She shrugged. “Timing is everything. I guess the masses weren’t ready for Now until…you know…now.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Touché, but not true,” I told her. “Meister Eckhart was an incredibly popular preacher. Too popular. He was brought down by jealous rivals.” I shook my head. “Why is so much scheming and backstabbing — and front stabbing, for that matter — done in the name of God?”
“Duh,” she said. “Don’t pretend to be a dumb-ass. You know perfectly well why.” I didn’t know perfectly well why, but I suspected she was about to tell me why. “People and their gods are just like people and their dogs.”
“Huh?” This time I felt myself six conversational and logical steps behind Miranda.
“You know how people and their dogs resemble one another? Crabby little ladies with snappish little Pekinese? Beefy bubbas with waddling bulldogs? Same thing with theology. Someone who’s bighearted, like your man the Meister, sees God as benevolent. A cruel, vindictive jerk, on the other hand, imagines God as harsh and vengeful. See? At the end of either leash — the dog leash or the God leash — there’s really just a mirror.”
The images — God on a leash, God as a narcissistic reflection — were shockingly irreverent. But she had a point, in an editorial-cartoon kind of way. Miranda almost always had a point.
It was nearly midnight Sunday; I should have been sleeping, but after tossing and turning for two hours, I gave up, got up, and got dressed.
Outside, a fierce wind was roaring across the rooftops. What had Jean called it? The mistral. The mistral was roaring, and the bells in the skeletal iron steeple of the Carmelite church tolled each time the gusts peaked. The moon was full, and the lashing branches outside my window cast shadows that twisted and writhed on my bed, beckoning me outside for some reason. Tiptoeing down the stairs, I unlocked the inn’s rattling wooden gate — the wind nearly tore it from my grasp — and set out into the gale.
Avignon was a maze of narrow, crooked streets, but it was a small maze — barely a mile wide, according to the map I’d studied — so even if I got lost, I couldn’t get terribly lost. Besides, Lumani faced the stone ramparts that ringed the city; to find my way home, all I’d need to do was find and follow the wall. If I walked an extra half mile, so what? The ancient city was beautiful, and the exercise would do me good.
Leaving Lumani, I turned left and followed the wall westward, toward the rocky hill where the Palace of the Popes and the cathedral perched. The streets were empty at this hour, and the city itself was largely shuttered and silent. The only noise came from the wind: the surging, surflike mistral churning across roof tiles and seething through the shredded leaves of plane trees.
I’d not gone far — ten minutes’ easy walk, a scant half mile — when the street butted into another stone wall, even higher than the ancient ramparts: Saint Anne’s Prison, a historical marker informed me, though it was no longer in use. Moonlight cascaded down the rock wall like water sheeting down the face of a cliff. The surface was rough, pockmarked with deep, shadowed craters, which I stepped closer to examine. From waist level up to a height of eight or ten feet, rectangular niches had been gouged into the blocks, and these niches — a hundred or more — were filled with objects: photos, figurines, crucifixes, trinkets, talismans. I puzzled over it, and suddenly I realized what I was seeing. Family and friends of the men inside the prison had filled the niches with mementos and relics.
A half block farther, I came upon a stone chapel tucked against the prison wall; a historical marker identified it as the Chapel of the Pénitents Noirs. The Pénitents Noirs — the Black Penitents — belonged to a religious society that revered John the Baptist; this particular group of them had banded together in the fifteen hundreds to minister to the prison’s inmates as their own way of doing penance. The chapel was small and simple, with the exception of an ornate relief panel above the doorway. The panel, carved in stone, measured eight or ten feet wide by at least fifteen feet high. Most of it was filled with angels, clouds, and rays of sunlight, or rays of heavenly glory; at the center, two hovering angels held some sort of serving tray between them in the sky. By the pale light of the moon, as the mistral roared overhead, I saw that the angels were serving up the severed head of the Baptist: a grisly reminder that martyrs — their bodies and bones — occupied a prominent and powerful place in the faith of medieval Catholics. More mementos and relics.
Zigging and zagging through the labyrinthine streets, I made my way toward what I hoped was the Palace of the Popes. Sure enough, above a nearby rooftop loomed a massive tower, fifteen stories high. The battlements at the top overhung the tower’s wall slightly; moonlight streamed down through narrow slits in the overhangs, streaking the stones of the wall. The slits, I realized as I reached the tower’s base and peered up, would allow boiling oil to be poured down onto attackers — or, at the moment, down onto me. So much for turning the other cheek, I mused.
The buttressed foundations seemed to grow like stony roots from the rock. A cobblestone pedestrian alley, carved deep into the rock, wound upward along the base of the palace here. Threading my way through the tight passage and passing beneath the thick arch of a flying buttress, I emerged into the great square fronted by the Palace of the Popes.
I found myself at the southeastern corner of the palace, far from the main entrance, and at the opposite end from the cathedral. The walls gleamed silvery white in the moonlight, with deep shadows delineating the arches and overhangs and arrow slits in the masonry. As I studied the details, a shaft of light at the base of the wall caught my eye. A small wooden door at the corner of the palace opened, and a man in black emerged, closing and locking the door behind him. He started across the square, and his walk — a loping gait with a slight limp — looked familiar. “Stefan?” I was only thirty feet from him, but the rushing wind swept my words away, so I called again, louder. “Stefan!” He whirled, scanning the square, coiling into a crouch as if to run. “Stefan, it’s Bill Brockton,” I yelled, waving both arms. He un-coiled and met me halfway.
“Mon Dieu, Bill, quelle surprise. What are you doing here at the middle of night?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “The wind, I guess — rattling the rooftops and rattling me. So I decided to take a walk, see the city by moonlight. What are you doing here at this time of night?”
He rolled his eyes. “A rah,” he said.
“Excuse me? What’s a ‘rah’?”
“A rodent. A big mouse.”
“Oh, a rat,” I said, remembering that the French tended to swallow the ends of their words.
He looked impatient. “Oui, a rah-t.” The way he emphasized the t this time, it almost sounded as if he’d spat it at me. “I finally got the motion detector working correctly,” he went on. “I have it linked to my computer, and something set it off a few minutes ago. So I came quickly. But it was just a big rat, eating a sandwich I left in the corner of the trésorerie at lunch today. Quelle peste!”
“Better a rat than a thief, though,” I offered. “And at least you know the alarm works.”
“Bien sûr! Of course. But now I’m on the edge, so it’s difficult to sleep.”
“You’re welcome to join me on a walk, if you want.”
He seemed surprised by the offer. “Oui, pourquoi pas? Midnight in the city of the popes. I will be your tour guide.”