“I want to stay and listen,” she said querulously. “It gets lonely waiting all by myself for the doors of the Kingdom to open and receive me.”
“God is always with you, Mother Pureza.”
“I wish He’d say something. I get so lonely, waiting, watching... Who is that young man? Why is he here in my Tower?”
“Mr. Quinn has come to see Sister Blessing.”
“Oh, oh, oh, he can’t do that!”
“That is what I must explain to him, in private.” The Master put a firm hand on her elbow and guided her to the steps. “Be careful going down, Pureza. It is a long fall to the inner court.”
“Tell the young man that if he wants to visit my Tower he must wait for an engraved invitation from my secretary, Capirote. Send for Capirote immediately.”
“Capirote isn’t here, Pureza. That was a long time ago. Now take hold of the guardrail and walk slowly.”
The Master closed the door quietly and returned to his position at the loom.
“Her Tower?” Quinn said.
“She commissioned it to be constructed. Now it belongs to us all. There is no private property in our community unless someone commits a material sin like our poor Sister Blessing.” He held up one hand in a silencing gesture. “Please make no denials, Mr. Quinn. Sister Blessing has confessed in full and is repenting in full.”
“I want to see her. Where is she?”
“What you want doesn’t carry much weight with us. When you trespassed upon our property, you were, in a sense, entering another country with a different constitution, a different set of laws.”
“I gather it’s still part of the Union,” Quinn said. “Or is it?”
“There has been no formal secession, that is true. But we do not accept as law what we do not believe to be right.”
“By ‘we’ you mean ‘I,’ don’t you?”
“I have been chosen to receive revelations and visions beyond the others. However, I am only an instrument of the divine will, a mere servant among its other servants.... I can see I am not convincing you.”
“No.” Quinn wondered what the man had been in real life besides a failure. “You wanted to talk to me. What about?”
“Money.”
“I thought that was a dirty word around here.”
“It is sometimes necessary to use dirty words to describe dirty transactions, such as accepting a large sum of money from a woman for performing a very small service.” He touched his forehead with his right hand while his left pointed to the sky. “You see, I know everything.”
“You didn’t get it in a vision,” Quinn said. “And accepting a large sum of money from a woman doesn’t seem to have bothered you much. This place wasn’t built with green stamps.”
“Hold your vicious tongue, Mr. Quinn, and I shall hold my temper, which can be equally vicious, I assure you. Mother Pureza is my wife, dedicated to my work, sharing my visions of the glory that awaits us. Oh, the glory, oh, if you could see the glory, you would understand why we are all here.” The Master’s face underwent an abrupt, unexplained change. The visionary suddenly became the realist. “You wish to make your report to Sister Blessing about the man O’Gorman?”
“I not only wish to, I intend to.”
“That will be impossible. She is in isolation, renewing her vows of renunciation, a trivial punishment considering the magnitude of her sins, concealing money, withholding it from the common fund, trying to reestablish contact with the world she promised to leave behind her. These are grave infractions of our laws. She could have been banished from our midst entirely but the Lord told me in a vision to spare her.”
The Lord, Quinn thought, plus a little common sense. Sister Blessing’s too useful to banish. There wouldn’t be anybody left to keep the rest of them healthy while waiting to die.
“You are to make your report to me,” the Master said. “I will see that she gets it.”
“Sorry, my instructions were specific. No Sister, no report.”
“Very well. No report, no money. I demand an immediate return of what is left of the sum Sister Blessing gave you. That seems to me quite a fair and just idea.”
“There’s only one thing the matter with it,” Quinn said. “The money’s gone.”
The Master pushed the loom aside with a sweep of his hand. “You spent a hundred and twenty dollars in a day and a half? You’re lying.”
“Living costs have gone up in my part of the Union.”
“You gambled it away, is that it? Gambled and boozed and debauched—”
“Yes, I had a pretty busy time what with one thing and another. Now I’d like to do what I was paid to do and get out of here. The climate in your country doesn’t agree with me, there’s too much hot air.”
A rush of blood stained the Master’s face and neck but he said in a controlled voice, “I have long since been accustomed to the gibes of the ignorant and the unbelievers. I can only warn you that the Lord will smite you with the sword of His wrath.”
“Consider me smote.” Quinn’s tone was considerably lighter than his feelings. The place was beginning to oppress him, the glorification of death hung over it as the smell of oil hung over Chicote. He thought, Once you get the idea that dying is great, it’s an easy step up to thinking you’re doing someone a favor by helping him die. The old boy’s been harmless so far but his next vision might have me in a featured role.
“Let’s quit playing games,” Quinn said. “I came to see Sister Blessing. Aside from the fact that she paid me to do a job, I happen to like her, and I want to make sure she’s all right. Now it’s no secret that you’ve had some trouble with the law—the law of my part of the Union, of course—and you just might be asking for more.”
“Is that a threat?”
“That’s exactly what it is, Master. I’m not leaving here until I assure myself that Sister Blessing is alive and in good health, as she was yesterday morning when I left here.”
“Why shouldn’t she be alive? What kind of nonsense is this? You talk as if we were barbarians, savages, maniacs—”
“You’re close.”
The Master got clumsily to his feet, kicking aside the loom. It crashed against the wall. “Leave. Leave here immediately, or I will not be responsible for what happens to you. Get out of my sight.”
Suddenly the door opened and Mother Pureza came in making little clucking noises with her tongue. “Oh, that’s not polite, Harry. It really isn’t polite after I sent him an engraved invitation through Capirote.”
“Oh God,” the Master said and covered his face with his hands.
“And you needn’t scold me for eavesdropping, either. I told you I was lonely, triste, desamparada—”
“You have not been abandoned, Pureza.”
“Then where is everybody? Where is Mama, and Dolores who brought my breakfast, and Pedro who polished my riding boots, and Capirote? Where is everybody? Where have they all gone, Harry? Why didn’t they take me with them? Oh Harry, why didn’t they wait for me?”
“Hush now, Pureza. You must be patient.” He crossed the room and took her in his arms and patted her thinning hair, her emaciated shoulders. “You must not lose courage, Pureza. Soon you will see them all again.”
“Will Dolores bring me breakfast in bed?”
“Yes.”
“And Pedro, may I hit him with my riding crop if he doesn’t listen to me?”
“Yes.” The Master’s voice was an exhausted whisper. “Whatever you like.”
“I might hit you too, Harry.”
“All right.”
“Not hard, though. Just a tap on the dome to sting a little and let you know I’m alive... But I won’t be alive then, Harry. I won’t be alive. Oh, I’m so confused. How can I give you a little tap on the dome to let you know I’m alive when I won’t be alive?”