FIVE
FATHER JOHN CALVIN dragged his carry-on suitcase away from Rome International Airport’s Customs gate a few minutes before sunset. He never took more than just the carry-on. As much as he traveled, it was just a matter of time before the airlines would lose a piece of checked baggage. The contents of the carry-on were far from precious, a couple changes of clothes, his shaving kit and the like. He could certainly afford to part with it. The loss of time was what he deemed too expensive a risk; tracking down misplaced baggage, waiting for it to arrive and be delivered to a hotel room, etc. John Calvin could accept a great many things, but inefficiency wasn’t one of them. As he neared the exit, a soldier in camouflage fatigues caught the white square at Calvin’s throat. Most people paid attention to the collar, if not to him. It often proved a helpful distraction. People remembered a priest, the black suit and white tooth at the neck, but not the face floating above it. The soldier nodded, the corner of his serious mouth twitched in what might have been a nervous smile. Calvin grinned his airport smile at the reflexive Catholic, making sure to appear a little nervous as he glanced at his AR-51 sub-machine gun. He loved Catholics. The uniform never failed to scare the shit out of them. Calvin moved toward the automatic glass doors. They withdrew on their tracks and burnt jet fuel pounded up his nose.
The buzz of a propeller was drowned out by the tearing roar of a large passenger jet. He supposed anything was better than the screaming child who’d sat behind him on the flight from Dublin. Under that all too familiar circumstance he often used a trick of self-hypnosis, a kind of forced concentration to drown out a squalling child, pleading target, whatever. But as he had begun to roll his eyes back and start the breathing exercises, strange images had disrupted his thoughts. With every attempt at calm, a flashing soup of religious icons and violence had thrashed behind his eyes. The images seemed so foreign, so injected, that he had finally given up trying to control them. He knew well enough not to fight with his subconcious when it clamoured. For the rest of the flight he’d endured the screeching toddler.
Now, he stared at a row of taxis purring at the curb, but instead saw the soldier. He’d been holding the sub-machine gun in a manner that left him vulnerable to three modes of unarmed attack. One would break his arm, the other his nose. The third would kill.
Calvin nodded to the taxi dispatcher, a man in a red jacket and a cap with a patent leather brim, standing at the head of the cab line. The dispatcher smiled. “Bongiorno, Padre,” and asked for Calvin’s destination. He had a piece of biomatter, lettuce or squashed pea perhaps, embedded between his two front teeth. Calvin almost answered in English and caught himself, covering the stammer with a cough. He gave the address in the Italian he’d spent a full year learning in one of many phonetic immersion courses. It had been the easiest of many new languages to master, his grasp of Latin already solid. He’d graduated the course, class of one, years ago, and after basing himself out of Italy for so long, spoke as well as a native. His accent gave him away as a Sicilian country boy. A few minutes later, he was staring into his book as the cab raced past the outskirts of the city.
His driver was less than talkative, for which Calvin was more than grateful. A silent hour passed as they moved away from Rome and into a countryside flayed open by fields and dotted with old forest, not yet plowed under. Just as Calvin sensed the driver’s suspicion that they might be lost, a dirt drive snatched out at the main road from a stand of silver olive trees. Calvin asked the driver to stop. He paid, tipped the adequate amount for a man with nothing extra, and got out. “Grazie,” he said through the exhausted version of his airport smile. The driver grunted and drove off down the two lane highway, empty save for his receding cherry tail lights.
Calvin stood in the dark at the head of the drive. A moonless sky roared with a blizzard of stars and Rome glowed on the southern horizon. He turned, the gravel underfoot popping and rasping. Insects and nightbirds jockeyed for auditory position, their calls quick and shrill. A frog droned in the ditch. At the end of the lane a house sat and waited, a fat stone cat with one square, yellow eye. Calvin couldn’t see it, squatting back in the olive trees, but he knew it was there. It and its single occupant.
He took a deep breath of spring air, balm on his sinuses and throat, and began to drag his suitcase down the drive. It hopped from pebble to dip, threatening to tip over in the dust, so Calvin grabbed one of the side handles and picked it up. He almost swung it next to him as he walked through the cool evening. The olive leaves gleamed and swayed in a gentle breeze that had yet to reach up the lane and caress him. He watched the movement of the trees, and just as he wondered when the wind would get to him, his brow cooled and his hair waved. The air, the sounds and stars. Calvin sighed. A man could forget a lot on a night like this.
It all hushed.
The breeze and night music did not taper off as if in response to a looming storm, but toggled off, harsh and definite. Again, Calvin stood frozen in a world gone mute. Only the sound of his heart, heavy and quickening, came through. Nothing outside of his own skull made a sound.
He rotated slowly, scanning, the hair on his neck stiff at attention. The stand of olives revolved to the corner of his vision, was replaced by a field of still, waist-high grass, silver in the starlight, then the lane where it stretched back to the black-top. Calvin squinted. There was someone standing at the end of the lane where it met the highway. His grip on the suitcase tightened. Concealed within the handle of the carry-on was a single razor blade. On an airport x-ray scan it appeared as a pencil thin line, a piece of reinforcement in the handle, but with a practiced twitch of the hand, it could be between Calvin’s thumb and forefinger before you could say mickey-mouse-airport-security. Had his eyes been lasers, Calvin would have incinerated the shadow at the end of the drive.
He shouted, “Hello?” in Italian and like the sound of his heart, the words were inaudible past his own lips. He could feel himself call out, hear the words reverberate in his mouth, but not in the air outside it.
The man started to walk toward him.
“Hello!” This time in French.
The man remained silent, but his walk was strange, hampered.
“Hello!” Calvin shouted in American accented English.
The shadow-man kept coming, his features indistinguishable in the moonless night.
Calvin willed his pupils to yawn wider, to suck in every available photon. He flicked his wrist just so. The carry-on dropped in a puff of dust at his feet and an inch of artful murder glinted in his palm. He unlocked his knees and waited in the unnatural cloud of silence, the only sound the steady pump of his blood. He told his heart to slow a few a beats, and as always, it did as it was ordered. Calvin held his hands loose, but up and in front. The razor hand offered out flat.
The man kept coming. A hundred feet. Seventy-five. Fifty and Calvin again noticed the man walked keeled over to one side. His shoes puffed up little clouds of dust, but not a single pebble popped underfoot. Twenty-five meters now, and the dark could no longer blind Calvin to all the details. Features resolved, a black suit, a single square of white at the throat, and pulling the man’s stride a bit, was a wheeled carry-on suitcase bumping along as he dragged it behind him. Calvin’s breath caught. He was looking at a reflection of himself as he’d been a few minutes ago. He blinked. Then it was gone.
The screeching of bugs and birds, chirping of frogs, the breeze through the tossing trees, all rushed back. Calvin barked a cry of alarm and actually took a swat at the air with the razor blade as if to slash a wound in the shouting night. After that instant of panic, his training kicked in and he whirled on his heels. The field, the trees, the drive spun around as he took it all in and analyzed for predators. There was nothing, just him and a warm spring night. He took himself down a notch, easing the hammer of his reflexes back to safe. Calvin was the killer on this road, and, as far as he could tell, the
re was only one of him.
Calvin made himself breathe in measured intervals as he bent over and slipped the razor blade back into its hiding place. He straightened and started back toward the trees and the house they hid. His brain wanted to scream, to gibber and whine questions for which he had no answer. He could feel the doomsday theories piling up: stroke, tumor, insanity. How long did he have? Was it somatic or neurotic? He walked, head down, carry-on bumping dumb and clunky against his leg.
There were plenty of causes for spontaneous auditory and visual hallucination. All rational reasons pointed to disease, madness. None of that bothered him. The dirt drive plunged into the hissing trees and increased darkness. Calvin remembered a time in his childhood that had felt a great deal like what had happened in Dublin and just a moment ago. A drop of sweat drew a line of frost down his ribs and he shivered.
He rounded a gentle bend in the drive and the house pounced, one-eyed and suspicious. He stopped just outside of the light thrown by the single illuminated window and looked up between the over-arching branches. They netted undulating triangles of star-field. Father John Calvin stared into one of those patches of sky and thought of a God whose name he did not know, a God in whom he believed, but did not trust.
“Not again,” he said.
As if in response, the door of the house swung open. A figure filled it and called his name in English.
“Yeah!” he answered, and trotted out of the gloom. “It’s me.”
The man in the door drew Calvin into a modest foyer with a gentle hand on the shoulder. Calvin set the carry-on down on polished floor boards that were at least four times his age. He faced the man he had come to meet, a healthy sixty-something, white-haired and quick-eyed. He too sported a black suit and white collar. He offered the back of his hand to Calvin, a jeweled ring winked like a frozen drop of blood. Calvin was supposed to put his mouth on it. He hesitated just long enough to remind the other man of his distaste for the ritual, then bent at the waist and brushed his lips over the ring.
“Your Eminence,” he recited and straightened. “How are you, Thom?”
Bishop Thomas Neary glowered a little. “Sill hate kissing the ring, don’t you?” he said. His voice held a trace of his beginnings in a small Bronx chapel decades ago. He held up a finger, the flesh soft and pink, smooth. “The office if not the man, John,” he admonished and held out his other hand.
Calvin gave a tired smile, a real one, and shook hands. “The man’s fine, it’s the office I worry about.”
“Cute, Father Calvin,” Neary said and lead the way into a modest study. He motioned to a couple of wing chairs drawn up to a crackling fire. Without thinking about it, Calvin plopped into the one that kept his back to the wall and gave him a view of the door. He sighed, deep and long. Neary moved over to a walnut high-boy and pulled out a couple of tumblers. “You need a drink.” he said over his shoulder. “You need a double.”
He brought over the glasses and handed Calvin four fingers of what he knew would be very old, very expensive single malt. He smelled it first, then took a sip. It burned in his mouth and cleaned the last of the airport fumes and road dust from his throat. He closed his eyes and relaxed into the creaking chair.
“Christ, that’s good.”
“Blasphemy, Johnny.”
Calvin squinted through one open eye. “Christ, that’s damn good?”
“There you go.”
Calvin chuckled and took another drink. “How’s things down at HQ? How’s Grampa?”
Neary looked into the fire. “I don’t think he’ll live through the winter, John. He’s awfully sick.”
“We’ve been saying that for years.”
“Yes, but he can’t even get through an entire mass by himself any longer. He has one of the bishops do the mainstay of the recitation.” Neary’s brow creased. He took a drink. “It’s tough to watch.”
Calvin sat forward. “You know what I think?”
“Oh, please, enlighten me.”
“I think he’s been dead for years and Holy Mother Church has been covering it up.”
Neary’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? Then who’s the little guy in the funny hat?”
“A puppet.”
Neary pursed his lips, appeared to consider the possibility. “And, uh, who’s pulling the strings?”
“Jim Henson,” Calvin deadpanned.
“The Muppet guy? Now, I’m certain he’s dead. Saw the funeral on TV. Kermit the Frog sang and everything. I cried like a baby.”
“That’s another part of the cover-up. Henson’s alive.”
“That’s quite a conspiracy theory.”
“Well, yeah.” Calvin brushed a hand over his lapel. “Men in Black and all.”
Neary chuckled. The Pope a puppet. It was funny, but John Calvin was the only man on earth from whom Bishop Neary would accept this kind of horrendous joke. It had taken years to find the right person for his unique job, and years more to train him, not to mention the cost. There was only one of Calvin, and Neary didn’t relish the idea of replacing him. Besides, he and Johnny went back.
Neary took another drink, a gulp, and winced. “I shouldn’t drink this with my stomach.”
Calvin nodded, waited for it.
Neary paused a beat, another. “So,” he began, “speaking of conspiracies and shadow operations.”
“Uh, huh.”
“Your latest triumph made the front pages of all the major rags.”
“Triumph,” Calvin tasted it. “Sure.”
Neary scrolled a hand through the air as he said, “Nobel Laureate Murdered in Dublin Pub.”
“Film at eleven.”
Neary set his eyes on Calvin. “I’m not happy about this one, John. You’re supposed to make them look like accidents. The paper said you damn near took his head off.”
Calvin gazed into the fire. A knot popped like a shot. “Linoleum knives’ll do that.”
“And just how was that supposed to look accidental?”
Calvin sipped his scotch. “Dunno’,” he said. “Like he cut himself shaving?”
“Enough with the jokes, Father Calvin.” Neary’s Bronx reared its head right and proper. “Cut the crap, Johnny. What’s with the friggin’ horror show?”
Calvin watched a tongue of flame lick over a log, the bark glowing like electrified paper. “I was sending a message: Don’t fuck with things best left to God.” He looked up. “Thought you’d like that, Thom.”
“We’re not the Mafia.”
“No, they’re just our squad of friendly little errand monkeys.”
“That’s right. They don’t leave the right signature, so we have them do the smaller jobs from time to time.” He jabbed a finger at Calvin. “You’re the one who does our killing for us.”
“That’s right.”
“Not like this it isn’t.”
“Look, Thom,” Calvin said. “I really thought you’d go for it, the way I did Connolly.”
“It was monstrous.”
“Maybe, but it’ll make the next geek who starts talking about making a Xerox copy of Christ think twice.” Calvin’s eyes flashed. “I’m not even against cloning as a rule, Thom. In fact, I’m for it. I think it’ll end up helping a lot of people one day, but you don’t get to do what Connolly was talking about doing.”
“So you slashed his throat and left the corpse like a common terrorist.” Neary looked out the black square of the window. “It was too much.”
Calvin paused a moment. He looked into his drink and spoke low and even. “Did you ever think about what might happen if some joker actually does clone Christ one of these days?”
“It would be an abomination.”
“Oh, quit reciting, Bishop Neary.”
“What?”
“Try to think past having your fucking Christian sensibilities offended, will you?”
Neary stared, a muscle in his jaw flexed.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be an abomination.” Calvin offered, and sat back. He took a long, slow pull of his scotch. If His Eminence wanted to know where Calvin was headed, he’d ask after he’d calmed down enough to stop clenching his teeth. Calvin took another drink, swirled the amber fluid around in the tumbler.
After a quiet minute. “What do you mean?”
Calvin sat up. “Thom, you and a lot of other people think of the idea of cloning the Son of God as an abomination because it’s what, unnatural?”
“Among other things.”
“It can’t be unnatural because God himself gave man the ability and inspiration to do the act. And if that’s true, and the hypothetical clone of Jesus Christ isn’t an abomination, then what is it?”
“You’ll tell me.” Neary said. “I’m just sure of it.”
Calvin opened his hand, palm up. “If it isn’t an abomination, a clone of Jesus might just be the Second Coming.” Calvin looked over into the fire again. A tendril of Revelations snaked through his mind. Black as sackcloth… His hand collapsed into a fist. “Maybe I bought the world some time.”
“By using Connolly like what—a scarecrow?”
Calvin smiled a little, his eyes far away. “Yeah, just like that.”
For a moment, Thom Neary could only stare at Father Calvin while his brain rolled over what the man had said. After a while, he took a drink. The liquid in his glass trembled just a little. “Did you enjoy Ireland?”
“The beer was good.”
Calvin watched the bishop drain the rest of his scotch, aware that the man was trying to speed toward the end of this meeting. He smiled into his own drink and tipped up the tumbler. Poor Thom, he thought. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, you created a monster and now you’re afraid it’s gone out of your control. He watched the older man over the rim of his glass. Thing is, you think I might be right.
Neary waited until Calvin set his glass on the arm of his chair and then, “You must be tired, Johnny.”
Calvin kept himself from smirking. “Exhausted.”
“The room’s all made up for you. We can talk about your next duty in the morning.”
Calvin showed his best and most harmless smile. “You want I should make pancakes?”
Neary couldn’t quite laugh. “Sure, John. That’d be great.”