Bless the Child (13 page)

“No,” she replied, shaking her head emphatically. “I was thinking, you’re a big surprise.”

Devlin’s face was serious again. “You know, I wouldn’t have given up if you’d said no tonight,” he said.

Maggie regarded him with amusement. “Why not?”

“Persistence is one of my better qualities. When something is important, you have to run me over with the IRT to keep me form pursuing it.”

“Oh, Lord,” she said suddenly stricken. “I hope you don’t think I’ve been leading you on by having dinner with you tonight, Lieutenant Devlin. I didn’t think . . . I mean, I’m living in the eye of the hurricane right now, and I can’t let anything distract me from helping Cody. Please forgive me if I’ve given you the wrong impression . . .” She let the words trail off, embarrassed and not knowing what to say, but wanting to be honest.

“Look, Maggie,” he said quietly, all merriment extinguished. “I was married to a girl from the neighborhood, as they say in the South Bronx. A nice girl . . . warm, pretty, and too smart to stay in the Bronx for long. We grew up together in a lot of ways. Married nearly nine years . . .” He stopped, and she could sense considerable pain behind the recollection.

“When things went wrong between us in a big way, I went a little crazy, and did a lot of stupid things. I took risks I shouldn’t have, dated women with bodies instead of souls . . . but you can’t fill up the holes in your heart that way. When I finally came to my senses, I became so damned discriminating, it would have taken the Virgin Mary to get through my guard.” He shook his head at his own confusions.

“Then I saw you at the station house the other night, and something happened. I don’t mean to make it sound like I was struck by lightning, Maggie, so don’t panic on me. But I wanted to talk to you. To get to know you. Not just get in the sack, although I can’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind. But that wasn’t my number one priority when I called you.” He smiled sadly, and she could see he wanted her to understand. “I thought . . . I’d like that lady to be my friend.”

Maggie sat back in her seat and looked carefully at the man. She saw nothing in his eyes but sincerity.

“I could use a friend too, right now,” she answered, thinking that had a comforting sound. “So I guess I’d better start calling you Malachy.”

“Actually, pretty much everybody calls me Dev, “ he responded quietly. “But you, Maggie . . . you can call me whatever you want.”

M
alachy Devlin opened the action on the Glock 17, snapped the slide into place, and shoved it unceremoniously into the well-worn gun leather at his belt. He strapped the snub-nosed .38 backup piece to his ankle with such automatic skill it took no conscious effort, both weapons an extension of self. He intended to use his day off for snooping.

Maggie O’Connor was on his mind. Annoyingly so. He’d tried to be sensible and put her out of his head; the last thing he needed was a lot of potential grief and not much hope of a happy ending. All that notwithstanding, the woman and her story had stayed with him, niggling at him, below the surface, where he couldn’t scratch.

She wasn’t crazy; instinct had told him that and dinner had confirmed it. But he’d been a cop for fifteen years, and if he’d learned one cardinal rule, it was that few things are what they seem. So, he’d have to resolve the question marks. Talk to people. Nose around. Call a confidential source or two. Then he’d have to make a decision. In or out.

Malachy pulled on his jacket and stuffed the pen and notebook into his pocket. Maybe he’d learn something today that would change his mind about wanting to help Maggie O’Connor and her granddaughter. But he doubted it.

S
t. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and West Fourth was empty of worshippers during most of the day. The diehard Catholics, mostly over age fifty, peopled the 6:00 or 7:00 A.M. masses, but after that, except for an occasional curate, nun, or derelict seeking refuge, the two-hundred-year-old Village landmark was generally empty. Maggie had always loved empty churches. No sonorous sermons, no admonishing clergy, no stringent regulations, or sins to sneak up on you . . . just Maggie and God, together in the hallowed dark.

She knelt upright at the alter, back ramrod straight, mind adrift somewhere in her childhood. It was holier if your knees hurt and your back cramped, the nun always said. It was your preparation for martyrdom. Sister Benedict had told her of the children of China who had their fingernails pulled out and stakes driven into their ears by Communists, who wished them to renounce their faith. Pain is important. Pain makes you holy. Suffering brings you closer to God.

Saint Lawrence was roasted, Saint Arden had his eyeballs plucked out. Maria Goretti was stabbed twelve times protecting her virginity. Then she forgave her attacker before she died, or so the Sisters said. And she was becoming a saint. Not that Maggie’d ever liked the sound of her. What kind of idiot would forgive someone who’d stabbed her twelve times?

The impious thought dragged Maggie back to the present. She was here to pray for guidance.

She sensed the altar rail beneath her arms; she had knelt there a million times, it seemed, since childhood, asking the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph to hear her prayers. Now she needed them to save this child she loved; families were their specialty.
What should I do?
she prayed.
Where should I go?
Whom can I trust?
The pleas tumbled out in an endless stream, in the comforting candlelit gloom.

Father Peter Messenguer.
The name slipped into her head as suddenly and clearly as if a neon sign had been switched on.
Father Peter Messenguer.
Of course! He would know, if anyone did.
Thank you, thank you!
She murmured fervently as she left St. Joseph’s nearly at a run, and headed for Amanda at the shop.

“I
know
you’ve
heard
of him Amanda,” Maggie prompted excitedly.

“Messenguer?” Amanda repeated. “He’s the famous theologian, who came a cropper of the Vatican over his heretical ideas, isn’t he?”

Maggie nodded her head vigorously. “He’s brilliant and wildly iconoclastic . . . the most astonishing mind I ever encountered, Amanda. The kind that leaves you breathless in the dust. I remember he speaks seventeen languages, ten of them ancient. He lectured once at Fordham when I was a senior, and I was given the privilege of being his escort for the weekend, so I shepherded him around campus, to lectures and teas. He was quite unbelievable—and mischievous, too, in a lofty sort of way, so when he got tired of smiling at faculty members relentlessly, he asked me to show him around the city. I was beside myself with delirium.”

Amanda laughed softly. Maggie had a capacity for enthusiasm that was ingenuous and contagious. She could look quite like a little girl when she was in the throes of something that excited her, curls bouncing, eyes dancing. Maggie was so many things, Amanda thought, watching her. Strong and fragile, a pushover for a sob story or a beggar on the street; but there was always more to her than met the eye. Like the Phi Beta Kappa key she kept unceremoniously among the house and car keys in her purse; it was only by accident Amanda had found out about that.

“He’s a Renaissance Man, Amanda,” she was saying. “An authority on comparative theology and ancient religions—I think he has a doctorate in anthropology, too.”

“And why, might I inquire, are we discussing him so exuberantly at this particular moment?”

“Because I’ve read that he’s an expert on the arcane . . . Don’t you see? If I can find him, he might remember me!” Maggie looked at Amanda’s blank expression with exasperation; she had told her about the satanic possibility. “He’ll know about the occult! Amanda. I know he will. The catch is I have to find him, to ask him.”

“Isn’t there a central file of clerics somewhere? Amanda asked. “1-800-Find Padre, or some such.”

Maggie shook her head. “Maybe there’s some sort of clerical directory,
if
you know where to find it, which I
don’t
—but I think he’s gone underground, sort of. Whatever the Church’s equivalent of being deep-sixed by the powers-that-be.”

“But I thought he was their fair-haired boy. Intellectual wunderkind, expected to be a cardinal by fifty.”

“All that’s true. He was-front-runner on the ecclesiastical fast track . . . studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, taught at Loyola . . . the intelligentsia’s darling. But he was so iconoclastic that the church hierarchy decided to gag him. They won’t even let the laity read his books anymore.”

“You seem to know a great deal about him.”

“I used to follow his career avidly, Amanda. I guess I had an intellectual crush on the man, or whatever you call it when the object of your fascination is utterly unattainable. Anyway, he was the only really famous person I knew back then, so every time there was an article about him anywhere, I gobbled it up. Until he dropped out of sight, a few years back.

“He’s a mystic as well as a genius, Amanda . . . and a devout believer. Nobody ever had the temerity to doubt his faith, as far as I know . . . but his visionary view of man’s evolution toward God is so breathtaking and mystical it borders on heresy. And, I think he wasn’t always willing to knuckle under to authority on the laity issues, either. So, they put him under wraps, out of the public eye. I imagine the Pope probably knows Messenguer’s vision is way beyond the Church’s ability to control. They did the same thing with Teilhard de Chardin, remember?”

Amanda did.

“Anyway, they’ve tucked him away somewhere and I need you to find him?

“Me? But I’m barely even a Baptist, much less a tracer of lost priests. What makes you think I can find him? Besides, he sounds so saintly maybe you should just look him up in your hagiography . . .”

She expected Maggie to laugh, but the face looking back was deadly serious. “I really
need
him,” Maggie said pleadingly. “At least he’s a place to start in this awful maze, and you always know somebody, who knows somebody . . .”

Amanda nodded, already thumbing the card file in her brain for someone who’d done charity work for the Archdiocese of New York. “Give me a couple of hours, and a telephone, darlin’,” she said ruminatively. “I’ll find your priestly paragon, wherever they’ve stashed him.”

Three hours later she called Maggie with the news.

“I’ve run your mystic to ground, Maggie. They’ve sent him to the Church’s equivalent of Siberia. Some book depository, near Rhinebeck, where they keep all those Indexed books the Church used to forbid Catholics to read. They’ve made him a glorified librarian of naughty books, if you can believe that. They’d probably put Stephen Hawking in charge of first-grade arithmetic, if they had him, too.” She paused for indignation. “Although, in all fairness, Harriet McCarthy say’s it’s a job so ‘fraught with intellectual seductions, it can only be given to one who is beyond this world’s temptations.’ Oh my! Doesn’t he sound like he hung the moon.”

Father Peter said he would see her.

P
eter Messenguer was an unpriest-like presence. He stood six foot two or three in the leather sandals he preferred to shoes, and the lean muscular build he’d inherited from the ancestral gene pool was the kind that ages well. Years spent on archaeological digs in hard countries had given his face the look of fine-tooled leather. Lines and creases intersected at places that suggested he laughed well and often. Yet his eyes turned down a little at the outside corners, just enough to impart a permanent expression of quizzical sadness. As if he had looked upon the world and found it wanting in some unfathomable way.

The aquiline nose was too prominent for handsomeness, but the rugged face was memorable, and far more male than one expected of a prelate. It was a fine, distinguished face, and marked by life. He looked the kind of man to be found in battered tweed and waders, in an Irish trout stream. Or on a Viking ship. But the eyes showed the haunting of one who looks beyond this world to something others cannot see.

His hair had leftover streaks of blond threaded through the white and gray. He wore it long, the habit of a lifetime lived far from barbers, and of a man devoid of physical pretensions.

He smiled at Maggie as he greeted her, and something wistful in his gaze made her wonder if he had expected her still to be nineteen, or, if perhaps her aging had reminded him of his own mortality.

“I remember you,” he said fondly. “We spent a weekend at Fordham, a little over a lifetime ago, running the Casuists to ground and probing the Manichaean Heresy. I thought you were the only thing of purity I encountered in New York.” He chuckled a little, as if recalling some great secret, and took her elbow firmly, to lead her into a small sitting room. Maggie smiled to herself; a “thing of purity” was not the impression she had wanted to leave him with.

“You’ll take tea, won’t you?” he asked eagerly. “It’s my only addiction, really—the legacy of my Irish grandmother.”

How glamorous the priest had seemed to her at nineteen . . . she, the Catholic school girl, he, so brilliant, so kind, so unexpectedly human. Maggie felt a surge of adolescent nervousness at seeing him again, and wondered at herself.

“Now, Maggie, dear,” he said, as the tea tray appeared, “you must tell me why you’ve sought me out in my place of exile. It can’t have been an easy quest.”

“I don’t really know where to begin, Father. Or whether I’m wasting your time. I have reason to believe that my grandchild has become involved with Satanism, and I’m way out of my depth in anything occult. So I prayed for guidance, and suddenly remembered reading that you had performed exorcisms. I thought perhaps . . .” She let the sentence trail off, for she didn’t know what it was she was asking.

Father Peter had been sitting back in his chair, teacup casually suspended between open knees. Now, he leaned forward, alert, put the cup on the table and looked at Maggie with a penetrating gaze.

“Why don’t you begin wherever the story needs to Maggie,” he said gently. “Middles, endings, beginnings—who among us knows which is which, anyway? Your guidance brought you here, perhaps mine will figure out why.”

Maggie took a deep breath and told him what she knew, what she thought she knew, and what she feared. Throughout most of her discourse, he sat silently, chair slightly tilted back, fingertips forming a small pyramid in front of his mouth. She wondered if he thought her mad.

“What a remarkable story, Maggie,” he said, thoughtful and serious, when she’d finished. “And surely no wonder you’re distraught. The question before us seems to be, what can I do to help unravel this tangled skein.” He stood up. “I think better when I walk . . . perhaps we could wander out among the trees, while I dredge up what I know that me be useful to you.”

Fish or cut bait,
he said to himself, as he put on his coat.
If you hear her out, you’re in . . . if you’re in, you’re in all the way.
It was always the same. You made the choice and suffered the consequences. And the Demon knew you wouldn’t say no.

There was a path that led from the book depository toward the Hudson; they walked toward the silver-gray water, glimpsed ephemerally through the trees.

“I can assure you, Maggie,” he said, when they’d walked a little way, “that satanic worship is as genuine a reality in the world today as it has been since the Fall of the Angels. Devil-worshipping cults frequently come to the attention of the Church. In the confessional, for example, people sometimes recount crimes so macabre it’s hard to imagine what penance could possibly expiate their sins. And, occasionally, churches or cemeteries are desecrated by Satan’s followers, but the police ask the bishop to keep the fact under his mitre to prevent panic. The same thing happens with murders. Sometimes quite gruesome ones take place in which ritual acts have been performed on the poor victim before his death, but as no one wants to open Pandora’s Box, the satanic connection is generally kept from the press and public.

“For example, some of the best law enforcement people I know firmly believe that Son of Sam was a Satanist, and that the slayings were ordered by the satanic cult hierarchy. Then, of course, there’s Charles Manson . . .”

“And Maa Kheru?” she asked. “Have you ever heard of that?”

Father Peter nodded. “The Church has been collecting data about that unsavory crew for some years now. My bet is that it not only exists, but is a very potent, very hidden tool for evil around the world. It seems to attract a higher level of intellect than many of the other cults—people with potential to be influential in the community. Rumor has it they’ve infiltrated government, industry, et cetera.”

“I don’t quite know what to say, Father. This all seems so preposterous to me.”

“I daresay it would to most anyone,” he replied with a slight smile. “But remember, Maggie, Satan is a fallen Archangel . . . we must presume he lost none of his powers when he fell—he lost only grace and the company of God. We must assume his power to be vast, and his followers ruthless and plentiful.”

“At least you don’t think I’m tilting at windmills”

“Not in the least,” he answered, “but if you’re tilting at Maa Kheru, you may need a rather large jousting pole.

“Something does trouble me about you story, though, Maggie. It seems to me there’s a significant missing piece to this puzzle. Why do they want this particular child so badly? Surely, there are a million children they could lay hands on without risking exposure. As I understand it, these Devil cults even use women as breeders to
produce
children for their infernal rituals. From what you tell me, the Vanniers appear to have all the money in the world at their disposal—why would they risk your going to the authorities, and muddying the waters around them? Perhaps the real question we need to address here is whether Cody could be special in some way we haven’t yet divined?”

He turned a questioning gaze on Maggie. “You don’t by any chance know the precise time and place of your granddaughter’s birth, do you?” he asked. Maggie answered yes.

“Come back to the library with me, then,” he said enthusiastically. “Let us draw up an astrological chart for Cody, and see if we can discover what it is that’s so very special about your granddaughter.”

“An astrological chart?” Maggie said incredulously. “I didn’t think the Church approved of anything that smacked of the occult.”

Father Messenguer smiled gently at her concern. “You’re right, of course. I’m afraid I’m a terrible embarrassment to my superiors,” he said simply. “But you see, Maggie, in my quest to understand the secrets of God’s breathtaking creation, I’ve studied all the great religions, in exquisite detail. In truth, I became a linguist so I might pursue my quest in the original languages of the great teachers. Along the journey, I’ve picked up a good many esoteric skills that are never taught in seminaries.

“I’ve lived in strange foreign places, you see, where Spirit is not constrained by our paradigms. A few of the skills I’ve mastered—like astrology—are quite frowned upon by the Church fathers—in this generation at least. They’ve forgotten, perhaps, that the Wise Men were themselves astrologers, and that it was a new star that proclaimed the birth of our Savior.

“I was introduced to the science of the stars by an old Hindu monk, whom I considered a saint. He was very wise and very, very good, so when I learned of the stars from him, I accepted that there might be something to their science . . . and over the long years since, my empirical observations have borne out that most of what he said was true. Frankly I’ve found astrology to be a useful enough tool, so I’ve blessed him for the gift, on more than one occasion. I fully expect its validity will be explained to the satisfaction of science, in the next century.”

“Why ever would you think that, Father?” Maggie was very disturbed by the notion.

“You see, my dear, quantum physicists now perceive the Universe to be a gigantic network of interrelated energy fields . . . personal, planetary, and intergalactic. If that is the case, why should not the electromagnetic fields of planets affect us humans, in much the same way they affect the tides, or the sex lives of mollusks, for that matter? I’ve always found it sensible to remember that one century’s magic is often the next century’s science.”

The priest continued to talk, in a rambling fashion, but with a clarity and breadth of subject matter that astounded her. They entered the great library, which acted as a repository for books the Church had, until the late sixties, forbidden the laity, and he settled in at what looked like a massive refectory table. Over the next hour he pulled books from stacks, punched data into a computer, scribbled notes on a yellow pad—as Maggie watched, entranced. He talked as he worked, bringing an almost boyish enthusiasm to the task, and she listened eagerly, fascinated by the facility of his intellect and the range of his curiosity. She couldn’t help but wonder what his age might be. Late fifties, perhaps. She watched the spare angularity of his movements; everything about him suggested strength and vigor.

“An astrological chart is no more than a map of the heavens at the precise moment of one’s birth,” he explained. “It presumes the interrelatedness of our individual energies with the greater energies of the cosmos. The ancient Celts likened this relationship to a giant energetic web that enmeshes us all. If anyone trembles the web, they would say, we all vibrate.

“According to astrologers, the map of one’s individual birth planets shows one’s character most explicitly—strengths, weaknesses, gifts, burdens, and such. I believe it also delineates the baggage we’ve brought into this life, from the snippet of the time-space continuum we choose to call the past. And it most assuredly shows which great challenges will lie before us, during a given lifetime.” He paused in his dissertation, stuck the pen he’d been using between his teeth, and left her, returning minutes later, laden with books that looked old and worn.

“Bear with me a moment, will you?” he mumbled past the pencil. “I may be on to something here.”

“May I help?” Maggie asked, feeling like Alice at the White Queen’s tea party. Finally, the priest scribbled something on a lined pad, in some unrecognizable language, and replied.

“You could make more tea, if you wouldn’t mind. Mrs. O’Leary will allow that one small intrusion into her domain. What I need to find is written in hieroglyph, so it may take me a bit of time to translate adequately. And tea always helps.” He smiled, and looked far younger than he could possibly be.

When Maggie returned from the kitchen, she saw he’d laid out a batch of papers for her perusal, and marked passages in several books. The priest looked up at her, and she tried to read the odd expression in his eyes, but it eluded her.

He frowned, as if deciding how to tell her what he’d found. “What we have here may be a bit difficult for you to digest, Maggie . . .” he said judiciously. “There really isn’t any way to explain it in Western terms. I’m afraid your granddaughter is what would be called a
Way-Shower
, in certain faraway places, where life is looked at in a vastly different perspective from ours.” He seemed troubled.

“You see, my dear, in parts of the globe in which reincarnation is an accepted notion, it is thought that certain very High Souls are incarnating at this moment in time, in order to help humanity save itself during the coming cataclysms. Your Cody appears to be one of these High Souls. And from what I see here, this child has no personal karma in this lifetime, Maggie—no debts left to expiate, if you will. She is here only to serve humanity. It would appear that she has no time frame, either . . . which means she is free to stay in the body or leave it, at will. I’m afraid, my dear, if your fears are well grounded, and these people attempt to take her too far into Darkness, she will simply die and be reborn again elsewhere, so she can fulfill her humanitarian destiny.”