The Thorn Birds (72 page)

“Sit down, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, his hand indicating the chair next to him.

“Hello, pusskins,” said Justine, tickling the blue-grey cat in his scarlet lap. “She’s nice, isn’t she?”

“Indeed she is.”

“What’s her name?”

“Natasha.”

The door opened, but not to admit the tea trolley. A man, mercifully clad as a layman; one more red soutane, thought Justine, and I’ll bellow like a bull.

But he was no ordinary man, even if he was a layman. They probably had a little house rule in the Vatican, continued Justine’s unruly mind, which specifically barred ordinary men. Not exactly short, he was so powerfully built he seemed more stocky than he was, with massive shoulders and a huge chest, a big leonine head, long arms like a shearer. Ape-mannish, except that he exuded intelligence and moved with the gait of someone who would grasp whatever he wanted too quickly for the mind to follow. Grasp it and maybe crush it, but never aimlessly, thoughtlessly; with exquisite deliberation. He was dark, but his thick mane of hair was exactly the color of steel wool and of much the same consistency, could steel wool have been crimped into tiny, regular waves.

“Rainer, you come in good time,” said Cardinal Vittorio, indicating the chair on his other side, still speaking in English. “My dear,” he said, turning to Justine as the man finished kissing his ring and rose, “I would like you to meet a very good friend. Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Rainer, this is Dane’s sister, Justine.”

He bowed, clicking his heels punctiliously, gave her a brief smile without warmth and sat down, just too far off to one side to see. Justine breathed a sigh of relief, especially when she saw that Dane had draped himself with the ease of habit on the floor beside Cardinal Ralph’s chair, right in her central vision. While she could see someone she knew and loved well, she would be all right. But the room and the red men and now this dark man were beginning to irritate her more than Dane’s presence calmed; she resented the way they shut her out. So she leaned to one side and tickled the cat again, aware that Cardinal Vittorio sensed and was amused by her reactions.

“Is she spayed?” asked Justine.

“Of course.”

“Of course! Though why you needed to bother I don’t know. Just being a permanent inhabitant of this place would be enough to neuter anyone’s ovaries.”

“On the contrary, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, enjoying her hugely. “It is we men who have psychologically neutered ourselves.”

“I beg to differ, Your Eminence.”

“So our little world antagonizes you?”

“Well, let’s just say I feel a bit superfluous, Your Eminence. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”

“I cannot blame you. I also doubt that you like to visit. But you will get used to us, for you must visit us often, please.”

Justine grinned. “I hate being on my best behavior,” she confided. “It brings out the absolute worst in me—I can feel Dane’s horrors from here without even looking at him.”

“I was wondering how long it was going to last,” said Dane, not at all put out. “Scratch Justine’s surface and you find a rebel. That’s why she’s such a nice sister for me to have. I’m not a rebel, but I do admire them.”

Herr Hartheim shifted his chair so that he could continue to keep her in his line of vision even when she straightened, stopped playing with the cat. At that moment the beautiful animal grew tired of the hand with an alien female scent, and without getting to its feet crawled delicately from red lap to grey, curling itself under Herr Hartheim’s strong square stroking hands, purring so loudly that everyone laughed.

“Excuse me for living,” said Justine, not proof against a good joke even when she was its victim.

“Her motor is as good as ever,” said Herr Hartheim, the amusement working fascinating changes in his face. His English was so good he hardly had an accent, but it had an American inflection; he rolled his r’s.

The tea came before everyone settled down again, and oddly enough it was Herr Hartheim who poured, handing Justine her cup with a much friendlier look than he had given her at introduction.

“In a British community,” he said to her, “afternoon tea is the most important refreshment of the day. Things happen over teacups, don’t they? I suppose because by its very nature it can be demanded and taken at almost any time between two and five-thirty, and talking is thirsty work.”

The next half hour seemed to prove his point, though Justine took no part in the congress. Talk veered from the Holy Father’s precarious health to the cold war and then the economic recession, all four men speaking and listening with an alertness Justine found absorbing, beginning to grope for the qualities they shared, even Dane, who was so strange, so much an unknown. He contributed actively, and it wasn’t lost upon her that the three older men listened to him with a curious humility, almost as if he awed them. His comments were neither uninformed nor naïve, but they were different, original,
holy
. Was it for his holiness they paid such serious attention to him? That he possessed it, and they didn’t? Was it truly a virtue they admired, yearned for themselves? Was it so rare? Three men so vastly different one from the other, yet far closer bound together than any of them were to Dane. How difficult it was to take Dane as seriously as they did! Not that in many ways he hadn’t acted as an older brother rather than a younger; not that she wasn’t aware of his wisdom, his intellect or his holiness. But until now he had been a part of her world. She had to get used to the fact that he wasn’t anymore.

“If you wish to go straight to your devotions, Dane, I’ll see your sister back to her hotel,” commanded Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim without consulting anyone’s wishes on the subject.

And so she found herself walking tongue-tied down the marble stairs in the company of that squat, powerful man. Outside in the yellow sheen of a Roman sunset he took her elbow and guided her into a black Mercedes limousine, its chauffeur standing to attention.

“Come, you don’t want to spend your first evening in Rome alone, and Dane is otherwise occupied,” he said, following her into the car. “You’re tired and bewildered, so it’s better you have company.”

“You don’t seem to be leaving me any choice, Herr Hartheim.”

“I would rather you called me Rainer.”

“You must be important, having a posh car and your own chauffeur.”

“I’ll be more important still when I’m chancellor of West Germany.”

Justine snorted. “I’m surprised you’re not already.”

“Impudent! I’m too young.”

“Are you?” She turned sideways to look at him more closely, discovering that his dark skin was unlined, youthful, that the deeply set eyes weren’t embedded in the fleshy surrounds of age.

“I’m heavy and I’m grey, but I’ve been grey since I was sixteen and heavy since I’ve had enough to eat. At the present moment I’m a mere thirty-one.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, kicking her shoes off. “That’s still old to me—I’m sweet
twenty
-one.”

“You’re a monster,” he said, smiling.

“I suppose I must be. My mother says the same thing. Only I’m not sure what either of you means by monster, so you can give me your version, please.”

“Have you already got your mother’s version?”

“I’d embarrass the hell out of her if I asked.”

“Don’t you think you embarrass me?”

“I strongly suspect, Herr Hartheim, that you’re a monster, too, so I doubt if anything embarrasses you.”

“A monster,” he said again under his breath. “All right then, Miss O’Neill, I’ll try to define the term for you. Someone who terrifies others; rolls over the top of people; feels so strong only God can defeat; has no scruples and few morals.”

She chuckled. “It sounds like you, to me. And I have so too got morals and scruples. I’m Dane’s sister.”

“You don’t look a bit like him.”

“More’s the pity.”

“His face wouldn’t suit your personality.”

“You’re undoubtedly right, but with his face I might have developed a different personality.”

“Depending on which comes first, eh, the chicken or the egg? Put your shoes on; we’re going to walk.”

It was warm, and growing dark; but the lights were brilliant, there were crowds it seemed no matter where they walked, and the roads were jammed with shrieking motor scooters, tiny aggressive Fiats, Goggomobils looking like hordes of panicked frogs. Finally he halted in a small square, its cobbles worn to smoothness by the feet of many centuries, and guided Justine into a restaurant.

“Unless you’d prefer al fresco?” he asked.

“Provided you feed me, I don’t much care whether it’s inside, outside, or halfway between.”

“May I order for you?”

The pale eyes blinked a little wearily perhaps, but there was still fight in Justine. “I don’t know that I go for all that high-handed masterful-male business,” she said. “After all, how do you know what I fancy?”

“Sister Anna carries her banner,” he murmured. “Tell me what sort of food you like, then, and I’ll guarantee to please you. Fish? Veal?”

“A compromise? All right, I’ll meet you halfway, why not? I’ll have pâté, some scampi and a huge plate of saltimbocca, and after that I’ll have a cassata and a cappuccino coffee. Fiddle around with that if you can.”

“I ought to slap you,” he said, his good humor quite unruffled. He gave her order to the waiter exactly as she had stipulated it, but in rapid Italian.

“You said I don’t look a bit like Dane. Aren’t I like him in any way at all?” she asked a little pathetically over coffee, too hungry to have wasted time talking while there was food on the table.

He lit her cigarette, then his own, and leaned into the shadows to watch her quietly, thinking back to his first meeting with the boy months ago. Cardinal de Bricassart minus forty years of life; he had seen it immediately, and then had learned they were uncle and nephew, that the mother of the boy and the girl was Ralph de Bricassart’s sister.

“There is a likeness, yes,” he said. “Sometimes even of the face. Expressions far more than features. Around the eyes and the mouth, in the way you hold your eyes open and your mouths closed. Oddly enough, not likenesses you share with your uncle the Cardinal.”

“Uncle the Cardinal?” she repeated blankly.

“Cardinal de Bricassart. Isn’t he your uncle? Now, I’m sure I was told he was.”

“That old vulture? He’s no relation of ours, thank heavens. He used to be our parish priest years ago, a long time before I was born.”

She was very intelligent; but she was also very tired. Poor little girl—for that was what she was, a little girl. The ten years between them yawned like a hundred. To suspect would bring her world to ruins, and she was so valiant in defense of it. Probably she would refuse to see it, even if she were told outright. How to make it seem unimportant? Not labor the point, definitely not, but not drop it immediately, either.

“That accounts for it, then,” he said lightly.

“Accounts for what?”

“The fact that Dane’s likeness to the Cardinal is in general things—height, coloring, build.”

“Oh! My grandmother told me our father was rather like the Cardinal to look at,” said Justine comfortably.

“Haven’t you ever seen your father?”

“Not even a picture of him. He and Mum separated for good before Dane was born.” She beckoned the waiter. “I’d like another cappuccino, please.”

“Justine, you’re a savage! Let me order for you!”

“No, dammit, I won’t I’m perfectly capable of thinking for myself, and I don’t need some bloody man always to tell me what I want and when I want it, do you hear?”

“Scratch the surface and one finds a rebel; that was what Dane said.”

“He’s right. Oh, if you knew how I hate being petted and cosseted and fussed over! I like to act for myself, and I
won’t
be told what to do! I don’t ask for quarter, but I don’t give any, either.”

“I can see that,” he said dryly. “What made you so,
Herzchen
? Does it run in the family?”

“Does it? I honestly don’t know. There aren’t enough women to tell, I suppose. Only one per generation. Nanna, and Mum, and me. Heaps of men, though.”

“Except in your generation there are not heaps of men. Only Dane.”

“Due to the fact Mum left my father, I expect. She never seemed to get interested in anyone else. Pity, I think. Mum’s a real homebody; she would have liked a husband to fuss over.”

“Is she like you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“More importantly, do you like each other?”

“Mum and I?” She smiled without rancor, much as her mother would have done had someone asked her whether she liked her daughter. “I’m not sure if we
like
each other, but there is something there. Maybe it’s a simple biological bond; I don’t know.” Her eyes kindled. “I’ve always wanted her to talk to me the way she does to Dane, and wanted to get along with her the way Dane does. But either there’s something lacking in her, or something lacking in me. Me, I’d reckon. She’s a much finer person than I am.”

“I haven’t met her, so I can’t agree or disagree with your judgment. If it’s of any conceivable comfort to you,
Herzchen
, I like you exactly the way you are. No, I wouldn’t change a thing about you, even your ridiculous pugnacity.”

“Isn’t that nice of you? And after I insulted you, too. I’m not really like Dane, am I?”

“Dane isn’t like anyone else in the world.”

“You mean because he’s so not of this world?”

“I suppose so.” He leaned forward, out of the shadows into the weak light of the little candle in its Chianti bottle. “I am a Catholic, and my religion has been the one thing in my life which has never failed me, though I have failed it many times. I dislike speaking of Dane, because my heart tells me some things are better left undiscussed. Certainly you aren’t like him in your attitude to life, or God. Let’s leave it, all right?”

She looked at him curiously. “All right, Rainer, if you want. I’ll make a pact with you—no matter what we discuss, it won’t be the nature of Dane, or religion.”

Much had happened to Rainer Moerling Hartheim since that meeting with Ralph de Bricassart in July 1943. A week afterward his regiment had been dispatched to the Eastern Front, where he spent the remainder of the war. Torn and rudderless, too young to have been indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth in its leisurely prewar days, he had faced the consequences of Hitler in feet of snow, without ammunition, the front line stretched so thin there was only one soldier for every hundred yards of it. And out of the war he carried two memories: that bitter campaign in bitter cold, and the face of Ralph de Bricassart. Horror and beauty, the Devil and God. Half crazed, half frozen, waiting defenseless for Khrushchev’s guerrillas to drop from low-flying planes parachuteless into the snowdrifts, he beat his breast and muttered prayers. But he didn’t know what he prayed for: bullets for his gun, escape from the Russians, his immortal soul, the man in the basilica, Germany, a lessening of grief.