Flicker (66 page)

Brother Justin's smile was now tinged with a deepening melancholy. “You must read your scriptures more closely. The prophet Seth tells us that even the one true God despairs of our condition. ‘For this world which thou dost inhabit is itself become the realm of darkness, and this very flesh that clothes thee is thy perdition.' ”

We walked from the studio back to the cabana. The path led downhill about a mile over unlighted ground. Brother Justin, carrying a flashlight, led the way. We didn't say much. But just before we
reached the stake fence from behind which I could hear bursts of repellent laughter from Humper and Slutty, a final question occurred to me.

“Did Max Castle ever qualify as one of the prophets of your faith?”

“I understand that there were high hopes for him in the early days,” Brother Justin answered as he unlocked the gate. “But later … well, it is really the role of our elders to designate the prophets in their own good time. So who can say?”

Sharkey, Jeanette, and I didn't get away from St. James School until after eleven o'clock that evening. This time Sharkey occupied the backseat, too stoned to be trusted at the wheel on the rough, winding road back to the beach. I could tell that our visit had had something like a traumatic effect upon Jeanette. She sat in a troubled silence for most of the trip, her sullenness contrasting starkly with Sharkey's carryings-on behind us. He was passing the time at one of his favorite strung-out entertainments: whistling the soundtrack scores of Maria Montez's greatest hits. Finally, after several miles of quiet, Jeanette turned to me. “Surely this movie we have seen, it will never be shown.” She was clearly asking me to say it wouldn't.

“Oh yes it will,” I said. “With a few minor cuts here and there. In a couple of years, it'll be on prime-time television. Oh yes. It will be a great success, sorry to say.”

Sharkey, picking up our remarks, plunked his chin on the top of the seat between us. “Great flick, great flick! Didn't you think it was a great flick?”

I teased him a little. “Do you think Clare would think it was a great flick?”

Sharkey let out a raspy-watery little smirk. “Oh Christ, Clare! Would she have her ass in an uproar. All night long, I can tell you. Boy oh boy, would I like to tie her to a chair and make her watch the whole thing.” He gave a wicked laugh. “But what about it, old pal? Didn't you think it was great? I thought you thought it was great. Didn't you think it was groovy-great?”

“Within a certain, special critical category, it was supreme,” I answered.

“What's he sayin'?” Sharkey asked Jeanette. “What kind of categal critigory?”

“Like public executions,” I said. “Or lynchings. When the mob comes back, it tells everybody it was a great lynching. Or like the
Aztecs, at the end of one of their ceremonies, maybe they used to say ‘That was a great human sacrifice. The skin came off all in one piece.' Groovy!”

“It will never be a success in France,” Jeanette insisted.

“Wrong,” I said. “Victor will love it. They'll all love it. The Semiologists, the Deconstructionists, what's his name, Vulkoloff… Mark my words. Simon Dunkle will be the rage of the
rive gauche
by next year.”

“But why?” She really wanted to know.

“Wrong question,” I corrected. “These days we ask ‘Why not?' Why not mayhem and torture and bondage? Why not bloody murder and genocide and apocalyptic fun and games? That's why. Because Simon Dunkle is the prophet of
why not.
And you and I are going to be the first to introduce him to the world that's waiting to hear from him.”

“The extermination of the Cathars. Jonny, my lad, that is one helluva story! Blood and guts, sword and fire, torture and mayhem. What more could you ask for?”

Faustus Carstad was UCLA's medieval specialist, one of the school's professorial luminaries. Now approaching his emeritus years, he still ranked as an internationally distinguished scholar—though it was rumored that younger members of his department regarded him as an antiquated drum-and-trumpet historian. Faustus would have been the first to admit to the charge, and without apologies. He fairly embodied the indictment. A vast, Falstaffian hulk of a man with a voice that teetered on the edge of a war whoop, he could easily have passed, with a change of costume, for one of the Viking chieftains to whom he proudly traced his ancestry. Barbarians were his kind of people.

Faustus brought a bracing Hemingway air to the academy, the same gruff masculine bravado, the same keen eye for physical prowess. Literally
an
eye. The right one. The other had been left at Okinawa, where he was credited with acts of genuine heroism. The patch he wore over the hollow socket had gained him the nickname Captain Kidd among his students. The piratical persona was more than a matter of appearance; it carried over into a cut-and-thrust lecture style that never failed to wallow in the gory details of his subject matter. The admonition he issued on the first day of class had become legendary. “History,” he would growl, “takes a strong stomach—at least the way you're gonna learn it here. Any of you young ladies who might be inclined to toss your lunch, be warned. Violence, vermin, villainy—and plenty of dirt. That's what medieval Europe was all about, and don't let any of my pantywaist colleagues tell you different. Dark Ages? They were dark as hell. That's what makes ‘em worth studying.”

Even in that period, when the schools were seething with antiwar agitation, his caveat had the predictable effect; it made him one of the biggest draws on campus. As did the reputation for boozing and womanizing, which (to his obvious satisfaction) was pursuing him into his retirement. When Faustus was at his most ebulliently histrionic—as when he offered his expert demonstration in the proper use of the broadsword for splitting one's opponent from gizzard to crotch—you could have sold tickets for the performance.

Dr. Byx had told me I would find no trustworthy information about his church. Maybe so, but that didn't keep me from trying. No sooner had the fall term begun than I went looking for Faustus to learn all I could about the Cathars. Perhaps what he told me was, by Dr. Byx's standards, unreliable; but it was surely engaging. In fact, bloodcurdling. Which made Faustus all the more eager to hold forth. By the time I approached him I'd managed to fill in the general outlines of the story. Brother Justin's books had helped, though they were only a start; I quickly read beyond them. But nothing I found in the dry, scholarly prose of three languages did more to bring the matter to life for me than a few hours with Faustus. “The western world's first holocaust,” was the way he described the fate of the Cathars, at once picking up my query with the sort of gusto that all things bloodthirsty brought out in him. “You have to come all the way down to Herr Hitler to find anything that remotely compares. If Pope Innocent (lovely name for the man!) and his minions had had their way, there
wouldn't have been one hank of heretical hair left over. The Cathars were called Albigensians back then—after one of their strongholds. Albi. Spectacular siege. Half the town starved. The rest went in the bloodbath. The Provencals had a gorgeous civilization going down there in the south of France. Effete, but gorgeous. Chivalry, troubadours, all that sort of thing, the first lamentable steps away from a healthy state of savagery. By the time the Holy Father and the Inquisitors got finished defending Christian orthodoxy, the place was a smoldering ruin. Carcassonne, Foix, Montségur. If you travel the area, you can still see the scars all over the landscape. Even Toulouse, the cradle of courtly love. Gutted. But why are you interested in this, my boy? As I recall, you were a lousy history student.”

I was hoping he wouldn't remember. As an undergraduate, I had, with maximum reluctance, taken a required course from Faustus. It turned out to be a delightful surprise, taught with wit and Faustus' own patented taste for sensational sanguinity. But at the time I was too absorbed in film studies to give the class more than minimal attention. Confronted with flunking, I pled with him for make-up assignments; that's what he recollected—probably with some suspicion that the paper I submitted had been plagiarized. He was more than half right about that. The work was mainly Clare's, something on Joan of Arc that had more to do with the Dreyer film than real history. But it served to get me through. Charitably, Faustus had given me a C –.

“I'm studying a filmmaker,” I explained and then elaborated not very truthfully along lines that I thought might pique his interest. “He was planning a movie about the Albigensian Crusade.”

“Was he, now? Anybody I might know?”

“His name was Max Castle.”

“Never heard of him. Should I?”

“Not really. German, nineteen-thirties. A minor figure. I'm sort of discovering him.”

“Man shows good taste. Somebody should've turned the crusade into a major motion picture years ago. De Mille, John Ford … somebody like that. Lots of action, lots of carnage. Sam Fuller, now there's a
man's
director.
Fixed Bayonets
—ever see that?” He gave a grumpy little laugh. “Probably you think that's crap.”

No, not just crap.
Sad-little-male-delusions-of-genital-grandeur
crap. Clare's precise words, in which I concurred, but not outspokenly
at that particularly sensitive moment. “Actually, Fuller is highly regarded in France.”

“That's supposed to mean something to me?”

“Well, I only …”

“Last Frenchy that had some balls was Napoleon—and he was half Italian. Since then, it's been all downhill.” He gave a bitter little snort. “Dien Bien Phu. Hell, you don't surrender just because you lost. That's just when things get interesting.” He touched a match to the soggy cigar he'd been gnawing since I entered his office and paused to suck off a deep drag. On the rebound, his lungs blurted out a harsh, wet cough. “These are gonna be the death of me,” he half grumbled, half wheezed as he scrunched the butt in a rusty metal ashtray that looked like part of an antique helmet. The mashed butt, however, went right back between his teeth. “Sonny, did you ever think about damnation?” he asked, fixing me with his one hawkish eye. “I mean
seriously?
”

I realized he'd changed the subject. We were back with the Cathars. “You have to understand,” he went on, “in the Middle Ages, theology wasn't just airy-fairy talk. It was the principal weapon of psychological warfare. Especially when it got round to discussions of perdition. The worm that never dies, the fire that's never to be quenched, the devil's poker rammed up your ass from here to eternity. Imagine what kind of clout that gives you in a society of piss-poor, moronic peasants. You've heard the one about power flowing from the muzzle of a gun? Believe me, kiddo, that's nothing compared to the power you can wring out of the muzzle of hell. The moral theology of damnation was the H-bomb in the church's arsenal.”

He paused to bring forth a bottle of brandy and two glasses. “Officially against the law on university grounds,” he reminded me as he poured. “But we don't care about that, do we, my boy? Hell, forming the minds of the young is thirsty work.” I accepted the drink, but before I'd finished, he was two ahead of me.

“As of
A.D
. 1300,” he continued, “the Church of Rome was managing an ecclesiastical monopoly that stretched from Ultima Thule to the Bay of Naples. But there was competition in the field—the Albigenses, who were running a rival firm in the most prosperous religious market in Christendom. Their own liturgy, hierarchy, sacraments, a one-stop, full-service operation. They were signing up the richest lords and ladies of Langue d'Oc. The peons too. Why?
Because the Albigenses took their religion to heart. Whereas, most of what passed for clergy in the Roman Church was a herd of hocuspocus drunken dimwits who couldn't tell the Apostles' Creed from moldy cheese. Most of them had a couple of concubines on the premises, a raft of kids to feed. God knows what they were getting up to with the female penitents in the confessional. Now on the other hand, the Cathar priests, the Parfaits as they were pleased to call themselves, they were living the true Christian life—if you can call that living. No meat, no wine, no creature comforts. Above all no sex. That's what Cathar means. ‘Pure'—as in puritan. Meaning, I suppose, they were a batch of obnoxious, cockless prigs. But they were hitting the old pope where it hurt—square in the bank account.”

I'd already learned from my reading that the great Albigensian Crusade held its place as one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of human indecency. D. W. Griffith might have included it as a fifth episode in
Intolerance.
But Faustus was putting an angle on the tale that I hadn't considered. “You believe the whole issue was about money?”

“Damn right it was. Biggest land grab of the Middle Ages. A onetwo punch. First you call in the crusaders to rape and pillage and just generally mow down the armed opposition. Then you send in the Inquisitors to barbecue the defenseless survivors. Following which, the victorious forces of the Church Militant lined up at the trough. Mass confiscation. That's what happened in the wake of every persecution. Estates, treasure, livestock, castles. That's how the law worked. A heretic's property escheated to the church. Or in this case to the church and King Philip so-called the Fair. Crafty son of a bitch cut one sweet deal with Pope Innocent. He picked up a prize piece of real estate called the whole of southern France—which had only dubiously belonged to the Capetian crown heretofore. Plus the wealth of the Templars, who got railroaded into oblivion as heretical fellow travelers.”

“You don't believe the Templars were Cathars?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. We've got no hard evidence. Not that King Philip cared about that. Templar gold is what he was after. And there was plenty of that. Templars were the first gentile bankers, you know. Along with the Venetians. Handled the whole cash flow between western Europe and the Holy Land. The trade was worth billions. You can just bet the pope couldn't wait to get his hands on assets like that. But the Templars commanded a lot of respect all across
Christendom. Damn good fighters, and—for the most part—true ascetics. The Poor Knights of Christ, that was their original name. Warrior monks. They had to be discredited before they could be plundered. Holy Father did a damn good job of that. He had the Templars vilified in seven shades of lavender. Witchcraft, pederasty, diabolism, blasphemy …”He snorted derisively. “Actually pushed it to the point of diminishing returns. They pinned such a reputation for black magic on old Jacques de Molay that after they burned him on the Îie de la Cité—that wouldVe been in 1314—some of the spectators snuck across the river in the dead of night to collect his ashes. Made a fertility potion out of them.”