The Sixth Station (27 page)

“Parts of the foundation as well as coal found on the site date the house to the first century. Coal used by the Blessed Mother herself! The
abbé
’s discovery, however, was totally ignored in Rome. No surprise there.”

“You mean to tell me that Rome would ignore the most important artifact in Christianity?”

“In fact, yes. For one thing the place where the Mother of God died is in a
Muslim
country—a religion at constant war with Christianity. And religious differences aside, on the financial side—and the Vatican is nothing if not brilliant when it comes to managing their trillions—they would lose billions in tourist revenue if the holiest Christian place on earth were in a Muslim country.” Then he sniffed disgustedly. “As if Jesus had ever traveled to
Italy,
where they have
their
headquarters!”

I stopped walking and looked at him. “
Their
headquarters? I thought you were part of ‘
their.
’”

He ignored me. “Anyway, we
know
what the Son of the Son thinks of all their gold!”

I ignored the “Son of the Son” reference and added, looking directly at the little stone house, “Not a hint of gold anywhere so far. I must say, Father, you sound as if you’ve gone off the reservation.…”

He let that pass, too, and took my arm as we approached the house. “At any rate, about ten years after Gouyet’s discovery, a Lazarist priest organized a second research team and came to
this
site—and found the chapel in ruins. They also found an ancient statue of the Virgin with the hands broken off.”

“But Rome doesn’t officially recognize it as the House of the Blessed Mother, correct?” I asked.

“No—and yes. In 1896 Pope Leo XIII came to see it for
himself
 … and he left believing that it was authentic. But it took another fifty-five years for another pope to come. That was in 1951. That’s when Pope Pius XII came. He then bestowed upon Meryemana the status of ‘Holy Place’; Pope John XXIII made that designation permanent, and then Pope Paul VI unofficially confirmed the little house’s authenticity on July twenty-sixth, 1967.

“Did you know that even Pope John Paul II served mass here in November 1979? As did Pope Benedict XVI in 2006?”

When I shook my head no, he finished: “Yes, Benedict came on November twenty-ninth, 2006.”

“What? How come I never heard any of this?”

“Just another trip by another pope, that didn’t mean much—to an outsider,” he said sarcastically. “But we all know what this place means. I wonder what it will mean to you.”

He then stepped up to the threshold, unlocked and lifted the grate, and then unlocked the front door. We stepped through an archway and into a room made of ancient brick and mortar.

Above us a skylight provided light, as did the small windows that were placed high up on the walls.

“Did the Blessed Mother play for the Knicks?” I asked inappropriately.

He took no offense. “People were very tiny back then, as you know. But this place? It was built as a fortress, basically, impenetrable—that’s why the windows were so high, the walls so thick. Her protector knew that if they had killed her son, they would—if they could have found her—kill her as well. The Christian religion was spreading very quickly.”

He placed his hands around the thickness of one arch. True, it looked at least two feet thick.

“For what other inconceivable reason would a house built in the first century have been created with such extraordinary security? Walls this thick were for castles, not peasants’ homes.”

I had to admit he was right. We stepped into the front room.

The floor was laid with an exquisite Turkish carpet that covered the entire surface, and to the left and right were long simple wooden shelves attached to the walls with benches tucked underneath. If there hadn’t been votive candles covering the shelves, you might have thought you’d stepped into a Turkish tea shop. Except for the exceptionally old bricks and beautiful arches, that was it.

We walked through another open archway into the second room of the two-room house, where an ancient statue of the Virgin stood atop a white marble altar under an arched hearth. A very large, intricate silver crucifix on a metal stand stood to the right and slightly behind the altar, which was laid with a pristine white cloth embroidered with crimson. Two large candles were burning in metal candlesticks on either side of the statue, and a little bouquet of flowers stood in front.

The priest gestured for me to kneel down on the marble kneeler at the altar. I hesitated. I was already shivering uncontrollably, and kneeling on cold, hard marble was hardly what I wanted to do, but I knew that if I wanted to hear the rest of the story, I’d have to do the bossy old guy’s bidding.

He gestured again, slightly annoyed that I hadn’t jumped to his command immediately. Shaking as though I were dropping into some kind of hypothermia, I nonetheless managed to ease between him and the crucifix and knelt down.

I bowed my head and put my hands together on the freezing cold altar and waited for him to continue. Instead, a horrible pain—a blow?—to my head felled me. I felt a blanket go ’round my shoulders, heard the gate come down and the door lock, as the room went dark.

24

My brain felt as though it were swelling rapidly inside my head, squeezing the skull to bursting.

I heard the front grate opening, even though I didn’t remember that we’d ever pulled it closed! Then the noise stopped, but a blinding light began pouring in under the door. It looked as though the sun itself had melted and was dripping liquid light that was crawling toward me.

The wooden door suddenly swung fully open, and the whole room filled with a light so unbearably bright that the air itself became one with the light.

Then I saw them. Standing at the threshold bathed in the frightening, glorious light were three men. And each was holding a box.

It’s a dream. It’s just a dream. Calm down. You must have gone into hypothermia or shock. Doc said you had endometriosis back when you were trying to conceive. Did you get an early, heavy period? No—not due for at least two weeks. The priest will call an ambulance. Just a dream …

It was almost harder to see in the blinding light than it would have been in the pitch black, but I could make out the silhouette of a man standing over me. Not one of those from the doorway. This man was wearing fatigues with a bandolier of bullets strapped across his chest, a rifle and a semiautomatic pistol in his hands.

Iraq 2005? No, that was long ago. But still, he’s not an American soldier. I know that.

I was shivering, that I knew, when the man spoke.

“Father—don’t do anything foolish.” I moved my eyes until they honed in on another man in the room, a young priest. It wasn’t Father Paulo—I couldn’t see him anywhere.

Sadowski? No, Sadowski’s dead. Dead. I think I killed him. No, no. Not me.

The three figures in the doorway were still standing without moving a muscle. Like department store displays.

Don’t move; he thinks you’re dead. He walks over and around you as though you’re just an overturned piece of furniture.

“Hand them over, Father. I don’t want to kill you.” His accent was undetectable. “But you know I will, and I’ll take your pals here with me.”

I could see that the priest was holding three boxes, one on top of another. “These are just gifts…” the priest said. “Gifts. They brought—”

“Hand them to me,” the soldier said again, aiming the gun between the young priest’s eyes.

“Your guns are useless here,” the priest replied in a surprisingly haughty way, as though he weren’t about to die. “Are you blind, man? Don’t you see who our visitors are?” he said, gesturing toward the men in the doorway.

“Hand them to me or you may detonate or spread whatever is in the boxes. You
will
kill the Baby!”

Oh, God. Has someone taken a baby into the house? I hear no baby!

He turned to look aside. I could see the outline of a woman standing there. She seemed to be wearing a burqa and was standing stock-still.

Someone else was moving into my line of vision—but it/she/they were crawling on the floor. It was a young girl, blood seeping down her legs. Her tiny white nightgown was transparent with sweat—and occluded with
blood
. The poor little thing was whimpering but was so weak even her cries were barely audible.

Please let me wake from this nightmare. Oh, God! The dying girl—what is she holding? Is it a baby? Yes. A tiny infant—can’t be more than a few hours old!

“Help me … please … help me,” the girl tried calling to the strangers in the doorway. They immediately began to move forward toward her, arms extended.

I willed myself to open my eyes all the way.

Move, dammit!
Nothing.

“Help me! Save me. Save my Baby,” the girl implored. The men looked as helpless as she was.

How could she have given birth? She is just a baby herself!

“I’m a prisoner,” she cried, her voice barely above a choked whisper. And then revealing what a child
she
still was, she implored with her last bit of strength, “Can you call my mother?” She looked to be twelve, or at the most fourteen.

The soldier stood between them. It was obvious that the rescuers were never going to get to the girl or the baby as long as
he
was alive.

Am I dead? Is this hell? Why don’t they do something?

With the rifle still trained on the doorway, and the pistol on the priest, the soldier spat out, “Snap out of it!
Gifts,
you fool? Biological weapons, chemicals. Goddammit.”

The priest answered him by bursting into a high-pitched laugh—ridiculous, absurd, and uncontrolled. He then threw his head back and sniffed the air like a wild dog. “That’s a good one,” the young cleric snorted hysterically, while the soldier shot concerned glances at the terrified girl. She was still holding on to the baby, still whimpering. He then turned to the woman in the burqa. As soon as his eyes met hers, she threw her head back, too, but so far back that it was nearly perpendicular to her shoulders. She let out an equally high-pitched laugh and also began sniffing the air in quick, rapid snorts.

The woman jumped and clapped her hands together like a schoolgirl.

Meantime, the young cleric, taking the soldier’s momentary pause for weakness or confusion, it seemed, tried to move forward. The soldier, in a movement so fast the priest didn’t see it coming, aimed the laser directly between his eyes.

“Stop where you are.”

He was squeezing the trigger and was probably a thousandth of a millimeter away from contact, when the priest said, “No, see? I’m putting them down,” as he lowered the boxes and gestured toward the wooden shelf a few feet away.

The soldier let him put all three boxes on the altar, and with his gun, gestured for the priest to move away from the boxes as he moved toward them.

But as the soldier neared the table, the woman in the burqa literally leapt across the room and snapped up one of the boxes—the one made of silver. In a split second, before he could even shoot, she ripped off its lid, and, giggling again like a teenager, scattered the powder inside the box. It flew everywhere—toward me, toward the girl, and toward the poor, very, very still baby.

“What have you done?” the soldier bellowed. My own eyes burned terribly. I could still see the baby—it was in the girl’s protective arms. It didn’t seem possible that it was even still alive.

While he furiously rubbed his eyes with one hand and pointed his rifle in at her with the other, the three men in the doorway stood as still as the poor little baby on the floor.

With his gun still on the woman’s temple, he pushed her to the floor and flattened her with the sole of his combat boot. With his free hand he whipped out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed her tightly behind her back. No one else moved.

“Against the wall!” he ordered the rest of them. “Move it!” The three men gingerly stepped in. I was shocked to see their clothing—it was all clerical, or at least religious, garb. One wore a hooded galabia, the next a Buddhist robe, and the third a huge fur hat and a white, fringed prayer shawl that extended to his knees over a black suit.

The solider commanded, “Hands up against the wall. Now!” They did as they were told, and with his rifle trained on them, he frisked each one in turn. Nothing.

“What was in that box?” Again, nothing. The lack of response so infuriated him that he struck the man standing closest to him, the Jew, with the butt of the pistol, drawing a gash from mouth to ear. Still, the man stood calmly, not even reaching to stem the blood gushing from his cheek.

The girl screamed, but still no sound came from the infant. Then in a coordinated move that looked rehearsed, each man turned his head to the left to stare at the newborn and its terrified child-mother, huddled, shaking, and soaking wet under the altar, where she had scampered.

The Jew opened his mouth to speak to her, but in a movement so quick it was almost unseen, the soldier put the pistol right up against the man’s temple. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

“My name is Gaspar,” the man said with an accent that sounded Israeli in a voice surprisingly deep for a man so young and so slight.

“You have exactly thirty seconds to tell me what you’re doing here and how you got in.”

I’m not imagining this. These things are really happening.

“You’ve used up fifteen of your thirty seconds.…”

Gaspar answered him in a voice that was quiet but firm. “We were guided here,” he said, oblivious to the semiautomatic pressed to his temple. “To see it for ourselves, study it—”

“Study? What? The Baby?” snarled the soldier.

“The star. It guided us here. We are just astronomers.”

He grabbed the Jew and put the pistol to his temple. “What is in the boxes? Anthrax? Botulism? You have five seconds…”