Relic of Time (20 page)

“Neal, let's stop over. We're in no rush.”

“We'll miss our connection.”

“That's what I'm suggesting.” She saw a passenger service desk for their airline and headed for it. Neal stood sleepily at her side while she arranged for them to fly out the next day, even succeeding in getting their luggage sent to baggage claim. While they waited for the bags to appear, Lulu said, “There's a Hilton over there.”

“Uh-uh. Airport hotels are like sleeping in a plane.”

So they took a cab downtown, Lulu giving the driver the address of the Whitehall on Delaware. A crowded little lobby, lots of Japanese and German tourists. Neal liked it.

“We always stayed here,” Lulu said.

“Ask for the bridal suite.” He'd be damned if he'd ask who “we” was this time.

As soon as they got to their room on the seventh floor Neal felt wide awake. The area around the hotel looked interesting.

“Navy Pier is within walking distance,” Lulu said. “Or there's a little trolley.”

“Were you here on one of your honeymoons?”

She put her arms around him. “I am now.”

Later they ate in the restaurant on the street floor and had a drink afterward in the bar. In the lobby the concierge was sending tourists off to the theater. On his desk, in a tray, were newspaper clippings, and Neal was surprised to see that they were of the Holy Heist. He pointed this out to Lulu. When the man was free, Neal took the chair next to his desk and asked if the Cubs were in town. But neither Chicago team was playing in town. Neal had already known that. He picked up one of the clippings from the tray and the concierge looked sheepish.

“It's a little ghoulish, I know. The American who was killed there? He stayed here at the Whitehall just days before the event. He and his wife.”

“I'm writing a piece on him.” He showed the concierge his credentials.

“Then you already knew.” The concierge looked relieved.

“Tell me about them.”

The concierge had not really seen much of the couple. Most of his memories seemed to have been prompted by the events in Mexico City. But once they had bought tickets from the concierge.

“They might have been on their honeymoon.”

Neal asked the concierge to tell him anything else he remembered, then they were led around to the manager's office. A little fellow with sandy hair and a Slavic face. His nameplate seemed to be missing some vowels.

“Splivic?”

The manager corrected Neal. He let it go, and told his story about doing a column on Lloyd Kaiser and his wife. On the way to the reception counter, Lulu had whispered, “He was a widower.”

“Widower than what?”

She was right, yet the concierge had spoken of Kaiser's wife.

With some reluctance, the manager turned to his computer and sought the information Neal had asked for. Would he even be bothering about this if the concierge hadn't mentioned a wife?

Splivic found the records. Would he print them out? More reluctance, but he finally agreed. They sat listening to the printer behind the reception desk clatter away.

“Just Kaiser and his wife?”

The manager looked surprised. “Oh no, he was alone.”

They took the printout of the guests registered on the days Kaiser had been in the hotel.

“I thought he was going to be my story,” Lulu said.

“You can have the wife.”

“Neal, he had no wife. The concierge must be confused.”

“Just another guest he got friendly with?”

“It's a cozy little hotel.”

On the little trolley taking them to Navy Pier, Neal figured out that Catherine Dolan had to have been Lloyd's companion. Hers was the only woman's name on the register of all the days Lloyd Kaiser had been here.

“Imagine her reaction when she learned he had been killed in the basilica.”

“She was from Minneapolis.”

Lulu put her arm through his and snuggled closer.

Neal said, “And there is his family.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake. You aren't seriously considering writing about the man.”

“Of course not.”

But as they bumped along, he thought that maybe he would.

The window showed the signs of hurried washing, sun lay on the dusty blades of the blind, a fly buzzed persistently about the room he called his office, and George Worth felt an animal content. Shelves made of bricks and boards contained the few books he had kept for his own, the rest going into the large room for the benefit of guests. The electric typewriter on his desk had once been the very latest marvel of its type, perhaps twenty or thirty years earlier. A Selectric, navy blue, that purred contentedly as his hands hovered over the keyboard. His fingers dropped to the keys and the globe on which the characters were molded danced across the page. Lines formed, no need for the carrier to move.

“A typewriter!” Clare had exclaimed.

He had thought at first she was chiding him for having taken possession of such a wonderful machine. It had been among donated items and from the moment George had seen it he wanted it. His mother had used such a typewriter. He had felt almost guilty as he bore it away to his office. But Clare was reacting to the quaintness of the Selectric. No one used typewriters anymore. His guilty possession was added to the list she seemed to be making of his self-deprivations. He stopped praising the machine when he saw her reaction. Saint George Worth in love with his poverty.

He missed her. He missed everything about her except her way of seeing his life as heroic. When he told her there were times when he, too, wanted to just walk away from it all, to live like everyone else, the way he had been raised, she clearly thought that he was making this up for her sake. Would she believe how rare such moments as this were, the sun on the window, a friendly fly for company, wanting to purr like the Selectric? But his office was his hideout as well as where he worked to keep the house afloat. The small income from the silly science fiction he wrote was often the difference between being able to go on another week or shutting the doors. Benefactors were more likely to bring old clothes and furniture, rarely something like the Selectric, which had replaced his manual typewriter. What asceticism would Clare have been able to imagine if she had seen that portable Underwood?

Of course he did not think his stories were silly when he wrote them. Could any writer disdain what he was actually writing? George doubted it. Hacks must have the same sense of exhilarated creativity as Tolstoy. The magazines that bought his stuff still billed themselves as science fiction publications, but there was no science in what George wrote. It was futurist fantasy, short on hardware, allegories of virtue and vice palatable because they were set in a far-off imaginary land. His favorite setting was the planet Aidos, a light-year or two from Mars, George Worth sole proprietor. The place was prelapsar-ian; there was an absence of religion except the universal unquestioned reverence for the Being who had brought Aidousians and their planet into existence. Aidos was more than a few light-years from the Catholic Worker house in Palo Alto where he wrote. His current effort, like several that had preceded it, was a veiled version of his love for Clare Ibanez.

He was interrupted by Lowry with news of what had happened outside Pocatello. George sometimes looked at the dated sports page of newspapers that lay around the common room, but that was it; so Lowry, who had retained an insatiable appetite for the trivial happenings of the day, was his main source of news of the world.

“Did they recover it?” The stolen portrait.

“Apparently not.”

“Could I see the story?”

“Good Lord, it wasn't in the paper.”

Vincent Traeger, the so-called former CIA agent, was Lowry's informant. Traeger had been the one to whom Lowry had made what he called his general confession when he had left behind his long involvement with those he could not bring himself to call terrorists. “No names,” he had insisted, “just accounts of what had happened and what was planned. He already knew the names,” he added, peering at George. Lowry seemed to see the way he lived now as a variation on the way he had lived before, only with a different end in view. He called the Catholic Worker house his private witness protection program.

“Why would he tell you?”

“Quid pro quo? He knows of my devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.” That devotion had been behind Lowry's conversion. Before it, he had regarded the Virgin of Guadalupe as the patroness of terrorism. No wonder Lowry despised Miguel Arroyo.

“Tell me,” George said, turning off the Selectric. Lowry nailed Brother Fly with a rolled-up magazine.

The story he narrated was soon supplemented by newspaper accounts, which concentrated on the arrest of Theophilus Grady, who had been holed up in Idaho while his theft of the sacred portrait was causing havoc on both sides of the border. Eventually such stories contained Grady's refusal to say where the stolen portrait was.

“Why?”

Lowry applied a match to his pipe. “I suppose he doesn't want the chaos he has caused to stop.”

But then came the official announcement that the missing portrait had not been found in Pocatello.

For weeks the news that Lowry had been passing on to George stemmed from that awful event in the basilica in Mexico City: the storming of the border and the guerrilla war raging in the deserts and mountains, fanned by Miguel among others, although he had tried unsuccessfully to call it off. Repentance? He said that he now feared that violence would postpone the inevitable but peaceful accomplishment of his dreams of an altered California, a united Southwest. Only belatedly did George hear of what had happened in long-term parking at the San Francisco airport.

“Don Ibanez was there?!”

Concern for the old man could mask his love for Clare. Lowry had been witness to the whole sad thing, the mutual love and then the gathering depression when Clare realized that George was not doing what he did in Palo Alto only as a temporary thing. It was to be his life.

“You haven't taken vows,” Lowry had said to him not long before.

If Clare couldn't join him, why didn't he join Clare? George was almost shocked to hear this from the man he regarded as his Peter Maurin. Did he think of himself as Dorothy Day? After the shock of the suggestion, it became his greatest temptation. Just walk away from all this and live like everybody else. Why not? Lowry was right. He had not made any solemn promise to God to go on like this forever. George plunged once more into the writings of Dorothy Day, looking for indications that she, too, had been tempted by the thought of just getting out, away from the drunks and addicts and woebegone losers, ladling out soup and clothes and trying not to preach to them. But the fact of the matter was that she had lived her long life without deserting. And she'd never married again. When George had told Clare that some houses were run by married couples she had not reacted as he had hoped.

“I couldn't live like this, George.”

“One day at a time.”

From her expression he might have been describing the way prisoners under a life sentence reconcile themselves to the endless time ahead.

“Go see her,” Lowry said now, when George kept expressing concern for Don Ibanez. “Take a few days off. You'll be easier to live with.”

Catherine had insisted that she would like to visit one of the wineries but she really didn't pay much attention as the vintner gave them a royal tour befitting the daughter of Don Ibanez. Afterward, they sat outside in the shade sipping wine, the leaves rustling pleasantly in the slight breeze, the whole valley giving off a variety of perfumes.

“You've lived here all your life?”

Clare nodded. “I was born here. I mean, at home.”

“And your mother?”

“I scarcely remember her. I was only three at the time she died.”

“So you are your father's daughter.”

“I suppose I am.”

Catherine's remark had seemed to be a leading one, and so it proved to be. She wanted to talk about Jason Phelps. She wanted to tell Clare of the professor's attitude toward the Virgin of Guadalupe. Did Clare realize that the whole thing had been disproved?

“Of course he would think so.”

“It's not just his opinion. He showed me a book, a book by a Catholic, who claims that Juan Diego never existed.”

“Leoncio Garza-Valdés?”

“You know it?”

“Catherine, my father has every book ever written about the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

“But have you read it?”

“Have you?”

“I don't read Spanish. Jason summarized it for me.”

“It is a very serious book.”

“But it doesn't convince you?”

“No. Oh, I can believe that not every bit of the image is miraculous. Others have touched it up. If nothing else, it is the eyes that would remove any doubt I might have.”

“The eyes?”

Clare explained the images that had been found in the eyes of the Virgin, that they displayed optical laws unknown at the time of the vision or any later repainting. “One of the images is of Juan Diego, whom Garza-Valdés says never existed.”

“And the pope canonized him!”

“That is a strong confirmation of the vision, isn't it?”

“But if he didn't even exist . . .”

“Not even Garza-Valdés goes quite that far. He says Juan Diego's existence is doubtful. So would be that of any ancestor of his of five or six hundred years ago.”