Earthly Powers (109 page)

       He had insisted, on his return from Soviet Russia, on being helicoptered to Castel Gandolfo. It was summer, June 3, and it was right for the Pope to be there. For two days his corpse lay in state at this country palace, watched over by two Swiss Guards and lighted by a solitary candle. The faithful pushed and shoved each other on the staircases to get a good look at a corpse which began to decompose very early. Women wept and fainted. He had given instructions that no one should photograph him either dying or dead, having in mind what Galeazzi Lisi, the private doctor of his predecessor, had done sold pictures of Pius in extremis and given a gruesome press conference on the causes of his death. Despite the veto, flashlights popped and thousand-lira notes changed hands.

       The decaying body was then transported to St. Peter's in Rome in a motor hearse that kept a steady pace, slow driving being impossible to Italians, and outriders on motorcycles buzzed and rasped before, behind, to left, to right. Helicopters whirred above. The procession stopped briefly at St. John Lateran, the cathedral church of the Roman diocese, so that Cardinal Paolo Menotti, who tended it on behalf of its official bishop, could recite a psalm. Then the Mayor of Rome, a Communist, became responsible for the safe passage of the papal body to St. Peter's. Messages had come through from political terrorists to the effect that it would be immune from kidnapping and there was no need to guard it with tanks and machine guns. This was to some extent accepted as a sincere declaration of truce, but security was as vigilant as it can ever be in Italy, and there was a vaguely Chicago look about Carlo's cortege. In the Piazza di San Pietro, where Vatican territory begins, the Mayor was seen to wipe off the sweat of relief as he handed his burden over. The body was laid in the great basilica and the crowds came to wail over it. The click of rosary beads was answered by the snap of Odorokos, Oyayubis and Kugwatsus. The Vatican gendarmes brutally hustled the crowds forward, right turn, out. Avanti avanti.

       Despite hidden electric fans, the air was foul about Carlo's body. He had left instructions not to embalm. Here was the corruptible that had to be put off. The face had turned the colour of strong tea, the ears were black, the mouth gaped idiotically showing teeth still strong. My father, long corrupted in a Toronto graveyard, would have admired them and talked about waste.

       Carlo had requested a funeral pious and simple, no catafalque, no monuent. His monument was all about him, a world restored to a view of its own worth, dignity and essential goodness. His plain coffin lay on the ground in front of the altar, an open copy of the Rituale Romanum on it. The cardinals were in red, not black, and they wore mitres to stress their episcopal functions. Bishops, like Saint Ambrose, were burly fighters with balls. The sculptress of the basso-relievo of the Ambrosian struggle and triumph was present, much noticed in her smart mourning from a Roman couturier with truly piratical eyeshade. The paschal Alleluia was sung: Vita mutatar non tollitur. The remains of Gregory XVII were laid to rest in the crypt of St. Peter's, not far from the bones of the bewildered fisherman who had seen the light of the world go out upside down. Carlo's will was published a few days after his obsequies. He had nothing material to leave. The wealth of the Campanati family had already been bequeathed to the children of Israel. He left to his brothers and sisters, growing in number at an annual rate of about fifty million souls, the beauty of the earth and the fruitfulness thereof, an assurance of God's benevolence, a sure hope of heaven.

CHAPTER 77

The death and burial of a beloved pontiff drove out from the front pages of the newspapers of the world, even in the countries of the Soviet bloc, such trivialities as riot, murder, and earthquake. But the nearer the newspapers were to the Mojave Desert of California the less space they expended on the mourning and rejoicing going on in distant Rome, a city a hell of a way west of Tokyo. The ghastly dissolution of the Children of God shocked editors into the expenditure of their grossest headline type and made their staffs drain their Rogets.

       Godfrey Manning was picked up by the police with little difficulty at Los Angeles Airport. He could disguise his head by removing his toupee and his upper lip with a false moustache, but he could not disguise his eyes. Passengers on international flights provoked suspicion by wearing dark glasses under the soft nighttime lights of the departure lounge, and dark glasses were swiftly whipped off by police at the boarding gates. Manning was attempting to travel on a genuine United States passport in the name of Carlton Goodlett: a bald moustached photograph looked out at the dirty world with eyes which, unsuccessfully, tried to dissimulate their prophetic fervour. He had booked a first-class ticket, one way, to Valparaiso. The case he carried contained one million dollars in notes of a hundred. The baggage already checked in was crammed with another million, as well as jewels donated by rich women who wished to go to heaven without too much altering their ways of life. Manning seemed somewhat relieved to be arrested. He had not been in the habit of running away from things, except the threat of nuclear holocaust.

       His story is well known. It has even gone into books. In downtown Los Angeles he told it, in distress, ramblingly, repetitiously, over cardboard beakers of the coffee which had been an abomination before the Lord. He even smoked cigarettes, unhandily, like a girl smoking her first. Sometimes he wept. In his eyes everyone could see a strange mixture of horror and self-righteousness.

       The daughter of U. S. Congressman Robert Lithgow, a girl of fifteen named Lydia, had attended a revivalist meeting run by Manning in Eugene, Oregon, in the company of a girl friend, and had been overwhelmed with the power and goodness that flowed from the man. She had announced herself a convert to the sect and had been driven back in Manning's own limousine to the Home of the Children in Redfern Valley. The girl friend, harder to seduce, had reported back to the Lithgow family, and Lithgow, then in Washington on his legislative duties, had invoked the Mann Act. On the allegation that his daughter had been transported over the state line for an immoral purpose, he had been able to secure the services of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in demanding entrance to the Home and the restitution of the person of his daughter, her soul being another matter. Lithgow and his wife had driven up to the gates of the camp at sunset on the very day that Carlo died. Behind them, in an official car, were four armed officers of the Bureau. Lithgow had demanded entrance and been refused it by the guards. The senior FBI officer had then demanded entrance in the name of the United States Government. This also had been refused. The officer drew his gun as an earnest of his intention to enter. A guard fired out of nerves, wounding him in the right arm. Another officer fired at the guard and killed him. The remaining guards retreated to the guardroom and used it as a blockhouse. Firing, once started, continued and intensified. Lithgow and his wife lay dead. Two junior officers of the Bureau lay dying. The senior officer fired at the window of the guardroom and was himself shot through the heart. The remaining officer, who was losing blood fast, got back into the official car and tried to speed off for reinforcements. One of the tires had been struck by shot and was flat. He got out to commandeer the Lithgows' car. On the way to it he joined the dying.

       On hearing the news by telephone from the guardroom, Manning ordered that the jubilant bells be rung all over the camp, signifying immediate assembly in the great hangarlike Place of Prayer. All had to be there, children, sick, henchmen, secretaries, deputy ministers. This was an urgent matter: no time for devout shambling; running, running, under the whip if need be. It was, as always, a slow business getting the Children into the hall, all seventeen hundred of them. As the faithful entered, each was given the Body of the Lord wrapped in plastic, but this time a somewhat reduced Body, more like a pill. All, even Manning's aides, were instructed to hold in the palms of their hand the tiny seed of eternal life. At length they were all in. No organ played this time, no artful spots and floods conduced to a mood of devotion. Bare raw light from the roof emphasised that there was serious work at hand, not the fripperies of healing and prayer.

       His homily was brief. He had always warned his Children that the time would come when the enemy closed in. The advance guard of the enemy had been foiled, but the destroyers would soon be approaching in mass, the forces of evil, the mechanists of destruction.

       "Be not afraid of them that kill the body," he cried from the rostrum. "The hour has come for the putting off of this corruptible. We shall all meet again in a split second in heaven. Take ye and eat. This is my body." The guards at the gate had to find a less expeditious way to the next world.

       Manning presided over the almost instantaneous deaths of seventeen hundred adults. The children did not die: they spat out the bitter host. He saw from his podium what he had often tried to imagine, his imagination being much assisted by pictorial evidence of Nazi camp slaughter: uncountable slumping bodies, as though awkwardly trying to get down to pray in the imposssible space between rows of bucket seats, eyes shut or glassy, the rictus after the bitter desiccation of the mouth, arms in automatic supplication heavily or gently dropping, and all this on a scale inacceptable to the horrified eye. There were noises, too—the rattle in the throat, the loosening of bowels and faecal odours threaded the air. He panicked about the wailing children and, worse, those children who did not wail but fixed him with the hard eyes of wonder. In this single huge family there was no nuclear family feeling. No couples lay dead embraced. No children tugged at dead parents to bring them back to life again. There was no mother, only a father. This father got down from the podium and approached a girl of thirteen who had refused her host, medicine, quietus. "See, my dear," he said, "we must all go together. I go last, because I have to tuck you all in for the night, for the day rather, the day that is already dawning for all these now free of the horrible world. Take the Body of the Lord, there's a good girl. Take the Body of the Lord, damn you." She shook her head and wailed and he wondered how best to kill her. Though to stun would be enough. He tried strangulation but she got free and ran up the central aisle between the rows and files of lolling dead. She ran knockkneed screaming out, the one living witness.

       Desperate, and with little strength and much sweat, he tried to kill the smaller ones by smothering with his coat, then by strangulation or, in four instances, by picking them up by the feet and dashing their heads against the tops of the bucket seats. He was astonished at how long it took to smash an infant skull. Some he left to wail. He had to get out now. No, he was supposed to die with his flock. No, suicide was a deadly sin. And yet his absence must not be noticed from among the grotesque assembly of the faithful unto death. It must appear that he had gone to heaven with them, perhaps arriving and smiling ready to greet an instant before. He went backstage where cans of gasoline had long been kept for such an emergency as this. He had faced the prospect of death, though vicariously, nearly every day. He, though no smoker, had even kept the means of ignition in his pocket—a jewelled lighter from Tiffany's donated by a Mrs Henderson, not of the flock but a believer in his work who kept her distance, whose vow to abstain from the foul weed and other Godless stimulants had been signalled in this gift. There had been times, trying to raise money from the corrupt and important, when he had offered lights as he had smiled indulgently at others' bottles. Make unto yourselves friends of the Mammon of Righteousness. Manning poured a whole canful of the eager combustible into the central aisle of the Place of Prayer. He remembered his aunt once saying of an Abbott and Costello film that the audience had died laughing. This guy kills me. He thought he heard gunfire at the front. He took out the lighter from Tiffany's and wondered whether to throw it ignited into the rich reeking fluid. No, it was a gift. He flicked on the spark, let it lick the outer edge of the gasoline, then saw fire whoosh. Flame leapt quickly into the dry air.

       The locked trunk of his Plymouth, always parked at the back of the Place of Prayer, had always contained the rich luggage of possible exile: it was as safe a place as any to store loot. He got into it and effected a more benign ignition. The flames in the Place of Prayer had already reached the roof. There was a metal gate, flush with the metal fence, diametrically opposed to the main en trance of the compound and about a mile and a half distant from it. He drove toward this steadily along a sandy track. He wept on reaching the gate: he could not find the key to it. At length he did and unlocked, swinging it open wide. He saw again to his left garnet and amber flames rejoicing, crowned with an unworthy pall of rising black pollution. God's air should be kept clean. He left the Home of the Children of God and proceeded along a dirt track toward a secondary road. He would reach the airport without touching the city. Before arriving at that secondary road he knew he had better stop. He thought he would have to spend long minutes on the syndrome of horrorstricken grief. He found himself remarkably calm, as it were fulfilled. In the glove compartment he had some of the machinery of disguise. He turned himself into Carlton Goodlett, checking with the passport photograph. That passport had cost a lot of money.

       "They were all better out of it," he told the police. "A vile and filthy world, and its vileness and filth could not be kept out of the abode of grace. I do not regret what I have done. I have sent them to a safe haven. Only fear of the Lord's punishment prevented me from dispatching myself in the same manner. Suicide is a terrible sin." And then he said, over and over again, and this confirmed the police suspicion that he was a nut: "Any salt of hydrocyanic acid. The cyanides contain the ion CN. They had been a long time waiting. I wondered if they would still work. Two thousand rats, they said, that's impossible. All too possible, I told them. You must use men's weaknesses to the glory of the Lord. Some would call it blackmail, a very dirty word. I got what we needed from him, a young man in the pharmaceutical industry who had sinned terribly. God will decide whether or not to punish, I told him, the punishment of men is nothing and may justly be evaded. But some sins merit punishment from the Lord's human ministers if they are committed within the Lord's precincts. They merit terrible punishment, even unto death. The Lord's ministers know themselves to be so through the favours of the Lord. In them the flesh is transfigured, and all the joys of the flesh. My name is God Manning. In me the human and divine conjoin. But it is not for me to judge the entire world, only those who are committed in the Lord's name to my care. I have always done my duty. I have always been faithful to the divine ideal. I wish to go home to my long deserved rest."