“Always butting into other people’s business?”
“We are told that America is the land of the free.”
Switters might have brought up video surveillance in public places, police microphones on neighborhood street corners, sniffer dogs in airports, blue codes, urine testing, DNA data banks, Internet censorship, helmet laws, tobacco laws, seat belt laws, liquor laws, persecution for joking, prosecution for flirting, litigation over everything under the sun, and the telling statistic that in the U.S., 645 out of every 100,000 citizens were locked up in prisons, as opposed to an average of 80 per 100,000 in the rest of the world. However, it was just too difficult to put those things into Arabic. And anyhow, he would have had to end by suggesting that maybe those outrages were a small price to pay, America being so bouncy, and all.
Switters switched to French, in which Toufic, like many Damascenes, was modestly conversant. “If
Switters turned to see if Toufic had followed any of this babble and found him sound asleep. Well, okay, this was as good a time as any to bring on Mr. Beretta. He removed the handgun from crocodilian confinement and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. He was convinced that the Vatican attorney (perhaps earrings— ” “ —are needed here, perhaps not) was armed. He pictured the fellow curling a finger around a teacup handle or a sugared date much as it might close around a trigger. The longer he pictured this, the more uneasy he became. At last, he shook Toufic gently awake.
“You were dreaming of Louisville, Kentucky, weren’t you? Dreaming of the Yankee dollar. I could tell by the way you were grinning. Sorry to interrupt, pal, but I’m in requirement of strategic relocation.”
Toufic was groggy and irritable, but he followed instructions, driving without headlamps around to the rear of the convent and parking close to the mud wall. Grunting, Switters slithered backward through the window, then scrambled up onto the roof of the car. From there, it was an easy matter to hoist himself to the top of the wall. Seated on the wall, he waved Toufic back to the gate and wondered what to do next. He wasn’t particularly worried because the electricity wasn’t on in the compound yet, and he knew that any minute now Pippi would have to—Yes, perfect, there she was!
There commenced a low voltaic drone, like Thomas Edison’s spiritual mantra or the romantic humming of ogres in love. Toward the center of the oasis, a few lights flickered on. Pippi backed away from the generator shed and broke into a trot, pigtails swinging, as if in a great hurry to resume unfinished business elsewhere on the premises. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him. Obviously she didn’t know it was he. From the way she screeched, she might have been transported for a second back to Notre Dame—and the way he squatted there atop the wall, the tip of his cigar glowing red in the thickening dark, well, to mistake him for a gargoyle was by no means ridiculous. He called her name, which no horrid gargoyle had ever done, even in her nightmares, but still she trembled, one freckled hand over her mouth. Perhaps, she imagined him to be the ghost of Cardinal Thiry, come to punish the Pachomians for having failed him. She was delusional enough to fear such a thing. The deeply religious are by definition superstitious. As she slowly crossed herself, Switters observed, not for the first time, how much she resembled a middle-aged version of Audubon Poe’s daughter, Anna. Oh, that succulent sprig, Anna! To think he might have. . . . But why was he thinking of such things now?
“Pippi!
When she realized it was he, she shrieked anew. She hopped around in a circle squealing before composing herself and dashing to fetch him the nearest pair of stilts. They were the outsized stilts, the Barnum & Bailey stilts, the absurdly tall pair, for his customized two-inch walkers had been left in his old room, and the regular pair was at the front gate where it was always kept. What the hell. He’d called it, hadn’t he? Send in the clowns.
If the stilts that had held him two inches above the ground were analogous to enlightenment, this extra- elevated pair must have represented Nirvana. It was not surprising, then, that so few aspirants ever attained the Nirvanic state. Switters, by now an accomplished stiltsman, was nearly as ungainly on the exaggerated numbers as he had been the first and only time he’d ever strapped them on. He teetered, staggered, and dangerously swayed, but he set off, anyway, following behind Pippi, only too glad that his hands were free. For the present, he busied his hands with the task of brushing foliage aside as they traversed the various orchards. At one point, his head banged against a high branch in a willow tree, startling a pair of roosting cuckoos and causing them to rocket from their untidy nest, their normal sweetly mournful song taking on an angry, hysterical edge. He grabbed a limb to keep from falling and sent yet another of the slender white-and-olive birds flapping noisily into the night air. “Oh, stop your bitching,” he scolded them. “It isn’t that late. You remind me of my grandmother.”
Governing her pace so that she would be close enough to break his fall should he topple, Pippi—in staccato, over-the-shoulder bursts—tried to fill him in. “From the Vatican. They want it. The prophecy. The Church knows about it. Fannie told. Watch your head. They want it now. I think Masked Beauty will not give it up.”
By the time Pippi and Switters reached the main building, the meeting had lost any semblance of civility. In fact, the participants had erupted from the conference room and were grouped outside by the jasmine bushes, arguing heatedly. So much for sneaking up on them. A ten-foot Switters came weaving and wobbling through the eggplant patch just as the older churchman, the scholar from Lisbon, reached out and ripped off the abbess’s veil. She slapped his face, a light blow that did not stun him half as much as the sudden sight of her two-story wart. He was gawking at the growth as if transfixed when his gaze was diverted by the arrival of the careening colossus, its throat full of wahoo, its hair full of leaves.
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
