by Farris, John
Pinky Tubner still had a headache and a case of nerves from bombs in the night as she waited with her husband for the Pontiff to make his entrance into the elegant library. Also she was starved. Frank had fasted for the last twenty-four hours, a weekly regimen that he said kept him mentally sharp and increased his store of energy, but Pinky hadn't been able to hold down breakfast and so had passed on lunch when invited by two of the other women present in the library, Liz Adamson from St. Loo and Pem Carpenter from Cleveland.
She kept a gloved hand in Frank's while they circulated, admiring with the others ancient and modern objets d'art from every part of the world, the oriental carpets that lay on a marble floor as reflective as a glacial lake, dark solid Renaissance library tables and upholstered chairs. The air was sharp with the acidic odor given off by the crumbly leather of valuable old books.
Lined up on one of the long tables were sixteen red velvet boxes containing twenty-four-karat gold medallions, with St. Peter on the reverse and Pope John the Twenty-fourth on the obverse, his sharply struck profile surrounded by an inscription (from St. Irenaeus): Gloria dei homo vivens—"living man is the glory of God." All of Leoncaro's honored guests coveted these medallions, each of which had been blessed and would be given into their hands by His Holiness at the conclusion of today's reception.
Frank had smoothly insinuated himself into a discussion of the inroads—or depredations, according to the majority view being expressed—that Islam was making in third-world countries, with Catholic ministries lagging in their influence. "It seems to me," he was saying, "that a religion without the 'radiant mystery' of salvation as its greatest concern is more interested in exploiting poverty and oppression for political reward."
Pinky found herself standing too close to a stylishly barbered man whose aftershave was making her headache worse. She allowed herself to be separated from her husband by another of the wives, Irene Hudlow from the archdiocese of Denver. Irene was tall, ungainly, nearsighted; her glasses gave her blue eyes that watery aquarium look. In the way of homely women on important social occasions, Irene had over primped. Pinky had found her, during their get-acquainted stage earlier in the week, to be somewhat ditzy. With no encouragement on Pinky's part Irene had proudly showed off her surgical steel tongue stud, which she had acquired at the age of fifty-plus as a means (outrageously misguided, it seemed to Pinky) of bonding with her sixteen-year-old daughter.
"They say his eyes are just so gorgeous," Irene gushed.
"Who?"
"The Holy Father. On TV you don't really notice because of the totality of expression, his ineffable power. But his eyes are a remarkable sea-green shade, according to the monsignor from Vatican PR I was just talking to. An unusual color, even for a northern Italian. I get jittery when I meet celebrities, although it should be old-hat by now. Howard's an exhibitor, you know—multiplexes in three states—and there are scads of movie stars and directors at ShoWest every year."
"ShoWest?"
"In Las Vegas; it's a big convention, basically a promotional deal for the studios trying to sell us their new product. We get advance looks at all the big flicks they have in the works. I'm thirsty; it's warm in here, isn't it? But I don't dare drink any more punch. Even though my tongue sort of swells in my mouth like a toad if I'm trying to talk to, say, Harrison Ford. Or, forget it, Tom Hanks. Now, the Holy Father! My knees are already knocking. A league of his own. You wouldn't happen to know where the girls' sandbox is? But probably it's too late to duck out; His Holiness should be here any second."
Pinky glanced at a Vatican photographer, who had smilingly motioned for her to stand a little closer to the towering Irene Hudlow. Pinky obliged, but was afraid afterward that her eyes had blinked shut just as his flash went off. There was another photographer on hand, this one with a video camera. And three men in black suits who didn't appear to have any particular responsibilities. Probably security for His Holiness, Pinky concluded with a feeling of sadness. Necessary even here, within the hushed frescoed magnificence of the Apostolic Palace.
There was an expectant stir and turning of heads to the library's entrance, but still it wasn't the now-tardy Leoncaro: instead Pinky saw a stunning young woman of mixed oriental and African bloodlines, as tall as Irene Hudlow, on the arm of a man with a tanned somber face and a pronounced limp in spite of his reliance on a dark cane with a thick twist in the wood and eyespots where thorns had been cut away. He looked as if he might be recovering from a bad car accident; he wore his English-tailored pinstriped suit coat cloak-style because of a cast on his right forearm. The regal young woman was wearing a vividly patterned shuka with a silk headscarf knotted behind her head and a breastplate of glowing pink-tinged cowrie shells on gold chains.
Obviously they were invited guests, but not honorees; a security man glanced at the cane, but from his expression the couple were expected, Pinky assumed, and had been cleared elsewhere in the palace.
"Wow." Irene Hudlow said under her breath.
"Celebrities?" Pinky asked; Irene had established herself as the expert on the breed.
"Hmm. I don't think she's in pictures, but the face is awfully familiar. What presence. Cripes, I'd love to be able to walk into a room like that. Would you look at the fellas? You can practically hear their eyeballs clicking."
"I wonder what he does?" Pinky said, her attention now on Tom Sherard.
"Hard to tell, but I smell money. May be one of those sportsmen who take big gambles; y'know, racing yachts in the horse latitudes and going for round-the-world hot-air balloon records. That's no health-club tan. This guy lives." Irene got a squinched look around her mouth. "Jeez, I think I'll have to chance it and look up the bathroom. How about you?"
"No, what I need is to pop an Excedrin and wash it down with some punch." Pinky grinned. "I'll let you know if you miss anything."
"Don't say that," Irene admonished, and sought the ear of a security man for directions to the women's lounge. Pinky fished in her clutch purse for the tin of Excedrin and was served punch in a cut-glass cup by a young Irish nun who wore one of those modified habits—simple blue shirtwaist, dark gray pleated skirt, and an unobtrusive black-bordered wimple—that made her look more like a practical nurse than a bride of Christ.
"They do keep it warm in here," the nun said with a smile, blotting the hollows of her eyes with a paper napkin, noting the tablet that went onto Pinky's tongue before she began to drink her punch.
The monsignor in charge of the afternoon's reception and one of the security men were rounding everyone up to form a line near the library's entrance. Howard Hudlow was looking around in annoyance. As Pinky went to join her husband she whispered in his ear, "Ladies' room."
"Nervous bladder" he said, shaking his head. "Forgot to pack her Datrol."
"I think we're all a little nervous," Pinky said on Irene's behalf, then slipped into the reception line beside Frank, who was on his toes, doing his unobtrusive isometrics, all smiles. This was it. A lifetime of adoration and anticipation was culminating this side of heaven.
Pinky briefly observed the recently arrived couple off to themselves in a corner of the library looking over a piece of modern sculpture she'd seen earlier, by a Zambian artist. Gray stone and ebony, a cloaked African mother (she'd had to look twice before she realized the folds of the "cloak" were really praying hands around the stylized oval face), two babes at her breasts. Then the Pope walked in followed by two men, one of whom was a monsignor and had a flat black case under his arm; the other was probably another security man who had met Leoncaro in his second-floor apartment for the brief walk to the library.
The honorees weren't wearing name tags, but the Holy Father apparently knew everyone by sight. No prompting required by his secretary, who trailed him down the reception line. Leoncaro clasping hands, smiling, taking his time, a personal reference in each greeting, as if they were all best friends who hadn't been together for a while. And, yes, his eyes were an incredible shade of green. Pinky felt a warm bloo
d-tingle as he moved closer to where they stood toward the end of the line. She saw that Frank's hands were joined at the belt line almost as if he were preparing to receive communion; but Pinky knew he had been trembling moments ago.
"Faith is only as powerful as human nature allows it to be," His Holiness said in response to a question from one of the wives.
Irene Hudlow appeared at the entrance to the library, looking flustered and somewhat askew. A security man approached her with a palms-up gesture. Too late to join the others. She'd have to wait there. Her husband giving her a deadly look. Pinky had him pegged as somewhat of an emotional bully.
Irene looked distractedly at the security man as he whispered in her ear. Pinky returned her attention to the Pope, but she caught the movement of Irene's head in the background as she simultaneously seized the security man by his longish hair and yanked his chin up, exposing his throat. And that's where Irene bit and tore before throwing the man, now jetting blood, out of her way.
Afterward Pinky had a lot of difficulty piecing together the sequence of events because much of what happened, in the nature of a small complex riot occurring within the framework of mere seconds, she simply needed to forget for the sake of her sanity.
There was the man with the torn throat staggering and raining blood at the marbled threshold of the library; another security guard drawing a pistol from beneath his jacket and stepping into Irene's path as she rushed toward the Holy Father, one thick lens of her eyeglasses spotted with blood; the reception line breaking up with screams and shouts of warning; Leoncaro turning toward the outlandish, harpy-like Irene as she smashed the second security man to the floor with casual but immense strength. Was a shot fired into Irene's midsection? Time-skip. Pinky had no memory of it.
Ensorcelled Irene (what other explanation could there be?) nearly had the Pope in her grasp when Laurent Colbert seized him and whirled him out of harm's way. Both men stumbled toward Frank and Pinky, Laurent embracing Leoncaro with both arms. The two of them resembling an awkward ballroom dance team.
Then Frank—
—her own husband—
(The one memory, please God, she could have done without, but no such luck; it was to be forever in her mind like a funerary curse etched at the entrance to an ancient tomb)
—Frank grabbed the off-balance papal secretary and wrenched him away from His Holiness. As Leoncaro fell, Frank and Colbert came head to head.
And Frank, his jaws appearing to unhinge like those of a rattlesnake, bit off half of the monsignor's face, then heaved him in a flying body block toward the remaining two security men.
Irene swooped in, shrieking approval. Pinky's scream froze in her throat.
Time-skip.
When time resumed in its now helter-skelter fashion both Irene Hudlow and Frank Tubner were clawing at the slippery cassock of the Pope, who was face down on a carpet and covering his head with both hands. Blood was everywhere on the cassock and papal robes in dabs and finger smears, blood made more vivid by repeated flashes as the Vatican's official photographer, as deep in shock as anyone there, metronomically continued to record the chaotic scene. Irene Hudlow's husband, not such a tough cookie after all, had fainted. The Irish nun was screaming, having nearly attained a note that would shatter the glass fronts in the bookcases.
These horrors were more than sufficient to keep Pinky in nightmares for the rest of her destroyed life, but, unmercifully, there was worse to come.
As quick as Frank Tubner had been to pounce on the unprotected Pontiff, he was raised from his and Irene Hudlow's intended prey, jerked almost six feet off the floor by an otherworldly force that Pinky felt in her own wavering bones. She saw a jolt of astonishment in Frank's eyes just as the force bent him double like a giant cramp in the gut and sent him headlong into the wall above a row of bookcases, near the twenty-five-foot ceiling with its fine painting of a gathering of someday-saints in another age of miracles.
A worm of blood crawled down Pinky's upper lip. Pem Carpenter's nose literally gushed into her white gloves as she backed toward the doorway; another woman's backside was staining from an untimely and abnormal menstrual flow. Pinky's eyes flicked from her airily suspended husband to the outstretched hand of the young woman in the Hermes-style shuka. Not begging for surcease; commanding it. Her lovely face was distorted, as if reflected from a curved dark surface. Irene Hudlow's elongated face also was undergoing change: a dark shadow like hair on her widening jaw, nostrils flattening and enlarging. Wildness in both their faces: but even Pinky, in terrified straits, could distinguish the difference. Good was eye to eye with evil and Irene's splayed, knuckly, haired-up hands, inches from the prostrate Pope, were as still as if they had been locked to the wrists in a block of granite.
At the same time Frank, still doubled and hissing like a viper from the Book of Revelation, bobbed against the ceiling above their heads, a grotesque party balloon. Most of the oxygen in the library seemed to have been consumed by the demands of their terror; the heat now was almost scorching.
Leoncaro's secretary, nearly blinded, his face wrecked down to fragments of gleaming bone, threw himself across the Pope's body. The library was emptying; more nosebleeds to fuel pandemonium.
"You know who I am," Irene said with a curt aside of her head; she was cutting new teeth that jutted from her upper gums like ivory stakes. She spat in fury at the tall African girl while simultaneously urinating on the floor.
"And you know who I am," Bertie Nkambe returned. Then with an agonized glance at her companion she said, "Tom! They're trying to shift on me! I don't know how long I can hold them off!"
"Give me the chunky fellow," Tom Sherard said calmly.
His Holiness stirred, trying to rise with Colbert's body on his back. The secretary had passed out.
"Totus tuus," Leoncaro said with a lift of his eyes to Bertie. I give myself totally to you. He was bewildered from shock or perhaps serene in the light of a vision of the Holy Virgin.
Three men rushed to get Leoncaro on his feet. They half dragged him to the door while Irene struggled, shrieking impotently. Then with a sound as painful as an arrow to the ear Irene split the carapace of force holding her immobile. She bounded on all fours after the Pontiff, now splitting out of her dress as well, revealing the colorful ass of a baboon.
Frank Tubner fell at the feet of Tom Sherard, who smashed his head sidelong with the cane; there was a double crack of split skull bone, first from the impact with the cane, then as Frank's head hit the marble floor, but Pinky didn't hear that hollow-sounding report. Time had just skipped on her once more. Skipped for the rest of the afternoon.
Eden Waring, accompanied by two tall, bearded Swiss Guardsmen in their amusing orange-and-blue striped Renaissance regalia, was hurrying along the corridor that led to the library when the screaming erupted and echoed throughout the Apostolic Palace, followed by invited guests bailing out of the library with bloody noses, followed by the Pope, more blood on white satin, his zucchetto dangling over one ear, gold pectoral cross swinging as he was more or less carried by three men in black suits, and followed by—
The two guards, unable to believe their eyes, tried to hold Eden back as the Pope was pushed inside a room and a stout oak door slammed behind them. The late Irene Hudlow, now transformed into something else entirely, hit the door hard enough after a leap of more than fifteen feet to cause chandeliers up and down the corridor to tremble and blink. Real ugly, but obviously powerful. What remained of Irene was a nice rope of pearls around its hairy neck. Claws gouged splinters a foot long and an inch thick from the elaborately carved door.
Eden recovered her faculties while the Swiss Guards and others, attracted by the fearful screaming that could be heard, probably, in the basilica, were backing up. Eden crept closer with a grimace white as a scar, moving at an angle in the wide corridor, so far unnoticed by the howling-mad creature. She held Tom Sherard's walking stick level and at shoulder height, gripping it a few inches below the gold lion's head. She
calmed herself with an athlete's practiced focus.
The four-hundred-pound, ten-foot-high door began to come off its ornate hinges.
Bertie appeared in the library doorway as the creature acknowledged Eden's approach with a baleful over-the-shoulder look. For a few moments the claws were still while it pissed lavishly on the floor, expressing both contempt and a territorial imperative.
What kept you? Bertie wanted to know. Subvocally she still sounded weakened by the ordeal.
Storm over the Atlantic. That's a gorgeous shuka.
Thanks. My guy at Hermes. Eden?
Yeah?
Don't fool around with this beastie. There are people dying in here.
I wasn't thinking of adopting it, Eden told her, curtly shutting Bertie out of her mind; she needed to retain focus and not allow surging adrenaline to pump her heart through the roof of her mouth.
The creature resumed its frenzy of destruction. The massive door came free with a tortured screech of old nails pulling out of wood and wrenched bronze hinges, and was flung end over end down the wide corridor at Eden.
"Simba!"
The lion's-head walking stick streaked end-first from Eden's hand as she dodged away from the tumbling door. The stick was a momentary blur, catching light as it arched toward the open doorway. It pierced the creature in mid-leap like a heavy arrow from a medieval longbow. Flesh, sinew, bone, and heart skewered in a fraction of a second. The creature fell headlong and skidded in a heap almost to the feet of those who had sought refuge inside the large domed chamber. A leathery eyelid closed in shadowless diffused sunlight.
When Eden got there a stink was rising from the hairy body that was curled limply on one side. Some pearls from the broken strand were rolling slowly across the marble floor.
Eden looked into the eyes of John the Twenty-fourth. His Holiness looked appalled and seriously pissed at the same time. He held his gold cross in one hand, away from the blood-soiled front of his cassock.
