The Clowns of God (38 page)

“I have been given a call to proclaim the Last Things and the Coming of the Lord. I have answered the call. I seek the means to make the proclamation. You have offered me shelter and funds and experts to help me. I have accepted with gratitude; but I have nothing to give in return.”

“Have I asked for anything?”

“No, but I have to warn you and believe me it is an act of love! you must never expect to possess any part of me or hope to manage me in any fashion.”

“For God’s sake! Why do you think you have to warn me?”

“Because when we first met you talked of being mystical about your own past, about your family connection with Saint Catherine of Siena. It seemed to me a very significant prelude. You were offering me the same kind of support that she had offered Gregory XI, to bring him back from Avignon to Rome. But one can’t repeat history and one can’t duplicate relationships. That Gregory was a mincing man, a vacillator and a coward. I have many faults, but I am not such a man. I am called to walk a desert road.” She started to protest but he stayed her with a gesture.

“There is more, so please let me say it. I am not ignorant of the life and works of your little Saint.

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the great women mystics. I have read the Dialogo and the Epistolario. Catherine wrote much and beautifully about love, human and divine.

Nevertheless, there are dark passages in her relationships that none of her biographers has wholly explained. She is too exotic for my taste; possibly because I am French and she never liked the French. But I think that once or twice she pushed the young men of her cendcolo too far. She was dreaming divine love when they were still struggling to make sense of the human variety and that’s when the tragedies occurred. So …” He smiled and shrugged.

“Like good Jesuits we have defined the terms and spelt out the rules of the game. Am I forgiven?”

“Yes. But not easily.” She raised her glass in a silent toast and tossed off the rest of the wine.

“It’s late. I have to be at work early in the morning.”

“I have to go out, too. I have a meeting with the Russian Minister for Agricultural Production.”

“Petrov? I’ve had bank dealings with him. He’s tough but decent. However, he’s in a desperate position. If he can’t get enough grain for winter, he’s a ruined man.”

“And our world is one hour closer to midnight.”

He rose and held back her chair. When she stood up she turned and took his hand and kissed it in the old-fashioned style.

“Good night, Monsieur Gregoire.”

He accepted the gesture without comment.

“Good night, madame, and thank you for the shelter of your house!”

In Room 580 of the Hotel Meurice, Jean Marie Barette, once a Pope, talked with Sergei Andrevich Petrov, Minister for Agricultural Production in the USSR. Petrov looked tired and crumpled, as if he had shed his clothes on the bedroom floor and climbed into them the next morning. His eyes were red and rheumy. His voice was hoarse and his skin exuded a smell of stale liquor. Even his sense of humour was wearing thin.

“You think I look a wreck? I am. Twelve, fifteen hours a day for weeks now, I’m travelling, talking, pleading, squawking for husks of grain like a starving parrot! But no one wants to sell to me. So I walk down the ladder to stage two. What do I ask for now? Intervention, mediation what they call in the trade ‘good offices’. It occurred to me you might be willing to help.”

“Willing, yes,” Jean Marie answered without hesitation.

“How useful is another matter. In the democracies the Leader of the Oppositon still has a strong voice and a lot of bargaining power. With me it’s different. I’m just zpasteur en retraite. Put it another way. How would you react if I came asking favours from you in Moscow?”

“Better than you think. You have. much respect everywhere. Will you try to help? The position is desperate.

Famine is the horror nobody understands until it happens.

Look at Africa! The warnings had been there for years, but nobody paid any heed! From the Sahara to the Sachel to the Horn, suddenly thousands were dying. Now that threat hangs over us except that for us it’s dearth in winter! We’ll just about get through it; and then, as soon as the thaw comes, I promise you the rockets will be launched and our armies will move south towards the oilfields of the Gulf, west through the great Hungarian plain, by sea towards India, the Philippines and Australia. It’s like an axiom of mathematics.

The only way to stave off disorder at home is to march against the enemy abroad. The Western powers and the Chinese are playing that dangerous game the English call brinkmanship.

Well, it’s not a sport that you enjoy with an empty belly. So, once again, will you try to help?”

“Yes, of course I will try; but I can’t work in a vacuum. I need a briefing. I need a list of trading points which your people are prepared to concede in return for urgent supplies.

You too play the game on the edge of the precipice and you can be just as stupid as any in the West! So, I need a piece of script, however elementary, that gives me authority to act as broker in the market.”

“That may be difficult.”

“Without it, the rest is impossible. Come, Comrade Petrov! I can make press statements, sermons, appeals. I did it every Sunday in Saint Peter’s Square! I made special diplomatic speeches on every tour. But that’s the same as you making a May Day Speech on Marxist-Leninist ideology and the solidarity of the People’s Soviets! It puts no meat in the stew!

But with a brief in my hand, one that you can repudiate if I botch it Bien! At least I will be received as an emissary with respect.”

“Would you be prepared to come to Moscow?”

“Yes provided I get a friendly invitation from the men at the top and I’m not harassed at every step by the KGB.”

“That won’t happen, I promise you.”

“When would you want me there?”

“As soon as possible; but I have to stick my toe in the water just to see that there are no crabs waiting to bite it off. How can I get in touch with you?”

“Through my brother, Alain, at the bank, Halevy Freres et Barette.” He scribbled the address on a desk-pad and passed it to Petrov.

“Alain won’t know where I am; but I’ll be in touch with him from time to time.”

Petrov folded the paper and put it into his pocket-book.

He said: “Would you join me in a drink?”

“Thank you, but it’s a little early for me.”

“I need one. I know I’ve been hitting it hard the last few weeks; but what’s a man to do at the end of another lousy day with the begging bowl? You don’t get any medals for effort in this business just fish-eyed stares and ‘tut-tut, Comrade, there must be something constructive you can do!” I know there isn’t and they know there isn’t; but they’re safe in the Kremlin shuffling their papers while I’m wearing out shoe leather and patience.”

“I thought you had some hope with Pierre Duhamel.”

“So far that’s all it is hope! He’s trying to work out some complicated scheme by which we purchase cargoes while they’re in transit and divert them to Baltic ports. It’s the size of the operation that’s the problem unless Duhamel is playing dirty. What do you think of him?”

“I think he’s trying to play clean in a dirty game.”

“It could be. What about that drink?”

“Suggestion,” said Jean Marie Barette.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Forget the drink. Order coffee for two. Give me your size and I’ll go down and buy you a new shirt and underwear.

Then you send your suit out to be pressed and take a long, hot bath while you’re waiting for it.”

Petrov stared at him in disbelief.

“You’re telling me I’m unclean?”

“I’m telling you, dear Comrade, that if I were under the gun as you are, I’d change twice a day, never drink till after sundown and let it be known that anyone who thinks he can do my job better is welcome to it.”

“Only one problem with that prescription.”

“What’s that?”

“Whoever takes my job will want my head as well and I don’t want to part with it just yet. But you’re right about the rest of it. I’m size 40. You go buy the clothes. I’ll order the coffee. It usually takes a while to get room service anyway.”

“I thought you were staying at the Embassy,” said Jean Marie Barette.

“I am,” said Sergei Petrov.

“I keep this place for private contacts.”

“Are you sure they are private?”

“As sure as I can be. I know the room is not bugged. On the other hand, that scares me more than anything.”

“Why?”

“Because it could mean nobody really gives a damn what I do. I could be a sitting duck, just waiting for someone to knock me off. Not that it would matter very much. The whole human race has a pretty limited run anyway.”

“Precisely how long do you give it?”

“Let’s see. We’re now in September. If I can’t get grain before the winter, the Army will march immediately after the spring thaw. If I get it, then there’s a breathing space, but not too long, because there’s still the problem of fuels and energy, and every big nation has a plan for preemptive strikes if the oilfields are threatened. At worst we’ve got six to eight months, at best, eighteen. It’s not a pretty thought, is it?”

“I’ll go buy the clothes,” said Jean Marie.

“Any preference in colours?”

Sergei Andrevich Petrov burst into a bellow of laughter.

“I wish the old comrades could see me now! Ever since the revolution the Vatican has been a burr in our breeches. Now I have the Pope buying my underwear!”

“And what’s odd about that?” asked Jean Marie with bland innocence.

“The first one peddled fish in Israel.”

As he went about the simple business of buying socks and underwear, he was struck not only by the comedy of the situation but by the macabre recklessness of it. Born in the mid-twenties, he had been too young for military service with the French Army, and he had been forced to flee to the mountains to avoid conscription for forced labour under the Germans. He had fought with the Maquis and begun his seminary training a year after the end of hostilities. But one of his most vivid memories was the nightmare period when the Germans began to pull out and the whole edifice of occupation began to collapse. It was like a Walpurgisnacht of drunkenness, cruelty, heroism and complicated insanities.

Now he was seeing the same thing again the operatic disorders in Tubingen, assassination by decree, Pierre Duhamel, the trusted servant of the Republic, conniving at secret horrors in the vain hope of preventing greater ones, and now Sergei Petrov, trying to break a blockade of the grain market and drowning his despair in vodka. It was the madness-in-little which was the most sinister of all. Famine in the Horn of Africa? Eh! What was it? A natural purge of surplus population from marginal land that is, until you picked up a child with a belly like a balloon and arms like matchsticks and hardly enough heart-beat to pump air into its lungs. Then you cursed God and cursed man, his errant creature, and primed the bombs to blast the whole mess into oblivion!

Whereupon, with sublime irrelevance, he decided that brother Alain was right. He did need some new clothes. If he were shopping for Petrov he might just as well spend a little care on himself. There was no point in going badly dressed to one’s own funeral.

* That night, Roberta Saracini had three guests home to dinner. They came in work clothes and brought brief-cases, an artist’s folio and a video tape machine. They had the purposeful air of professionals who knew exactly what they were about and needed no advice from the unskilled. The oldest of the three was a big, florid-faced fellow with a broad smile and a shrewd eye. Roberta introduced him as Adrian Hennessy.

“No relation to the cognac. He’s American, speaks seven languages, and makes expensive sense in all of them. He arrived from New York this morning. If you and he can get along he will direct our operation.”

The second guest was a mannish young woman whose features looked vaguely familiar. This one was the surprise packet.

“Natalie Duhamel, our expert on films and television. I believe you know her father.”

“I do.”

Jean Marie was nonplussed. The young woman gave him a cool smile and a well-rehearsed definition.

“My father and I have an excellent relationship. He doesn’t produce my shows and I don’t write his reports to the President. In matters of confidence, he doesn’t ask, I don’t tell and vice versa!”

“It’s a very precise arrangement,” said Jean Marie Barette.

“And this,” Roberta Saracini presented her third guest, a stripling youth who might have modelled for the Delphic charioteer, “this is Florent de Basil. He designs, he paints, he makes beautiful songs.”

“In short, a genius.” He had the ready innocent smile of a child. He took Jean Marie’s hand and kissed it.

“I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to meet you. I hope you’ll be able to give me time to do a portrait.”

“First things first, my love,” said Roberta Saracini.

“It’s half an hour to dinner. Why don’t we start work over cocktails?”

Adrian Hennessy opened his brief-case and brought out a tape recorder. Florent de Basil produced a sketch-pad.

Natalie Duhamel sat placidly watching. Hennessy took a swallow of liquor and stated categorically:

“We talk off the record first. If we don’t agree the terms of reference we enjoy our dinner and call it a day. If we agree, then we start work forthwith. First item. How do we call the subject? That’s you, sir. Remember, certain materials like notes and tape recorders have to be carried around, therefore, they can be lost. So, we don’t want real names.”

“My name is Jean Marie …”

“Then let’s change it to American: John Doe. Next, the aim of our project. As Roberta has explained it, you have a message which you wish to deliver to the world. You are concerned, however, that you should not be seen to propagate this message as an official teacher of the Roman Catholic Church.”

“That’s an accurate summary. Yes.”

“But it is still incomplete. It ignores the heart of the problem: that as a one-time Pope you still wear the aura of your office. There is no way you can make public declarations without coming into conflict with the present incumbent who, by the way, is the least inspiring of oratOES*J o*-the question is: how far are you prepared to risk that conflict?”