“Are you going to write about it?” Catherine asked Jason.
They were on the patio in the evening, sipping margaritas, the great valley spread out below them. Phelps passed a hand over his shock of white hair, sipped his drink, and smiled at her.
“There is no need. It’s already been done.”
Catherine did not understand. Most of the books that had arrived were devoted to authenticating the legend that had grown up around the miraculous portrait.
“Leoncio Garza-Valdés, a devout Catholic, a medical man, produced a book that went against the grain of his desires. He was like that fellow Weinstein, who set out to exonerate Alger Hiss and was forced to conclude that the man was guilty as charged. His former companions in championing Hiss never forgave him. And so it has been with Garza-Valdés.”
“He thinks the portrait is a fake?”
“Oh, many have cast sufficient doubts on the received view of the portrait, and its dating. Garza-Valdés was driven to conclude that Juan Diego himself had never existed.”
“And he convinced you?”
“He would convince anyone with an open mind. But an open mind is the last thing you can expect in such matters. I include myself, of course.” Another smile, another sip of his margarita. “The supreme test for Garza-Valdés was the fact that John Paul II had canonized Juan Diego. Made a saint of a man who, as Garza-Valdés proved to his own satisfaction, never existed. And yet Garza-Valdés continues to be a Catholic and professes a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin. But the whole story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is for him a fabrication.”
“Then all this commotion over the theft . . .”
“Is ridiculous.”
“That book should be translated.”
“You think that would make a difference?”
Catherine could not have explained why she felt so elated by what the distinguished old skeptic was saying. It was as if one more safeguard against the temptation that had brought her to Jason Phelps had been removed. The seductive attraction of the faith that had sent Lloyd rushing off to Mexico to do penance for their torrid days in Chicago, the stirring of old memories of piety that she had felt at his funeral, seemed ridiculous indeed in light of what Jason was saying. She pulled her chair closer to his. Ever since they had become lovers, a transition that she regarded as part of her cure, she had come to revere this man. It was not fair to compare her visits to his bed with the passion she had known with Lloyd. With Jason, it was as if he were the beloved and she the lover. Actually, she preferred it that way. And he was tender in his slow and faltering lovemaking. She wouldn’t have called it love, but she had gotten less satisfaction from far younger men.
“I wonder if Don Ibanez knows of Garza-Valdés’s book.”
“Oh, he must.”
“Have you discussed it with him?”
“Certainly not. There is a manly simplicity in his devotion. Obviously, it gives him great consolation. None of us can live without illusions.”
“What are your illusions?”
“That I am a young man again.” He ran his hand over her head, down her arm, and clutched her elbow. She leaned forward and kissed him. How odd it was to feel more mustache than lips.
Catherine wished that Clare were still working on Jason Phelps’s papers so that she could talk about all this with the younger woman. Jason might wish to leave Don Ibanez to his delusions, but Catherine would have felt strengthened in her own disbelief if she could reproduce it in Clare.
II
“It’s a cozy little hotel.”
They seemed like an old married couple when they flew back east, fed up with California and events they kept missing. Neal Admirari reminded himself that he was a columnist, not a reporter, and Lulu wrote for Commonweal, a magazine not exactly concerned with the breaking news of the day. Going to El Paso had seemed right at the time, but what difference did being there make to them?
“We should have stayed put.”
“Then we wouldn’t have married.”
He looked at her, his nicely plump, pretty-faced, brand-new wife whose lips widened in a smile. Lulu was in the middle seat, Neal had the window, and the aisle seat was occupied by a kid who couldn’t quite get comfortable—iPod plugs in his ears, a vacant look, but always squirming. Whenever he stretched one leg out in the aisle, he had to pull it back to let someone go by. Neal leaned toward Lulu and kissed her nose and the kid turned and stared. Neal smiled at him, invoking the old male camaraderie. The kid frowned and looked away, embarrassed.
“My place or yours?” Lulu asked.
Where they would settle had been their question for a week now. Neal had a loft in the Village. (“The Village!” Lulu was right; it seemed a desperate stab at his disappearing youth, like kissing Lulu on the nose with that kid looking on.) Lulu’s apartment was in the Bronx, one he had never seen. She described it.
“We got it for a song.”
“We?”
Neal’s immediate predecessor. He didn’t like the thought of being a replacement for whatshisname, a substitute sent in to play the third quarter.
“Neal, I don’t want to live in a bachelor’s pad.”
“You make it sound more interesting than it is.”
“I’ll bet.”
Neal let it go. If she wanted to think of him as Don Giovanni that was all right with him. It was the thought of all that moving and getting settled again that decided them to leave California and get at it. Neal had the summer place up in Connecticut and they would go there first.
“But I haven’t a thing to wear.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Again the smile. She whispered, “It’s our anniversary.”
She was right. Two weeks since the ceremony in San Diego. He would have kissed her again if it hadn’t been for Ichabod with the iPod.
Lulu went back to her book. She was reading up on Our Lady of Guadalupe in search of an idea for an article. Neal settled back, put on his eyeshade, and consulted the darkness as recent events slid past his mind.
The Holy Heist, as the New York Post described it, had been the beginning, a handful of masked and armed men raising a ladder, wrenching the framed picture of Mary free, and then shooting their way out of the basilica, killing one American. He smiled. The old joke about the Catholic press. Earthquake in Tahiti, no Catholics killed. Kaiser. Lulu had googled the name. Lloyd Kaiser had been an Indiana author.
“What did he write?”
“History for young adults.”
“Come on.”
She read him some of the titles. One on Heloise and Abelard, a book on Patrick Henry, another on Henry Adams, yet another on the founding of Notre Dame. That one had hit the jackpot, selling like popcorn in the Notre Dame bookstore, and across the land as alumni bought it for their kids.
“Was Kaiser a graduate of Notre Dame?”
She shook her head. “Indiana. College of Dentistry.”
“Come on.”
He read the entry himself. Well, lots of people fled boring professions in order to write. Neal himself had once thought of writing a novel—who hadn’t?—but it would have been a bus-man’s holiday since he already wrote for a living.
“You should do a piece on him, Lulu.”
“One American killed?”
“Hey, that’s catchy.”
Now he smiled into the darkness created by his eyeshade. He might do a piece on Lloyd Kaiser himself. He began to compose it. There in the legendary basilica sat the author of popular history for young adults, on the mourning bench by the confessionals. A shot rang out and he leapt to his feet. . . . Neal drifted into sleep.
They had to catch another plane in Chicago, and Neal had trouble getting fully awake. Lulu looked at him with almost maternal concern as they went through a waiting area, on the lookout for a list of departures and their next gate. Neal was yawning. His eyeshade still hung around his neck. He felt like putting it on again and letting Lulu lead him through the crowds.
“Neal
, let’s stop over. We’re in no rush.”
“We’ll miss our connection.”
“That’s what I’m suggesting.” She saw a passenger service desk for their airline and headed for it. Neal stood sleepily at her side while she arranged for them to fly out the next day, even succeeding in getting their luggage sent to baggage claim. While they waited for the bags to appear, Lulu said, “There’s a Hilton over there.”
“Uh-uh. Airport hotels are like sleeping in a plane.”
So they took a cab downtown, Lulu giving the driver the address of the Whitehall on Delaware. A crowded little lobby, lots of Japanese and German tourists. Neal liked it.
“We always stayed here,” Lulu said.
“Ask for the bridal suite.” He’d be damned if he’d ask who “we” was this time.
As soon as they got to their room on the seventh floor Neal felt wide awake. The area around the hotel looked interesting.
“Navy Pier is within walking distance,” Lulu said. “Or there’s a little trolley.”
“Were you here on one of your honeymoons?”
She put her arms around him. “I am now.”
Later they ate in the restaurant on the street floor and had a drink afterward in the bar. In the lobby the concierge was sending tourists off to the theater. On his desk, in a tray, were newspaper clippings, and Neal was surprised to see that they were of the Holy Heist. He pointed this out to Lulu. When the man was free, Neal took the chair next to his desk and asked if the Cubs were in town. But neither Chicago team was playing in town. Neal had already known that. He picked up one of the clippings from the tray and the concierge looked sheepish.
“It’s a little ghoulish, I know. The American who was killed there? He stayed here at the Whitehall just days before the event. He and his wife.”
“I’m writing a piece on him.” He showed the concierge his credentials.
“Then you already knew.” The concierge looked relieved.
“Tell me about them.”
The concierge had not really seen much of the couple. Most of his memories seemed to have been prompted by the events in Mexico City. But once they had bought tickets from the concierge.
“They might have been on their honeymoon.”
Neal asked the concierge to tell him anything else he remembered, then they were led around to the manager’s office. A little fellow with sandy hair and a Slavic face. His nameplate seemed to be missing some vowels.
“Splivic?”
The manager corrected Neal. He let it go, and told his story about doing a column on Lloyd Kaiser and his wife. On the way to the reception counter, Lulu had whispered, “He was a widower.”
“Widower than what?”
She was right, yet the concierge had spoken of Kaiser’s wife.
With some reluctance, the manager turned to his computer and sought the information Neal had asked for. Would he even be bothering about this if the concierge hadn’t mentioned a wife?
Splivic found the records. Would he print them out? More reluctance, but he finally agreed. They sat listening to the printer behind the reception desk clatter away.
“Just Kaiser and his wife?”
The manager looked surprised. “Oh no, he was alone.”
They took the printout of the guests registered on the days Kaiser had been in the hotel.
“I thought he was going to be my story,” Lulu said.
“You can have the wife.”
“Neal, he had no wife. The concierge must be confused.”
“Just another guest he got friendly with?”
“It’s a cozy little hotel.”
On the little trolley taking them to Navy Pier, Neal figured out that Catherine Dolan had to have been Lloyd’s companion. Hers was the only woman’s name on the register of all the days Lloyd Kaiser had been here.
“Imagine her reaction when she learned he had been killed in the basilica.”
“She was from Minneapolis.”
Lulu put her arm through his and snuggled closer.
Neal said, “And there is his family.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You aren’t seriously considering writing about the man.”
“Of course not.”
But as they bumped along, he thought that maybe he would.
III
“Go see her.”
The window showed the signs of hurried washing, sun lay on the dusty blades of the blind, a fly buzzed persistently about the room he called his office, and George Worth felt an animal content. Shelves made of bricks and boards contained the few books he had kept for his own, the rest going into the large room for the benefit of guests. The electric typewriter on his desk had once been the very latest marvel of its type, perhaps twenty or thirty years earlier. A Selectric, navy blue, that purred contentedly as his hands hovered over the keyboard. His fingers dropped to the keys and the globe on which the characters were molded danced across the page. Lines formed, no need for the carrier to move.
“A typewriter!” Clare had exclaimed.
He had thought at first she was chiding him for having taken possession of such a wonderful machine. It had been among donated items and from the moment George had seen it he wanted it. His mother had used such a typewriter. He had felt almost guilty as he bore it away to his office. But Clare was reacting to the quaintness of the Selectric. No one used typewriters anymore. His guilty possession was added to the list she seemed to be making of his self-deprivations. He stopped praising the machine when he saw her reaction. Saint George Worth in love with his poverty.
He missed her. He missed everything about her except her way of seeing his life as heroic. When he told her there were times when he, too, wanted to just walk away from it all, to live like everyone else, the way he had been raised, she clearly thought that he was making this up for her sake. Would she believe how rare such moments as this were, the sun on the window, a friendly fly for company, wanting to purr like the Selectric? But his office was his hideout as well as where he worked to keep the house afloat. The small income from the silly science fiction he wrote was often the difference between being able to go on another week or shutting the doors. Benefactors were more likely to bring old clothes and furniture, rarely something like the Selectric, which had replaced his manual typewriter. What asceticism would Clare have been able to imagine if she had seen that portable Underwood?
Of course he did not think his stories were silly when he wrote them. Could any writer disdain what he was actually writing? George doubted it. Hacks must have the same sense of exhilarated creativity as Tolstoy. The magazines that bought his stuff still billed themselves as science fiction publications, but there was no science in what George wrote. It was futurist fantasy, short on hardware, allegories of virtue and vice palatable because they were set in a far-off imaginary land. His favorite setting was the planet Aidos, a light-year or two from Mars, George Worth sole proprietor. The place was prelapsar-ian; there was an absence of religion except the universal unquestioned reverence for the Being who had brought Aidousians and their planet into existence. Aidos was more than a few light-years from the Catholic Worker house in Palo Alto where he wrote. His current effort, like several that had preceded it, was a veiled version of his love for Clare Ibanez.
He was interrupted by Lowry with news of what had happened outside Pocatello. George sometimes looked at the dated sports page of newspapers that lay around the common room, but that was it; so Lowry, who had retained an insatiable appetite for the trivial happenings of the day, was his main source of news of the world.
“Did they recover it?” The stolen portrait.
“Apparently not.”
“Could I see the story?”
“Good Lord, it wasn’t in the paper.”
Vincent Traeger, the so-called former CIA agent, was Lowry’s informant. Traeger had been the one to whom Lowry had made what he called his general confession when he had left behind his long involvement with those he could not bring himself to c
all terrorists. “No names,” he had insisted, “just accounts of what had happened and what was planned. He already knew the names,” he added, peering at George. Lowry seemed to see the way he lived now as a variation on the way he had lived before, only with a different end in view. He called the Catholic Worker house his private witness protection program.
“Why would he tell you?”
“Quid pro quo? He knows of my devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.” That devotion had been behind Lowry’s conversion. Before it, he had regarded the Virgin of Guadalupe as the patroness of terrorism. No wonder Lowry despised Miguel Arroyo.
“Tell me,” George said, turning off the Selectric. Lowry nailed Brother Fly with a rolled-up magazine.
The story he narrated was soon supplemented by newspaper accounts, which concentrated on the arrest of Theophilus Grady, who had been holed up in Idaho while his theft of the sacred portrait was causing havoc on both sides of the border. Eventually such stories contained Grady’s refusal to say where the stolen portrait was.
“Why?”
Lowry applied a match to his pipe. “I suppose he doesn’t want the chaos he has caused to stop.”
But then came the official announcement that the missing portrait had not been found in Pocatello.
For weeks the news that Lowry had been passing on to George stemmed from that awful event in the basilica in Mexico City: the storming of the border and the guerrilla war raging in the deserts and mountains, fanned by Miguel among others, although he had tried unsuccessfully to call it off. Repentance? He said that he now feared that violence would postpone the inevitable but peaceful accomplishment of his dreams of an altered California, a united Southwest. Only belatedly did George hear of what had happened in long-term parking at the San Francisco airport.
“Don Ibanez was there?!”
Concern for the old man could mask his love for Clare. Lowry had been witness to the whole sad thing, the mutual love and then the gathering depression when Clare realized that George was not doing what he did in Palo Alto only as a temporary thing. It was to be his life.
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