Relic of Time

by Ralph McInerny

  Now, across the river in a windowless room, the three who had accompanied him from the White House sat in silence. Who was in charge?

  Boswell, the man in the glen plaid suit and polka-dot tie, his silvery hair falling across his forehead, looked at Traeger.

  “You know this fellow Grady?”

  “I knew him.”

  Silence.

  “Can you find him?”

  It might have been a job interview. Why the hell, with all the resources at their command, weren’t they already in search of Grady?

  “I’ll find him.”

  “Get it,” the one with a paunch said. The others smiled at the quotation.

  After a moment, Traeger nodded.

  For the next several hours, he was taken from office to office and readied for his mission. The reason for using someone no longer connected with the Company became clear. The official view was that the little war raging on the southern border was just a minor dustup, no need to make a federal case of it. Better to have a trained freelancer remove the cause of the skirmishes.

  “We’ll get it back where it belongs when you recover it.”

  Traeger remembered a rooftop in Rome when his old colleagues had become the enemy. He wondered if he could trust them now.

  When he left, he was armed, briefed, provided with a variety of IDs. He was driven to Reagan by Boswell.

  “How is Dortmund?”

  “Old.”

  Boswell nodded as if age was something that happened to others. “He’s a legend.”

  “That’s what he tells me.”

  “He praised you to the skies.”

  No need to comment on that.

  At the airport, he got out, having shaken Boswell’s hand. He hurried into the terminal, past the baggage area, and into a men’s room. Ten minutes later, he emerged and crossed the street and climbed the stairs to the Metro station. He was on his own and he would start now.

  Back in the city, he went to Amtrak and bought a ticket to Chicago, a roomette for the overnight journey. There were several hours before his train would leave. He went outside, where, from a bench, he called Dortmund.

  On the phone, the old man sounded vigorous and almost young. Traeger told him about his day.

  “Thanks for recommending me.”

  “What else do you have to do?”

  Did Dortmund think that he, too, spent his days sitting in the sun on a patio?

  “Watch your back” was Dortmund’s final word of advice.

  Traeger had dinner before boarding the train and once he was on, locked himself in his roomette. He let down the table and opened the laptop he had been issued. His own was in his briefcase. Before the train pulled out of the station, he was reading what the agency had on Theophilus Grady. The old stuff he already knew, but it was clear that Grady had been under surveillance ever since he organized the Rough Riders.

  Grady was a throwback. He would have flourished under Wild Bill Donovan, but had rubbed the bureaucracy that had grown up over the years the wrong way. Grady had wanted war when the policy of the Company was truce. His last assignment had been in Albania, where he had led a band of rebels who descended from their mountain redoubts to raise hell and havoc. That an American was involved in those incidents had infuriated the State Department. Grady had failed to respond to orders to get the hell out of Albania and come home. In the end, they’d had to go for him, Traeger and others. He was metaphorically stripped of his epaulets and fired from the Company. Predictably, he had called a news conference to protest the lily-livered policies that were leading the country into ruin. After his five minutes of fame, he disappeared from public view. But not from surveillance.

  “We have a man in his outfit,” Traeger had been told.

  He waited.

  “No need to know his name.”

  “What has he said about the stolen image?”

  There was a long silence. “We think he may have gone over.”

  In his roomette, Traeger smiled. He realized he had more respect for Grady than for the well-groomed men who had briefed him. But what in hell was the guy doing stealing religious images? What he said, no doubt. Diplomacy and threats had not stemmed the tide of illegal immigration. It seemed doubtful whether the will to stem it existed. Sacrilege aside, Grady had hit upon a sure way to catch the attention of our neighbors across the border. Even if he wasn’t behind the theft, he had turned it to his advantage.

  Somewhere in western Pennsylvania, Traeger let down his bunk and lay on it fully clothed. With the lights off, the window no longer mirrored the roomette and he lay on his side and watched the country slide by, clusters of lights from time to time, the dim silhouette of farm buildings, and trees, trees, trees. Well, the state was Penn’s woods, after all.

  Would he be able to find the tree he sought in the woods he was about to enter?

  III

  “The man’s an atheist!”

  Her father had been astounded when Clare Ibanez told him that she had taken a job as secretary to their new neighbor, Jason Phelps.

  “The man’s an atheist!”

  “It’s not catching.”

  “What kind of work would you do?”

  “He is trying to put order into his papers, his publications, a lifetime accumulation.”

  “He would be wiser to burn it all.”

  Jason Phelps had taught at Berkeley for most of his academic life. His renown as an anthropologist was all but eclipsed by the personal crusade he had undertaken a decade or so ago. It was one thing to encounter superstition in backward tribes and civilizations, but the fact that mad beliefs had survived into the late twentieth century and now into the third millennium stirred him to zealous debunking. His little book on the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius in Naples was scathingly dismissive. He had tried, without success, to obtain some small portion of whatever liquid was in the reliquary.

  “Of course my request was refused,” he wrote. “It would be like a magician permitting you to see how he accomplishes his deception.”

  So, too, at Nevers in France, he had sought permission to examine the incorrupt body of Saint Bernadette, the seer of Lourdes. He was given accounts of the several exhumations that had preceded putting the body in its glass case, on view to the faithful. The fact that he was given the accounts made him skeptical of them.

  But it was Lourdes itself that had drawn his particular fury. There, scientists with undeniable credentials subjected supposed cures to just the kind of painstaking examination that Phelps himself advocated. And time and again they concluded that there was no natural explanation for the fact that a person suffering from a terminal illness had come to Lourdes, prayed to Our Lady in the grotto in which she had appeared, drank the water, and came away cured. Certified by scientists! It was too much to bear. To give the patina of objective truth to such preposterous claims! Of course there must be a psychological explanation, some psychophysical power that science had yet to identify, something perfectly natural, triggered perhaps by the visit to Lourdes, but scarcely the result of sending up a few prayers to a simpering statue. What could not happen had not happened; it was as simple as that.

  Two years before, Phelps, a retired widower, had bought property in the Napa Valley, just a few acres from the vast estate of Don Ibanez, no great loss to the vineyards, and on it he had built the comfortable two-story house in which he intended to spend his last years, years after which he was positive that nothing but nothingness awaited him.

  Clare’s father paid a courtesy call on their new neighbor in his role as hidalgo of the locality. The Ibanez family had settled in California five hundred years earlier, the first arriving with the conquistadores, others attached to the Jesuit and Franciscan missions. It was early in the eighteenth century that the Ibanez family had come to the Napa Valley. Their real estate had embraced fifty square miles, much of it vineyards that produced the grapes from which their wines were made. Don Ibanez, as he styled himself, presented a dozen bo
ttles of wine to Jason Phelps and welcomed him to the neighborhood.

  Some days later, Phelps returned the courtesy, presenting Clare’s father with signed copies of several of his books, all anthropology. Don Ibanez still had no inkling that Phelps was a crusading debunker of things religious. Nor did this come out when he took Phelps to the chapel some fifty yards from the house. It was a replica of the basilica in Mexico City, and within, as in the original, there was the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe high above the altar.

  “No need for a moving walkway here, of course.”

  “Moving walkway?” Phelps asked.

  Clare’s father was happy to explain.

  “Why go to Mexico when they could come here?” Phelps had asked.

  Don Ibanez laughed. “But this is merely a reproduction. The actual cape with the image on it is in the shrine in Mexico City.”

  “Interesting.”

  Thus civility and reticence got the two men through what might have been a testing encounter. It was not until a week later that Frater Leone, a Benedictine who lived in the hacienda and said Mass in the little basilica, identified their neighbor for her father.

  “The man who wrote the book about the shroud of Turin,” the priest explained. The two men spoke Spanish when they were together.

  “But he was obviously impressed by the chapel here!”

  “That surprises me. He is a belligerent atheist.”

  “Atheist!”

  His book on the shroud of Turin was written to refute any suggestion that the tests that had been made, careful scientific tests, supported the legend that had made the shroud an object of veneration as the cloth in which the body of Jesus was buried and on which was found, like a photographic negative, an image of the body it had enclosed.

  “But they found the shroud to be authentic,” Don Ibanez said.

  “Most drew that conclusion. But there were members of the scientific team who drew a negative conclusion.”

  “And Phelps is among the deniers?”

  “That puts it rather mildly.”

  If her father had known this when Phelps was buying his land, he would have had the sale canceled, something he could easily have done. Now, he had half a mile up the road a skeptic, an atheist, an enemy.

  Clare shared her father’s religious beliefs and his devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe but not his weakness for unusual religious phenomena and his tendency to make Marian apparitions the center of his creed.

  It was on her morning jog that she had first encountered Phelps, puffing along on his bicycle, keeping mortality at bay. She stopped to talk to him.

  “I want to stay hearty enough to finish my work,” he said, breathing heavily.

  “Your work?”

  He explained.

  “But can’t you get someone to do that for you?”

  “Oh, I could never entrust it to anyone else. A helper, yes. A helper I could use. But in this remote region . . .”

  He looked at her through unkempt eyebrows.

  “What do you do all day?” he asked.

  She laughed. “This and that.” She would not mention the novel she was writing. It had seemed a kind of therapy to begin it after she had broken up with George. “Come home,” her father had said. “What you want is peace and quiet.”

  Was it? In any case, she came home, not intending to stay, but doing so, for nearly half a year. What an indolent life it seemed, how luxurious and carefree, after working in the Catholic Worker house that George ran in Palo Alto. How she admired him. He seemed a saint, otherworldly, totally disinterested in money or prestige or any of the things that drove others their age. When she praised him, he looked at her with his deep, deep eyes.

  “Come and help.”

  She was a student at Stanford, as he had been. She stopped going to class. She spent much of her day there, helping George and the others with the “guests,” drunks and addicts and derelicts who had reached bottom without any hope of rising again. So the point was simply to be of help to them as they were, without expecting some great transformation. “Sufficient for the day is the soup thereof” was one of George’s maxims. And he wasn’t being cynical.

  Clare had kept her apartment and that led to George’s suggestion that she live in the women’s residence. Besides the building in which the guests were received and fed and clothed, there were two houses, one for men, the other for women. George lived in the first, and he suggested that she take a room in the second. He showed her through the place. He was very proud of it. In the kitchen was a woman with a baby on her hip and a neckline that was not daring but serviceable, facilitating breast-feeding the child she held. The boy seemed to have some sort of rash.

  “Infantigo,” the mother explained.

  George took the baby and the woman showed Clare the upstairs. It was all she could do not to shudder. Here was poverty indeed. There was nothing romantic about it. It was squalid and unclean and . . . But why go on?

  “So what do you think?” George asked when she came down.

  “Nice.”

  “Did Sandy show you your room?”

  “I think I saw them all.”

  She went to the door and outside, where George joined her. “You don’t like it.”

  “George . . .” She searched his face for understanding. But how could you explain to Saint Francis that you just couldn’t live his way?

  “It takes getting used to.”

  She could believe that, but why should one get used to squalor and dirt? It was the beginning of the end of what had promised to be something very serious between her and George. Eventually she fled to her father and the haven of the Napa Valley.

  On their second morning encounter, Professor Phelps formally asked her to come help him with his accumulated papers. She agreed.

  “The man’s an atheist!” her father cried.

  No doubt. But he was also considerate, fastidious, grateful, and witty. And it gave Clare something to do now that she had despaired of her novel. Dorothy Day had written a novel, before her conversion; that seemed to be the genesis of the idea. Working with Professor Phelps on his papers was less demanding.

  IV

  She put her hand on his.

  The bishops of the United States had earned Neal Admirari’s grudging approval by the way in which they defended illegal immigrants. The hierarchy had been notably timid and tepid on most moral and social issues, with exceptions of course, but the exceptions were not Neal’s cup of tea.

  “You think Catholic politicians who are cheerleaders for abortion and all the rest should be given communion?”

  This from the recently widowed Lulu van Ackeren, once the love of his life and now returned to journalism as a contributor to Commonweal.

  “Let’s not politicize the Eucharist,” Neal said unctuously.

  Opposing Lulu’s views was something he did as much to stir her into anger as to express his own thoughts. When she was angry, the years seemed to wash away and she was once more the girl she had been. Her hair was still blondish, doubtless due more to art than to nature now, and the great blue eyes still sparkled with youthful fire. It had always been argument that had lit the fire of love between them. Ever since her return, Neal had been wondering whether their grand passion would know a second act. Patience was the watchword now, because of his indecision and the fact that she was, after all, still in mourning of a sort. Besides, if it came to that, he would be husband number three.

  “Read the Catechism,” she urged.

  “First chance I get. How about Catholic politicians who support an unjust war?”

  “There are two schools of thought on that, and you know it.”

  “There are two schools of thought on everything.”

  They were in the bar of the hotel in El Paso where the media had gathered, but their table was off in a corner, a small table, which made it difficult not to keep knocking her knees with his. Their argument now was a diversion, just getting into practice again. They were on the same s
ide so far as immigration went. And Benedict XVI, bless his former Holy Office—formerly the Inquisition—heart, was clearly on the side of the poor who defied the law and swarmed across the border. The pope had made the telling point that the way to stop immigration was to make things more tolerable in the immigrants’ native lands.

  “Two more, kiddo,” Neal called to a passing waitress.

  “I don’t want another,” Lulu said.

  “These are for me.”

  Of course she’d have another drink. It was a professional obligation to have a snootful if one were to protect the public’s right to know.

  “I had forgotten what rowdies the media are.”

  “One does one’s best.”

  “You.” She dropped her chin and gave him the benefit of an approving look. They had met that morning at an early Mass, and that set them apart from their colleagues. Most of them had no idea who Our Lady of Guadalupe was.

  “Patroness of the Americas,” Neal had said authoritatively when the question arose.

  “North and South both?”

  “You got it.”

  Background stories on Theophilus Grady and his Rough Riders had appeared in most of the media represented here, cobbled together by researchers in New York and Washington. Neal had needed to do little research for the two pieces he had written for his syndicated column. Was Lulu impressed by the heights he had reached? A syndicated column was the dream of every member of the print media. Several websites had tried to lure Neal away but he still couldn’t bring himself to believe that that was where the future lay.

  “The print media is dead,” Nicholas Pendant had assured Neal.

  “Are.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You got fact-checkers?”

  “Of course we’ve got fact-checkers. Papers are dying all over the country, Neal. And it’s not just the general illiteracy. It’s far easier and quicker to log on to Mercury to get the news.”

  Mercury was the up-and-coming website and Pendant could prove it.

  “You have links to my column now.”

  “See? You log in yourself.”