Relic of Time

by Ralph McInerny

  He nodded. Then he crossed himself, kissed his knuckle, and bowed his head. He was still silently praying when her father came in.

  Don Ibanez stopped, letting the door close behind him. Miguel, hearing the door, straightened and then Clare led him to her father.

  “Father, this is Miguel Arroyo.”

  Her father seemed to recognize Miguel but he called on generations of aristocratic restraint. He bowed. Miguel began to put forth his hand, thought better of it, and returned her father’s bow.

  “Senor Arroyo wants to speak to you, Father,” she whispered. “I’ll leave you alone.”

  Outside she walked slowly away, but the door of the little basilica did not open again behind her. Well, that was the perfect place for Miguel to give her father his astounding news.

  The door of the basilica was still closed when she got to her car. She drove it around to the front; she would have to take Miguel back to Pinata when the discussion was over.

  The hacienda, shaded by the many trees around it and thanks to its thick walls, was cool on even so hot a day as this. The windows in the rooms were pulled open and curtains moved slowly in a slight breeze. Ten minutes went by, and then another ten. What advice would her father give Miguel?

  Half an hour later, Clare was surprised to see her father’s car go down the drive. Her father was at the wheel, Miguel a passenger.

  IX

  “ ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

  “Why did you never marry?” Lulu asked.

  “Word got out.”

  She laughed, making her breasts bounce. Neal Admirari was still trying to figure out where this was going. Wherever that was, neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to find out. They were now called the Devoted Duet by their colleagues.

  “And I can’t even sing.”

  They bounced then, too. Lulu and he were certainly devoted to sipping single-malt scotch, no ice, no water, and keeping apart from the others. The media moved like a nomadic band, taking their cue from the television crews, assuming that whoever sent them elsewhere knew what they were doing. Now they were in Phoenix, where the sound of rifle fire and mortars were audible. They were drinking too much. So Neal suggested they go to San Diego.

  “What on earth for?”

  “I want to show you where I went through boot camp.”

  “Neal, I can’t afford it. I am not on an expense account.”

  “You paid your own way here?”

  “Well, after all, I knew you’d be here.”

  Once, not many years ago, he had proposed marriage, and learned that there was the impediment of a husband. He had advised her to get an annulment, but a pall had descended upon them. They drifted apart. It was difficult to believe, when he was with her, that she had been married twice, the first finally annulled, the second ended by death, just months ago. Third time lucky? Lulu still looked virginal. He had never forgiven himself for taking her to bed where, afterward, he found out about that first husband. He had felt that he was corrupting her. They were both Catholic journalists then. “What is a Catholic journalist?” “A Roman reporter.” She had even laughed at that. Well, it was good exercise for her breasts.

  “I’ll buy your ticket.”

  “You will not!”

  “I don’t mean buy. I’ll use some of my miles. They keep accumulating.”

  “That’s different.”

  “From what?”

  “Being a kept woman.”

  Was she a keeper? They flew to San Diego, where he booked them into a hotel, separate rooms.

  “Now I’ll call a priest.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I’d get a blessing on our love.”

  She looked at him in silence, trying to figure out what he meant.

  “His name is Horvath. We were in the seminary together. He’s in the chancery and will know how to fix it.”

  More silence. She drew her lower lip between her teeth. Her eyes left his, then came back.

  “You’re serious.”

  “I am. What do you say?”

  Her smile grew gradually on her plush lips and then her teeth appeared. “I do.”

  And she did, some hours later, in a side chapel of the cathedral, Horvath presiding. The justification was that this was an emergency.

  “What emergency?” Horvath was an older version of his youthful self, the spiky hair graying, the fat nose keeping his eyes apart.

  “She is a proximate occasion of sin.”

  “Neal!”

  Horvath seemed embarrassed. What did he think people got married for? But Neal was glad to see that his old classmate was an untroubled celibate.

  Their honeymoon trip was a visit to the Marine Corps base, where he talked their way past the guard, and then led her out onto the mile-long parade ground. They looked back at the seemingly single building that formed a bracket around the parade ground.

  “It was still camouflaged when I was here.”

  He waited for a tug of nostalgia, but it did not come. He had been just a kid when he went through, eight weeks of hell, but proud as punch when his platoon marched past the platform full of brass, a marine at last.

  Back at the hotel, he canceled her room, and they moved into his but immediately decided to go downstairs and drink. Single malt.

  “We should ask for married malt.”

  Not much of a bounce out of that one. Were they sipping Dutch courage? After an hour he suggested they go up.

  “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

  “If I had any breasts, they would bounce.”

  He explained it to her in the elevator. They were already pressing against one another. They undressed each other on the way to the bed and it was everything it should have been. Afterward, she lay naked in his arms and the silence was golden. When his arm started to go to sleep, he untangled.

  “I think I’ll douche.”

  She looked alarmed.

  “It’s French for shower.”

  “I’ve never had a French shower.”

  They had it together.

  He called room service and ordered their dinner, which they ate wearing only the terry-cloth robes they found in the closet. They took turns glancing at the bed. After round two, he turned on the television, which was how they learned of the kidnapping of Don Ibanez.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  “What are you knitting?”

  Ignatius Hannan had made few friends among his fellow electronic billionaires, but then there only were a few who survived the almost daily revolutions that rendered yesterday’s epic breakthrough obsolete early this morning. It was no industry for observers. The few at the top were at least as inventive and resilient as anyone they hired. Still, Hannan did not find his peers congenial, and doubtless vice versa. They were, after all, competitors, and they had all been personally narrowed by their abstract imaginations. When they turned to philanthropy other differences emerged. Bill Gates promoted contraception, Hannan the Catholic Church, the former with accompanying press releases, Hannan sub rosa, as he had learned to say. But Don Ibanez had become as close a friend as Hannan had.

  When Ibanez heard of the replica of the grotto at Lourdes that Hannan had built on the grounds of Empedocles, he asked him to come out and see his own replica of the basilica in Mexico City. Hannan made a special flight to see it, bringing Laura and Ray along. And so Laura had met Clare and they became friends. Laura had been given accounts of the tragic progress of Clare’s relations with George Worth, and she knew of her part-time employment with Jason Phelps, their agnostic neighbor. The terrible news of the kidnapping of Don Ibanez sent Laura rushing in to tell Nate.

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “I’d like to be with her.”

  A beat or two, then a nod of his head. He picked up the phone and gave the order. “They’ll be ready whenever you are.”

  “Oh, Nate. Thank you.”

  “I may come out myself.” It was
as much question as statement. Laura kept his schedule.

  “You have four days with appointments that could easily be postponed.”

  “Get a hold of Crosby. And keep me posted.”

  Posted! This venerable cliché evoked snail mail, and coming from one of the agents of the instantaneous communication and dispersal of information it seemed truly quaint. She had a fleeting image of the Pony Express from a book of her girlhood, the rider racing from post to post, the brim of his hat blown back, saddlebags filled with letters written on lightweight paper. Like World War II V-mail, Ray had said.

  “How would you know?”

  “How did you know about the Pony Express?”

  Now that she was married to Ray, Nate had mixed feelings about her continuing at Empedocles. A married woman should stay home, that was his conviction, held all the more firmly by a single man.

  “What would I do at home?”

  “Once you have a family, you’re fired.”

  “Once I have a family, I’ll quit.”

  But so far, they’d had no luck. Sometimes she had the superstitious fear that she and Ray were being punished for the affair that had preceded their marriage. The religious atmosphere of Empedocles would have made such thoughts inevitable, even if there hadn’t been her brother, Father John Burke, now part of the bureaucracy of the Vatican. He had finished his dissertation and Nate had insisted that they all attend the defense. Nate had been impressed by the concerned cardinals in the audience. John had written an expanded, annotated, and massive development of the rationale with which the then-cardinal Ratzinger had accompanied the publication of the third secret of Fatima. John’s dissertation defense had been more a celebration than an ordeal, with all those dignitaries gathered in the Palazzo della Segnatura for the occasion. There had been a standing ovation after the unanimous vote of acceptance was announced. Summa cum laude. Nate had wanted to give John a huge dinner afterward, but that had to wait until the following day, as John was taken off by the cardinal who hoped the promising young priest would be named as his successor as acting prefect of the Vatican Library.

  “What would be an appropriate gift?” Nate had asked.

  “Why don’t we ask John?”

  The gift had been a magnificent chalice, which Laura helped him pick out in one of the church goods stores along the Via della Conciliazione. John had been reconciled to the extravagance by the thought that the vessel would be used at Mass, and thus was more an honor to Our Lord than to himself.

  “Will you be here forever, John?”

  She meant the Vatican.

  “That’s not up to me.”

  Several times, he had confided his hope that, his degree won, he could go home and teach in the diocesan seminary or, even better, be assigned to some obscure parish where he could do the work of a priest. Did he imagine becoming an assistant to someone like Father Krucek, the priest with whom he had stayed when he came home during the flap over the missing third secret of Fatima? Laura could imagine her brother made a bishop, then a cardinal, and then . . . But that was absurd.

  All such thoughts were pushed away now in the aftermath of the outrage that had been committed at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  On the flight out, Laura tried unsuccessfully to reach Crosby. Nate wanted him to direct his full attention to the missing Don Ibanez now. Laura was almost impressed by the fact that her boss ranked a missing person above the missing sacred portrait. Ray had commented on the seeming paradox of these two enormously wealthy men, Don Ibanez and Nate Hannan, striving for the simple piety of the peasant.

  “Can you buy your way through the Needle’s Eye?”

  Laura knew the reference was to a gate into Jerusalem, but still the metaphor suggested the literal needle. Imagine that sewing had gone on way back then. She herself had taken up knitting, causing a surge of expectation in Ray.

  “What are you knitting?” he asked, his eyes aglitter with potential fatherhood.

  “Socks.”

  “For whom?”

  “My husband.”

  “Oh.”

  They had stopped talking about her seeming inability to get pregnant. Nate had suggested a novena. That was all right with Ray. “But I want to become a father the old-fashioned way.”

  Below her the piebald Midwest was visible through fluffy clouds, a quilt of fertility, breadbasket of the nation, and more and more of the world, and it had other labels besides. Flyover country. How easily one became used to flitting about the world in a private plane, free of all the fuss of commercial travel, the security checks, the delays. And she could use her cell phone during the flight.

  They had passed over the Rockies when Ray called and told her Crosby was on the line.

  “I’m told you’re on your way,” Crosby said.

  “You’re in California?”

  “I could meet you. You’re coming in to Oakland?”

  “Yes. I want to be with Clare Ibanez. Any news about her father?”

  “Maybe. I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  Jack Smiley, the pilot, gave her an ETA and she passed it on to Crosby.

  They went out over the Pacific before coming into the Oakland airport where, having landed, they taxied to the area reserved for private aviation. Crosby came out of the building as Laura crossed to it. On the drive up to the Napa Valley, he told her that Miguel Arroyo had been taken in for questioning.

  “Miguel Arroyo!”

  “He had been up there to see the daughter. Apparently they met in a Catholic Worker house in Palo Alto.”

  Laura knew all about the house in Palo Alto, and of Clare’s unhappy love for George Worth. But Miguel Arroyo?

  When they arrived, Laura was told that Senorita Ibanez was in the basilica. The reference was to the replica visible from the back of the huge hacienda.

  “I’ll talk to her first alone,” she told Crosby and he gave her a little salute in reply.

  The circular church was empty except for Clare, sitting immobile in a back pew, eyes closed, a rosary running through her fingers. Laura sat beside her. The girl turned, surprised, and then threw herself into Laura’s arms and wept. What do you say to a girl whose father is missing? After ten minutes, they rose and went outside. There was a bench flanked by beds of lush flowers Laura could never have identified.

  “What’s this about Miguel Arroyo?”

  “Laura, I had to tell them. He was here. He said he had to see my father. I left them alone and then I saw my father’s car go down the drive.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Miguel was with him, I’m sure. Oh, how I hate tinted windows. But I had driven Miguel here after we met in town.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to see your father?”

  “Laura, it must have been a ruse. Oh, what a fool I am. My father could not abide Miguel and his bellicose approach.”

  The search for Don Ibanez’s car had been unsuccessful. And Miguel Arroyo had been found in the headquarters of Justicia y Paz in Los Angeles. He expressed angry surprise that he should be accused of such a thing. Yes, he had talked with the venerable Don Ibanez.

  “What about?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Laura,” Clare said, “he had no way to get to town. I drove him here.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Yes.”

  Confronted with this, Arroyo said that Don Ibanez had taken him to Pinata where he had left his van.

  Crosby came across the lawn to the bench and all this had to be told again.

  At the end of the day, Clare had agreed with the greatest reluctance to go back to helping Jason Phelps, anything to distract herself.

  “Can you stay, Laura?”

  “I will if you want me to.”

  “Please.”

  The following morning they went together to Jason Phelps’s place.

  II

  “Where can we meet?”

  Theophilus Grady had commanded his Rough Ri
ders from a two-story building just south of Santa Barbara, within earshot of the audible roar of Highway 101. The building, like the camps along the border, was abandoned now. Traeger sat in his parked car in the empty lot wondering what else he had expected. After the El Paso news conference, there had been nothing but silence from the man who had precipitated the crisis. Casualties along the border were mounting, and the ca-balleros who, aroused by Miguel Arroyo, had been harassing the Minutemen defending the border now found themselves under fire from bands of volunteers who had entered the fray. Where the hell it would all end was a good question.

  Meanwhile the rosary crusade for the return of the sacred portrait gathered force and spread throughout the nation. The networks and cable news shows had covered this with surprising tolerance. Just for laughs, Traeger got out of the car and walked to the entrance of the building. The door was open and a little gray-haired lady peered at him over the reception desk.

  “No one’s here.”

  “Aren’t you someone?”

  She displayed the tips of her denture. “I’m just minding the store.”

  Her name was Gladys Stone, according to the plastic plate on the counter.

  “I’d like to leave a message.”

  “I told you, no one is here.” Another display of denture. “Other than myself.”

  “Tell them Traeger was here. Vincent Traeger.”

  “Tell who?”

  “The people who aren’t here. Grady will do. We’re old friends.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  Good Lord, she had become coquettish. Traeger would have had to be a lot older than he was to respond to Granny’s come-on.

  He wrote his name, handed her the slip, and headed for the door.

  “How can he get in touch?” Gladys called after him.

  Aha. He turned and went back to the desk. Would Marilyn Monroe look like Gladys if she had lived? He took the slip and wrote his cell phone number on it.

  “I could give you mine, sweetie.”