The spasms diminished after less than thirty seconds, his withered arm falling over the rail, dangling there limply for a moment until the nurse came around to readjust it at his side.
Martin stared down at him. His cheeks felt too hot, then too cold in the air-conditioning. He could hear the intake and expulsion of his own breath over the hiss of the ventilator.
He ordered his legs to move him toward the bed. “Señor Colón,” he said in a low voice. “It is Father Martín.”
There was no acknowledgment.
The priest leaned over the deathbed. The sores on Colón’s face were crusted with yellowish discharge. Martin could smell ointment on him and, underneath, the far more unpleasant odor of infection.
“Do you remember our discussions?” he said. “We have had many of them, about many subjects. About faith. And strength.”
He thought he saw Colón’s eyes twitch under their closed lids.
“Now we will ask God’s grace, and find renewed strength in our unity with his spirit,” he said. “You and I, together—”
Alvarez stepped forward. “Father, he is much too weak.”
Martin shot a hand out behind his back and waved him into silence.
“Mi presidente, ” he said. “Can you take Communion?”
A moment passed. Colón’s eyes flickered more rapidly. And then one of them opened and fastened on Martin.
Its white was swimming in blood.
Martin’s cheeks flushed hot and cold again. He realized they were wet with perspiration.
“Are you able to receive Communion?” he repeated, trying to smooth the tremor in his voice.
Colón strained to answer, managed nothing more than a croak.
“Enough,” the doctor protested. “He mustn’t be—”
This time Alvarez fell silent without any urging.
Colon had declared his wish with a weak but unmistakable nod, his red eye never leaving Martin’s face.
Martin turned to the bed stand, knelt before it a second time, and lifted the communion cloth off the pyx. If the heart of Alberto Colon was weighted with sin, he would have to unburden himself before God almighty; it was not humanly possible for him to give confession in his present state.
Moving to the bedside, Martin put the communion cloth under the dying man’s chin and recited the Confiteor, offering penance in his name, pleading for his absolution from worldly sin: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. ”
When he had finished his petition, he took the Host from its receptacle, blessed it, and brought it over to Colon.
“Try to swallow,” he said. “If you have difficulty, a sip of water might help.”
Colon stared at him with his one open eye, the iris uncannily bright, as if all the passion and will that had gained him the presidency — an office he had won in a free election against a powerful league of corrupt influences — was blazing through it.
He produced a groan of effort. Then his cracked lips slowly parted.
The odor of sickness on his breath was even stronger than it had been coming off his pores. Crops of raised, purplish lesions marched across his tongue and palate. His front teeth were smeared with blood where it had leaked from the rim of his gums.
The wafer between his thumb and index fingers, Martin bent to put it in his mouth… and that was when everything inside him stalled.
He stood there, rigid, his hand inches from the dying man’s mouth.
Those ulcers on his tongue. Open. Weeping fluids.
Martin was unable to budge.
Unable to touch him.
What was it Alvarez had said to him in the anteroom?
“I cannot escape the thoughts and images… and I am afraid. ”
The priest felt a cutting shame. His resolute dismissal of the doctor’s admonition came back to him now as self-mockery.
I am afraid.
His forehead beaded with sweat, he averted his eyes from Colon long enough to place the wafer on his tongue. But he could not keep his hand from shaking or drawing quickly back, and as he gave utterance to his prayers of viaticum, they seemed to fall away from him, or he from them. The disconnection was like nothing Martin had experienced before. It was as if he were slipping into a dark hole, some forsaken inner recess where all words of faith dissolved into empty silence.
And though he would spend much time trying to convince himself otherwise, right then, betrayed by his fear, praying in secret anguish, Martin knew for a dreadful certainty that his fall had only begun.
THREE
Rollie Thibodeau felt his tackle jerk hard as the giant sea bass erupted from the bay, its spiny dorsal fin raised like a mainsail, foam spraying off its mottled flanks.
He braced himself, his feet planted apart, knowing he couldn’t afford to give the fish any slack. His heavy line stretched taut. The stand-up rod bent in his hands, and its butt pressed into his abdomen. He tightened his grip, his harness straps digging into his shoulders, the muscles of his arms straining against the drag of the line.
Then something gave out inside him. It was less a sensation of pain than a sudden buckling weakness between his stomach and groin. His feet slipped forward over the Pomona’s deck, and he saw the gunwale come closer. Three, maybe four inches, but that was enough tow for the bass. It rushed straight up out of the water, plunged with a tremendous splash, and then broached again, its wide gray head whipping ferociously from side to side.
Vibrating like a bowstring across its entire length, the line snapped just behind the wire leader.
The bass flailed backward, away from the stern of the motor yacht, Thibodeau’s hook still buried in its gaping jaw. For a charged moment it was completely airborne. Its scales seemed to darken and lighten in patches as its great body undulated in the sunlight. Thibodeau guessed it was between five and six feet long.
He was shouting imprecations at the creature as it smacked down into the water, rolled over, and dove beneath the surface, its tail churning up a small spiraling wake before it torpedoed from sight.
Winded, his face red with exertion above his short, brown beard, Thibodeau tossed his rod disgustedly to the planks and leaned over the rail.
“Damn,” he grunted. And kicked the gunwale. “Goddamn!”
Megan Breen stared at his back for a few seconds, then shifted her eyes to Pete Nimec over to her left. Both had raced up behind Thibodeau to cheer him on when the fish struck.
Nimec mimed a basketball handoff. Ball’s in your court.
She looked at him another moment in the crisp, offshore breeze, a thumb hooked into the hip pocket of her Levi’s, her thick auburn hair blowing over the shoulders of a tailored leather blouse.
Then she shrugged and stepped closer to Thibodeau.
“It happens, Rollie,” she said. “Everybody has a story to tell about the one that got away.”
He turned abruptly from the rail.
“Non,” he panted, shaking his head. “I had it beat.”
“Seemed to me that it was full of fight.”
“You don’ know!” he said. His cheeks and forehead went a darker shade of red. “Doesn’t matter if that thing was twistin’ like a demon in holy water. It was tired out, and I shoulda had it!”
Her eyes sharpened.
“Cool down, Rollie,” she said. “They call what you were doing sportfishing for a reason. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable activity.”
He shook his head again, took a deep breath, then released it.