The Sixth Station (44 page)

“I therefore bow to their wisdom and remove myself from the position of chief judge of this tribunal and beg the pardon of everyone who has worked so tirelessly to see that justice is done in this case. I wash my hands of these proceedings and retire to contemplate my misconduct in solitude.”

“Wow,” I said, turning to Maureen. “She didn’t just say she washes her hands of the whole thing, did she?”

“Yes, she most certainly did.”

Just then the world came back to order—or make that chaos—and the stuck motorists, instead of returning to their vehicles, ran to hug and confer with one another outside of their cars. We heard another explosion in the distance.

The cops were trying without success to get the traffic moving again when the BBC announcer brought on the usual suspect talking heads.

“Do you believe that the extraordinary removal of Judge Fatoumata Bagayoko from the United Nations Special International Criminal Court proceedings could potentially lead to a mistrial?” the reporter asked.

A jurist from some country or other answered, “Yes, Carter, I do believe that we are looking at exactly such a possibility. The chief judge just said in no uncertain terms that after seeing the children she was no longer impartial. She even said that the defendant is ‘no ordinary human being’! Shocking, really.”

Said another panelist, “It’s practically a guarantee that this is going to be declared a mistrial.…”

“Or a mis
tribunal,
in this case,” someone else quipped.

At that point Maureen got out of the car herself and decided to be proactive. A real Yusef move, I thought.

She was speaking in Italian to one of the frustrated cops, and I could see her pointing and gesturing like mad, as I sat there in my new role as a black Catholic nun. The cop came with her to the car and looked in. He asked for my credentials in Italian, and I just sat there paralyzed as to what the right thing to do was.

“She’s from Guatemala,” Maureen said in Italian. And then she said something to me in some language or other, which I assumed meant, “Pretend to reach for your documentation.” I opened her black purse and fished around until the cop grew impatient, what with hundreds of cars backed up behind us. Instead, he mumbled something, Maureen got back in the car, and he let us and the five cars ahead of us go through the roadblock, stopping the car immediately behind us for an inspection.

“Nice work,” I said, trying to high-five her but immediately realizing this wasn’t exactly what two nuns would do. My hand stayed in the air and I pretended to adjust the veil.

We drove up the mountains, glued to the news on BBC. Dona came on to report that the Reverend Smythe had taken the platform in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza to address the crowds, which, if possible, had only grown bigger and more unruly than they had been on day one.

“I wonder what the old bastard has to say,” I said aloud.

Is that a look of disgust that passed over Maureen’s face? Wow. She must really hate the guy.

“Now we take you directly to Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza and Reverend Smythe,” Dona reported.

To the roar of what sounded like hundreds of thousands of people, the reverend began: “Today, the devil himself rose from the depths of hell and began the process of destroying the living Christ within you.

“When Judge Bagayoko declared that Demiel ben Yusef, who is the personification of evil on earth, was a healer and
not
a destroyer, she revealed herself to be the devil’s own concubine.

“Do not rest believing that the devil failed because the other fair-minded jurists saw fit to throw this whore of Babylon off the throne. They too are just as likely to become possessed by the human Satan, Demiel ben Yusef.

“Do you believe those children—his legless, blind, and burned victims—were really healed? No! Those were media tricks by the infidels. No one believing in the Christ Almighty was fooled by their chicanery. No one in their right mind would believe those fools, magicians, liars, and murderers.

“Those poor children were whisked away and killed by Demiel ben Yusef’s minions who do his bidding. The mainstream media is playing a vicious game with you—one in which other children were flown in to replace them. I know this. Do not, I repeat,
do not
let Demiel ben Yusef, the devil incarnate, walk away free to destroy the world. Because, my fellow believers in Christ, that is what ben Yusef, Bagayoko, and all those who hate Jesus are doing.

“Those who trespass are but the evidence, the mirror that shows us that men and women who live without Christ are lost, eternally lost, condemned, damned to follow the serpent! Do not be swayed by the words of sinners.

“‘You shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him; but you shall kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones.’

“All people must rise up against this false god and his followers. Demiel ben Yusef—I repeat, and I beg you to understand and take action—is none other than the devil incarnate!”

Dona returned to the air amid thunderous applause and what sounded like mad rioting.

“The Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe’s supporters have begun to clash wildly with ben Yusef’s supporters, and the whole of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza up as far as I can see to the United Nations is in a riot situation! It is total bedlam,” she screamed into the microphone above the roar.

Just then gunfire broke out, and Dona screamed, “The riot police on horseback have entered the park! Horses are trampling the—”

Then nothing—the station went dead. “Oh, my God! Dona! What happened to Dona?” I screamed in the car, burying my hands in my face. Maureen leaned over and patted my hand.

“These are terrible times, and the police are on the scene.…”

Instead the radio made all kinds of old-fashioned crackling noises before we heard the voice of il Vettore, whose group had pirated the station and, I later learned, all the radio frequencies in the world.

“Stop in the name of Demiel ben Yusef,” she declared. “The rioting, the killing, the torchings, the bombings that have already begun must stop immediately. Stop in the name of the Son of the Son, I beg you!

“Everything you are doing is against everything,
everything
that Demiel has preached. He just implored you to not die in his name, nor to kill in His name—nor in the name of any person, church, or religious institution.

“The tribunal will continue regardless of the inhumanity of man against man. This is not a process you—or any human—can stop. If Demiel must die, as He said He would, then please let Him die a man of peace. Let Him die in the peace of our Lord, knowing that He left the earth better for His being here than worse than before He came to us.

“Do not, I beg you, listen to false prophets like the Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe,” she continued, choking back tears. “He proclaims war against all who do not believe in Jesus. He is wrong. Do not take up arms in the name of Jesus or His Son. Do not take up arms against one another. In the name of the Son of the Son of God, I beg you, do not allow killing, profiteering, power mongering, or hatred to sully His name and destroy everything He worked for.”

The radio went silent again, and so did Maureen and I as we each contemplated what we’d just heard as we drove the next two and a half hours through the mountains, with hillsides ablaze on either side, overturned cars, and burned-out towns and beautiful vacation homes being torched in the distance.

“Armageddon doesn’t happen in a day,” I finally said to Maureen as we drove off the Alanno-Scafa exit.

As we passed through the unmanned tollbooth, we narrowly avoided running over the corpses of two
carabinieri
lying directly in front of the booths.

Maureen sped up and we pulled off the highway, tires squealing, onto the local road. People were running amok through the first small town we came to, some smashing windows, others holding torches like some old
Frankenstein
movie, setting fire to the local police station.

Because of the congestion of people in the road, we slowed down to a crawl.

“Get ready…” Maureen said as she accelerated slightly. Instead of people being mowed down and climbing onto our car in fury, as I thought they would, the crowds instead parted, and on either side of the car people knelt down and made the double sign of the cross as we passed.

“Salvatore del Salvatori! Dio vi benedica! Filius Salvatori! Dio vi benedica,”
they called as they bowed before us. Maureen just looked at me calmly.

“You really
are
the one picked by fate to save the Savior’s Son! Even these people who have never laid eyes on you before stopped the chaos for a moment to pay homage. Extraordinary, really.”

“This is so weird and so creepy I can’t stand it.”

“Why?”

“This business of crowds bowing and crossing—happened to me once before. After I left your house in Rhinecliff.”

She didn’t answer, so I continued: “This crossing twice, do you think that’s what the term
double-cross
means?”

“Perhaps.”

“The Cathars—those folks who were burned in the thirteenth century?—they double-crossed the Crusaders by sneaking away in the middle of the night under the very noses of their occupiers.”

She just looked at me briefly without answering and then went back to concentrating on driving through the crowd without running anyone down.

I pushed. “No, I mean, are you sure it isn’t
you
who they are bowing before? It only happens when I’m near or around
you,
Maureen.”

She just looked at me and kept on slowly and very, very carefully driving out of the burning village.

39

The drive from the Alanno-Scafa exit to the town of Manoppello took another forty minutes, given the narrowness of the road and the fires burning randomly but fiercely in the wooded areas as well in many towns along the route.

We followed the signs leading to the sanctuary, and drove into a village square dominated by a strange-looking monastery church. Yes. Finally, the church of the Cappucine friars on the Tarigni hill outside Manoppello. From the front at least, it looked like a kid’s drawing of a church—except the entire façade was inset with a repeating pattern of dark stone crosses, broken only by a giant rose window and a steeple on the side of the building.

Think classic medieval church gone Pop Art—even though it was built two hundred years after the Middle Ages and three hundred before pop anything.

What the heck is this thing?

The tiny town was quiet. Too quiet. While rioting and burnings were going on in the surrounding towns and villages, this one was so still it was as though the apocalypse had already come and gone and no one had been left standing.

Maureen stopped the car in front of the church, and I got out. “Coming in?”

“No, I’d better stay with the car—just in case.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It looks like everyone’s skipped town.”

“Trust no one. Remember?”

“Right.” I turned back. “I assume that includes you?”

“That includes me.”

I walked up the seven or eight wide stone steps leading to the entrance and tried to open the church doors, but they were all locked.

I turned back to look at the town. Nothing. Just Maureen in her nondescript, now that I think about it, cop-looking car.

Maybe everybody fled to escape the rioters—or to join them
.

There was a tiny hotel right next to the monastery, so I walked back down and looked in the windows. I tried the door despite the fact that there was a sign in the window reading
CHIUSO
!!! (“Closed!!!”)

From the lower vantage point, looking up, I noticed that the monastery church had a tiny gift shop attached on the hotel side and that a window was slightly open.

Is that a monk peeking out the window? Definitely. That’s definitely a monk.

A brown hood obscured the monk’s face. It almost looked as though he didn’t have a face. Nonetheless, I waved and walked back toward him and, taking my chances, used the nun’s name.
“Dove posso trovare la suora che si chiama Grethe?”

He opened the leaded window slightly and gestured with his hand to the mountain. Then:
“La suora vive nella piccola casa sulla montagna,”
meaning that—yes!—Sister Grethe did live up on the mountain!

He abruptly closed the small window, and I saw a tiny point of red light on my chest. A laser site.

Get your ass in gear, lady.

I made a quick, if deliberately measured walk back to the car and opened the door and got in.

“Damn! There’s a monk in the window and he’s packing heat,” I barked at Maureen, trying to catch my breath. “I don’t know whether we can trust him, but he said to go up that mountain road. The nun supposedly lives up there. By the looks of some of those big houses, it must be the smallest house on the mountain—easy to find. If not, and we knock on the wrong door, we get our heads shot off by some very rightfully paranoid Italians.”

We made our way up the dusty mountain road, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen either in any of the upscale vacation homes or even in smaller year-round houses dotting the mountainside. All shut up tight. It was impossible to see if anyone was there, because all the window gates were closed tight and even some of the front doors had giant bars and homemade devices across the front to keep out marauders.

We drove farther and farther up, the road getting more and more winding, until suddenly amid the ghost hill of houses, a tiny stucco cottage came into view—its front door ajar, the windows wide open.

Pristine white linen curtains were flapping slightly in the balmy spring breeze. I could hear singing and the sound of an organ coming from inside.

“Stop the car! Stop the car!”

Maureen slowed then stopped the car and put on the emergency brake to prevent us from rolling backward. The singing stopped, although the organ music continued. As we were looking up at the house, a nun in full habit stepped out onto the tiny porch and looked at us. She was in her late sixties and squinted against the sun to get a better look.