F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (26 page)

           
 
"Ah," Vincenzo said, and left it at
that. What did he know about women?

           
 
"A unique and wonderful woman," Dan
went on, sipping his ale, "with a unique and wonderful problem."

           
 
"Oh?" Through decades of hearing
confessions, Vincenzo had become the Michelangelo of the monosyllable.

           
 
"Yeah. The woman I love is looking for a
miracle."

           
 
"Aren't we all?"
Myself most of all.

           
 
"Not all of us. Trouble is, mine really
thinks she's going to find one, and she seems to be forgetting the real world
while she's looking for it."

           
 
"And you don't think she'll find
it?"

           
 
"Miracles are sucker bait."

           
 
"As much as I hate to say
it"—Vincenzo sighed—"I fear there is some truth in that. Although I
prefer to think of the believers not as suckers, but as seekers. I saw a
village full of seekers today."

           
 
Vincenzo went on to relate an abbreviated
version of his stop in Cashelbanagh earlier today. When he finished he found
the younger man staring at him in shock.

           
 
"You're a
priest!”
Dan said.

           
 
"Why, yes. A monsignor, to be
exact."

           
 
"That's great!" he snapped, quaffing
the rest of his ale. "And you're going to New York? Just
great
That really caps my day! No
offense, but I hope we don't run into each other."

           
 
Without another word he rose and strode from
Jim Cashman's pub, leaving Vincenzo Riccio to wonder what he had said or done
to precipitate such a hasty departure. Perhaps Dan Fitzpatrick was an atheist.

           
 
It was after a second pint of Murphy's that
Vincenzo decided he'd brooded enough about miracles and unfriendly Americans.
He pushed himself to his feet and ambled into the night.

           
 
It was cool out on the street. A thick fog had
rolled up from the sea along the River Lee, only a block away, and was
infiltrating the city. Vincenzo was about to turn toward St. Patrick Street and
make his way back to his hotel when he saw her.

           
 
She stood not two dozen feet away, staring at
him. At least he thought she was staring at him. He couldn't tell for sure
because the cowled robe she wore pulled up around her head cast her face in
shadow, but he could feel her eyes upon him.

           
 
His first thought was that she might be a
prostitute, but he immediately dismissed that because there was nothing the
least bit provocative about her manner, and that robe was anything but erotic.

           
 
He wanted to turn away but he could not take
his eyes off her. And then it was she who turned and began to walk away.

           
 
Vincenzo was compelled to follow her through
the swirling fog that filled the open plaza leading to the river. Strange . . .
the lights that lined the quay silhouetted her figure ahead of him but didn't
cast her shadow. Who was she? And how did she move so smoothly? She seemed to
glide through the fog . . . toward the river . . . to its edge . . .

           
 
Vincenzo shouted out as he saw her step off
the bulkhead, but the cry died in his throat when he saw her continue walking
with an unbroken stride . . . upon the fog. He stood gaping on the edge as she
canted her path to the right and continued walking downstream. He watched until
the fog swallowed her, then he lurched about, searching for someone, anybody to
confirm what he had just seen.

           
 
But the quay was deserted. The only witnesses
were the fog and the River Lee.

           
 
Vincenzo rubbed his eyes and stumbled back
toward the pub. The doctors had told him to stay away from alcohol, that his
liver couldn't handle it. He should have listened. He must be drunk. That was
the only explanation.

           
 
Otherwise he would have sworn he'd just seen
the Virgin Mary.

           
The Judean Wilderness

           
 
Kesev sobbed. He was still alive.
When will this END?

           
 
He'd tried numerous times before to kill
himself but had not been allowed to die. He'd hoped that this time it would
work, that his miserable failure to guard the Resting Place would cause the
Lord to finally despair of him and let him die. But that was not to be. So here
was yet another failure. One more in a too-long list of failures.

           
 
The jolt from the sudden shortening of the
rope had knocked him unconscious but had left his vertebrae and spinal cord
intact. Its constriction around his throat had failed to strangle him. So now
he'd regained consciousness to find himself swinging gently in
Sharav
a dozen feet above the ground.

           
 
For a few moments he let tears of frustration
run the desert dust that coated his cheeks, then he reached into his pocket for
his knife and began sawing at the rope above his head.

           
 
Moments later he was slumped on the ground,
pounding his fists into the unyielding earth.

           
 
"Is it not over, Lord?" he rasped.
"Is that what this means? Do You have more plans for me? Do You want me to
search out the Mother and return her to the
Resting Place
? Is that what You wish?"

           
 
Kesev struggled to his feet and staggered to
his Jeep. He slumped over the hood. That had to be it. The Lord was not through
with him yet. Perhaps He would never be through with him. But clearly He wanted
more from him now. He wanted the Mother back where she belonged and was not
about to allow Kesev to stop searching for her.

           
 
But where else could he look? She'd been
smuggled out of
Israel
and now could be hidden anywhere in the world. There were no clues, no
trail to follow . . .

           
 
Except the Ferris woman. Who was she? Had that
strange, unsettling nun on the plane been her, or someone pretending to be her?
And did it matter? All he knew was that the Explorer he'd seen in the desert
that day had been rented on her card. There might be no connection at all. The
Mother could have been stolen days before then.

           
 
He gazed up into the cold, unblinking eye of
the night.

           
"All right, Lord. I'll continue
looking. But I search now on
my
terms,
my
way. I'll find the Mother for You
and bring her back where she belongs. But you may not like what I do to the
ones who've caused me this trouble."

           
Manhattan

           
 
Dan finished tightening the last screw in the
swivel plate. He flipped the latch back and forth, watching with inordinate
satisfaction how easily its slot slipped over the swivel eye. He fitted the
shackle of the brand-new combination padlock through the eye.

           
 
"We're in business, Carrie."

           
 
She didn't answer. She was busy inside the
coal room with the Virgin. Or maybe
busy
wasn't
the right word. Carrie was engrossed, preoccupied, fascinated,
enraptured
with the Virgin.

           
 
The
Virgin .
. . Dan had heard Carrie refer to the body or statue or whatever
it was so often as "the Virgin" that he'd begun thinking of it that
way himself. Certainly easier than referring to it as the Whatever.

           
 
After an uneventful trans-Atlantic trip, the
Virgin had arrived in New York late last night. He and Carrie were on the docks
first thing this morning to pick her up. She breezed through customs and
together they spirited her crate through the front door to St. Joe's basement,
through the Loaves and Fishes kitchen, and down here to the subcellar. The old
coal furnace that used to rule this nether realm had been dismantled and carted
off when the diocese switched the church to gas heat. That left a wide open
central space and a separate coal room that used to be fed by a chute from the
alley. Carrie had chosen the old coal room as the perfect hiding place. It was
ten by ten, the chute had been sealed up long ago, and it had a door, although
the door had no lock. Until now.

           
 
Dan opened the door and stuck his face inside.
He experienced an instant of disorientation, as if he were peering into the
past, intruding upon an ancient scene from the Roman catacombs. A functioning
light fixture was set in the ceiling, but it was off. Instead, flickering candlelight
filled the old coal room, casting wavering shadows against the walls and
ceiling. Dan had lugged one of the folding tables from the mission down here a
couple of days ago and placed it where Carrie had directed, and that had been
just about the last he'd seen of her until this morning. She'd spent every
spare moment of the interval feverishly dusting, scrubbing, and dressing up the
room, draping the table with a blanket, setting up wall sconces for the
candles, appropriating flowers left behind in the church after weddings or
funerals, making a veritable shrine out of the coal room.

           
 
A short while ago they'd opened the crate and
he'd helped her place the Virgin's board-stiff body on the table. Carrie had
been fussing with her ever since.

           
 
"I said, the latch is in place, Carrie.
Want to come see?"

           
 
She was bending over the body where it rested
on the blanket-draped table, straightening her robe. She didn't look up.

           
 
"That's all right. I know you did a great
job."

           
 
"I wouldn't say it's a great job," Dan
said, leaning back and surveying his work. "Adequate's more like it. Won't
keep out anybody really determined to get in, but it should deter the idly
curious."

           
 
"That's what we want," she said,
straightening. She turned toward him and held out her hand. "Come
see."

           
 
Dan moved to her side and laid an arm across
her shoulders. A warm tingle spread over his skin as he felt her arm slip
around his back. This was the closest they'd been since leaving Israel.

           
 
"Look at her," she said. "Isn't
she beautiful?"

           
 
Dan didn't know how to answer that. He saw the
waxy body of an old woman with wild hair and mandarin fingernails, surrounded
by candles and wilting flowers. He knew Carrie was seeing something else. Her
eyes were wide with wonder and devotion, like a young mother gazing at her
newborn first child.

           
 
"You did a wonderful job with this place.
No one would ever know it was once a coal room."

           
 
"And no one should ever know
otherwise," she said. 'This is our little secret, right?"

           
 
"Right. Our
little
secret. Our
big
secret
is us." Dan turned and wrapped his other arm around her. "And
speaking of us . . ."

           
 
Carrie slipped from his embrace. "No,
Dan. Not now. Not here. Not with . . . her."

           
 
Dan tried to hide his hurt. Just being in the
same room with Carrie excited him. Touching her drove him crazy. Used to drive
her crazy too. What was wrong?

           
 
"When then? Where? Is your
brother—?"

           
 
"Let's talk about it some other time,
okay? Right now I've got a lot still left to do."

           
 
"Like what?"

           
 
"I have to cut those nails, and fix her
hair."

           
 
"She's not going on display,
Carrie."

           
 
"I know, but I want to take care of
her."

           
 
"She's not a—" Dan bit off the rest
of the sentence.

           
 
"Not a what?"

           
 
He'd been about to say Barbie doll but had cut
himself off in time.

           
 
"Nothing. She did fine in that cave with
nobody fussing over her."

           
 
"But she's
my
responsibility now," Carrie said, staring at the Virgin.

           
 
"Okay," Dan said, repressing a sigh.
"Okay. But not your only responsibility. We've still got meals to serve
upstairs. I'm sure she wouldn't want you to let the guests down."

           
 
"You go ahead," she said. "I'll
be up in a few minutes."

           
 
"Good." Dan wanted out of here. The
low ceiling, the dead flowers . . . the atmosphere was suddenly oppressive.
"You remember the lock combination?"

           
 
"Twelve, thirty-six, fourteen."

           
 
"Right. See you upstairs."

           
 
He watched Carrie, waiting for her to look his
way, but she had eyes only for the Virgin.

           
Shaking his head, Dan turned away.
This wouldn't last, he told himself. Carrie would come around soon. Once it
seeped into her devotion-fogged brain that her Virgin was merely an inert lump,
she'd return to her old self.

           
 
But there was going to be an aching void in
his life until she did.

           
 
Carrie listened to Dan's shoes scuff up the
stone steps as she pulled the Ziploc bag from her pocket and removed the
scissors from it.

           
 
Poor Dan, she thought, looking down at the
Virgin. He doesn't understand.

           
 
Neither did she, really. All she knew was that
everything had changed for her. She could look back on her fourteen years in
the order—fully half of her life—and understand for the first time what had
brought her to the convent, what had prompted her to take a vow of chastity and
then willfully break it.

           
 
"It was you, Mother," she said,
whispering to the Virgin as she began to trim the ragged ends of dry gray hair
that protruded from under the wimple. "I came to the order because of you.
You are the Eternal Virgin and I wanted to be like you. Yet I could never be
like you because my virginity was already gone . . . stolen from me. But you
already know the story."

           
 
She'd spoken to the Blessed Virgin countless
times in her prayers, trying to explain herself. She'd always felt that Mother
Mary would understand. Now that they were face to face, she was compelled to
tell her once more, out loud, just to be sure she knew.

           
 
"I wanted a new start, Mother. I wanted
to be born anew with that vow. I wanted to be a spiritual virgin from that day
forward. But I couldn't be. No matter how many showers I took and scrubbed
myself raw, no matter how many novenas I made and plenary indulgences I
received, I still felt
dirty."

           
 
She slipped the hair trimmings into the
plastic bag. These cuttings could not be tossed into a Dumpster or even flushed
away. They were sacred. They had to remain here with the Virgin.

           
 
"I hope you can understand the way I
felt, Mother, because I can't imagine you ever feeling dirty or unworthy. But
the dirtiness was not the real problem. It was the hopelessness that came with
it—the inescapable certainty that I could never be clean again. That's what did
me in, Mother. I knew what your Son promised, that we have but to believe and
ask forgiveness and we shall be cleansed. I knew the words, I understood them
in my brain, but in my heart was the conviction that His forgiveness was meant
for everyone but Carolyn Ferris. Because Carolyn Ferris had done the
unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unpardonable."

           
 
She kept cutting, tucking the loose trimmed
ends back under the Virgin's wimple.

           
 
"I've been to enough seminars and read
enough self-help books to know that I was sabotaging myself—I didn't feel
worthy of being a good nun, so I made damn sure I never could be one. I regret
that. Terribly. And even more, I regret dragging Dan down with me. He's a good
man and a good priest, but because of me he broke his own vow, and now he's a
sinning priest."

           
 
Carrie felt tears welling in her eyes.
Damn, I've got a lot to answer for.

           
 
"But all that's changed now," she
said, blinking and sniffing. "Finding you is a sign, isn't it? It means
I'm not a hopeless case. It means He thinks I can hold to my vows and make
myself worthy to guard you and care for you. And if He thinks it, then it must
be so."

           
 
She trimmed away the last vagrant strands of
hair, then sealed them in the Ziploc bag.

           
 
"There," she said, stepping back and
smiling. "You look better already."

           
 
She glanced down at the Virgin's long, curved
fingernails. They were going to need a lot of work, more work than she had time
for now.

           
 
"I've got to go now," she said.
"Got to do my part for the least of His children, but I'll be back. I'll
be back every day. And every day you'll see a new and better me. I'm going to
be worthy of you, Mother. That is a promise—one I'll keep."

           
 
She just had to find the right way to tell Dan
that the old Carrie was gone and he couldn't have the new one. He was a good
man. The best. She knew he'd understand and accept the new her . . .
eventually. But she had to find a way to tell him without hurting him.

           
 
She placed the bag of clippings under the
table that constituted the Virgin's bier, then kissed her wimple and blew out
the candles. She snapped the combination lock closed and hurried upstairs to
help with lunch.

           
 
Carrie was adding a double handful of sliced
carrots to the last pot of soup when she heard someone calling her name from
the Big Room. She walked to the front to see what it was.

           
 
Augusta, a stooped, reed-thin, wrinkled
volunteer who worked the serving line three days a week, stood at the rear end
of the counter with Pilgrim.