Lux Domini: Thriller: A Catherine Bell Story

by Alex Thomas

  His body was pressed against the seat during take-off. As the plane took flight, the sensation promptly reminded him of the very moment Sister Silvia rebelled with her last agonising breath. Everything had gone according to plan, but the nun’s passing gave deRossi a unique surprise.

  He believed to have had a mystical experience.

  The first real-life encounter with Silvia in that tiny church – she had been immersed in prayer after making her way through the slums – had left him enraptured. Never in his life had he seen someone pray with such sincerity. But then that priest had come and knelt next to her, ruining the entire holy scene. Finally, after her prayer, Silvia and the priest had spoken quietly with one another. Then deRossi had seen – of this he was certain! – a timid smile race across Silvia’s face.

  After a warm goodbye, the priest had disappeared, leaving Silvia and deRossi alone in the church. It was the moment he had been waiting for from his discreet hiding place. Only the candlelit statues of the saints should be witness to his necessary intervention.

  DeRossi quietly approached the middle aisle from which he could see both the vestry’s entrance as well as the main church entrance. It was so quiet in the church that he could hear a pin drop.

  During his travels he had not only studied up on Silvia’s biography, but also on the church’s secret underground and the only access to it.

  Silvia was once again immersed in deep prayer. He walked before the altar and made a sign of the cross. He then knelt next to the nun as if he wanted to start a dialogue with God. The rag soaked with chloroform, which would serve as an anaesthetic, was already in his hand. It didn’t even take a minute. The tiny, slender Silvia didn’t stand a chance.

  Half an hour later the nun awoke in the church’s secret underground. Her eyes revealed neither fear nor shock. She didn’t even scream, perhaps knowing that no one could hear her down there anyway.

  "No matter what you do in your own ignorance," she said to him with complete calm, "you will not destroy the work. Triumph is not the door through which you will go."

  For the first time in his life, deRossi felt a certain level of unease. The feeling raced through his body like a disturbing tickle. "I am only the medium," he shot back.

  Silvia shook her head. "No, you are less than that." Her eyes flashed with courage and determination. "Your life is a blind, random hustle without purpose or aim. You love the darkness more than the light. You have never felt the flame of faith within yourself and have never loved a single other human being other than yourself, and yet you wear this ring."

  DeRossi winced, but then instantly pulled himself back together. He had replaced his clothing with Indian robes. He had indeed completely forgotten the ring this time, perhaps because it had long since become a part of him. He had been a Lux member since he was young. "Whatever has brought my master against you must be far worse than anything I have ever experienced," he said, returning her intense gaze. "Your work no longer has meaning."

  DeRossi’s fake indignation didn’t impress Silvia in the least. She simply sat there and waited without saying another word. He went to it before he could wimp out. Silvia accepted her fate like a sacrificial lamb. Her death actually made deRossi anxious.

  He had felt, no seen, quite clearly the very moment the life had left her eyes. Something in Silvia’s final breath swept toward him like a streak of fog, touching him on the forehead.

  He knew he had felt it. Like a sibling’s caress. Like a tender kiss.

  Silvia had forgiven him!

  At the thought DeRossi clawed the seat’s armrest with his fingers and looked out through the dirty window at Calcutta, a city drenched in suffering and joy. In his mind’s eye, however, he saw a very different scene: candles. A sea of candles. With Silvia in the midst of them all. He unconsciously reached for a pack of cigarettes that he kept with him. But then he remembered that it was prohibited to smoke on the airplane. For the duration of the flight from Calcutta to Frankfurt, the Monsignor tried to do just one thing: to banish the image of the candles and Sister Silvia from his memory.

  LUKE

  45

  Mount of Olives near Jerusalem, 33 A.D.

  Catherine was outdoors. The sky above her was full of bright, foreign stars. She sat in a circle of men and women around a warm campfire. Others lay in the grass, already asleep. Catherine on the other hand didn’t feel like sleeping. She could feel that it was going to be a particularly special night.

  One of the men knelt next to her, laying a warm cloak around her body. It was only now that she noticed she was pregnant.

  "You should get some rest. Too much strain isn’t good for you or the baby. You shouldn’t be here at all."

  "I am pregnant, not ill," countered Catherine with a tinge of humour. She realised it was not her speaking, but that this conversation had taken place nearly two thousand years in the past.

  The man pointed to a group that was sitting a bit farther away around another fire. "It is they. The chosen ones."

  "Which one of them is the – anointed?"

  Her companion pointed to a lonely figure who stood apart from the rest. A second, smaller and more slender person went to stand next to him. Both of them hugged, standing quietly next to one another as they looked out at the promised land of Jerusalem.

  "This man awoke Lazarus in Bethany from the dead," he said reverently. "I saw it with my own eyes."

  "This man has created miracles," said a voice behind them. "And every one of these miracles has its price."

  Catherine turned around. The man introduced himself as Judas Iscariot, but the young woman thought she recognised someone else in him. A red aura mixed with some blue and white surrounded him. It looked as if he were fighting some internal battle with himself. She saw the demise of the anointed in his pain-ridden eyes.

  In that very moment Catherine awakened, her nightgown drenched in sweat. She switched off the alarm clock, taking her time to come to. She lay in a dark room by herself. A wet film covered her face as if she had a fever. Then she remembered where she was. She was in the Apostolic Palace as a part of the papal household and was protecting the Pope with her psychic energy. But her dream didn’t want to release her. It felt like a real memory in her mind and in this room.

  She still saw the people around the campfire, felt its warmth on the Mount of Olives, saw the fear and pain in Judas’ eyes. Somehow Judas was Cardinal Benelli at the same time.

  She had to escape this world. This insanity. Catherine jumped up, ran to the bathroom and took a shower. After standing beneath the hot stream of water for several minutes, she turned off the faucet, grabbed a large towel and dried herself off. The entire bathroom was enshrouded in fog, covered with steam. She looked in the mirror and froze.

  A crooked line appeared on the fogged up mirror. It was a half ichthys symbol, the secret marking of the early Christians. One person would draw an arch in the sand. The other then completed the fish symbol with a reversed arch and claimed to be a brother or sister in Christ two thousand years ago. Had Benelli sent her this sign? To encourage her? To remind her of the deeper meaning behind her mission?

  As if hypnotised Catherine walked toward the mirror and completed the symbol.

  46

  Ben remembered that the Apostolic Vicariate of Bengal was established in 1834. It was named Archdiocese Calcutta by Pope Leo XIII in 1886. Three suffragan bishops stood by the archbishop’s side to support him in his work. The ecclesiastical province included the suffragan bishoprics of Asanol, Bagdogra, Baruipur, Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Krishnanagar and Raiganj. But for most of the people in the slums the Catholic Church started to existed mainly through the selfless work of Mother Teresa. Less than one per cent of the Indian population was Christian.

  Ben had gotten one of the airport taxis to take him directly to Shanti Nagar. Sister Bernadette, one of the charitable missionaries greeted him at the main entrance at the heavy wrought-iron gate. He had been travelling for virtually an entire day f
rom Rome to Calcutta and although he was dog-tired, he insisted on seeing Sister Silvia’s corpse. The crazy encrypted crime scene photos that Cardinal Ciban had received in his office via the Internet continued to swirl around his head. The dead nun had looked like a prophetic statue of a saint surrounded by a sea of candles. One of the photographs had looked so peaceful, so spiritual, so promising – so much so that it almost looked brutal. Sister Bernadette was a tiny, rotund person with steel-rimmed glasses and a warm-hearted aura. She had often accompanied Sister Silvia on her tours through the slums as she told Ben on the way to the morgue. That was the reason Mother Superior had asked her to support the Monsignor during his investigations surrounding the death. Of all the order members, she was the one who best knew her way around the slums near Shanti Nagar and the little church where the body was found.

  Sister Bernadette opened the door to the morgue. They passed a little lobby that led down a dark corridor. In contrast to the heat outdoors, the air-conditioned room felt so refreshing that he almost nearly froze.

  "Why didn’t you go with Sister Silvia into the church?" asked Ben.

  "I was called to another patient," explained the rotund nun quietly in the blue and white sari. "Sometimes we divide the labour in the slums among ourselves to be more efficient." She talked about the patient she visited. A mortally ill man with cancer who died that very night. The poor thing had suffered terribly over the past year, but Bernadette had never once heard him yelp or complain. In the end he was just skin and bones because he could no longer eat solid foods.

  "I see," said Ben with concern. He was slowly starting to get a sense of the level of unspeakable suffering with which the missionaries were confronted on a daily basis.

  They walked through long, dim corridors to the right of which came recesses in regular intervals that were either empty or filled with a corpse laid out on a stretcher. Sister Bernadette finally stood in front of one of them. The missionary looked at the recess and froze.

  "What’s wrong, Sister?" asked Ben, surprised by her reaction.

  "She’s gone!"

  "Pardon me?" He came closer. The stretcher was empty indeed. "Perhaps she was moved?" Ben thought out loud although he didn’t quite believe it himself.

  Why would someone want to bring Sister Silvia’s corpse from one recess to another? The corner seemed just as well air-conditioned as the others. He also couldn’t imagine that the Archdiocese Calcutta had given an order to move her. Besides, the archbishop had informed the Vatican of the death. If he had had the corpse moved elsewhere, he certainly would have let the missionaries’ Mother Superior know.

  "It is most unlikely," explained Sister Bernadette. It seemed the same thoughts had crossed her mind as well.

  They searched the rest of the stretchers, even those they had already passed, but they couldn’t find the dead body anywhere. Ben and Sister Bernadette finally spoke with Mother Superior who then immediately called the archbishop’s office. No one knew about moving any bodies. None of the missionaries or the other colony residents could say anything about where the body might be. Sister Silvia seemed to have vanished out of thin air.

  "I have little hope, but perhaps Father Raj can tell us something," said Sister Bernadette ultimately.

  Ben had heard that the priest had discovered the body in the little church. After he had recovered from the initial shock, he had contacted the Archdiocese Calcutta for help. The archbishop’s call had come in to Cardinal Ciban’s office in exactly the moment that Ben had discussed Abel’s murder with him. In response, the prefect had handed him a file that had been lying on the desk and asked him to open it. The first thing Ben noticed was the encrypted anonymous report of an intrusion into the computer system. The second thing — he had held his breath – was exactly the same headline that he had just read about the house fire near the Forum Romanum.

  Ciban had already made the connection between the nocturnal intrusion into the Lux Domini computer system and Abel’s murder. He had most likely added Ben’s nocturnal break-in into Benelli’s villa to the equation as well.

  Ben had looked up from the file, gathered all his courage and asked: "What is ‘LUKE’, Eminence?" Ciban had not answered right away. Instead, he had asked for the file back and allowed it to disappear into one of the heavy drawers in his enormous desk. But Ben didn’t relent. "What do Sister Isabella, Father Darius, Father Sylvester and Cardinal Benelli have to do with it?"

  "Do you think it a clever question?" the prefect had asked simply.

  For a moment they sat in absolute silence. Then the phone had rung and held Ben back from a much too brash response. The archbishop from Calcutta himself was on the phone and had reported about a bizarre death in a tiny church in Motijheel.

  Sister Bernadette had been right. Chances were slim that Father Raj could shed any light at all on the body’s disappearance, but perhaps he could tell them something that might help them further. Besides, Ben had wanted to examine the crime scene right away anyway.

  They made their way to the quarter where the little church was located. Ben had insisted that they take the exact route that Sister Bernadette and Sister Silvia had taken that day.

  They walked through the slums in which thousands of people rented tiny, windowless cottages without running water, sanitation or even the ability to cook anything. Unfiltered water only flowed through the public pipes at certain times of the day. The rain and waste water from the cisterns that the people needed to use to wash their clothes and themselves was, out of bare necessity, used by the animals too.

  Sister Bernadette told him about the fate of a rickshaw driver who could no longer pay his buggy’s rent and therefore lost his job. He then had no money to pay for his sick wife’s medical treatments. The rickshaw driver basically gave up, retreated to his modest home and took his own life. Unfortunately, Sister Bernadette only learned of the man’s fate after he had committed suicide.

  On the way through the slums, the missionary told him that many people here lived mainly off the things they found in the dump and sold to the factories. Fragments of leather, rubber, junk, plastic, etc. Fewer than ten per cent of the slum dwellers could read and write. A lot of men escaped through alcohol, leaving the women to carry the entire burden of their children and their husbands. The terrible living conditions and signs of famine and malnutrition led to further diseases such as cholera, malaria or tuberculosis. A real devil’s circle.

  During the taxi ride to Shanti Nagar, Ben had seen how many people live on the streets. The driver had told him that power outages of up to several hours were quite common in Calcutta. The city could no longer manage its twelve million inhabitants with thousands more arriving daily. The impact of the city’s overpopulation was overwhelming. More and more industries were leaving Calcutta and, as Ben found out, fewer and fewer airlines were landing here, which meant the city was losing its international lifeline. Nonetheless, Calcutta was not a dying city as many liked to claim. Life went on. Everywhere.

  "We are almost there," said Sister Bernadette, pointing straight ahead. "You see. There it is!"

  Ben recognised the tiny, simple church in front of them. They crossed the overcrowded market with its abundant offerings that stood in the front courtyard of the Lord’s house. Ben had never seen so many people in such a tiny space before.

  47

  Rome, The Vatican, Apostolic Palace

  Catherine had once again withdrawn to the rooftop garden with her laptop in tow while the Pope met with His Eminence Cardinal Gasperetti and Monsignor Massini. As far as she knew, the head of the Curia was unsettled and the cardinal hoped to get answers to some of his more pressing questions in order to placate his colleagues.

  Catherine didn’t know what to make of Gasperetti. On the one hand he exuded such calm and optimism. On the other she thought she might sense a deep division within his soul. But he seemed to belong to the good side in the game for power. If Darius hadn’t taught her to control her gift and not invade others’ priva
cy, she might have risked taking a quick look at his aura.

  She placed her laptop on a small garden table and opened it. It seemed crazy to her that, as a proclaimed heretic, she would be working on her latest book right in the heart of the Catholic world. Her current chapter was about the term hell and its holy purpose of intimidation. The high prefects before whom she had stood in the court would most likely suffer a heart attack if they got wind of it.

  Catherine had just referred to the Germanic origins, the goddess Hel and her protected kingdom of the dead, when her surroundings changed dramatically. The garden table upon which her laptop had once stood was now replaced with a decorated table at which several men and women sat. At the same moment she realised it was the Passover meal from the Old Testament that was later replaced through the New Covenant by the Last Supper in the New Testament. It was here that Jesus had first introduced the Eucharist.

  One of the men sat next to a beautiful woman. He took the bread, blessed it and spoke: "Take and eat, then this bread is like my body." Then he grasped a cup of wine, spoke a blessing and passed it around. "This is my blood, the blood of the New Covenant that will be spilled for many."

  Catherine recognised the man who broke the bread and passed the cup. It was the anointed. The air was filled with tension. They barely said a word. Everyone ate and remained silent. She recognised the man among the twelve apostles who had introduced himself as Judas Iscariot. He looked at her and seemed to recognise her as well. Judas was noticeably tense. Catherine knew all too well why: he had drawn the lot of traitor and had accepted it, whether he liked it or not.

  She examined the group and suddenly recognised two additional men at the table: Benelli and Darius! Both seemed as unhappy as Judas Iscariot. They too seemed to see Catherine. By God what did the cardinal and the priest have to do with the Last Supper?