Foley felt frustration choking him again. He had to get out of this house for a while, away from the priest, away from his peculiar madness, away from the trappings of this… this circus.
On the sidewalks and street, a large crowd waited again. There were television cameras as well, and reporters standing around in trench coats.
Foley moved away from them, down the sidewalk to the first intersection, then left down a broad avenue of white stucco houses. Rome seemed so far away and yet, if the journal were completed in a few days, he could be back there by the weekend, sitting in his favorite trattoria in the old quarter, listening to the lies of the owner who bragged of his direct descent from the family of the Caesars—
The gray car had turned at the corner. It followed him discreetly down the street.
The city seemed so empty to him. No one walked, the streets were never full of people. And now, at lonely dawn, in the rain, he felt the emptiness more and felt his sense of isolation from this strange American culture. Block after block of stucco houses, each as large as a villa. So much wealth, he thought, so much emptiness.
The rain began to soothe him and he walked at a slower pace.
The gray car stopped a hundred feet behind him and a man in a dark jacket emerged from the driver’s side. A second man slid from the passenger seat behind the wheel of the car.
Foley let the thoughts of Tunney and the journal and the secret — if there was a secret, whatever the secret was — recede from his mind.
He thought of the soft days in Ireland when he visited his uncle’s home in Wicklow.
He thought of the melancholy over the green, lush fields on those days of endless, gentle misting rain.
But he was not a child.
He was lost in this strange country, trying to extract the secret of a journal, a secret he could not even be told by Ludovico.
Foley crossed the wide street and stood now on the shoreline of the city, a half-mile from the entrance of the causeway to the island of Clearwater Beach. Boats in the shallow waters of the harbor moved slowly back and forth. There was little traffic on the causeway and he started down the street toward it, in the shadow of the sleeping downtown buildings.
Why had Tunney hidden the journal?
“Pardon.” The voice was rumbling, soft.
Foley turned, felt the nudge, pushed away. The stranger smiled at him for a moment. The face of a saint behind wire-rimmed glasses, the eyes huge and mild. The stranger smiled as he hurried on in the rain. He carried an umbrella. He had poked Foley with the tip.
There was no reason to have the umbrella facing forward, Foley thought. There was no wind, the rain was falling straight down.
He felt the coolness of the drops on his uncovered heart. A soft day is what the old Irish countrymen would call it as they took to the soggy green fields in their tweed caps, faded black suit jackets, and high rubber wading boots worn against the muds of spring. Soft as he had known the days of his childhood.
His vision played tricks on him for a moment and he stopped and looked across the causeway at the towering hotels on the beach; or, perhaps, it was not a beach but Liverpool again and he was a child down by the docks, playing in the shadows of the Lever towers.
But that was madness.
He wasn’t a child, he was…
He was Martin Foley, yes, that was it.
An umbrella point like a pinprick. He knew that from somewhere. Was it a trick?
He started to walk across the causeway. Here, the rain felt colder as it dropped on his head.
He felt the drops. And then he felt each drop. Each drop, drop, drop, each one heavier than the last.
He held up his hand against the drops. The drops of rain were crushing him. Each fell like a hammer blow. His head exploded as each drop struck him, savagely, again and again, each drop like a stone. They were stoning him and each drop was a rock. He bled.
He wiped rain from his forehead and saw that it was blood. He was soaked in blood. He was dying with the blood forming across his eyes; he could not see.
Dying.
Jesus Christ, succor me in my last moment.
He was a boy visiting Aunt Mary, outside the cot, outside in the green fields, he smelled smoke and dung, the peat fire.…
Mother Mary, Aunt Mary, Mother of God from Dun Laoghaire.
He was running. Yes, he was definitely running. A ridiculous thing to do in the rain. The rain fell too quickly, too harshly, but if he ran faster and faster, the rain would fall behind him, he would be out of it. There, he was running between the drops of rain. All he had to do was run back and forth between the drops of rain.…
And then he saw him.
Jesus Christ, standing on the sidewalk across the roadway, on the other side of the Memorial Causeway. This causeway was a memorial to Him, the Lamb of God.
Christ beckoned him.
Jesus Christ. Full of grace and beauty.
He began to run.…
It was quite a traffic problem, Officer Montgomery Duvall said later, much later, in his unofficial report at the Pinellas County sheriff’s office. First of all, he explained, the pickup truck that hit the priest skidded in the wet rain and damn near slid right off the causeway itself and that would have been a helluva mess. But the worst was when the other traffic stopped to help, and the priest, he got up just like that, ran right across the roadway, bleeding from when the pickup hit him, and they said you should of seen it. Ran right into the water. Waded right out until he drowned.
They found the body by late afternoon because the waters were calm and not very deep.
Because the death could have been listed as a suicide, and because suicide was the single unforgivable sin in Catholic belief, Father McGillicuddy used all his persuasion to get a detailed autopsy.
Which was the reason, in turn, that a bright young medical examiner discovered the massive amount of LSD in the blood of the victim.
A rumor came out of the morgue that the priest had been on dope and that even the old one in the motherhouse, the one who worked miracles, was part of a new dope cult. The edgy citizens of Pinellas, who had been witness to the protracted struggle between local politicians and the bizarre cult of the Church of Scientology, were quite ready to believe anything.
After three weeks, the body of Martin Foley was returned to Liverpool for a final funeral and, at last, burial.
But by then, the secret he had wanted to learn — because of which he had died — was finally known.
19
“What I can do for you?” The accent was thick, suspicious. Denisov had difficulty understanding him for a moment until the man repeated himself.
“My name is Jorgensen,” Denisov said.
“Yeah?”
“I am with the Dagblat Svenska.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The largest newspaper. In Sweden.”
“In Sweden? You Swedish?”
Denisov nodded. The room was at the end of a hall in a motel on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in the city of Clearwater. Outside, traffic surged back and forth restlessly along the miles of franchise food shops and restaurants and motels with small swimming pools on the roadside.
He had had difficulty finding the place at all.
“I would like to speak to this woman,” Denisov said, smiling. “I am too interested in what has happened in the church.”
“You are?” The lean face of the middle-aged man appeared to have a permanent five o’clock shadow etched around the chin. He wore a white shirt open at the neck. His face and arms were deeply sunburned, as though he worked outside.
“Well, I tell you, Mr. Anderson—”