Stealing God (2 page)

Ron looked sheepishly at Danny.

‘God almighty, that was a bloody gash thing to come out with.' Danny nodded. If Jimmy had kids then he'd been married, and if he'd been married his wife was dead. Only a widower would have been accepted by Duns College to train for the Catholic priesthood. ‘We should have known. It was a bloody gash thing to come out with. I tell you, mate, I felt like the floor should just open up and swallow the pair of us. I'll have to do better than that.'

‘We both will.' There was silence for a moment. ‘I tell you what, Ron, I didn't think it would be so hard.'

‘Hard?'

‘Not the study, the book stuff, I expected that, and it's not the discipline. It's what you have to become, the person you have to try and be, for others. I don't know if I can do that.'

Ron's natural cheerfulness reasserted itself.

‘Come on, sure you can, we all can. You've just got to give it time. The main thing is to learn, that's why we're here. You learn by listening, you learn by reading, and you learn by your mistakes. You get better and that's the way you get where you're going.'

‘Maybe so, but those mistakes hurt people, like we hurt Jimmy just now and sometimes the damage a mistake does is a lot worse and whoever gets hurt can't just get up and walk away.' The big man spoke as someone talking from painful, personal experience so the Australian stayed silent and let him talk. ‘There's a price for everything, I found that out a long time ago, and I don't want other people having to pay too high a price just so I can do my learning.'

Ron thought about it.

‘But it can't be helped, can it? Other people always pay the price one way or another.'

‘I suppose so.'

Ron finished his beer.

‘Another coffee?'

Danny pushed his cup away.

‘God, no, I'm getting so I hate the filthy stuff. One is plenty.'

‘Why not have a beer then?'

Danny looked at him; somehow it had suddenly turned into that sort of day.

‘Because it wouldn't be a beer and it wouldn't stop at one and the price would be more than I would want anyone to pay.'

Ron had been an accountant in a firm of solicitors and was not in any sense worldly wise, but the big man's words were not lost on him.

‘Bloody hell, it's a day for finding out about people, I'll say that. Jimmy's lost a wife and you …'

But he let the rest of it hang in the air.

‘So I drink tea when I can get it and coffee when I can't,' the big smile came back, ‘and I'm still trying to learn from my mistakes.'

They got up. Ron put his hand in his pocket, pulled out some coins, and put the payment with a small tip on the table. The barman looked up from his newspaper and nodded to them as they went to the door. They had left everything on the table for him to clear away. They were OK, they were the regulars.

Outside the clear sky was no more than a ribbon of blue between rooftops. Down in the street, on the narrow pavement, there was a permanent semi-gloom. The two men stood for a moment. The afternoon was free of study or lectures, it was theirs with no calls on their time. By unspoken consent they turned away from the traffic and bustle of the Corso and went the other way, towards the spring sunshine and the trees at the bottom end of the street. They'd walk beside the Tiber where it would be warm, bright, and quiet and Rome would be looking its best.

‘I wonder what the rector wanted to see Jimmy about?'

‘Who knows?'

And they set off, not tourists, but certainly not Romans. An odd couple.

TWO

Jimmy had also walked towards the Tiber. His most direct route would have been the Corso Emanuele which led to the Vatican City but it was too busy for the walk to be pleasant so he made his way through shady, narrow, side streets until he came out at the Ponte Mazzini. He crossed the river which ran below him between high, stone walls and broad footpaths created in homage to the Seine in Paris. The road above the river was tree-lined, quiet, and almost free of traffic but not far away in front of him was the main road where the noise and bustle began again. He slowed his pace. What was it the rector wanted to see him about? It wasn't time for the routine monthly meeting and he couldn't think of anything that had happened which would require another appointment. He put the question out of his mind and busied himself with thoughts on a different matter, one with which he was familiar – pain.

It was hard to believe that some chance remark, like the one Ron had made in the bar, could suddenly rip open an emotional wound and make it feel as if all the hard work of healing had been wasted. The pain just flooded back. He dealt with it in the only way he could, the way the kind, old, Irish priest in Mayo had shown him. He accepted it. He knew he deserved it, so he didn't try to fight it. A few short years ago this pain of loss and guilt could combine so that he came close to self-destruction, now a humble acceptance kept the worst of his demons at bay. His mind strayed to his theological studies; he let it, it helped.

All his life he'd heard the stories of how Jesus cured people possessed by evil spirits, first at school then on Sundays at Mass. As a child he'd enjoyed them, been impressed and a little frightened that evil spirits could get inside you somehow. As an adult he'd found such stories vaguely annoying when read out at church alongside the eternal truths enshrined in the Gospels. He sometimes wondered how the Church could mix the real Jesus and real miracles with such long-dead superstitious crap.

He no longer wondered.

Now he knew it wasn't superstition and it wasn't crap. The demons of self-destruction were very real. On arriving to study in Rome one of his first New Testament essays had been on the miracles of Jesus and he had drawn high praise for his understanding of the destructive power of inner demons. For a brief period he was regarded as a possible scholar, even asked out for a drink by a Rome-based English Dominican. But that drink and subsequent essays quickly put him back where he belonged, among the plodders.

His brain shifted again. Pain.

Why was the pain of Ron's remark so much harder to bear, so much harder to deal with, than any physical pain? As a child he had learned that it was possible to control physical pain inflicted from the outside, to feel the fist or the boot, but go to a place deep inside yourself where you could hide, where physical feelings were somehow numbed or suspended. He had had to use the lesson many times himself and, as a policeman, made sure others couldn't find such a place as he questioned them in a cell or influenced their thinking in some stinking back alley. Yes, many times, too many. But with this pain he could find no place to hide, nowhere was free of it, when it came it possessed him.

Pain.

You never got to the bottom of pain. However bad it was you knew it could get worse. Of one thing he was certain, this pain wasn't something you could beat or hide from or overcome by your own efforts. The best that could be hoped for was to accept it, live with it, and ultimately find forgiveness. If forgiveness ever came.

Suddenly he realised he had stopped and was leaning on the low parapet, and gazing down into the brown water. It had rained heavily two days ago and the river was moving quickly, muddy and swirling. He stood up and looked towards the traffic on the next bridge. What the hell did it matter? He was who he was, what his past had made him. Now he had to make the best of it, what else was there? He smiled to himself. Nothing, there was nothing else. A pretty young woman was passing and smiled back at him, thinking his smile had been meant for her. She carried on and Jimmy watched her. Slim, in a light blue dress with long dark hair and high heels. Going to work or to meet a boyfriend. Someone with a life before them, things to do, people to meet, and places to go. Yet she had noticed him and smiled. That was nice, a fortuitous piece of uncomplicated human contact. He turned and set off; the young woman had lifted him.

The quiet road ended at a bridge carrying one of Rome's main roads which, having crossed the Tiber, carried on for about a hundred metres then went into a big tunnel which swallowed its four lanes. Jimmy walked to the tunnel, once inside he lost all ability to think as his head filled with the traffic noise echoing and bouncing off the walls. After about four hundred metres he turned off the footpath and went down into a pedestrian underpass. It came out on the far side of the main road where a flight of steps took him up, back into the sunlight and out onto a wide piazza. Facing him at the end of the piazza were the massive walls and dome of St Peter's Basilica with the columns of St Peter's Square fanning out from it.

Jimmy began to walk across the piazza. On his right was an elegant hotel where people, mostly tourists, were sitting at tables, talking and drinking, soaking up the sunshine and the atmosphere. On the opposite side was a large, slab-like building which showed the world a blank, ochre wall topped by a shallow, red, pantiled roof. This was the Palazzo del Sant'Uffizio, the beginning of the Vatican and home to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. An innocent-sounding name until you were told it used to be called the Holy Office, and before that, the Inquisition. At the far end of the Palazzo the Renaissance ended abruptly and the stuccoed walls gave way to a high, steel security fence in the middle of which were two gates. Behind the fence to the side of the gates was an equally modern and ugly one-storey set of offices. These necessities of modern civilisation stood in the space between the Palazzo and St Peter's Basilica and unashamedly jarred with everything around them as if to announce to the world, “don't be fooled by all the history, pageant, and beauty that surrounds you; we are armed and dangerous”.

Jimmy arrived at the gateway where two Swiss Guards were on duty. Even after eight months in Rome he still thought they looked ridiculous in their striped red, blue, and yellow uniforms, dark floppy berets, and knee-length pantaloons. Although they looked more suited to a carnival he recognised at once the faces under the berets and the look their eyes had in them. These were soldiers, guards, and they took their job very seriously. He gave his name and the name of his rector. One of the guards went to the office inside the gate where his name was checked against a list and his face checked against a photo he had had to supply on arrival at the College. He was then waved through to the office where he was electronically swept, signed in, and given his pass. The guards' uniforms might be quaint but the security certainly wasn't.

He walked up the wide cobbled road between St. Peter's and the Palazzo towards a complex of equally ancient buildings that stood behind the Basilica. This was the Vatican no tourists saw, where the work got done, where the lives and souls of over a billion Catholics world-wide were monitored, influenced, and guided.

Why did the rector want to see him? Not a slap on the wrist. He hadn't put a foot wrong since he came to Rome, and he was sure the rector couldn't have found out anything about London … at least he was almost sure. He was being careful, but these days he knew he made mistakes. He had made one back in the bar with Ron and Danny. He had told them something about himself and they had laughed and the pain had come again.

Pain.

It always came back to pain.

Jimmy stopped outside a small side entrance to one of the big old buildings. Here an office was made available to the Duns College rector when one of its students was in training. Jimmy paused. He wanted to clear his mind before any interview began.

I can't put any of it right, I can't bring any of them back, and I can't change what I was or what I did. This is how it is now and this is what I've chosen. He looked at the ancient black door. Behind it, in an office on the top floor, the rector of the College waited. He looked at his watch. He was dead on time. Unbidden, a question forced itself into his head. What the fuck am I doing here?

But he didn't stand and think about it because he knew the answer. He knew exactly why he was here.

THREE

‘Come in.'

The Duns College rector who answered Jimmy's knock was unique among the administrators of Institutions in Rome preparing men for the Catholic priesthood. She was black. No one had expected Professor Pauline McBride to take any pride or pleasure in her appointment when it had been announced. No one ever did. On the rare occasion of a Duns student being accepted for training the College appeared, Brigadoon-like, from nowhere. Once brought back to life it consisted of a temporary office, a temporary phone line, some headed notepaper, the student, and a rector who served on a part-time basis until training was finished at which point Duns College and its rector once again disappeared.

The post, though honorary, was not regarded as an honour, it was the “black spot” of Catholic academic life in Rome and when rumours of a Duns student circulated senior staff lived uneasily until the blow had fallen elsewhere. In the case of Professor McBride it was widely assumed that she would resent more deeply than most what had been done to her. After all, strictly speaking she should never even have been considered for the post. She was not a senior staff member of one of the many educational and training institutions run by the Catholic Church. She was, when not having her time wasted by Duns business, a senior member on the faculty of the Collegio Principe, founded in 1519 by Cesare Borgia to study of the relationship between Religion, Politics, and Power. The Collegio Principe, as a secular institute, had never been on the traditional rota from which Duns rectors were drawn. The consensus as to why she had allowed herself to be “persuaded” was that she had become a new and useful statistic. The Vatican had taken the opportunity, when it arose, to rectify an increasingly awkward point of political correctness. It could now point to a black, female seminary college rector on its official list of senior appointments. Progress in racial equality and gender justice with the minimum of nuisance. The Vatican way.