Cradle and All Page 8

  Another man standing beside the bed replaced the first. He fumbled fretfully in his leather bag. He had a present for her, a gold ring with a glinting crimson stone in the center.

  “You didn’t have to do that. You’re my present, my gift,” she said. “Touch me,” she said. “Please. You’re such an angel.”

  His touch was like velvet. He knowingly stroked the slick creases of her sex until she begged him to finish her. . . .

  A third man pushed aside the second. The mattress sagged under the weight of this man. “You’ve got the softest skin, you know?” he said. “You’re a miracle.”

  “I know it. That’s the truth.”

  He pressed himself into the divine wet spot she presented to him, holding her breasts, crying into her hair in his ecstasy.

  When he had finished with her, a fourth one went to her. He smelled of seawater and unwashed wool and pine needles. He was only fourteen and he loved her too. He ejaculated on her thigh, and again when he entered her.

  A huge man came next and roughly dragged the boy out of her embrace. Then he lowered his aching limbs down beside her. “Warm me, my love,” he said. “It’s very cold tonight.”

  He was the one, the leader, the most experienced, by far the best lover. He was wearing sheepskin and tweed and a complex essence of musk and spices and tobacco that she found endlessly compelling. His voice was deep and smooth and sounded like a cello, and when he said her name, tears filled her eyes.

  She went to her knees beside him, tipped her breasts to his mouth, and he sucked each of them. Then she mounted him, rode him until her cries were tearing from her throat in a delicious ecstasy streaming out of the open window and into the cold night air.

  “Why do you disobey me?” He suddenly roared out a question.

  Kathleen Beavier woke with a violent start. She was sweaty, panting as if she’d been running for her life. She’d also been crying.

  She could still hear the Voice — tormenting, taunting.

  She was wet everywhere. Her bed was wrinkled and soaking, as if she hadn’t changed it in weeks. She could almost hear the trailing end of a voice. There was a funny smell on the sheets.

  But she was entirely alone. It was just as it had been every night for months.

  At the very instant that Kathleen Beavier woke up, Colleen Galaher also bolted straight up in bed, and screamed. Afterimages flickered and popped like huge bubbles in front of her eyes. The flannel sheets were tangled around her bare feet. How had that happened?

  She began to cry, hysterically.

  Chapter 35

  Ireland.

  OF COURSE, THERE WERE some people who knew about Colleen. The locals knew, but they kept it to themselves. It was their problem, their bloody business. No one else’s.

  The village boys and girls of Maam Cross were cruel, without pity or remorse or reason. They called Colleen “the little whore of Liffey Glade.” They also painted their opinion of her in fierce red letters on the newly whitewashed walls of the McDonald’s in town: Colleen sucks fairie dicks!

  When she came to town, she had to pass that horrible, obscene sign. It made her sick to her stomach.

  Today, she was doing the shopping. Her father was dead from cancer. Her mother had been crippled for many years. She and her mother made do on their allotment from state and church.

  DONAL MACCORMACK, FAMILY GROCER was third in a row of newly repainted one-story storefronts at the village crossroads. Since the infusion of billions of pounds to renovate Ireland, fresh paint was in evidence everywhere. The buildings were contrasting bright colors: marigold, violet, persimmon, lake blue. Signs were gilded in order to attract tourists.

  Colleen thought life was better now in Ireland than it had ever been, but small-mindedness and antiquated values clung to the people like tar to a wooden spoon.

  She wrapped the thin cloth coat she’d bought three years ago at Dunnes in Galway more tightly around her bulging belly. She glanced up the tangerine-color exterior of the grocery store to the slate roof. Beside the satellite dish, a chimney pot puffed smoke into the dank fall skies.

  She skipped her eyes down again, across the bloody half-torso of a calf that hung in the market’s window. Disgusting! Gross!

  Then she sighed and went in to do her shopping. Enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of the electric-heated neighborhood store, Colleen placed a half-dozen eggs, flour, salted herring, praties, milk, honey, and a hunk of farmer cheese in a basket.

  As she put her rumpled bank notes on the counter, she felt terribly conscious of the female clerk’s probing eyes. So distracted, Colleen left the store and stepped directly into the path of Michael Colm Sheedy.

  “Oh, bloody excuse me, missus.” Michael feigned a polite smile and pulled off his Donegal tweed cap. His shaven head glistened.

  A black stone of an earring dotted his earlobe. He wore a zip-up hoodie and long baggy trousers, but not because he was wearing his dad’s clobber. Gangsta clothing was the style of these boys, who emulated big-city-gangster behavior.

  “Well, would you believe this!” The sixteen-year-old clapped both hands onto his wiry hips. “It’s wee Colleen Galaher with her awful big, awful shameful belly right outta The X-Files. Still pregnant with the son of God? Is that Himself down there?”

  Colleen’s eyes quickly moved from Michael to the others in his group, who’d all changed out of their school uniforms of gray trousers and blue school blazers. John O’Sullivan, Finton Cleary, Liam McInnie, and Michael’s girl, Ginny Anne Drury.

  They were lolling in front of the Sweet Shop. Billie Piper’s hit tune “Because We Want To” was playing in the background.

  They were waiting for her.

  Colleen stumbled backward, almost dropping the groceries. “Please, Michael, my mother is very sick. I have to go now.”

  “Aye, Colleen. This won’t take but a minute, darlin’. We’d just like a bit of group discussion here. What we’re wanting to know is, Did God take you to the cinema first, or did he just fuck ye in the backseat of his car?”

  Colleen gasped. “You shouldn’t be talking bad like that, Michael.”

  Suddenly Michael Sheedy lifted tiny Colleen and her shopping bundles right off the sidewalk, up toward the red sun just sinking over the village roofs.

  Colleen’s face had turned pale. Tears slipped out of her bright green eyes. “Oh, dear God, no, Michael Sheedy!”

  “‘Oh, dear God, no, Michael Sheedy!’” the boy mimicked in a high-pitched, mocking voice.

  As his lads fell into laughter, the head bullyboy passed Colleen down the line.

  “Quick think, Johno. Don’t drop the ball now, the godhead.”

  Johno O’Sullivan, nearly twenty-five stones in weight and only sixteen years of age, nearly did drop Colleen. He was okay at football but not so good with his hands.

  At the last juggling second, he shuffled her along to Liam McInnie, Michael’s chief lieutenant, flatterer, and imitator. Liam wore a swastika tattoo on his right hand.

  “Please, Liam,” Colleen cried out. “Ginny Anne, please! Make them stop! I didn’t hurt anyone. I’m pregnant!”

  The freckled Irish farmboy held Colleen up above his head. He screamed out a loud Croke Park football cheer. The others howled with laughter.

  “Pregnant with a little bastard, ye mean. Aye, ye little whore, Colleen! Never give me a proper date! But then, you were screwin’ the Lord on High.”

  At that moment, the most peculiar thing happened on the desolate main street of Maam Cross, the strangest thing ever in the ancient Druid village.

  Out of thin air came a brown-and-yellow thrush at the speed of a bullet. The small bird screeched once and then caromed hard off Liam McInnie’s head.

  The Irish boy instinctively put Colleen down. His hands flew to his face to cover his stricken eyes.

  “Bloody fucker!” Liam McInnie screamed in pain as the bird dived again. “Oh, you bloody fucker! My eyes! Oh, Jaysus! My eyes!”

  Colleen looked back o
nce as she slipped away from the terrifying scene. Liam was clasping his eyes. Blood was coursing down his face. Ragged strips of red flesh hung from the boy’s cheek.

  The bird was nowhere to be seen. It had disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  The bird was an angel, Colleen thought. It truly was. Heaven must have sent it to stop Liam McInnie and his mean, awful friends.

  Chapter 36

  New York City.

  NICHOLAS ROSETTI AWOKE with a start. His mind was still focused on the incredible secret; he’d been thinking of it all night. He thought that he knew why he was being attacked, though no one of sound mind would believe him.

  He blinked away the violent and morbid images until he got a fix on his actual location. He was in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan, a city he’d never visited before and one he had disliked intensely from the moment he entered it.

  Turning his head, he took in faded ivory wallpaper, mahogany furniture, and the heavy swags of drapery striped rose and pink and beige now blocking out the light on Broadway, north of Times Square.

  He listened absently to the whine of a police siren above the soft hum of the air-control unit.

  He ordered tea and an assortment of rolls from room service. Then he showered, cleansing himself at last of night sweat.

  He dressed in black pants and a gray wool turtleneck sweater. Placing the teacup on the desk by the window overlooking the street, he unbuckled the black satchel.

  The bag held all of his work on the investigation. He smoothed out an old newspaper clipping. The yellowed paper was dated October 14, 1917, and the headline was as stark and powerful as the event itself: MIRACLE AT FATIMA.

  The reporter for the New York Times had written these words:

  To the astonished minds and eyes of this baffled and terrified crowd whose attitude goes back to biblical times — who, pale with fear, with bared heads, dared to look up at the sky — the sun clearly trembled violently. The sun made abrupt lateral movements never seen before. The sun did a macabre dance across the sky today as the Mother of God supposedly “spoke” to three small children.

  There had been a terrifying warning at Fatima. Even the New York Times admitted as much.

  And the secret had been kept since that time — for almost eighty-two years!

  The most recent evidence and documentation sat at the top of his bulging bag: a nineteen-page deposition on his meeting with fourteen-year-old Colleen Galaher in Maam Cross.

  Next came a packet of two- and three-day-old newspaper clippings. Pieces from the Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, the Observer, the Irish Press, and others. Tales of viruses out of control, plagues, strange unexplainable deaths.

  Rosetti felt his neck stiffen. Tension was returning in waves. He was afraid again. He couldn’t hide, not even in New York City.

  Pope Pius had told him the secret of Fatima. No, please! Rosetti prayed. I am not worthy!

  But he knew the secret was true. He was a believer, and he believed.

  There were two virgins, thousands of miles apart.

  One girl would bear the Son of God, the Savior.

  The other girl would bear the Son of Satan.

  Book Two

  KATHLEEN AND COLLEEN

  Chapter 37

  New York City.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Nicholas Rosetti slogged through bottomless despair as he walked down New York’s crowded Eighth Avenue. He was in Hell, wasn’t he?

  He pushed against the rush-hour pedestrian traffic, wincing at the frequent touch of strangers. He was a mass of tics and nerves, he knew. He jumped at every sound, imagined or real.

  Soldier of Christ, he thought. No, just soldier. Soldier!

  He pushed onward, mourning the recent death of His Holiness Pope Pius, a good pope, a grave loss to many millions. And he felt the loss more than any of them. He’d been charged with a mission that he’d had the grandiosity to accept.

  And now he was alone. He was definitely in Hell. These New York people were all damned. He could see it in their eyes. He could feel evil and desolation everywhere he walked.

  The New York Daily News under his door that morning had caused his desperation and despair to overflow. On the front page, where it most surely didn’t belong, was a story about Kathleen Beavier.

  It was a grievous error for this news to be released. It was typical of America, wasn’t it? Everything was a circus here. There were no secrets. Kathleen was rich and American — so she was news. Colleen was Irish and poor — so where was the story? He wished that none of it had been made public.

  News — that was his mission for the day. He had made several calls to Rome, and then calls had been made to him back to New York. He arrived at a West Side studio owned by ABC Television at six o’clock. He was escorted to a small viewing room, and then, mercifully, he was left alone.

  Bracing himself, he slumped lower and lower in the screening-room chair. He forced himself to watch . . . the news.

  All of it was very bad . . . and very scary.

  The unreleased footage, all of it shot within the past week, portrayed the ongoing drama of a terrifying five-month drought in the Indian state of Rajasthan.

  The first jumpy tape image was a wide traveling shot flashing through a grotesquely impoverished village, Sirsa. In a husky, authoritative voice, the news anchor described the conditions depicted on the screen.

  “In much of modern-day India, life is not as you or I have seen it portrayed in movies about the British East India Company or the Bengal Lancers. The state of Rajasthan, in particular, is sometimes called the Great Indian Desert because of its vast arid plains and its relentless siroccos and simooms; a seething hellhole with an average daily temperature of one hundred fifteen degrees.”

  Hellhole, Rosetti thought. How very precise.

  “This Indian state, with a population of more than forty-four million, is the worst drought and famine area in the world. From April until July, a feverish white-hot sun bakes the scorched land and the people like a demonic torch. Dust accumulates for miles. Hot, suffocating winds blow dust and meal chaff as far north as New Delhi.

  “Villages are like smoking furnaces. The great, motionless sand dunes make you feel that ancient, primordial evil presences are there in the Indian desert.

  “As of September seventh of this year, the terrible drought has persisted for two full months, longer than ever before. This entire Indian state has become a smoldering pyre for its dead.

  “Six hundred thousand men, women, and children have died here since April! Over six thousand more die each day!

  “If there is a hell on earth, then it is here in doomed Rajasthan.”

  The time is close at hand, Rosetti thought. Too close. He could feel the danger everywhere, and it was real, not his imagination.

  Everywhere, there were clear signs of the Beast’s presence.

  Gehenna.

  Six hundred thousand dead! That was nothing to the Beast.

  He began to enumerate: The drought in the state of Rajasthan, the unspeakable famine in India. The slaughter in Rwanda; genocide so brutal and senseless it could have been inspired only by evil. AIDS, with a death grip on China, most of Africa, and now Spain and Sicily. The new polio was crippling the West Coast and breaking out in New England as well. A burgeoning hemorrhagic plague resembling Ebola had suddenly appeared in southern France, flowering near the miraculous shrine of Lourdes.

  The Enemy had come as foretold.

  Lucifer’s army was here — fallen angels, legions of them.

  It was their time.

  Chapter 38

  Newport, Rhode Island.

  I WAS ACUTELY AWARE of Justin’s closeness as we walked on the seaside footpath. I was also aware of what a handsome couple we made, because several people passing us gave us a sideways look. If they only knew the story, our story. I had been a nun, and Justin was still a priest.

  But we weren’t a couple. Far from it. It was as if there were a thick wall of electric c
urrent between us, simultaneously attracting and repelling.

  Three times in the past two days we had taken walks or drives together. Ostensibly to discuss Kathleen Beavier. Justin was the cardinal’s point man and he was very serious, and good at the job. I couldn’t tell if he believed in Kathleen, but he was intellectually open to all possibilities.

  Of course, there was much more than that between us. And I kept thinking, I’m not a nun anymore. I can think about Justin O’Carroll any way that I want.

  As we walked, I told him a brief, harmless history of Cliff Walk, the slender, three-and-a-half-mile trail that fit like a choker around Newport’s graceful southeastern shore.

  “William Backhouse Astor once walked here with his lady, the ‘Queen of the Four Hundred,’” I said, showing off my grasp of trivia. “John Kennedy supposedly courted Jacqueline on Cliff Walk while he was in the Navy and she was Newport’s debutante of the year.”

  Now, Justin and I walked along the same historic path. But there was a substantive difference. We weren’t lovers and never would be. Except for a brush of his hand three days ago in a café, we never touched. Honestly, I wanted to hold him more than anything in the world, but knew I wouldn’t.

  Why had we been brought together like this again? Smashed together was more like it. It proved to me that God was a sadist.

  We continued along a long, winding stretch of Cliff Walk overgrown with blackberry bushes and flanked by historic Newport mansions and their high fences. It was so perfect. We passed behind Millionaires’ Row, the place where, locals swore, Henry James coined the phrase white elephants. Here was the Breakers; Stanford White’s Rosecliff; Beechwood; Richard Hunt’s obsessive Marble House.

  “You know, Annie,” Justin finally said, “sometimes I think that you have a strange image of yourself. You seem very open, very free and easy. And yet you hold yourself off from people.”

  I stopped in the footpath and looked at him. What he’d said hurt me, true or not. “I don’t know what you mean. I have lots of friends. I like my life a lot. Do you mean that because I’m not married I can’t be fulfilled?”