Embarrassed by my lack of biblical knowledge, I answered her with a question instead: “So you believe John took that old woman all that way? How would She have survived the trip?”
“The Blessed Mother? She was only forty-six or so when Her Son was crucified.”
“What? I don’t know all that much about the New Testament,” I admitted, “but I do know that Jesus died when He was thirty-three. Right?”
“Right. The same age as Demiel ben Yusef is now.”
Holy good God! How had I not thought of that before? This is getting even weirder.
Maureen leaned back, pleased with my reaction. “The Blessed Mother was probably twelve or thirteen years old when She became impregnated. She had already been betrothed to Joseph, an older man, before that. Remember, in those days a girl was promised in marriage between the ages of eleven and fourteen at the latest.”
“Thirteen! So the Mother of Infant Jesus wasn’t a thirty-year-old blue-eyed white woman in a light blue burqa?”
“Hardly. And after Her Son, the seditionist—what we might call a terrorist today—was crucified, Her life was no longer safe in Jerusalem. Thus Mary’s house in Selçuk. It stands to this day.”
I must have looked surprised, so she said, “Why, Ms. Russo, with that good Italian Catholic last name, I’m frankly surprised that you don’t know your Catholic history.”
I countered: “Do you always judge a book by its writer? The Russos are proud agnostics, well, deists more specifically. I was brought up to never trust a religion that requires big gold hats and massive golden cathedrals in order to worship God.”
She looked disgusted.
“My parents were hippies back in the day.”
She dropped her point.
“As I was saying, we found that a group was escaping with the infant boy and its thirteen-year-old mother—yes, she was the same age as the Virgin Mary. A girl named Theotokos Bienheureux, who had been hemorrhaging very badly. We were told she probably would have died anyway—”
I cut her off. “Who exactly was this girl? Where did she come from?”
“America. New York City, actually. She went to the Friends Seminary school there, and then suddenly she wasn’t there anymore. Her parents skipped town when the school came looking. The cops thought they’d murdered her. We learned differently. They’d simply pimped her out to these freaks.”
I swallowed hard.
“As I was saying,” she continued, “she was traveling with three of the most evil humans that ever lived: a renegade, defrocked Catholic nun named Grethe—no last name we knew of, and a Vatican priest named Paulo Jacoby, plus a twenty-something-year-old soldier of fortune named, yes, Yusef Pantera. The same man who was named by the chief magistrate this morning. I assume you’ve been listening to the news?”
I didn’t dignify the question with a response, but said, “You know ben Yusef said to me, ‘Go forth for I am six,’ but if I’m counting correctly, you’re telling me there were five of them, including the baby.”
“Yes, there were five of them. And there was no question that they and the baby had to be ‘disappeared.’”
American-ordered infanticide of Christ, for Christ’s sake?
“Disappeared as in ‘shot’?” I asked, trying to look unaffected.
“No, as in blowing their plane out of the sky,” she said sarcastically. “Two hours after our meeting had begun, the electricity was restored and they began tracking all ports, sea, rail, air. We found that they had boarded a private aircraft during the blackout.
“We never figured out where all their resources came from. But trust me, theirs was the only aircraft that was able to take off, as opposed to just land, that day. That’s one reason we—all the operatives—knew it was their plane. It was also the one thing that proved that in fact this infant was no ordinary child.
“It was clear—at least to us and our higher-ups, from whom we were taking our orders on a minute-by-minute basis as things changed, and they were changing rapidly—that this child or whoever was in charge of this child seemed to be able to harness and block energy! Could it be true that the baby was some kind of superbeing? Or a clone of Jesus? Who else could harness power? It was an earthshaking concept, to say the very least!
“An international fleet of fighters was launched. They surrounded it and, just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers, “blew their aircraft out of the sky! Or a plane we believed was their aircraft.”
She carefully drained her glass and wiped her mouth as if she’d just had a cup of tea instead of half a tumbler of Scotch and had told me about capturing a spy instead of describing the assassination of a thirteen-year-old girl, a newborn baby, a nun, a priest, and their—what?—bodyguard/father/child molester?