Relic of Time (6 page)

Even as a boy he had found the computer no more mystifying than an abacus. In his early teens, he was already a tester of beta programs, and he was soon hired by an electronics company at a salary that dazzled his parents. But he remained immune to money as money. For some years, the sheer fun of devising new programs was sufficient for him; eventually, in his twenties, he founded Empedocles, and before he was thirty he was listed among the twenty-five richest men in the country. When his head touched the ceiling of the Crystal Palace of wealth, something happened. One sleepless night, surfing the channels of distraction, he came upon EWTN, where Mother Angelica seemed to be speaking directly to him with the simplicity of his sainted mother. He was overwhelmed. He flew to Birmingham, where he confessed his sins, the minor sins of an overly busy man, and vowed to change his life.

He did. He found again the devotion to the Blessed Virgin that he had learned at his mother's knee. He resolved to put his wealth at the service of the Catholic Church. On the grounds of Empedocles he had an exact replica of the grotto at Lourdes erected. And he had remained single, a species of eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake. Ignatius Hannan was stunned by the outrage perpetrated in Mexico City.

“They'll find it,” Ray Whipple, his right-hand man, insisted.

“Of course they will,” said Laura. Her status would have required him to have two right hands.

“There's no of course about it. What is being done?”

“We won't know until it's over.”

Hannan seemed not to have heard. “Get hold of that fellow Traeger.”

“Nate, he's retired.”

“I'll bring him out of retirement. I like that man.”

Traeger had been the key to the recovery of the third secret of Fatima and in the process had been betrayed by his old associates in the intelligence community.

Laura promised to get hold of Traeger and summon him to New Hampshire.

This proved to be a promise impossible to keep. There was no answer at the phone numbers Laura had for Traeger. Then she remembered Dortmund and succeeded in putting through a call to him.

“He's on assignment,” the old voice said.

“Mr. Hannan wants to hire him to recover the stolen image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

A long pause. “Tell Mr. Hannan that things are under way.”

“I don't believe it,” Hannan said when Laura reported to him. “That's government double-talk. If the administration was serious they would . . .”

He wasn't sure what he expected them to do. But then he was neither a politician nor an operative like Traeger. He believed in relying on people who knew things he did not.

“If not Traeger, someone like him.”

Ray Whipple said he would see what he could do.

And that was how Will Crosby came to Empedocles, flown in from the Boston airport on a company helicopter, and coming crouched under the still whirling blades toward a waiting Ignatius Hannan.

Crosby had turned his background into a successful investigation agency. He had come on the assumption that Hannan had some problem with competitors, the sort of problem Crosby had built a reputation on handling. His eyes rounded when he learned what was expected of him.

“That's not in my usual line.”

“It's not in anyone's usual line. I've heard good things of you.”

“Your grotto reminds me of Lourdes.”

“It ought to. It's an exact replica. Have you been to Lourdes?”

“I took my mother there in her last illness.”

“And?”

“She died in peace.”

Crosby's mention of his mother reminded Hannan of his own. It seemed to form a bond between them. And when they got down to the theft of the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, it was clear that Crosby and Hannan were kindred spirits indeed. Crosby wanted time to think. He went out to the grotto and sat there telling his beads. When he came back, he said, “I'll do my best.”

It was then that Ignatius Hannan revealed that he planned a two-pronged attack. The efforts of Crosby would of course be kept from the public. What everyone would know was that Ignatius Hannan was offering one million dollars for the safe return of the sacred image.

“Anyone who would steal that picture will give it up for money.”

“You may be right,” Crosby said.

“Within a week, I will double the amount.”

“I wouldn't do that.”

“Why not?”

“They'll wait to see what you'll offer the following week.”

Will Crosby was a large man, over six feet tall, his face an arrangement of planes that did not reveal his mind. He was in excellent physical shape, and he had a wife and grown children, one at Notre Dame; one at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia; and a daughter at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. Ray Whipple had listed the man's feats in the CIA, any one of which recommended him for the task Hannan now hired him to undertake. After starting his own agency, he single-handedly rescued a senator's daughter, still intact, from kidnappers who were negotiating with a Saudi sheik for her purchase; that alone would have recommended him to Hannan. The rescued girl had subsequently written a book about her ordeal, one that was banned by various libraries around the country for its alleged Islamophobia.

“You'll start immediately?”

“I have associates who can take care of lesser matters.”

The two men shook hands; the helicopter lifted, dipped once, seemingly toward the grotto, and then rose gracefully and disappeared over a tree-covered hill. Hannan turned to Laura.

“Prepare a statement about the reward.”

George Worth was appalled by Miguel Arroyo's call to arms. Pacifism was a central tenet of the Catholic Worker movement and in recent years the plight of immigrant workers had become a dominant concern. No wonder. The center in Palo Alto, and others across the Southwest, all the way to Houston, provided refuge and aid to the Latinos who had learned that the utopia they had sought gave them at best an equivocal welcome. Their labor was welcomed but now, with the federal crackdown, many were being rounded up as they emerged from work. Employers were first warned, then fined. The party, it seemed, was over.

George missed Clare. At first he had considered his attraction to her to be a weakness. She was beautiful, but Dorothy Day had been beautiful at Clare's age. She was a child of privilege, but who was not? George's family lived in affluence in Winnetka. When he admitted this to Clare, it was meant to indicate that they were more alike than different. He understood her reaction to the poverty in which he and the guests lived. It had taken him a long time to overcome it himself. Now that he was more or less used to it, he almost missed the aversion he had felt at first. But his conversations with Clare had seldom alluded to what he was sure explained her going.

“George, if this country is as bad as you think, why should you want to protect the illegals coming into it?”

“Don't call them illegals.”

“What should I call them?”

“Brothers. Sisters.” He smiled. “Jesus.” How many guests bore the name Jesú?

“They're exploited here, you say so yourself.”

“They will have an effect on the injustices they suffer.”

Dorothy Day had spoken of the plight of nonunionized workers, the sweatshops, the bullying bosses, but all that now seemed a bygone world. American workers were now members of the bourgeoisie, comfortable, well paid, materialistic.

“What changes?”

“They'll keep jobs in the country.”

The fact was that the big unions now backed globalization, even at the manifest expense of their members, with jobs out-sourced from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, everywhere, and whole industries packing up and resettling in Taiwan, Latin America, wherever they were able to lower their wages and increase their profits.

Once immigrants had been farmworkers for the most part, harvesting the crops of the country, glad for the grueling labor that enabled them to send money home, or return with it when the season was over. In college, George had been a volunteer, spurred on by Campus Ministry to devote his summers to the cause of the farm workers. The poverty they lived in rivaled that from which they had fled, although some farmers provided decent housing. George had never thought of this as political action. Radicalizing immigrant farm workers had always seemed to him a misunderstanding. Oh, he had lifted his voice in protest against the plague of industrial farming, with whole counties, it seemed, under the thumb of the giants in the food industry. Of course that kind of farming was more efficient, but it could be done with a few men on machines. His second summer, he had joined the workers in the field.

Agriculture exercises a mystic attraction on the city boy, particularly one from the affluent suburbs. To nurture and eventually harvest the fruits of the earth seemed a religious experience. The caprices of nature—frosts, flood, and drought—contributed to the sense that farming could only succeed with the help of God. Moving through the rows of ripe tomatoes, filling his basket like the others, George felt the endless sweaty, exhausting task seemed a form of prayer. But he learned not to voice such lofty thoughts to his companions when they gathered in the evenings. The local bishop appointed a priest to the immigrants and they were grateful for the Mass he said for them each Sunday, but their religion was one of practice, not discussion. On a wall in every shack was the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with, at night, a candle burning before it.

In senior year, he read the autobiography of Dorothy Day; he subscribed to the Houston
Catholic Worker
; he found his destiny.

“A soup kitchen?” his father had asked, trying to keep calm. The summers spent with the farmworkers had seemed a harmless romantic notion next to this. At least George hadn't gone to Cuba to cut sugarcane for Fidel.

“We will provide food, of course. And lodging.”

“Do you know how many of these people have gotten into the country?”

George knew.

“So tell me how one soup kitchen can help them all.”

“I will help those I can.”

Of course his father opposed government programs to help the poor. His contempt for the “nanny state” was total. Universal health care, ever-rising minimum wages, regulation after regulation—all that interfered with the fundamental law of economics. Supply and demand and a firm eye on the bottom line. A rising tide lifts all boats. His father knew that all a man had to do was lift himself by his own bootstraps. He had done it himself.

“I don't believe in political solutions, Dad.”

“Good!”

His father thought he had won an argument. Mother Teresa of Calcutta was once interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge, who had marveled at her efforts to collect and comfort the dying. It was, perhaps, the beginning of his conversion. But at the time he had asked the old nun why she didn't agitate for a social, a political, remedy for such poverty.

“And let others do it?”

It was watching that interview over and over that had converted George to the religion he already professed. To living it. Blessed are the poor. And the companion of that was, the poor you will always have with you. There was no “solution” to poverty any more than there was a solution to original sin. This was a vale of tears, even in Winnetka. One on one, person to person. The Good Samaritan hadn't troubled himself with the fact that he could not simultaneously help every wretch beside the road. He was here; this wretch was here; he did what he did. That was the answer.

“A drop in the bucket,” his father said.

“Not if everyone did the same.”

“But not everyone will.”

“That doesn't take away my obligation.”

They had agreed to disagree. His father had listened impatiently when George told him how the fathers of the modern economy, and later Marxists, had opposed alleviating the plight of the poor. The former had thought that, eventually, all would benefit from industrialization; the latter had counted on a revolutionary uprising to bring down the system.

“I am not a Marxist, George.”

“Of course not.”

John Paul II, in
Centesimus Annus
, had eloquently restated the Church's position on unbridled capitalism, but his words had been twisted into a defense of the reigning political economy. Well, the pope had seemed to waffle a bit on government solutions. George preferred Dorothy Day's and Mother Teresa's positions. Do what you can for the poor and beaten. Don't try to shuffle it off on others, on sweeping solutions that worsened the problem. One day at a time. A bowl of soup. When I was hungry, you fed me. His father had begrudgingly put up the money for the house in Palo Alto. George had taken only half of what he offered.