Gospel (112 page)

O'Hanrahan looked as if he might spit.

The three military men and Underwood left, smugly grasping the
Contendings of St. Andrew.
O'Hanrahan sat on the bed to steady himself. Lucy quietly closed the door and locked it. Only then was she confident enough to turn around and silently cheer, clenching her fists and jumping a little. O'Hanrahan laughed more deeply: “You, Sister Lucy, are a genius!”

“I
knew
I'd seen Underwood's ring before.”

“That moron Shaughnesy,” O'Hanrahan grumbled. “Figures, really. Looking back, it's a bit difficult to believe Shaughnesy would spend any department money to retrieve me, any more than he'd really send me out with a credit card.”

“Let's get out of Khartoum,” she requested.

He put a hand on her shoulder, fatherly. “It just so happens I've got two tickets, thanks to Colonel Westin, for Addis Ababa tomorrow morning,” he reported.

Ethiopia? Another country? “And then we're going back to Jerusalem?” she hoped. She had thought it all out: she would find out whether she was pregnant the
day
she got back to civilization and then decide accordingly. If pregnant, she would confess her sin to O'Hanrahan and Rabbi Hersch and, hell, after everything they'd all been through, these guys would think of something to help her. She could go to a kibbutz or something. Give the kid up for adoption in Israel—it might be possible. Or have it in Israel and bring it back to the U.S. and place it in adoption back home. The important thing is
not to go home.
For the next eight months.

Whom, after all, could she trust? Judy would tell Gabriel and it would get back to her parents. There was nowhere to hide out, and she knew as well as she knew anything her life would be without value as a pregnant unmarried woman in the sphere of the Dantan Family and her maiden aunts; oh, even at the University of Chicago they'd yuck it up, have a good laugh on the frumpy Irish girl who came back from a summer with O'Hanrahan, pregnant and sunburned.

“Sir?” she prodded. “We
are
going back to Israel, aren't we?”

O'Hanrahan slowed in his answer. Actually, he was content to put her upon a plane and pack her off home while he pursued “Q” and his harem, of course, in Teheran.

(You selfish man. This woman is your salvation!)

He hadn't thought about what to do with Lucy.

(Never anybody else. It's always your own desires!)

“Sure, I suppose,” he said, postponing the suspension of his disciple's duties until the last minute. “Goodness, look at the time!”

“We've got to get our stamps from the Ministry of Transportation or we're never getting out of this place!”

The Ministry of Transportation.

A building only Kafka could have imagined.

Six stories of a square plan, each office identical, each waiting area and service window identical, and the bureaucrats themselves, mostly soldiers—it seemed the whole country was in the army—ignoring all pleas and bribes. Emaciated Africans, families of eight, huddled in piles in stinking, dirty clothes wearing expressions of hopelessness, trying with what life was left in them to get an emigration stamp, a permit for something, a pardon, a bending of the rule … and weeks could transpire before these wishes, if ever, were fulfilled.

Lucy saw a man in some final stage of bureaucratic humiliation tug on a soldier's pantleg and weep, beg for some silly stamp on a crinkled paper he waved as if it were a surrender flag. The Arab private shook his leg and lost the pest, walking on obliviously. There was no fresh air, no working lights above, and little natural light in the building—the air was thick with harsh blue tobacco smoke that hung like smog.

“We'll never get out of here,” Lucy moaned, after forty-five minutes of impatient waiting. “This is pointless. This is Hell.”

Each time a certain veiled woman passed by, O'Hanrahan leapt to his feet with twenty others and screamed at her, cried out like sellers in the commodities market back in Chicago, sacrificing any dignity for attention. This icy bureaucrat would coldly choose one and promise him or her that it would be just a moment, five minutes more.

Then it was prayer time.

The
azaan
blasted forth over the p.a. system.

All the people waiting would spread out a straw mat and for the next forty-five minutes there would be afternoon prayers. O'Hanrahan noticed many of the black Sudanese didn't pray and presumably weren't Moslem—hence, their inhuman wait for attention, for days, for weeks. Or maybe they were just bereft of hope, in the bosom of African bureaucracy and beyond the reach of Allah.

“Now? Please!
Laosah mahtee!
” O'Hanrahan cried to the all-important woman, on her next appearance after prayertime. “We must go to Ethiopia tomorrow!”

She took his and Lucy's passports and disappeared.

For the benefit of tourists downstairs there was a laughably ill-equipped tourist information station. Lucy left O'Hanrahan and went down to it, read an outdated brochure, then asked impulsively where the nearest phone center was. Across the street, she was told, in the Marriott Hotel.

Lucy longed to hear what the rabbi would advise them and, committing her remaining Sudanese pounds, she had the Marriott Phone Center operator place her call to Hebrew University.

The voice was a gravelly whisper. “This Lucy?”

“Rabbi Hersch, is that you?”

Silence.

Lucy: “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, to answer your question, everything's wrong. I don't trust the phone in my office so I'm having my calls bounced to my colleague's office, where I am now. My office got broken into again and so did my desk safe…”

Lucy's heart beat faster. “Who got into it?”

“I don't know, but they must have great connections. Hebrew University is an armed camp against terrorism and Intifada—you can't just walk in there and break in a safe, break in an office, unless you're…”

“Someone else in the university?”

“God Himself,” he contemplated, a strong note of frustration in his voice.

Lucy offered her own uncheery report. O'Hanrahan had been arrested, the embassy got him out of trouble, Mr. Underwood stole their scroll at gunpoint, but got the wrong one, the Mad Monk showed up in Khartoum two days before they did. “We seem to be falling two days behind him now,” Lucy sighed.

Rabbi Hersch took a deep breath. “What good is this monk's research doing him? He doesn't have the scroll.”

“Not yet. I'll talk quick. We're leaving for Addis Ababa tomorrow and then I guess we'll fly from there to Jerusalem.”

“Wouldn't do it. Let's get to Chicago or New York maybe—I got friends there.”

But Lucy really didn't want to go home. Rabbi Hersch was messing up her Operation Secret Baby in the Holy Lands plan—

“Can't believe Paddy O'Hanrahan is getting on a plane,” the rabbi said softly. “After Rudolph died in that crash at O'Hare, Paddy swore he'd never get on another one.”

Lucy felt her head lighten. “I thought it was a car accident…”

“No, Beatrice died in a car accident speeding hysterically to O'Hare in seven inches of snow and ice to see if Rudolph survived the plane crash. It was a 727, slid off the runway, everyone injured and just ten deaths but Paddy's kid was one of them. And then Beatrice went crazy … didn't anyone tell you any of this?”

“Not the details.”

The rabbi: “So. Does Addis have a Hilton? When and where can I meet you guys?”

“Well, Dr. O'Hanrahan says…” There had been a click. “Hello? Hello?”

And now a repeating dial-tone noise.

Lucy went out into the late-afternoon light, which had turned the Ministry of Transportation a warm desert orange. She found O'Hanrahan where she'd left him. After passing on the highlights of her phone call, she asked, “Any progress on our rubber stamps?”

“A lady just told me it would be two minutes, tops.”

Ten hopeful minutes gave way to an impatient fifteen, twenty, then the anesthetized blank stares returned as an hour evaporated in the heat and stench of the building. Finally, two toothless men, smiling, laughing, enjoying it vicariously—they had been waiting days for such a moment for themselves—pulled on O'Hanrahan's sleeve, rousing him to life:
as-sikriteera!
they shouted. The omnipotent secretary was knocking on the glass of the service window. O'Hanrahan clambered to his feet and received the passports … his own and some other white woman's, not Lucy's.

“But this is not her,” he insisted.

She shrugged. What's the difference?

O'Hanrahan wrote out “Lucy Dantan” and put an Arabic equivalent next to it. Please, he begged, for the love of Allah! Find her passport and put a single Sudanese half-pound, 17-cent, stamp on it.

O'Hanrahan returned to the dark stretch of floor in a hallway that Lucy had marked as her own. He looked at the place he had formerly sat and there was a chicken there, scrawny, undernourished. As he shooed it with his foot, a woman came running for it, shaking her finger at him, scooping up her prize possession.

“I don't suppose,” said Lucy, “I want to know what the toilet is like in this building.”

“I can assure you you don't.”

There at the end of the hallway came a drinks seller, hawking bottles of water for two pounds apiece. The poorer Sudanese watched sadly as the glistening bottles of liquid passed, not able to afford them. The Arabic Sudanese bought some bottles, as did the soldiers. O'Hanrahan asked for two. Is it clean? he asked. Oh yes, he was assured. Lucy and he stared at the bottle. It was room temperature. O'Hanrahan held it up to the dim light. No, damn them, better not drink it. Lucy gave hers away to the ragged family of eight, her idea of a leper colony, hunched silently across the hallway from them. She studied how they each had a sip gratefully, and then passed it on to another indigent family—three mouthfuls of water stretched to sixteen people.

O'Hanrahan's legs were falling asleep so he got up to wander the hallway to the end and then turn around. Between two connecting hallways he noticed that the tile-cement floor had been chipped away as if hit by a mortar in this one spot. It was filled with brownish, brackish water. Five stories up: a mud puddle in an office building.

Africa!

A
UGUST
24
TH

On the limousine ride to the airport at six
A.M.
, O'Hanrahan was anxious, wiping his brow repeatedly like a tic.

“You fly all the time, don't you?” he asked her.

Lucy didn't fly all the time but she would not have joked with him, knowing that his son had met his death that way. “All the time,” she reassured him. “There's nothing to it. And this isn't a long flight to Addis, is it? Just think if we were flying from here to Chicago, how long that would be. This is just a little hop.”

“Yes,” he said, swallowing her answer like medicine.

In the pause, she was of two minds about her bringing up his son's death: in a human way she wanted to know the details and commiserate, but another facet wished to keep O'Hanrahan invulnerable—too much had conspired to make her mentor and idol, her Moses in the wilderness, fragile and fallible. She longed briefly for their inequitable relationship in Ireland, his great somebody to her meaningless nobody. There was some comfort, after all, in his Jovian domination of events.

(So you think it best not to give comfort where you can.)

She sighed. And before she could retract it, she said, “I'm sorry.”

“Hm?”

Lucy looked at the shambling, outlying shacktown passing by, the open sewers gurgling up brown water, the roosters atop trash piles crowing the dawn. “I'm sorry about what happened to your son.”

Oh, registered O'Hanrahan. The McCalls or the rabbi probably satisfied her curiosity. “Yes, I'm sorry too.”

“I mean, there's nothing I can say…”

“I appreciate,” he said mechanically, “that you said something at all. It was a long time ago, of course,” he added, wondering why.

“But you must be reminded. You know, getting on this plane.”

He nodded, back in touch fully with the old sadness, the lifelong ache. There ought to be, he thought, a moratorium on sympathy past a certain point—within six months of the funeral, fine. But after that, why bring it back anew?

(But Patrick, this is all humankind has. Sympathy, if everyone practiced it, would save your world tomorrow from most pain and woe.)

True. And there were people, he reflected, men he had appointed to the department and given tenure to, women in the administrative pool who'd typed hundreds of letters for him and owed their Christmas bonuses to him who did not say a thing to him, who sent no card, who turned their heads at his bereavement.
All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me.
He said at last, “He was a good kid. Rudolph.”