The Sixth Station(62)

“I am Father Paulo Jacobi,” he said.

Under the hood I could discern a man, perhaps eighty; thin, with heavy-lidded, rheumy blue eyes. He wore a black cassock, similar in style although not in color to the kind worn by monks. A large gold and jewel-encrusted cross of a type I’d never seen glittered dramatically on a heavy gold chain on his chest. All four posts of the cross had v-shaped wings that curved outward.

“Aha. Father Jacobi. So I see,” I said, my meaning both literal and figurative.

“I’m afraid you seem to ‘see’ as well as a blind man,” he replied.

“Okaaaay.” I pushed the glass of hot tea away from me, and it spilled on the table.

“Miss Russo, may I remind you that you are no longer in New York. Manners count for much here, and yours seem to be sorely lacking.”

“Excuse me? You are the one who had me dragged into this place kicking and screaming. In what country—or perhaps what time period—is that considered mannerly behavior, Father?”

Did you sell that little girl to some sex ring way back in the eighties, you freak?

This old bastard was really beginning to tick me off, my fear turning back to good old-fashioned New Yorker intolerance. No wonder Maureen had sort of warned me about him.

My crack about his having bad manners seemed to bring him back to reality—or civility at least—and he turned cordial on a dime.

Slime bag.

“Please. Let us begin once more then,” he said, reaching for my hand.

“No, not that maneuver again! I prefer to keep my typing fingers intact, thank you very much.”

He won.

Fast for an old creep.

This time he held it gently and turned my hand over several times the way a palm reader might, studying it. He then did something incredibly creepy: He lifted it and, yes, kissed it!

When I snatched my hand back from him and looked at it, I could see a red trickle coming down the center of my palm. Damn! It had started to bleed. But strangely there was no cut, puncture mark, or scratch that I could see.

“What the hell?”

“No, not hell, Miss Russo. Anything but.” With that Father Paulo got down on his knees before me. “You are indeed the Chosen One!” he cried, in a sort of ecstatic state. Mr. Cesur bent his head, made a double sign of the cross, and got down on his knees as well.

In, I assumed, devil-worshipper tongue (which turned out only to be Turkish), they began chanting, something like, “Tan ree I yidder, Tan ree buy’d a car, tan ree eclipse the sun,” over and over again.

I later learned—via Google Translate—that it was probably: “Tanrı iyidir. Tanri büyüktür, Tanrı elçisidir korur!” “God is good. God is great. God bless the messenger!” That would be me apparently.

He—they—were insane. Clearly.

“The Chosen One needs a Band-Aid,” I said. “I cut my hand somehow. You didn’t bite it, did you?”

I’m thinking AIDS, I’m thinking vampire. I’m thinking this is worse than being a fugitive with a price on my head. Get the hell out of here. Somehow.

Never having had someone kneel before me—other than, say, Donald, when he was half in the bag and singing to me in what he thought was French on our wedding night—I was completely at odds about what to do.

“Ah, I could use a Band-Aid,” I repeated.

Nothing. So I went for the idiotic.

“Rise!” I declared, like Elizabeth to Essex. It was worth a try—right?

It worked. The two men got off their knees and stood before me.

“Do you have a Band-Aid?” I asked again, now sucking on my palm to stop the bleeding.

“A Band-Aid will never stanch the blood of Christ,” Father Paulo declared.

“I think it’s just a cut, really.”

Mr. Cesur brought me a cloth, which he wrapped around my hand as a tourniquet. When I unwrapped the thing two minutes later, the blood was stanched. “See? The blood of Christ has stopped,” I said, as Jacobi and Cesur stared trancelike.

“Miss Russo, it is the stigmata—the sign. The unmistakable sign we have all been waiting for. You are the Chosen One we have waited for. The only one who can save the world.”

“I’m just a reporter. I can’t save the world. Seriously.”

He looked at me somewhat bemused by my—what?—naïveté. He continued as though I hadn’t just made this giant concession to my inability to save the world from destruction.

He picked up my hand again and said, “Look, there is no mark. It’s as though it had never happened. You can’t deny the truth of what happened to you.”

It was just a cut, for God’s sake. But don’t turn down an interview, now that the old coot’s your willing servant! You may even get out of here without being killed.