When it came time to leave the compound, Brooke opted for shopping the Champs Elysées, while Joey wanted to go to the great Cathedral at Notre Dame. “Aren’t you part French?” Joey prodded Brooke.
“Yes, on my father’s side. Mom is Irish.”
“So were you brought up Catholic?”
“Yes, but I haven’t been to church in years.”
“Wanna join me?”
“I really had my heart set on seeing the shops and all the fashions I can’t afford to buy.”
“Well, good hunting.”
“Have fun…genuflecting.”
As the cab pulled up to the huge edifice of the Cathedral, Joey’s thoughts returned to the first time he had walked into the Immaculate Conception Church. To the nine-year-old Joey, it was the biggest church in the world. Now here in the great Cathedral, those feelings returned. He was spellbound by the Church at a young age. It was something about the ritual, the reverence and the comfort he saw in the faces of the people attending Mass, that made him want to get more involved. As soon as he could, he became an altar boy. It made his mother deliriously happy; his dad wasn’t quite so enchanted. For five years, Joey had helped with the celebration of Mass, then weddings and funerals. At first, the funerals were hard to take, but as he saw how the families needed to cry, grieve, and celebrate the lives of those they had lost, he began to appreciate the role he and faith played in helping people get through life. He would later in life define it as ‘divine serenity.’
When one of the brothers of the Church asked Joey if he thought of becoming a priest, even at fifteen he knew it wasn’t a good fit for him. He liked the result but wasn’t into the process. He liked the helping part, but the study, the theology, was boring to him. What loomed as his largest objection, however, was the uncertainty as to where he might be sent. It could be to St. Pat’s on Fifth Avenue or to a small tent in Zimbabwe; you just didn’t know.
A broad grin appeared across his face at the thought that if the Sisters of Immaculate Conception school in the Bronx could see him now, entering Notre Dame, “Our Lady of Paris,” they would drop to their knees because it would surely be a sign of the end of days.
He dabbed his finger in the font of holy water and crossed himself. Even though he had never been in here before, he felt at home. At that moment it hit him — that’s why the ritual, the icons, the Stations of the Cross, the altars, and every other element were the same here as in any Bronx church. Although more splendid and more ornate, still they were familiar. It meant that anywhere in the world a practicing Catholic went, he or she could always find home, or at least something that felt safe and familiar. When Latin was more prevalent, Joe imagined that it must have been easy to be able to communicate at some level with a parish priest in Latin, even if he was Chinese and you were in China and couldn’t speak a word of Mandarin to him or anyone else.
His footsteps echoed off the marble and stone that had made the reading of the scriptures reverberate in the time before microphones. He found a pew about halfway to the altar and bent down on one knee, crossed himself, and sat. Looking up and all around the nave, he took a deep breath. He remembered preparing the incense for mass — the combination of myrrh and other ingredients creating the distinctive smell that meant you were in God’s house. He put his hands together and said a few prayers, along the way praying for his son, his wife, his parents, his sister, and then for his country, and asked for guidance in the work he and Bill did.
He crossed himself and decided to move closer to the altar to get a better look. A young priest was setting up for a service. He nodded to Joey, who responded with a nod and the word, “Father,” to the man, who was probably five years younger than he.
“American?” the priest asked.
“Yes.”
“Me too. I’m from Philadelphia.”
“New York.”
“Frank Mercada.”
“Joey Palumbo. Nice to meet you.”
“First time here?”
“Yes, first time.”
Father Mercada looked up to the eight-hundred-year-old architecture. “Magnificent isn’t it.”
“Gloria in excelsis Deo.”
“Theologian?”
“Nah, I was an altar boy as a kid.”
“Me too. I just kind of stayed with it. Now…” He looked up again to the ceiling of the apse.
“So how did you go from Philly to here?” Joey said.
“You never know where they are going to send you.”
Joey smiled.
“So you used to prep for mass?”
“Five years.”
“Want to see the rest of the church?”
“I don’t want to take you away from what you are doing,” Joey said, in a way that kind of meant “sure” which surprised even him.
“I’ve got two hours; besides, I was a little bored anyway.”
They spent the next half hour walking through the cathedral and then under it, as Mercada showed him the catacombs and ruins of the ancient Roman baths on which the cathedral was built. At one point they crossed into an area that had an old door with huge wrought iron hasps and hinges from the Middle Ages. It was definitely locked.
Of course Joey asked, “Those two big wrought iron rings on the door look like a ring of thorns. Is that where they keep the crown?”
“The Crown of Thorns? No, that’s upstairs; I’ll show you later.”
“Then what’s in there?”
“I don’t know. I have never been in there.”
That earned Father Mercada a quizzical look from Joey.
He responded by way of explanation, “When I first got here there was a deacon, who has since left, and he referred to it once as the Knight’s Chamber.”
“As in night and day or the Sir Galahad variety?”
“Definitely the k-night.”
“See, that is exactly why I couldn’t do this; become a priest. I made the right choice, all right,” Joey said stretching his palm, face up and gesturing toward the ancient portal.
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t sleep a wink or eat until I got on the other side of that door. It would be killing me. You, you my friend, have the acceptance and great forbearance that I lacked.”
“And I, my friend, also don’t have the key; thus the forbearance comes easy. So what did you do instead?”
“I became a cop and then an FBI agent, and now I work at the White House.”
“Well, I’d also say you definitely made the right choice.”
“Dean Robert McNally on two,” Cheryl announced as Bill was finishing up an opinion paper on ‘Privatization of Aerospace Initiatives.’
“Thank you for returning my call, Dean McNally. I was surprised to learn that you have no record of a Percival Cutney or Smyth as having attended Notre Dame.”
“Mr. Hiccock, I even e-mailed the picture you sent to retired and relocated teachers and professors and almost no one seems to remember him.”
“Forgive me, Dean, but as a scientific discipline, ‘almost’ is statistically not 100 percent.”
“Well, there was one professor, Professor Cecil Hughes who misidentified him as Parnell Sicard. And although there is similar likeness from our year book photo, it is impossible that it could be him.”
“Why is that, Dean?”
“Because Parnell died in the Mideast back in 1983.”
“Can you send me that photo? Oh, and Dean, what did Hughes teach?”
“Theology.”
“Thanks, Dean McNally, you’ve been very helpful.”
VIII. ANCESTRAL KAI
Looking out from the bridge of the Shobi Maru, her captain, Kasogi Toshihira, worried about the front moving in across the part of the Pacific he was traversing with sixty-five hundred new Toyota Tundras and Tacomas in the hold of his vast floating parking lot. The wide expanse of calm, for the moment, blue ocean spread out before him like a soft carpet. The bottom of his vista was dotted with the early morning ritual run of the three Imperial Marines of the Japanese Defense Force keeping their regimen and their physical prowess in peak condition. Since the re-emergence of pirates, the Japanese government posted the JDF Marines on cargo ships that were the main artery of the economic lifeblood for the island nation.