Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Speaking of blue nudes, Switters couldn’t help being struck at that moment by the similarity between the remembered figure in the painting, with its sapphire domes and midnight naves (a rambling plastic Gaudi cathedral pumped so full of huckleberry cream that its stained-glass windows were bulging out), and Domino’s bluish silhouette as it loomed now in that tower lit only by starlight. In shadowy profile, bereft of flaw and detail, the ex-nun’s body could have belonged to the queen bee of one of those North African harems that had set Matisse’s thyroid and brushes to throbbing—although it could just as easily, he supposed, have stepped down from a 1940s jungle movie poster: an untamed, thunder-titted She who ruled tribes of awestruck warriors and consorted with panthers.

The minimalist spectacle of Domino’s maximalist contours was enough to justify his decision to tarry at the oasis awhile longer. But there were other reasons (or excuses), as well. Chief among them was the trouble then brewing between Syria and Turkey. Having protested for a long time that Syria was arming and financing PUK separatists who were seeking to carve an autonomous Kurdish state out of sections of Turkey and Iraq, an angry Turkish government had finally dispatched troops to the Syrian border. Syria responded in kind. Now, according to the Net, armies were massed along both sides of the Turkish-Syrian frontier, and the border was closed tighter than a young girl’s diary. Since Turkey was the only country from which he could legally fly home, Switters was rather trapped. Normally, the situation would have turned his crank—there were few things he loved more than that sort of challenge—but in a wheelchair or on stilts? . . . He could be reckless, but he wasn’t stupid.

Any hope that Poe might pick him up somewhere along the Mediterranean coast was dispelled when Bobby informed him (in their personal Langley-proof e-mail code) that The Banality of Evil was plying the Adriatic and was likely to remain in those waters as long as the Balkan horror show shrieked on unabated.

What the hell? Switters had no great reason to rush his departure, did he? Suppose he actually could locate Today Is Tomorrow again and convince him to cancel the taboo: what then? He lacked prospect for gainful employment anywhere on the planet, and out here under the vast desert sky, where primitive equalities prevailed, the notion of completing his doctoral thesis had come to seem downright silly. That the human species was apparently evolving beyond the civilized limitations of analogic perceptions, heading toward a Finnegans Wake state in which its thinking and acting would manifest in terms of perpetually interfacing digital clusters—well, that phenomenon continued to fascinate him, but he could ponder it without interruption beneath the pomegranate trees at the oasis; he didn’t require academic sanction or societal reward: “Having played for many years by our rules, Mr. Switters, you may henceforth call yourself Doctor, though please bear in mind the title is solely meant to massage your ego and does not qualify you to take Wednesday afternoons off or practice gynecology.”

Moreover, although he couldn’t begin to explain why or how exactly, he still believed he was gaining some special insights into existence by observing it from two inches above the ground. If nothing else, a man on stilts was a man apart. So what if he was noticed only by a gaggle of aging ex-nuns?

Thanks to President Hafez al-Assad’s cordial relations with Fidel Castro, fine Havana cigars were available in Damascus—but only at the luxury hotels. Transdesert truckers did not shop at luxury hotels. Switters had been brought cheroots manufactured in the Canary Islands. Like all machine-rolled cigars, they were in a hurry to burn themselves up, a kind of vegetative death wish, a plant-world version of self-destructive rock stars. Still, like those fey rockers, they had talent while they lasted. Switters spewed a stream of richly flavored suspended carbon particles toward the Milky Way, obscuring about three thousand of those five thousand stars to which human vision was said to be limited. And he said, “So, how soon can I peruse the Fatima Lady’s climactic fortune cookie?”

Domino was drying her hands. “How soon? Were you not listening to me? I said, Christmas Eve. If you stay, I will give you the Virgin’s message on Christmas Eve. It will be apropos, you know, a kind of—”

“Yeah, I see. A gift for the man who has everything.” Exaggerating his pucker, he blew a smoke ring so large a Chihuahua could have jumped through it. “Very well. I’ll Adam this Eden for eight more weeks. And you’ll guarantee you’ll show me the goods?”

“I promise on the Holy Bible.” Then she added for his benefit, “And on Finnegans Wake.”

They sealed the bargain with a purposeful kiss, at the conclusion of which he gloated, “I outwitted you on that one, Sister, my love. I would have agreed to stay and celebrate Christmas with you even if you hadn’t promised to show me the prophecy.”

“No, you big imbecile, I outwitted you. I would have shown you the prophecy even if you had not consented to make me a happy holiday. I would have shown it to you tomorrow or the next day. Now, you have to wait until Christmas.”

He pretended to be miffed. “How typical of you mackerel-snapping snafflers. I should have known better than to deal with a tricky theophanist. I’ve become yet another sad victim of simony.” She ignored his ostentatious flaunting of vocabulary, and he became sincere. “But why, Domino? Why would you want to share your big holy secret with a virtuoso sinner like me?”

After a long pause, she answered, “Because the nature of Mother Mary’s last words at Fatima has troubled us. We’ve never been quite sure if we interpret them correctly. Your—how do you call it?—input might be helpful. You look at religious issues in a most unique—What are you doing?”

Switters was pretending to write on an imaginary notepad with an invisible pencil. “I may have been fired by the CIA, but I still moonlight for the Grammar Police. Unique is a unique word, and Madison Avenue illiterates to the contrary, it is not a pumped-up synonym for unusual. There’s no such thing as ‘most unique’ or ’very unique’ or ‘rather unique’; something is either unique or it isn’t, and damn few things are. Here!” He mimed tearing a page from the pad and thrust it at her. “Since English is not your first language, I’m letting you off with a warning ticket. Next time, you can expect a fine. And a black mark on your record.”

Domino pretended to take the imaginary citation. Then, miming every bit as well as he, she “tore” it into shreds. As she tossed the nonexistent confetti into his face, he had to fight to conceal his admiration.

True to her word, she would not show him the fabled third prophecy until Christmas. Why? Not because of peer pressure. The Pachomian sisterhood was far from unanimous in its enthusiasm to grant to its unruly male guest the privilege of handling, reading, and discussing the transcription around which their order had coalesced (ultimately, their custodianship of the Fatima revelations had knit them together more tightly than their advocacy of women’s rights or even their devotion to St. Pachomius), yet there was none among them who would oppose the will of Domino and the abbess. After all, if it wasn’t for Masked Beauty, there would be no transcript, no oasis, no Pachomian Order. Privately, some feared that their much adored Sister Domino had fallen prey to Fannie’s demon, but they’d respect her wishes, Asmodeus or no Asmodeus.

Nor did Domino hold off out of mistrust. As inexperienced as she was in the area of romance, she knew in her bones that, for better or for worse, Switters cared too much to deceive her. He would never read the prophecy and then skip out.

In fact, twice during November she offered to go ahead and show him the prophecy; she was becoming a bit anxious to get his reaction. Switters, however, insisted on waiting. He reminded her that they had made a pact. They must honor that pact, he told her, they must honor it even if it was frustrating, unnecessary, or outright senseless to honor it, because not to honor it would create more quaggy willy-nilliness in the world. They had to honor it because in honoring it, there was a certain purity.

That was what had convinced her to wait. That was what had touched her. That was what had made her want to want what he wanted. It was the way that he said “purity.”

She would not show him the prophecy until Christmas, but she felt free to provide some background, and he felt free to receive it. She told it to him the way that Masked Beauty had told it to her.

Sometime during 1960, Pope John XXIII summoned the bishop of Leiria to the Vatican. The Portuguese bishop, whose diocese included Fatima, was barely off the flight from Lisbon when the supreme prelate drew him aside and whispered his intentions to open the envelope in which Lucia Santos (then Sister Mary dos Dores) had sealed Our Lady of Fatima’s final prophecy. Assuming that Lucia had written down the prophecy in Portuguese, Pope John was going to need the bishop’s assistance.

That afternoon, following an austere private lunch, the two men retired to the papal study, prayed to God and to Mary, and slit open the envelope (which had been held for three years in the study wall safe) with a jewel-encrusted blade. The contents, surprisingly brief, were, indeed, handwritten in Lucia’s native tongue. At that point, the bishop confessed what the pope already had deduced from their unsteady lunchtime conversation: his Italian was more than a little rusty. The pope had no Portuguese at all.

It was imperative that the translation be exact, every particular fully rendered, no subtlety or shade of meaning glossed over or ignored. The bishop had a suggestion. He was fluent in French, could read it as precisely as he read Portuguese. Suppose he translated the prophecy into French? His Holiness grumbled that that was a start, then left the study briefly to make a telephone call.

Working with extreme care, the bishop of Leiria spent approximately two hours translating the few lines of neat, if childlike, script. No sooner was the task completed to his satisfaction than there was a discreet rap at the door, and a third man joined them in the study. The newcomer was Pierre Cardinal Thiry.

Unsure of his own French, Pope John had decided to entrust the Parisian red hat, whose Italian he knew to be eccellente, with the job of moving the text perfectly from French into Italian.

With the bishop looking over his shoulder, Cardinal Thiry went to work. The pope went next door to his bedchamber to rest his nerves. In less than an hour, Thiry had produced a translation that, while mystifying and somewhat disturbing, nonetheless satisfied both him and the bishop with its accuracy. On the page, however, it was aesthetically displeasing, so Thiry made a fresh, tidier copy for Pope John, absentmindedly folding the messy copy and inserting it between the pages of his Italian dictionary.

John XXIII, roused by a tiny silver bell, returned to the study, where he shambled to the tall, leaded window to read at last the notorious Marian prophecy by the fading light of the sun. Moments later, he rotated slowly to face his subordinates with the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother’s parrot. No, it was worse than that. It was the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother.

After being repeatedly assured by the bishop and the cardinal that nothing, not a trace nor a tense nor a tinge, not a prefix, a suffix, nor an inflection had been lost in translation, Pope John again left the study, commanding the others to wait there. They did. They waited all night, dozing in the voluminous leather armchairs that were said to have been a gift to an earlier pope from Mussolini. A good twelve hours passed before John burst into the room, as haggard and red-eyed as a Shanghai rat. The pope obviously had not slept. The salt of dried tearwater streaked his cheeks. A flunky followed him in and lit a fire in the fireplace before departing.

John crumpled up Thiry’s Italian translation and dropped it into the flames. He ordered the bishop’s French translation burned as well. Then, with some apparent misgiving, glancing sorrowfully, almost appealingly, about the study, as if hoping the others might dissuade him, he fed, with trembling white hands, Lucia Santos’s original to the indifferent fire.

The bishop must have felt that a portion of Portuguese history was going up in smoke, but he did not vocally object. In a few minutes, after the ashes had been scattered in the grate, he followed Cardinal Thiry out of the apartment. Pope John returned to his bed, where, according to Vatican gossip, he wept for several days.

At that juncture, the alleged third and final prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima existed in just two places: in the memory of Sister Mary dos Dores (then aged fifty-three and cloistered in Spain), and in a French translation concealed inside Pierre Cardinal Thiry’s dog-eared old Italian dictionary. Whether the cardinal deliberately smuggled the document out of the Vatican for reasons of his own, whether he acted on sudden impulse, or whether he simply forgot about the extra copy in the swirl of the moment, discovering it when he got home, Masked Beauty was never to learn.

What was apparent was that the cardinal had decided the Virgin’s words, as upsetting as they may have been, needed to be preserved. He did not want them in his possession, however, preferring that they be held outside of Europe altogether. Thus, he sealed the sheet of papal stationery inside a heavy manila envelope and placed it in the care of his Jordan-bound, headstrong but trustworthy, disturbingly pretty (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”), young niece. For twenty-one years, Croetine hid the envelope, unaware of its contents. Upon her uncle’s death in 1981, she thought she ought to have a peek.

Quite probably, Croetine was stunned—she never described her initial reaction—but a couple of years later, under fire from Rome and having changed her name to Masked Beauty, she called her renegade sisters, one by one, into her quarters, read to them the cardinal’s account of how he came to obtain Mary’s prophecy, and then let each nun read the message for herself. Now their shared and sacred secret, they bore it like a cross and protected it like a covenant, to what end they didn’t really know. What they did recognize was that it pasted them, all nine of them, inseparably one to another, a miraculous Marian mucilage—until Fannie had pried herself loose.

“You were never completely taken with our Fannie,” Domino asserted. Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello. As far as he could tell, there was neither accusation nor rivalry in her remark.

“Not especially. Cute, but . . .”

“She was chaste, but she wasn’t pure?” Domino thought she was starting to figure him out.

“She was strange, but she wasn’t inexplicable.”

“Oh? Du vrai? So, then you can explain why she ran away.”

“I cannot.”

“Then Fannie is inexplicable.”

He shook his head. “There’s an explanation for her exodus. We just aren’t privy to it. Ignorance of the facts is no more synonymous with inexplicability than technical chastity is synonymous with purity.”

“Ooh-la-la. Does this mean you’re going to write me another ticket?”

“No, my subjective semantic opinions are not to be confused with the uniform rules impartially enforced by the brave men and women of the Grammar Police.” He stroked her smooth, voluptuous rump. “By the way, have I ever told you about the time Captain Case and I were strip-searched at a roadblock inside Burma? Rubber gloves were unavailable there, you see, and the militiamen, understandably not wishing to foul their fingers in our . . . what you French sometimes call l’entrée de artistes, had a pet monkey they’d trained to do the job for them. He was a smart little fellow with tiny paws as red as valentine candy, and—”

“Switters! Why are you telling me this thing?”

Good question. He was damned if he knew. Was it because that day in Burma he’d been harboring a secret document (though hardly a prophetic one) in his entrée de artistes? Or was it because the proximity of Domino’s exposed fundament—as dreadfully inviting as the entrance to an unexplored Egyptian tomb—was reminding him both of the jitter-fingered monkey’s electrifying probe and the request he’d squeamishly denied that uninhibited young woman down in Lima?

Dissatisfied with their exchange of e-mail, Bobby Case finally took the risk of calling Switters on the satellite phone. The date was November 22, 1998, which, incidentally, happened to be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley. It was also the thirty-fifth anniversary of what, in a more perfect world, would have been the secondary and less newsworthy of the two events, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In truth, the call probably wasn’t all that risky. The CIA liked to keep tabs on its former employees, particularly those disemployed in an uncordial atmosphere, and even more particularly those it suspected of continued unfavorable attitudes and activities (if for no other reason, Switters’s association with Audubon Poe qualified him as a person of interest), but as it scrambled to establish a new identity, scrambled, indeed, to justify its existence in a so-called post-Cold-War world, the agency would have assigned Switters an insultingly low priority. Still, like every intelligence organization, the CIA was fueled by paranoia, and one never knew when a cowboy might sprout a wild hair.

Bobby weighed those things, for his own sake as well as his friend’s. Then, he made the call. Langley would have pinpointed the Swit’s location months ago, he reasoned, and, besides, this conversation was to be of a decidedly personal nature. Wasn’t it?

As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as personal as Bobby might have liked. So evasive was Switters about his reasons for postponing his return to the Amazon that Capt. Case began to imagine all sorts of goings-on—political, mystical, and sexual—at the Syrian oasis. He began to wonder if he hadn’t ought to be at the convent himself, joining in the fun. In the end, however, he began to conclude, from things said and unsaid, that Switters might actually have lost his head over one of the molting French penguins or “some unhappy shit like that.”

So Bobby, who was well trained in the art of firing rockets, let one fly. He mentioned that he’d contacted Maestra recently from Hawaii, where he’d gone for a few days of R and R, just to see if she had any insight into why her damn fool grandson wasn’t tending to business (i.e., getting his legs back, in order that he might walk the Switters walk as well as talk the Switters talk). Suzy had answered the phone. “Yep, son, I knew the instant she said ‘hello’ it was your Suzy. Her voice was so hot and sweet I damn near had to open a window and send out for insulin.” Bobby paused, and in the silence he could picture Switters pinkening around the edges of what he styled his “dueling scars,” could virtually hear, all the way from Okinawa, the clenching of those teeth that Norman Rockwell might have loved (in an eight-year-old boy; in a man Switters’s age, they would have scared the corny illustrator half out of his smock).

After an effective interval, Bobby continued. “We had us a nice little chat. She told me she’d been upset and confused for a spell but that she was older now—she’s turned seventeen, you know: where does the time go?—and she’d got a better handle on things. ‘I miss him a lot,’ she said, and I could hear it in her voice like an upholsterer who’s swallowed one too many tacks. She says she dreams about you—there’s folks that’d consider that a bona fide nightmare—and worries about you, you being off unsafe somewhere in a damn wheelchair.

“Of course, I informed her that you’d soon be doing what was necessary to get up on your hind legs again like a man. And that then you’d surely come and take her for a stroll downtown. She was so pleased she near about squealed like a monkey. Say, do you remember that time in Burma when—”

“Forget it, Bobby!”

“Listen, I put in for leave last month so I could go down to Peru with you to fix things with your witch doctor, and then had to cancel it. I’m putting in for another one, and I aim to take it. Thirty days is too long to spend in Texas now that the golfers have got ahold of the place, so iffen I’m not gonna be cruising the Amazon with you, guess I’ll have to fall by Seattle, see what I can do for Maestra and Suzy in your unexplained absence.”

Switters knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t hesitate. “Right after Christmas,” he said firmly. “Ere the needles have browned upon the tree. Ere the reindeer dung has rolled off the roof. Ere the egg has gone rancid in the last of the nog. Ere Baby Jesus has been crammed back in the box.”

“I’m banking on it, podner,” said Capt. Case.

But that afternoon, even as he fondled the old rag of a training bra for the first time in nearly a year, Switters had an eerie sensation that he’d made a pledge that couldn’t be kept.

Damascus is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

It was on the road to Damascus (then already six thousand years old) that the apostle Paul (formerly Saul) suffered an epileptic seizure. Pounded to his knees by the relentless strobe of the sun, an egg-white mousse of spittle sudsing from his baked lips, Paul imagined he heard the big boom-boom voice of God (formerly Yahweh) admonishing him to scorn sensuality, snub women, and subdue nature, instructions that he subsequently incorporated into the foundation of the early Church (what came to be called “Christianity” was really Paulinism).

It was on the road to Damascus, now a paved highway lined with pizza parlors, car lots, and ice cream stands, that Switters, too, experienced a painful pulsation of lights behind his eyes, knocked sideways by his first migraine in eight months. Switters did not hear God’s basso profundo. Above the horns, shouts, canned Arabic music, amplified prayers, and ubiquitous unmuffled motors—the cacophony thickened dramatically as they neared the city—he registered not a whisper of heavenly guidance, although at that point he might have welcomed some succor if not some actual advice.

If Switters’s head ached twice as badly as usual, it may have been because he was of two minds.

Having rejected Deir ez-Zur as being too close to the Turkish border troubles, and Palmyra as being too far from anyplace useful, he had elected to ride the supply truck cum desert taxi all the way to Damascus. From there, he would have to negotiate a stealthy entry into Lebanon. (Maybe he’d drop in on Sol Glissant, take a dip in one of his pools, have one last gander at Matisse’s Blue Nude 1943.) From Lebanon, he figured it ought to be easy enough to scoot into Turkey. So—ahead of him, somewhere down the line, there was Redhook ale and red-eye gravy; there was air-conditioning and beaches, there were libraries and galleries and forests and skylines, there were Maestra and Bobby and Today Is Tomorrow and the thing that had always seduced him and pulled him forward: the promise of new adventure. There might even have been—dare he consider it?—Suzy. Those things and more waited at the farthest end of the Damascus road, and they put the wahoo in him. But back at the other end, behind him, receding quickly now, there was a compact little Eden, where the almonds were toasting and the cuckoos were crooning. Back there was the infamous last prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima. Back there was a magic wart and a magic hymen. Back there was Domino Thiry.

Thus, as through the intermingling smokes of falafel fires and lunatic traffic he entered the city where the alphabet was born and zero invented, Switters was of two minds. Each of them was agleam. Both of them were hurting.

To report that he was of two minds is not to imply, exactly, that he was torn by dilemma. Though hardly a stranger to contrariety, Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or. (To say that he took both a both/and and an either/or approach may be overstating the extent of his yin/yanginess.) Wasn’t he friend to both God and the Devil? Moreover, there had never been any question about whether or not he would leave the Pachomian convent: his eventual departure was written in every little star that ever burped its hydrogen and farted its helium in the void above the roofless roof of the Rapunzel Suite. In fact, something had been revealed (suggested may be the more accurate word) at the convent that had propelled him from the place as unstoppably as if he, himself, were a belch of sidereal gas.

Nevertheless, Switters could be said to be of two minds for the simple reason that, on the outskirts of Damascus, his synaptic electric bill was being split, fifty-fifty, by the process of anticipation and the process of memory, the former yanking his thoughts onward, the latter drawing them back.

In the end, the migraine proved no match for those two processes. As vicious as the headache was, it barely blunted his vague but exciting mental foretaste of South America via Seattle, while his memory of Christmas in Domino’s tower was too acute to be overridden at all.

On Christmas Eve, Switters had attended vespers. He went expecting to be bored in a nostalgic and not altogether displeasing way. Those expectations were met. Afterward, roast lemon chicken with garlic sausage stuffing was served in the dining hall. There were walnut cookies and hot date tarts. The last remaining bottle of old wine—the sole survivor from the Domino birthday bash—was uncorked, and he led the sisters in a toast to the rebirth of the Divine in the world.

“And to the kings and wise men who arrived from the East,” he said in French. In English he added, “Bearing gifts of frank incest and mirth.”

Masked Beauty, who hadn’t comprehended the English, asked earnestly if Egypt was by any chance east of Bethlehem. Domino, who’d caught the pun, asked him to please refrain from sacrilege. She wagged a scolding-mother finger at him, with an expression that seemed to say, “Just wait until I get you home, young man!”

He didn’t have long to wait. Following a brief songfest in front of the rather goofy Christmas tree that he had fashioned from date palm fronds and snowed with puffs of shaving cream, a caroling during which everybody sang “Silent Night” in French, English, and the original German, and Switters performed solo a paraphrase of “Jingle Bells” in a tootered-up chipmunk voice (“Jingle bells / Batman smells / Robin laid an egg”), the gathering broke up. He and Domino retired to the tower.

In one corner she had made a smaller version of his dining-hall tree, substituting satin ribbons for the aerosol foam. Beneath it, on a brass tray, she’d placed three items:

A bottle of arrack.

A jar of petroleum jelly.

A manila envelope with rumpled edges and an aura around it.

Before the silent night, holy night was through, they’d investigate all three.

The wine that Switters had helped press in October (from grapes that, on stilts, he’d helped to pick) was too young to be agreeably consumed. Domino had ordered the potent date liquor from Damascus as a holiday treat. He thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but, concerned that she might still be under the impression that he was a man who required alcohol’s flame to light the fuse of his zest, he attempted to assure her that arrack was a nonessential perk.

“Alcohol,” he said, “is like one of those beasts that devours its own young.” He told her that strong drink, early on, gave birth to whole litters of insights and ideas and joyful japes. But if you didn’t round up those bright and witty cubs and whisk them away from her, if you allowed them to remain in her lair as the postpartum depression set in (if you kept drinking, in other words, beyond a certain point), she’d whirl on them and chew them up or swallow them alive, and in her dark maw she’d turn them to shit. He held out his cup. “I’ll have just one,” he said, secretly wishing she had bought him hashish, instead. (Wasn’t it ever thus with Christmas gifts?)

Of course, he had more than one. More than two. But he didn’t overdo it, at least not by C.R.A.F.T. Club standards. Anyway, it turned out that the arrack was primarily for her own benefit. It prepared her for the other items on the tray. Starting with the petroleum jelly.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. Following an extended barrage of arrack-scented kisses, during which each of her sumptuous bulges had been lovingly measured and stroked; during which his lingam had been symbolically peeled and repeeled as if it were the principal effigy of a bacchantic banana cult, she had presented herself for lubrication.

“Why not? If I am to live like a desert woman, I should love like a desert woman.” But she wasn’t sure. Wasn’t this one of the sins that had brought down Sodom?

(The squish of the jelly. The socket that formed around his finger. The suction of the mouth that never eats. The flutter of the lashless eye. A pink noise that traveled up the spine like the whistle of a toy train. A troll burrow commandeered for a royal wedding. The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The groom, in purple helmet, yet to arrive.)

“Et tu?” she asked breathily. “And you? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I want every youness of you,” he answered, adding somewhat cryptically, “Ah, that road I’ve never traveled, where the oyster meets the fig!”

But he wasn’t sure, either. Feeling that remote part of her anatomy commence to dilate, to grow, as it were, hospitable, it occurred to him—ominously, perhaps—that he knew the word for it in only four or five languages.

(The bridegroom muscling through the cellar door. The rattle of the plumbing. The furnace’s roar. Ceiling plaster cracking. Cans falling off the shelves. Basement flooding. Cat escaping up the chimney with a banshee yowl and its tail on fire. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, everything was stirring and God save the mouse.)

Afterward, they lay quietly in each other’s arms, exhausted, awed, a little stunned; bonded the way people are who have shared an experience about which others can never be told, and which, they intuit, will be forever remembered yet rarely referred to between themselves.

Nearly an hour passed before Domino got up, lit several extra candles, poured them each another half-cup of arrack, and returned to their carpets, envelope in hand.

“Every girl who enters a convent,” she began, by way of a preamble, “does so for two reasons, only one of which is religious. The secondary reasons vary from the girl to the girl, though you are correct when you are thinking—I know how the Switters mind works—that the reasons frequently involve some aspect of sexual fear, sexual guilt, or compensation for rejection by the opposite sex. It is true that there are few physically attractive nuns. But then there is the case of Masked Beauty, who became a nun for the same reason she generated that escargot on her nose: she was sick and tired of always being stared at by men.”

Switters gulped the arrack. He was not a sipper. Domino didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on the envelope.

“Some novices hear the call to serve humanity, to teach or to nurse. Those who enter closed convents, cloisters, choose to serve by being rather than by doing. That was what I chose. For my God, I would be instead of do, believing that the penance and reparations of the few can effect the salvation of the many. But I had, I must confess, other, less admirable motives. I wanted, you see, to belong to a special group, to be a member of a secret society that stood apart from the world, that operated closer to the bone, closer to the truth, closer to God’s mysteries than the rest of humankind. Perhaps it was due to the way I was spurned by the girls in my American school, the ones who kept me out of their clubs and called me ‘French whore’ and so forth. It doesn’t matter why, I still was guilty of elitist aspirations.”

“Good for you. The right kind of elitism can restore the butterfat to a homogenized society. It multiplies nuance and expands the range of cultural motion.” He started to recount for her Maestra’s views on the virtues of true elitism, but Domino waved him off.

“I’m not looking for justification or approval, but I was sure you would understand, because in a sense it must be similar to your decision to belong to the CIA. I’ve come to suspect that we are somewhat alike in that way, having a desire not for power but for a status that lies beyond the consciousness of those who are merely powerful. Now, however, let me tell you that while I loved the stark sanctity of the cloister, it failed to entirely satisfy me. The secrets there were not especially secret, for one thing. The Christian select had essentially the same—how do you say it?—scoop as the Christian masses. They simply ritualized it differently and concentrated on it more exclusively. So, silly Simone was disappointed and by 1981 had decided to leave the nunhood. Really. I was set to turn in my wimple. That’s when my aunt showed me the contents of this envelope.” She patted the scruffy packet.

“It isn’t that what is inside here is so amazing. You may well regard the last prophecy of Fatima as anticlimactic or even outright nonsense. The intriguing thing for me, silly sinner that I am, has always been the very secrecy of it, the fact that I have had access to holy information that not even the College of Cardinals, not even the present pope is privy to. By luck or design, our little maverick order was charged with the safekeeping of a . . . a unique message—ha! no grammar ticket!—that the Blessed Mother deemed vitally important. I’ve found that situation exciting. It’s put me in league with Mary somehow, and it’s made me feel a part of something singular, momentous, and . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Fun?”

“No, no. For all of the consternation it’s caused us here, it has been thrilling for me, as I’ve shamefully admitted, but I would draw the line at calling it ‘fun.’ How could I when there is nothing the least bit funny or, from the Western point of view, even hopeful about the third prophecy. In fact, it’s all quite horrible. Quite horrible.”

Her eyes suddenly became tight and intense. “But see for yourself. Voilà.” She thrust the envelope into his hands.

It was sturdy, the old envelope, but scuffed and flaky, and might have felt to him like the dried skin of a sidewinder had not his fingertips been slick with petroleum jelly.

Switters offered a brief preamble of his own.

“Etymologically,” he said, clearing that part of his throat that hadn’t been cleared by the arrack, “a prophet is somebody who ‘speaks for’ somebody else, so I take prophecy (from the Greek, proph¯et¯es) with about the same amount of salt as I take press releases from a corporate shill. A prophet is just a self-proclaimed mouthpiece for invisible taciturn forces that allegedly control our destiny, and prophecy buffs tend to be either neurotically absorbed with their own salvation or morbidly fascinated by the prospect of impending catastrophe. Or both. A death wish on the one hand, a desperate, unrealistic hope for some kind of supernatural rescue operation on the other.”

As he undid the clasp on the envelope, she informed him that the roots of the word notwithstanding, the prophet in this case was not speaking on behalf of a higher power, was hardly God’s publicist but rather, in a sense, a whistleblower, warning her beloved humanity what the Almighty had in store for it if it didn’t shape up. Our Lady of Fatima, then, was a kind of spy, a mole, an operative, working behind the scenes to delay if not forestall divine retribution, scheming to buy more time for her earthly brood. Domino thought that Agent Switters, of all people, would be sympathetic.

He responded that any feeling of occupational bond with the Virgin Mary was regrettably beyond him at the moment, but he promised to keep his mind as open to Marian ideas as a convenience store was to hold-up men. Nevertheless, he believed it only fair to advise her up front that he was as leery of those who predicted the future as he was disdainful of those for whom the future always promised to be real in ways that the present was not. “It’s here. Today. Right now,” he said.

“What is?”

“All of it.”

“Today is tomorrow?”

“There you go.” He flashed her a grin that could housebreak a walrus. Then, he opened the envelope.

Inside the envelope were not one but four sheets of paper. On two of them, Domino had provided complete English translations of the first and second Fatima prophecies. The crowning item, obviously, was the page of personal papal stationery, now dog-eared and yellowed, upon which Cardinal Thiry had written down his French version of the controversial third prophecy nearly forty years earlier. In addition, there was included an English translation—rendered, presumably, by Domino—of the third prophecy.

Since he had read them largely in bits and pieces or paraphrase, while assisting Suzy and Masked Beauty with their individual research projects, and since Domino was of the opinion that the trio of predictions was ultimately inseparable, Switters decided to refamiliarize himself with One and Two before tackling the pièce de résistance.

the first prophecy

You have seen Hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end soon, but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the reign of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that He is about to punish the World for its crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father.

Okay, then. And next—

the second prophecy

To prevent World punishment, I have come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the first Saturdays (of each month). If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the World, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and various nations will be annihilated.

Already sedated by dinner, arrack, and the act of love most naughty, Switters could barely read those prognostications without yawning. They struck him as vague, bland, generalized, incongruous, and overly concerned with the fate of the Church, its dogma, and its leader. Had he heard them related by a starry-eyed ten-year-old Portuguese peasant girl in 1917, they might possibly have spun the propeller on his intellectual beanie, but now he just stretched and sighed like a hockey coach at a tea dance before proceeding to the ballyhooed main event: that legendary ultrasecret time-release pope onion,

the third prophecy of fatima

Before this century draws to a close, there are to be unimaginable advances in all sciences. These achievements will bring about a great physical ease but little intelligence or happiness. Everywhere, communication and education will flourish, yet men, deprived of My Immaculate Heart, will sink ever further into stupidity. Anguish and violence will increase apace with material wealth, and many will be lost to fiery death and sickness of spirit. In the century after this one, however, a certain unexpected wisdom and joy will come upon a segment of the population that has survived the earlier sorrows, but, alas, the Word that brings about this healing will be delivered to mankind neither from Rome’s basilica nor from a converted Russia, but from the direction of a pyramid. Whether it is by design of God or the Evil One, even I do not know, yet the World must not fail to pay it close attention, for Heaven and Hell hang in the balance.

That was how it went. Switters read both the English and French versions, and as far as his sleepy mind could tell, they were in perfect agreement. In the next to last sentence, the French mot had been translated as “word” when he supposed it could have been rendered, as it often was in French, as “cue” (something said or signed in order to elicit a particular action onstage), but the meaning here was virtually the same, and he was scarcely in a mood to quibble. In fact, he yawned like a pigeonhole before conceding that “This little augury is more intriguing than the first two. Definitely more intriguing. But I honestly can’t see what all the furor is about, why you’d find it so horrifying or ol’ John the Twenty-third would go through a ream and a half of Kleenex.”

“You don’t see why?”

“No, sister love, I don’t. I mean, it’s hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham. Or that an abundance of information can exacerbate ignorance, if the information is of poor quality. Or that people can be lavishly entertained right around the clock and still feel empty and disconnected. Fatima slam-dunked the crystal ball in that regard, I have to give her credit, whoever she was. All that stuff is on us like a bad suit, and she called it in 1917. But, hey, there’s a flip side to it, ways to profit from it, ways to get around it, and—”

“Yes, yes,” Domino broke in impatiently. “The remedy is Her Immaculate Heart. But what about the rest of the prophecy?”

“You mean the nice part about unexpected joy and wisdom heading our way in the next century? Sounds bloody jolly to me, to quote the late Potney Smithe, Esquire. Bloody jolly. Assuming that you and I will be among the survivors.”

“Yes, but this so-called wisdom and joy, this healing, will not be brought about by the Church.”

“So? Who gives a damn whether the Church brings it about as long as it’s brought about?”

She frowned so hard her cheeks nearly doubled. “Don’t you see? The enlightening doctrine is to come from the direction of the pyramids. From the Middle East. That means Islam. Mary’s inference is that Islam will succeed where Christianity has failed. Who gives a damn? Everyone in the Western world ought to give a damn! The implications are almost too disturbing to be contemplated.”

“Well now, this wouldn’t happen to be the whining of a poor loser, would it?” A herd of sarcastic remarks was set to stampede out of his voice box, but he bit his tongue and turned them back. He didn’t want to hurt her, and he was too drowsy to covet prolonged conversation. “Listen,” he said, “these prophecies leave a lot of room for interpretation, and there’s a possibility you may have missed—”

“Don’t you think we haven’t—”

“Yeah, I know you and Masked Beauty have been kicking this gong around for years, but you still may have misinterpreted some point or other. Isn’t that why you wanted me to cast my unflinching bloodshot beam on it? I, who have left speechless entire roomfuls of itinerant journalists and shadowy international entrepreneurs with my unprecedented unravelings of certain passages of Finnegans Wake? Just let me sleep on it, sister love. Do please let me sleep on it.”

With that, he blew out the closest candle, kissed the disappointed nun, and snuggled down between the rugs. “Have you noticed,” he asked in a faint, sweet voice just before he began to snore, “that nobody talks about the sandman anymore?”

Our hero must have received a heavy dusting of the sandman’s sedative grit because when he finally awoke, the sky was full of blue and the bed empty of Domino. The secret envelope and the telltale Vaseline were gone as well, though the English translation of the third prophecy could be seen protruding from his left tennis shoe. It was eight according to his watch, which meant it would have been eleven, Christmas Eve, in Seattle. He’d intended to ring his grandmother at an earlier hour, but even though it was now past her bedtime, he decided to call her. He held his breath as he punched in the numbers, fearful that Suzy might answer the phone, discouraged that she probably would not.

“This had better be good,” a sleepy voice grumbled.

“It’s a holiday greeting, full of love, warmth, and good cheer,” piped Switters.

“You!” Maestra growled. “I might have known. You think an old woman doesn’t need her rest just because it’s Santa Claus’s birthday? Next thing I know you’ll be calling me up at midnight on the Fourth of July to pledge allegiance to what’s left of the flag.” Then she softened and inquired as to his health and whereabouts—”Not that you’d be truthful about it”—and complained that he was off in some flea-bitten land somewhere, ignoring her, risking his hide and lying about it, when it was no longer of any necessity. “You can take the boy out of the CIA but you can’t take the CIA out of—”

“Merry X-mas, Maestra.”

“Heh! Merry X-mas, you no-good scamp. I miss you. Little Suzy misses you, too, for some unfathomable reason. It was you who put dirty ideas in the poor child’s head and led her astray. She’s gone to Sacramento for the holidays. What time is it, for God’s sake? That cute Captain Case checks up on us every now and then. He doesn’t wait until the middle of the night on Christmas. Okay, there’s just one thing I have to know. Are you still scooting yourself around in that pathetic dodge-’em chair?”

“No. I’m not. I’m on stilts.”

There was prolonged silence on the other end of the line, although he could tell from her breathing that she definitely hadn’t dozed off.

Maestra’s silence must have been contagious, for the oasis was unusually quiet that morning. He was soon to learn from a note pinned to the door of his room that Masked Beauty, rather abruptly, had decreed it a day of private devotion, during which the sisterhood would neither eat nor speak. That’s fine, Switters reasoned. It’ll create an atmosphere conducive to my contemplation of the Fatima folderol.

But was it folderol? Rilke, the poet whose verses had helped him get out of bed mornings in Berkeley, wrote, “The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” And Today Is Tomorrow, with his vision root, had offered the Swit an actual glimpse of the interpenetration of realities and chronologies. He could not with conviction deny that prophecy was theoretically possible. It was just that so much of it reeked of hysteria, esoterica, naiveté, and humbug—and Fatima’s forewarnings were hardly free of that shrill cloy. Nevertheless . . .

Nevertheless, a fair amount of what she (be she Divine Mother or schizophrenic pasture girl) had predicted in her three-pronged prognosis had indisputedly come to pass. It wasn’t much, really, but it was enough to merit serious consideration of the remainder of her declarations.

The part that Switters found encouraging (though he would never admit to a need for encouragement), and the part that seemed to hurt Domino deep in her heart, was the business about a happy transformation of humanity (or, rather, a portion of humanity, an elite, perhaps) that would be cued not from the Church or the Kremlin but from pyramid territory. Domino believed this a foretelling of the triumph of the Islamic point of view, a victory of Mohammed’s metaphysical system over the institutions and metaphysics of Jesus Christ. Switters was not so sure. He kept harkening back to the material he’d pulled off the Net for Masked Beauty, the stuff about King Hermanos constructing the pyramids as vaults in which to shelter the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages. He’d wager neither his Beretta nor his Broadway show tunes on it, but he had an inkling that it was in those mystical, astrological, and alchemical texts known as the Hermetic Writings, rather than in the teachings of the Koran (and the dogma into which those teachings had been subsequently corrupted), that modern survivors would locate their cue as to how to attain and sustain a wise and joyful existence. After all, the Hermetic Writings were from the pyramids, were, in effect, responsible for the pyramids, whereas any connection between pyramids and Islam was of the most tenuous and after-the-fact geographical nature.

Thus it was that on Christmas Day, Switters had sat in the shade of a lemon tree and, while nibbling on leftover falafel that he’d stolen from Maria Une’s deserted kitchen, sump-pumped into his frontal lobe everything that he could remember about the Hermetic tradition.

Chickpea in his mouth, dry heat in his nostrils, papery leaf rustle and narcotic hen cluck in his ears, grainy wind on his skin, distant shimmer (like a flutter of god beards, a pulse of muslin-wrapped phosphorus) in his eyes, thirst never far from his throat: it was, in terms of the senses, a perfect situation in which to try to summon his faint knowledge of that series of writings (like the Bible, it was a disjointed, fragmented collection rather than a unified canon) known as the Corpus Hermeticum. The tradition, while popularized in ancient Greece, had originated in still older Egypt, in places probably not wildly different from this one.

Hermetic teachings, as best as he could recall, did not constitute a theology, but, rather, were designed as a practical guide to a sane and peaceful life of natural science, contemplation, and self-refinement. They did, however, in their effort to define and celebrate humanity’s place in the grand scheme of things, analyze at great length our relationship to the cosmos, before and after death. Their purpose, though, was to educate and improve; to enlarge the soul rather than to save it.

Well and good, Switters supposed. There was much to admire about a belief system that refused to proselytize or to water itself down to attract converts, that was nature friendly, body friendly (references abounded in the writings to various forms of sex magic), tolerant, respectful, and innocent of any recorded act of repression or bloodshed. A belief system that didn’t insist on belief? That did more good than harm? He’d award it six stars out of five and tell it to keep the change—bearing in mind all the while that a committee of dullards (who but the dull had time or patience to serve on committees?), a small infusion of earnest missing links, could pull it down to their squeaky level and enfeeble it almost overnight.

Still, the Hermetic tradition had deeper roots than any of our religions (though not as deep as shamanism), and was rumored to be preserved to this day by adepts who honored it without banging any pots and pans. On the other hand, those adepts (sometimes called the Invisible College) were few in number, weak in influence. Even in its heyday, Hermeticism had never—so far as anybody knew—turned a single tide of history. Was there any sound reason to reckon that there would occur a resurgence of Hermetic interest in the near next century (the millennial page was so close to flipping one could feel its latent breeze), and that it would thus inspire or instruct a significant minority of the corporate-molded populace to tune its cells to a higher frequency? No, there was something about such a scenario that just didn’t pitch. Granted, he wasn’t much of a consumer, but if this was what Fatima was selling, he was keeping Mr. Plastic in his wallet, at least until he kicked a few more tires and drove around the block.

Using one of the stilts, he swatted a winter lemon loose from a bough, catching it as it fell, a feat that filled him with immense pleasure. He reamed the fruit with a stiff finger, and for some perverse reason, thought of Domino and the intimacies of the previous night. Then, squeezing lemon juice onto a patty of cold falafel, smelling its citric aliveness, rolling its fresh solar acids—yellow, dynamic, and changeless—along the bronco spine of his tongue, he turned back to the curious prophecy.

What possible impetus could there be for a Hermetic renaissance? An unearthing, perhaps, of the fourteen golden tablets? He tried to imagine a team of Egyptologists brushing the sands of centuries from the plates, scanning their magnifying glasses along the columns of glyphs, suggesting, months or years later, during an announcement on CNN, that if beleaguered viewers were only to heed the oblique instructions so quaintly encoded in those ancient alchemical symbols, they might develop techniques and practices for overcoming their human limitations, and, in the process, a way to understand—and function smoothly within—an immutable cosmic order. But try as he might, he couldn’t envision the impact of such information lasting much beyond the cheeseburger and minivan commercials that would follow it. Hermeticism had its merits, certainly, but it lacked immediacy. It seemed so stereotypically occult as to be fusty and inane, like the wizard hat that Mickey Mouse wore when he played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In his gut (where the ball of white light was spritzing the acerbic droplets of lemon juice), he sensed that a neo-Hermetic utopia was even less likely than an Islamic one.

Pausing then, brushing the last falafel crumbs from his lips, he thought of the old trickster who’d given his name to those Greco-Egyptian mysteries: old Hermes, god of transitions, runner of errands between the two worlds, patron of explorers and thieves. Setting up his three-card monte stand on the frontiers of knowledge, Hermes was neither a suffering savior deity nor a loving father deity, but a brash bringer of new ideas and practical solutions to those who were quick enough to grasp them, strong enough to accept them. Hermes could be regarded as the immortal prototype of the mortal shaman, and like shamans everywhere, he was a revered practitioner of folk medicine, conversant on every level with plants, constellations, and minerals. He could heal, but he also could—and would—play outlandish pranks. Rather similar, as Switters had earlier noted, to Today Is Tomorrow, damn his parrot-boiling hide.

In the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions, Hermes had been identified originally as one of the Great Mother’s primal serpent-consorts, an aspect still alluded to by the pair of snakes entwined around a rod in the Hermetic logo of the American Medical Association. Levantine lore went so far as to view Hermes as a personification of the World Snake, the ruler of time, and in dragging that arcane tidbit from his memory pond, Switters’s mind again scrolled to the Amazonian shaman. When Switters had asked R. Potney Smithe if the Kandakandero religion (if it could even be loosely described as a religion), had a name, the anthropologist had replied that when the tribal elders referred to anything remotely resembling a belief system, it was with a phrase that translated as something like, the Cult of the Great Snake. (“That’s bloody damned epic, isn’t it? Eh? Mind you, I haven’t the foggiest notion what it infers.”) Switters hadn’t a clear notion, either, but there in the Syrian bake, he experienced a tiny chill as he remembered that other character, the crafty, multilingual, ex-Marxist mestizo who, though not a Kadak (not one of the “Real People”), appeared to be working toward becoming Today Is Tomorrow’s disciple, if not his lieutenant or rival; and how the dude had renamed himself Fer-de-lance and sported a constrictor-skin ensemble (except for gold teeth and Nike basketball shoes). Fer-de-lance radiated some spooky, transcultural, reptilian charisma, which was not unenhanced by the buzz that he supposedly had an ongoing relationship—a totemic dialogue, a Moby Dickian fixation, a vendetta, or a marketing ploy: who could even guess?—with a forty-foot-long anaconda. Hale fellow, well met.

As near as Switters could recollect, Today Is Tomorrow, himself, expressed no direct interest in any kind of serpent magic, not in regard to time or anything else. However, this circuitous reminiscing about the witchman had brought his image fully to mind, and, abruptly, at that instant—wham! bam!—a thought hit Switters like a stockyard paddle smacking a porker’s backside. Could it possibly? . . . Yes! Of course! How obvious! That was it! He felt the validity of it in every gob of his marrow. And in a sudden rush of eureka, he forgot himself, taboowise, and very nearly sprang to his feet.

He had caught himself, steadied himself, realigned his heels on the loaf of red rock where they’d been carefully propped, and leaned back against the spindly trunk. Overhead, the lemons swung like papier-mâché stars in a cheesy planetarium. It was a totally bizarre theory, he supposed, this connection he was entertaining, but the Fatima phenomenon was pretty crazy, too, and the mere fact that it had been accredited by a major mainstream institution didn’t render it any less so. Switters was, well, if not thoroughly emotionally excited, at least intellectually stimulated, and he was anxious to share his “discovery” with Domino. Much as she had shared the secret prophecy with him? Had drawn him into the pudding? Irrationally, perhaps, he thought of Eve introducing the consciousness-expanding snake fruit to her partner in Eden. The sharing of certain kinds of knowledge is seldom without consequences.

For better or for worse, however, his desire to apprise Domino was thwarted. She remained in seclusion the whole of Christmas Day, thickly cocooned in prayer, though whether to please Baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or Masked Beauty was never evident. Frustrated, Switters had brainstormed awhile longer under the furniture-scented tree, then stilted off to the office to e-mail a holiday greeting to Bobby Case. To his surprise, his friend had returned the sentiment immediately. Massive merriment to you, son. Here on Oki, we got us raw octopus with all the trimmings. How you spending your day?

There being no way to truthfully explain, Switters replied that he had to leave right away to attend a performance of The Nutcracker.

Hope it’s the one with Tonya Harding, wired Bobby. And that was that.

In his room, having retrieved the remainder of the arrack from the tower, Switters drank, pondered, drank some more, pondered some more. Within an hour, both the drinking and the thinking petered out, and he turned to Finnegans Wake, though he got no further than a line in the preface, where Stan Gebler Davies wrote of Joyce, “The man had an interesting life, which most men do who have an abiding interest in women, drink, high art, and the operation of their own genius.” Stopping to consider that statement—wondering why it seemed so tricky, so difficult, to lead simultaneously an interesting life and a conventionally moral life (it was as if some pathology of dualism conspired to make them mutually exclusive)—he fell asleep and did not wake until morning, when there was an urgent rapping at his door.

“Monsieur Switters! Le camion! Le camion!”

“Pippi?” It had to be Pippi, for even the voice sounded freckled and red-haired. “What? The truck? Le camion? Pourquoi?”

It was true. The supply truck had arrived. It hadn’t been expected for another couple of days. Switters was tempted to kiss it off, to catch it the next time it came through, which would be only two or three weeks. But then he remembered his “discovery” and rushed to get out of bed and throw his things together.

“Dépêchez-vous!”

“I’m hurrying. Où est Sister Domino?”

Pippi assured him that Domino would meet him at the gate. And she did. Had it not been so abrupt, she probably wouldn’t have cried, but she had no time to prepare herself, and teardrops, one after the other, rolled like dead bees down the overturned hives of her cheeks as she explained to the astonished driver that the white-suited male (A man? Here?) in the wheelchair would be needing passage to Deir ez-Zur.

The trucker insisted that Switters ride in the front with him and his assistant, undoubtedly as much out of curiosity—he wanted to question him—as politeness or respect. He fired up the engine and waited, with impatience and disbelief, while the crippled American and the French nun embraced.

Domino’s smile cut like a prow through the cascading tears. “I should have no complaints,” she said with a brightness that was only half false. “I’ve known the full strong love of a man of the world and yet emerged with my maidenhood immaculate. A virgin in partu.” She tried to laugh, but there was a chirpy lump in her throat.

“Cake and eat it,” said Switters approvingly, noticing that his own voice sounded as if it were being run along the pickets in a fence. “Listen. We never got time to talk. About the third prophecy, I mean.”

“I know. I know. This is happening too fast. You must write me about it as soon as you can. The truck still brings our mail.” She glanced nervously at the driver.

“No. Listen. You have to hear this. It’s not Islam.”

“Not Islam?”

“The word, the message that can transform the future. It isn’t going to come from Islam. It’s coming from Today Is Tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?” Was this dear man a nut case, after all?

“The prophecy says the cue will be delivered from the direction of une pyramide. Not les but une. Singular. The direction of one pyramid. Don’t you recall that Today Is Tomorrow has this head . . . the man’s a living pyramid! Whatever comes out of his mouth comes from the direction of a—”

“Ooh-la-la! This is crazy.”

The driver sounded his horn. The assistant, standing by to help Switters into the cab and fold up his wheelchair, clapped his hands. Switters quieted them both by snarling something in colloquial Arabic, the equivalent of “Hold your fucking camels.”

“You’d better go, my dearest,” said Domino.

“Think about it,” Switters insisted. “The guy’s a pyramid with legs.”

“So? He’s a savage. He’s an illiterate witch doctor. A wild primitive who lives in the forest, incommunicado.”

“True enough. But he’s got a kind of philosophy. I’m serious. He’s got a concept. A vision. And it’s out of a pyramid, not that a pyramid per se is any—”

“What kind of ‘philosophy’? What could he have that would—”

“I’m not sure. I mean, it’s unique, but I only know the general outline. I’ll find out, though. If there are pertinent details, I’ll find them out when I’m there. Okay?”

“Okay,” she sighed, unsure as to what she was agreeing to. She made a little furrow in her chin, which the tear runoff filled like rainwater in a ditch.

The other Pachomians, one by one, had gathered at the gate to see him off. ZuZu, Pippi, Mustang Sally, both Marias, Bob. Masked Beauty was last to arrive. She wore her veil, of course, but he could detect her beauty-buster behind it, glowing like a holographic hush puppy, a glob of ghost grease in the morning sun. Holding her old body erect, august as an abbess ought to be, proud as a Matisse nude, she clasped his hand. “Tell them to limit their procreation,” she said in her flat, childish French. “Wherever you go, tell them.”

Switters squeezed her bony fingers. He promised. Then, as the burly assistant lifted him bodily into the truck, he blew the sisterhood a round of kisses and yelled, “Save my stilts!” He yelled it again, wedged between the two truckers, as they drove away. “Au revoir! Save my stilts!”

In the deep velvet radish of his heart, he must have realized that it was highly unlikely that he would ever see those Pippi-made stilts again, yet had he been unwilling to lie to himself, he would have been a very poor romantic, indeed. Why, he might have asked, did it seem so tricky, so difficult, to lead simultaneously a romantic life and a fully conscious one?

During the long, rough drive—east-northeast to Deir ez-Zur (where they passed the night), south-southwest to Palmyra (where they again slept over), and on southwestward to the capital—Switters was compressed like anchovy paste in a living sandwich. The assistant, on his right, rarely spoke, but Toufic, the driver, encouraged by Switters’s earlier display of Arabic, questioned him relentlessly. A squat man, about thirty, with a lath basket of tight black curls, and soft brown eyes that leaked soul by the ounce, Toufic was a Christian (Eastern Orthodox, of course, not Roman), and as such, demanded to know what his passenger had been doing in a convent. Toufic also had relatives in the rug trade in Louisville, Kentucky, and while he himself had often dreamed of emigrating there, he was incensed over America’s recent air attacks on the innocent people of Iraq and wanted from his rider a full accounting for those bully-boy atrocities.

Switters’s answers must have pleased him, for by the time they got to Deir ez-Zur they were conversing agreeably, and by the time they departed Palmyra they were behaving like schoolyard buddies.

They entered Damascus (about 7 P.M., December 28) on An-Nassirah Avenue, proceeding at a slow, noisy pace to the walled old city and the Via Recta, mentioned in the Bible as the “Street of Straight,” though its straightness, like many another biblical reference, could hardly have been meant to be taken literally. The Via Recta marked the boundary of the city’s Christian quarter, and it was into that quarter that Toufic drove Switters after the other passengers and ten crates of dates had been offloaded. “For your comfort and safety,” he said, reminding Switters that they were in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Between sunrise and dusk, he would find nothing to eat outside the Christian quarter, and even there only in a private home. Moreover, the sacred rigors of Ramadan had intensified anti-American passions in Syria (the Iraqi bombing raids having occurred only ten days earlier), and in some parts of Damascus there were blades that would relish the wicked white butter of a Yankee throat. Luckily, Toufic and his family had a spare room to let.

With a cough—half leaded exhaust fumes, half brazier kabob smoke—Switters accepted the offer. He trusted Toufic but regretted that Mr. Beretta lay unattended in the crocodile valise in the rear of the truck. The ex-operative was getting a wee careless in his retirement. He sighed, disgusted but not really surprised that Clinton had fallen in with the cowboys. It was an all too familiar story.

Toufic stopped the truck, an aging deuce-and-a-half Mercedes with a canvas canopy, on a coiling side street and sounded the horn four times. With squeaks and rattles, a rickety corrugated tin door was raised, and Toufic backed the vehicle into a deep, narrow garage. Dimly lit by a pair of raw forty-watt bulbs that dangled from the stucco ceiling like polished anklebones on strings, the space smelled of motor oil, solvent, sour metals, musky rubber, and burnt gunk. Off to the right, more brightly illuminated, was a small glassed-in office occupied by three men: two standing, one seated at a cluttered wooden desk. Toufic had to go to the office to complete some paperwork. He suggested that Switters wait where he was. “I’ll be needing my valise,” said Switters, fairly pointedly.

The assistant fetched the bag. Then he fetched brushes, rags, and a tub of soapy water and began vigorously to wash the peeling paint of the sand-and-sun-tortured truck. Through the veil of scrub water that coursed down the windshield, the naked lightbulbs reminded Switters of the lemons of St. Pachomius. Their yellow blaze aggravated his headache. He shifted his gaze to the office, where Toufic was now in conversation with the others: the man at the desk, who was an older, fatter version of Toufic, and the two standing men, who, Switters noticed, wore suits and ties and European faces. Something about the pair tightened Switters’s Langley-trained eye. He squinted through the sudsy stream. He patted his valise.

After nearly a half hour, Toufic returned, scolding the assistant for killing his truck with cleanliness. “Go home to your family,” he ordered, shooing the busy washer out the door. “We go, too,” he told Switters, and he unfolded the chair. Puzzled at how nimbly his passenger leapt from the cab into the Invacare 9000, he asked, “What did you say again was the trouble with you?”

“Walking pneumonia.” The phrase did not translate well into Arabic.

Toufic lived several blocks from the garage. Switters rolled along beside him through the streets of the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. It was in this very neighborhood that the misogynist, Paul, had taken refuge after his fit on the Damascus road and formulated the structure and stricture of what would become known as Christianity. The Street of Straight, indeed. As they bumped along over the worn paving stones, Toufic, a bit embarrassed, informed Switters that he could only offer his room until early the following morning. Toufic had been assigned an unexpected driving job, and, of course, he could not leave Switters alone in his home with his wife.

Of course not. Toufic may have been Christian, but he was nonetheless Arabic and thus subject to the sexual insecurities that among men of the Middle East achieved titanic, even earth-changing proportions; insecurities that had spawned veils, shaven heads, clitoridectomies, house arrest, segregation, macho posturing, and three major religions. The women hereabouts must have really been something! thought Switters. They must have had loins of fire, pussies of gold; their libidos must have brayed like wild asses and loomed like desert dunes. Inexhaustible, inextinguishable, inextricable, they had turned the weaker sexual animal inside out and drove him to build cultural, political, and religious walls in order to contain their deep, roiling juices; walls so steep and rigid they still stood. The Levant had no monopoly on penile insecurity: two of the world’s most magnificent creatures, the tiger and the rhinoceros, were going extinct in 1998 because Asian males believed they needed to consume the body parts of those beasts to shore their precious peckers up; and dangerously excessive population growth in many nations was due to a husbandly compulsion to publicly demonstrate virility by keeping their poor wives pregnant. Yet, it was in the Middle East that the perception of pussy whippery had manifested itself most dramatically and with the longest-lasting consequences, and Switters (who had, himself, experienced a tinge of coital frailty after Sister Fannie bolted his cot) wished he might have visited the tents of some of those lusty Semitic and pre-Semitic lasses. Had the men been ego-wounded crybabies and scaredy-cats, or were the women actually that free, that hot? In any event, you can bet he would have learned the name for their intimidating treasure in every tribal dialect.

His reverie, his fanciful yearning for a time machine that might set back his presence on that Damascus street by five thousand years, was punctured by Toufic’s resumed apologies. Apparently the driver imagined that his guest was sulking. “I am very sorry, my friend, but I must drive again come the dawn. I had not thought it so.”

“No problem,” Switters assured him. “Will you be going anywhere near the Lebanese border? I could use a ride.”

“Oh, no. As a matter of fact”—he laughed—”I must drive again back to the convent oasis.”

The wheelchair skidded to a stop. “Why? What do you mean?” The migraine shot out of his ears like squirt from a clam. He hadn’t felt so alert in months.

Toufic looked worried, as if he were again offending the American. “Those two foreign gentlemen at the garage. They wish to be taken there tomorrow.”

Switters remained stationary. “What for?”

“Why, business of the Church, most assuredly. One of them is a religious scholar from Lisbon in Portugal, and the other is a lawyer in the employ of the Vatican.”

“They told you this?”

“They told my boss. I will transport them in his car with the four-wheel drive. No need for the truck, naturally. The gentlemen could not hire a car from the airport because the drivers there are under Ramadan.”

En route to Deir ez-Zur, they’d discussed Ramadan, and Switters had wondered why, if a people were at one with the Divine, was not every month holy; why this setting apart of dates and places, shouldn’t Tuesday be as glorious as Sunday or Saturday, shouldn’t one’s water closet be as sanctified as Mecca, Lourdes, or Benares? If Toufic imagined such thoughts in his guest’s mind at this moment, however, he was badly mistaken.

The foreign gentlemen at the garage . . . The younger, thinner one (late thirties, probably, and lithe as a bean vine) had a face like the instruction sheet that came with an unassembled toy: it looked simple at first and ordinary and frank, but the longer you studied it, the more incomprehensible it became. It was his body language that was troublesome, however. From his receding ebony hair to the points of his hand-tooled shoes, the Italian carried himself with the self-conscious grace of a commercially oriented martial artist. He feigned an attitude of disinterest, of relaxation, yet every muscle was spring-wound and tense, ready to pop into furious action. Switters had observed a similar look in many a street-level operative, in many a hitman. There was a time when he had observed the look in his own mirror.

The older man (well over sixty) had wispy gray hair and the ruddy complexion of a whiskey priest. His mouth was babyish and weak, a mouth meant for sucking a sugar tit; but behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were as hard and unfeeling as petrified scat. Although he seemed highly intelligent, Switters could detect that his was an intellect of the shrewd variety, the kind that grasped facts and figures and understood virtually nothing of genuine importance; a well-oiled brain dedicated to the defense, perpetuation, and exploitation of every cliché and superstition in the saddlebags of institutionalized reality. This cookie is the spitting image of John Foster Dulles, thought Switters, and immediately he dispatched a sample of his oral fluids to mingle with the dust of the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth.

Switters turned to the somewhat bewildered Toufic. “Beginning tomorrow, pal,” he said, “you’re going to have a new assistant. I hope your employer’s jalopy seats four comfortably.” He fixed the slack-jawed Syrian with what the unoriginal have described as his fierce, hypnotic green eyes. “I’ll be going back to the oasis with you.”

He unzipped his valise and, tossing aside C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirts and socks with little cartoon squid on them, went straight for the false bottom. “First,” he said, “you’ve got to help me install this device in the rear seat of that car we’ll be driving. In English, we call it a bug.”

Switters grinned. Toufic looked numb. Above them, the third-quarter crescent of the Ramadan moon was itself a numb smile, perfectly suited, perhaps, for the human activities upon which its dry silvery drool seemed ever destined to fall.

Part 4

You only live twice:

once after you’re born

and once before you die.

—Bashō

Once upon a time, four nuns boarded a jetliner bound from Damascus to Rome. Alitalia Flight 023 took off to the northeast and flew out over twenty or so land miles of the arid Syrian plain before banking with an avian grace and turning back toward the Mediterranean. From the air, the desert appeared a loose, lumpy weave of red and yellow strands, like a potholder made in the craft shack at a summer camp for retarded children. The nuns were sweating like mares, and as they . . .

Sorry. It’s no big deal, really; nothing major, not anything that wholly justifies this interruption. And yet despite the fact that the truths in narration are all relative truths (perhaps the truths in life, as well), despite the sovereign authority of poetic license, this report, claiming no kinship to Finnegan, has, in the interest of both clarity and expediency, endeavored never to indulge in the sort of literary trickery that actively encourages readers to jump to false conclusions. So, while it may be overreactive in this instance, while it may even smack of the kind of self-righteous puritanism that is to genuine purity what a two-bit dictator is to a philosopher king, let us reach into the inkwell jewel box and withdraw two sets of exquisite superscript signs— “ for the right ear, ” for the left—and hang them from the lobes on either side of the word nuns. Like so: “nuns.” This, of course, is not for purposes of ornamentation, although these apostrophic clusters possess an understated, overlooked beauty that transcends the merely chic. (Do they not resemble, say, the windblown teardrops of fairy folk, commas on a trampoline, tadpoles with stomach cramps, or human fetuses in the first days following conception?) No, a stern word such as nuns is undemanding of decorative trinket. We so adorn it here only to set it apart from other words in the sentence for reasons of scrupulous verisimilitude.

It was reported above that once upon a time in Damascus, four nuns boarded an airliner bound for Rome. To be absolutely factual, while they may have looked like ordinary holy sisters to their fellow passengers, three of those “nuns” had been long-since defrocked and the fourth “nun,” the one rolled aboard in a wheelchair, was a man.

The part about them sweating, however, was completely accurate. They perspired because it was a warm day in May, and they were dressed in dark, heavy winter habits that had been dug out of a trunk in the abbess’s storeroom, their lighter habits, customary in that area of the world, having been ceremoniously incinerated approximately one year before. They also perspired because they were nerve-racked, because their ability to board the flight had been in question to the very last moment; because recent history, already somewhat of a trial for them, had really gotten out of hand after the evening when that “nun” most deserving of apostrophic disclaimer—the imposter, the man—had reappeared at their convent.

The supply truck, when en route from Damascus to Deir ez-Zur, always stopped for the night in a hill village about thirty kilometers west of the Pachomian oasis. That was why it would arrive at the compound early of a morning. The car, an Audi sedan with reinforced suspension, heavy-duty shock absorbers, and four-wheel drive, traveled faster than the truck, even across that rude terrain; there were no deliveries to be made in the village, and the European clients would brook no delay. So, Toufic drove through the settlement with only a honk and a wave, and pressed on to the convent. They arrived just before sunset.

Ordering Toufic and his suspect “assistant” (again, the earrings of qualification) to wait in the car, the two men walked up to the great wooden gate. As they read its sign, Switters listened with interest to hear how many times they’d ring the bell. He watched even more intently to see which of the sisters would eventually admit them. He knew that in time the pair would be admitted. He knew their business. Their quiet conversation in the backseat had resounded in his ear chip like dialogue in a Verdi opera, and although his Italian was hardly perfetto, he had scant difficulty in piecing together their intentions.

Not surprisingly, it was Domino Thiry who finally let them in. She couldn’t see him, and Switters caught only the briefest glimpse of her, but it was enough to set his pulses syncopating the way they used to do when Suzy entered the room. He wondered if Suzy would still affect him like that—and could think of no reason why she would not. He lit a cigar. There was little cause to rush. The churchmen were undoubtedly ruthless, but they would prefer negotiation to intimidation, intimidation to violence. There would be protocol to follow. On both sides. Right now, he imagined that tea was being served.

“Back there on the other side of Jebel ash-Shawmar¯iyah,” said Toufic, referring to the central mountain range, “when we passed that band of Bedouins, you almost broke your eyeballs looking at them. I thought you were going to leap from the car and join them.”

“I almost did. But I didn’t see anyone I recognized.”

Scoffing, Toufic pulled the lever that allowed his seat to recline. He had driven for nearly nine hours, a lot of it spent dodging rocks and potholes in the roadless road. He lay back and lit a cigarette. If he was aware that his cigarette, any cigarette, was to Switters’s cigar what a two-bit dictator was to a philosopher king, he did not let on. “You may have been better off intruding on Bedouins instead of getting mixed up in the internal affairs of a church to which you don’t even belong.”

“I expect you’re right.”

“You Americans!”

“Always butting into other people’s business?”

“We are told that America is the land of the free.”

Switters might have brought up video surveillance in public places, police microphones on neighborhood street corners, sniffer dogs in airports, blue codes, urine testing, DNA data banks, Internet censorship, helmet laws, tobacco laws, seat belt laws, liquor laws, persecution for joking, prosecution for flirting, litigation over everything under the sun, and the telling statistic that in the U.S., 645 out of every 100,000 citizens were locked up in prisons, as opposed to an average of 80 per 100,000 in the rest of the world. However, it was just too difficult to put those things into Arabic. And anyhow, he would have had to end by suggesting that maybe those outrages were a small price to pay, America being so bouncy, and all.

Switters switched to French, in which Toufic, like many Damascenes, was modestly conversant. “If land is taken to mean nation, then ‘land of the free’ is an oxymoron. You know this word? An oxymoron is a faux paradox, an incongruity that arises not out of the pervasively contradictory nature of the universe but out of a clumsy or deceptive misuse of language. Our oxymorons are more dangerous than our missiles, pal. Back when the mendacious phrase ‘genuine imitation leather’ was accepted by the populace without violent protest, it paved the way for all the bigger, more sophisticated lies that were to follow. But, hey, don’t get me wrong, Toufic, I’m no seditious malcontent. After eight months of living high on the chickpea, I’d just love to sink down into one of those American fried ham suppers with gravy, a meal so greasy you have to tie it to your teeth to chew it. Afterward, a Baby Ruth candy bar, an hour of Pee-wee Herman. And if the truth be told, I’m nearly as admiring of the audacious hustler who had the sheer gall to promote a ‘genuine imitation’ as I am disappointed in the public that neglected to lynch him for it. P. T. Barnum, Joseph Goebbels, John Foster Dulles.” He spat out of the window. “The ‘genuine imitation leather’ bastard could rub shoulders with the worst of them.”

Switters turned to see if Toufic had followed any of this babble and found him sound asleep. Well, okay, this was as good a time as any to bring on Mr. Beretta. He removed the handgun from crocodilian confinement and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. He was convinced that the Vatican attorney (perhaps earrings— ” “ —are needed here, perhaps not) was armed. He pictured the fellow curling a finger around a teacup handle or a sugared date much as it might close around a trigger. The longer he pictured this, the more uneasy he became. At last, he shook Toufic gently awake.

“You were dreaming of Louisville, Kentucky, weren’t you? Dreaming of the Yankee dollar. I could tell by the way you were grinning. Sorry to interrupt, pal, but I’m in requirement of strategic relocation.”

Toufic was groggy and irritable, but he followed instructions, driving without headlamps around to the rear of the convent and parking close to the mud wall. Grunting, Switters slithered backward through the window, then scrambled up onto the roof of the car. From there, it was an easy matter to hoist himself to the top of the wall. Seated on the wall, he waved Toufic back to the gate and wondered what to do next. He wasn’t particularly worried because the electricity wasn’t on in the compound yet, and he knew that any minute now Pippi would have to—Yes, perfect, there she was!

There commenced a low voltaic drone, like Thomas Edison’s spiritual mantra or the romantic humming of ogres in love. Toward the center of the oasis, a few lights flickered on. Pippi backed away from the generator shed and broke into a trot, pigtails swinging, as if in a great hurry to resume unfinished business elsewhere on the premises. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him. Obviously she didn’t know it was he. From the way she screeched, she might have been transported for a second back to Notre Dame—and the way he squatted there atop the wall, the tip of his cigar glowing red in the thickening dark, well, to mistake him for a gargoyle was by no means ridiculous. He called her name, which no horrid gargoyle had ever done, even in her nightmares, but still she trembled, one freckled hand over her mouth. Perhaps, she imagined him to be the ghost of Cardinal Thiry, come to punish the Pachomians for having failed him. She was delusional enough to fear such a thing. The deeply religious are by definition superstitious. As she slowly crossed herself, Switters observed, not for the first time, how much she resembled a middle-aged version of Audubon Poe’s daughter, Anna. Oh, that succulent sprig, Anna! To think he might have. . . . But why was he thinking of such things now?

“Pippi! C’est moi. Les échasses, s’il vous plaît. The stilts. Dépêchez-vous. C’est moi, bébé. The fucking circus is back in town!”

When she realized it was he, she shrieked anew. She hopped around in a circle squealing before composing herself and dashing to fetch him the nearest pair of stilts. They were the outsized stilts, the Barnum & Bailey stilts, the absurdly tall pair, for his customized two-inch walkers had been left in his old room, and the regular pair was at the front gate where it was always kept. What the hell. He’d called it, hadn’t he? Send in the clowns.

If the stilts that had held him two inches above the ground were analogous to enlightenment, this extra-elevated pair must have represented Nirvana. It was not surprising, then, that so few aspirants ever attained the Nirvanic state. Switters, by now an accomplished stiltsman, was nearly as ungainly on the exaggerated numbers as he had been the first and only time he’d ever strapped them on. He teetered, staggered, and dangerously swayed, but he set off, anyway, following behind Pippi, only too glad that his hands were free. For the present, he busied his hands with the task of brushing foliage aside as they traversed the various orchards. At one point, his head banged against a high branch in a willow tree, startling a pair of roosting cuckoos and causing them to rocket from their untidy nest, their normal sweetly mournful song taking on an angry, hysterical edge. He grabbed a limb to keep from falling and sent yet another of the slender white-and-olive birds flapping noisily into the night air. “Oh, stop your bitching,” he scolded them. “It isn’t that late. You remind me of my grandmother.”

Governing her pace so that she would be close enough to break his fall should he topple, Pippi—in staccato, over-the-shoulder bursts—tried to fill him in. “From the Vatican. They want it. The prophecy. The Church knows about it. Fannie told. Watch your head. They want it now. I think Masked Beauty will not give it up.”

By the time Pippi and Switters reached the main building, the meeting had lost any semblance of civility. In fact, the participants had erupted from the conference room and were grouped outside by the jasmine bushes, arguing heatedly. So much for sneaking up on them. A ten-foot Switters came weaving and wobbling through the eggplant patch just as the older churchman, the scholar from Lisbon, reached out and ripped off the abbess’s veil. She slapped his face, a light blow that did not stun him half as much as the sudden sight of her two-story wart. He was gawking at the growth as if transfixed when his gaze was diverted by the arrival of the careening colossus, its throat full of wahoo, its hair full of leaves.

After that, the scene became a tad chaotic. Switters circled the group (he had to keep moving, otherwise he would fall), demanding to know if the rights of property owners were being violated, if trespass had occurred, and if the gentlemen present were cognizant of certain provisions of the Geneva Convention. He waggled a finger at the professor. “That ain’t no way to treat a lady,” he cautioned, although it was hard to tell if it was menace or merriment in his voice. The sisters were jabbering excitedly to one another, pointing accusing fingers at the professor, who, once he recovered from the shock of Switters’s intrusion, began berating Masked Beauty for the inappropriate state of affairs. Several goats, awakened by the disturbance, were bleating, the donkey brayed, and irate cuckoos made passes overhead. Only Sister Domino and the so-called attorney remained calm; Domino because . . . well, because she was Domino, and the attorney because he recognized Switters from their day-long drive and realized that there was more to this farcical turn of events than met the eye. It was unthinkable that he would become flustered. He was a professional and wore no expression at all as his gaze followed the antics of the maniac stilter.

Dr. Goncalves, for that was the Fatima scholar’s name, insisted, in French, that he would not leave the compound without the document he had come to secure. Obviously, he had made that same assertion several times before, although more politely, under less clamorous conditions. For her part, Masked Beauty was firm in maintaining that the paper in question was the private property of the Pachomian Order, to which Dr. Goncalves, his face growing more scarlet by the moment, replied that no such order was recognized by the Church and therefore did not exist. “What do you call this, then?” the abbess wanted to know, gesturing with the remains of her veil at the women and the grounds around her. “I was inclined to call it a misguided violation of the covenant with God,” Goncalves answered, “but now I call it a madhouse, as well.” He removed his straw hat and swatted at Switters with it as he came stumbling by. Switters laughed and then remarked to Scanlani, for that proved to be the younger man’s name, “Nice threads, pal.” Scanlani was wearing a snail-colored suit with a signature Armani cut. At the compliment, his upper lip twitched in an almost imperceptible hint of a snarl.

Masked Beauty attempted to refasten her torn veil, an action that for some reason infuriated Professor Goncalves. He snatched the filmy cloth from her hand and lashed her with it. Drawing back to strike him with a kind of roundhouse wallop, the old woman’s body went akimbo in a manner that mimicked the way Matisse had liked to paint her. Interesting, mused Switters, for he could detect in the arrangement of cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones that formed her body, in the planes these shapes flattened into when he narrowed his eyes, the foundation of Analytic Cubism. In paintings such as Blue Nude 1943, had Matisse humanized Cubism, restored it to a natural, less formalistic state without relinquishing its inner dynamic, rescued the female form from Picasso’s wood chipper, and put it back together as a whole slab of juicy color?

As he was pondering that notion, Domino acted. She stepped between the professor and her aunt as if they were silly, quarreling children. “Enough,” she announced evenly. “You gentlemen must leave here at once. This is an official request, and if it is not honored, then matters will be turned over to our chief of security.” With a nod of her head, a toss of her glossy brown hair, she indicated the joker on stilts—and it was then that she and Switters made eye contact for the first time that evening. Something went leaping between them, something intimate and lively, but also quizzical, wary, and a wee bit weird.

Acknowledging his role, Switters bellowed at the men in his rudest Italian. “Sparisca! Sparisca! Get lost!”

As if activated by a switch, Scanlani sprang. He took five lateral steps with the quickness of an NBA point guard and thrust out his right leg with the force of a Thai kickboxer. The leather sole of his expensive Milano-cobbled boot smashed into one of Switters’s stilt poles. Instantly losing his already precarious balance, Switters tumbled wildly backward. With a splintering crash, he landed in a jasmine bush. Broken twigs dug into his back like daggers, but what was left of the shrub served as a buffer between him and the earth. His feet had not touched. A trickle of blood ran from a deep scratch on his cheek. “Another damn scar,” he lamented. “I tell you, the gods are jealous of my good looks.” Two or three fragrant petals were plastered to the wound. He sniffed. “It smells like the junior prom in here,” he said.

Scanlani’s generic expression was unchanged, but Dr. Goncalves laughed derisively. “Your chief of security?” he asked with a smirk. Pippi and ZuZu made an effort to help Switters out of the shattered bush, but he waved them off. “Go get my starship,” he whispered to Pippi. “It’s in the car parked at the gate.”

Domino glared at the professor. “If he’s injured,” she said, indicating Switters, “you will never be given the prophecy.”

“Oh?” Goncalves raised his eyebrows. “So you are saying that we may be given it?”

“That depends. Our order will have to discuss various—”

“Over my dead body!” exclaimed Masked Beauty.

“Now, aunt, let’s keep an open mind. At some future date, after certain conditions have been met, certain concessions granted, it may be in everyone’s best interest to—”

“It is in everyone’s best interest that you surrender the stolen document immediately,” Goncalves said. His tone was as threatening as a green sheen on mayonnaise. He shoved Domino aside in order to confront Masked Beauty directly. “Look at you!” He forced the words through clenched dentures. “Just look at you. How can the likes of you think to defy the authority of the Holy Father?” The old abbess blinked. Had she any lingering worry about still being beautiful, it was all gone now.

“I defy the authority of the Holy Father!” came a loud cry from the bush. “I defy the authority of the Holy Authority! I defy the authority of the unholy authority! Fuck authority and the Polish sausage it rode in on!” Then he added, because his back was being painfully gouged and because he was on a roll, “Fuck the Dallas Cowboys!”

“Oh, do watch your tongue, Mr. Switters,” chimed in Maria Deux. “All is lost through sacrilege.”

“Silence that heathen oaf,” commanded Goncalves. He said it to Masked Beauty, upon whose rococo rhino polyp his beady eyes remained fixed, but it was Scanlani who moved catlike toward the busted bush, not walking so much as gliding. The jurist hadn’t gotten far, however, before three shots rang out in rapid succession.

Mr. Beretta had spoken. Mr. Beretta had barked at the stars.

Disturbed again, the cuckoos took flight with a fluttering of feathers and shrieks of protest and alarm. The sound of scrabbling goat hooves was heard, and from the henhouse a great chorus of nervous clucking suddenly ensued. Scanlani froze. Switters leveled the gun at him. He fully expected Scanlani to whisk a pistol of his own from inside his fine jacket. He imagined the move would be as slick as a magician’s. It would be pretty to watch. Even his stance—well-shod feet wide apart, both hands on the gun—would be instinctive and classic. So, Switters was actually disappointed when Scanlani made no move.

Switters’s position was awkward and uncomfortable, laid out as he was on a bed of organic nails, but he held the 9-mm steady. His intent was to try to shoot the gun out of Scanlani’s hand without hitting him. He’d accomplished that feat once in Kuwait City, blasting a Czech-made CZ-85 apart in the fist of a double agent. Particles of metal had flown off it like cold black sparks. Dropping what was left of the pistol, the man had whimpered. He’d held up his vibrating hands to watch their hue redden, his fingers already swelling like microwaved frankfurters. But, as they say, “That was then and this is now.” (What would Today Is Tomorrow make of such a maxim?) Switters was not at all convinced he could duplicate the marksmanship, even if he was on his feet. He steadied the barrel and waited. For whatever reason, Scanlani failed to act.

“Throw down your gun,” Switters ordered. He wasn’t sure he’d gotten it right in Italian, so he repeated the command in French and English. Scanlani shrugged, a big arrogant Neapolitan shrug. “Okay, pal, have it your way,” said Switters. “Remove your jacket.” The alleged attorney understood, for he slipped out of his suit coat, folded it carefully, and placed it on the ground. The shoulder holster Switters had expected to be exposed was nowhere in sight. “Damn!” he swore. He couldn’t lie in that position much longer.

Waving the Beretta, he had Scanlani remove his shirt and twirl like a fashion model. There was no handgun stuck in his waistband, front or back. “Okay, clever boy, take off your pants.” The man refused. For the first time, he displayed emotion, and the emotion was outrage and disgust. Switters’s back felt like the time clock in an anthill. This was becoming unbearable. “Remove your damn pants!” he repeated vexatiously. Dr. Goncalves and the sisters looked dumbfounded.

Again, Scanlani refused to comply. Switters squeezed off a volley of shots at the dirt alongside the handsome calfskin boots. Everyone shrieked. Scanlani hastened to unbuckle his belt. And several moments passed before Switters realized three things:

1. Scanlani was unarmed.

2. Inadvertently, he had asked the fellow not to remove his trousers but, rather, to pull down his panties, a linguistic gaffe that could be traced to certain nights in Taormina and Venice, when he’d desired a clearer view of what the Italians, speaking clinically, referred to as la vagina (the same as in America), but informally (and sweetly) tended to call la pesca (the peach) or la fica (the fig).

3. One of the bullets fired at Scanlani’s feet had ricocheted off a rock and struck Masked Beauty in the face.

“It was an honest mistake,” said Switters, referring to the gunpoint disrobing of Scanlani: he hadn’t yet noticed that Masked Beauty was bleeding. “I gave you credit for being something more than just another scumbag lawyer. Please accept my apology. And my condolences.” Domino, who likewise was oblivious to her aunt’s wound, rushed over to add her apologies. Switters’s heart seemed to liquefy when he witnessed the characteristic and irrepressible compassion in her concern. Nevertheless, he called out, “Keep your distance, sister love. The man may be unarmed, but his manners are deplorable.”

He thought he heard her mutter, “No worse than your own,” but he couldn’t be sure, for about that time Pippi had barged onto the scene, pushing his wheelchair. Toufic was with her. Together, they lifted him out of the tangle of twigs (it resembled an oversize cuckoo’s nest) and onto the “contour plus” cushion that still adorned the “drop-hook, solid-folding” seat. Continuing to brandish the automatic pistol, he waved it at the rapidly dressing Scanlani and at Goncalves, who was one big eel-mouthed gash of petulance. “Toufic, ol’ buddy, our guests were just saying their good-byes. You’re supposed to chauffeur them to Deir ez-Zur for their overnight lodging, as I recall. In the dark, no road, a good sixty kilometers as the camel flies: I suggest that you organize an expeditious departure.” It was then that he—and Domino—had noticed the Pachomians huddled around the abbess.

Once it was ascertained that Masked Beauty was not gravely injured, he ushered the Italian and the Portuguese to the gate. The former was mutely furious, the latter loudly vocal with accusations and threats. As Switters was removing his belongings from the car, Domino rushed up and insisted that he give the Vatican delegation his satellite phone number and e-mail address. She told them she was sorry that things had gotten out of hand—both sides were at fault, she said—and she urged them to contact her and the abbess when tempers had cooled. Perhaps, she said, something could be worked out.

When the Audi pulled away, she glared at Switters, and not because she’d overheard him lobbying a somewhat bewildered Toufic to include a pinch of hashish in his next scheduled delivery to the convent. “You reckless maniac,” she scolded. “Your irresponsible macho gunplay has disfigured my aunt.”

Horrified that he might have caused Masked Beauty permanent harm, he rolled himself rapidly to the infirmary, where his guilt and sorrow subsided slightly after he learned the extent of the so-called disfiguration. It seemed that the ricocheting bullet had grazed the old woman’s nose, neatly slicing off at the base the tiny Chinese mountain of horn flesh, the violet viral cauliflowerette, the double-dipped God-wart that for many decades had been protuberating there.

Nobody at the oasis got much sleep that night. Even the animals were restless and jumpy. The sisterhood was atwitter with agitation, and Masked Beauty, although surprisingly free of pain, was in a state of shock following her abrupt and artless amputation. “You’ll just have to get used to being desirable again,” Switters told the abbess. “Is it not a fine thing to be rebeautified on a planet that’s being systematically trashed? You know, my mother always wanted me to become a plastic surgeon. It would have saved her a fortune in lifts and tucks.”

For her part, even as she swabbed his own scratched cheek with iodine, Domino remained in a huff. True, she and her sisters had not merely accepted but actively solicited his protection, yet she found it brutal and anti-Pachomian that he would assault an official party from the Vatican (no matter that the party was belligerently authoritarian) with a deadly weapon. He replied that “assault” was a bit of an exaggeration. And then he told her a story.

The story had been passed on to him by Bobby Case, who had learned it from one of his “wise ol’ boys.” It seemed that long ago, a holy man, a bodhisattva, was walking through the Indian countryside when he came upon a band of poor, troubled herdsmen and their emaciated flock. The herdsmen were moaning and gnashing and wringing their hands, and when the bodhisattva asked them what was the matter, they pointed to a range of nearby mountains. To drive their flock to fresh green pasture on the other side of the hills, they had to traverse a narrow pass. In the pass, however, a huge cobra had established a den, and each time they went by it, the snake attacked, stabbing its long venomous fangs into animals and humans alike. “We can’t get through the pass,” the herders complained, “and as a result, our cattle and goats are starving, and so are we.”

“Worry not,” said the bodhisattva, “I will take care of it.” He then proceeded to climb up to the pass, where he rapped on the entrance to the den with his staff and gave the cobra a lecture it would not soon forget. Thoroughly shamed and chastised, the big serpent promised that it would never, ever bite the herders or their charges again. The holy man thanked it. “I believe you when you vow that in the future you will refrain from the biting of any passerby,” he said, and went on his way.

About a year later, Bodhisattva came that way again. From a distance, he saw the herdsmen. They appeared content, their animals hardy and fat. Bodhisattva decided to look in on the cobra and compliment it on its good behavior, but although he repeatedly rapped his staff on the rocks, he received no response. Perhaps it moved away, thought Bodhi, and he made to leave. Just then, however, he heard a weak groan from deep inside the cave. Bodhi crawled inside, where he found the snake in pitiful condition. Skinny as a drawstring and battered as a tow rope, it lay on its side, fairly close to death.

“What on earth is the matter?” asked the guru, moved nearly to tears.

“Well,” said the cobra in a barely audible voice, “you made me promise not to bite anyone. So, now, everybody who comes over the pass hits me with sticks and throws stones at me. My body is cut and bruised, and I can no longer leave the den to find food or water. I’m miserable and sick, but, alas, there is nothing to be done to protect myself, because you proclaimed that I shouldn’t bite.”

Bodhisattva patted the poor creature’s head. “Yes,” he agreed. “But I didn’t say you couldn’t hiss.”

The meaning of the story was not lost on Domino. She soon forgave Switters for his hissing. She continued to believe that he had hissed excessively and had taken an unseemly amount of pleasure in hissing, but she was not one to linger in the stale cellars of resentment. Nevertheless, her attitude toward him had changed. While he could have attributed the change to his cavalier gunplay or to the accidental shearing off of Masked Beauty’s growth (if he could divest the abbess of the shield behind which she’d taken refuge—her supernatural wart—mightn’t he likewise flush Domino from behind the convenient cover of her supernatural hymen?), he realized that she had seemed different, somehow, even before the shooting started. Thus, he was not entirely surprised when she announced that their tower-room petting sessions were at an end.

“I’ve had my fling,” she said, “and escaped relatively unscathed. I believe I can safely state that should I ever enjoy such acts again, it will be under the auspices of matrimony.”

“And I’m not a candidate to share your marriage bed?”

In spite of herself, she smiled. “If that is a proposal, I will give it due consideration.”

Perhaps fearful of arousing his imp, he elected not to pursue the matter, and that seemed okay with her. They had a great many other things to talk about, and over the next four months—during which lengthy and, at times, acrimonious negotiations with the Vatican took place almost weekly via e-mail—they talked as fervently as they once had kissed. If either or both of them regarded conversation an unsatisfactory substitute, they did not let on.

The talking had begun the morning after the incident, when, in the shade of one of the walnut trees, she had briefed him on the reasons why the Church had sent Dr. Goncalves and Scanlani to retrieve the Fatima prophecy in the first place.

A lot of the briefing was pure conjecture—the piecing together of tidbits of information that Goncalves had let slip, combined with an intuitive feel for the situation—but in weeks to come, when more facts became available, Domino’s assessment proved quite accurate, although it should be noted that the full story unfolded slowly over time and may never be completely known.

For whatever reason, Fannie, after she fled the oasis, had made a pilgrimage to Fatima in rural Portugal. There, under the spell of the very place where the Virgin Mother had allegedly made her most dramatic historical appearances, Fannie had requested an audience with the nearby bishop of Leiria. Eventually, an interview was granted. The bishop was aware of his predecessor’s involvement with the Lady’s third prophecy, how he had concealed it in his safe from 1940 until 1957, when, under the direction of Pope Pius XII, he’d hand-carried it to Rome; and then, three years later, how he’d gone to assist Pope John XXIII with its translation. What the current bishop didn’t know was why the Vatican powers had never revealed the contents of the prophecy. He’d heard the rumors, but felt it was none of his business. Still, he was intrigued by the defrocked Irish nun’s story, allowing that it was at least feasible that the Church believed the prophecy destroyed, and even that the infamous Pachomian abbess, Croetine Thiry, might, through her late uncle, have ended up with the only extant copy.

It was one thing to be intrigued, quite another to take action. If Pope John had, indeed, burned the prophecy and what he believed to be the only copies thereof, he must have done so for a very sound reason. The Vatican undoubtedly would concur with that reasoning. The news that Cardinal Thiry’s translation had escaped the flames might hold a minimum of delight for it. And Rome had a long tradition of killing, literally or figuratively, the messenger. On the other hand, if a surviving copy did exist, wouldn’t it want to be apprised? Especially if the copy was in the possession of a loose cannon such as Abbess Croetine?

In the end, the bishop nervously telephoned that cardinal in Rome whose duties included the investigation of miracles and visitations. He relayed Fannie’s story and awaited official reaction. It was not long in coming. Less than a week after the phone call, the cardinal rang up the bishop and instructed him that Fannie’s tale was a blasphemous hoax and should be dismissed as such and forgotten.

Feisty Fannie, however, was not so easily deterred. She went to see Sister Lucia, now nearly ninety-two years old and living again in Portugal. To the surprise of those around her, the normally reclusive Lucia received the Irishwoman. In private, Fannie told her story, and as she recited the words of the third prophecy (over the years, all of the Pachomians had unintentionally memorized it), cerebral calcification cracked, rust flaked away from axon terminals of mnemonic neurons, and in the old woman’s brain, synapses that hadn’t fired in years—decades, perhaps—commenced to shudder, sputter, and send off sparks. They shook hands with other synapses, and the crone found herself recycling each and every word of that fateful prognostication that she’d received over miraculous meadowland airwaves in 1917 and written down for presumed posterity in 1940, the words that she had cautioned would “bring joy to some and sorrow to others.”

On a couple of occasions in the past, Sister Lucia had voiced polite disappointment that the Church had not even attempted to consecrate Russia, as the Lady of Fatima had directed in the second prophecy, and that the third prophecy hadn’t been acknowledged at all. But Lucia was nothing if not an obedient handmaiden. She had always submitted docilely, thoroughly, to the authority of Vatican fathers. Even in her advanced age, however, she was not unaware of the worldwide resurgence of Marianism in general, and of interest in the Fatima Virgin in particular. Like Switters, moreover, she was susceptible to Fannie’s Irish charm. It hadn’t taken the fugitive Pachomian more than an afternoon sipping watered-down port in a sunny Portuguese garden to convince the nonagenarian nun that the time had come to honor the Holy Virgin’s wishes, to present her exhortations and warnings to humankind, with or without Vatican cooperation.

Both Fannie and Lucia were aware that a significant conference was scheduled for early June in Amsterdam. Entitled “New Catholic Women,” it was to be a gathering of nuns, laywomen, teachers, writers, and concerned parishioners who had in common a growing spirit of resistance toward the repressively sexist practices and attitudes that persisted within their church. It was the premise of conference organizers that the Church’s continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their physical lives. Representatives of the Blue Army, the largest and best known of the contemporary Fatima cults, had announced their intentions to attend the gathering, and Fannie experienced little difficulty in persuading Lucia that Amsterdam in June was the ideal place and time to disclose the contents of the secret third prophecy to the masses for whom Mother Mary had intended it. For reasons as political as spiritual, regular conferees would be receptive to an airing of Marian information that had been supposedly suppressed by the patriarchs. They would be receptive to the airing whether or not they as individuals believed Mary had actually appeared at Fatima, and the Blue Army would be overjoyed, since it regarded the longreticent Sister Lucia as only slightly less saintly than Mary herself. The frosting on the Communion wafer was that the conference was bound to attract global media coverage.

Some media members were, as early as December, already paying attention, for when word leaked out of the “New Catholic Women” organization office that the legendary Sister Lucia would surface in Amsterdam to personally unveil the third prophecy of Fatima, the news popped up in papers and on broadcast stations around the world. As is often the case, buzz begat buzzsaw. The phone calls and faxes that the bishop of Leiria began suddenly to receive from Rome were uniformly lacking in any shade of tickled pink.

Within seventy-two hours of the leak, a helicopter deposited a Vatican cardinal in Leiria. The red hat was accompanied by his secretary and two members of the Holy See’s legal affairs team, one of whom, not surprisingly, was the mysterious Scanlani. Portugal’s foremost Fatima expert, the scholarly theologian and fascist apologist, Dr. Antonio Goncalves, also joined the discussions in the bishop’s study. The following day, Goncalves, the bishop, and the cardinal descended on Sister Lucia and browbeat the frail old nun into publicly announcing that she would not under any circumstances appear at the Amsterdam confab, that she was not at all certain that any text of Fatima’s third prophecy existed, and that if one did exist, it rightfully was in safekeeping at the Vatican.

As for Fannie, she slipped out of Portugal as stealthily as she had slipped out of the Pachomian oasis. No matter. The Vatican team was not particularly worried about her. Not only was the defrocked Irishwoman deficient in ecclesiastical cachet, she was a known sexual deviant, having, as a matter of record, undergone a number of exorcisms in an attempt to purge her of the Asmodeus that had continued to corrupt her well into her thirties. It would be easy to denounce and discredit her, particularly since she did not possess the copy of the prophecy but only claimed to have read it and memorized it under dubious circumstances somewhere in Syria. Given the facts, the Amsterdam conference quite probably would not even allow her a forum.

So much for that. But suppose, Dr. Goncalves asked, that a copy of the third prophecy was, indeed, held in a maverick desert convent; suppose it was in Cardinal Thiry’s verifiable handwriting; and suppose, just suppose, it did, as the wench Fannie had intimated, call the future of Roman Catholic influence into question? Shouldn’t an effort be made to secure the document and turn it over to the Holy Father, the single personage with the authority to determine its fate? What if, inspired by Fannie’s efforts, that troublesome Abbess Croetine should decide to carry her uncle’s translation to Amsterdam in June?

The cardinal was a practical man. “I hear the desert is pleasant this time of year,” he said. He winked at Scanlani. He winked so hard it jiggled his velvet cap.

January. February. March. It was a period of flat suspense. Alfred Hitchcock on a grapefruit diet. A clock that ticked but did not advance: every time you looked, it said five minutes to midnight. A bomb with a damp fuse. The other shoe that drops and drops and keeps on dropping. Ice fishing as an Olympic sport. The tension was so steady, the pressure so uniform, there were weeks when it might have been boring were it not on the verge of being desperate.

It was the threat of serious danger that kept Switters in Syria. True, the sisters relied on his computer, but he could have left it with them and gone on to South America adequately served by his flip phone. They would have accepted the computer, all right, but they wanted no part of the government-customized Beretta Cougar 8040G, no matter how he Tom Clancyed its light weight, negligible recoil, side-mounted magazine release button, and all-around athleticism. (“I’m not gun-happy by any means,” he assured Masked Beauty, “but we angels can’t let the cowboys have all the fun.”) So, he remained at the oasis, committed to its protection until matters were somehow resolved. He had a sense of responsibility, of loyalty, Switters did, but it must be mentioned that he was also motivated by simple curiosity.

Not that Switters would have deemed curiosity an inferior or even ordinary motive. Au contraire. On his very first field assignment for the CIA, he had, undercover, accompanied a champion high-school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin, on a trip to Moscow. There had never been anything in Russia even remotely resembling the eighty-piece, high-stepping, plume-bedecked ensemble that, fronted by a baton-twirling, short-skirted, white-booted drum majorette, paraded from Gorky Park to Red Square, booming a brassy, sassy rendition of “Jesus Christ, Superstar”; and Switters, when he could pry his gaze off the majorette (any hope on his part to get in her pants was ruthlessly squashed by a sizable phalanx of mother hens from the New Richmond PTA), couldn’t help but notice how many Russians simply turned their backs on the spectacle and went about their dreary business in the streets. Even if you were fiercely anti-American, he thought, wouldn’t you at least be curious? In later years, when he would find himself the only outsider, the first Caucasian, in a remote African or Asian village, he would notice that some inhabitants gaped openly, grinning at him with itch and relish, while others looked right past him or turned away, expressionless. And so he came to recognize that there were two kinds of people: those who were curious about the world and those whose shallow attentions were pretty much limited to those things that pertained to their own personal well-being. He concluded further that Curiosity might have to be added to that list of traits—Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics—that, according to his grandmother, separated full-fledged humans from the less evolved. Of course, curiosity was not entirely lacking among four-footed beasts, as many a dying cat would attest, and Maestra’s narrow-focused “missing links” were occasionally capable of being intrigued by trifles like the domestic affairs of film stars and royalty; but such displays of interest were feeble, even pathetic, when compared to the inquisitive marveling of the wonderstruck, the obsessive questing of scientists and artists, or even to the all but squealy speculations of those who could barely wait to see what was going to happen next.

In that regard, the Vatican also could be assumed to be partially motivated by curiosity. The pope, naturally, was curious about the augury that had set his predecessor to throwing off tears like an ice sculpture in a wind tunnel. Dr. Goncalves was curious for academic reasons. Even the blandly arrogant Scanlani must have been curious. The Church undoubtedly wanted possession of the Fatima prophecy because it worried that it might encourage the feminist bent of the new Marianism and because of the rumor that the Virgin had foretold of a spiritual renaissance in which the Christian establishment, unthinkably, was not a major player. Every bit as much as it feared and resented the prophecy, however, the Church was curious about it. Domino, with the help of Switters, both stoked and thwarted that curiosity. And they and the sisterhood lived with the consequences.

January. February. The Ides of March. A sky-lidded night plain. A star-loaded sky. A moon without a pond to primp in. A wind without a leaf to tease. A nighthawk without a wire to rest on. A couple without a corner to turn. Her sandals, his wheels, made a popcorn-eating sound in the sand.

He watched as she squatted to pee. She was matter-of-fact. He whistled a show tune. Although they never touched, theirs was the radiating, maddening-to-others intimacy of longtime easy lovers. If she made enough water, the moon might glimpse itself, after all.

Now that they no longer rendezvoused in the tower room, Domino and Switters often strolled together at night. Rather, she strolled, he rolled. (Stilting in tandem with a companion on foot produced ridiculous rhythms.) Switters usually preferred to stroll and roll outside of the compound, out in the desert, both because they could speak more freely there and because he could check the perimeters for possible intruders. By March, the Vatican had apparently given up on trying to pressure Syria to deport the Pachomians: thanks to Sol Glissant, they held clear legal title to their land. Army helicopters no longer buzzed the oasis, and the last police raid, in early February, had failed for the third time to find an alien American male on the premises. (“Just one pretty nun,” reported the officer-in-charge, “and nine ugly ones, including an old abbess who can’t stop rubbing her nose and a big burly mute one, confined to her bed.”) Still, it paid to be alert. Switters remembered those Islamic militants from the closest village, and it would not have surprised him if Roman agents incited them to spy on, or even attack, the convent.

For more than two months, while the abbess paced in her chambers, absentmindedly but compulsively polishing the unfamiliar regularities of her newly planed proboscis, Domino had bargained hard with Rome. Scanlani, who proved as verbose electronically as he was taciturn in person, spoke for the Church. Initially, starting about a fortnight after Switters had run him and Goncalves off the compound, his on-line communiqués consisted of the kind of insidious intimidation—bully-boy menace couched in oblique legalistic formalities—for which lawyers were universally despised. When Domino failed to back down, when she intimated and then flatly stated that her aunt might, indeed, attend the “New Catholic Women” conference, disputed document in hand, Scanlani became gradually, reluctantly, more conciliatory. Of course, at that time, Masked Beauty, still wary of its presumed Islamic overtones, had absolutely no intention of publicizing the Virgin’s message in Amsterdam or anywhere else, but she came to appreciate her niece’s strategy: “If the Holy Father agrees to reinstate the Order of St. Pachomius,” Domino would write again and again, “then the Order of St. Pachomius will consent to turn over to the Vatican the sole extant text of the third prophecy of Fatima.”

Eventually an industrial-strength votive candle had flared in the old abbess’s mind. She chuckled. She stroked her shockingly sleek snout. “Chantage,” she said.

“Yes.” Domino grinned back. “Blackmail.”

They laughed. They bit their lips, their tongues, the pulpy lining of their cheeks—and went right on laughing. They were disgusted with themselves, guilt-ridden, ashamed; but they were, momentarily, at least, forced into giggles by the very idea of it. Blackmailing the pope!

And there had come a day, just past the middle of March, when the pope blinked. Scanlani signaled that, in exchange for the return of certain Church property, the Holy Father would officially accept the Pachomian sisters back into the fold. There was a catch, naturally, and it was the terms of the Roman offer that had occupied Domino and Switters on their stroll and roll that night in the parched but cooling grit, where the moon, as anticipated, had indeed examined its acne in the puddle that Domino straddled like the primordial Mother of Oceans.

Because of her youth in Philadelphia, perhaps, she’d never acquired the French habit of dabbing herself with the hem of her skirt, so she squatted there, panties down, for a while, as if waiting for the wind to dry her. To distract his thoughts, Switters tried to spin his chair, but it was no use: you couldn’t pop a wheelie in the sand. Finally she stood, affording him just a flash of what, in South Africa, the whites called the poes and the moer, the coloreds called the koek, and many blacks knew as indlela eya esizalweni (a mouthful any way you looked at it): the cultural information latent in the different ways those neighbors referred to the same commonplace and yet everlastingly mysterious organ was fodder for a fascinating sociological thesis, though not from our man Switters, who was happy just to have learned the names, in case an occasion ever arose to address the thing in question in its proper local idiom. At any rate, Domino was beside him again now, repeating the conditions of the Vatican proposal.

“They’ll readmit us to the cloth, but they won’t support us financially, which is okay, because we’re used to poverty and we can take care of ourselves. However, they also demand that we stay out of Church politics, keep our mouths shut, don’t rock any boats.”

“And you absolutely will not agree to that?”

“Mais non! We have to speak out. It’s our duty to life. Putting a stop to this rampant, irresponsible procreation is like finding the cure for cancer. The ‘breeders,’ as you call them, are rather similar to cancers, actually; tumors with legs. A cell becomes malignant when it misinterprets or mishandles information from the DNA, and then all it cares about is replication—at least that’s what I’ve read—and it will go on blindly, selfishly replicating itself even though it smothers the innocent, healthy cells around it. And, of course, it eventually dies itself because it has destroyed its environment. Everything dies then. Yes? So, the egotistical breeders misinterpret God’s word, or cultural definitions of manhood, and they—”

“Yeah, I get the analogy, sister love.” Moreover, he agreed with it, although it seemed harsh coming from her. He wondered if some of his own cheerful cynicism had rubbed off on her. He wondered, too, to what degree, if any, she’d ever entertained the fantasy of bearing children of her own.

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghosts of souls who hadn’t lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X’s without Y’s. Y’s without X’s. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn’t go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome—yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents the uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like a phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.

Not every childless woman was so accompanied—it may have been only those who at least partially, on some level, wanted the girls and boys that they, for whatever reason, chose not to conceive—but when Switters looked hard at Domino, as he did now, he saw her saturated with other lives. He wondered if she was aware of her phantom brood, but he wasn’t about to ask. If he broached that subject, his imp might start messing with his coconut, and the next thing he knew, he could be inquiring about what she thought of his potential as a father. He liked children and children liked him, better than most adults liked him, but men such as Switters didn’t breed in captivity. Oh, no. What he was going to ask, and not for the first time, was why she and Masked Beauty, having slowly, steadily moved away from much of the old patriarchal doctrine, still desired to be a part of the traditional Church. The reasons she gave were never very clear, though he surmised that they were not dissimilar to the emotions that caused him to sometimes muse wistfully about the CIA.

Before he could raise the question, however, they were distracted by a noise. It came from close to the compound, there where the bud-weighted boughs of an orange tree overhung the wall. The sound was that species of muffled hack related to an inverse yap, as if someone were trying to suppress a cough. Switters exposed Mr. Beretta to the light of the moon. In a whisper he asked Domino to push his chair toward the noise, and she complied, tensely but calmly.

As they drew nearer, a form stirred in the shadows. Grasping the pistol with both hands, Switters yelled something in Arabic, wondering as he did so why he hadn’t chosen Italian. Instantly two figures darted from the wall. Two short figures. Two small figures. Two doglike figures. Loping off into the dunes, they unraveled a ribbon of musk behind them.

Domino smiled with relief. “I—I don’t know the English,” she said.

“Jackals,” Switters informed her. “Rare to see one these days. We’ve had ourselves a lucky little nature ramble.”

His nose was turned up at the jackal smell. Her nose was turned up at his pistol. She stood scowling at its beautiful ugliness. She shook her head, and moonbeams exposed the underlying red in her hair. “When you were a secret agent,” she asked, “did you have a double-oh seven? License to kill?”

“Me? Double-oh seven?” He laughed. “Negative, darling. I had a double-oh oh. License to wahoo.”

She knew that by wahoo he was referring to a cry of exhilaration, an exclamation of nonsensical joy, and she knew, also, that it had a basis in Scripture—”Make a joyful noise unto the Lord”—but she was not so sure she could distinguish between that kind of defiant exuberance and mere childish bravado. She continued to fix him with a half-frown of affectionate disapproval.

Meanwhile, Switters’s attention was focused long and hard in the direction of the fleeing jackals. After a while, Domino said, “I didn’t know you were so interested in wildlife.” He might have rejoined that wildlife was the only life that did interest him, but he just kept looking and listening, saying nothing. Those jackals concerned him. They gave him an evil feeling. He was aware that while few people kept jackals as pets because of their odor, the animals were easily tamed. Conceivably, some party could have trained the jackals to skulk around outside the compound walls. A bug could have been concealed in the fur of one or both of them, a listening device that would record any voice within fifty yards spoken above a whisper. Vatican security might neither possess equipment that sophisticated nor a mentality that ingenious or perverse, but the black-bag tekkies at the pickle factory were capable of that and more. Much more.

If Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald had been interested enough in him to have him tailed in Seattle, he quite likely had had his name put on satellite. That meant that anytime anyone typed the name Switters into an on-line computer or spoke the name Switters into a telephone—anywhere in the world—it would be recorded and pinpointed geographically and chronologically, by one of the covert satellites that the company had had put in orbit around the planet.

As he considered that possibility, sitting there beneath a granary of stars that were not all stars, he was struck by the thought that the giant bulbs, the shiny black and copper pods that he’d seen circling the globe when his consciousness was massively enlarged by yopo and ayahuasca; the bulbs that called themselves our overlords and boasted that they ran the show; the pods that the shaman dismissed as a bunch of big blowhards . . . well, what if the master bulbs were just a more evolved generation of intelligence satellites? The fact that Amazonian Indians had apparently been familiar with them for decades, if not centuries, meant little in a realm where the past was today and today was tomorrow: the connectedness of electronic technology and primal mythology seemed not only plausible but inevitable when one accepted the scientific theory and mystical principle of the interpenetration of realities. Wasn’t advanced cybernetics a hell of a lot closer to meditative and psychedelic states than to the meat-and-potatoes commerce of everyday life?

“Hey! Where have you gone?” Domino shook him, though rather timidly, for he still clasped the weapon that she now called his “hisser.”

Switters cleared his thoughts. He decided not to share his concerns about the jackals. It was probably silly, anyway. So far, there had been no inkling that the company was involved in or even interested in this dispute over the Fatima prophecy. Sure, the Vatican and the CIA sometimes cooperated—after all, they both believed they had a huge stake in controlling human behavior and maintaining the status quo—but, more than likely, the Church would prefer to keep the Fatima fracas under its own steeple. He reminded himself that it was easy to grow paranoid in the desert. The absence of shadows caused the mind to invent them. History had proven this a hundred times over in a landscape where one man’s mirage was another man’s divine revelation.

No, he couldn’t permit himself to start hallucinating company spooks with obedience-school jackals. One thing he knew for certain, however, was that Scanlani and his bosses were going to be infuriated when the Pachomians refused their offer. That meant he wasn’t going to be leaving Syria anytime soon. And in the skeleton-dry wind, he could hear the rift widening between him and three of the four human beings he cared about most.

When, in the fortnight following Christmas, he had failed to show up in Seattle, Maestra had e-mailed him and Bobby had phoned. Their frustration with him was almost explosive. Then, about a week later, an e-mail had arrived from Suzy. The first two communiqués had been anticipated, but Suzy’s caught him off guard, and while its tone was very different, it was no less affecting.

When you were just a sprout, wrote his grandmother, I advised you never to trust anybody who didn’t have secrets. Even though it’s sound advice, I could kick myself for impressing it so firmly on your soft little brain. I’ve created a damn monster. Maestra wanted him home, wanted him out of that wheelchair or off of “those crazy damn sticks,” and if her requests weren’t promptly honored, she wanted a detailed explanation of why they were not. His clandestine ways had become intolerable. She intimated that she was on her last breath and if he was to see her alive, he’d better not tarry. He was fairly sure the deathbed bit was an act, and he wrote back to remind her that she’d also taught him that guilt was a useless emotion. It didn’t prevent him from worrying, however, especially when, undoubtedly piqued by his flip attitude and lack of candor, she’d not written back.

As for Bobby, he’d practically shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you, podner?! Are you still there?”

“You mean here? I’m afraid so.”

“With her?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What, then?”

After a pause, Switters had answered, “Not your need to know.” There was a modicum of sweet revenge in that reply, but any pleasure he took from it was short-lived. Well aware that Switters was working neither for the company nor Audubon Poe, Case was not, as he put it, “buying one Texas ounce of that ‘need-to-know’ horseshit.”

Dehydrating Okinawan rice paddies with the heat of his frustration, Bobby said that he’d always considered Switters a cut above the other loose cannons, jumping beans, jackrabbits, flakes, wild cards, and hot potatoes with whom, due to his own shortcomings as a responsible citizen, he’d been doomed to associate, but he, Switters, had turned out to be the worst of the lot. “It come upon me one night in Bangkok, actually, that if you didn’t back offen that fucking James Joyce, it was one day gonna drive you over the lip—and now it’s went and done it.”

Bobby said he had leave coming up and he was going to use it to take matters in his own hands. He threatened to blow into Syria like a twister out of Hondo. Switters had half believed him. But Bobby hadn’t appeared. Neither had he e-mailed or called.

The letter from his stepsister arrived later in January, arrived soundlessly, spectrally, no wood fibers to give it substance, no ink to ferry its essence to the eyes the way blood ferries oxygen to the brain; arrived as a standardized arrangement of backlit glyphs upon a cold glass panel; unscented with Suzy’s perfume, unlicked by her wet tongue, devoid not merely of tearstains but of pizza or lipstick traces; an aseptic transmission whose ephemerality was all the more pronounced due to the fact that his computer was programmed to trash-can after six hours any and all messages for reasons of security (that contemptible word!). With a quaint old low-tech pencil, Switters had copied it onto the flyleaf of Finnegans Wake (talk about your stained paper: wine, beer, cigar ash, soy sauce, fish sauce, gravy, blood, unspeakable and indefinable vegetable-animal-and-mineral deposits, the kind of splotches that might enliven the bedsheets of a Third World beach motel). He reread it once a week. No more, no less.

Hi,

Guess you weren’t expecting to hear from me after so long a time, huh? There’s a whole lot I’ve been wanting to talk to you about and I’d been saving it until I saw you again. Everyone was so disappointed when you didn’t come home at New Years. This really isn’t your home though is it? And I know you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you’re doing now. And Switters I also understand that you must have had good reasons for behaving how you did in Sacramento. I’m very very sorry I tripped out that night. I should of trusted you more instead of thinking you were a big liar or had gone crazy or something. I guess I was just confused. I was such a baby back then, such a child. I think about what a spank girl I was back then and it’s like I want to hurl my breakfast or something. I can’t believe it was only a little over a year ago! I’m 17 now, as you ought to know, and a lot has changed with me. Time is a funny thing isn’t it? A planet made out of rock and water takes a few turns in space or whatever and suddenly you’re a different person than you were before. It’s a weird system if you ask me. Anyway I’m here in Seattle now and enjoying the rain. Ha ha. There’s some pretty cool kids at my new school but Maestra won’t let me hang with them much. She’s really great though, and when I get bummed she plays me old blues records and stuff. Reads to me out of Shakespeare who I totally love! I don’t want to bore you with my life but this socked-in morning finds me in a whirl of questions bubbling up from the unseen below or from somewhere over the rainbow maybe. You’re way far the wisest man I’ve ever known and you could always make anything in life seem not just okay but funny and grand. You did hit on me a lot but I know it came from a place of passion and love and I know you’re a person with deep feelings that you hide behind your crazy antics and I also know that you’d protect me with your life from anything or anybody that ever tried to hurt me. Now that I’m older and more “experienced” you would find me a horse of a different color as they say. Please forgive me for being such a clueless brat in the past. And please keep a little bit of me in your heart. There’s a piece of you in mine and it grows as I grow.

I miss you,

Suzy

On at least one occasion when he read over her letter, Switters had unlocked the hidden compartment in his famous crocodile valise, retrieved a particular nylon and cotton vesture (stained almost as colorfully as the flyleaf of Finnegans), and dangled it in the candlelight, its twin cups, though as empty as potholes, mirroring the atmospheres as well as the hemispheres of his brain. Perhaps not surprisingly, Switters, as an erstwhile cyberneticist, had some theories about the bicameral brain, its fractile reflection of a universe steeped in paradox: how, simultaneously and inseparably, it functioned both as a computer running programs and as a program being run, how its mastery of preemphasis often failed to protect it against random signals, viruses, or the meddling of “imps.” That sort of thing. Of course, when it’s taken into account that Switters was a fellow who liked to pretend that his corporeal being was energized and regulated by a ball of mystic white light—a kind of luminous coconut—it’s understandable that reservations might arise regarding the trustworthiness of his views.

In any case, when he went on-line to compose a reply to Suzy’s letter, he resisted any impulse to refer to the brain’s tendencies—dramatically pronounced in schizophrenics, virtually nonexistent in many “missing links”—toward ambivalent or contradictory states. The example of her bra notwithstanding, such theorizing would have come across as esoteric if not entirely irrelevant, and, worse, might have veered dangerously close to self-analysis.

Neither could he consider writing to Suzy in the roguish manner he’d favored in the past, telling her, for example, that between her honey thighs she was “as tight as a plastic doll, as squeaky as a Styrofoam sandwich, as soft and sweet and salty as periwinkle pie.” No, as accurate as such comparisons still might be, he no longer felt impelled or entitled to make them.

Instead, after deleting about a dozen different approaches, he limited his response to a simple declaration of affectionate appreciation. He was grateful for her words, he said, and would not forget them or take them lightly. “ ‘The men don’t know,’ “ he concluded, quoting a line from Willie Dixon, a bluesman he was sure was in Maestra’s record collection, “ ‘but the little girls understand.’ “

Of all of mankind’s inventions, the helicopter was the most totalitarian. Barbarically invasive, it used its vertical maneuverability—its capacity to climb, descend, hover, and whirl—as a means of raucously raiding life’s tender corners, scattering to the rats and dogs the last sweet crumbs of human privacy. Peasants in their paddies, Humboldt hippies in their pot patches, happy revelers at inner-city block parties, drivers on freeways, sunbathers lazing nude on deserted beaches, all were prey, sitting ducks for those angry gunships with their authoritarian voices and prying eyes. The sound of the rotary blades—cop cop cop cop cop!!—was entirely appropriate for a craft that had come to symbolize police-state potentiality and to mechanically embody every libertarian’s nightmare.

Any winged aircraft, from the smallest Cessna prop puppy to the biggest Boeing behemoth, was a romantic artifact, a swoozy sculpture, a sailing thing of irresistible appeal; but a helicopter . . . a helicopter was like a funky old shoetree that a witch had caused to levitate. Chunky and uncouth, it was as if some weird kid had planted a homemade whirligig in the fat of a turd.

Switters hated helicopters. Even though twice—once in Burma, once on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border—they had John Wayned down to lift him out of dire situations, he never saw one without fantasizing about shooting it out of the air (the fact that they sometimes could be used for good, and thus win the approval of the naive masses, served only to make their evil more insidious). When, on March 20, a whirlybird (cute nickname for such a hellish machine) dropped from the new spring upon the oasis, its needling motor sewing stitches in the sky, its blades chopping ozone into bluish kindling, whipping the first blossoms off the orange trees, stirring up dust and chicken feathers, turning leaves inside out like pocketknives, coughing smoke in the faces of frantic cuckoos, Switters barely could restrain himself from trying to make his fantasy a reality.

The helicopter hadn’t landed. Neither had it fired upon them. It buzzed the compound, low and loud, a half-dozen times and then whump-whumped off in the direction of Damascus. However, its intrusion, coming less than seventy-two hours after Domino had e-mailed Scanlani to reject the Church’s offer, left little doubt in Switters’s mind about the mood in Rome. Domino wasn’t as convinced as he of the connection, but he’d warned her all along that the Vatican wouldn’t suffer her rejection with mercy or charity.

Switters was especially concerned because this helicopter, unlike the ones that had flown over them back in January, did not bear the insignia of Syrian military. It bore, in fact, no insignia at all, an omission with uncomfortable implications. Once again he had to wonder if Langley might not be involved in this religious rumpus, an eerie feeling that intensified when, on two more occasions, he discovered jackals lurking beneath the walls of the paper-snaked Eden. Domino scoffed at the notion of eavesdropping jackals until he told her about the several hundred espionage dolphins that regularly plied the world’s bays and harbors for their handlers in the CIA. His former colleagues were hardly uningenious.

“It’s likely to get ugly from now on, sister love. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I smell smoke in the cabin, and the exits are not clearly marked.”

As stubborn as Domino was, he eventually convinced her to call an emergency meeting to formulate a defense strategy. The helicopter, which had torn down her clothesline and mussed her hair, provided a bit of an impetus.

That evening in the conference room, Switters was the last to arrive. He entered wearing a shabby suit (a year of crude laundry had taken its toll) and a sheepish grin. His laptop, it seemed, had just received an e-mail from Rome in which, much to his astonishment, the Church had backed down, agreeing, in exchange for the Fatima prophecy, to refrock the Pachomians without any undue restrictions on their rights of free speech.

If Switters thought that that was the end of it, that he could quit the convent now with an easy mind and swivel his attentions to the furtherance of his personal agenda, the fleshing out of the film script of his life, including a scene in which he, with the hard rubber charm of Bogart, would persuade a picturesque Amazonian medicine man to lift a quaint taboo, well, if that’s what he thought, he was mistaken. Because the very next day, Domino contacted Scanlani and brazenly upped the ante.

Although it was completely against his best interest—and probably hers as well—Switters couldn’t help but be delighted by her rash action.

Dawn’s last cock-a-doodle was still aquiver in the red rooster’s craw when she knocked at his door. Unfazed by the nakedness obvious beneath his thin muslin sheet, she plopped her plumping bottom (time’s dung beetle was rolling her buttocks into lush round balls) onto his bedside stool and shared her intentions. If the Vatican fathers wanted the Fatima document, she told him, they were going to have to meet yet another demand. To wit: they would have to agree to disclose to the public the full text of the third prophecy within six months of its receipt, to disseminate its contents and make them widely known.

“A stipulation guaranteed to ferment patriarchal peevishness, I would venture,” said Switters.

She shrugged. She smiled. She said, “C’est la vie.”

“But what about Masked Beauty? I’ve been under the impression that she’s always insisted on keeping the prophecy secret because of the doubt and pessimism it could generate among earth’s happy Christians.”

“Precisely. That’s why I’ve come to you. My aunt has never really heard your interpretation of the Virgin’s pyramid reference. She still suspects it’s an admission of the superior truth of Islam. I need you to explain, to convince her otherwise.” She paused. Her eyes seemed to stop and savor a particular bulge in the bedclothes. “Peut-être convince me, as well,” she mumbled.

They agreed to meet in Masked Beauty’s quarters in an hour. Domino appeared reluctant to leave his company, and when she did, he had the distinct feeling that she was going to her room to indulge in the covert delicious shame that dogged not merely Fannie but most in her vocation.

Aroused by the image, Switters considered a similar, perhaps synchronous indulgence but decided instead to review the prophecies, about which he maintained, not altogether uncharacteristically, ambivalent feelings. Obviously, the predictions, whether Marian or Lucian in origin, had correctly called some shots. (Was it mere coincidence? Did it matter?) Moreover, certain aspects of them about which he’d held reservations had, over time, been elucidated by Domino to his general satisfaction. For example, regarding the first prophecy, where the Virgin was alleged to have warned that “a night illuminated by an unknown light” would be the sign that God was ready to punish his misbehaving lookalikes with war and famine, Domino had contended that that was an accurate foretelling of a unique (she used the word with trepidation, worrying that she should have said “unusual” instead) meteorological event. On January 25, 1938, much of the Northern Hemisphere was dazzled and panicked by what has been described as the most dramatic and bizarre display of the aurora borealis in recorded history. Undulating bands of vivid color, wide, violent, and continuous throughout the night, were accompanied by snapping and crackling sounds, causing thousands to believe that the world was ablaze and doomsday was on the front burner. Less than ninety days after that awesome atmospheric laser circus, Hitler marched into Austria, and the great war that Fatima had predicted was off and running. Switters searched “northern lights” on the Internet and soon found that Domino’s facts were accurate.

In the second prophecy, he’d been put off by all that “consecration of Russia” business. As near as he could figure, Fatima’s command was, at best, Red-baiting and, at worst, a modern example of misguided evangelical zeal being used to justify Roman Catholic imperialism. It hadn’t worked in this case, but it conjured up images of black-robed priests walking arm in arm with genocidal conquistadors, administering absolutions while the loot—and the bodies—piled up. True, Fatima hadn’t advocated a forced conversion of Russia, and to consecrate, i.e., to declare or make sacred, was in and of itself a noble gesture. Yet, it smacked somehow of self-serving expansionism or, at least, condescension.

Not so, argued Domino. She pointed out that the Virgin had spoken of “the error of Russia,” and Switters had to concur that no honest, intelligent person could claim any longer that Communism, however well-intentioned, was anything less than a wretched economic and psychological mistake. However, that was not quite the point, according to Domino. While it had been popular in reactionary circles to paint the Fatima Virgin as a sort of cold warrior, prodding the holy armies of capitalism to subdue the godless Commies, Our Lady was actually saying something quite different. She was, in fact, promoting a revitalization of the Christian faith, a return to the original teachings of Jesus, the rebel rabbi who so vigorously scorned the kind of worldly pursuits that had come, a few centuries after his death, to preoccupy a corrupt and power-mad Church. If the Vatican fathers were proud and foolish and materialistic, and though it pained her to admit it, Domino believed they were; if Rome was spiritually broken beyond repair, and this, too, she’d come to believe; then where could the spiritual center go to fix itself, to reestablish itself on those principles of Jesus that mankind had generally found just too damn difficult to follow?

“To the individual heart,” replied Switters. “The only church that ever was.”

His answer startled Domino, caught her by such surprise that after jerking upright, she slowly drooped forward in her chair, like a sunflower that could no longer bear the weight of its crown; and for thirty seconds or so, she was so lost in thought that her orbs were kind of an inky smear. He squeezed her knee (one of those familiarities in which he rarely anymore indulged) and the eyes winked back on, like modem lights after a power surge. “I meant geographically,” she said. “Where could Christ’s renewed Church recenter itself in the physical world?”

Switters thought: Wall Street? Disneyland? Devil’s Island? To him, the location of Catholic world headquarters was so irrelevant to anything remotely significant that he didn’t bother to venture a serious guess.

“There was nowhere in Western Europe that was any improvement over Rome, and the United States of America was not Jesus’s style.”

“Too bouncy,” agreed Switters.

“Christ always shunned the high and mighty; so we are told. He preferred to mingle with the whores and publicans and sinners, he directed his message to the wayward and downtrodden. Is this not so? Well, in Russia there was a vast population of materially and spiritually impoverished souls, lost and longing for change. It would have been a clean slate, a fertile field. What better way to deal with an unholy land than to thrust upon it the mantle of holiness? Yes? Oui? To replace a bad king with an honest peasant, to replace our imperious pope with a converted Bolshevik, wouldn’t this be an action true to the stark spirit of Jesus? Perhaps equally as important, shifting the cornerstone of Christianity to Russia would have served to heal the tragic schism between the Western and Eastern Orthodox faiths and to reunite their rites. So much suffering on so many levels might have been avoided if the Church had had the grace to heed its Mother’s words. In the stillness of her Immaculate Heart, the hurly-burly antics of Stalin would have seemed like some cruel slapstick, comic and stupid, and few would have supported him. That was in 1917, remember, when there was time.”

Reviewing Domino’s words on that spring morning, he repeated the phrase to himself: “when there was time.” Did the fact—and it certainly appeared to be a fact—that history was accelerating mean that there was less time? Or more? Were there fewer beans in the jar, or were the beans simply pouring in at such a furious pace that they were creating a vortex? He knew that at the center of every cyclone there was a calm circle, a space into which time’s tentacles did not seem to reach. Was that tondo of stillness what was meant, then, by the odd phrase, “my Immaculate Heart”?

Intrigued, he sat zazen on his cot for thirty minutes—thirty minutes as measured by those dials and digits that seemed to have so little to do with that void into which meditative stillness always transported him. (He supposed Immaculate Heart was as good a label for it as any other.)

Centered now, he felt he was properly prepared to hypothesize about Today Is Tomorrow. However, on the way to Masked Beauty’s chambers, he stilted by the pantry shed and picked up a bottle of wine. Maria Une protested that it was still too young to drink, but he responded that in the Immaculate Heart, terms such as “too young” were relative if not inapplicable. The old cook was uncertain how to take that reference, and while she studied him for signs of sacrilege, he pushed aside the thoughts of Suzy that the remark had unintentionally engendered.

Then, as he was badgering Maria Une for a corkscrew, he believed he heard the jackals again, yapping just beyond the wall in broad daylight. It took him a minute to realize that it was only Bob and Mustang Sally chortling over some private joke down by the onion beds. Was he becoming paranoid? No, at least not when compared to Skeeter Washington, who, admiring the stars one evening on the deck of Poe’s boat, was heard to say, “If the universe be expanding, they gotta be something chasing it.”

There was a faint lilac smudge where the wart used to stand. A visual whisper had replaced the visual cackle, the seeable caw. When candlelight struck it, it seemed a dot of bluish fog, a nail scar from an ancient crucifixion, a pinpoint of shadow cast by a migratory moth. Three months after separation from her divine wad of tissue, Masked Beauty continued to mark its absence by compulsively rubbing and pulling at her nose, like one of those compassionate zoo apes that openly toys with its genitals in order to relieve the guilt of visiting schoolchildren.

Caressing her snout, Masked Beauty glanced from the wine bottle to Domino and back again. Pushing her hair from her face, Domino glanced from the wine bottle to Masked Beauty and back again. Switters smiled weakly. “All those sponges in the ocean,” he said, “it’s a wonder there’s any water left.” Ah, the power of the non sequitur! Not knowing how to respond, the two women put away the tea things and wiped the dust from a set of wineglasses. Domino was a bit nervous about how her aunt would react to Switters’s interpretation of the pyramid prediction, Masked Beauty was clearly uncomfortable without a veil—or rather, she was uncomfortable without a mask to mask—but once they grew accustomed to the idea, they both welcomed a glass of early morning wine. The women sipped, and Switters, as was his practice, gulped. They were mostly silent; he, with each swallow, became more verbose.

Testing limits of credibility, he told the abbess everything he knew about the Kandakandero shaman with the pyramid-shaped head: his origins, his potions and powders, his fatalistic despair over the white man’s invasion of his forest, his discovery of humor and his attempts to appropriate its magic, his theory that laughter was a physical force that could be used both as a shield and as a spirit canoe in which the wisest and bravest—the Real People—could navigate the river that separated and connected the Two Worlds.

“Which two worlds? Why, Heaven and earth, if you please. Life and death. Nature and technology. Yin and yang.”

“You mean the female and the male?” asked the abbess.

“In a sense. More precisely, more fundamentally, it’s light and darkness. Light and darkness without any moral implications. Good and evil exist only in the biomolecular realm. In the atomic realm, such notions become useless, and in the electronic realm, they disappear altogether.”

Switters talked briefly about particle physics and the search for ever smaller elementary particles. “Recently physicists have started to conclude that in the entire universe there may be only two particles. Not two kinds of particles, mind you, but two particles, period. One with a positive charge, one with a negative. And listen to this: the two particles can exchange charges, the negative can trade off to become positive and vice versa. So, in a sense, there’s only one particle in the universe, it being a pair whose attributes are interchangeable.”

“What makes them decide to trade places?” asked Domino.

“Excellent question, sister love.” Switters took a swig of wine. It was, indeed, very young, but it possessed a toddler’s bashful bravado. “Maybe they get bored. I don’t know. Figure that out and you can go eat lunch with God. Twice a week. Make him wash the dishes.”

Domino made an expression somewhere between a wince and a smile. Masked Beauty’s was closer to the wince. The abbess ran a finger along the length of her nose. Her nose resembled an inflated map of the Yucatán Peninsula, the bluish spot indicating the lost capital of the Mayas.

“It gets better,” said Switters. “This is only theory, there’s no empirical evidence, but the belief now is that when they crack the final nut, split the most minute particle—and we’re talking about something smaller than a neutrino—what they’ll find inside, at the absolute fundamental level of the universe, is an electrified vacuum, an energy field in which light and darkness intermingle. The dark is as black as a bogman’s toejam, and the light is brighter than God’s front teeth; and they spiral together, entwined like a couple of snakes. They coil around each other, the light and the darkness, and they absorb each other continuously, yet they never cancel each other out. You get the picture. Except there isn’t any picture. It’s more on the order of music. Except the ear can’t hear it. So it’s like feeling, emotion, some absolutely pristine feeling. It’s like, uh, it’s like . . . love.”

He paused to drink, and Masked Beauty studied him. “Are you versed in matters of love, Mr. Switters?”

Switters shot Domino an embarrassed look. The look he got back had as much insolence as shyness in it. “I love myself,” he said. “But it’s unrequited.”

Both women laughed at this. Then Domino said, “Mr. Switters is experienced in love, auntie, but not in pure love.”

(Switters didn’t argue, but had Bobby Case been present, the spy pilot would have objected, “Why, hell, ladies, pure love’s the only kind of love this silly hombre knows at all.”)

Rising to light another stick of incense, the abbess commented that while their discussion of advanced physics was certainly interesting, she failed to detect its bearing on the subject at hand.

“Well,” said Switters, “this pyramid-headed curandero from deep in the Amazonian jungle seems to have concluded that light and darkness can merge in a similar fashion on the biomolecular plane, the social plane. He says it occurs during laughter. That a people who could move in the primal realm of laughter could live free of all of life’s dualities. They would be the first since the original men, the ancestors of the Real People, to live in harmony with the fundamental essence of the universe. The essence our quantum physicists are talking about. Today Is Tomorrow says the civilized man can’t perpetuate that state because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, he’s become emotionally invested in one narrow, absurdly simplistic view of the nature of existence; and the Indians can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the civilized man’s humor. But the people strong and nimble enough to combine unlimited intellectual flexibility with the mysterious energy of the laugh, well, they would become . . .”

“Enlightened?” ventured the abbess.

“Enlightened and endarkened,” Switters corrected her. “Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.”

Masked Beauty wasn’t convinced. “A sense of humor is a fine thing,” she agreed, “but it is not a way of life, and it certainly is not a means of serving our Lord. This strange savage of yours does not even know our Lord.”

“Why does that matter? Fatima said that in the next century—which pops out of the box in about nine months, by the way—the message that will bring unexpected joy and wisdom to a segment of humanity isn’t going to be coming from the Church of your Lord. Am I right? She said it will come from the direction of a pyramid. Well, Today Is Tomorrow qualifies as a pyramid, as near as I can tell, and he’s got a much fresher message than Islam, including esoteric Islam, with which, if you factor in the Hermetic tradition, it has a little bit in common.” He gulped. “Mmm. This vintage possesses a rather touching innocence, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and it is almost gone,” the abbess noted. She’d never seen anyone drain a bottle of wine so wholeheartedly. “Perhaps I am just a stupid old woman, but I fail to understand how your shaman’s ideas are at all practical or applicable. How can a mere sense of humor—”

“And a flexible, expansive definition of reality,” Switters reminded her.

“Okay, that as well. But in a troubled world such as ours, one cannot walk around laughing at everything like a mindless magpie. Where is the hope in that?”

He didn’t seem to have a ready response. Tugging at a curl, as if the pressure on his scalp might activate cerebration, he cleared his throat but said nothing. He was entertaining notions about how a radical and active sense of humor could puncture the sterile bubble of bourgeois respectability, how it could destroy smug illusions and in so doing, strengthen the soul; how if the essence could somehow be extracted from laughter, that essence might prove less like sound than like flavor, the flavor of the soul tasting itself at the raw bar of the absolute. Yet, he was neither informed enough (he hadn’t previously given it much thought) or drunk enough to put such notions into words. What the hell? Since when was he the shaman’s mouthpiece?

Observing his hesitation, Domino spoke up. “I don’t believe Mr. Switters is advocating mindless laughter, auntie. I don’t believe he is advocating anything. He’s simply trying to solve the riddle of the third prophecy. And I must say, I find it an attractive alternative to our own interpretation.”

“What? Laughing one’s way into Heaven?”

“I think what is at issue here,” Domino went on, “is a kind of mindful playfulness. I have observed it in Mr. Switters, and I suspect it could be extricated from Today Is Tomorrow’s philosophy—a philosophy, by the way, that seems almost to have resulted from combining aspects of an archaic shamanic tradition with a kind of Zen nonattachment and an irreverent modern wit. Mr. Switters defeats melancholy by refusing to take things, including himself, too seriously.”

“But many things are—”

“Are they? What I’ve learned from Mr. Switters is that no matter how valid, how vital, one’s belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one’s adherence to it.”

Masked Beauty rubbed her scar as though trying to erase it. Or to stimulate new growth. “I realize that happiness is relative and often dependent upon or at least affected by external circumstances, whereas cheerfulness can be learned and consciously practiced. Both you and Mr. Switters seem to have a knack for practicing cheerfulness—oh, but I can see that our discussing Mr. Switters in this way is making him uncomfortable. Let us return to the ideas of his pyramid man. Assuming that a deliberate comic cheerfulness can evolve into a sustainable joy, where does the wisdom come from?”

Domino deferred to him, but he nodded for her to answer. “I would guess,” she said, “that what might be extrapolated from Today Is Tomorrow’s epiphany is that joy itself is a form of wisdom. Beyond that is the suggestion that if people are nimble enough to move freely between different perceptions of reality and if they maintain a relaxed, playful attitude well-seasoned with laughter, then they would live in harmony with the universe; they would connect with all matter, organic and inorganic, at its purest, most basic level. Could not that be our Lord’s plan for us, his goal for his children? Now, auntie, don’t make a face. Perhaps . . . perhaps that’s even where God resides, there in that—how did Switters call it?—that energized void at the base of creation. It makes more sense than on some poof-poof Riviera among gold-plated clouds.”

Pausing to let that sink in—to sink into her own consciousness as well as her aunt’s—Domino took a Switters-sized swallow of wine. “Perhaps, too,” she resumed, “Today Is Tomorrow’s ideal is precisely what is needed to rescue the human race from its tragic flaw: prideful narcissism. Isn’t that where all this ‘seriousness’ comes from? A dilated ego?”

Switters regarded her with amazement. He saw her in a whole new light. On the grease rack of his esteem, he jacked her up a few more notches. What a stand-up girl! he thought. She gets it. Better than I get it, maybe. He felt a spreading warmth toward her. He also felt a spreading need to urinate. The degree to which the wine had contributed to both of those sensations is not worth examining. It is enough to say that he reached for his stilts, blew kisses, presented the women as a parting gift his favorite word in all of earth’s languages—an ancient Aztec utterance that meant parrot, poet, interlocutor, and guide to the underworld; all that stuffed into a single word; and a word, he assured them, that could not be properly pronounced unless one had had one’s tongue surgically altered, preferably with an obsidian blade. He presented them with a spitty approximation of that word, and then, before anyone could say, “What? It doesn’t mean vagina?”, he weaved off to the nearest privy, leaving Domino to convince Masked Beauty that the third prophecy of Fatima referred not to a triumph of Islam but to the views of a capitate freak from the Amazonian forest; and to persuade her, further, that the prophecy, bizarre implications and all, should be made public by the institution most at risk from it.

Evidently, she did a pretty good job, for shortly after noon, she sought him out and had him e-mail Scanlani with the Pachomian demand for full disclosure.

If Domino could imagine that God occupied the fundamental subatomic particle, where did she think Satan lived? In the fundamental anti-particle? In a quarklette of dark matter? Wouldn’t the presumed interweaving of light and darkness in that minutest of maws give her a clue that God and Satan might be codependent if not indivisible? The real question was where did the neutral angels reside, the ones who refused to take sides? There would be, of course, plenty of elbow room of a sort in that elementary space. Because the light waves therein would have been transformed into photons had they struck any matter, indications were that the space was infinitely empty. Which also would suggest that God and the Devil were energies in which, outflanking Einstein, mass dropped out of the equation.

By the time Domino arrived to have him e-mail Scanlani, the effects of the grape had worn off, and Switters was no longer bruising his brain with such thoughts. He felt bruised enough by the wine itself, its infantile character having left him with the kind of headache with which newborn babies leave sleepless dads. Any impulse he might have had to wonder aloud to her how it was that the microcosmic could not merely reflect but contain the macrocosmic, any desire to suggest that levity might actually be the hallmark of the sacred, had evaporated, and he was not unhappy to be thusly unburdened. He wished to concentrate on convincing Domino that her tactics with the Vatican would likely provoke strong reaction. He wanted the oasis to steel itself.

Once again, however, he was mistaken. Not three days had passed before word arrived from Rome that the Pachomian demand would gladly be met. According to Scanlani, the Holy Father had been planning all along to make public the third prophecy as soon as he was convinced of its authenticity.

Noticing Switters’s frown, Domino asked if he smelled a rat. “Worse,” he said. “I smell a jackal.”

It did have a stink about it. It seemed much too easy, passing beyond the smooth into the slick. What worried him even more than Rome’s newfound spirit of accommodation was the last line of Scanlani’s communiqué, the line that advised that within the week, representatives of the Holy See would be arriving at the Syrian oasis to collect the Fatima transcript.

“You cannot allow that,” Switters insisted.

“Why not?”

He then outlined several grisly scenarios, one in which all occupants of the compound were shot dead and the massacre blamed on religious fanatics (or, if Damascus was cooperating, on the troublesome Bedouins); another in which insidious chemicals were employed to make it look as if a deadly virus had swept through the order. They might paint the Pachomians as a suicide cult. They might even slaughter the sisters and blame it on him. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere, vulnerable, unprotected, naught but the wind and the cuckoos to witness our fate.”

Domino scoffed. She proposed that his service in the CIA had lowered his reality orientations. “There would be no cause to murder us, nothing to gain. Suppose they renege on their promise and don’t make public the prophecy, or else they edit it to their advantage; and suppose then that we protest and release our own version of the prophecy, Cardinal Thiry’s version? How many will believe us? How many will care? In the end, we are no more to them than the nuisance fly.”

“People swat flies,” he said, but he knew that she was right. Governments—and the armed agencies that served them—loathed intellectuals and artists and freethinkers of every stripe, but they didn’t particularly fear them. Not anymore. They didn’t fear them because in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume. But though Switters was well aware of those conditions, he was also aware that they could be and ought to be subverted. Moreover, he was aware that cowboys periodically caught Hollywood fever, instigating ludicrous, horrendous capers out of sheer ennui, a smoldering appetite for thrill and domination. So he badgered Domino relentlessly until she at last gave in.

The Pachomians, she e-mailed Scanlani, would surrender the Fatima prophecy only to the Holy Father himself. It would be directly delivered to the pope and none other. “Do not waste your time traveling to Syria,” she told him, at Switters’s insistence. “We shall travel to Rome.”

This time, the reaction was more typical, if not more reassuring. Hostility seethed from every glyph. Scanlani chided Domino for her presumptuousness, her audacity and insubordination in thinking she could order the Holy Father about, thinking she could force a papal audience. He reminded her that her superiors had gone out of their way to be accommodating, and for her ingratitude and impertinence he berated and belittled her as only a practiced lawyer could. His attack brought her close to tears. Contrite, she was ready to back off, but Switters wouldn’t permit it. “The grand mackerels have given in before, and they may again. Stick to your—pardon the expression—guns.”

Reluctantly she did. And a wicked war of words ensued, a dispute that raged for weeks. No Vatican representative came to Syria, but overheated electrons zinged eastward across the Mediterranean on a regular basis, and hard-boiled electrons often passed them, heading west. Several times Domino seemed to lose her stomach for the fight, but Switters, operating on not much more than a hunch, propped her up, girded her loins (though he might have preferred to ungird them), and pushed her back into the fray.

Toward the end of April, she prevailed.

She didn’t know if she had simply worn them down or if they were getting nervous as June and the “New Catholic Women” conference approached, but quite abruptly one day in the weeks following Easter, the Church fathers relented, going so far as to issue a thoroughly polite formal invitation to meet with the Holy Father in a fortnight’s time.

Hugging Switters, almost sobbing with relief, she said she was overjoyed that it was done and that, in the end, winning an audience with the pope was worth all the Sturm und Drang.

“Personally, I’d rather meet Pee-wee Herman,” he said, “but if you’re happy, I’m happy. And if you’re safe and happy, I’m happier yet.”

She suggested that he must be happy on his own account as well. He could leave now, leave at once, and start attending to his considerable personal agenda. “Not so fast,” he said. “You may have won the compulsories, but you still have to skate the freestyles, and there ain’t no way your coach is abandoning you until the last damn twirl is twirled. Oh, no! Not with this set of judges. Some way, somehow, I’ve got to escort you to Rome.”

She told him he was out of his cotton-picking mind. She told him he was crazy and brave and sweet. He told her he was just curious.

The May moon looked like a bottlecap. More specifically, entering its last phase, the moon looked like a bottlecap that a fidgety beer-drinker had squashed double between macho thumb and forefinger. The moon was making Switters thirsty, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver wasn’t listening.

“I want to love America,” Toufic lamented, “but America requires me to hate it.”

Toufic had come to drive the Pachomian delegation to the airport at Damascus. He arrived on a Monday evening so that they might get a very early start on Tuesday morning. He arrived with a crumb of hashish for Switters, and they sat by the car now, smoking it in the faintly moon-painted desert. He also arrived with American offenses on his mind. Offenses in Iraq. Offenses in Yugoslavia. Those offenses made Toufic angry, but mostly they made him sad. His large brown eyes seemed saturated with a kind of molten chocolate grief.

“What is wrong with your great country?” Toufic lamented. “Why must it do these terrible things?”

Switters held a cloud of candied smoke in his lungs. “Because the cowboys wiped out the buffalo,” Switters said.

“Everywhere a buffalo fell,” said Switters, “a monster sprang up in its place.”

Switters was going to list some of the monsters, but his mouth was dry, and he feared he couldn’t expectorate.

“There’s a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam,” said Switters.

Straining to comprehend, Toufic sighed with his eyes.

“When Lee surrendered at Appomattox,” said Switters, “it sealed once and for all Wall Street’s power over the American people.”

Switters said, “There’s a direct link between Appomattox and genuine imitation leather.”

“But,” Toufic lamented, “your country has so much.”

“Well,” said Switters, “it has bounce. It has snap. It has flux.”

“Americans are generous and funny, the ones I have met,” Toufic lamented, “but I am compelled to oppose them.”

“It’s only natural,” said Switters. “American foreign policy invites opposition. It invites terrorism.”

Switters said, “Terrorism is the only imaginable logical response to America’s foreign policy, just as street crime is the only imaginable logical response to America’s drug policy.”

Toufic wanted to pursue this in greater detail, but the hashish was kicking in, and Switters was rapidly losing whatever interest he had in politics. “Politics is where people pay somebody large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is sadomasochism. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Switters said, between pursed lips, for he was holding in the last of the oily smoke, “Let’s talk about . . . let’s talk about . . . Little Red Riding Hood.”

Switters told Toufic the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Toufic was puzzled but enthralled. He listened attentively, as if weighing every word. Then, Switters told Toufic the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He did the voices. Switters did the big gruff bass Daddy Bear voice, he did the medium-sized nurturing domestic Mama Bear voice, and he did the little high-pitched squealy Baby Bear voice. Toufic was absolutely spellbound.

Toufic wanted more. So, next, Switters tried to describe Finnegans Wake to him. It was not a complete success. Obviously baffled, Toufic became disinterested, even slightly irritated; but Switters persisted in his “titley hi ti ti” talk and his “where, O where is me lickle dig done” talk, just as if he were back at the C.R.A.F.T. Club in Bangkok.

But Switters wasn’t in Bangkok, he was in the Syrian desert, and the May moon, entering its last phase, appeared folded over on itself like a thin yellow omelet. It was making him hungry, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver was no longer listening.

Six of them crowded into the Audi sedan long before dawn. Toufic, of course, was at the wheel, and there were Masked Beauty, Domino, Pippi, Mustang Sally—and Switters, dragged out in nun’s habit, traveling (he hoped) on ZuZu’s passport. As they lined up in the dark to pack themselves into the car, Masked Beauty turned and faced them. “We are going to Italy,” she announced solemnly, perhaps unnecessarily. “You will find that it in no way resembles Italian nights in our dining hall.”

“Italian nights? What are those?” asked Mustang Sally, referring sarcastically to the fact that the sisters had not enjoyed an Italian night since Switters had cleaned out their wine cellar back in September.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” crowed Switters, trusting that he’d turned the tables and awakened the rooster.

The drive was hot and hard. For fifteen or so miles around midmorning, they were shadowed by a helicopter. This particularly angered Pippi, who badly needed a pit stop. Watching her squirm to hold her water, Switters was given yet another reason to despise choppers.

They arrived at the Damascus airport at half past one, believing themselves unfashionably early for a 5 P.M. flight. Such, alas, was not the case.

Switters had purchased their tickets over the Internet, courtesy of Mr. Plastic, and they picked these up at the Alitalia counter without a hitch. (When Domino inquired how he intended to pay for them, he said that was not an issue, since he’d charged them to his grandmother’s attorney, whose credit information he’d had the foresight to hijack after the woman cheated him out of his cabin in the mountains.) Up to a point, clearing customs likewise had gone smoothly. Switters, wheelchaired and bewimpled, pushed by Pippi and fussed over by Mustang Sally (as though he were the most unfierce of invalids), was accepted as Sister Francine Boulod (ZuZu’s real name) without question. Whenever an official looked him over, Switters would commence to drool, inspiring the douanier to shift his attentions elsewhere. The trouble came when the women were advised that while they were free to leave the country, or free to stay, once they left they could not return: the Syrian government would not be renewing their visas.

Lengthy protests and convoluted discussions followed. When the Frenchwomen objected that they could not possibly depart Syria under those circumstances, the customs agent-in-charge shrugged and said, in essence, “Fine. Don’t go.” Switters wasn’t liking the implications of this at all, but he dared not open his lightly rouged, drool-bedewed mouth.

Having eventually exhausted her arguments with officials at the airport, none of whom could supply her with a reason for the visa restrictions, Masked Beauty began making frantic phone calls. Nobody appeared to be in that day at the Syrian Foreign Office. Every living soul at the French embassy seemed to be in a meeting. The abbess made call after call, to no avail. And now, Flight 023 was boarding.

At the last minute, just before the gate was closed, it was decided that Masked Beauty would remain in Damascus to attempt to resolve the visa problem. The rest of the party would proceed to Rome, where with any luck, the abbess would catch up with them in time for their papal audience on Thursday. They left her stewing, rubbing her nose as if it were a lamp whose genie had gone on coffee break. They barely made the flight.

The three former nuns and one quasi-nun (here’s a way to avoid the “earrings”) had reserved rooms, on Switters’s recommendation, at the Hotel Senato. A smallish albèrgo, the Senato sat, modest cheek to pagan jowl, next door to the Pantheon in the Piazza della Rotonda, the loudest, most colorful, most, for that matter, Italian corner of Rome, and a favorite of Switters’s, although he sometimes complained that the area bordered on being too damn vivid.

At the check-in desk, the clerk handed Domino a message. It was from Scanlani. He welcomed the Pachomians to Rome. He informed them that their audience with the Holy Father had been moved up to 14:30 hours on Wednesday, the following day. And he advised them that in Italy it was illegal to impersonate a nun, so all of them, most especially their “chief of security,” ought to change into civilian clothes.

It was a rather stunned flock of penguins that lugged its bags (there were no bellmen at the Hotel Senato) into the dwarfish lift. Only two persons could fit at a time, and Domino and Switters elevated last. “I know you don’t like the sound of this,” she said, fluttering Scanlani’s note, “but it’s going to be okay. I only hope my aunt gets here in time. The prophecy is hers. I don’t feel right about surrendering it without her.”

After dropping off her bag in the room that she would share with Mustang Sally and Pippi, Domino came to Switters’s room to help him off with his habit. “Hold still, ZuZu,” she said playfully. “Only forty-six more buttons to go.”

Beneath the heavy habit, he wore his undershorts. The boxer shorts with little snowmen on them and maple trees with buckets attached for collecting maple sap. With a sudden flourish that astonished them both, she yanked them down around his ankles.

She fondled him until he was as stiff as a tire iron. Then, cupping his testes in the palm of her hand, like a farmgirl weighing guinea eggs, she knelt before his Invacare 9000 and gave him a single lick; a long, slow, wet, pedestal to pinnacle lick. He laid his hands on her head, hoping to guide her into more of the same, but she stood and backed away from the chair. She was shaking.

“I want you so bad I could scream,” she said. “I want you so bad I could yell and spit and scratch the flowers off this wallpaper. I want you so bad I could kick the furniture and pray to God and piss in my panties and weep.”

“But?” he asked, as she took another step backward. It was only one word, but his mouth was so dry he could barely utter it. As a matter of fact, it came out in Baby Bear’s voice. He was stiffer than before, if that was physiologically possible, and a fever had descended upon him like a satyric malaria.

“But I’ve made a vow to Mary and to myself and to that part of myself that is Mary and vice versa. Not until I am married.”

“We cou-cou-could marry tomorrow,” he stammered. “Hell, the pope could marry us.” The imp had hold of him for certain.

Domino smiled. It was a smile that could have overturned three or four Vespas in the piazza beneath their window. “Silly goose,” she said. “It would never work out between us. I’m too old and you’re too . . . Anyway, you will make fun of this, but when I enter St. Peter’s tomorrow, it is important to me to enter as a virgin. I may not have on my habit, but between my legs as in my heart, I will be a nun.”

“The maidenhead Lazarus,” he muttered, hoping that he didn’t sound too sardonic. He did, after all, admire the sheer obstinacy of her commitment to the patriarchs’ bogus notion of innocence. “The hymen that rose from the dead.”

She frowned. But then she smiled again. “Yes,” she said with an air of pride that was only partially feigned. “And it’s the only one on the planet. It’s unique.”

“So far as we know.” He was still so aroused his eyeballs were hard.

“Yes,” she agreed, as she backed out of the room. “So far as we know.”

The next day they lunched just off the piazza at the gastronomically glorious Da Fortunato al Pantheon, although only Switters and Mr. Plastic had much of an appetite. Thrilled to be out of the chickpea zone at last, Switters gobbled both grilled sea bass and spaghetti alle vongole veraci, washed down with a carafe of frascati. It was Italian asparagus season, and he ordered the aspàrgi bianchi in three different preparations, pausing between each to improvise asparagus poetry: “Erect as the white knight’s lance, a flameless candle that lights the country ditch, pithy pen with a ruffled nib for writing love letters to his cousin, the lily; O asparagus! lean lord of spring” etc. etc., on and on, in Italian, French, and English, until the waiters joined Domino and Sally in rolling their eyes.

After dessert and grappa, they stopped back by the hotel to see if Masked Beauty had arrived. She had not, alas, so they split up and took two minicabs to Vatican City. Switters rode with Pippi, who was practically gnawing the freckles off her fingers with nervous excitement. Pippi was wild to see the Holy Father, of course, but she felt somehow that the timing was wrong. “This is supposed to be happening tomorrow,” she whined.

“Today is tomorrow,” said Switters. He took her hand and held it tightly until they reached the half-hidden service entrance off Via di Porta Angelica, where, as instructed, they were to meet Scanlani. Indeed, the Swiss Guardsman who answered Domino’s ring ushered them inside immediately, and there Scanlani waited, expressionless, smartly dressed, looking as if the Exxon Valdez had run aground in his hair. He showed no surprise at seeing Switters.

The party was invited onto a minibus, not much more than an oversize golfcart, which, having no provision for the disabled, caused Switters a bit of difficulty. Apparently, Scanlani found this amusing, although it was almost impossible to tell. Switters wanted to hold on to the rear of the vehicle and be towed, but his host objected that it would attract attention. Pippi and a Swiss Guardsman tipped him over and more or less dumped him into the cart. His chair was folded and plopped awkwardly and heavily in his lap. He patted the contraption. “It’s guaranteed fireproof,” he said, and grinned at Scanlani.

Traveling the Vatican’s back streets, out of sight of pilgrims and tourists, they passed through two security checkpoints, at the second of which they were taken into separate cubicles and searched so thoroughly that afterward Domino whispered in Switters’s ear that she might as well have lost her virginity to him the night before. The guard captain was highly alarmed by Switters’s pistol, but Scanlani said it was okay, telling the captain that the crippled American “used to be one of us” (a statement to which, under normal circumstances, Switters would have strenuously objected). He was made to give up the weapon, however. They locked it in a vault, assuring him that he could retrieve it on his way out. Without the gun in his waistband, he had to tighten his belt. “How to eat a huge lunch and still lose weight,” he mumbled.

“I warned you not to bring that thing in the first place,” said Domino.

The captain and three other Swiss Guards now accompanied them to the large building that stood at the northwest of Piazzo San Pietro, the ugly old gray castle in which the pope had his apartments. They entered through a side door and in a wood-paneled vestibule were greeted with practiced courtesy by a cardinal—robe, red beanie, and all. He was the prelate in charge of investigating miracles. “Do you do warts and hymens?” asked Switters. Neither the cardinal nor Domino acknowledged his remark, but there was a throb of unspoken menace in the almost imperceptible curl of Scanlani’s upper lip.