“Is that hope or dread I read in your face?”
“Both. Pantera’s got the scarf, so that’s hope—if he’s alive. But if he’s not, both the scarf and the man are incinerated and wiped out forever.” I somehow couldn’t bring myself to say “dead” and his name in the same sentence. Fool.
She switched the subject. “We have to leave here. Now. The world is about to be rocked off its foundations”—she checked her watch—“in about ten minutes. But regardless of that, this place isn’t safe for you—now.”
“Why, what’s happening?” I demanded.
“Ben Yusef. He’s going to make an announcement. From prison.”
“Are you sure?”
She gave me that look again.
“Okay … and?”
“I think it will not just alter the course of his tribunal but the course of the world—one whose end, it seems, has already begun.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tsunamis, earthquakes, routine class-five hurricanes, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions, for starters, have already become commonplace—no? Anyone who thinks the end hasn’t begun is a fool. What he says today may hasten it—that’s all. Unless you can prove before they kill him that he is indeed the cloned Son of the Son of God! Perhaps you can rally those who believe in Jesus to rise up.”
“Do you believe he is the Son of the Son?”
“I saw the children from the UN,” she answered. “I saw them.”
“How? I thought they were now hidden away and only Judge Bagayoko has seen them.”
She just looked at me. Right.
The subject was changed. “I assume you have a lead on the source blood or you wouldn’t be heading north. The mountains?” she asked.
“Yes. I think it may be in Manoppello—a small town in Abruzzo. In a monastery there.”
“And how do you know this?”
“Reporters investigate,” I said, playing her game her way. She let it go and opened the plastic bag she’d brought with her. Inside was a nun’s veil, a gray dress, some sensible shoes, and a bottle. She held it up. Instant tanning lotion. “You really will be a ‘sister’ now.”
How many times in one lifetime—or make that one week—am I going to dress up like a nun? I’m like a fetish hooker.
I went into the little bathroom and applied the tanning liquid by the dim light of the bathroom fixture. In Italy the ceilings and the light fixtures are all too high to cast any decent light for you to actually see anything very well in a mirror. But from what I could make out, I didn’t look tan, I looked African-American.
“You forgot your hands,” she said, sticking her head into the bathroom. “Black women do not have white hands.” She took the bottle and rubbed the tops of my hands and handed me the clothes. “Now put these on,” she said, before washing the tanning lotion off her own palms.
As I slipped the dress on, Maureen took her gun out of her little-old-lady purse, walked to the window, and opened the shutter slats a hair to survey the area below. “Hurry now.”
I slipped into the clothes, and she helped me attach the veil and hung a crucifix around my neck. “I’ll divert the clerk. You take the next lift.”
When I came back down to the lobby, the clerk was nowhere to be seen and Maureen directed me to a nondescript black car parked across the street, and we got in. “It has an Alfa engine; don’t worry,” she said.
“My rental car…”
She just looked exasperated at my idiotic compulsiveness as she started her car.
38
The minute we got back on the highway, I heard a loud explosion in the area of the motel.
“The car?” She said nothing.
We could also hear gunfire from towns around us and small fires blazing in the trees on the mountainsides. She pushed the pedal to the floor and accelerated to a dangerous speed.
“It’s begun,” she said, and turned on the radio.
She switched to BBC.
“Ben Yusef. He’s about to do it.”
From his jail cell, the voice of Demiel ben Yusef was clear and strong, even though he’d been fasting for what must have been at least forty days by then.
“Now that I am about to give up the shell in which I have been entombed in this lifetime,” he said, “neither do I refute nor admit to the charges against me. Only God, my parent, can judge me.
“Do not mourn me, nor exalt me, and do not kill in my name. You cannot mourn me, for I will never die. As you will never die—no matter what you fear in the coming days.
“Death is just an altered state of being. Life after life is the normal state. Everyone who is alive is already dead and also now alive. Understand this and fear death no more.