Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

us.” The imp had hold of him for certain.

Domino smiled. It was a smile that could have overturned three or four Vespas in the piazza beneath their window. “Silly goose,” she said. “It would never work out between us. I’m too old and you’re too . . . Anyway, you will make fun of this, but when I enter St. Peter’s tomorrow, it is important to me to enter as a virgin. I may not have on my habit, but between my legs as in my heart, I will be a nun.”

“The maidenhead Lazarus,” he muttered, hoping that he didn’t sound too sardonic. He did, after all, admire the sheer obstinacy of her commitment to the patriarchs’ bogus notion of innocence. “The hymen that rose from the dead.”

She frowned. But then she smiled again. “Yes,” she said with an air of pride that was only partially feigned. “And it’s the only one on the planet. It’s unique.”

“So far as we know.” He was still so aroused his eyeballs were hard.

“Yes,” she agreed, as she backed out of the room. “So far as we know.”

The next day they lunched just off the piazza at the gastronomically glorious Da Fortunato al Pantheon, although only Switters and Mr. Plastic had much of an appetite. Thrilled to be out of the chickpea zone at last, Switters gobbled both grilled sea bass and spaghetti alle vongole veraci, washed down with a carafe of frascati. It was Italian asparagus season, and he ordered the aspargi bianchi in three different preparations, pausing between each to improvise asparagus poetry: “Erect as the white knight’s lance, a flameless candle that lights the country ditch, pithy pen with a ruffled nib for writing love letters to his cousin, the lily; O asparagus! lean lord of spring” etc. etc., on and on, in Italian, French, and English, until the waiters joined Domino and Sally in rolling their eyes.

After dessert and grappa, they stopped back by the hotel to see if Masked Beauty had arrived. She had not, alas, so they split up and took two minicabs to Vatican City. Switters rode with Pippi, who was practically gnawing the freckles off her fingers with nervous excitement. Pippi was wild to see the Holy Father, of course, but she felt somehow that the timing was wrong. “This is supposed to be happening tomorrow,” she whined.

“Today is tomorrow,” said Switters. He took her hand and held it tightly until they reached the half-hidden service entrance off Via di Porta Angelica, where, as instructed, they were to meet Scanlani. Indeed, the Swiss Guardsman who answered Domino’s ring ushered them inside immediately, and there Scanlani waited, expressionless, smartly dressed, looking as if the Exxon Valdez had run aground in his hair. He showed no surprise at seeing Switters.

The party was invited onto a minibus, not much more than an oversize golfcart, which, having no provision for the disabled, caused Switters a bit of difficulty. Apparently, Scanlani found this amusing, although it was almost impossible to tell. Switters wanted to hold on to the rear of the vehicle and be towed, but his host objected that it would attract attention. Pippi and a Swiss Guardsman tipped him over and more or less dumped him into the cart. His chair was folded and plopped awkwardly and heavily in his lap. He patted the contraption. “It’s guaranteed fireproof,” he said, and grinned at Scanlani.

Traveling the Vatican’s back streets, out of sight of pilgrims and tourists, they passed through two security checkpoints, at the second of which they were taken into separate cubicles and searched so thoroughly that afterward Domino whispered in Switters’s ear that she might as well have lost her virginity to him the night before. The guard captain was highly alarmed by Switters’s pistol, but Scanlani said it was okay, telling the captain that the crippled American “used to be one of us” (a statement to which, under normal circumstances, Switters would have strenuously objected). He was made to give up the weapon, however. They locked it in a vault, assuring him that he could retrieve it on his way out. Without the gun in his waistband, he had to tighten his belt. “How to eat a huge lunch and still lose weight,” he mumbled.

“I warned you not to bring that thing in the first place,” said Domino.

The captain and three other Swiss Guards now accompanied them to the large building that stood at the northwest of Piazzo San Pietro, the ugly old gray castle in which the pope had his apartments. They entered through a side door and in a wood-paneled vestibule were greeted with practiced courtesy by a cardinal—robe, red beanie, and all. He was the prelate in charge of investigating miracles. “Do you do warts and hymens?” asked Switters. Neither the cardinal nor Domino acknowledged his remark, but there was a throb of unspoken menace in the almost imperceptible curl of Scanlani’s upper lip.

With an air of aloof benevolence, such as one might find in a kindergarten teacher whose interest in children was strictly professional, the cardinal led the group down a long, dim hallway to a door that opened onto a garden of unexpectedly large dimensions. Spring flowers and spring-green shrubs were everywhere, and there were pines and chestnut trees and scattered broken hunks of ancient columns that, relieved of their burden of porticoes, lay about in decorative retirement. Birds were singing, though with no more or no less religiosity than if they’d been at a New Jersey landfill, while the afternoon sun fuzzed everything in a lazy chartreuse haze. Gas of asparagus.

At the far end of the garden, perhaps fifty yards’ distant, there was an ivy-covered pavilion, a raised gazebo of sorts, made of ivory-painted latticed wood, and it was down a graveled path to that gazebo that the cardinal led them, single file, after first briefing them on the protocols of a papal reception.

Approximately five yards from the gazebo, the cardinal stopped them. When Switters, who’d been propelling himself, didn’t brake quickly enough, his wheelchair was jerked to a halt from behind. He glanced over his shoulder to see the captain hovering there. “I thought the Swiss Guard were all young bucks,” Switters said. “You look old enough to remember John Foster Dulles.” His subsequent expectoration was subdued, even delicate, but the Guardsman shook his chair forcefully and laid a firm hand on his shoulder.

“The Holy Kielbasa witnessed not one speck of my secular sputum,” Switters protested. He was correct. There was a throne inside the shadowy gazebo, but as best he could tell, peering through the ivy vines, it was presently unoccupied.

“You’ve been drinking alcohol, sir,” the captain said.

“Merely boosting the ol’ immune system,” explained Switters.

The party had spread out a bit in front of the gazebo, and the ex-nuns were staring hard, straining to glimpse the patriarch whom they might resist but whom they could not help but revere: their conditioning would allow no other response. Not one papal blip had appeared on their radar screens, however. Switters could make out two figures in business suits to either side of the empty throne, but neither of them cast a popish shadow. Scanlani entered the gazebo then and joined them. The trio conversed briefly, then called to the cardinal. In turn, the cardinal beckoned to Domino. “You have the paper of interest? Good. Please come.” He took her by the elbow and steered her up the four short steps that led into the gazebo. Mustang Sally and Pippi fell in behind her, bursting to genuflect, but a Guardsman blocked each of their paths, and even though Switters hadn’t moved, he felt the captain tighten his grip on the wheelchair.

A pair of songbirds flew over, making songbird noises.

Domino paused at the top of the steps. Although her back was to Switters, he could tell she was riveted on the pavilion’s rear entrance, searching for some sign of a little white monkey with china blue eyes and an aura of milky authority. She searched in vain, proceeding no farther, clutching the dog-eared Fatima envelope to her bosom. Gently the cardinal tried to nudge her inside, but she wouldn’t budge. At that point, however, Scanlani and his two companions began, in a friendly, if deliberate, fashion to edge toward her.

As they inched out of the deeper shadows, into the confusing pattern of ivy leaf and sunlight, one of the men proved to be good Dr. Goncalves, Fatima scholar and author of a biography of Salazar, in which he portrayed the Portuguese dictator as a latter-day apostle. There was something familiar about the second man as well. In a few clicks of his biocomputer, Switters identified him as a company spook, a shrewd, rat-eyed cowboy by the name of Seward, who was run by Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and who apparently possessed some interest and expertise in religious affairs, having at one point petitioned Mayflower to allow him to smack the Dalai Lama, whose inner circle Seward had managed to penetrate. “The little sheet-wrapped bastard’s promoting a destabilizing brand of happiness,” Seward was said to have complained. Mayflower countered, “His emphasis on happiness is precisely why nobody takes him seriously.”

Switters was taking Seward seriously. It would be a major understatement to say he did not like the looks of this, the sound of it, the smell of it.

Those in the gazebo were conversing now. Even in the sweet green hush of the garden, he could hear nothing of the men’s side of things, but every now and then, he caught a word or two of Domino’s. He heard her say “no” a lot. He heard her say, “This isn’t right.” He heard her say, “I can’t do that.” He heard her say, “I will have to consult the abbess.” From the way her back muscles rippled under her best chador, he knew she was squeezing the