Virgin

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Is your team losing?” Vincenzo said.

  The man turned and offered a wan smile. “I’m American. Don’t know the first thing about rugby.” He extended his hand. “Dan Fitzpatrick. And I can guess by your accent that you’re about as far from home as I am.”

  Vincenzo shook it and offered his own name—sans the religious title. No sense in putting the fellow off. “I happen to be on my way to America. I’m leaving for New York tomorrow.”

  “Really? That’s where my … home is. Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither, really.” Vincenzo didn’t want to get into his medical history so he shifted the subject. “I guess something other than rugby must be giving you such a long face.”

  He wanted to kick himself for saying that. It sounded too much like prying. But Dan seemed eager to talk.

  “You could say that.” He flashed a disarming grin. “Woman trouble.”

  “Ah.”

  Vincenzo left it at that. What did he know about women?

  “A unique and wonderful woman,” Dan went on, sipping his ale, “with a unique and wonderful problem.”

  “Oh?” Through decades of hearing confessions, Vincenzo had become the Michelangelo of the monosyllable.

  “Yeah. The woman I love is looking for a miracle.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Myself most of all.

  “Not all of us. Trouble is, mine really thinks she’s going to find one, and she seems to be forgetting the real world while she’s looking for it.”

  “And you don’t think she’ll find it?”

  “Miracles are sucker bait.”

  Vincenzo sighed. “As much as I hate to say it. I fear there is some truth in that. Although I prefer to think of the believers not as suckers, but as seekers. I saw a village full of seekers today.”

  Vincenzo went on to relate an abbreviated version of his stop in Cashelbanagh earlier today. When he finished he found the younger man staring at him in shock.

  “You’re a priest?”

  “Why, yes. A monsignor, to be exact.”

  “That’s great!” he snapped, quaffing the rest of his ale. “And you’re going to New York? Just great! That really caps my day! No offense, but I hope we don’t run into each other.”

  Without another word he rose and strode from Jim Cashman’s pub, leaving Vincenzo Riccio to wonder what he had said or done to precipitate such a hasty departure.

  Perhaps Dan Fitzpatrick was an atheist.

  After a second pint of Murphy’s Vincenzo decided he’d brooded enough about miracles and unfriendly Americans. He pushed himself to his feet and ambled into the night.

  A thick cold fog had rolled up from the sea along the River Lee, only a block away, and was infiltrating the city. Vincenzo was about to turn toward St. Patrick Street and make his way back to his hotel when he saw her.

  She stood not two dozen feet away, staring at him. At least he thought she was staring at him. He couldn’t tell for sure because the cowled robe she wore pulled up around her head cast her face in shadow, but he could feel her eyes upon him.

  His first thought was that she might be a prostitute, but he immediately dismissed that because there was nothing the least bit provocative about her manner, and that robe was anything but erotic.

  He wanted to turn away but he could not take his eyes off her. And then it was she who turned and began to walk away.

  Vincenzo was compelled to follow her through the swirling fog that filled the open plaza leading to the river. Strange … the lights that lined the quay silhouetted her figure ahead of him but didn’t cast her shadow. Who was she? And how did she move so smoothly? She seemed to glide through the fog … toward the river … to its edge …

  Vincenzo shouted as he saw her step off the bulkhead, but the cry died in his throat when he saw her continue walking with an unbroken stride … upon the fog. He stood gaping on the edge as she canted her path to the right and continued walking downstream. He watched until the fog swallowed her, then he lurched about, searching for someone, anybody to confirm what he had just seen.

  But the quay was deserted. The only witnesses were the fog and the River Lee.

  Vincenzo rubbed his eyes and stumbled back toward the pub. The doctors had told him to stay away from alcohol, that his liver couldn’t handle it. He should have listened. He must be drunk. That was the only explanation.

  Otherwise he could have sworn he’d just seen the Virgin Mary.

  The Judean Wilderness

  Kesev sobbed.

  He was still alive.

  When will this END?

  He’d tried numerous times before to kill himself but had not been allowed to die. He’d hoped that this time it would work, that his miserable failure to guard the Resting Place would cause the Lord to finally despair of him and let him die. But that was not to be. So here was yet another failure—one more in a too-long list.

  The jolt from the sudden shortening of the rope had knocked him unconscious but had left his vertebrae and spinal cord intact. Its constriction around his throat had failed to strangle him. So now he’d regained consciousness to find himself swinging gently in Sharav a dozen feet above the ground.

  For a few moments he let tears of frustration run through the desert dust that coated his cheeks, then he reached into his pocket for his knife and began sawing at the rope above his head.

  Moments later he was slumped on the ground, pounding his fists into the unyielding earth.

  “Is it not over, Lord?” he rasped. “Is that what this means? Do You have more plans for me? Do You want me to search out the Mother and return her to the Resting Place? Is that what You wish?”

  Kesev struggled to his feet and staggered to his Jeep. He slumped over the hood.

  That had to be it. The Lord was not through with him yet. Perhaps He would never be through with him. But clearly He wanted more from him now. He wanted the Mother back where she belonged and was not about to allow Kesev to stop searching for her.

  But where else could he look? She’d been smuggled out of Israel and now could be hidden anywhere in the world. He had no clues, no trail to follow …

  Except the Ferris woman. Who was she? Had that strange, unsettling nun on the plane been her, or someone pretending to be her? And did it matter? All he knew was that the Explorer he’d seen in the desert that day had been rented on her card. There might be no connection at all. The Mother could have been stolen days before then.

  He gazed up into the cold, unblinking eye of the night.

  “All right, Lord. I’ll continue looking. But I search now on my terms, my way. I’ll find the Mother for You and bring her back where she belongs. But you may not like what I do to the ones who’ve caused me this trouble.”

  FIFTEEN

  Manhattan

  Dan finished tightening the last screw in the swivel plate. He flipped the latch back and forth, watching with inordinate satisfaction how easily its slot slipped over the swivel eye. He fitted the shackle of the brand new combination padlock through the eye.

  “We’re in business, Carrie.”

  She didn’t answer. She was busy inside the coal room with the Virgin. Or maybe busy wasn’t the right word. Carrie was engrossed, preoccupied, fascinated, enraptured with the Virgin.

  The Virgin … Dan had heard Carrie refer to the body or statue or whatever it was so often as “the Virgin” that he’d begun thinking of it that way himself. Certainly easier than referring to it as the Whatever.

  After an uneventful transatlantic trip, the Virgin had arrived in New York late last night. He and Carrie had been on the docks first thing this morning to pick her up. After passing through customs they spirited her crate through the front door to St. Joe’s basement, through the Loaves and Fishes kitchen, and down here to the subcellar. The old coal furnace that used to rule this nether realm had bee
n dismantled and carted off when the diocese switched the church to gas heat. That left a wide open central space and a separate coal room that used to be fed by a chute from the alley. Carrie had chosen the old coal room as the perfect hiding place. It was ten by ten, the chute had been sealed up long ago, and it had a door, although the door had no lock. Until now.

  Dan opened the door and stuck his face inside. He experienced an instant of disorientation, as if he were peering into the past, intruding upon an ancient scene from the Roman catacombs. A functioning light fixture was set in the ceiling, but it was off. Instead, flickering candlelight filled the old coal room, casting wavering shadows against the walls and ceiling. A couple of days ago Dan had lugged one of the folding tables from the mission down here and placed it where Carrie had directed, and that had been just about the last he’d seen of her until this morning. She’d spent every spare moment of the interval feverishly dusting, scrubbing, and dressing up the room, draping the table with a blanket, setting up wall sconces for the candles, appropriating flowers left behind in the church after weddings or funerals, making a veritable shrine out of the coal room.

  A short while ago they’d opened the crate and he’d helped her place the Virgin’s board-stiff body on the table. Carrie had been fussing with her ever since.

  “I said, the latch is in place, Carrie. Want to come see?”

  She was bending over the body where it rested on the blanket-draped table, straightening her robe. She didn’t look up.

  “That’s all right. I know you did a great job.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s a great job.” Dan leaned back and surveyed his work. “Adequate is more like it. Won’t keep out anybody really determined to get in, but it should deter the idly curious.”

  “That’s what we want,” she said, straightening. She turned toward him and held out her hand. “Come see.”

  Dan moved to her side and laid an arm across her shoulders. A warm tingle spread over his skin as he felt her arm slip around his back. This was the closest they’d been since leaving Israel.

  “Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Dan didn’t know how to answer that. He saw the waxy body of an old woman with wild hair and mandarin fingernails, surrounded by candles and wilting flowers. He knew Carrie was seeing something else. Her eyes were wide with wonder and devotion, like a young mother gazing at her newborn first child.

  “You did a wonderful job with this place. No one would ever know it was once a coal room.”

  “And no one should ever know otherwise. This is our little secret, right?”

  “Right. Our little secret. Our big secret is us.” Dan turned and wrapped his other arm around her. “And speaking of us …”

  Carrie slipped from his embrace. “No, Dan. Not now. Not here. Not with … her.”

  Dan tried to hide his hurt. Just being in the same room with Carrie excited him. Touching her drove him crazy. Used to drive her crazy too. What was wrong?

  “When then? Where? Is your brother—?”

  “Let’s talk about it some other time, okay? Right now I’ve got a lot still left to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I have to cut those nails, and fix her hair.”

  “She’s not going on display, Carrie.”

  “I know, but I want to take care of her.”

  “She’s not a—” Dan bit off the rest of the sentence.

  “Not a what?”

  He’d been about to say Barbie Doll but had cut himself off in time.

  “Nothing. She did fine in that cave with nobody fussing over her.”

  “But she’s my responsibility now.”

  Dan repressed a sigh. “Okay. But not your only responsibility. We’ve still got meals to serve upstairs. I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to let the guests down.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  “Good.” Dan wanted out of here. The low ceiling, the dead flowers … the atmosphere was suddenly oppressive. “You remember the lock combination?” “Twelve, thirty-six, fourteen.”

  “Right. See you upstairs.”

  He watched Carrie, waiting for her to look his way, but she had eyes only for the Virgin.

  Shaking his head, Dan turned away. This wouldn’t last, he told himself. Carrie would come around soon. Once it seeped into her devotion-fogged brain that her Virgin was merely an inert lump, she’d return to her old self.

  But there was going to be an aching void in his life until she did.

  Carrie listened to Dan’s shoes scuff up the stone steps as she pulled the zip-lock bag from her pocket and removed the scissors from it.

  Poor Dan, she thought, looking down at the Virgin. He doesn’t understand.

  Neither did she, really. All she knew was that everything had changed for her. She could look back on her fourteen years in the order—fully half of her life—and understand for the first time what had brought her to the convent, what had prompted her to take a vow of chastity and then willfully break it.

  “It was you, Mother,” she whispered to the Virgin as she began to trim the ragged ends of dry gray hair that protruded from under the wimple. “I came to the order because of you. You are the Eternal Virgin and I wanted to be like you. Yet I could never be like you because my virginity was already gone … stolen from me. But you already know the story.”

  She’d spoken to the Blessed Virgin countless times in her prayers, trying to explain herself. She’d always felt that Mother Mary would understand. Now that they were face to face, she was compelled to tell her once more, out loud, just to be sure she knew.

  “I wanted a new start, Mother. I wanted to be born anew with that vow. I wanted to be a spiritual virgin from that day forward. But I couldn’t be. No matter how many showers I took and scrubbed myself raw, no matter how many novenas I made and plenary indulgences I received, I still felt dirty.”

  She slipped the hair trimmings into the plastic bag. These cuttings could not be tossed into a dumpster or even flushed away. They were sacred. They had to remain here with the Virgin.

  “I hope you can understand the way I felt, Mother, because I can’t imagine you ever feeling dirty or unworthy. But the dirtiness was not the real problem. It was the hopelessness that came with it—the inescapable certainty that I could never be clean again. That’s what did me in, Mother. I knew what your Son promised, that we have but to believe and ask forgiveness and we shall be cleansed. I knew the words, I understood them in my brain, but in my heart was the conviction that His forgiveness was meant for everyone but Carolyn Ferris. Because Carolyn Ferris had be involved in the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unpardonable.”

  She kept cutting, tucking the loose trimmed ends back under the Virgin’s wimple.

  “I’ve been to enough seminars and read enough self-help books to know that I was sabotaging myself—I didn’t feel worthy of being a good nun, so I made damn sure I never could be one. I regret that. Terribly. And even more, I regret dragging Dan down with me. He’s a good man and a good priest, but because of me he broke his own vow, and now he’s a sinning priest.”

  Carrie felt tears welling in her eyes. Damn, I’ve got a lot to answer for.

  “But all that’s changed now,” she said, blinking and sniffing. “Finding you is a sign, isn’t it? It means I’m not a hopeless case. It means He thinks I can hold to my vows and make myself worthy to guard you and care for you. And if He thinks it, then it must be so.”

  She trimmed away the last vagrant strands of hair, then sealed them in the zip-lock bag.

  “There.” She stepped back and smiled. “You look better already.”

  She glanced down at the Virgin’s long, curved fingernails. They were going to need a lot of work, more work than she had time for now.

  “I’ve got to go now. Got to do my part for the least of His children, bu
t I’ll be back. I’ll be back every day. And every day you’ll see a new and better me. I’m going to be worthy of you, Mother. That is a promise—one I’ll keep.”

  She just had to find the right way to tell Dan that the old Carrie was gone and he couldn’t have the new one. He was a good man. The best. She knew he’d understand and accept the new her … eventually. But she had to find a way to tell him without hurting him.

  She placed the bag of clippings under the table that constituted the Virgin’s bier, then kissed her wimple and blew out the candles. She snapped the combination lock closed and hurried upstairs to help with lunch.

  Carrie was adding a double handful of sliced carrots to the last pot of soup when she heard someone calling her name from the Big Room. She walked to the front to see what it was.

  Augusta, a stooped, reed-thin, wrinkled volunteer who worked the serving line three days a week, stood at the near end of the counter with Pilgrim.

  “He says he’s got a complaint,” Augusta said, looking annoyed and defensive.

  The guests often complained about Augusta, saying she was stingy with the portions she doled out. Which was true. She treated the soup and bread as if it were her own. Carrie and Dan had been over this with her again and again: The idea here was to serve everything they made, then make more for the next meal. But they couldn’t very well tell her she wasn’t welcome behind the counter anymore—they needed every helping hand they could find.

  Carrie glanced around for Dan, hoping he could field this, but he was standing by the front door, deep in conversation with Dr. Joe.

  “Preacher don’t want me to say nothin’, Sister,” Pilgrim said, “but he found this in his mouth while he was eating his soup and I think you should know about it.”

  He held out his hand and in the center of his dirty palm lay a three-inch hair.

  “I’m Preacher’s eyes, you know.”

  “I know that,” Carrie said.

  Everybody knew that. Mainly because Pilgrim told anyone who would listen whenever he had a chance. Preacher was blind and Pilgrim was his devoted disciple, leading him from park to stoop to street corner, wherever he could find a small gathering that might listen to his message of imminent Armageddon.