Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

True to her word, she would not show him the fabled third prophecy until Christmas. Why? Not because of peer pressure. The Pachomian sisterhood was far from unanimous in its enthusiasm to grant to its unruly male guest the privilege of handling, reading, and discussing the transcription around which their order had coalesced (ultimately, their custodianship of the Fatima revelations had knit them together more tightly than their advocacy of women’s rights or even their devotion to St. Pachomius), yet there was none among them who would oppose the will of Domino and the abbess. After all, if it wasn’t for Masked Beauty, there would be no transcript, no oasis, no Pachomian Order. Privately, some feared that their much adored Sister Domino had fallen prey to Fannie’s demon, but they’d respect her wishes, Asmodeus or no Asmodeus.

Nor did Domino hold off out of mistrust. As inexperienced as she was in the area of romance, she knew in her bones that, for better or for worse, Switters cared too much to deceive her. He would never read the prophecy and then skip out.

In fact, twice during November she offered to go ahead and show him the prophecy; she was becoming a bit anxious to get his reaction. Switters, however, insisted on waiting. He reminded her that they had made a pact. They must honor that pact, he told her, they must honor it even if it was frustrating, unnecessary, or outright senseless to honor it, because not to honor it would create more quaggy willy-nilliness in the world. They had to honor it because in honoring it, there was a certain purity.

That was what had convinced her to wait. That was what had touched her. That was what had made her want to want what he wanted. It was the way that he said “purity.”

She would not show him the prophecy until Christmas, but she felt free to provide some background, and he felt free to receive it. She told it to him the way that Masked Beauty had told it to her.

Sometime during 1960, Pope John XXIII summoned the bishop of Leiria to the Vatican. The Portuguese bishop, whose diocese included Fatima, was barely off the flight from Lisbon when the supreme prelate drew him aside and whispered his intentions to open the envelope in which Lucia Santos (then Sister Mary dos Dores) had sealed Our Lady of Fatima’s final prophecy. Assuming that Lucia had written down the prophecy in Portuguese, Pope John was going to need the bishop’s assistance.

That afternoon, following an austere private lunch, the two men retired to the papal study, prayed to God and to Mary, and slit open the envelope (which had been held for three years in the study wall safe) with a jewel- encrusted blade. The contents, surprisingly brief, were, indeed, handwritten in Lucia’s native tongue. At that point, the bishop confessed what the pope already had deduced from their unsteady lunchtime conversation: his Italian was more than a little rusty. The pope had no Portuguese at all.

It was imperative that the translation be exact, every particular fully rendered, no subtlety or shade of meaning glossed over or ignored. The bishop had a suggestion. He was fluent in French, could read it as precisely as he read Portuguese. Suppose he translated the prophecy into French? His Holiness grumbled that that was a start, then left the study briefly to make a telephone call.

Working with extreme care, the bishop of Leiria spent approximately two hours translating the few lines of neat, if childlike, script. No sooner was the task completed to his satisfaction than there was a discreet rap at the door, and a third man joined them in the study. The newcomer was Pierre Cardinal Thiry.

Unsure of his own French, Pope John had decided to entrust the Parisian red hat, whose Italian he knew to be eccellente, with the job of moving the text perfectly from French into Italian.

With the bishop looking over his shoulder, Cardinal Thiry went to work. The pope went next door to his bedchamber to rest his nerves. In less than an hour, Thiry had produced a translation that, while mystifying and somewhat disturbing, nonetheless satisfied both him and the bishop with its accuracy. On the page, however, it was aesthetically displeasing, so Thiry made a fresh, tidier copy for Pope John, absentmindedly folding the messy copy and inserting it between the pages of his Italian dictionary.

John XXIII, roused by a tiny silver bell, returned to the study, where he shambled to the tall, leaded window to read at last the notorious Marian prophecy by the fading light of the sun. Moments later, he rotated slowly to face his subordinates with the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother’s parrot. No, it was worse than that. It was the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother.

After being repeatedly assured by the bishop and the cardinal that nothing, not a trace nor a tense nor a tinge, not a prefix, a suffix, nor an inflection had been lost in translation, Pope John again left the study, commanding the others to wait there. They did. They waited all night, dozing in the voluminous leather armchairs that were said to have been a gift to an earlier pope from Mussolini. A good twelve hours passed before John burst into the room, as haggard and red-eyed as a Shanghai rat. The pope obviously had not slept. The salt of dried tearwater streaked his cheeks. A flunky followed him in and lit a fire in the fireplace before departing.

John crumpled up Thiry’s Italian translation and dropped it into the flames. He ordered the bishop’s French translation burned as well. Then, with some apparent misgiving, glancing sorrowfully, almost appealingly, about the study, as if hoping the others might dissuade him, he fed, with trembling white hands, Lucia Santos’s original to the indifferent fire.

The bishop must have felt that a portion of Portuguese history was going up in smoke, but he did not vocally object. In a few minutes, after the ashes had been scattered in the grate, he followed Cardinal Thiry out of the apartment. Pope John returned to his bed, where, according to Vatican gossip, he wept for several days.

At that juncture, the alleged third and final prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima existed in just two places: in the memory of Sister Mary dos Dores (then aged fifty-three and cloistered in Spain), and in a French translation concealed inside Pierre Cardinal Thiry’s dog-eared old Italian dictionary. Whether the cardinal deliberately smuggled the document out of the Vatican for reasons of his own, whether he acted on sudden impulse, or whether he simply forgot about the extra copy in the swirl of the moment, discovering it when he got home, Masked Beauty was never to learn.

What was apparent was that the cardinal had decided the Virgin’s words, as upsetting as they may have been, needed to be preserved. He did not want them in his possession, however, preferring that they be held outside of Europe altogether. Thus, he sealed the sheet of papal stationery inside a heavy manila envelope and placed it in the care of his Jordan-bound, headstrong but trustworthy, disturbingly pretty (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”), young niece. For twenty-one years, Croetine hid the envelope, unaware of its contents. Upon her uncle’s death in 1981, she thought she ought to have a peek.

Quite probably, Croetine was stunned—she never described her initial reaction—but a couple of years later, under fire from Rome and having changed her name to Masked Beauty, she called her renegade sisters, one by one, into her quarters, read to them the cardinal’s account of how he came to obtain Mary’s prophecy, and then let each nun read the message for herself. Now their shared and sacred secret, they bore it like a cross and protected it like a covenant, to what end they didn’t really know. What they did recognize was that it pasted them, all nine of them, inseparably one to another, a miraculous Marian mucilage—until Fannie had pried herself loose.

“You were never completely taken with our Fannie,” Domino asserted. Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello. As far as he could tell, there was neither accusation nor rivalry in her remark.

“Not especially. Cute, but . . .”

“She was chaste, but she wasn’t pure?” Domino thought she was starting to figure him out.

“She was strange, but she wasn’t inexplicable.”

“Oh? Du vrai? So, then you can explain why she ran away.”

“I cannot.”

“Then Fannie is inexplicable.”

He shook his head. “There’s an explanation for her exodus. We just aren’t privy to it. Ignorance of the facts is no more synonymous with inexplicability than technical chastity is synonymous with purity.”

“Ooh-la-la. Does this mean you’re going to write me another ticket?”

“No, my subjective semantic opinions are not to be confused with the uniform rules impartially enforced by the brave men and women of the Grammar Police.” He stroked her smooth, voluptuous rump. “By the way, have I ever told you about the time Captain Case and I were strip-searched at a roadblock inside Burma? Rubber gloves were unavailable there, you see, and the militiamen, understandably not wishing to foul their fingers in our . . . what you French sometimes call l’entree de artistes, had a pet monkey they’d trained to do the job for them. He was a smart little fellow with tiny paws as red as valentine candy, and—”

“Switters! Why are you telling me this thing?”

Good question. He was damned if he knew. Was it because that day in Burma he’d been harboring a secret document (though hardly a prophetic one) in his entree de artistes? Or was it because