Relic of Time (19 page)

There was nothing in back either.

“Maybe they were thrown out,” Crosby suggested.

But when they stepped back from the Hummer they saw a half dozen men surrounding them, rifles at the ready.

Traeger tried telling them they were just a couple of hunters, but their hand weapons told against that. Reluctantly they turned them over.

“Theophilus Grady is expecting you.”

They went single file—Crosby, Traeger, their escorts—and it was not a walk in the park. There was nothing like a path, and the undergrowth between the trees was like the hedgerows in France. The exertion of the steep climbs and then steeper descents kept them silent. What was there to talk about anyway?

“How far is it?” Traeger called back over his shoulder.

“We're halfway there.”

Halfway! It was like hearing that you'd gotten half the forty lashes you had coming. It was fifteen minutes later that they heard the roar overhead. An engine. A whir of blades. A helicopter. The column stopped and tried to see it through the tops of trees.

“That's not one of ours,” someone said.

It sounded like a Chinook to Crosby. Traeger looked at him but said nothing. Twenty-five yards farther on, they could see the cabin through the trees. The helicopter had landed and there was the sound of gunfire. Their captors were looking at one another.

Traeger said, “Give us our weapons before you go. It looks like we're going to need them.”

The handguns were hurled at them and then their escort melted into the trees. Going to help their besieged fellows? Not very likely.

Traeger and Crosby went to earth, lying still and watching the action. One of the black-clad warriors from the helicopter went down and that seemed to galvanize his fellows. There was an assault on the cabin, a bursting inside, more gunfire, then silence. While they watched, a Pontiac with tinted windows arrived.

Crosby and Traeger waited. It was ten minutes more before Theophilus Grady was hustled out the door, trying to retain his dignity as he was pushed toward the helicopter. His holsters were empty.

Twenty minutes later, after the helicopter had lifted off, there was only silence. The car with tinted windows stayed, the house doubtless being searched. Eventually, the driver came out carrying a package as big as he was. He stowed it carefully in the backseat, got behind the wheel, and the car slid away. Crosby looked at Traeger.

“Were they ours?”

“Maybe. The car with the tinted glass? That's the one that followed me out of St. Louis.”

Then they went for their car, taking what they thought was a shortcut, which added considerably to the distance. They fell into the car finally, huffing and puffing after the long scramble through the woods, up and down, a helluva hike. Traeger got out his cell phone.

“Dortmund? Traeger.”

He listened.

“Thanks a lot.”

“He said he tried to warn us, but he had company.”

“From the Company?”

“Who else?”

PART II

Holy Hoax

CHAPTER ONE

The arrest of Theophilus Grady was not announced immediately, doubtless so his captors could squeeze out of him where the missing sacred portrait was. If they were surprised at his answer, which he clung to throughout what must have been a pretty rough grueling, it was as nothing compared to the public reaction. No one believed that the head honcho of the Rough Riders did not have the missing portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“Waterboard the son of a bitch,” urged Gunther. “The only thing that will quiet things down is the return of that picture.”

Miriam Dickinson, who had inspired the rosary crusade to send up ceaseless prayers so that Our Lady's miraculous portrait would be returned to the shrine in Mexico City, where pilgrims could once more revere it, urged a redoubling of the effort.

From Washington came the announcement that a thorough search of Grady's Idaho hideout had not turned up the missing miraculous image.

As days passed, the awful thought occurred that Grady might be telling the truth. Garbled accounts of the events that had taken place in long-term parking at the San Francisco airport prompted some to think that, while Grady might have had the portrait, it had been seized by someone else. But who?

Working with Jason Phelps, Catherine had noticed the books that kept arriving from
Amazon.com
, all of them concerned with Juan Diego and his cape. When Juan Diego opened the cape to show the skeptical bishop the unseasonable roses he had gathered at the behest of the Virgin, her image on the cape drove away all doubts. It was that cape, that
tilma
, as it was called, revered for centuries, that had been forcibly taken from the basilica.

“Are you going to write about it?” Catherine asked Jason.

They were on the patio in the evening, sipping margaritas, the great valley spread out below them. Phelps passed a hand over his shock of white hair, sipped his drink, and smiled at her.

“There is no need. It's already been done.”

Catherine did not understand. Most of the books that had arrived were devoted to authenticating the legend that had grown up around the miraculous portrait.

“Leoncio Garza-Valdés, a devout Catholic, a medical man, produced a book that went against the grain of his desires. He was like that fellow Weinstein, who set out to exonerate Alger Hiss and was forced to conclude that the man was guilty as charged. His former companions in championing Hiss never forgave him. And so it has been with Garza-Valdés.”

“He thinks the portrait is a fake?”

“Oh, many have cast sufficient doubts on the received view of the portrait, and its dating. Garza-Valdés was driven to conclude that Juan Diego himself had never existed.”

“And he convinced you?”

“He would convince anyone with an open mind. But an open mind is the last thing you can expect in such matters. I include myself, of course.” Another smile, another sip of his margarita. “The supreme test for Garza-Valdés was the fact that John Paul II had canonized Juan Diego. Made a saint of a man who, as Garza-Valdés proved to his own satisfaction, never existed. And yet Garza-Valdés continues to be a Catholic and professes a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin. But the whole story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is for him a fabrication.”

“Then all this commotion over the theft . . .”

“Is ridiculous.”

“That book should be translated.”

“You think that would make a difference?”

Catherine could not have explained why she felt so elated by what the distinguished old skeptic was saying. It was as if one more safeguard against the temptation that had brought her to Jason Phelps had been removed. The seductive attraction of the faith that had sent Lloyd rushing off to Mexico to do penance for their torrid days in Chicago, the stirring of old memories of piety that she had felt at his funeral, seemed ridiculous indeed in light of what Jason was saying. She pulled her chair closer to his. Ever since they had become lovers, a transition that she regarded as part of her cure, she had come to revere this man. It was not fair to compare her visits to his bed with the passion she had known with Lloyd. With Jason, it was as if he were the beloved and she the lover. Actually, she preferred it that way. And he was tender in his slow and faltering lovemaking. She wouldn't have called it love, but she had gotten less satisfaction from far younger men.

“I wonder if Don Ibanez knows of Garza-Valdés's book.”

“Oh, he must.”

“Have you discussed it with him?”

“Certainly not. There is a manly simplicity in his devotion. Obviously, it gives him great consolation. None of us can live without illusions.”

“What are your illusions?”

“That I am a young man again.” He ran his hand over her head, down her arm, and clutched her elbow. She leaned forward and kissed him. How odd it was to feel more mustache than lips.

Catherine wished that Clare were still working on Jason Phelps's papers so that she could talk about all this with the younger woman. Jason might wish to leave Don Ibanez to his delusions, but Catherine would have felt strengthened in her own disbelief if she could reproduce it in Clare.

They seemed like an old married couple when they flew back east, fed up with California and events they kept missing. Neal Admirari reminded himself that he was a columnist, not a reporter, and Lulu wrote for
Commonweal
, a magazine not exactly concerned with the breaking news of the day. Going to El Paso had seemed right at the time, but what difference did being there make to them?

“We should have stayed put.”

“Then we wouldn't have married.”

He looked at her, his nicely plump, pretty-faced, brand-new wife whose lips widened in a smile. Lulu was in the middle seat, Neal had the window, and the aisle seat was occupied by a kid who couldn't quite get comfortable—iPod plugs in his ears, a vacant look, but always squirming. Whenever he stretched one leg out in the aisle, he had to pull it back to let someone go by. Neal leaned toward Lulu and kissed her nose and the kid turned and stared. Neal smiled at him, invoking the old male camaraderie. The kid frowned and looked away, embarrassed.

“My place or yours?” Lulu asked.

Where they would settle had been their question for a week now. Neal had a loft in the Village. (“The Village!” Lulu was right; it seemed a desperate stab at his disappearing youth, like kissing Lulu on the nose with that kid looking on.) Lulu's apartment was in the Bronx, one he had never seen. She described it.

“We got it for a song.”

“We?”

Neal's immediate predecessor. He didn't like the thought of being a replacement for whatshisname, a substitute sent in to play the third quarter.

“Neal, I don't want to live in a bachelor's pad.”

“You make it sound more interesting than it is.”

“I'll bet.”

Neal let it go. If she wanted to think of him as Don Giovanni that was all right with him. It was the thought of all that moving and getting settled again that decided them to leave California and get at it. Neal had the summer place up in Connecticut and they would go there first.

“But I haven't a thing to wear.”

“That'll be fine.”

Again the smile. She whispered, “It's our anniversary.”

She was right. Two weeks since the ceremony in San Diego. He would have kissed her again if it hadn't been for Ichabod with the iPod.

Lulu went back to her book. She was reading up on Our Lady of Guadalupe in search of an idea for an article. Neal settled back, put on his eyeshade, and consulted the darkness as recent events slid past his mind.

The Holy Heist, as the
New York Post
described it, had been the beginning, a handful of masked and armed men raising a ladder, wrenching the framed picture of Mary free, and then shooting their way out of the basilica, killing one American. He smiled. The old joke about the Catholic press. Earthquake in Tahiti, no Catholics killed. Kaiser. Lulu had googled the name. Lloyd Kaiser had been an Indiana author.

“What did he write?”

“History for young adults.”

“Come on.”

She read him some of the titles. One on Heloise and Abelard, a book on Patrick Henry, another on Henry Adams, yet another on the founding of Notre Dame. That one had hit the jackpot, selling like popcorn in the Notre Dame bookstore, and across the land as alumni bought it for their kids.

“Was Kaiser a graduate of Notre Dame?”

She shook her head. “Indiana. College of Dentistry.”

“Come on.”

He read the entry himself. Well, lots of people fled boring professions in order to write. Neal himself had once thought of writing a novel—who hadn't?—but it would have been a bus-man's holiday since he already wrote for a living.

“You should do a piece on him, Lulu.”

“One American killed?”

“Hey, that's catchy.”

Now he smiled into the darkness created by his eyeshade. He might do a piece on Lloyd Kaiser himself. He began to compose it. There in the legendary basilica sat the author of popular history for young adults, on the mourning bench by the confessionals. A shot rang out and he leapt to his feet. . . . Neal drifted into sleep.

They had to catch another plane in Chicago, and Neal had trouble getting fully awake. Lulu looked at him with almost maternal concern as they went through a waiting area, on the lookout for a list of departures and their next gate. Neal was yawning. His eyeshade still hung around his neck. He felt like putting it on again and letting Lulu lead him through the crowds.