Diamond Solitaire

CHAPTER THREE

The priest looked into the widow's trusting eyes and rashly told her, "It's not as if it's the end of the world."

The words of comfort were spoken on a fine summer evening in the sitting room of a country villa in Lombardy, between Milan and Cremona. Pastoral care, Father Faustini termed it Ministering to the bereaved, the sacred obligation of a priest. True, the ministering in mis instance had continued longer than was customary, actually into a second year. But Claudia Coppi, cruelly widowed at twenty-eight, was an exceptional case.

Giovanni, the husband, had been killed freakishly, struck by lightning on a football field. "Why did it have to be my husband when twenty-one other players, the referee and two linesmen were out there?" Claudia demanded of the priest each time he came on a visit. "Is that the Lord's will? My Giovanni, of all those men?"

Father Faustini always reminded Claudia that the Lord works in mysterious ways. She always gazed at him trustingly with her large, dark, expressive eyes (she had worked as a fashion model) and he always told her that it was a mistake to dwell on the past.

The priest and the young widow were seated on a padded cushion that extended around the perimeter of the sunken floor. As usual, Claudia had hospitably uncorked a Barolo, a plummy vintage from Mascarello, and there were cheese biscuits to nibble. The sun had just about sunk out of sight, but to have switched on electric lights on such an evening would have been churlish. The scent of stocks, heavy on the cooler air, reached them through the open patio doors. The villa had a fine garden, watered by a sprinkler system. Giovanni, not short of money-he'd made it to the top as a fashion photographer-had called in a landscape architect when the place was built. For Father Faustini, the remote location of the villa meant a three-mile trip on his moped, but he never complained. He was forty and in good health. A rugged man with tight, black curls and a thick moustache.

"You're doing so much better, now," he remarked to the widow Coppi.

"It's window dressing, Father. Inside, I'm still very tense."

"Really?" He frowned, and only partly out of concern for the tension she was under. It was a good thing the room had become so shadowy that his disquietude wouldn't be obvious to her.

"My usual problem," she explained. "Stress. It shows up in the muscles. I feel it in my shoulders, right across the top."

"As before?"

There was a silence. Father Faustini was experiencing some tension, also.

Claudia said, "Last week you really succeeded in loosening the muscles."

"Really?" he said abstractedly.

"It was miraculous."

He cleared his throat, unhappy with the choice of word.

She amended it to, "Marvelous, then. Oh, the relief! I can't tell you how much better I felt."

"Did it last?"

"For days, Father." While he was absorbing that, she added plaintively, "There's no one else I can ask."

She made it sound like a plea for charity. Father Faustini sometimes fetched shopping for elderly members of his flock. He often collected medicine for their ailments. He'd been known to chop wood and cook soup for poor souls in trouble, so what was the difference in massaging Claudia Coppi's aching shoulders? Only that it set up conflicts within himself. Was it right 10 deny her Christian help because of his moral and spiritual frailty?

On the last two Friday evenings he had performed this service for her. Willingly he would have chopped wood instead, but the villa's central heating was oil-fired. He would have fetched shopping with alacrity, but she had a twice-weekly delivery from the best supermarket in Cremona. She had a gardener, a cook and a cleaner. What it came down to in practice was that the only assistance Father Faustini could render to Claudia Coppi was what she was suggesting. The poor young woman couldn't massage her own shoulders. Not well enough to remove muscular tension.

There was another factor that made him hesitate. Once a week in church he heard Claudia Coppi's confession, and lately-he wasn't certain how many times this had occurred, and didn't intend to make a calculation-she had admitted to impure thoughts, or carnal desires, or some such form of words. It wasn't his custom to ask for more details in the confessional once the commission of a sin was established, so he couldn't know for sure that there was a connection with his visits to the villa.

"I found something you could rub in, if you would," she said.

He coughed nervously and crossed his legs. This was new in the routine. "Embrocation?" he queried, striving to limit his thoughts to muscular treatment, remembering the overpowering reek of a certain brand favored by footballers. The stuff brought tears to the eyes.

"More of a moisturizer really. It's better for my skin. Really smooth. Try." She reached out and smeared some on the back of his hand.

He wiped it off immediately. "It's scented."

"There's a hint of musk," she admitted. "If you'd like to hold the pot, I'll just slip my blouse off."

"That won't be necessary," he quickly said.

"Father, it's silk. I don't want it marked."

"No, no, signora, cover yourself up."

"But I haven't unbuttoned yet" She laughed and added, "Is it as dark as all that?"

"I wasn't looking," he said.

"That's all right. I've got my back to you anyway."

As she was speaking he heard the blouse being slipped off her shoulders. Now he was in a real dilemma. She sounded so matter-of-fact, so nonchalant By protesting, he was liable to inflate this into a moral crisis. It could appear as if he were letting himself be influenced by things she had said in the confessional.

"Not too much at once," she cautioned. "It goes a long way."

He suppressed his misgivings, dipped in a finger and spread some over his palm.

Claudia's back was towards him, as she had claimed. He reached out and applied some of the moisturizer to the back of her neck.

She said, "Oh dear, the straps are going to get in your way."

"Not at all," protested Father Faustini, but the brassiere straps were tugged aside, regardless.

On the previous visits, he'd been persuaded to massage Claudia, without using a liniment, through her T-shirt. This was a new experience. The contact with her flesh unsettled him more than he cared to admit. He traced the slope of her shoulders, feeling the warmth under his fingers. The smoothness was a revelation. When his hands cupped the round extremities of her shoulders he was compelled to pause.

She sighed and said, "Bliss."

In a moment he felt sufficiently in control to resume, spreading the moisturizer liberally across the shoulder blades and up the spine to her neck. She had her head bowed so that her long, dark brown hair hung in front of her. He gave some attention to the deltoid muscles, gently isolating them, probing their form. In spite of what Claudia had said about tension, everything felt reasonably flexible to him, but he was the first to admit that he was no physiotherapist.

"Let me know if I'm causing any discomfort," he told her.

"Quite the reverse," she murmured. "You have the most incredible hands."

He continued to apply light pressure to the base of her neck until quite suddenly she raised her head and drew the hair back behind her shoulders.

"Enough?" he enquired. He hoped so. The movement of her hair across the backs of his hands had given him a physical sensation not to be encouraged in the priesthood.

But Claudia Coppi remained unsatisfied. She told him mat there was still some tension at the tops of her arms.

"Here?"

"Yes. Oh, yes, just there. Do you mind if I lean back against you, Father? It's more comfortable." She didn't wait for his answer.

The back of her head was on his chest, her hair against his cheek. In the same movement she placed her hands over his own and gripped them firmly. Then she pushed them downwards.

He hadn't discovered until now that she had altogether uncovered her breasts. She guided his hands over them. Exquisitely beautiful, utterly prohibited breasts offered for him to experience. For a few never-to-be-forgotten seconds of sin, Father Faustini accepted the offer. He held Claudia Coppi's forbidden fruits, passing his hands over and under and around them, thrilling to their fullness and their unmistakable state of arousal.

A monster of depravity.

With a supreme effort to banish fleshly thoughts, he blurted out the words "Lead us not into temptation," and drew his hands away as if they were burned.

Tormented with shame, he stood up immediately and strode resolutely through the patio doors and around the side of the house without looking back. He didn't respond to Claudia Coppi's, "Shall I see you next Saturday?" He knew he had to be out of that place and away.

He thought he heard her coming after him, probably still in her topless state. As swiftly as he could manage, he wheeled his moped out to the road, started it up and zoomed away.

"Fornicating fool," he howled to himself above the engine's putt-putt. "Weak-willed, degenerate, wanton, wicked, wretched, sex-crazed fellow. Miserable sinner."

The little wheels bore him steadily along, his headlight picking out the road, but he was barely conscious of the journey. His thoughts were all on the depravity of his conduct. A man of God, a priest behaving like some beast of the field, only worse, because he was blessed with a mind that was supposed to be capable of overcoming the baser instincts.

How will I answer for this on the Day of Judgment? he asked himself.

God be merciful unto me, a sinner.

Precisely at which stage of the journey he became aware of what was ahead of him is impossible to say. Certainly he must have traveled some distance before he was ready to submit to anything except the writhings of his tormented conscience. It had to be spectacular, and it was. Father Faustini stared ahead and saw a pillar of fire.

The night sky was alight above the Plain of Lombardy, fizzing with hundreds of brilliant fiery points. Their origin was a fiery column, perhaps three thousand meters away, and towering over the land. Emphatically this was not a natural fire, for it was more green than orange, bright emerald green, with flares of violet, blue and yellow leaping outwards. Father Faustini was seized with the conviction that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Otherwise he might have suspected that something had been added to the Barolo he had swallowed, because what he was seeing was psychedelic in its extraordinary combination of colors. He'd seen large fires before, and mammoth firework displays, but nothing remotely resembling this.

What else could a wretched sinner do in the hour of reckoning, but brake, dismount, go down on bis knees and pray for forgiveness? He felt simultaneously panic-stricken and rocked with remorse, that this should happen on the very night he had transgressed, after a lifetime of blameless (or virtually blameless) service in the Church. He knelt on the turf at the roadside, his hands clasped in front of his anguished face, and cried, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

He couldn't discount the possibility that his lapse with Claudia Coppi was directly responsible for what was happening. By speculating that his few seconds' fondling of a pair of pretty breasts had hastened the end of the world, he may have been presumptuous, but he felt an ominous sense of cause and effect

He sneaked another look around his clasped hands. The state of the sky remained just as awesome. Streaks of fire were leaping up like skyrockets, leaving trails of sparks.

As yet there were no avenging angels to be seen, nor other apocalyptic phenomena. He heard no trumpets, but nothing would surprise him now.

Instead he saw two brilliant lights, so dazzling that they made his eyes ache. And immediately there came a low droning, becoming stronger. The source wasn't supernatural. A car, its headlights on full beam, was moving at high speed towards him along the road, from the direction of the pillar of fire. Father Faustini could understand people fleeing from the wrath to come, but he knew that they were deluding themselves. There could be no escape.

And so it proved.

The engine-note grew in volume and the lights intensified in brilliance. Ordinarily, Father Faustini would have waved to let the driver know that he was dazzled. But of course he wasn't mounted on his moped. He was on his knees at the side of the road. He'd abandoned the bike when he'd first seen the pillar of fire. Abandoned it where he had stopped, in the middle of the narrow road.

The car was racing towards it.

He clapped his hands to his head.

There simply wasn't time to drag the moped out of the way. He could only hope that the driver would spot the obstruction in time and steer to the side. It might be academic at this late stage in the history of the world whether an accident-even a fatal accident-mattered to anyone, but Father Faustini had always been safety conscious and he couldn't bear the thought of being responsible for anyone's death.

In truth, the driver of the car would share some blame, for bis speed was excessive.

What happened next was swift and devastating, yet Father Faustini saw it in the curious freeze-frame way that the brain has for coping with danger at high speed. The car bore down on the moped without any letup in speed until the last split second, when the driver must have seen what was in front of him. The rasp of tire rubber on the surface of the road as the brakes were applied made a sound like a siren's blare. The car veered left to avoid the moped, and succeeded. But it hit the curb, went out of control and ricocheted to the opposite side. Father Faustini registered that it was a large, powerful sedan. The white light from the headlamps swept out of his vision and was replaced by intense red as the car skidded past with its brake lights fully on. It mounted the curb and started up a bank of turf that bordered a field. The band of rear lights lifted and spun in an arc. The whole thing was turning over. It was thrown on its back not once, but three times, tons of metal bouncing like a toy, smashing through a fence and finally sliding on the roof across the ploughed earth.

One of the rear lights was still on. It went out in a spray of sparks. Smoke was rising from the wreck.

Father Faustini's legs felt about as capable of holding him up as freshly cooked pasta, but he stumbled across to see if he could get anyone out before the entire thing caught fire.

The weight of the chassis had crushed the superstructure. The priest got on his knees beside the compressed slot that had once been the driver's window. There was a figure inside, the head skewed into an impossible angle. Too late for the last rites.

Round the other side was the passenger, another man, half on the turf. Literally. The other half, from the waist down, was still trapped inside. The halves were separated at the waist.

The priest crossed himself. A wave of nausea threatened, but it was vital to stay in control because the air reeked of raw petrol and the whole wreck was likely to turn into a fireball any second. Still troubled that someone might be alive and trapped inside, he lay on his stomach to try and get a sight of what had been the backseat. He needn't have troubled. There wasn't a centimeter of space between the torn upholstery and the impacted roof.

As he braced to get up, a sound like the rushing mighty wind of the Pentecost started somewhere to his right. The petrol had caught fire.

He sprang up and sprinted away. Behind him, there was a series of cracking sounds followed by an almighty bang that must have been the petrol tank exploding. By then, he was twenty meters away and fiat to the earth.

He didn't move for a while. His nerves couldn't take any more. He actually sobbed a little. It was some time before he thought of saying a prayer. In his embattled mind, the car crash had overtrumped the Day of Judgment.

Finally, he sat up. The wreckage was still on fire, but the worst of it was over. Filthy black smoke was taking over and the stench Of burning rubber stung his throat and nostrils. He stared into the flames. The charred, mangled metal that remained barely resembled a vehicle.

Every muscle he possessed was trembling. With difficulty, he got to his feet and walked past the burning wreckage towards the moped, which still stood untouched in the center of the road, a testimony to his stupidity and his responsibility for this tragedy.

Beyond, the night sky was still rent by the vast pillar of fire that had so distracted him. The colors were still unearthly in their brilliance and variety. Even so, Father Faustini was forced to reconsider whether it could really be Judgment Day. The shock of the car crash had altered his perception. He couldn't explain the phenomenon. There had to be a reason for it, but he hadn't the energy left to supply one.

He got astride the moped, started up and rode off to report what had happened…