The Sixth Station(128)

“Stop the car! Stop the car!”

Maureen slowed then stopped the car and put on the emergency brake to prevent us from rolling backward. The singing stopped, although the organ music continued. As we were looking up at the house, a nun in full habit stepped out onto the tiny porch and looked at us. She was in her late sixties and squinted against the sun to get a better look.

“That’s her!” Maureen cried. “Grethe. The mad scientist. Literally! She’s still wearing the Carmelite habit despite being defrocked decades ago.”

If ever anyone didn’t look like a mad scientist or defrocked nun, it was that lady standing on the porch. She looked, if anything, like a little old lady who’d given her life to Jesus.

Or maybe like a nonkilling version of Maureen. I opened the car door and again Maureen declined to join me as I walked up the path to her house. In fact, she ducked down in the seat.

Will the nun buy this cheesy nun outfit?

She looked me over carefully, not giving an inch, studying my face as I studied hers in turn.

I’ve seen that look before. Right. In every subway car in New York. A genuine nut job.

She leaned on the railing and simply said, in a very thick German accent, “The end has begun. Don’t you see? Oh, yes.”

Then she touched my face the way a blind person would—to “see” me with her fingers.

“Soon they’ll be here, cara Alazais. They’ll come for me. Sie werden mein Junge bald töten!”

“How do you know my name?”

It’s not your name—remember? Not your name.

The nun began to weep then. “They will kill my boy soon.” She looked down uncomprehendingly at the rosary hanging down the front of her habit and mumbled, “Sie werden unser Gott bald töten … They will kill our Lord.”

She squinted at the car, but Maureen was down enough so that she wasn’t visible. She moved to the threshold of her front door and gestured for me to enter.

The cottage was a tiny two-room affair. The front room was unfurnished save for a small cot, an easel with a painting-in-progress of Armageddon, and a table with a microscope on it. There were many large and small icons on the walls, floor, and on every available inch of space. They all had one theme: the Holy Face of Manoppello. It smelled of oil paint and turpentine.

She ushered me into the back room, which had a Pullman kitchen, a state-of-the-art computer, an electron microscope, and what looked like right-this-second medical testing equipment.

The back wall was made up of skinny metal drawers—the kind that hold medical slides or photos. Each was marked in symbols I’d never seen before.

Off the back of the house was an enclosed porch with candles and incense burning on a small altar.

“Did he give you the sample?” Grethe implored, still searching my face for—what?

“Who do you mean?”

“Jacobi. The priest. Did he give you anything?”

“You mean Father Paulo?”

“Ha. Lying scum,” she spit out, her German accent getting thicker by the second. “Almost ruined the entire Experiment. Him and that filthy soldier. Two badt ones—yes, very, very badt!”

How did this group ever spend time together without killing one another?

“Well, I had a test tube with blood.…”

“Yes! Yes! Give it now to me,” she sang almost like a little ditty, as she clapped her hands and began a little jig.

So nuts.

“I don’t have it. It broke.”

“What does this mean?” she wailed, and began keening in that “ululu” way the Iraqi women did over their dead during the war.

“It got crushed under, ah, a boot.”

She grabbed me by the sleeve and tugged violently. “Why were you so careless? Why did you let him have it?” Tears were pouring down her face, and she began rending the fabric of her habit.

“I didn’t. The test tube was in the safekeeping of a friend of his, in, ah, in a carpet shop. In Istanbul.”

The nun stopped dead and turned on her heel and stared at me.

“Headquarters entrusted that, that, drug-addict pig to hold on to the precious cord blood? Noooooo. Impossible. Quite impossible.” She ripped the top portion of her habit, and it hung down over her bodice while she rocked back and forth, crying and keening.

As quickly as it started, the hysteria stopped. Grethe wiped her eyes and stood up as though none of that had just happened.

“So you have other proof?” she asked crisply. “Didn’t Paulo give you anything else? Did he?” she asked hopefully.

“No, but see, I met Yusef Pantera and—”

She cut me off midsentence and menaced me with her balled-up fist, causing me to take a few steps back. Good thing, because the little old nun spat a big one right on the floor between us.