Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

  After that, the scene became a tad chaotic. Switters circled the group (he had to keep moving, otherwise he would fall), demanding to know if the rights of property owners were being violated, if trespass had occurred, and if the gentlemen present were cognizant of certain provisions of the Geneva Convention. He waggled a finger at the professor. “That ain’t no way to treat a lady,” he cautioned, although it was hard to tell if it was menace or merriment in his voice. The sisters were jabbering excitedly to one another, pointing accusing fingers at the professor, who, once he recovered from the shock of Switters’s intrusion, began berating Masked Beauty for the inappropriate state of affairs. Several goats, awakened by the disturbance, were bleating, the donkey brayed, and irate cuckoos made passes overhead. Only Sister Domino and the so-called attorney remained calm; Domino because . . . well, because she was Domino, and the attorney because he recognized Switters from their day-long drive and realized that there was more to this farcical turn of events than met the eye. It was unthinkable that he would become flustered. He was a professional and wore no expression at all as his gaze followed the antics of the maniac stilter.

  Dr. Goncalves, for that was the Fatima scholar’s name, insisted, in French, that he would not leave the compound without the document he had come to secure. Obviously, he had made that same assertion several times before, although more politely, under less clamorous conditions. For her part, Masked Beauty was firm in maintaining that the paper in question was the private property of the Pachomian Order, to which Dr. Goncalves, his face growing more scarlet by the moment, replied that no such order was recognized by the Church and therefore did not exist. “What do you call this, then?” the abbess wanted to know, gesturing with the remains of her veil at the women and the grounds around her. “I was inclined to call it a misguided violation of the covenant with God,” Goncalves answered, “but now I call it a madhouse, as well.” He removed his straw hat and swatted at Switters with it as he came stumbling by. Switters laughed and then remarked to Scanlani, for that proved to be the younger man’s name, “Nice threads, pal.” Scanlani was wearing a snail-colored suit with a signature Armani cut. At the compliment, his upper lip twitched in an almost imperceptible hint of a snarl.

  Masked Beauty attempted to refasten her torn veil, an action that for some reason infuriated Professor Goncalves. He snatched the filmy cloth from her hand and lashed her with it. Drawing back to strike him with a kind of roundhouse wallop, the old woman’s body went akimbo in a manner that mimicked the way Matisse had liked to paint her. Interesting, mused Switters, for he could detect in the arrangement of cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones that formed her body, in the planes these shapes flattened into when he narrowed his eyes, the foundation of Analytic Cubism. In paintings such as Blue Nude 1943, had Matisse humanized Cubism, restored it to a natural, less formalistic state without relinquishing its inner dynamic, rescued the female form from Picasso’s wood chipper, and put it back together as a whole slab of juicy color?

  As he was pondering that notion, Domino acted. She stepped between the professor and her aunt as if they were silly, quarreling children. “Enough,” she announced evenly. “You gentlemen must leave here at once. This is an official request, and if it is not honored, then matters will be turned over to our chief of security.” With a nod of her head, a toss of her glossy brown hair, she indicated the joker on stilts—and it was then that she and Switters made eye contact for the first time that evening. Something went leaping between them, something intimate and lively, but also quizzical, wary, and a wee bit weird.

  Acknowledging his role, Switters bellowed at the men in his rudest Italian. “Sparisca! Sparisca! Get lost!”

  As if activated by a switch, Scanlani sprang. He took five lateral steps with the quickness of an NBA point guard and thrust out his right leg with the force of a Thai kickboxer. The leather sole of his expensive Milano-cobbled boot smashed into one of Switters’s stilt poles. Instantly losing his already precarious balance, Switters tumbled wildly backward. With a splintering crash, he landed in a jasmine bush. Broken twigs dug into his back like daggers, but what was left of the shrub served as a buffer between him and the earth. His feet had not touched. A trickle of blood ran from a deep scratch on his cheek. “Another damn scar,” he lamented. “I tell you, the gods are jealous of my good looks.” Two or three fragrant petals were plastered to the wound. He sniffed. “It smells like the junior prom in here,” he said.

  Scanlani’s generic expression was unchanged, but Dr. Goncalves laughed derisively. “Your chief of security?” he asked with a smirk. Pippi and ZuZu made an effort to help Switters out of the shattered bush, but he waved them off. “Go get my starship,” he whispered to Pippi. “It’s in the car parked at the gate.”

  Domino glared at the professor. “If he’s injured,” she said, indicating Switters, “you will never be given the prophecy.”

  “Oh?” Goncalves raised his eyebrows. “So you are saying that we may be given it?”

  “That depends. Our order will have to discuss various—”

  “Over my dead body!” exclaimed Masked Beauty.

  “Now, aunt, let’s keep an open mind. At some future date, after certain conditions have been met, certain concessions granted, it may be in everyone’s best interest to—”

  “It is in everyone’s best interest that you surrender the stolen document immediately,” Goncalves said. His tone was as threatening as a green sheen on mayonnaise. He shoved Domino aside in order to confront Masked Beauty directly. “Look at you!” He forced the words through clenched dentures. “Just look at you. How can the likes of you think to defy the authority of the Holy Father?” The old abbess blinked. Had she any lingering worry about still being beautiful, it was all gone now.

  “I defy the authority of the Holy Father!” came a loud cry from the bush. “I defy the authority of the Holy Authority! I defy the authority of the unholy authority! Fuck authority and the Polish sausage it rode in on!” Then he added, because his back was being painfully gouged and because he was on a roll, “Fuck the Dallas Cowboys!”

  “Oh, do watch your tongue, Mr. Switters,” chimed in Maria Deux. “All is lost through sacrilege.”

  “Silence that heathen oaf,” commanded Goncalves. He said it to Masked Beauty, upon whose rococo rhino polyp his beady eyes remained fixed, but it was Scanlani who moved catlike toward the busted bush, not walking so much as gliding. The jurist hadn’t gotten far, however, before three shots rang out in rapid succession.

  Mr. Beretta had spoken. Mr. Beretta had barked at the stars.

  Disturbed again, the cuckoos took flight with a fluttering of feathers and shrieks of protest and alarm. The sound of scrabbling goat hooves was heard, and from the henhouse a great chorus of nervous clucking suddenly ensued. Scanlani froze. Switters leveled the gun at him. He fully expected Scanlani to whisk a pistol of his own from inside his fine jacket. He imagined the move would be as slick as a magician’s. It would be pretty to watch. Even his stance—well-shod feet wide apart, both hands on the gun—would be instinctive and classic. So, Switters was actually disappointed when Scanlani made no move.

  Switters’s position was awkward and uncomfortable, laid out as he was on a bed of organic nails, but he held the 9-mm steady. His intent was to try to shoot the gun out of Scanlani’s hand without hitting him. He’d accomplished that feat once in Kuwait City, blasting a Czech-made CZ-85 apart in the fist of a double agent. Particles of metal had flown off it like cold black sparks. Dropping what was left of the pistol, the man had whimpered. He’d held up his vibrating hands to watch their hue redden, his fingers already swelling like microwaved frankfurters. But, as they say, “That was then and this is now.” (What would Today Is Tomorrow make of such a maxim?) Switters was not at all convinced he could duplicate the marksmanship, even if he was on his feet. He steadied the barrel and waited. For whatever reason, Scanlani failed to act.

  “Throw down your gun,” Switters ordered. He wasn’t sure he??
?d gotten it right in Italian, so he repeated the command in French and English. Scanlani shrugged, a big arrogant Neapolitan shrug. “Okay, pal, have it your way,” said Switters. “Remove your jacket.” The alleged attorney understood, for he slipped out of his suit coat, folded it carefully, and placed it on the ground. The shoulder holster Switters had expected to be exposed was nowhere in sight. “Damn!” he swore. He couldn’t lie in that position much longer.

  Waving the Beretta, he had Scanlani remove his shirt and twirl like a fashion model. There was no handgun stuck in his waistband, front or back. “Okay, clever boy, take off your pants.” The man refused. For the first time, he displayed emotion, and the emotion was outrage and disgust. Switters’s back felt like the time clock in an anthill. This was becoming unbearable. “Remove your damn pants!” he repeated vexatiously. Dr. Goncalves and the sisters looked dumbfounded.

  Again, Scanlani refused to comply. Switters squeezed off a volley of shots at the dirt alongside the handsome calfskin boots. Everyone shrieked. Scanlani hastened to unbuckle his belt. And several moments passed before Switters realized three things:

  1. Scanlani was unarmed.

  2. Inadvertently, he had asked the fellow not to remove his trousers but, rather, to pull down his panties, a linguistic gaffe that could be traced to certain nights in Taormina and Venice, when he’d desired a clearer view of what the Italians, speaking clinically, referred to as la vagina (the same as in America), but informally (and sweetly) tended to call la pesca (the peach) or la fica (the fig).

  3. One of the bullets fired at Scanlani’s feet had ricocheted off a rock and struck Masked Beauty in the face.

  “It was an honest mistake,” said Switters, referring to the gunpoint disrobing of Scanlani: he hadn’t yet noticed that Masked Beauty was bleeding. “I gave you credit for being something more than just another scumbag lawyer. Please accept my apology. And my condolences.” Domino, who likewise was oblivious to her aunt’s wound, rushed over to add her apologies. Switters’s heart seemed to liquefy when he witnessed the characteristic and irrepressible compassion in her concern. Nevertheless, he called out, “Keep your distance, sister love. The man may be unarmed, but his manners are deplorable.”

  He thought he heard her mutter, “No worse than your own,” but he couldn’t be sure, for about that time Pippi had barged onto the scene, pushing his wheelchair. Toufic was with her. Together, they lifted him out of the tangle of twigs (it resembled an oversize cuckoo’s nest) and onto the “contour plus” cushion that still adorned the “drop-hook, solid-folding” seat. Continuing to brandish the automatic pistol, he waved it at the rapidly dressing Scanlani and at Goncalves, who was one big eel-mouthed gash of petulance. “Toufic, ol’ buddy, our guests were just saying their good-byes. You’re supposed to chauffeur them to Deir ez-Zur for their overnight lodging, as I recall. In the dark, no road, a good sixty kilometers as the camel flies: I suggest that you organize an expeditious departure.” It was then that he—and Domino—had noticed the Pachomians huddled around the abbess.

  Once it was ascertained that Masked Beauty was not gravely injured, he ushered the Italian and the Portuguese to the gate. The former was mutely furious, the latter loudly vocal with accusations and threats. As Switters was removing his belongings from the car, Domino rushed up and insisted that he give the Vatican delegation his satellite phone number and e-mail address. She told them she was sorry that things had gotten out of hand—both sides were at fault, she said—and she urged them to contact her and the abbess when tempers had cooled. Perhaps, she said, something could be worked out.

  When the Audi pulled away, she glared at Switters, and not because she’d overheard him lobbying a somewhat bewildered Toufic to include a pinch of hashish in his next scheduled delivery to the convent. “You reckless maniac,” she scolded. “Your irresponsible macho gunplay has disfigured my aunt.”

  Horrified that he might have caused Masked Beauty permanent harm, he rolled himself rapidly to the infirmary, where his guilt and sorrow subsided slightly after he learned the extent of the so-called disfiguration. It seemed that the ricocheting bullet had grazed the old woman’s nose, neatly slicing off at the base the tiny Chinese mountain of horn flesh, the violet viral cauliflowerette, the double-dipped God-wart that for many decades had been protuberating there.

  Nobody at the oasis got much sleep that night. Even the animals were restless and jumpy. The sisterhood was atwitter with agitation, and Masked Beauty, although surprisingly free of pain, was in a state of shock following her abrupt and artless amputation. “You’ll just have to get used to being desirable again,” Switters told the abbess. “Is it not a fine thing to be rebeautified on a planet that’s being systematically trashed? You know, my mother always wanted me to become a plastic surgeon. It would have saved her a fortune in lifts and tucks.”

  For her part, even as she swabbed his own scratched cheek with iodine, Domino remained in a huff. True, she and her sisters had not merely accepted but actively solicited his protection, yet she found it brutal and anti-Pachomian that he would assault an official party from the Vatican (no matter that the party was belligerently authoritarian) with a deadly weapon. He replied that “assault” was a bit of an exaggeration. And then he told her a story.

  The story had been passed on to him by Bobby Case, who had learned it from one of his “wise ol’ boys.” It seemed that long ago, a holy man, a bodhisattva, was walking through the Indian countryside when he came upon a band of poor, troubled herdsmen and their emaciated flock. The herdsmen were moaning and gnashing and wringing their hands, and when the bodhisattva asked them what was the matter, they pointed to a range of nearby mountains. To drive their flock to fresh green pasture on the other side of the hills, they had to traverse a narrow pass. In the pass, however, a huge cobra had established a den, and each time they went by it, the snake attacked, stabbing its long venomous fangs into animals and humans alike. “We can’t get through the pass,” the herders complained, “and as a result, our cattle and goats are starving, and so are we.”

  “Worry not,” said the bodhisattva, “I will take care of it.” He then proceeded to climb up to the pass, where he rapped on the entrance to the den with his staff and gave the cobra a lecture it would not soon forget. Thoroughly shamed and chastised, the big serpent promised that it would never, ever bite the herders or their charges again. The holy man thanked it. “I believe you when you vow that in the future you will refrain from the biting of any passerby,” he said, and went on his way.

  About a year later, Bodhisattva came that way again. From a distance, he saw the herdsmen. They appeared content, their animals hardy and fat. Bodhisattva decided to look in on the cobra and compliment it on its good behavior, but although he repeatedly rapped his staff on the rocks, he received no response. Perhaps it moved away, thought Bodhi, and he made to leave. Just then, however, he heard a weak groan from deep inside the cave. Bodhi crawled inside, where he found the snake in pitiful condition. Skinny as a drawstring and battered as a tow rope, it lay on its side, fairly close to death.

  “What on earth is the matter?” asked the guru, moved nearly to tears.

  “Well,” said the cobra in a barely audible voice, “you made me promise not to bite anyone. So, now, everybody who comes over the pass hits me with sticks and throws stones at me. My body is cut and bruised, and I can no longer leave the den to find food or water. I’m miserable and sick, but, alas, there is nothing to be done to protect myself, because you proclaimed that I shouldn’t bite.”

  Bodhisattva patted the poor creature’s head. “Yes,” he agreed. “But I didn’t say you couldn’t hiss.”

  The meaning of the story was not lost on Domino. She soon forgave Switters for his hissing. She continued to believe that he had hissed excessively and had taken an unseemly amount of pleasure in hissing, but she was not one to linger in the stale cellars of resentment. Nevertheless, her attitude toward him had changed. While he could have attributed the change to his caval
ier gunplay or to the accidental shearing off of Masked Beauty’s growth (if he could divest the abbess of the shield behind which she’d taken refuge—her supernatural wart—mightn’t he likewise flush Domino from behind the convenient cover of her supernatural hymen?), he realized that she had seemed different, somehow, even before the shooting started. Thus, he was not entirely surprised when she announced that their tower-room petting sessions were at an end.

  “I’ve had my fling,” she said, “and escaped relatively unscathed. I believe I can safely state that should I ever enjoy such acts again, it will be under the auspices of matrimony.”

  “And I’m not a candidate to share your marriage bed?”

  In spite of herself, she smiled. “If that is a proposal, I will give it due consideration.”

  Perhaps fearful of arousing his imp, he elected not to pursue the matter, and that seemed okay with her. They had a great many other things to talk about, and over the next four months—during which lengthy and, at times, acrimonious negotiations with the Vatican took place almost weekly via e-mail—they talked as fervently as they once had kissed. If either or both of them regarded conversation an unsatisfactory substitute, they did not let on.

  The talking had begun the morning after the incident, when, in the shade of one of the walnut trees, she had briefed him on the reasons why the Church had sent Dr. Goncalves and Scanlani to retrieve the Fatima prophecy in the first place.

  A lot of the briefing was pure conjecture—the piecing together of tidbits of information that Goncalves had let slip, combined with an intuitive feel for the situation—but in weeks to come, when more facts became available, Domino’s assessment proved quite accurate, although it should be noted that the full story unfolded slowly over time and may never be completely known.

  For whatever reason, Fannie, after she fled the oasis, had made a pilgrimage to Fatima in rural Portugal. There, under the spell of the very place where the Virgin Mother had allegedly made her most dramatic historical appearances, Fannie had requested an audience with the nearby bishop of Leiria. Eventually, an interview was granted. The bishop was aware of his predecessor’s involvement with the Lady’s third prophecy, how he had concealed it in his safe from 1940 until 1957, when, under the direction of Pope Pius XII, he’d hand-carried it to Rome; and then, three years later, how he’d gone to assist Pope John XXIII with its translation. What the current bishop didn’t know was why the Vatican powers had never revealed the contents of the prophecy. He’d heard the rumors, but felt it was none of his business. Still, he was intrigued by the defrocked Irish nun’s story, allowing that it was at least feasible that the Church believed the prophecy destroyed, and even that the infamous Pachomian abbess, Croetine Thiry, might, through her late uncle, have ended up with the only extant copy.