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“Yes, there was. I have it with me. That and the rest of his stuff. Not the clothes. The books, pamphlets, notebooks.”

Clare lifted a curious eyebrow. “For me?” she asked.

“I thought I'd bring what I had for show and tell.”

“If you have no use for them,” Angelotti suggested, “I'd be.willing to take them. I've been trying to collect a small archive of materials. Our members' writing, their personal libraries, that sort of thing.”

“And the Greek book is of some value, you think?”

He shrugged. “Only to a specialist in the field. A Gnostic catechism, I believe. I know Rosenzweig had such a work.”

“You're a Dominican, I gather.”

“Formerly, I should say. In my own eyes, still. But officially defrocked—like
all our members. As you have learned, our views are not welcome in the church.”

We'd finished dessert. Oddly enough, Clare, who was never the most efficient of hostesses, went to work quickly clearing dishes. Minutes later, she reappeared wearing her jacket. “There's a flick I have to catch tonight. Plus a party after, where they'll try to get me drunk enough to write a favorable review. I'm sure you and Eddy will find plenty to talk about.”

I was startled to see her leaving. “I thought … ”

She came close and put a hand gently on my cheek. “I think you should talk to Eddy first. I've heard it all. We'll be sure to chat before you leave. I'll try to be back by midnight. Wait for me.” She rose on tiptoe to brush a kiss across my cheek. She was wearing perfume, my Clare! Then, in my ear, she whispered, “Trust him.”

So I found myself alone with an Italian monk who seemed perfectly at home in Clare's apartment. He knew where the liquor was kept, fetched a few bottles, and poured us each a cognac. “She is quite odd, Clare,” he said. “She listens to me, but I think she only half believes—or less than that. Sometimes she simply laughs. But then she asks to hear more.”

I settled across from him in a deep leather love seat, a coffee table between us. “She loves film,” I explained. “I suspect you and I know something about that love she'd rather not hear. Like the betrayed wife who wants and doesn't want to know what her husband's been up to.”

He nodded. “So I gather. A pity. She could help us.”

“The only member of Oculus Dei I ever met was a madman,” I said. “Are you a madman?”

“Would I be Clare's friend if I were?”

“Are you going to tell me about medieval movies?”

He laughed. “But this I think you already know about. The Templars' magic lantern, Manichaean flip-books… ”

“All leading up to Max Castle.”

“The master of the art. Now, thanks to your diligent labors, restored to posthumous prominence and once again ready to smuggle his heresies into the public consciousness.”

“And Simon Dunkle?”

‘ “Ah, there
you
may have something to tell
me.”
He reached for an inside pocket and drew out an envelope. My letter to Clare. Laying it on the coffee table, he said, “Clare took the liberty of letting me
read it. She thought it would help.” Angelotti was astute enough to notice my resentment. “I did try to skip over the more personal matters. In any case, do bear in mind that I am a priest. I have some respect for people's confidences.”

I reminded him that I hadn't asked him to hear my confession, but let the issue slide. He was a courteous man with a compassionate air. And Clare had told me to trust him. “You didn't know about Simon?” I asked.

“Only a little. That he was the great new hope of the orphans, their first attempt to train a major director since Castle, this I have heard. But his work—what I know of it—seems still very marginal, very underground. How seriously to take it, I have no idea.”

Before I told him what I knew, I decided to go back to the beginning. The remote, original, primordial, once-upon-a-time beginning, if he could escort me that far. “Where does it all start—the orphans, the heresy? Seventeenth century? Thirteenth century?”

Angelotti settled into his chair and took a long sip of cognac, then cast his eyes to the ceiling. “How far back …? For our purposes, or at least
my
purposes, we would need to reach back to Simon's namesake. You have come across him, Simon Magus, Simon the Magician?”

I had. I gave Angelotti a quick read-out. “The original Christian heretic, a rival of Jesus himself, taken by some to be the Antichrist.” Angelotti nodded. “That's quite a way to go, isn't it? Two thousand years?”

He gave a soft chuckle. “Well, if we were to believe the dualists … ”

I knew the term but asked him to explain it as he understood it.

“That is what we call our heretical friends, making no distinction among their many sects and cults and schools. There have been many religious dualists, but all share one central doctrine.
Duo sunt.
There are Two. Two gods, not one. All the rest follows from this. And for them, this leads back to the beginning of time. A cosmic condition. As a human teaching, it can be found in the oldest superstitions—and in the latest news of the day.”

“The latest news?”

“The belief in the ultimate enemy. It is all around us. The communists. The Mafia. The blacks. The Jews. The street gangs. These are all variations on the ancient theme. Good Us versus Wicked Them.
That, of course, is what the dualists play upon, that fear, perhaps as old as the shadows in the ancestral cave. What lies hidden there, eh? What lurks in every dark corner, waiting to pounce and kill? Every child is born with that same dread of the wholly other. And from it grows the great hatred and the great despair: the conviction that evil is invincible, that we have no power against it. It is the devil's trump card.”

He sighed and sipped his drink again, then asked whether I cared if he smoked. He took out a crooked cheroot, dipped it in his cognac, lit up, and relaxed into a deep drag. “These excellent little luxuries … I have a weakness for them.”

“All right, then,” I said, “starting with Simon the Magician. Are you saying the orphans date back that far?”

“Not as orphans, no. But some of their predecessors do. And as far back as that, we can find the little flip-books used as a teaching device, a catechism. The world as the struggle of the Dark God against the God of Light. The early church did all it could to root out the heresy wherever it appeared.”

“But it failed.”

“Alas, yes. There was always a corner of the world where some small infestation of dualists could take shelter, especially by moving east or into the deserts. Later, the Moslem world proved more hospitable to their teachings, and from there they could make continued forays into Europe, Southern Italy, the Balkans, the south of France.”

All this was the background to the great Albigensian crusade. We could skip that; it was a history with which I'd made myself familiar. “And after the crusade, then what becomes of them?”

“The struggle against the Albigenses—that was the most determined effort the church undertook. And still, we know that certain Cathar elements survived.”

“By ‘elements' you mean people.”

“Yes, people.”

“Whom the church would have slaughtered, burned … ”

A sadness came into his eyes, but his voice was firm with no note of apology in it. “They were brutal times.”

“Would you have preferred to see the crusade succeed in wiping out every last Cathar?”

His eyes held me with their candor, the look of a man who was entrusting me with a terrible admission. “The persecution came
within inches of its goal. If it had succeeded, that might have been for the best. This way, the church has the blood on its hands, but without the benefit.”

“The benefit? Of what? Massacring women, children … ”

Angelotti didn't waver, but the sorrow in his voice was unmistakable. “You know what the dualists teach. That the physical world is evil, the earth we live upon is hell. It is an obscene teaching. Suppose all this could have been blotted out seven centuries ago by that one act of unspeakable cruelty, a single righteous blow. Would you now look back and regret that it had happened?”

There was a cunning inflection to the question, almost as if Angelotti knew where his thrust would lodge. I thought at once of Simon's
Sad Sewer Babies.
True enough, if the crusade had succeeded, the world might have been spared this ugly descent into nihilism. Was that what I was defending here, Simon's right to make life look vile beyond description? The best answer I could come up with was, “I don't believe you can ever wipe out an idea by killing the people who hold it. Surely the idea would have survived somehow, somewhere, no matter how much blood was spilled.”

Angelotti nodded gravely. “A good answer. So let us agree that old Pope Innocent was profoundly misguided when he launched the crusade. So too the members of my own order, who, as you know, organized the Inquisition. Please understand I am not here to speak in behalf of this ancient atrocity. At the time, St. Francis hoped to convert the heretics by kindness and preaching. I would like to believe that would have been my choice as well.”

I backed off, realizing there was nothing to be gained by reviling Angelotti, who had, after all, been cast out by the church. “So then,” I went on, “the orphans trace back to the surviving Cathars.”

“We can be more specific. They descend from three elders who fled before the sack of Montségur, March 16, 1244… .”

“St. Arnaud the Survivor … and two others,” I added. Angelotti gave me an impressed and quizzical stare. I answered the implied question. “There's a painting over the altar in the chapel in Zurich.”

“You have seen it?”

“Yes. It was explained to me by a Dr. Byx.”

“Byx, yes. An important man. And he told you …?”

“Nothing much. He was pretty close-mouthed.”

“The story is quite dramatic. A hairbreadth escape in the dead of night before the crusaders strike, and then the three old men flee to
three widely scattered cities. Toledo, Aix-la-Chapelle, possibly Prague. Some say they took with them a great Cathar treasure. Others say they fled with nothing but the clothes they wore to live in poverty, begging along the roads. Gradually, small troops of refugees, hungry, ragged, frightened, find their way to the elders. The largest congregation may be no more than a dozen. This is the saving remnant. By agreement the elders meet again secretly three years later in a village near Barcelona—safe territory. They meet on the anniversary of the razing of Montségur. A fateful occasion. From that meeting—the Council of Gerona, as the dualists remember it—the risen Cathar Church takes its origin. There all the ground plans are laid. Or rather, I should say,
under
ground plans. A crucial decision is made. The church of the Albigenses will become clandestine, a church in exile, never again revealing its existence, never again openly recruiting or teaching. Yet it will continue its mission, which is to man the front line against the Evil God.

“But how to do this with the Inquisition still so doggedly at work? Here the elders came up with a daring stratagem. They would train a small elite corps of young Cathars to infiltrate one of the knightly orders. The Templars were chosen because of their wealth and power. But, as you know, the papacy soon detected the scheme. It does not hesitate. It strikes the Templars a death blow. Even so, some of the survivors flee to other orders, the Hospitalers, the Knights of Malta. Here again they are hunted down. Eventually this strategy is given up. The military orders were too prominent, too close to the Roman Curia.

“So there follows a period, some two centuries, when we know little of how or where the heretics survived. We assume in small, scattered bands, often passing themselves off as orthodox Catholics. Finally, in the seventeenth century, in the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, they emerge into the light once more, this time in the guise of a charitable institution. The Orphans of the Storm. This becomes their new public identity—and their mission. To save the children. And in the wake of the wars, there were all too many orphans throughout Europe waiting to be saved. How commendable that these good Christian souls should come forward to care for the innocent. In the confusion of the times, nobody could any longer be certain of anyone's religious orientation. There were so many sects, so many wild-eyed prophets in the streets, so many millennial cults. Quite often the orphans were mistaken for a Catholic religious order—a confusion
that continues today and which they encourage for protective coloring.

“In any case they are doing so much good, who bothers to examine their credentials? So they slip back into history. As it turns out, the orphanages were a solution to more than one problem for the dualists. They allowed our friends to recruit new members at a tender young age, when the mind is ripe to be formed. For you realize, all the orphans are schooled to become Cathars. Think of it. A church that has had total control over the education and upbringing of its every member for four centuries. And then, there was the question of concupiscence. You're familiar with the Cathar teaching?”

“Yes. They seek to become ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of God.' Meaning, no sex.”

Angelotti corrected me. “Not quite. Oh yes, there are Cathars—the so-called Perfect of the faith—who deny themselves all recourse to sex, as do our own celibate clergy in the church. But the remainder of the flock are permitted to indulge. A necessary concession to the frailties of the flesh. Indeed, I am told that Cathar sexuality can achieve the most baroque extremes. A sort of western Tantric yoga. You understand that the Cathars are not prudish about the pleasures of the flesh. No, it is procreation they reject. That is where their church and ours part company most decisively. Indeed, if you have ever wondered why our church is so fiercely opposed to contraception, it is because we regard it as a Cathar ploy. It is not a victory we intend to allow them. So you see their position is, sex yes, but babies no. This creates an obvious problem. How do our friends replenish their numbers generation after generation?”