The reward was quick. He looked aghast and shocked.
“Still has a huge price on her head, I think. She knew who you were, Father, back then even if you didn’t know who she was.”
The priest nearly jumped off the bench, unable to maintain his demeanor. Standing now in front of me, he shook his bony finger at me and exclaimed, “You met Wright-Lewis? She’s alive?”
“Well, yes.” I didn’t react as he was expecting me to.
“Then trust me, she is not in hiding or wanted. She must still be on the company’s payroll.” His breathing started coming rapidly again, and again he popped a pill under his tongue. “And if she is alive,” he seethed, “then she is still hunting.”
“No, no, no, Father Paulo, that you’ve got wrong. I know that she was involved in the search for some kind of clone baby back in 1982. She confessed that much to me. But she thought until ben Yusef showed up that they had blown up the plane you all were supposed to be riding in—”
“Not some kind of ‘clone baby,’ as you call Him. The clone of Jesus Himself!”
“Oh, yes, ah, that’s what I meant.”
Why is it so cold?
“Your condescension is quite arrogant, you know,” he said, and then continued, as though he assumed he’d just given me a huge blow. Not.
“They blew up a plane, not the plane,” he said, not yet regaining his composure. “It was a decoy.” He too was trembling now. I didn’t think it was from fear or cold, since the sweat was pouring off his forehead in rivulets; more like blind rage.
“Wright-Lewis is the personification of pure evil!” he raged, taking his starched handkerchief from his pocket and mopping his brow.
“I think she thinks the same about you! But anyway, whatever she was, she is not any longer. I believed her when she told me that she’s spent her life in sorrow and regret about what they’d done. She is greatly relieved to even hold out the smallest bit of hope that she didn’t kill him.
“She said that she now believes that ben Yusef is the reborn Christ, and that when he kissed me in front of the UN Building she realized that I was the one who was supposed to find the proof. She’s now even a born-again, or something like it, and prays only for the proof that she didn’t”—I felt foolish even saying it—“kill Baby Jesus in that plane.”
He looked weary and wary at the same time. Standing before me, he leaned down and looked right into my face. His face was so close to mine that I could smell his breath, and it was clear he’d had something stronger than a communion host and a sip of religious wine that morning. He said, “You listen to me carefully. Very, very carefully. Trust no one, Ms. Russo, not even me, if you don’t believe me. But I beg you to believe me. Maureen Wright-Lewis above all is not to be trusted. Maureen Wright-Lewis is a hunter!”
“A what?”
“An Inquisitor! Inquisitionist. Inquīsītiō,” he spat out disgustedly. I remained silent. I mean, seriously, how does one respond to such a statement in the twenty-first century?
“You think that they don’t exist?” he asked, exasperated, as though he were addressing a complete naïf. “They, like my kind, Ms. Russo, always exist.”
“I don’t understand—your ‘kind’? You mean an exorcist?” I asked, totally confused.
“Oh, God, no! Anyway, you don’t need to understand. You just need to believe—even though I realize that idea goes contrary to your contrary nature.”
Then he turned slightly away before turning back again. “Will you excuse me, please?” He walked toward the souvenir stand without waiting for my acknowledgment. I could see he was making a call on his cell phone, but try as I might I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. Then it occurred to me: I had been straining to hear in English and he had been speaking in Italian. Before I could switch my brain, he’d hung up and was slowly walking back to the bench where I had been left shivering.
As though he hadn’t just accused Wright-Lewis of being an Inquisitionist straight out of the twelfth century, he took my hand and gestured for me to walk with him again.
“Your hands are very cold. Why, my dear, you are shivering.”
“Well, it’s freezing here—especially in the shade.”
“No—it’s twenty-two degrees!” I made a face and he said, “Oh, that’s about seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit. They still don’t teach that regularly in the U.S.—ridiculous.”
“Well, they do, but not when I went to school.”
We slowly headed toward the house, and he said, “So you wanted to know how we know for certain that this was the actual home where the Blessed Mother lived out her days.”