The Third Revelation (15 page)

“Come then, and we'll be lonely together.”

She came, arriving three days later, taking a flight from Rome to Brindisi, and then coming by boat to Corfu. She could have flown in but couldn't face the prospect.

“It looked like a hang glider.”

“Better well hung than ill wed.”

She took him in her arms. “You say the most unusual things of any man I've ever known. That's a quotation, isn't it?”

“Kierkegaard,” he said, keeping it simple. “You look marvelous.”

And she did. While he waited for her, he had steeled himself for disappointment, remembering the discrepancy in their ages. It had been over a year since he had seen her last, but she looked younger than he felt. She had stepped back to examine him.

“You don't look at all ill.”

“You make me feel that I lured you here under false pretenses.”

They took a cab to the hotel where he had reserved a room for her, on the floor above his. She tried to conceal her surprise.

“This way, we can be lonely together,” he explained.

“Let's just be together, shall we?”

He canceled her room and they spent the next three hours in bed. Afterward, from where they lay, they had a marvelous view of the sea. In the harbor to the left, the boat she had come on lay anchored. She said dreamily, “And to think that on the flight over I wondered if it was wise for me to do this.”

“It's certainly not otherwise.”

But she wanted to be serious. It seemed a moment when her Catholic conscience would go to work and fill her with remorse for the good time they had just had. That wasn't it at all.

“Why are you lonely, Gabriel? Why am I lonely? We're so good for one another.” And she brought her body against his. He couldn't agree more.

The next day, they rented a car and drove to a small inn that overlooked an impossibly blue body of water with an island on which an impossibly white chapel with a blue tile roof stood.

“Corfu is a painting,” she cried.

He was about to say he would paint the scene for her. He hadn't held a brush in years. In any case, she had taken out her digital camera. After the chapel, she took his picture. Later he took hers. One could not get photographs of middle-aged nudes developed, of course.

“Not that you need development, my dear.”

It might have been flattery, but he was feeling the unfamiliar attractions of honesty. Up to a point, of course. The point of the exercise was to make their union permanent. And she was beautiful, earthy and beautiful. He would marry her, if it came to that. In the end, it was she who proposed to him. Her conscience had kicked in, and the idea seemed to be that they were on their honeymoon, anticipating the joys of marriage, but they could make it all right.

“Why have you never married?”

“I've been asking myself the same thing.”

All the priests on Corfu were Orthodox, which would have been all right with him. It turned out that it wasn't all right with the Orthodox priests, nor with Zelda.

“We must do it right.”

They did it right in Rome, in Santa Susanna, the celebrant a jovial Paulist who regarded rules as subject to interpretation. Gabriel described himself as Catholic, thinking of Oriana Fallaci. When they went to bed in the Hilton it was as man and wife.

“Where will we live?”

“I let the lease on my apartment in Paris go.” And so he had, years ago.

“Where are your things?”

“In storage.” The phrase conveyed much more than met the case.

“I am going to take you home with me,” she said triumphantly. “My trophy husband.”

They flew home first-class and on the flight whispered like lovers, sipping drinks, ignoring the awful movies.

“Now it won't matter that I never mastered that program you used.”

“Explain.”

She explained. She told him of Vincent Traeger, a colleague of her husband's. “My first husband,” she added, poking him in the ribs.

“Colleague?”

“Chuck was in the CIA. I told you that.”

If she had, he had forgotten it.

“He loved the Delacroix you got for me.”

Brendan Crowe had disappointed him.

Catena spotted Harris exit from the main house into the colonnade and darted into the enclosed garden, tiptoed on the crunchy gravel, and stopped at a coconut palm. He put his hand against it and held his breath. He could hear nothing, but then his hearing was bad. He prayed that Harris would walk along the colonnade, reenter the building, and be on his way. Of course. It was nonsense to think the man was pursuing him.

“Bishop Catena,” said a voice behind him.

He all but levitated. He turned around. It was only young Quinn.

“What do you want?” Catena was angry at being relieved that it was only Quinn.

“I printed these out for you.” Quinn passed a sheaf of pages, printouts of e-mails.

Catena took them, thanked Quinn, wanted to apologize to the young man for his impatience, but most of all wanted to get away before Harris caught him. Perhaps they were all pessimists, but Harris brought gloomy foreboding to a new level.

Before he himself went inside again he looked back, and through the shrubbery and gaudy flowers he could see the massive Harris standing motionless, eyes closed, before the statue of Our Lady. Catena struck his breast. Mea culpa. He should not assume that Harris was always at his worst.

During the final weeks of Pentecost—there was no nonsense about Ordinary Time at the Confraternity of Pius IX—Catena felt the thrill he had always felt when hearing the prophetic passages chosen for the Gospel readings during that time. The end of the world. The signs by which it would be known. And yet the exact hour can never be known. Not even the angels know that. But God vouchsafed signs to his people, and read them we must, as best we can. Bishop Catena knew that throughout the history of the world, men, and women, had been sure they were living in the end times. The first generation of Christians seemed to think that they would be the only generation, that the end of time and the coming again of Christ were imminent. There were scoundrels who took that to weaken the authority of Scripture and tradition. Surely all it meant was that every age was nearer to the end times. “It is later now than when we first believed,” Paul said. And so it is. For all that, Catena had the mounting certainty that something big, very big, was about to happen.

It had begun with the scythe that had moved through the Vatican, an assassin cutting down two cardinals with the ease of an instrument of God. Of course that didn't justify what the man had done, murder was murder, but God can turn even evil to good effect.

Brendan Crowe had disappointed him there. Catena admitted that to himself, not wanting to encourage the impatience with which Harris reacted.

“There's more information in the newspapers than in these!” Harris said, shaking the e-mail printouts from Crowe.

That, of course, was false. The newspapers might tell them that the cardinal secretary of state had died and that Cardinal Maguire had suffered a fatal heart attack. If that had been all they had to go on, what would they be permitted to think? Crowe had come through. The two cardinals had been murdered.

“But how?” Harris demanded.

What difference did it make? The two men, and God rest their souls, were dead. The ranks of the enemy were thinning. Besides, something was afoot. Catena was sure of it. Events of this sensational magnitude could not be swept under the rug. At any moment he expected the media to explode. The Sunday Gospels brought the comforting message that the end was drawing near.

It was true that the Fatima messages suggested that after bloody persecution, the Church would know a period of peace and prosperity, having regained Her bearings. Very much like John in the Apocalypse. And then?

It was the bloody scourge that Catena thought might finally be beginning.

Of course, believers were being persecuted all over the globe. It was argued in a book by Robert Royal that there had been more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all previous centuries combined. That was doubtless true. And there was the neo-pagan abomination of abortion, millions of unborn babes murdered every year, a slaughter of the innocents that made King Herod seem an amateur. But the scourge had to strike at the center of the trouble. In his office, he closed the door and stood, thinking of the hope, and dread, of course, that he had known when John Paul II was shot in Saint Peter's Square. It was beginning. But the pope had survived. The assassin was caught and tried and imprisoned. How cloaked in mystery the whole thing had been, but the mystery seemed to enclose a political motive. Bah.

And to think that all along they had known it was coming! Ratzinger's coy remarks to Vittorio Messori in 1985 about the secret Sister Lucia had entrusted to the pope had given no indication that the attempted assassination had been part of it, predicted, prophesied by the Mother of God. And they had gone on as if all was well. The task of the Church was to fulfill the promises of Vatican II, to recover its true spirit! That spirit was killing the Church.

And then five years later came the cynical pretense that the third secret was being made public. There had been photocopies of Sister Lucia's letter, authentic, no doubt, but not the whole letter. Anyone with the least knowledge of Fatima knew that what had been made public could not be all. The time since had been one of unrelieved anguish for Catena. He all but instructed Crowe to steal the original. But the thought of having that document put in his hands filled Catena with fear and trembling. A message from Mary written in the hand of Sister Lucia. To hold that, to read that. It would be like holding in his mortal hands the original of John's Gospel. His messages to Crowe had been accordingly ambiguous, as if he hoped the assistant prefect would make the decision and incur the responsibility.

Tarcisio Bertone's recent book on Sister Lucia did not deceive Catena.

A tap on his door.

Catena straightened, then moved swiftly to his desk and sat. “Come.”

Harris shuffled in, wheezing, closing the door behind him, and stood before Catena, his eyes bright.

“It's gone.”

“What is gone?”

“The third secret has been removed from the archives.”

“You've heard from Crowe!”

Harris sat. The man seemed to be enjoying this. “He is missing, too.”

“What do you mean, missing?”

“He has left the country.” Harris allowed his voice to drop. “He has flown off to America.”

Harris would have liked to parcel out what he had learned, he would have liked to expand on his contacts in the office of Vatican security, but he was too excited for that. Stunned, Catena listened. He felt betrayed. What terrible game was Crowe playing?

Rodriguez had gone to the archives with an authorization from Cardinal Piacere and asked to see the third secret. The box was brought and opened.

“It was empty.”

“Did Ratzinger keep it?” A worse thought. “Did he destroy it?”

Harris shook his head. “Oh no. It was returned to the archives.”

Harris spelled out what he had learned. Crowe had flown to the States in a private plane owned by a fabulous rich man who could buy anything he wanted.

“Apparently he bought Crowe.”

Harris had done research on Ignatius Hannan. He put the results before his superior. Catena read the sheets as if they were a document of Vatican II. Hannan was eccentric, granted, but his interest seemed to be to acquire paintings depicting the mysteries of the rosary. The replica of the grotto of Lourdes that had been erected on the grounds of the man's company was an item that in other circumstances would have charmed Catena. But if Lourdes, then Fatima, and if Fatima . . .

“There is another possibility,” Harris said.

Is there anything more corrupting to the human spirit than having surprising information to divulge? Harris was not a better man because of what he had discovered. He was impossible.

“Trepanier,” Harris whispered. He had leaned toward Catena to say this, then sat back, awaiting his reaction.

“My God in heaven.”

To think it was to believe it. Jean-Jacques Trepanier was in an unsettling way the distorted mirror image of himself, his Fatima magazine and “Our Lady's Crusade” deriving full benefit from its American setting. What seemed zeal in the confraternity seemed fanaticism in Trepanier's efforts. His public and insolent remarks about the Curia, his all but accusation of the pope himself as the chief conspirator, were all the more appalling because they seemed simply to draw out the implications of the convictions that sustained the confraternity. If Catena had imagined himself holding the original of the third secret with fear and trembling, he could imagine Trepanier flourishing it with glee. In his hands, the letter would be a weapon with which to strike down his foes. A means of triumphing over his enemies.

“We must join forces,” Harris said.

“Never.”

“We must form a united front. How else can we control what that man might do?”

What had seemed a counsel of despair now seemed an instance of prudent caution. Of course. If Trepanier managed to get hold of that document, he did indeed require the moderating influence of the Confraternity of Pius IX.

“But Crowe?” the bishop bleated.

“He is a Judas.”

Instead he got drunk.

Hannibald, Vatican correspondent for the largest national Catholic weekly in the States, asked Neal Admirari to a little reception he was giving for Bishop Francis Ascue. Neal couldn't remember the name from the roster of Americans employed in various posts in the Vatican.