I Am God (18 page)

That was where the letter ended. The captain, too, was white by the time he had finished reading. He put the sheet of paper down, put his elbows on the desk, and hid his face in his hands. His voice was muffled as he made one last attempt to convince himself that what he had just read wasn’t true.

‘Mr Wade, you could have written this yourself. How do I know this isn’t another of your hoaxes?’

‘The TNT and the napalm. I checked. Nobody mentioned it, either on TV or in the newspapers. I assume they don’t yet know about it. If you can confirm that was the cause of the explosion, I think that’s sufficient proof.’

Russell had said this to Vivien, who was pale and didn’t seem able to speak. All three of them were thinking the same thing. If what was written in the letter was true, it meant they were at war. And the man who had started this war had, on his own, the power of a small army.

‘And there’s another thing. I don’t know how useful it might be.’

Again Russell Wade put his hand in the inside pocket of his jacket. This time he took out a bloodstained photograph. He held it out to the detective.

‘Along with the paper, Ziggy gave me this.’

Vivien took the photograph and stared at it for a moment or two. A kind of electric shock seemed to go through her.

‘Wait a moment. I’ll be right back.’

She disappeared into the corridor, barely leaving Russell and Captain Bellew time to wonder what she was up to. There was only one flight of stairs between the captain’s office and
her desk, so it didn’t take her long to pick up the yellow folder and get back. She closed the door and approached the desk.

‘A couple of days ago, during demolition work at a site on 23rd Street, a body was found inside a cavity wall. According to the ME, it had been there for about fifteen years. We didn’t find any significant clues, apart from one thing.’

Assuming that the captain already knew most of this, Russell realized that Detective Vivien Light’s presentation was for his benefit. That meant she was respecting their pact.

‘On the ground next to the body,’ she continued, ‘we found a document holder containing two photographs. Here they are.’

She gave the captain the black and white enlargements that were in the folder. Bellew examined them for a few moments. When Vivien was certain he had digested them, she passed him the photograph Russell had shown her.

‘And this is what Ziggy gave Mr Wade.’

As soon as he saw it, the captain couldn’t stop himself crying out, ‘Holy fucking shit!’

He continued looking from one photograph to the other for what seemed like for ever. Then he leaned across the desk and held them out to Russell. In one, there was a young man in uniform standing in front of a tank: an image that looked as if it dated from the Vietnam war. In the other, the same young man, in civilian clothes, was holding a big black cat up to the camera, a cat that seemed to have one leg missing.

Now Russell knew why Detective Light had behaved the way she had, and why the captain was so surprised. The young man and the cat in the photograph found next to a body that had been dead for fifteen years were the same as those in the photograph Ziggy Stardust had put in his hands before dying.

I
am
God
…

Ever since Father Michael McKean had opened his eyes, those three words had been echoing in his head as if they were on some kind of endless tape loop. Up until last night there had still been, somewhere inside him, a small hope that it was all the ramblings of a madman, ramblings that hurt no one but the madman himself. But reason and instinct, which were usually in conflict, told him it was all true.

And in the sunlight everything seemed clearer and more final.

He remembered the end of that strange conversation in the confessional, when the man, after making that terrible declaration, had changed his tone and become soft spoken, conspiratorial, uttering words of menace in a voice that artfully combined guilt and innocence.

‘Now I’m going to stand up and leave. And you won’t follow me, or try to stop me. If you did, the consequences would be very unpleasant. For you and the people who are dear to you. You can trust me on that, just as you can trust everything I’ve said.’

‘Wait. Don’t go. At least tell me why—’

The voice interrupted him, once again firm and precise. ‘I thought I’d made myself clear. I have nothing to explain.
Only announcements to make. And you’ll get them before anyone else.’

The man continued with his ravings as if they were the most natural thing in the world.

‘This time I reunited darkness and light. Next time, I will bring together earth and water.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’ll understand, in time.’

The voice was full of a calm, inexorable menace. Terrified that he would disappear at any moment, Father McKean asked him a last desperate question.

‘Why have you come to me? Why me?’

‘Because you need me more than anyone else. I know that.’

There followed a silence that, coming from a man who claimed to be the master of eternity, seemed infinite. Then he uttered his final words. His farewell to a world that was doomed.

‘Ego sum Alpha et Omega.’

The man stood up and left, almost noiselessly, a rustle of green beyond the grille, a glimpse of a face in the
semi-darkness
. Father McKean sat there alone, breathing with difficulty but devoid of fear, because what he was feeling was so big and so nameless it left no room for anything else.

He left the confessional white faced, and when Paul came to find him he was startled by his pained look.

‘What’s the matter, Michael, aren’t you feeling well?’

He didn’t see any point in lying. In any case, after what had happened he really didn’t have the strength to celebrate the noon mass. Mass was a moment of joy and togetherness, and the thoughts he had inside him could only contaminate it.

‘No. To tell the truth, I don’t feel well at all.’

‘Okay. Go home. I’ll take the service.’

‘Thanks, Paul.’

Paul had had some visitors from outside the parish, and he found him a ride back to Joy. A man Father McKean didn’t know introduced himself as Willy Del Carmine and pointed to a large car. He could barely remember the colour. For the whole of the brief journey he was silent, looking out the window, emerging from his thoughts only to give directions to the driver. He didn’t even recognize the road he had travelled along a thousand times.

When he was in the forecourt, hearing the noise of the car as it drove away, he realized he had not even thanked or said goodbye to the man who had been so kind as to give him a ride.

John had been in the garden when he saw the car pull up, and now he joined Father McKean. He was a man of uncommon sensitivity and a keen ability to read people’s moods.

Father McKean knew he would realize something was wrong. He had already sensed it in the tone of his voice when he had phoned from Saint Benedict to say he was on his way back. As if to confirm the opinion he had of him, John approached him now as if afraid he was being intrusive.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Everything’s fine, John. Thank you.’

His colleague did not insist, confirming another of his qualities, discretion. They knew each other too well by now. He knew John was confident that, when the time was right, his friend Michael McKean would open up to him. He wasn’t to know how different things were this time.

The problem was insoluble.

And it was the source of an anguish he had never felt before. In the past he had talked with other priests who had
been told about crimes in the confessional. Now he understood their turmoil, their sense, as human beings, that they were in conflict with their roles as ministers of the church they had chosen to serve.

The seal of the confessional was inviolable. That was why it was forbidden to betray anyone who unburdened himself there.

Such a violation was not permitted even where the confessor’s life or other people’s lives had been threatened. The priest who violated the secrecy of the confessional would be automatically subject to the excommunication known as
latae
sententiae,
which could be lifted only by the Pope. And that was something the Holy Father had rarely done over the course of the centuries.

If the sin confessed was a criminal act, the confessor could suggest or demand of the penitent, as an indispensable condition for absolution, that he hand himself in to the authorities. That was all he could do, though: he certainly couldn’t inform the police himself, not even indirectly.

There were cases where part of the confession could be revealed to others, but always with the permission of the person involved and always without revealing his identity. This was valid for some sins that could not be forgiven without the authorization of the Bishop or the Pope. All this, however, supposed one crucial thing. The request for absolution was dependent on repentance, or the desire to free the soul from an unbearable weight. In this particular case, Father McKean was dealing with neither.

A man had declared war on society.

Destroying buildings, claiming victims, sowing grief and despair. With all the determination of the God who, in his madness, he claimed to be, the God who had destroyed cities
and wiped out armies in the days when the law was still based on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

After that tentative conversation in the forecourt with John, he headed for the kitchen to avoid having to explain himself further. As far as he could, he put on his best mask and went in the house to have lunch with the kids, who were pleased to have him with them for their little Sunday feast.

Not everyone was fooled. Mrs Carraro for one. And in the hubbub of laughter and comments and jokes around the table, a couple of the kids realized something was up. Katy Grande, a seventeen-year-old girl with a funny freckled nose, and Hugo Sael, a boy who was particularly sensitive to the world around him, looked at him every now and again with a questioning air, as if wondering where the Father McKean they knew was hiding.

In the afternoon, while most of them were in the garden enjoying the sunshine, Vivien and Sundance joined them. If Sundance was unhappy at the turn of events that had forced the authorities to postpone the concert, she didn’t show it. She was quite calm, and seemed happy to be back at Joy.

She and her young aunt appeared much more united than the day before when Vivien had come to fetch her. All the embarrassment there had been between them seemed to have vanished. It looked as if their uneasy relationship had taken a completely new direction.

This impression was confirmed when Vivien, in words that were close to euphoric, told Father McKean what had happened with her niece, and about their new-found,
hard-won
intimacy and togetherness.

Now, in the light of a new day, he realized how
unresponsive
he had been to that enthusiasm. He hadn’t been able to stop himself asking the detective about the tragedy on 10th
Street and its consequences and implications, trying almost obsessively to find out if the police had a lead, an angle, any idea about who might have committed that atrocity. He had barely been able to suppress the temptation to take her aside and tell her what had happened, what he knew.

Now he realized that he’d had all the answers he was going to get, given that this was still an ongoing situation and that whatever information Vivien might have, as a police officer, was strictly confidential.

They both had their secrets. And both were duty bound to keep them. They had both taken vows to that effect, one secular, the other religious.

Ego
sum
Alpha
et
Omega
…

Father McKean looked out the window at that green and blue spring landscape that usually filled him with a sense of peace. Now he found it almost hostile, as if winter had returned, not because of anything external, but because of the eyes with which he was now looking at it. After he had got up from his bed like a sleepwalker, he had taken a shower, dressed and said his prayers with a new fervour. Then he had walked up and down the room, barely able to recognize the objects around him. Poor, familiar things, everyday objects that, even though they represented the everyday difficulties of his life, seemed all at once to belong to a happy time that was now lost for ever.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Michael, it’s John.’

‘Come in.’

Father McKean had been expecting him. They usually met on Monday mornings to discuss the week’s activities and objectives. Whatever the difficulties, it was a gratifying time, which confirmed them in their commitment to achieve the
aims the small community of Joy had set itself. But today John entered with the air of someone who would have liked to be in another place and time.

‘Sorry to bother you, but there’s something I absolutely have to discuss with you.’

‘No bother. What’s going on?’

Given their familiarity and mutual respect, John decided to start with a little preamble. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I’m sure you’ll tell me in due course. And I’m sorry to be troubling you now.’

Yet again, Father McKean was made aware of John Kortighan’s great tact and how lucky he was to have a man of his calibre on the staff.

‘It’s nothing, John. Nothing important. It’ll pass, trust me. But tell me what’s on your mind.’

‘We have a problem.’

At Joy there were always problems. With the kids, with the money, with members of staff, with the temptations of the outside world. But judging by John’s face, this was a
particularly
tricky one.

‘I had a word with Rosaria this morning.’

Rosaria Carnevale was a parishioner at Saint Benedict, of Italian extraction, who lived in Country Club but ran a branch of the M&T; Bank in Manhattan, which handled the
community’s
financial interests and administered Barry Lovito’s estate.

‘What does she say?’

What John said next was something he had hoped never to have to say. ‘She says that while this case has been going on, she’s bent over backwards to keep sending us the monthly allowance, as laid down in our charter. But now, after a petition by Mr Lovito’s presumptive heirs, she’s received
another court order. All payments are suspended until the dispute has been resolved.’

This meant that until the judge had pronounced, apart from the contribution by the state of New York, the community would lose its main source of income. From now on, Joy would have to rely for its general needs on its own resources and on spontaneous offers from people of goodwill.

Father McKean again looked out the window, silent and pensive. When he spoke, John Kortighan heard the unease in his voice.

‘How much do we have in reserve?’

‘Little or nothing. If we were a company, we’d be bankrupt.’

The priest turned with a small, colourless smile on his lips. ‘Don’t worry, John. We’ll manage. As we always have done. We’ll manage this time, too.’

But although his words might be full of confidence, there was little trace of it in his tone of voice. It was as if he had said these words more to delude himself than to convince the person he was talking to.

John felt the cold wind of reality gradually take possession of the air in the room.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you now. We’ll talk about the other things later. They’re minor in comparison with what I’ve just said.’

‘Yes, John, you can go. I’ll be with you soon.’

‘Okay, then. I’ll wait for you downstairs.’

Father McKean watched as his right-hand man left the room and gently closed the door behind him. He didn’t like the fact that John felt so bad about the situation, but what really hurt him was the feeling that he, Michel McKean, had disappointed him.

I
am
God
…

He wasn’t God. He had no wish to be. He was only a man conscious of his earthly limits. Up until now he had been content to serve God as best he could, accepting everything that was offered him and everything that was asked of him.

But now …

He picked up the cellphone from the desk and after a brief search in the address book dialled the number of the archdiocese of New York. He waited impatiently as the phone at the other end rang a few times. When at last a voice answered, he identified himself to the switchboard operator.

‘I’m Father Michael McKean from the parish of Saint Benedict in the Bronx. I’m also the director of Joy, a community that takes in teenagers with drug problems. I’d like to talk to the archbishop’s office.’

Usually his introductions were much more concise, but he had preferred to emphasize his status to make sure his call was put through immediately.

‘One moment, Father McKean.’

The switchboard operator put him on hold. A few moments later another voice came on. A young, polite voice.

‘Hello, Father. I’m Samuel Bellamy, one of Cardinal Logan’s colleagues. How can I help you?’

‘I need to speak to His Eminence as soon as possible. In person. It’s a matter of life and death.’

He must have conveyed his own distress very effectively, because there was genuine regret in the tone of the answer, as well as a hint of anxiety.