“Yes?”
“Monika, I’m trying to find out what happened.”
“The theater was exploded.”
“I know, I was there, but I was hit in the head and I don’t remember anything. What I’m trying to find out is, was anybody down there in the—”
The phone was set down with a clatter.
I waited through a painful minute until I heard the receiver being scraped up again.
“Everyone is dead,” Monika said.
“What? No!”
“I asked Heinz, and he says everyone is dead.”
“But I was told the theater was empty!”
I heard her say “Here!” and another voice came on the line—Heinz’s.
“What do you want?” he said. “All are dead.”
“No! Heinz, I was told the theater was empty.”
“Who tells you this?”
“I was told this in the hospital. They said no one was looking for bodies because the theater was empty.”
“Ja, so. They tell you.”
“Do you know that Shirin was there?”
I heard a muffled exchange between the two.
“I hang up now,” Heinz said.
“No, wait! Can you tell me Shirin’s last name? Her surname?”
Heinz thought for a moment before saying, “You should be there too.”
Then he hung up.
Afternoon
I spent the next three hours in bed, and the thoughts I thought don’t need to be recorded here.
Around four o’clock some being knocked and made his way in and introduced himself chummily as Fr. Joe. He wanted to know if he should schedule a spot for me in the chapel.
I said, “What?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday, Father,” he said to me. “I assume you’ll be saying Mass.”
“I will not be saying Mass,” I told him.
Fr. Joe disappeared as if whisked offstage like a puppet on strings.
So at least that much has been settled. I’ve reached and passed the fiftieth degree of losing my faith.
Evening
Tim, my middle-of-the-night confidant, is a Native American, built along the lines of a sumo wrestler. This is a summer job for him. During the school year he’s a student at junior college in a town nearby. Not having eaten all day, I was starved, and he directed me to the dining room, which I took one look at and decided I couldn’t stand right now—too bright and too much conversation that people would want to include me in.
I went back and asked Tim if I could get a tray sent over, and he said sure, nothing easier.
I told him I was expecting a visitor from St. Jerome’s University by the name of Fr. Lulfre, and he asked how he’d be arriving. I told him I supposed by car.
Tim looked through his papers and asked if he’d be spending the night.
I assume so.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re pretty careful about letting us know this stuff, and there’s no Fr. Lulfre down here.”
“He’s expected for dinner.”
Tim shrugged and repeated that he didn’t think so.
I went back to my room and, with nothing better to do till my tray arrived, decided to take stock and see how many of my belongings had gone south while I was going west. Amazingly, except for my billfold, with all my cash and credit cards, every last thing seemed to be there, including my passport. I called Tim, and he confirmed my suspicion that the billfold was under lock and key in the office, “for safekeeping.”
The item of greatest interest was the tape recorder, which had a tape in it that had been run forward an hour or so. After I’d eaten and returned the tray, I rewound the tape and hit the play button, mentally crossing my fingers and holding my breath. The first second confirmed my hopes: It was a tape of Shirin’s speech at the theater on May 25. I stopped the tape to consider the fact that, if Heinz Teitel was right, these would be the last words I’d ever hear from her. The thought did me no good one way or another. I pushed the play button and listened.*
Following my usual practice of letting review material go by unrecorded, I had evidently turned the tape on in the middle of the speech. It’s not easy to summarize what I felt on hearing what she had to say. She put it all together at last. I had no idea what the talk was “officially” called. I knew it could only be called “The Great Remembering.” This was it, the fulfillment of the promise—and it left me with only about a million questions.
But there was one thing I finally understood beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that was why both Charles and Shirin declined to formulate a defense against the charge of being the Antichrist. I was disappointed in myself that I’d been so dense about it, that I’d failed to hear what they were telling me and what Fr. Lulfre was telling me. At any rate, I finally understood why, when I said that B seemed harmless, Fr. Lulfre’s reply was, “That can’t be right.”
Indeed, it wasn’t right.
I’ve made a written copy of the speech. In these uncertain circumstances no precautions are excessive.
Obviously Fr. Lulfre didn’t turn up here tonight—or if he did he’s been asleep for hours.
Three A.M.
I finally figured out why I can’t get to sleep. I’m going to have to learn to think more like a fugitive. I’m too used to being passive and trusting. It took me two hours of tossing and turning to get the point, which is that this is a potentially disastrous situation for me.
I don’t know why Fr. Lulfre failed to show up tonight, but I’m damned glad he didn’t, because there couldn’t possibly be a worse place for me to confront him. If he wanted to, he could lock me up here and throw away the key. I’ve got to get out of here right now and hope to intercept him on more favorable ground. Luckily, if there’s a wing of this place that’s high security, this isn’t it. I think I could make my way out with nothing but the essentials (recorder, notebooks, tapes, and passport), but a hundred-mile trip with nothing but lint in my pockets is not an appealing prospect. I should at least make a try at persuading Tim to liberate just one credit card from my billfold in the safe.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 29–The Great Remembering.
Monday, June 3
The fugitive at 35,000 feet
So that’s that. Between now and Hamburg I’ve got a lovely bunch of hours ahead of me in which to sleep and bring this journal up to date—and in a nice, roomy first-class seat, since no other was available on this flight. The Laurentians won’t notice the difference, and surely they must expect to send off their apostates with a little Visa Golden handshake.
Though it took the better part of two hours, Tim was persuadable. I may be dumb, but nobody ever said I didn’t know how to make myself understood. I made a stab at getting him to throw in the keys to his car, but no, he wouldn’t go that far. It took a couple more hours, but I did finally manage to hitch a ride. Priests have to cultivate an innocent, harmless look, which comes in handy on the road (as every serial killer knows). Once I got to an automatic teller machine, I was home free.
I reached Fr. Lulfre’s office at eleven o’clock in the morning, and by God, there he was, just where I’d left him almost a month ago—something I hadn’t exactly counted on, since it was Sunday.
He looked up at me from behind his desk, plainly astounded, and said, “You didn’t have to do this, Jared. I was planning to come see you today.”
He actually didn’t get it; he thought I’d jumped the wall out of mere impatience to be near him.
“I’m here for a reckoning, Fr. Lulfre.”
He capped his pen and set it aside—nice, well-thought-out moves.
“A reckoning, eh? You sound like the staunch hero of some turn-of-the-century melodrama.”
“Different century,” I said, sitting down, “but that’s the idea.”
“What is it you want reckoned?”
“I’ll tell you what I remember, then you can tell me the rest.”
“All rig
ht.”
“They said I might or might not eventually remember the explosion, but all I remember right now is a little flash. For a while I thought it was something I’d dreamed, and maybe it is, but I don’t think so. Do you know the setup in the theater?”
“Yes.”
“Your man in Radenau laid it out for you.”
Fr. Lulfre nodded, then added, “Our man in Europe, actually.”
“This is the elderly person who introduced himself to me as Herr Reichmann?”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you already had a man on the ground there?”
He shrugged. “It’s always better if you think it’s all up to you.”
“Then why did he phone me with instructions?”
“He got impatient. Professionals always get impatient with amateurs. You know that.”
I shook my head. “Why did you send me at all?”
“We sent you for exactly the reasons I gave you.” He smiled briefly. “For almost exactly the reasons I gave you. Under his real name, Reichmann maintains perfectly respectable offices in Berlin, Prague, and Paris and works on retainer for a dozen different firms and individuals, mostly in the U.S. He’s a very useful, knowledgeable person, and ninety-nine percent of the chores we give him are routine and innocuous, but when we asked him to look into Charles Atterley for us, he showed a side we hadn’t seen before. His approach was, ‘I can’t make out what the blighter is saying, so why don’t I just shoot him and be done with it?’ Whatever you may think of us after this dreadful experience, Jared, absolutely no one considered taking such advice. We had to send someone of our own to have a look at Atterley, and believe me, we very much wanted you to persuade us that he was harmless.”
“And I failed to do that.”
“It was out of your hands, really. He was condemned from his own mouth by the speeches you faxed to us.”
“And you actually authorized his assassination?”
The man shrugged. “You said it very well, Jared: These days are still those days. Nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years—or the last thousand—except that heretics can no longer be executed in public. I take all this as seriously as Pope Innocent the Third, who ordered up a crusade against the Albigenses. I take it all as seriously as Pius the Fifth, who, when he was the grand inquisitor, personally instigated the massacre of thousands of Protestants in southern Italy. I take it all as seriously as Thomas Aquinas, who said, ‘If ordinary criminals may be justly put to death, then how much more may heretics be justly slain.’ For Thomas well knew that the murderer just shortens his neighbors’ temporal life, whereas the heretic deprives them of eternal life. If you no longer understand the difference—or if it no longer matters to you—then I assume you’ve lost your faith.”
“You assume rightly, Father. I’m afraid it’s fallen to the modernist fallacy.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and I could see that he sincerely meant it.
“Since you quoted me about ‘these days still being those days,’ I assume the resourceful Herr Reichmann had the theater bugged.”
“Of course he did. It was an obvious thing to do. Atterley and his followers were just too incredibly trusting to survive for very long as subversives.”
“Yes, they were. So you knew they were recruiting me.”
“Yes. That was an unexpected bonus, and you handled it just right.”
“Except that I ended up recruited.”
“Yes—except for that.” He frowned for a moment, then looked up. “You say you now remember the explosion?”
“I said I remember a little flash. I’m looking up out of a well at Herr Reichmann, who’s looking down into the well at me. I think this was the stairwell at the theater.”
“That’s right. That’s all you remember?”
I nodded.
“I’m not exactly sure what happened there. Reichmann’s story is that you blundered into him on the stairs moments before the bomb was to go off. Evidently you assumed he was up to no good and wouldn’t let him talk you into leaving the theater with him, and when you headed down the stairs to warn the others, he slugged you and left you to your fate. This was relatively lucky for you, since that iron staircase was the only structure that survived both the blast and the collapse of the roof.”
“You don’t think it actually happened that way?”
“It may have happened that way. All I know for certain is that this is what Reichmann wants us to believe, and we’re in no position to contradict him.”
There was nothing for it now but to ask the question I dreaded to ask: “Did Reichmann tell you who was in the theater when it was destroyed?”
“He indicated that he got everyone.”
I stared at him bleakly.
“His exact words were, ‘The inner circle is gone.’”
I said, “Everyone else seems to think the theater was empty.”
Fr. Lulfre shrugged.
“Well, he missed one—me.”
He shook his head. “Jared, you know I think highly of you, but you’re not a charismatic firebrand.”
“I don’t think being a firebrand has anything to do with it.”
Again he shrugged.
“You know, I couldn’t figure out why B insisted on putting his entire schedule on hold while he dealt with me. It made even less sense after Charles’s death. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No, frankly, I don’t. What is it that made less sense after Charles’s death?”
“Why B insisted on spending so much time with me.”
Fr. Lulfre started to tell me that he didn’t know what in the world I was talking about, then the light dawned. “You’re talking about the woman … Sharon?”
“Shirin,” I told him. “Shirin is B.”
“I thought Charles was B.”
“Charles was B, but so was Shirin.”
He shook his massive head, shooing away a bothersome fly.
“B had to spend time with me so that, even if worse came to worst, you could be told that you’ve failed.”
“You’re being far too elliptical for this old brain, Jared. If worse came to worst?”
“If you succeeded in killing both Charles and Shirin.”
“If I succeeded in killing both Charles and Shirin, then I still will have failed?”
“That’s right. Because you didn’t kill me. I’m not a charismatic firebrand, but that doesn’t matter. I am B.”
“You are B? You really believe that?”
“It’s not a matter of belief, Father. I’m no longer what I was when I sat here three and a half weeks ago—and you can’t change me back to what I was.”
Fr. Lulfre leaned forward, interested at last. “And you really think this matters, Jared? You think you’ll do something different, now that you’re B?”
“Oh yes,” I told him, getting to my feet. “There’s no question about that. That’s a certainty.”
“I’m not sure whether to scoff or to shudder, Jared. But if I had a gun in my desk, I’d take it out and shoot you dead just to be on the safe side.”
“Would you really?”
“Yes, I would. Do you remember your friend Shirin’s last speech at the theater a week ago? Or did you lose that along with the explosion?”
“I lost it, but I listened to a tape of it yesterday.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said heavily. “At any rate, Reichmann made a tape of it as well, and played it for me on the phone. That was what …” He spread his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness.
“That was what sealed her fate,” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s right. You see, she showed me more clearly than any advocate of ecumenism why we are a confraternity, Jared—we Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus. We’ve drawn ourselves up from the slime in which animism grovels so proudly. We represent what is highest, what is most upward reaching, transcendental, and sublime in mankind. What stands between t
he members of the confraternity are minor rifts. What stands between the confraternity and animism is a gulf as wide as the gulf between Man and brute, spirit and matter.”
“I agree.”
“What will you do now?”
I took the tape recorder out of my pocket and showed him that it was running. “First, I’ll find a safe place for this tape, Father. You called us too incredibly trusting to be conspirators, but you’re pretty trusting yourself.”
“You’re quite right, Jared. None of us has been trained to look at the world with suspicious eyes. But you won’t turn it over to the police.”
“Certainly not. This is my safe-conduct for at least as long as you’re alive. Once the police have it, it’s worthless for that purpose.”
He nodded. “Yes, you’ll definitely want to find a very safe place for that.”
I left, and because it seemed like a good time to start being a little less incredibly trusting, I didn’t turn my back on him till I was outside with the door shut between us.
Tuesday, June 4
Radenau revisited
I’m installed in my old room at the hotel, and it feels rather eerie. The desk clerk acknowledged my appearance without surprise, allowing himself the liberty of hoping I was now completely restored after my “unpleasant experience” of nearly being blown to bits.
I arrived early enough to do a little useful groundwork. I picked up a few necessities like underwear and shaving equipment and spent some time with telephone directories at the library. I managed to place a display ad in the local paper asking Shirin or Michael to contact me. Naturally the ad takers would accept nothing but real money, so tomorrow I’ll have to see if this piece of magic plastic will actually produce more cash if inserted in the proper slot of some proper machine.
My work with the phone books paid off to the extent that I managed to locate Frau Doktor Hartmann; she says my head should be cut off and thrown to the dogs, and torture wouldn’t induce her to help me find either Michael or Shirin if they were alive; although beyond prosecution, I am, in her opinion, guilty of their murder. On this basis, I guess I can cross Frau Hartmann right off my list of supporters.