Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Good night.”

  VII

  Isola di Capri

  He tossed and turned in fitful half-sleep for several hours. Occasionally, he heard muttering and sporadic groans from Billy’s room. Obviously, the Monsignor was dreaming. In the middle of the night, the groans became yelps and then, suddenly, a loud cry for help.

  “Oh, Lord! My gut!”

  Elijah went into the other room and found Billy sitting up in bed with a look of terror on his face. He was holding his belly and rocking back and forth. In a contortion of physical agony, he threw himself onto the pillows, rolled around, and then tried to get out of bed.

  “Quick! The bathroom!” said Billy and ran for it. He staggered out again about twenty minutes later.

  “Something’s really wrong. I’ve been retching and retching, and it just won’t stop, even though my stomach’s empty. Nasty bouts of diarrhea too. It’s something more than indigestion. I’ve never had cramps like this in my life.”

  He began groaning again and tears of pain sprang to his eyes.

  “It sounds like something serious”, said Elijah. “I’m taking you to a hospital.”

  He rang Roberto on the house phone and asked for directions to the closest one. Fifteen minutes later they were staggering into the emergency ward at Salerno. Billy was still retching.

  In heavily accented Italian, Billy described his symptoms to an intern.

  The young doctor asked what they had eaten the evening before, and when they both replied, simultaneously, lasagna, he asked if Billy had eaten anything different from Elijah.

  “Christmas cake and cognac”, said Billy making a clown face. The doctor was unamused.

  “You aren’t in shock,” he said somberly, “so there is no immediate danger of death.”

  “Thank you for that reassurance”, Billy said in English.

  “It is possible you have eaten something that makes a neurotoxin. Did you eat canned peas yesterday?”

  Billy shook his head.

  “Fish, chicken, mayonnaise?”

  “No. No. No.”

  “You have picked up something. You may have a staphylococcus or salmonella—ordinary food poisoning. I want to keep you here until morning. It could be something worse. We will keep an eye on you and do some tests.”

  “His bedside manner leaves something to be desired”, said Billy. “But he’s a bright lad and just might pull me through!” He attempted a wry look, but a spasm of torment crossed his face. He begged for directions to the nearest toilet and dashed for it.

  The doctor turned to Elijah and said, “He will be dehydrated. I will put an intravenous into him and place him under observation.”

  “Do you have any idea what may have caused it?”

  “I don’t know. Cognac wouldn’t do this, and I don’t think the cake is guilty.”

  “Then what could have done this to him?”

  “It’s a mystery. Life is full of mystery.”

  “Is it possible he will be better by morning? We are scheduled to attend an important meeting in a few hours from now.”

  “It would be unwise for him to leave that soon. Although his symptoms are not life-threatening, they are severe. Salmonella can last several days and is debilitating. I wouldn’t want to discharge him after a few hours, especially if he is dehydrated.”

  Billy wobbled out of the bathroom. A nurse ordered him into a wheelchair. Elijah walked along with them to the ward.

  When the patient was bundled into bed, and they were alone, Elijah said: “You are here for a few days. I will look in on you when I get back from Capri this afternoon.”

  “Damn! That’s foolish. You can’t go by yourself.”

  “I can.”

  “Into Mordor without Billy? Think twice, lad!”

  “I don’t want to go alone, my friend. I am sorely afraid of it. But Christ will be with me.”

  “You’ll be needing a legion of angels with you too, not to mention a suit of asbestos armor!”

  “You must pray for me.”

  “I’ll pray for you, but I don’t like it. I think you should wait.”

  “There may not be another opportunity. This is the moment that divine Providence has arranged.”

  “Maybe. But I think there’s something fishy about this, if you’ll pardon the salmonella pun. Maybe the enemy wants you to go alone into the lion’s mouth.”

  “I won’t be alone.”

  “That’s very edifying of you; how can I argue with that!”

  The pain took over again, followed by more retching. They did not discuss the matter further. A nurse arrived with bottles and tubes. An intravenous needle was planted in Billy’s arm. He turned away while she was inserting it.

  “No martyr me. Billy hate pain.”

  “You’ll feel better soon”, said the nurse.

  “Did you get much sleep?” asked Billy with a frown.

  “Almost none.”

  “I thought so. You look like I feel. Why don’t you go back to the boathouse and try to catch a few hours? It’s five o’clock now. You could easily get three more hours before they take you to the marina. Those three hours might change the future of the world. Ow, ow, ow, Billy hurt! Billy wanna go home!”

  “I can’t leave you like this.”

  “You bloody well can. I outrank you. I’m a Monsignor and you’re a lowly monk. Holy obedience, remember? Now git!”

  Elijah obeyed, but on his return to the boathouse he did not sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the birds began their dawn chorus. He got up and prayed his morning office, but it was dry. The prayer of faith, with no spiritual consolations. He wondered over this. Did the Lord wish him to go into the mouth of the lion with a sense of emptiness, and perhaps with his confidence shaken? Or did He want him to go forward in sheer faith, conscious only of his weakness?

  “My Savior,” he whispered, “Jesus, true Lord of the world, I do not ask for human strength. But I ask for the grace to speak to him only those words that you desire to be spoken. Give me a right heart. Gird me with truth. Armor me with faith. Protect my soul from the principalities and powers that rule this man, even those that are unknown to himself. Grant me the sword of the Spirit, that the words of my mouth might move the thoughts of his heart, that this enemy of Yours might no longer walk with the foe, but be restored unto righteousness. For the glory of the Lamb!”

  Stillness filled him. The peace of the poor men. The consolation of the chosen ones. He knelt by the end of the bed and held the chip of wood in his hand as if it were the first and final anchor in a spinning cosmos. In that position, unmoving, he waited for the dawn.

  At first light, he telephoned the hospital. The doctor on morning duty informed him that Billy’s condition was stable, and that the patient was sleeping. There was some danger yet, he said, but it was not critical. It was a matter of waiting. He suggested that Elijah call again in the evening. The patient could receive visitors then.

  He asked the doctor to tell Billy that he had gone on to Capri, and unless something unforeseen occurred, he would return to the mainland by late afternoon. He would come by the hospital in the early evening.

  Roberto’s wife made him an ample breakfast of sausages and scrambled eggs. Over her protests, he rejected the grand dining room and ate instead at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. As she poured more coffee into his cup, she murmured her sympathies regarding “poor Signore Stangsby”. She beat her breast and hoped aloud that it was not the Christmas cake that had done it. She asked where they had eaten supper the night before, and when he told her, she threw up her hands, and said, “Ecco! Those little restaurants, they don’t keep an eye on the heat! Two tourists died last year from shellfish. Now this!”

  “We both ate from the same dish”, Elijah said. “Lasagna.”

  She shrugged, “Maybe you have a strong stomach.”

  “If anyone has a strong stomach it’s Signore Stangsby.”

  “Allora!” she shrugged again, sighing a
nd muttering to her pots.

  Roberto put his head in to say that the marina was expecting him within the hour. The appointment secretary had phoned from Capri to say that the President hoped to meet him sometime between nine and ten o’clock.

  Elijah steered the Jaguar down the winding driveway to the highway, following Roberto, who manipulated a yellow Land Rover as if he were in the Grand Prix. Five minutes later, they turned onto a private lane leading to the waterside. There, he saw a solitary cabin cruiser rising and falling in the swell beside the dock.

  Roberto waved, honked, and roared back up the lane.

  The boat’s crew came forward across the parking lot as Elijah locked the car. The captain, an older man with dyed red hair, greeted him politely but impersonally, and introduced the second mate, a man of about thirty years, who looked as if he would be more suitably employed at a family enterprise in Sicily.

  “My son-in-law”, explained the captain.

  Neither of the men looked at him for more than a second Their eyes turned back to the boat and immediately they set to the task of departure. Elijah climbed aboard, the engine rumbled, and within seconds the boat was skimming across the blue water of the gulf. Running alongside the Sorrento Peninsula, they moved at astonishing speed toward the west.

  Elijah sat in the stern seat, in the open air, relishing the exhilaration of wind and spray. The cruiser turned slightly to the right, entering the Gulf of Naples, where a massive cliff rose out of the sea before them. The captain came back and pointed to it.

  “Isola di Capri”, he yelled into Elijah’s ear. “We stop at the marina soon. Up there on top, that is Monte Tiberio. The white building is the President’s palazzo. Beside it is Tiberius’ palace, the Villa Jovis. The old emperor, he used to throw people off that cliff there if they made him mad.”

  The captain roared laughing, went back to the pilot house, and took over the helm. The younger man stood to the side and stared at Elijah without expression. Shortly after, the boat slid up beside a wharf. The son-in-law jumped over the gunwales, moored the boat, and waved Elijah out.

  “You come this way.”

  He led him onto the shore and through a gate to a concrete pad where a long, sleek, red helicopter sat warming its engines.

  The son-in-law opened the passenger door and nodded to the pilot. Elijah climbed in and fastened his seatbelt. The motors began to hum at high pitch. The machine rose straight up, as smooth as an elevator, banked without a tremor, and flew straight for the height of Monte Tiberio. Within a minute, Elijah was standing on a white landing pad, so bright that he had to shield his eyes from the reflection. He heard the helicopter take off again, leaving him blinking, dazzled, and disoriented.

  “Professor Schäfer, welcome”, said a disembodied voice.

  A hand shook his, took him by the elbow, and led him off the pad to a building that closely resembled the beach house at Salerno. The voice at the end of the hand introduced itself as the appointment secretary, and then materialized as a man in his sixties. He was dressed fastidiously but comfortably, and looked as if he should be managing a transnational corporation. The expression, like Roberto’s, was poised, cordial, quick to smile, and exquisitely polite.

  “Please come into the reception building, sir”, he said. “It’s so much cooler in there. You can wash up if you like, and I’ll have someone bring you tea. I understand you prefer tea to coffee. Yes? And you take lemon, no sugar, I believe.”

  “That’s correct”, said Elijah. “How did you know?”

  The secretary smiled knowingly and conducted him along a glass corridor into a window-lined semicircular room overlooking the Gulf of Naples to the north and the Gulf of Salerno to the east. The back wall was paneled in rosewood. Far below, speedboats made white trails, moving at a snail’s pace across the sea.

  “The President is not available until 9:30, when he will be very pleased to receive you in the studiolo, a private library in his residence. He has an outstanding collection of ancient documents. You would find many of them unique. The Cordova Codex, for example, is the only existing copy of a manuscript of Aristotle that was long considered lost in the great fire of Alexandria. As you are an archeologist, I’m sure you realize the significance of this discovery.”

  “This is astounding news”, said Elijah, excited. “Which of the lost books has been found?”

  “I will let the President answer that question. Archeology is one of his great loves, and one of his pleasures is to share personally the discoveries his antiquities foundation makes possible.”

  “Very good”, said Elijah.

  “Please make yourself comfortable until I return. Then we will go directly to his residence.”

  He was left alone to meditate on the sea, to sink into the Scandinavian furniture, to run his feet (he had temporarily removed his shoes) back and forth over a pale amethyst carpet. The mahogany coffee table invited him to notice the reflection of his face. Wild roses brushed against the window pane. Swallows darted across the sky. A blue bronze horse begged the hand to stroke its arched back. Elijah did so. He sipped from the cup of tea and delighted in the room.

  Every now and then he felt a pang in his heart when he recalled the man with whom he would soon be speaking. Potentially the most skilled adversary the Church had ever faced. The sensation was one of mild fear mingled with curiosity, and even—to Elijah’s surprise—anticipation. When he recognized this impulse he immediately recollected his thoughts and began to pray. He wondered at himself. How easily he had forgotten to pray! What had happened to his sense of vigilance? Had he been anesthetized by the accumulation of fatigue, his distraction over Billy’s health, and the pleasure of these surroundings?

  He admonished himself. Vigilance gathered strength within him. The spirit of prayer pushed back a sensation of lurking shadows. He rested in this state for some minutes until the secretary strode into the room and announced: “He is ready. Please, come, Professor Schäfer.”

  He was led through a glass-encased causeway over a tumble of rocks and ornamental gardens to a larger building, designed to match the visitor’s pavilion. They went through two security stations and entered a hall that opened onto a vaulted living room. This room was almost a full circle, fully 300 degrees of which was floor-to-ceiling glass. The air was cool, scented with jasmine. Elijah had no time to look at the artwork, for the secretary turned and walked backward, extending one arm wide, guiding him to another annex, smiling broadly all the while. He entered a large room and announced, “Elijah Schäfer, sir.”

  A tall, silver-haired man got up from his armchair and came forward with an extended hand. He wore a white cardigan over a turquoise polo shirt, gray slacks, and burgundy oxfords. His face was handsome, well-complexioned, grave, and kindly; it radiated openness. His grip was warm and firm.

  “Father Schäfer, a very great pleasure.” His voice was deep, modulated with that hint of age which denotes dignity rather than decline.

  “Mr. President, I bring greetings from His Holiness, and his best wishes for your health.”

  “Please convey my thanks to His Holiness, and in return, my wishes for his health.”

  “He has asked me to convey to you his personal gratitude for your efforts in the cause of world peace, and to assure you of his prayers for you.”

  “That is most kind. Please convey to His Holiness my gratitude and esteem.”

  He removed his reading glasses, looked into Elijah’s eyes, and smiled.

  “Now that we have completed the formalities, why don’t we relax?”

  He took Elijah by the arm and led him to a large leather chair facing the sea. The President sat opposite him, crossed his legs, and surveyed Elijah’s attire.

  “I note that you have not traveled in clerical clothing.”

  “At the request of the Holy See. The Holy See would appreciate a certain informality, and discretion, to mark the style of our meeting.”

  “Ah, yes”, said the President. “I know your Cardinal
Secretary of State quite well, though only by reputation. He is, I understand, an astute judge of political implications.”

  “I am sure that he is among those who applaud your efforts in the cause of peace between nations. But, regrettably, in the present world there is much confusion. The Church is very old. She has seen civilizations rise and fall. She must exercise caution.”

  “Understandably so. We too must exercise caution about governments and movements. Not all men in this world are committed to the ideals for which we both strive.”

  “I am happy that you do not take any offense at our approach.”

  “We are at the preliminary stage of discussions, which I hope will grow into friendship between our government and yours. Your caution only increases my respect for your Pope and the Church.”

  The secretary entered at that moment, preventing a reply. He asked to speak privately with the President. The President apologized and left the room. During the interim, Elijah noted that the walls were lined with thousands of volumes of books. Inbuilt display cases contained ancient coins, amphoras, pottery, and Roman bronzes.

  The President returned.

  “I see you are admiring my collection. These artifacts were unearthed during the reconstruction of the Villa Jovis. They date from the first century, almost certainly the years when Tiberius ruled the empire from this very place.”

  “This site resonates with history.”

  “Indeed, an embarrassing glut of history.”

  “If I recall my lessons correctly, wasn’t he regarded as one of Rome’s most bloody tyrants?”

  “That is a myth which grew up around his memory. Recent studies indicate that he may have been maligned by the early Church in its zeal to posit Religion against the State. During the last sixty years he has been more fairly judged. The prevailing opinion among scholars is that Tiberius was a ruler faithful to his duties, prudent, just, and self-contained. Did you know he didn’t leave Capriae during the last ten years of his life?”

  “I can understand why. It is a beautiful island.”

  “That, and the fact that Rome was a sewer of intrigue.”