“Of all the diseases, why did this one stand out?”
Dean Huxley sighed. “Even into this century, leprosy victims have been shunned and stigmatized. Shut away. Mocked. It’s a cruel, cruel disease. Leprosy was considered a test by God. Mithraism may be the earliest remaining human religion, Joe. It is still practiced in some places. It’s thirty-five hundred years old. Mithras was a god, principle rival to Christ for five hundred years. The movement had similar sacraments. Adherents called their priests ‘father.’ Early Christians attacked Mithraic cult temples, smashed their statues, destroyed their graveyards, killed believers. Many scholars believe that if Rome had not become Christian, today Mithraism would be one of the principal religions on Earth. What’s the difference between a cult and a religion anyway? Some thinkers say the only difference is how many people belong.”
She looked sad, not because Christianity had won out, but because suffering had taken place.
I asked, “What did Mithraism have to do with leprosy?”
“Well, they had a sanctuary in France, near Bourg-Saint-Andéol. They regarded the spring there as having healing power. In the middle ages they brought people suspected of having leprosy there, stood ’em up by the bank, and had the town barber bleed them. They’d mix the blood with the spring water. If the blood remained red and liquid, the suspect was pronounced clean. What are you staring at?”
In some ways, the year might as well have been 1200. The pews might have been filled with peasants and dukes. The expressions on the faces around me were probably as similar to those long-dead people as the DNA inside them, and the bacteria multiplying in their bloodstreams.
“The window,” I said. “The lepers. Leprosy and religions. I’m thinking about what you said.”
Nadine said with some delicacy, lowering her voice, “Joe, you look tired. Eddie called a few weeks back, and told me that you spend too much time alone in the woods.”
“Eddie is an asshole.”
“No, he’s not. You know, Joe, the French writer André Malraux wrote that everyone is really three people: the one you show the world, the one you think you are, and the one who you really are.”
“So you know who I am but I don’t?”
“I would never be that presumptuous.”
“The world was simpler when Malraux was alive.”
“It was never that.”
“Oh, I think you’ll agree that we face a few new complex problems just now, Nadine.”
“Technically, yes. But in the end, complexity is something humans dream up to deny truth.”
I appreciated the concern but the preaching irritated me, especially now. “I’m not going to play this game so you can feel better, Nadine. There are more important things to do.”
Unfazed, she said, “You don’t believe in God anymore?”
I shook my head. “Oh, I do. That’s the problem. But he and I made a deal.”
“Which is?”
“I agree to keep making the choices he throws at me, and he agrees to keep me away from love.”
“What does one thing have to do with the other?”
I saw Karen, dead, in an abandoned house in Alaska. I was startled to have that image switch to a vision of Chris Vekey, which I pushed away. “I’ve killed people, Nadine. I’d do it again. Eddie thinks I feel guilty about it but he’s wrong.” I poked my chest. I signed the deal here. I said, “No more dragging in other people.”
“Joe, we both know that you can’t make deals with him, he doesn’t work that way, and if you think you have, you’re fooling yourself.”
“All kinds of new things seem to be going on.”
It was impossible for Orrin Sykes to hear what Joe Rush and the dean were saying. He’d knelt only eight feet from them, but they spoke in low voices, and the prayers around him were loud. Sykes wished he could get closer, but that might draw Rush’s attention. He’d hoped that the cathedral would be one of those places where you could stand on one side of a room and, through weird acoustics, hear whispers on the other. You were always reading about whisper corners in castles or cathedrals.
There was no whisper corner here.
The prayers fell silent for a moment and Sykes watched Rush. Through the quiet he heard a single phrase.
The Sixth Prophet.
Sykes rose and looked down at the worshipper beside him, a heavyset jowly guy wearing a Washington Redskins hat and a jacket. He was a football fan and that had been his undoing. The condiments had been infected before Sykes arrived in Washington, during a game against the New York Giants. Hundreds of people putting mustard or ketchup on their burgers and hot dogs had consumed the bug. Orrin saw sores on the man’s lips. The man had to know what was happening. He was staring up at the depiction of Christ. Sykes could read the moving lips, “Save me, save me.”
Sykes thought, with real compassion, After you die, you will change into something new.
Sykes got to his feet and, with a backward glance at Joe Rush, made his way back down the nave and past the redwood-sized columns and beneath the soaring V-shaped ceiling, past the Woodrow Wilson Bay, where the remains of the Twenty-eighth President were buried. Past the Lee-Jackson Bay, which depicted scenes from the lives of U.S. Civil War generals. Past the Folger Bay, where windows honored eighteenth-century explorers who opened the American West.
Outside, the snow had thickened, and fell heavily, and Orrin Sykes left rapidly filling tracks as he made his way back toward the car. Rush was still inside. Sykes called Harlan, who went oddly silent when he heard the report. Sykes was unaccustomed to detecting any sign of doubt in Harlan. But when Harlan spoke, it was with the same soothing tones he used day to day back home.
“He asked about the Sixth Prophet, Orrin?”
“About the term. The words.”
“He’s alone, you said. Major Nakamura isn’t there?”
“No.”
“There’s nothing in the reports I saw about this. No guard with him? Private car? You said you saw him arguing with the others in the admiral’s car?”
“I don’t know for sure. I think I saw it.”
“Did he phone anyone?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did he mention Columbia County?”
“I couldn’t hear well. Everyone was praying.”
Harlan muttered something bitter, which Orrin could not make out, then said, “He was told to stay out of the investigation. He’s supposed to be out! And he’s still in the church now, but you left?”
“I thought you’d want to hear this right away.”
“Right. Of course. But why is he asking? Does he know something? Or is he fishing?”
Harlan gave Orrin instructions then. He knew that what he requested was risky, but it was necessary, he said. “If there’s a way to talk to him, a way to pick his brain, that would help us very much, Orrin.”
“But there’s people going in or out every few minutes. And you never know if someone will appear.”
“Remember those things you did in Iraq? That you confessed? I told you then there was a reason for everything, there’s a reason you learned those skills. You must call upon those skills now. A skill is neither good nor bad by itself.”
Orrin had a vision of a cement block house in a village. Of an Iraqi tied to a chair, screaming as Orrin did things to him. The man had been nothing more than a thief who worked for a rival gang. Orrin had tortured and killed that man to find a thousand gallons of diverted lubrication oil. When he was done, even his socks and the space between his toes had been soaked with the man’s blood.