Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (64 page)

The supply truck, when en route from
Damascus
to Deir ez-Zur, always stopped for the night in a hill
village about thirty kilometers west of the Pachomian oasis. That was why it
would arrive at the compound early of a morning. The car, an Audi sedan with
reinforced suspension, heavy-duty shock absorbers, and four-wheel drive,
traveled faster than the truck, even across that rude terrain; there were no
deliveries to be made in the village, and the European clients would brook no
delay. So, Toufic drove through the settlement with only a honk and a wave, and
pressed on to the convent. They arrived just before sunset.

Ordering Toufic and his suspect
“assistant” (again, the earrings of qualification) to wait in the car, the two
men walked up to the great wooden gate. As they read its sign, Switters
listened with interest to hear how many times they’d ring the bell. He watched
even more intently to see which of the sisters would eventually admit them. He
knew that in time the pair would be admitted. He knew their business. Their
quiet conversation in the backseat had resounded in his ear chip like dialogue in
a Verdi opera, and although his Italian was hardly
perfetto
, he had
scant difficulty in piecing together their intentions.

Not surprisingly, it was Domino Thiry
who finally let them in. She couldn’t see him, and Switters caught only the
briefest glimpse of her, but it was enough to set his pulses syncopating the
way they used to do when Suzy entered the room. He wondered if Suzy would still
affect him like that—and could think of no reason why she would not. He lit a
cigar. There was little cause to rush. The churchmen were undoubtedly ruthless,
but they would prefer negotiation to intimidation, intimidation to violence.
There would be protocol to follow. On both sides. Right now, he imagined that
tea was being served.

“Back there on the other side of Jebel
ash-Shawmar¯iyah,” said Toufic, referring to the central mountain range, “when
we passed that band of Bedouins, you almost broke your eyeballs looking at
them. I thought you were going to leap from the car and join them.”

“I almost did. But I didn’t see
anyone I recognized.”

Scoffing, Toufic pulled the lever
that allowed his seat to recline. He had driven for nearly nine hours, a lot of
it spent dodging rocks and potholes in the roadless road. He lay back and lit a
cigarette. If he was aware that his cigarette, any cigarette, was to Switters’s
cigar what a two-bit dictator was to a philosopher king, he did not let on.
“You may have been better off intruding on Bedouins instead of getting mixed up
in the internal affairs of a church to which you don’t even belong.”

“I expect you’re right.”

“You Americans!”

“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
land
is taken
to mean
nation
, then ‘land of the free’ is an oxymoron. You know this
word? An oxymoron is a faux paradox, an incongruity that arises not out of the
pervasively contradictory nature of the universe but out of a clumsy or
deceptive misuse of language. Our oxymorons are more dangerous than our
missiles, pal. Back when the mendacious phrase ‘genuine imitation leather’ was
accepted by the populace without violent protest, it paved the way for all the
bigger, more sophisticated lies that were to follow. But, hey, don’t get me
wrong, Toufic, I’m no seditious malcontent. After eight months of living high
on the chickpea, I’d just love to sink down into one of those American fried
ham suppers with gravy, a meal so greasy you have to tie it to your teeth to
chew it. Afterward, a Baby Ruth candy bar, an hour of Pee-wee Herman. And if
the truth be told, I’m nearly as admiring of the audacious hustler who had the
sheer gall to promote a ‘genuine imitation’ as I am disappointed in the public
that neglected to lynch him for it. P. T. Barnum, Joseph Goebbels, John Foster
Dulles.” He spat out of the window. “The ‘genuine imitation leather’ bastard
could rub shoulders with the worst of them.”

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!
C’est moi. Les échasses,
s’il vous plaît.
The stilts.
Dépêchez-vous. C’est moi, bébé.
The
fucking circus is back in town!”

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 of roundhouse wallop, the old woman’s body went
akimbo in a manner that mimicked the way Matisse had liked to paint her.
Interesting,
mused Switters, for he could detect in the arrangement of cubes, spheres,
cylinders, and cones that formed her body, in the planes these shapes flattened
into when he narrowed his eyes, the foundation of Analytic Cubism. In paintings
such as
Blue Nude 1943
, had Matisse humanized Cubism, restored it to a
natural, less formalistic state without relinquishing its inner dynamic,
rescued the female form from Picasso’s wood chipper, and put it back together
as a whole slab of juicy color?