“You will see he gets it quickly?” he pleaded.
The clerk was of that genre of bureaucrat who cultivate impeccable coldness as an art form.
“Do you see this?” he said indicating a basket on his desk. “That is today’s personal mail to His Eminence. I have another pile, thicker still, secretariat mail that he must also read. In addition, I have a handful of phone messages, to which he must respond. The Holy Father’s office has called to arrange an unscheduled meeting for this afternoon, and you are the fourth cleric who has come by this morning, without an appointment, demanding to see him on urgent and sensitive matters. What am I to do!”
“If the cardinal knew what it is I wish to tell him, I believe he would put all other matters aside.”
“No doubt he would be moved to put aside even the Holy Father?”
Elijah sighed and spread his hands.
“Please. In the name of God.”
“I am a busy man. So is the cardinal. Eventually, when he can find a free moment, he will contact you. It is the best I can do.”
Elijah went away with a heavy heart and took a taxi back to the International College.
* * *
He had a course to teach after supper, but was surprised to find that the classroom was half full. All of the novices were present, yet none of the day-students and auditors had arrived.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
The novices exchanged looks and chuckled.
“Father, didn’t you know? There’s a big soccer game tonight. It’s one of the finals for the World Cup.”
“I see”, said Elijah. “In that case, I wonder if there is much point in comparing Juan de La Cruz to Aquinas on the subject of the Cross.”
The students suppressed their grins and stared at him to see what he would do next.
“We will try theology another night, when the big game is over. There is no class this evening, my brothers.”
They stampeded out, and Elijah wondered where they would find a television set in all of this house of Carmel.
He went wearily to the chapel and prayed for an hour. His tension eased somewhat, but he continued to feel restless.
He telephoned to the Gemelli, but the nurse at ICU could tell him only that Monsignor Stangsby’s condition had stabilized. He might be able to receive visitors within a few days.
Feeling agitated, Elijah went out for a walk in the dusk.
The night was cool, and a few stars pricked the brass dome over the city. The noise of traffic on the main thoroughfares had declined a little but was still jarring to his nerves. He turned away into side streets that he did not know, and he walked without any sense of direction other than a vague impression that he would make a wide circuit around the college and return to it within an hour. His ramble took him through a run-down residential district, where women screeched at children from balconies, and the streets were full of litter. Dogs barked at him. A rat was not the least concerned at his approach. The smell from the sewers was strong here, mixed with odors of offal and cooking pasta.
On a dark street between lampposts with burnt-out lights, a group of street boys surrounded him. He found it both sad and amusing to meet teenagers who spoke gutter Italian, dressed like Nazis but with haircuts like savage American Indians. They sneered and mocked and frisked him for cash. They found only a few lire and the stained rosary. They threw the rosary to the ground, stomped on it, shoved him around their circle, and went off cursing and laughing, without doing any serious damage to him. He blessed their departing backs.
The rosary was in pieces. He gathered up the broken fragments and put them into his pocket. He prayed for the youths and continued his walk.
A few blocks farther on, he passed an alley and saw a flame from the corner of his eye. Fearing fire in one of the tenements, he turned and went into the dark passage. At the end of the narrow canyon he came upon a crowd of children and youths hunched over a fire.
When they saw him, the youngest of them screamed in terror. Then all of them scattered, shrieking “Prète, prète! Sacerdote!” The older ones ran away from him more slowly, trotting backward toward the street, howling a stream of filth at him. He was amazed at the inventiveness and the vileness of their words. He was further perplexed that in the feeble light they had been able to tell he was a priest. He went over to the deserted fire and saw splinters of wood burning under an iron grate. Something black lay across the top of it, smoking. Then the black thing moved. Elijah jumped back in horror, then moved forward and tipped the grate over with his foot. The black thing rolled onto the cobblestones and began to writhe noiselessly.
It was a cat. Its paws had been hacked off and its limbs and mouth were trussed with black tape. Most of its fur was badly burnt. The stench was horrible. Its eyes flared at him insanely, glowing red, incandescent in the light from the flames. Elijah stared in disbelief.
He found a loose brick and hit it on the head. He hit it again and again until it ceased to move.
Then he stood up and looked around. The fire was enclosed within a white circle that had been drawn on the cobblestones. Within the circle and on the walls of the alley were chalked magical symbols. Elijah uttered a prayer of exorcism and sprinkled holy water in all directions. Then he walked away.
During the next hour, while he searched for a route back to the house, he saw more of humanity than he had seen since the War.
He stepped over several sleeping drunks. He passed two old women who were vigorously slapping a fat man who was laughing hysterically and staggering under the influence of the wine bottle he brandished in one hand. A little weeping girl was pulling on his free arm, crying, “Nonno! Come home, Nonno!”
A deranged youth dressed only in underwear, hunched beside a stairwell, ferociously smoking a cigarette, muttering to himself. Middle-aged men roared down the narrow streets in Porsches and BMWs, dressed in shining black leather, looking powerful, cynical, and swollen with knowledge. They made rude signs at Elijah.
He passed an old church and saw young women lighting cigarettes in the alcove of its doorway. They called out invitations and prices to him. He went over and began to exhort them to leave the life into which they had fallen, but they merely found his archaic terminology hilarious. They laughed not unkindly, and swore at him without conviction, and told him to leave them to their work. He pleaded with them to at least conduct their business at some other place than the door of a church. They stopped laughing and explained with great seriousness, and a certain civility, that the church was abandoned and the Blessed Sacrament not there, a grudging concession to reverence. He prayed interiorly to Mary Magdalen for them, and surprisingly, they left without another word. A small victory, but he was shaken.
Eventually, traveling through a maze of cross streets and avenues, he arrived back at the House of Studies. He went straight to the chapel and knelt without moving. There, in the calm of the room, he realized that his hands were trembling.
“My God,” he cried, “my God. Where are you? Why can we not reach them?”
When his hands had ceased to shake he heard a voice speak to him from the tabernacle. Simultaneously, it spoke within him.
My son, I ask you to go down into the lost places. Go without fear.
“I have no strength, my Lord. I have no power to save them!”
No man can save another. Only I can save. Yet My strength is within you. My strength works most effectively in your weakness. When will you trust Me?
“What is happening, Lord? Your Church is reeling from many blows and bleeding from a million wounds.”
Have no fear. Walk into the darkness and bring back souls from it. I am with you always.
“What would you have me do, Lord? What about Billy? How can I warn the Pope? I am hedged in on many sides and walled out of the very place where I must go. What should I do?”
You are to do only this: you are to look neither to your left nor to your right. You are to go neither ahead of Me nor behind Me. Wait f
or Me and I will act.
Then, gently, the Presence withdrew into its ordinary state. Even so, it remained with him. He felt it as a sweet fire that surrounded and gradually filled his agony. A fire so different from the fire in the alley that it was a marvel they could be called by the same name. The fire of Presence on this altar was the embrace of total love; it burned but did not consume. It gave joy, not pain. It did not bind its creatures nor mutilate their flesh. It freed them. It gave light. It consoled and it fed them. Why did men hate it so?
He went to bed and slept.
IX
Rome
Elijah waited patiently for the cardinal to contact him. But no message came that day or the next. He taught his classes and kept himself busy with private research. He prayed and read and walked a circuit of clean streets around the college. He went out one evening to the Gemelli but found Billy sleeping soundly. He looked much improved, which lifted Elijah’s spirits considerably. Not wanting to disturb the monsignor’s sleep, he left as stealthily as he had come.
Though he prayed and made continual acts of trust, the suspense caused by the Vatican’s silence continued to mount. It was difficult to trust, even more difficult to remain without action, when all within him was crying out, Avanti! Sound the alarm!
But he did as he was told and waited. If there had been no apocalyptic literature in which to bury himself for long hours each day, the tension would have become unbearable.
He was growing in admiration for this Englishman, the famous Cardinal Newman, who had converted from Anglicanism in the last century. An unusual character, a man out of step with almost every level of his society. His loneliness, bordering on alienation, had given him a unique perspective. He was able to step outside the ethos of his century, the nineteenth, and observe it with an objective eye. He was serious to the point of melancholy, brilliant, sensitive, and, it was said by many, a genuine prophet. He had written and preached extensively about the spirit of Antichrist. He said that this perverse spirit was growing in the world and that a great apostasy was looming. He quoted from the prophet Daniel, who warned that the adversary’s power over all nations would be obtained peaceably and by flatteries.
Newman further argued that the apostasy of the people of God in various times and places had always preceded the coming of antichrists, tyrants such as Antiochus, Nero, Julian the Apostate, the false prophet Muhammad, and the atheistic leaders of the French Revolution—each a type or foreshadowing of the Antichrist who would come at the end of history, when the mystery of iniquity would express its final, terrible illogic. The failure of believers to live their faith, Newman warned, as in previous ages, would usher in the reign of “the man of sin”, who would deny the divinity of Christ and exalt himself in His place, even to the extent of entering the temple of God and demanding that he be worshipped.
Elijah read: They shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the Daily Sacrifice, and they shall place the Abomination that makes desolate, and as such as do wickedly against the Covenant shall be corrupted by flatteries. . . .
His concentration was broken by the porter rapping on his door.
“Father, a message from the Vatican! They’re sending a car for you. It should be here in ten minutes. You’re to go to a meeting.”
“I will be ready, Brother. Thank you.”
He splashed cold water on his face, straightened his habit, and bustled down the hallway to the chapel. There he prayed for a few minutes before the porter came in and signaled that the car had arrived.
“Hurry, hurry, he’s circling the block.”
Elijah went out onto the main steps and looked up and down the street, but there was not a limousine in sight. He was about to go back inside to question the porter when a badly rusted yellow Volkswagen pulled up with squealing brakes. An arm jutted out of the driver’s window and beckoned.
“Jump in, Father”, said the Cardinal Secretary of State.
Elijah buckled his seatbelt as the cardinal tore away from the curb in a cloud of black exhaust. With a beep-beep and a lurch, he screeched around a corner, plunged into the frantic stream of nighttime traffic, and drove like a typical Roman in the direction of the dome of Saint Peter’s.
“I am relieved! You have received my note, Eminence.”
“Note? I have received nothing from you.”
“But I have been trying to contact you since Monsignor Stangsby’s accident.”
“Il colmo! That’s the limit”, said the cardinal, exasperated. “It’s been a circus of activity since the accident. I suspect that my staff has been screening the communications coming through the office. There’s a flood of it, more than we can possibly handle right now. I must apologize. With William absent. . .”
The cardinal seemed to swallow what he was about to say.
“Your Eminence, there is something urgent I must tell you.”
“And I you. I have some very unfortunate news, Father. I’m afraid our William is dead.”
Instantly, the traffic seemed to slow, and sound faded from his ears. His heart gave one great thump, and an old agony returned to his breast. He stared out the windscreen, disbelieving, suspended in timelessness and a slow-motion tour of the eternal city.
The cardinal’s voice broke the spell.
“I’m sorry. He was your friend.”
“Yes, he was my friend.”
“It’s a terrible loss to us all. So many times I said to him, William, you pray like an angel but you drive like a devil.”
This from a man who was tearing down the Via Appia at eighty kilometers per hour.
“I saw him a few days ago and he seemed to be recovering well. Do they know what happened?”
“The people at Gemelli say they don’t know why he died. Until there’s an autopsy they can only guess. His doctor thinks there was a hemorrhage inside they didn’t catch. Possibly a large blood clot stopped the heart. It happened in the middle of the night. The night-duty nurses failed to hear the alarm. Apparently, they were busy with another crisis on the ward, though it proved to be a false alarm. By the time they responded to William, he was gone.”
“This is very bad”, Elijah said.
“I know. We will miss him. He brought laughter into a place that’s too often solemn. He was a gifted administrator.”
“It is worse than our personal loss. Far worse.”
The cardinal looked sideways at him.
“What do you mean?”
“It is very serious. Far more than I can explain during a short car ride.”
“Bene! We’ll go to my office and you can tell me what it is.”
“I don’t think that would be wise. We cannot assume that any place is safe.”
“Father,” said the cardinal gently, “William’s death is a shock to you. Why don’t I take you back to the Carmel? You can rest. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“When I tell you what has occurred during the past few weeks you will know that I am not suffering from grief or nervous shock. William and I have discovered a grave threat to the papacy and to the nature of the Church herself. Her very foundations are in danger.”
“Her foundations?” said the cardinal, looking dubious.
“Can we stop and walk?”
The cardinal did not immediately answer. Elijah could see he was weighing everything.
“All right”, he said in a quiet voice. “We will go to some friends. There, we won’t be troubled by uninvited listeners.”
By which Elijah understood, with some relief, that the cardinal had his own doubts about the security of curial offices.
“We will speak no more for the time being”, he said. “Electronic surveillance is sophisticated these days. A bug may even craw inside a beetle.”
Fifteen minutes later they pulled off the Via Appia onto a lane that wound through shrubbery and trees.
The cardinal parked the car on the grass flanking the lane, leaving the headlights on, pointing toward a small stone building that appeare
d to be a funerary chapel of the fifth or sixth century. He unlocked the bronze door, entered, and switched on an electric light within. Elijah turned off the car lights and joined him.
The cardinal went through a doorway at the end of the room, unlocked another door, went through, and disappeared down a long flight of stone steps. The stairway was obviously very ancient, cut through strata of alluvial soil, then a tufa mixture of gravel and earth, and finally at the lowest level, stone. The staircase ended abruptly about fifteen meters beneath the surface, opening onto a narrow, irregularly hewn gallery that drew away from them into indeterminate darkness.
“This is my only luxury”, said the cardinal, shaking the key in his hand. “Come, I want to introduce you to my friends.”
He led Elijah farther down the concourse and turned right into one of countless underground avenues that branched off the main galleria.
“You know where we are of course?”
“The catacombs.”
“Yes. There are miles and miles of them down here. We are in San Callistus, in a little-known side passage. See, from here on no one ever goes. Only the crazy cardinal.”
He stopped at a wooden door of great age, unlocked it, and entered. Elijah followed. In the pitch blackness of the chamber he heard the scratch of a wooden match; a light flared blindingly as the cardinal lit a kerosene lantern. He closed the door behind and shot the bolt.
“I like to come here sometimes. I sit among the graves of my brothers and sisters. It gives one perspective, no? When Rome seems especially full of corruption, and the Vatican is a hive of busy bees chewing up paper into honey, ah, then I come down here and pray to the Lord. I say, keep me simple, my Lord. Don’t let me become a prince. Don’t let me become puffed up with my self-importance. Let me become like these little ones, your true servants.”
Elijah glanced around at the shelves set into the walls. “Look here, Father. Read this; what does it say?”
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