“Perhaps.”
“The Cathars—those folks who were burned in the thirteenth century?—they double-crossed the Crusaders by sneaking away in the middle of the night under the very noses of their occupiers.”
She just looked at me briefly without answering and then went back to concentrating on driving through the crowd without running anyone down.
I pushed. “No, I mean, are you sure it isn’t you who they are bowing before? It only happens when I’m near or around you, Maureen.”
She just looked at me and kept on slowly and very, very carefully driving out of the burning village.
39
The drive from the Alanno-Scafa exit to the town of Manoppello took another forty minutes, given the narrowness of the road and the fires burning randomly but fiercely in the wooded areas as well in many towns along the route.
We followed the signs leading to the sanctuary, and drove into a village square dominated by a strange-looking monastery church. Yes. Finally, the church of the Cappucine friars on the Tarigni hill outside Manoppello. From the front at least, it looked like a kid’s drawing of a church—except the entire façade was inset with a repeating pattern of dark stone crosses, broken only by a giant rose window and a steeple on the side of the building.
Think classic medieval church gone Pop Art—even though it was built two hundred years after the Middle Ages and three hundred before pop anything.
What the heck is this thing?
The tiny town was quiet. Too quiet. While rioting and burnings were going on in the surrounding towns and villages, this one was so still it was as though the apocalypse had already come and gone and no one had been left standing.
Maureen stopped the car in front of the church, and I got out. “Coming in?”
“No, I’d better stay with the car—just in case.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. It looks like everyone’s skipped town.”
“Trust no one. Remember?”
“Right.” I turned back. “I assume that includes you?”
“That includes me.”
I walked up the seven or eight wide stone steps leading to the entrance and tried to open the church doors, but they were all locked.
I turned back to look at the town. Nothing. Just Maureen in her nondescript, now that I think about it, cop-looking car.
Maybe everybody fled to escape the rioters—or to join them.
There was a tiny hotel right next to the monastery, so I walked back down and looked in the windows. I tried the door despite the fact that there was a sign in the window reading CHIUSO!!! (“Closed!!!”)
From the lower vantage point, looking up, I noticed that the monastery church had a tiny gift shop attached on the hotel side and that a window was slightly open.
Is that a monk peeking out the window? Definitely. That’s definitely a monk.
A brown hood obscured the monk’s face. It almost looked as though he didn’t have a face. Nonetheless, I waved and walked back toward him and, taking my chances, used the nun’s name. “Dove posso trovare la suora che si chiama Grethe?”
He opened the leaded window slightly and gestured with his hand to the mountain. Then: “La suora vive nella piccola casa sulla montagna,” meaning that—yes!—Sister Grethe did live up on the mountain!
He abruptly closed the small window, and I saw a tiny point of red light on my chest. A laser site.
Get your ass in gear, lady.
I made a quick, if deliberately measured walk back to the car and opened the door and got in.
“Damn! There’s a monk in the window and he’s packing heat,” I barked at Maureen, trying to catch my breath. “I don’t know whether we can trust him, but he said to go up that mountain road. The nun supposedly lives up there. By the looks of some of those big houses, it must be the smallest house on the mountain—easy to find. If not, and we knock on the wrong door, we get our heads shot off by some very rightfully paranoid Italians.”
We made our way up the dusty mountain road, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen either in any of the upscale vacation homes or even in smaller year-round houses dotting the mountainside. All shut up tight. It was impossible to see if anyone was there, because all the window gates were closed tight and even some of the front doors had giant bars and homemade devices across the front to keep out marauders.
We drove farther and farther up, the road getting more and more winding, until suddenly amid the ghost hill of houses, a tiny stucco cottage came into view—its front door ajar, the windows wide open.
Pristine white linen curtains were flapping slightly in the balmy spring breeze. I could hear singing and the sound of an organ coming from inside.