selected previous to their having actually been seated. “They know me here,” he whispered in her ear.
After a few sips of wine, Luc Sante asked pointedly, “Why do you seem so melancholy in this place? We have comfort, wine, music, good company…”
She instantly apologized, realizing he must have read the melancholia from her features. “I am sorry, Father. It's… it's just that… Well, it would appear that all my scientific skill has been of little help in actually pinpointing these killers, Father.”
A waiter stood in a nearby comer, and from time to time he rushed the table, refilled the wineglasses, and disappeared again. Something of a faceless, nameless penguin in his black and white, she thought.
The elegant restaurant at the hotel filled with music from a piano now being played by a gifted young black woman. She played Chopin, moved to Bach, and then settled on one of Beethoven's lighter moods.
“1 do not mean to mock or disparage your attempts or what you do for a living, Dr. Coran, but…” He hesitated.
“But?” she encouraged.
“But experience has taught me.” Luc Sante's voice, so deep, rich and full, rose above the music. He spoke around sips of his wine. “What is paraded as scientific fact is quite often mere rhetoric.”
“Rhetoric?”
“We know what we know. We don't always need a scientist to tell us what we already know.”
“All right, but we-people-don't always know what we need to know.” She tried to counter his logic with her own.
“So they need you? They need to be told what is what? They need to follow the precepts of some current belief held by a mere handful of scientists searching for truths beyond the scientists' reach in the first place?”
“Not unlike our investigation, you mean?”
He lightly laughed. “I hadn't thought of it in quite the same terms, but yes, you might say so,” Luc Sante added, snatching up the roll of bread between them, offering her first a piece and then taking one for himself. “Perhaps, it is time to abandon your scientific goggles for a pair of intuitive eyes. Your instincts have saved you in the past, and they will again in the future if you let them,” he attempted reassurance. “If you get out of the way of your own instincts, Jessica Coran.”
“Maybe it's this place, London. It's dizzying and romantic.”
“Thank God for romance! But Jessica, we both know you are gifted, and you must feed your gift at all times.”
“But I trust in science, and-”
“Blindly? To the detriment of answers, solutions, truths? 1 should hope not.”
She continued to argue, “Well… as for current belief, we scientists-as blind as we may be-“Call it tunnel vision rather than blindness. Comes from staring down too many microscopes, perhaps,” he joked and chewed down his food in barbarian, hedonistic fashion, like a man who'd just stepped from the thirteenth century. He saw her staring at him. His hands and his mouth were full of bread. Choking it down, he laughed like Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV. “My table manners, I should warn you, are atrocious, but then I have the excuse of being French!” He laughed more. “In France, everyone eats with his hands and his heart. You should try it! Handle your food and it tastes supreme. I have spent my life in service here in England, but I spent my youth in France. I return only for the air nowadays.”
She laughed at this. “You really need not apologize to me, Father.”
“Then let us return to the subject at hand.”
She nodded, saying, “All right. We scientists do require some sort of current belief to make it-”
'To make life palatable? To make chaos orderly? To create the next best toothpaste?” He again laughed boyishly at his own words, causing her to smile.
'To make connections. In seeing the connectedness of things, we learn. We can only learn when we see- own-the relationship between and among things. And one generation guides the one after. And what's wrong with that? Some singular scientist generally leads the way. Remember Galileo? Newton? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Einstein, and-”
“Newton was a fool!” He did not stop to explain this. “I don't abhor science or scientists as a rule, really, dear. But we mere mortals become too easily impressed, too easily swayed and convinced by the magic and incantations, the smoke and mirrors of it all. We are too easily accustomed to regard scientific knowledge as Truth with a capital T, when in fact what scientific knowledge is, is the best available approximation of the truth in the judgment of the majority of scientists in a specified field.”
“Touche,” she offered.
He continued, and she thought about Luc Sante's detractors who said that he loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Then again, so did she. “This is so whether it's paleontology, psychology, or pathology, or any other- ology, you see?”
“Do you include ideology in this overstuffed basket of approximations of the truth?” she asked.
“Aha, now we spar and parry. Have you ever fenced, my dear?”
“Coincidentally, I have recently taken lessons.”
“Fencing with words can be just as diabolical and can cut just as deeply. As to your question, yes, most ideologies are as insipid and leaky as any sieve.”
“But hasn't it always been true and necessary that throughout the history of mankind's search for truths, that with each step, we require some railing, some bedpost, some lamppost to hold on to? In order to further the search for understanding, growth, learning? That each science or philosophy must suffice us, in order for us to move on, to nurture growth to the next level of being and light and godliness, that place where our young generation today points us toward, absolute understanding and coexistence?”
“Of course, you are right, my dear, but not to the degree that science be taken as a Holy Grail, child.”
Calling her child made her smile. Coming from anyone else, it would have been insulting. Coming from Father Luc Sante, it felt comforting.
“I simply ask that you not allow science to overtake your faith, my dear.” He continued sipping his wine, the waiter continued filling their glasses. “And if you dispute me, my stand is shared by every psychotherapist worth his fee.” He stopped to acknowledge her furrowed brow before going on. “And make no mistake about it, psychotherapists are in fact 'faith healers' in the sense they restore one's faith as much as anything, for their concern is not with science but the soul of a man and the innocence of a faith often lost in childhood.”
She nodded boisterously. “Most scientists want to prove some truths exist in a world in which the ultimate truths are always going to be elusive. I think that's what you're saying. That while such things as, blind faith are viable, they have no identifiable variables or mathematical equivalents or formulas attached, that blind faith is the ultimate in freedom of choice. That's just the way it is. Reality's a bummer for the scientists as well as the rest of us.”
He took her hand in his again, smiling as if she were a student who now fully and finally understood. “Indeed, truth is not something that we are bom with. It is not something we possess, but rather a goal toward which we strive.”
“Well, I understand that we scientists are little more immune to jumping to an unsound conclusion than anyone else, but in the absence of any other physical-”
He threw up his hands, waving her down. “We are simply too anxious and too content to let our scientists and anyone in authority do our thinking for us, Doctor. We are too easily led, too readily compartmentalized and departmentalized and happy to do it. Happy to live the life of ants scurrying across gingham tablecloths without the slightest notion of the whole. Seeing only that part of the floating opera of life confined to one's limited, single perspective, a world of colloquials. We accept that the business of God, time, and space are all questions best left to those in charge whose job it is to explore these testy areas. So we can go about doing our mortal accounting and following the one precept of God's which pleases us most-bearing children.”
“Whoa, now hold on. Not everyone on the planet is-”
“I tell you, there is a profound tendency in the civilized world to make our scientists 'philosopher kings' whom we ask to guide us through every intellectual labyrinth, when indeed, they are just as lost as we are. The blind king leading the blind cave dweller out of the cave and into a larger cave- the life of a cerebrally unmotivated, uninterested, disinterested peasant…”
“But Father… Dr. Luc Sante, you're a scientist. How can you say we've not progressed from the cave one
