Thomas M. Disch (35 page)

“I was wondering when you’d think to ask that one. What would happen would be, from the Church’s viewpoint, the worst possibility of all, and the lawyer tells me that that proviso is ironclad and incontestable. It would go to creating a memorial, in iron and concrete, to the victims of priestly pedophilia.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Alexis.

“That was my own first reaction.”

“A memorial where?”

“In the front yard of his home in St. Paul.”

“There are zoning laws!”

“I’m afraid not. There was a case recently about crossburning by the Klan that Wiley says—and he should know—establishes a clear precedent.”

“And the
form
of this
memorial?
Is it to be a plaque, or—?”

“Bing had an artistic imagination. It is to take the form of the Christ Child, at something like the age of eleven, crowned with thorns, and crucified. He’s to be shown life-size, but the cross is to be twelve feet high. He’s commissioned a sketch of what’s intended from the sculptor Donald Granger. Wiley showed it to me. It’s impressive.”

“Might I add: indecent?”

“Not ostensibly. There are no genitalia or wounds. It’s all very aboveboard and symbolic. But the symbolism is powerful—I think you’d agree.”

“Massey will shit his episcopal breeches.”

“Which was another reason, it occurred to me, why it might be better, all around, for me to take the money and run.”

“Oh, you sly fox,” said Alex, smiling in a way that was once again friendly. “You
arranged
this with him!”

“I swear to God,” Father Mabbley declared, crossing himself. “Never!”

“Well, it changes everything, doesn’t it? You will leave the priesthood for the sake of the priesthood.”

“I doubt that Bing looked at it that way.”

“Ah, but he must have thought how you would look at it, so it amounts to the same thing.”

“So, between my priestly vows and the prospect of scandal. .

“Mab, it’s my
job
to avoid scandal.”

“Well, we’ll avoid that scandal, at least. With Bryce I can’t offer any guarantees, just as I can’t offer any information. But I do need a phone number, an address. Where is he?”

“Oh, you always know how to get what you want! Such a politician. But aren’t we all. I’ll tell Jeremiah to give you what you need to know. Over the phone. Unofficially. Mab, it’s wonderful to see you. But I’ve got to say good night.”

As many times as he had stood beneath the immense concrete ribs of the dome of the Shrine of Blessed Konrad of Paderborn, Gerhardt Ober never ceased to feel a chill of reverence. He had made pilgrimages to Rome, to Lourdes, to Oberammergau and Berchtesgaden. He had seen the great cathedrals of Chartres and Köln, and others whose names he’d forgotten, when he accompanied Monsignor O’Toole on his European speaking tour in 1951, but none of those edifices had inspired Gerhardt with the same sense of wonder. There had been in all of them something fussy and feminine, as though their architects had felt they must disguise the stark power of the masonry with filigrees of lace and bouquets of flowers. The architect of the Shrine had made no such concessions to mere prettiness. Here there were no frescoes of infant angels tumbling through gilded clouds, no stone carved to look like foliage—just the sheer muscling upward of the supporting pillars and the awful weight of the ferroconcrete dome they supported. To stand beneath this dome was to experience the Fear of God.

Gerhardt could see that he was not alone in that response. Father Bryce, though he had attended Etoile du Nord as a seminarian and later taught there, and must therefore have been familiar with the Shrine’s somber majesty, was nevertheless goggling at the dome like any tourist entering this holy place for the first time.

“There was an article in
National Geographic
years back,” Gerhardt declared proudly, “that called the Shrine one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Right along with the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building.”

“Truly,” said Father Bryce, who had uttered scarcely a word on the long drive north, “it is a marvel. Such an immense dome, and there seems almost no visible support.”

“Well, that’s what they can do nowadays with ferroconcrete. From the time the foundation was dug—and the Shrine goes down as deep as it stands high—till the cross was put on top of the dome, this whole thing went up in less than five years.”

“And we’re here … alone,” Father Bryce observed. “No other pilgrims have come to worship here.”

“It’s a shame, isn’t it? When I was a young man, just out of high school, this place was filled with visitors on Sundays during the summer months. They’d drive here from all over the country. But now—” Gerhardt shook his head bitterly. “It’s like the Church is ashamed of the place. There was a time when they were actually thinking of demolishing it. Only at that point it would have cost as much to raze as it had originally cost to put up. So they just try to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s why they let us have it for BirthRight. I think the Bishop would like to pretend we don’t exist either.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard Father Cogling say.”

“Ashamed of such magnificence,” Father Bryce marveled.

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it. And you want to know the reason, Father?” Gerhardt thrust out his bony jaw challengingly, and when Father Bryce nodded, he declared: “The Jews!”

“The Jews?” Father Bryce echoed, not in the tone of polite, cautioning skepticism that Gerhard was used to from all but a few priests of Father Bryce’s generation, but in a tone, much more, of honest curiosity.

“First there was the stink, in the sixties, right before he was going to be canonized, about Blessed Konrad having been anti-Semitic. Because he preached against the Jews who defiled the Holy Eucharist! There were pickets right here outside the gates of the Shrine with signs that said BLESSED

KONRAD—PATRON 5AINT OF ANTI-SEMITES. You might have seen them on TV when you were a kid, though the media wasn’t as biased then as it is now, and mostly the whole thing was kept off the TV news. But it was in the papers, all right, and you can bet those picketers were Jews. Or Commies. Or both, probably. And
then
, when they’d won that round, and the Vatican backed down and said Konrad wasn’t even
Blessed
Konrad anymore and may never even have existed, that’s when there was the fuss about the architect who built the shrine, Ernst Kurtzensohn. A Nazi, they said in the papers. Because he’d been an assistant for Albert Speer when he was a young man in Germany, and Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect. Could the man help it he was born a German? Is that a crime? If it is, then I’m a criminal! But suddenly the papers are saying that the Shrine, because the lower levels are built to withstand a nuclear attack, is somehow the same as the bunkers where the Führer was killed. Kurtzensohn had been the structural engineer for the Berlin bunker, so that makes him some kind of war criminal! They even tried to deport him back to Germany to stand trial. A war criminal! When he was a member of Opus Dei!”

“It is hard to believe,” Father Bryce murmured sympathetically.

“In the end, even Monsignor O’Toole turned against him.”

“Did he?”

“Of course, the Monsignor was under pressure himself, and his first thought was always for the Shrine. He knew that the Jews would be after him next. And he was right.”

Gerhardt fell silent, but for a moment the dome itself, with its marvelous acoustical sensitivity, resounded with its own, more abstract version of his fulminations, the meaning gone but the emotion intact.

“Amazing,” Father Pat commented. “It sounds like an entire pack of hunting hounds.”

A lot Father Pat would have known about the sound of hunting dogs, Gerhardt thought. But he did not venture to contradict the priest. Indeed, as the echoes died away, he had to admit the comparison was apt.

They had come to stand before the altar of the side chapel dedicated to the Monsignor’s memory. Gerhardt pointed to the simple marble plaque that was the only memorial to O’Toole’s accomplishments.

Father Bryce read the few words on the plaque and nodded respectfully.

“I wonder if I might ask you, Gerhardt, for a few moments here alone by this altar. That I might pray?”

Gerhardt suspected that he was being manipulated in some way, but it was not a request he could reasonably refuse. “Certainly, Father. For as long as you like. But my sister is keeping your dinner warm, you know.”

“God bless her,” said Father Bryce, getting down on his knees on the lowest of three steps leading to the altar.

Gerhardt withdrew to a respectful distance and mulled over the Situation. Things had been getting out of hand, and every time Gerhardt tried to come up with a solution, he seemed to make things worse. This was not the first time in his life he’d sinned for the sake of the Church, but it was the first time he had resisted the opportunity to go to confession as soon as it had presented itself. All during the long and mostly silent drive from the Twin Cities to the Shrine, Gerhardt had thought to ask Father Pat to hear his confession. Whatever opinion Gerhardt had of the man personally (and it was not high), he
was
a priest with the power of forgiveness that all priests inherit from Saint Peter, irrespective of their own grace or virtue. Father Pat might literally be reeking with sin and still administer the sacraments.

But Gerhardt had gone to confession with Father Pat before, and he knew that it would not be enough to say “Forgive me, Father, I’ve sinned against the fifth commandment” and let it go at that. Father Pat would demand to know the exact nature of his sin against the fifth commandment, and there were compelling reasons why Father Pat should not be admitted into his confidence, even under the seal of the confessional.

There had been opportunities, even in the rush of events, to approach Father Cogling, but the priest had his own reasons for wanting to remain uninformed of what he surely suspected. President Reagan had often operated in the same way, and it showed good sense in both priest and president. As a man of God, Father Cogling should keep his hands clean. Even in the Middle Ages it wasn’t the Church that had burned the heretics. All that side of things was handled by civil authorities—by laymen like Gerhardt Ober, who weren’t afraid of dirtying themselves if that might help to preserve undefiled the Church’s own immaculate garment. It was enough for Father Cogling to have expressed his concern to Gerhardt as to the fact of Father Pat’s being blackmailed, which he’d learned from having chanced to monitor a phone conversation between Father Pat and the blackmailer. Father Cogling had naturally been concerned for the younger priest, but even more, as he’d explained to Gerhardt, he was alarmed at the possibility of a scandal that could involve the Church.

Gerhardt had shared his alarm, and acted accordingly. Perhaps he’d been unwise.

And it had certainly been a mistake to have effected the disappearance of Father Pat’s mother and twin brother, even though at the time they had seemed to pose an even greater threat of scandal—to the Church in general, and to Father Cogling in particular. Gerhardt was devoted to Father Cogling.

No other priest in the entire archdiocese still honored the memory of Monsignor O’Toole and of the Shrine he had founded. Father Cogling was, in Gerhardt’s estimation, a true saint. He may have sinned in his youth, but sin can be repented, especially the sins of the flesh, which are in their nature fleeting.

As it said somewhere in the Good Book, what’s done can’t be undone, and there was no use crying over spilled milk—or even, for that matter, blood.

Repentance was not a matter of shedding tears, in any case, and that was a good thing for Gerhardt, since he’d never been one for crying. Repentance was something spiritual and sacramental; it took place between the sinner and the priest, and, as Father Cogling had explained it to him one time, it was one of the mysteries of the Faith. You had to put your soul into God’s keeping and just let go. God would do the rest. So the fact that Gerhardt wasn’t heartbroken over what he’d done was neither here nor there. God would be his judge.

Father Pat finally made a sign of the cross, got up off his knees, and turned to Gerhardt. “Well, now, shall we find out what your good sister has prepared for our dinner?”

“Right this way, Father,” Gerhardt said, leading the way to the single elevator in the Shrine proper that was kept in operation. He rummaged among the many keys on the ring chained to his belt, inserted one in the lock, and then pressed the button that now could summon the elevator. Apparently Hedwig had not used the elevator since his departure that morning to chauffeur Father Pat to the Shrine, since the door opened at once.

“After you, Father. They’re on the fourth level down.”

Father Pat gave an odd look at the cage of the elevator. “There is no .

. . stairway?”

“There is—that door over there—but it’s only for emergencies. I doubt it’s been used, though, since the Shrine was opened. If the local power fails, we’ve got an emergency generator that kicks in right away.”

Father Pat seemed reluctant to enter the elevator.