“Might have what?” said Giacomo ferociously, as if afraid that Paolo was going to say too much. “I am having a quiet word with Michael, if you please.”
“Ah…” Paolo stopped indecisively in the doorway. “Should I go?” When Giacomo failed to answer, the monk simply held out his hand and muttered a quiet blessing in Michael’s direction: “‘Amici, ascende superius,’ that is all you need to know for now. Ascend higher, my friend’. For in the bone house none will be able to recognize your bones. You’ll be dead and gone.”
“Why are you telling me all these things?” said Michael. “Are you going away?”
Paolo and Giacomo grew shifty. Their thoughts seemed to rise up, whirling about and skimming across the flushed evening sky like starlings hesitant to settle for the night.
Then Paolo said: “Yes, we are going away.”
“And you can no longer go through life as a stupid little prick from Provence who wants his girlfriend back,” said Giacomo. “You have to give her up.”
The two men inched towards the door. “We’ll take our leave, then,” said Giacomo, with a little wave. “God-speed.”
Paolo came forward and offered his hand for Michael to kiss, which he did, reluctantly: it stank of garlic and vinegar.
“Don’t let me down,” said Giacomo in the background. “Don’t sadden me.”
“I don’t think you could be saddened by anyone.”
Paolo intervened again: “An ambitious man does not have time for sadness, and that is because his time is valuable and he has many things to do before he sleeps.”
30
Cardinal Patrick O’Hara reclined in his favorite chair by the fire, sipping a cup of first-flush Darjeeling while he waited for the Mercedes Pullman to turn up. He was on his way to a private service at St. Stephen’s Chapel of the Abyssinians, far from the unwelcome crowds and their beloved cameras.
In another age, long ago, congregations had watched services through carved screens — had not even understood the chants and rituals, which were all in a different language from their own. Religion had been a mystery in those days. People had done as they were told and the priesthood held sway over society.
But democracy had invaded the world and now they were bound by its simplistic rules.
It had been a heavy night for his soul, one in which he had besmirched himself with a harlot. The narrow lane outside was usually deserted, but today he had seen her several times on the corner, a long-legged stork of a woman in a yellow leotard and tiny latex skirt, tottering unsteadily over the cobblestones in her thigh-length boots. Her availability had made him savage and restless. Ritually he’d repeated one of his favorite maxims, from St. Augustine, ‘God is to be enjoyed, creatures only used as means to that which is to be enjoyed.’ After his long, empty life, why should he not enjoy the delicacies on which others habitually gorged? It was a disturbing and delicious thought. Also a venal sin, yet why so venal? What in the name of God was so venal about reaching out and plucking the sweet cloven fruit of womanhood? Murder, yes, that was certainly an offense to His eyes. Murder had become commonplace — the death squads were constantly liquidating maggots. And most certainly it was justifiable.
He had kept it brief, up against the wall in the vestibule, then paying the jade what she asked — but he knew repentance would be more long-drawn.
He reflected on his long life of struggle, wondering, in spite of all, why he cared so much about people’s stuffing — whether of maggot or flesh? — when patently they were all human beings anyway.
Ah, what a life of melancholy. To be so alone! He thought of his old home in Limerick: the house where he was born, a crumbling unpainted smudge littered with a few sticks of worm-eaten furniture. A smell of dust that could not be got rid of, because the place itself was dust. The larder, stocked with dry beans and unmentionable tins containing nothing that could be eaten, unless his mother applied her utilitarian hand, which she only did at regulated times. The poverty of those days still made him shudder when he thought of it. Splintered floorboards without linoleum. Rats breeding behind the skirting boards, crawling wood lice drowned in the sink in the mornings. His father in his lumpy chair, fiddling with the wireless and solemnly listening to the King’s speech as if it made any difference to him. Outside, the garden with its tall rustling grass they had no mower to cut.
Only the church bells, ringing out for evensong, had moved his spirit back then. He had given his life to it. The Church, the behemoth, this human invention, an enormous whirlpool sucking more and more into itself, like a glutton at a table.
He shook his head to be rid of the memory; but when he peered out of the window at the dreary dark skies, he found it difficult to believe that there’d be some green, bright valley up there, where he’d be welcomed after his death.
You are a murderer and a wanton, he told himself. Who would welcome you?
Reeling with disquiet, O’Hara went to the great Venetian mirror in the hall and stood there studying his face in the mirror. Every furrow, every wrinkle and every twitch spoke of deep un-happiness; an unsmiling aspect in all that he had ever attempted.
You have acted out the iniquities and vices you always secretly longed for. Nonetheless you must take a stand against them.
I will be their inquisitor; I will fry the very gizzards of their apostasy, until their bones crack with loud splitting sounds and their brains come bubbling out of their miserable skulls, I will spill their churning guts; their pleas for mercy shall be as music to my ears.
Strength seemed to come churning back as these dark words rose up in him:
A day will come when people thank me for keeping the human race pure of this filth, this churning, slithering filth that threatens the very backbone of the human project.
Ah, how fine a phrase that is.
The human project.
A shining city on a hill.
A million willing throats pouring out their hearts in sacred song.
By the time he had sponged himself down, brushed his thinning hair, put on his pressed woolen cape and walked down the winding staircase, the long black car was already waiting outside, its engine idling. He settled into the soft leather back seat with a contented sigh. “St. Stephen’s,” he muttered to the driver, who did not answer or move. After a long minute, O’Hara leaned forward and repeated in a stern voice: “I said, St. Stephen’s!”
When the driver turned round, O’Hara’s evening took a decisive turn for the worse. Because the man sitting there in the driver’s seat was not his usual. In fact, he’d been replaced by Brother Paolo — the gluttonous maggot-monk.
“Good evening, Cardinal. We’re waiting for a few people. If you don’t mind.”
At that moment, the doors opened on either side. Giacomo climbed in next to O’Hara, and an anonymous non-speaking type in a dark windcheater got in on the opposite side. He didn’t show O’Hara he was armed; he didn’t have to.
The car accelerated away strongly.
O’Hara was agape for an instant, then quickly found his stride. “What is this? I have a service to attend to, brother Giacomo. I’m expected.”
“It’ll have to wait,” said Giacomo. “We’re invited to a dinner party and we thought you’d like to come. You seem so damned miserable all the time. If you were a dog I’d throw a bucket of water over you, give you a good wash, then a pile of marrowbones. And that’s precisely what I’m going to do — even though you’re not a dog.”