Heinzerling, now, with more tenderness than Mazarini had thought the Jesuit had in him. "We should find a position on the plaza, Father."
* * *
The battle itself was short, noisy and one-sided. The three priests took station in an upper room, awaiting the signal. Heinzerling turned out to have an American pistol, a huge brute of a thing by the standards of such, machined of some black metal. Mazzare frowned, but said nothing.
Outside, Mazzare could see down the street to where the Croats were coming from, and saw Dan Frost the constable facing them down. Good, he thought, draw them in. There is a man with courage, to die for his people. Would that constables in other towns were so conscientious.
The constable drew a pistol, leveled it at the front rank of Croats.
The shooting, when it came, was a rattle of rapid fire, the crack and curls of blue smoke from the Americans answering the coughs and reeking clouds of the Croat pistols.
Mazzare kept to the back of the room, where the unarmed sheltered, comforting the frightened. Mazarini stood in the window, ignoring the imprecations to keep his head down—every inch the captain he had once been—and watched the slaughter in the street below for some minutes.
Like him, Heinzerling stood. Side on to the window in the classic duelist's stance, returning fire and grinning the savage, tusky grin of a boar with the drop on the hunters.
The windows shattered in the storm of fire, the tinkle of glass inaudible in the rip of gunfire and the screams of wounded men and dying horses.
When it was clear that the battle was won, the street outside a bloody, shrieking shambles, Mazarini turned to find Mazzare holding a blood-soaked cloth to the back of a woman's head.
"Scalp wounds always bleed badly," offered Mazarini, "but are seldom serious."
"She's concussed. That"—Mazzare stabbed a finger at a heavy, brass-framed icon in the Eastern style—"fell off the wall."
Mazarini picked it up. It was painted on, of all things, black velvet. The saint's face was serene, slightly corpulent, and he was dressed in a white raiment adorned with jewels. The name written under the portrait was an odd one, the appellation even more so. Elvis—Still the King.
"What saint is this?" he asked, able now to converse normally with the guns all but silent.
It took some time to explain the slightly hysterical laughter to his satisfaction.
* * *
Irene Flannery's body was not found for hours. Cut down in her front yard, she had tried to drag herself back to her house to die, but had gotten only as far as a flowerbed. A riot of colorful growth like the rest of her garden, it had concealed her corpse from the first quick parties of searchers.
She was found, eventually, and only on Father Mazzare's insistence was she brought to the church for burial.
The order of service was stilted. The passages of scripture, the prayers and invocations echoed in the empty church. The badged man, the "Dan" who had spoken with Mazzare after he had tried to save the old woman's life, turned up for the requiem mass.
He had taken no communion and left without speaking. The Protestant Jones had also attended and had followed the pitiful cortege to the graveside, his worried silence following Mazzare's grimness like the foam in the wake of a ship running before a storm wind.
Mazzare had spoken the words of the requiem mass in a cold tone, an iron tone that hammered the flowing Latin syllables and drew them out as a glowing, hot wire of condemnation.
His sermon had been harsher still, for all its quietness and plainness of manner.
"The Ring of Fire was an Act of God," he had begun, "and in His Act he has done nothing so capricious as the act that has brought us here today. Irene Flannery, in her lonely old age, felt rejected. Rejected even by the church she made the second home of her thirty years of widowhood."
Not, today, the literary form of the eulogy, deprecated in a catechism that would not be written for three hundred years.
"She was not alone."
There were only seven people and a corpse to hear him. Only the corpse did not flinch.
"We have been brought to a world in which religion is no more than gang colors."
The walk to the cemetery was silent. There had been neither gasoline nor spare horses for a hearse. Irene Flannery, birdlike in life like so many old women, scarcely outweighed her pine box, but the pallbearers' tread was heavy.
"A world in which people kill and die and nations stand or fall by the canting of theologians and the greed of statesmen."
Heinzerling had risen in the small hours to dig a grave in the pouring rain.