Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Switters usually preferred to stroll and roll outside of the compound, out in the desert, both because they could speak more freely there and because he could check the perimeters for possible intruders. By March, the Vatican had apparently given up on trying to pressure Syria to deport the Pachomians: thanks to Sol Glissant, they held clear legal title to their land. Army helicopters no longer buzzed the oasis, and the last police raid, in early February, had failed for the third time to find an alien American male on the premises. (“Just one pretty nun,” reported the officer-in-charge, “and nine ugly ones, including an old abbess who can’t stop rubbing her nose and a big burly mute one, confined to her bed.”) Still, it paid to be alert. Switters remembered those Islamic militants from the closest village, and it would not have surprised him if Roman agents incited them to spy on, or even attack, the convent.

For more than two months, while the abbess paced in her chambers, absentmindedly but compulsively polishing the unfamiliar regularities of her newly planed proboscis, Domino had bargained hard with Rome. Scanlani, who proved as verbose electronically as he was taciturn in person, spoke for the Church. Initially, starting about a fortnight after Switters had run him and Goncalves off the compound, his on-line communiques consisted of the kind of insidious intimidation—bully-boy menace couched in oblique legalistic formalities—for which lawyers were universally despised. When Domino failed to back down, when she intimated and then flatly stated that her aunt might, indeed, attend the “New Catholic Women” conference, disputed document in hand, Scanlani became gradually, reluctantly, more conciliatory. Of course, at that time, Masked Beauty, still wary of its presumed Islamic overtones, had absolutely no intention of publicizing the Virgin’s message in Amsterdam or anywhere else, but she came to appreciate her niece’s strategy: “If the Holy Father agrees to reinstate the Order of St. Pachomius,” Domino would write again and again, “then the Order of St. Pachomius will consent to turn over to the Vatican the sole extant text of the third prophecy of Fatima.”

Eventually an industrial-strength votive candle had flared in the old abbess’s mind. She chuckled. She stroked her shockingly sleek snout. “Chantage,” she said.

“Yes.” Domino grinned back. “Blackmail.”

They laughed. They bit their lips, their tongues, the pulpy lining of their cheeks—and went right on laughing. They were disgusted with themselves, guilt-ridden, ashamed; but they were, momentarily, at least, forced into giggles by the very idea of it. Blackmailing the pope!

And there had come a day, just past the middle of March, when the pope blinked. Scanlani signaled that, in exchange for the return of certain Church property, the Holy Father would officially accept the Pachomian sisters back into the fold. There was a catch, naturally, and it was the terms of the Roman offer that had occupied Domino and Switters on their stroll and roll that night in the parched but cooling grit, where the moon, as anticipated, had indeed examined its acne in the puddle that Domino straddled like the primordial Mother of Oceans.

Because of her youth in Philadelphia, perhaps, she’d never acquired the French habit of dabbing herself with the hem of her skirt, so she squatted there, panties down, for a while, as if waiting for the wind to dry her. To distract his thoughts, Switters tried to spin his chair, but it was no use: you couldn’t pop a wheelie in the sand. Finally she stood, affording him just a flash of what, in South Africa, the whites called the poes and the moer, the coloreds called the koek, and many blacks knew as indlela eya esizalweni (a mouthful any way you looked at it): the cultural information latent in the different ways those neighbors referred to the same commonplace and yet everlastingly mysterious organ was fodder for a fascinating sociological thesis, though not from our man Switters, who was happy just to have learned the names, in case an occasion ever arose to address the thing in question in its proper local idiom. At any rate, Domino was beside him again now, repeating the conditions of the Vatican proposal.

“They’ll readmit us to the cloth, but they won’t support us financially, which is okay, because we’re used to poverty and we can take care of ourselves. However, they also demand that we stay out of Church politics, keep our mouths shut, don’t rock any boats.”

“And you absolutely will not agree to that?”

“Mais non! We have to speak out. It’s our duty to life. Putting a stop to this rampant, irresponsible procreation is like finding the cure for cancer. The ‘breeders,’ as you call them, are rather similar to cancers, actually; tumors with legs. A cell becomes malignant when it misinterprets or mishandles information from the DNA, and then all it cares about is replication—at least that’s what I’ve read—and it will go on blindly, selfishly replicating itself even though it smothers the innocent, healthy cells around it. And, of course, it eventually dies itself because it has destroyed its environment. Everything dies then. Yes? So, the egotistical breeders misinterpret God’s word, or cultural definitions of manhood, and they—”

“Yeah, I get the analogy, sister love.” Moreover, he agreed with it, although it seemed harsh coming from her. He wondered if some of his own cheerful cynicism had rubbed off on her. He wondered, too, to what degree, if any, she’d ever entertained the fantasy of bearing children of her own.

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghosts of souls who hadn’t lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X’s without Y’s. Y’s without X’s. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn’t go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome —yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents the uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like a phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.

Not every childless woman was so accompanied—it may have been only those who at least partially, on some level, wanted the girls and boys that they, for whatever reason, chose not to conceive—but when Switters looked hard at Domino, as he did now, he saw her saturated with other lives. He wondered if she was aware of her phantom brood, but he wasn’t about to ask. If he broached that subject, his imp might start messing with his coconut, and the next thing he knew, he could be inquiring about what she thought of his potential as a father. He liked children and children liked him, better than most adults liked him, but men such as Switters didn’t breed in captivity. Oh, no. What he was going to ask, and not for the first time, was why she and Masked Beauty, having slowly, steadily moved away from much of the old patriarchal doctrine, still desired to be a part of the traditional Church. The reasons she gave were never very clear, though he surmised that they were not dissimilar to the emotions that caused him to sometimes muse wistfully about the CIA.

Before he could raise the question, however, they were distracted by a noise. It came from close to the compound, there where the bud-weighted boughs of an orange tree overhung the wall. The sound was that species of muffled hack related to an inverse yap, as if someone were trying to suppress a cough. Switters exposed Mr. Beretta to the light of the moon. In a whisper he asked Domino to push his chair toward the noise, and she complied, tensely but calmly.

As they drew nearer, a form stirred in the shadows. Grasping the pistol with both hands, Switters yelled something in Arabic, wondering as he did so why he hadn’t chosen Italian. Instantly two figures darted from the wall. Two short figures. Two small figures. Two doglike figures. Loping off into the dunes, they unraveled a ribbon of musk behind them.

Domino smiled with relief. “I—I don’t know the English,” she said.

“Jackals,” Switters informed her. “Rare to see one these days. We’ve had ourselves a lucky little nature ramble.”

His nose was turned up at the jackal smell. Her nose was turned up at his pistol. She stood scowling at its beautiful ugliness. She shook her head, and moonbeams exposed the underlying red in her hair. “When you were a secret agent,” she asked, “did you have a double-oh seven? License to kill?”

“Me? Double-oh seven?” He laughed. “Negative, darling. I had a double-oh oh. License to wahoo.”

She knew that by wahoo he was referring to a cry of exhilaration, an exclamation of nonsensical joy, and she knew, also, that it had a basis in Scripture—”Make a joyful noise unto the Lord”—but she was not so sure she could distinguish between that kind of defiant exuberance and mere childish bravado. She continued to fix him with a half-frown of affectionate disapproval.

Meanwhile, Switters’s attention was focused long and hard in the direction of the fleeing jackals. After a while, Domino said, “I didn’t know you were so interested in wildlife.” He might have rejoined that wildlife was the only life that did interest him, but he just kept looking and listening, saying nothing. Those jackals concerned him.