Relic of Time

by Ralph McInerny

  Long years of married life had taught Geraldo when to speak and when to remain silent. He lit a cigarillo, and Amanda, who was downwind, disappeared into the house.

  Finally the television was turned off and the great rig, which had been put in place the previous day, began the task of drilling for water. Surveys of the property had been ambiguous. Only God knew how deep they would have to go for water. “China,” Amanda had muttered. “They’ll bring in tea if anything.”

  But it was not tea that came gushing forth after an hour’s drilling. A great black fountain arose from the earth, washing away the drilling equipment and showering the area with ebony drops. Oil! Geraldo’s initial disappointment gave way to elation at the realization of what was happening. Spattered like Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in the movie sometimes seen as a golden oldie on late night television, Geraldo danced around the gusher. Even Amanda did a sedate two-step in celebration of this incredible outcome.

  In subsequent days, government officials descended on the site. Against all previous surveys, there proved to be a veritable ocean of oil beneath Geraldo’s property and the surrounding area. Geraldo’s property was swiftly nationalized with a handsome recompense that would send Amanda and Geraldo north to a more appropriate retirement in Phoenix. Other probes were made. Oil seemed to be everywhere. Within weeks, the oil deposits of Mexico increased by a factor of fifty.

  Stewardship of Mexican oil had not been a model of prudence in the past. But with these amazing discoveries, something happened. A new and populist political party was formed, many of its members already elected under other labels, and the decision was made that this time everyone would benefit from the wells that sprang up like cactus around Guadalajara, and beyond. Elsewhere, similar discoveries were made. The population of Mexico would soon be as prosperous as the citizens of Saudi Arabia.

  When Benedict XVI was driven along the border in the Popemobile the day after the reinstallation of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the scene had already been transformed. Gunfire had ceased. The border, like many borders, had become a mere being of reason. One had to know it was there in order to know it was there. No longer did emigrants approach it stealthily; no longer were border patrols necessary to prevent illegal entries.

  Within a month, the traffic would be in the opposite direction as immigrants, legal and illegal, flowed back to their now prosperous native land. There was talk of a miracle.

  III

  “I won’t if you don’t.”

  Lulu found Neal Admirari’s reason for abandoning his book on recent events unconvincing. A hurried, sensational, and inaccurate book by a writer who had four hundred titles to his credit, if that was the word, had appeared soon after Our Lady of Guadalupe was returned to her shrine.

  “It’s a pile of junk, Neal. Yours will eclipse it.”

  “Lulu, it’s not my kind of thing.”

  “But the advance!”

  Hacker, Neal’s agent, had assured him that there would be no demand that he return the advance. Both parties had entered into the agreement with goodwill. Circumstances had changed. The agreement had been made under the implicit understanding of ceteris paribus. Of course Hacker’s fifteen percent was also a consideration in the agent’s interpretation of the contract Neal had signed.

  What Neal couldn’t tell Lulu was that Catherine Dolan had forced him to abandon the project. He had been interviewing her, wanting more details on the days she had spent with Lloyd Kaiser at the Whitehall Hotel in Chicago.

  “How would you like it if someone wrote of the times we spent together in the El Toro Motel?”

  “Who would be interested? Present company excluded, of course.”

  They were in Catherine’s Minneapolis apartment and she seemed changed with the setting. Where was the sensuous woman with whom he had frolicked in California?

  “Lulu would be interested,” Catherine said softly.

  “You wouldn’t!”

  She smiled her new Mona Lisa smile. “I won’t if you don’t.”

  After that he couldn’t risk going on with the book. Hell hath no fury like a woman unscorned. Trying to think of another way of doing the book made it sound too much like the quickie account that Lulu had disdained.

  “Pendant and Mercury have doubled my income, sweetie.”

  “And will no doubt double it again. I was thinking of prestige.”

  Lulu’s own reflective pieces on the theft of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe had drawn high praise and there was talk of collecting them into a book. That had provided a more convincing reason for dropping his own project. A man and wife writing rival books on the same subject?

  Before he left Catherine after that final interview, they talked of Jason Phelps.

  “Do you know, I thought you had killed him, Catherine.”

  “Myrna did.”

  Myrna? The cropped-haired, dour academic? Catherine told him that long ago when Myrna had been a graduate student at Berkeley she had fallen in love with Jason. At least her admiration for him had seemed like love. They had an affair, which at the time and in retrospect was the high point of Myrna’s life.

  “She didn’t take it very well when she learned of Jason and me.”

  “But he threw you out of his house.”

  “She didn’t know that. I did enjoy teasing her. What an awful friend I was.”

  “You aren’t serious that she killed him, are you?”

  “Oh yes. She told me so herself. I didn’t realize she was staying in Pinata.”

  “She was there all the time I was.”

  “I must have been out when she came to the house, trembling with remembered ardor. She slipped into the study and came up behind Jason sitting at his desk. She covered his eyes with her hands and kissed him on the head and blew in his ear. It was when he sighed and said, ‘Catherine?’ that, enraged, she picked up a bogus Polynesian war club and hit him. Again and again.”

  “Good God. Why would she tell you?”

  Catherine looked at the windows and at Lake Calhoun beyond. “It was proof that her feelings for him were stronger than mine. I think she expected me to accuse her to the police.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Perhaps I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.”

  “Do you see her still?”

  “We’re having lunch at the Minneapolis Club tomorrow. Would you care to join us?”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  Like never.

  IV

  The priest felt guilty, too.

  It was after a conference with Bishop Sapienza that George Worth turned over the Palo Alto Catholic Worker house to Lowry. The bishop had convinced George that he ran the risk of ruining Clare’s life as well as his own.

  “You have done much good, George. But you are not a monk.”

  George resisted, of course; the prospect before him seemed all too easy if he accepted the bishop’s advice. In the event, it was more difficult to convince Lowry than himself.

  “George, I’m a second banana. I couldn’t run this place.”

  “You’re running it now.”

  “Pro tem.”

  George reported Lowry’s resistance to Sapienza.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  The upshot was that Emilio Sapienza became George’s successor. The bishop’s own misgivings about the locale had been overcome, although from time to time he would still murmur,

  “Palo Alto, Palo Alto.”

  “But now you’re out of the shadow of Disneyland,” Lowry soothed.

  In reply, Bishop Sapienza gave a passable imitation of Don-ald Duck.

  Don Ibanez bought Jason Phelps’s place and Clare and George were installed there after their marriage in the little basilica, with Our Lady of Guadalupe, albeit only a copy, smiling her benediction on them. George began the engrossing task of learning to become his father-in-law’s successor as the manager of the vast holdings in Napa Valley.

  Don Ibanez had recovered his spee
ch, but was showing his age. He walked less erectly than before and spent much time working with Carlos on the grounds around the hacienda. He held no grudge against the gardener for having struck him with a shovel. Having discovered that Carlos had sequestered the original image behind the altar and allowed Traeger to go off with a copy, Don Ibanez hurried from the basilica intending to announce it to the world. Carlos had followed him and, outside the basilica, unable to accept the prospect that the object of his devotion would be removed, picked up a shovel and struck his venerable employer. He had confessed what he had done to Frater Leone, which was why the priest could not, even if he would have, accuse the gardener. Taking the blame on himself seemed the Christian thing to do, even apart from the restrictions of the seal of the confessional.

  The priest felt guilty, too. He had helped Carlos hoist the original into place behind the altar of the little basilica and put the copy in his room. While Don Ibanez was in a coma, Frater Leone had poured out the tale, more or less his own confession. After all, he had been as pleased as Carlos that the true image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was once more in the little basilica.

  Miguel Arroyo watched with dismay as the Latino population of California was halved, and still the hemorrage continued. Sometimes he thought that he, too, would move to Mexico. He settled for the post of honorary consul in San Diego, which did not entail a change of citizenship. He was clean-shaven now and reportedly drank more than was good for him.

  V

  “Do you say the rosary, Vincent?”

  Nate Hannan was not at Empedocles when Traeger stopped by, having gone off on retreat with the Trappists in Kentucky.

  “Is there an airport near there?”

  Laura lifted her hands. “He took Amtrak!”

  “Did he buy it first?”

  “It never even occurred to him.” She sounded surprised, or perhaps relieved.

  Laura wanted him to sign some papers, which he did, and then she slid a check across her desk to him. Traeger was astounded at the amount.

  “You did what you set out to do. And Nate wanted to take account of the difficulties you experienced in the process.”

  “How about Will Crosby?”

  “Don’t worry about Crosby.”

  Traeger promised he wouldn’t worry about Crosby. Good old Crosby. Traeger would never forgive Crosby for firing that warning shot, but all’s well that ends well. He got in his car and headed south.

  Dortmund was being rigged up with a new supply of oxygen when he got there, and Traeger waited until his old mentor was again snuffling satisfactorily through the plastic device in his nostrils.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Dortmund said as Traeger pushed the old man’s chair out onto the patio.

  “I don’t.”

  “Good. I can handle that myself.”

  After they were settled, Traeger went inside and brought out a couple of beers.

  “I never liked beer before, Vincent. Now I do. Do you suppose it is deterioration of the taste buds?”

  “Buds lite?”

  They talked of recent events, and Dortmund did not agree with Traeger on the matter of Crosby’s warning shot. Traeger let it go. Craig had recovered. No need to tell Dortmund of the king’s ransom he himself had received from Hannan.

  “So Boswell has retired.”

  “He was let go,” Dortmund corrected. “Sometimes even this administration recognizes when they have a skunk in their midst.”

  A minute’s silence. “How few good apples there were, Traeger. You, Crosby, one or two others.”

  “Poor Morgan.”

  “He wanted to be rich Morgan.”

  They talked of Theophilus Grady. With the cessation of hostilities and the disappearance of illegal immigration, the Rough Riders had melted away. Grady had been hired by the Albanian government to train their special forces.

  “Tell me about Gladys Stone.”

  Dortmund sighed. “You can take the girl out of the agency, but can you take the agency out of the girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “She was a girl when I met her.”

  “She thought she still was.” He told Dortmund of the old girl’s flirtiness when he was in pursuit of Morgan.

  “She always idealized Mata Hari.”

  “Who was she working for anyway?”

  “Gladys.”

  “She might have killed me.”

  “But she didn’t. I’m told she plans to marry a man who is a driver for Don Ibanez.”

  “Tomas?”

  “Is that his name?”

  “She’s too old to get a license.”

  “Now, now.”

  They sat in silence as the afternoon shadows lengthened.

  “Do you say the rosary, Vincent?”

  “At wakes.”

  “I’ve taken it up again. It is soothingly repetitive.”

  When Traeger rose to go, Dortmund said he would stay there on the patio. Telling his beads? Traeger shook the old man’s hand and started for his car. Dortmund called after him.

  “Watch your back.”

  ALSO FROM RALPH MCINERNY

  THE THIRD REVELATION

  An astounding miracle.

  Two vicious murders.

  A secret that could change the world.

  The Rosary Chronicles begin.

  Retired CIA operative Vincent Traeger spent years working undercover in Rome. But when the Vatican’s secretary of state is brutally murdered along with a prefect of the Vatican Library, Traeger must not only solve the murders, but fight an unseen enemy and navigate a treacherous maze through history, faith, and his own past if he is to discover the astonishing truth.

  penguin.com