F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (23 page)

           
The
Greenbriar

           
East of
Gibraltar

           
 
"A woman on board," Captain Liam
Harrity muttered as he thumbed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. "What
utter foolishness is this? Next they'll be after telling me the ship can
fly."

           
 
Gibraltar
lay three leagues ahead, its massive shadow looming fifteen degrees to
starboard against the hazy stars. Lights dotted the shores to either side as
the
Greenbriar
prepared to squeeze
between two continents and brave the
Atlantic
beyond. A smooth, quiet, routine trip so far.

           
 
Except for this woman talk.

           
 
Harrity leaned against the
Greenbriar's
stern rail and stared at
the glowing windows in the superstructure amidships. A good old ship, the
Greenbriar.
A small freighter by almost
any standards, but quick. A tramp merchant ship, with no fixed route or
schedule, picking up whatever was ready to be moved, from the
Eastern Mediterranean
to the
UK
and all points between, no questions asked.
Harrity had been in this game a long time, much of it spent on the
Greenbriar,
and this was the first time
any of his crew had talked about seeing a woman wandering the decks.

           
 
Not that there weren't enough places to hide
one, mind you. Small though she might be, the ship had plenty of nooks and
crannies for a stowaway.

           
But in all his years helming the
Greenbriar,
Harrity had never had a
stowaway—at least that he knew of—and he wasn't about to start now. Like having
a prowler in your house. You simply didn't allow it.

           
 
Maguire had started the talk that first night
out of
Haifa
. Harrity's thought at the time was that
Dennis had been nipping at the Jameson's a little earlier that usual. He'd let
it go and not given it another thought until two nights ago when Clery said
he'd seen a woman on the aft deck as they were passing through the Malta
Channel.

           
 
A temperate man, Clery. Not the sort who'd be
after seeing things that weren't there.

           
 
So Harrity himself was keeping watch on the
aft deck these past two nights. And so far no woman.

           
 
He turned his back to the wind and struck a
wooden match against the stern rail. As he puffed his pipe to life, relishing
the first aromatic lungfuls, a deep serenity stole over him. The phosphorescent
flashes churning in the wake, the balmy, briny air, the stars overhead,
lighting the surface of the
Mediterranean
as it stretched long and wide and smooth to the horizon. Life was good.

           
He sensed movement to his left,
turned, and fumbled to catch his pipe as it dropped from his shocked-open
mouth. She was there, beside him, not two feet away. A woman. She stood at the
rail, staring into the east, back along the route they'd sailed. She was
wearing a loose robe of some sort, pulled up around her head. Her features were
hidden by the cowl of the robe. Now he knew why Maguire had thought she'd been
wrapped in a blanket.

           
He shook off the initial shock and
stuck his pipe bit between his teeth. He should have been angry—furious, for
sure—but he could find no hostility within him. Only wonder at how she'd come
up behind him without him hearing her.

           
 
"And who would you be now?" he said.

           
 
The woman continued her silent stare off the
stern.

           
 
"What are you after doing on me
ship?"

           
 
Slowly she turned toward him. He could not
make out her features in the shadow of the cowl, but he felt her eyes on him.
And the weight of her stare was a gentle hand caressing the surface of his
mind, erasing all questions.

           
 
She turned and walked away. Or was she walking?
She seemed to glide along the deck. Harrity had an urge to follow her but his
legs seemed so heavy, his shoes felt riveted to the deck. He could only stand
and watch as she followed the rail along the starboard side to the
superstructure where she was swallowed by the deeper shadows.

           
And then she was gone and he could
move again. He sucked on his pipe but the bowl was cold. And so was he.
Suddenly the deck of the
Greenbriar
was
a lonely place to be.

           
Cashelbanagh
,
Ireland

           
 
Like everyone else, Monsignor Vincenzo Riccio
had heard the endless talk about the green of the Irish countryside, but not
until he was actually driving along the roads south of Shannon Airport did he
realize how firmly based in fact all that talk had been. He gazed through the
open rear window at the passing fields. This land was
green.
In all his fifty-six years he could not remember seeing a
green like this.

           
 
"Your country is most beautiful,
Michael," he said. His English was good, but he knew there was no hiding
his Neapolitan upbringing.

           
 
Michael the driver—the good folk of
Cashelbanagh had sent one of their number to fetch the Monsignor from the
airport—glanced over his shoulder with a broad, yellow-toothed smile.

           
"Aye, that it is, Monsignor.
But wait till you see Cashelbanagh. The picture-perfect Irish village. As a
matter of fact, if you're after looking up 'Irish village' in the dictionary,
sure enough it'll be saying Cashelbanagh. Perfect place for a miracle."

           
 
"It is much farther?"

           
 
"Only a wee bit down the road. And wait
till you see the reception committee they'll be having for you."

           
 
Vincenzo wished he'd come here sooner. He
liked these people and the green of this land enthralled him. But the way
things were looking lately, he wouldn't get a chance for a return visit.

           
And too bad he couldn't stay longer.
But this was only a stopover, scheduled at the last minute as he was leaving
Rome
for
New York
. He was one of the
Vatican
's veteran investigators of the miraculous,
and the Holy See had asked him to look into what lately had become known as the
Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh.

           
 
The Weeping Virgin had been gathering an
increasing amount of press over the past few weeks, first the Irish papers,
then the
London
tabloids, and recently the story had gained
international attention. People from all over the world had begun to flock to
the little village in
County
Cork
to see the daily miracle of the painting of
the Virgin Mary that shed real tears. Healings had been reported—cures,
visions, raptures. "A New Lourdes!" screamed tabloid headlines all
over the world.

           
 
It had been getting out of hand. The Holy See
wanted the "miracle" investigated. The
Vatican
had no quarrel with miracles, as long as
they were real. But the faithful should not be led astray by tricks of the light,
tricks of nature, and tricks of the calculated human kind.

           
 
They chose Vincenzo for the task. Not simply
because he'd already had experience investigating a number of miracles that
turned out to be anything but miraculous, but because the Vatican had him on a
westbound plane this weekend anyway, to Sloan-Kettering Memorial in Manhattan
to try an experimental chemotherapy protocol for his liver cancer. He could
make a brief stop in
Ireland
, couldn't he? Take a day or two to look
into this weeping painting, then be on his way again. No pain, no strain, just
send a full report of his findings back to
Rome
when he reached
New York
.

           
 
"Tell me, Michael," Vincenzo said.
"What do you know of these miracles?"

           
 
"I'll be glad to tell you it all,
Monsignor, because I was there from the start. Well, not the very start. You
see, the painting of the Virgin Mary has been gracing the west wall of Seamus
O'Halloran's home for two generations now. His grandfather Danny had painted it
there during the year before he died. Finished the last stroke, then took to
his bed and never got up again. Can you imagine that? 'Twas almost as if the
old fellow was hanging on just so's he could be finishing the painting.
Anyways, over the years the weather has faded it, and it's become such a
fixture about the village that it faded into the scenery, if you know what I'm
sayin'. Much like a tree in someone's yard. You pass that yard half a dozen
times a day but you never take no notice of the tree. Unless of course it
happens to be spring and it's startin' to bloom, then you might—"

           
 
"I understand, Michael."

           
 
"Yes. Well, that's the way it was after
being until about a month ago when Seamus—that's old Daniel O'Halloran's
grandson—was passing the wall and noticed a wet streak glistening on the
stucco. He stepped closer, wondering where this bit of water might be trickling
from on this dry and sunny day, for contrary to popular myth, it does
not
rain every day in
Ireland
—least ways not in the summer. I'm afraid I
can't say that for the rest of the year. But anyways, when he saw that the
track of moisture originated in the eye of his grandfather's painting, he ran
straight to Mallow to fetch Father Sullivan. And since then it's been one
miracle after another."

           
 
Vincenzo let his mind drift from Michael's
practiced monologue that told him nothing he hadn't learned from the rushed
briefing at the
Vatican
before his departure. But he did get the feeling that life in the
little village had begun to revolve around the celebrity that attended the weeping
of their Virgin.

           
 
And that would make his job more difficult.

           
 
"There she is now, Monsignor,"
Michael said, pointing ahead through the windshield. "Cashelbanagh. Isn't
she a sight."

           
 
There were crossing a one-car bridge over a
gushing stream. As Vincenzo squinted ahead, his first impulse was to ask,
Where's the rest of it? But he held his tongue. Two hundred yards down the road
lay a cluster of neat little one-and two-story buildings, fewer than a dozen in
number, set on either side of the road. One of them was a pub— BLANEY'S, the
gold-on-black sign said. As they coasted through the village, Vincenzo spotted
a number of local men and women setting up picnic tables on the narrow sward
next to the pub.

           
 
Up ahead, at the far end of the street, a crowd
of people waited before a neat, two-story, stucco-walled house.

           
 
"And that would be Seamus O'Halloran's
house, I imagine," Vincenzo said.

           
 
"That it would, Monsignor. That it
would."

           
 
There were hands to shake and Father Sullivan
to greet, and introductions crowded one on top of the other until the names ran
together like watercolors in the rain. The warmest reception he'd ever had, an
excited party spirit running through the villagers. The priest from
Rome
was going to certify the Weeping Virgin as
an inexplicable phenomenon of Divine origin, an act of God made manifest to the
faithful, a true miracle, a sign that Cashelbanagh had been singled out to be
touched by God. There was even a reporter from a
Dublin
paper to record it. And what a celebration there'd
be afterward.