldn’t think of any as Krucek ticked them off, as if he were reading a list. Yes, he had done all of those.
“Murder?”
Was this what he had feared? He inhaled. “In the line of duty.”
“Military?”
“CIA.” He added, as if to mitigate his sins, “I’m retired now.”
Krucek expelled air. “Well, I can’t just give you a couple Hail Marys to say as a penance, can I?”
Traeger shook his head. Could Krucek see that?
“You’re truly sorry for these sins?”
“They didn’t seem like sins at the time.”
“The killing?”
Again he nodded, but said, “Yes.”
“You don’t have time, I don’t have time, to go into the details. Are you sorry for all the offenses you have committed against Almighty God?”
The question lifted the discussion above this deed and that to what made any deed good or bad. Traeger realized what an influence Heather had been on him, not by anything she said, but by what she was. He wanted to be like that. And Krucek was offering him the first step.
“Yes, Father.”
“Okay. This is what I want you to do. Get yourself a rosary. Say it every day. Five decades, I mean. Ask Our Blessed Mother’s help to change your life.”
Krucek began the formula of absolution after he had recited the act of contrition in unison with Traeger. Traeger turned his head, wanting to hear the Latin words. Krucek’s hand raised, and then—whose sins ye shall forgive they are forgiven—he absolved Traeger of his sins.
Krucek remained seated behind the screen until Traeger left the sacristy. Heather looked up when he stopped at her pew. She looked up and, with the smallest smile, rose, and they went home to breakfast.
Now, sipping hot tea in a Chinese restaurant in Rome, studying the menu, his hunger mounting as he did, Traeger hoped Heather was safe in the Bridgetine convent where she was staying. He couldn’t afford to worry about her, not now. Everything depended on his getting together with Anatoly.
“Who’s your contact?” he asked Carlos.
Carlos just looked at him. Traeger would have thought less of Carlos if he had told him.
“Can you set it up?”
“God help us if I can’t.”
III
But moving was on his mind.
Gabriel Faust had given himself occasion to ponder two deep moral truths: greed knows no limits, and hubris is a nemesis to man. He had overreached.
A pardonable pride in his own craftsmanship had led him to imagine that the document he had produced, thanks to his calligraphic skills and a mimicry that in lettering rivaled Inagaki’s in oils, was worth the price he put on it. Not least because Trepanier had telephoned him while he was driving to Empedocles for the great disclosure to Hannan that some fraud had offered him what must be a fake for the preposterous sum of four million dollars.
Ignatius Hannan had not blanched at the amount.
“You’re certain it is authentic?”
Faust slid across the desk the report Inagaki had made.
“Isn’t this the man who is making our paintings?”
“The same.”
No explanation is better than a bad one. Faust was beginning to wonder at the much touted shrewdness of Ignatius Hannan. There was no need to instruct him on how to make the money payable in a manner that the seller could accept.
“He will still have to cash it,” Hannan said. “No bank will forget such a transaction. Of course they will call to have the check authenticated when it is presented.”
Faust thought about that. “It is the risk a thief runs.”
Hannan shook his head in disgust. “Imagine trafficking in such a thing.” All Hannan’s own money had been made cleanly. He wondered how it felt. The check would not be presented as Hannan imagined. The Swiss were far more discreet in these matters. Faust warmed himself at the thought that he was now, unquestionably, a multimillionaire. And if four million, why not more?
“We needn’t go through with it,” he dared say.
“We are stopping the trafficking, not engaging in it.”
Who cannot produce a good reason for what he intends to do in any case?
Trepanier was no Hannan, money-wise, but his operation was wildly successful. How much would the impassioned priest give for a copy of what Ignatius Hannan had paid four million to get?
During the great disclosure, as he made his pedantic presentation, he noticed how effectively Trepanier played his role of the unsuccessful suitor of that secret. Later, he had stopped Trepanier and led him away to his office.
“A great day,” he said, settling into his chair. The forged notebook lay before him. Trepanier could not keep his eyes from it.
“You have brought what we agreed to?”
Trepanier patted his breast. There was the crinkle of an envelope in his inside pocket. Faust produced the photocopy he had made of the passage he had added to the secret as it had been made public in 2000.
“Of course you will want to compare the photocopy with the original.”
Trepanier did this, leaning over the desk. When he was satisfied, he paused, bent over the forged document, and kissed it reverently. Then they made their exchange, the photocopy for the envelope that Trepanier drew from his pocket. In it was a check made out to Gabriel Faust in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
That was two hundred and fifty thousand that Faust came to regret when Trepanier detonated his public relations bomb. With an expertise that one could only admire, Trepanier managed to get the good news of the supposed Fatima revelation unleashed all but simultaneously in the so-called first world, followed close behind by feverish coverage in the second and the third. Within thirty-six hours, global reaction had taken place, and all hell was breaking loose throughout the Middle East. Muslims in every corner of the earth, and they seemed to be in every corner, rose as one man to protest this attack on their faith. And the bull’s-eye of their anger was the Vatican, more specifically, the pope.
The surprise was that Faust was surprised that Trepanier had so quickly and efficiently turned the bogus document into a media event. Gabriel Faust was filled with uneasiness.
It was one thing to hoodwink Ignatius Hannan.
It had been perhaps easier to hoodwink Jean-Jacques Trepanier, his hopes and dreams shaping what he saw beneath his nose. Faust regretted the relatively small sum he had asked when Trepanier bent over the notebook and kissed it.
How could he be surprised that Trepanier, who for years had been grounding his ministry on the claim that the full text of the third secret had been withheld, would not himself withhold what he had come into possession of? Had he been counting on Trepanier’s disappointment? Faust might have offered something closer to Trepanier’s wishes, some expression of heavenly discontent at the way the requests of Fatima were being met, or not being met, by the Church. But it had seemed wiser to play to Hannan’s current fixation on the demographic question and the abandonment by Europe of its traditional Christian identity. It took a bachelor like Hannan to preach passionately the need for reproduction, the imbalance between natives and immigrants in the Old World: the dangerous and seemingly irreversible tipping of the balance.
Faust smiled at this repetition of the onetime lament of the WASP. The immigrants, the Irish, are breeding us out of our birthright. The answer had been birth control, which had encountered a stone wall in all the Christian churches; a stone wall that had crumbled over the years, until the United States had become a great missionary nation, bringing contraception and choice to a benighted world. The immigrant Irish and Germans and Portuguese and Italians and all the rest had
eventually been converted to the contraceptive culture, and so, too, the lands of their origin. That, coupled with the toll of total war, had brought about the demise of native Germans, French, Spanish, Italians, willing themselves into extinction. The Scandinavians? Forget it.
Faust had been surprised by Hannan’s eloquence. He reminded him of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby worrying about the yellow menace.
“Who would have thought the danger lay with the Arabs?” Hannan asked.
“Who indeed?” Ray Sinclair asked, scarcely concealing his sarcasm.
It was clear that Sinclair and Laura Burke were embarrassed by the turn Hannan’s great religious conversion had taken. But Faust had seen in this the tack he must take as he labored over the facsimile of Sister Lucia’s letter, adding what he was sure would answer to Ignatius Hannan’s worst fears.
But Hannan refused even to read the document. All that work, and he might have palmed off a blank book. He treated the document Faust had produced with much the same reverence as Trepanier had, differently expressed of course.
“We must return it to the Vatican.”
Here was danger indeed. Imagine the paleographers of the Vatican chortling over the hoax they would be presented with.
Meanwhile, Zelda was more and more eager that they find a house closer to Gabriel’s employment.
“I hate the thought of moving,” she said.
But moving was on his mind.
He thought of Corfu, and rejected it. That distant isle seemed bound to occur to Zelda.
He thought of Pantelleria.
Ah, Pantelleria. He loved Pantelleria, a little volcanic island off the African coast, reachable from Trapani in western Sicily. It had scarcely more attractions than Juan Fernandez off the coast of Chile where the marooned Selkirk had scrabbled for existence during four years, providing the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. But Pantelleria held the enormous attraction of promising refuge. He smiled. A refuge of sinners. But would he continue to love that lonely island if it became his Elba, his Saint Helena?
IV
“A peek in the poke?”
It was Laura’s role to confront Nate with objections and alternatives to his schemes and proposals, but she had never undertaken to second-guess him once he had embarked on a course of action.
The replica of the grotto of Lourdes on the grounds of the Empedocles complex had been a mere bagatelle. Nate could afford it, and the result was, Laura admitted, wonderful, a serene redoubt among the frantic activities of Empedocles. She and Ray sat on a bench facing the shrine after the session in which Gabriel Faust had presented what he had managed to secure for Ignatius Hannan, for Refuge of Sinners, the third secret of Fatima.
“Four million dollars,” Ray said thoughtfully.
“It’s not the money,” Laura said.
“What’s the principle, then?”
“What do you really think of Gabriel Faust, Ray?”
“He has a devoted wife.”
The nonresponsive answer suggested an attractive tangent, a way of bringing up their own status—“unhappily unmarried,” as Ray had recently described it—but Laura was not to be distracted. Perhaps Ray was made uneasy by the same tangent.
He said, “A pig in a poke.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“A poke is a sack.”
“And a pig is a pig.”
“You buy it without getting a good look at what you’re buying,” Ray explained.
“He didn’t want to look at it.”
The document was now secure in the safe in Nate’s office, awaiting transfer to Rome by Heather. Laura said, “You and I could take a peek.”
“A peek in the poke?”
“You don’t want to.”
“You know, I admired Nate’s decision. There at last he had it in his hands, the big secret that has caused so much speculation for so many years, including his own, and he backed away from examining it. He didn’t have the right. Isn’t that what you would do if you thought you had a letter from the Blessed Virgin addressed to someone else?”
“It’s from Sister Lucia,” Laura said.
But Laura did not say this to diminish what Ray had said. He was right. Nate was right. Get the thing out of here and back to where it belonged.
When she came back from Logan after seeing Heather off, she took Ray aside and told him Traeger was also on the company plane. He reacted with alarm. Of course he imagined that Traeger had somehow forced his way onto the plane in order to fly away from his pursuers. Laura told him what Heather had said.
“He was staying with her?”
“Lower your eyebrows. I thought the same thing. She said no and I felt chided. You know Heather.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I know anything or anyone.”
“Heather is so transparent she’s invisible.”
Later, he said, “What is that story of Hemingway’s, the nun and the gambler? Or is that Faulkner? I said I no longer know anything. The virgin and the assassin.”
“You don’t know that, Ray.”
“Oh, I’m sure she is.”
Laura punched him on the arm.
“Wanna wrestle?”
“We don’t have a license.”
“Then what are we doing in bed together?”
“What we shouldn’t.”
And they did, and afterward, for the first time, each of them expressed the remorse they felt. “Let’s do it,” he said.
“We just did.”
“I mean marry.”
He meant it, he really did.
“Of course I’ll have to pass the blood test,” he said.
“You’ll have to go to confession is what you’ll have to do. What we have to do.”
“Will I have to say I’m sorry?”
“Fornication,” she mused.
“I’ll say I didn’t take pleasure in it.”
She put a pillow over his face. He freed himself.
“Do you think that maybe Heather and Traeger ever . . .” She got the pillow back over his face and fell out of bed in the process. She went on to the shower where, all aglow, as if the water were washing her sins away, she sang, not quite in tune, “Get me to the church on time.”
But these pleasant plans were interrupted by the bombshell of Trepanier’s disclosure of the suppressed third secret.
“Get Faust,” Nate said, white with fury.
Ray went away and in ten minutes was back. “He’s not here.”
“Call Zelda,” he said to Laura. “I’ll talk to her.”
Laura got through to the happy bride and turned the phone over to Nate.
“Zelda,” he cried, with delight, and Laura and Ray exchanged a glance.
They listened to the billionaire spend five minutes on trivia with Zelda, minutes that could have been given a more or less distinct calculation of the money they were costing him, and then, “Say, is Gabriel there?”
He listened. His expression changed. But his voice was still sweet when he said, “Zelda, sometimes I think I’ll forget my own name.”
More schmoozing before he hung up.
He said, “I have just learned that I sent Gabriel Faust to Rome so that he could return the document.”
A long silence broken finally by Laura.
“Poor Zelda.”
V
Not Castel Gandolfo.
The Reverend Jean-Jacques Trepanier had arrived at his apotheosis. The dream of crowning achievement had been reached. He had exposed the myrmidons of the Vatican as unreliable custodians of the secrets of Fatima.
The gush of elation that surged through him was slightly abated by the thought that it was difficult to know what he could ever do that would surpass this triumph. Where does a climber go after conquering Mount Everest?
He dismissed such thoughts as unworthy, as distractions and temptations. What he had unleashed upon the world was not about Jean-Jacques Trepanier. If that were all that was at issue, he could confess to a measure o
f disappointment. But the very surprise of the passage Gabriel Faust had provided him in photocopy seemed a confirmation of its authenticity. Never in a million years had Trepanier imagined that Our Lady had warned of the subjugation of Europe by Islam, a new dark age spelling servitude and persecution. And to think that this had been suppressed when there was still time to storm heaven and pray that the punishment not descend.
He felt no responsibility for the riots and bombings and sacrileges that followed on the release of the suppressed portion of the third secret. The blame for all that must fall on those who had concealed the Blessed Virgin’s warning.
That said, he could not look at the television coverage of what was happening, in the Arab world, in the countries of Europe, in Rome itself. Trepanier was appalled at the venom with which the Holy Father was attacked. He himself had always been careful to aim at targets beneath the Chair of Peter itself, to suggest that the pope was the victim of cynical bureaucrats. John Paul II had been too trusting. Benedict XVI was too trusting. If Trepanier felt any sadness it was at the thought of the Holy Father realizing at last how poorly he had been served by those he had trusted.
Calls came from Empedocles. He did not take them. Calls came directly from Ignatius Hannan himself, and still Trepanier did not take them. There was of course some sense of treating Hannan badly. He knew what the man must have paid for that document, whereas he had gotten the nub of the thing for a relatively modest amount. But who could own a message from the Blessed Virgin? Just as poverty and starvation trumped the right of private property, so the demands of heaven put ordinary morality in abeyance. He made a note of that; it could form the basis for his next televised sermon.
In the meantime, he went to the studio, where all scheduled programming was halted while viewers were addressed directly and live by the founder.
The Third Revelation Page 26