Meanwhile, Bosco had a great many pressing problems to deal with. In the eyes of Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist, Bosco appeared to be a figure of absolute authority among the Redeemers. This was far from the case. It might have been true concerning acolytes and even many senior Redeemers. His writ might now run in the Sanctuary but, however important it was, the centre of power for the faith lay with Pope Bento XVI in the holy city of Chartres. For twenty years a formidable bastion of power and orthodoxy, he had spent those two decades rolling back the changes of the previous hundred years in search of a renewed purity for the One True Faith. However, for some time he had been prey to that great affliction of age, Mens Vermis, first as a great tendency to forget, then to wander, then to wander and not return except for brief flashes of a few hours where his old grasp seemed to return in its entirety. From where, who knows? In the three years during which the Vermis had ruined his mind many cabals and juntos, cliques and coteries, had emerged preparing for the moment when death might release him from his duties. The two most important of these were the Redeemers Triumphant, run by Redeemer Cardinal Gant – responsible for religious orthodoxy – and the Office of the Holy See controlled by Redeemer Cardinal Parsi. Whoever controlled the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant controlled access to the Holy Father, and as the Holy Father was so ill, between them they controlled a very great deal. As for Gant and Parsi there was the difference between a gnat and a flea as to which of them hated Bosco most. Bosco’s view of either went a long way beyond hatred. This longstanding animosity was a matter of design by Pope Bento, who believed as much in the principle of divide and rule as he did in God. When the time was right he would have chosen a successor but such matters seemed beyond him now even though the choice was only between Parsi and Gant. It would not have been Bosco. Bosco was suspected of thinking and sometimes of new thinking. Aware of these reservations, Bosco had made other plans.
A reaper and sower even more gifted than Chancellor Vipond of Memphis, Bosco had reacted quickly to the catastrophe of Cale’s killing of Picarbo and his subsequent escape. But it is a great help when you know that God is on your side also to have brains, along with a belief that God helps those that help themselves. Bosco had put it about to those who needed to know that it was Antagonist spies who had murdered Picarbo and that Cale had been forced to accompany them to uncover a plan to murder the Pope. Where Antagonists were concerned no accusation was too outrageous. ‘A big lie,’ he was fond of saying to Redeemer Gil, the nearest Bosco had to a confidant, ‘is more easily believed than a small one and a simple one more readily than anything too complicated.’ He had therefore commissioned Redeemer Eugen Hadamowski, his propaganda Burgrave, to write a book, the Protocols of the Moderators of Antagonism, outlining the details of such a plot. They had then, after careful searching, found the body of a Redeemer who shared all the most exaggerated features generally held to be typical of an Antagonist: he had green teeth (a lucky symptom of the disease from which he had died), thick lips, a large nose and black curly hair. They had thrown his body into the sea just off the Isle of Martyrs, where they knew the current would carry it, and let the general willingness to believe in such conspiracies do the rest. The Protocols did not, however, confine themselves just to the details of the ghastly plot itself, but also expressed fear that an unusually brave and holy Redeemer spy was out and about and that through great risk and holy cunning had infiltrated the Antagonist plotters to try to save the Pope. More cunningly it claimed that an Antagonist fifth column had converted an undisclosed number of Redeemers to their heresy and that many of these apostates had worked their way to important posts in both Gant’s Redeemers Triumphant and Parsi’s Office of the Holy See, where they fed vital secrets to their masters and awaited the opportunity offered by any moments of weakness in the faithful. The Protocols also reluctantly conceded that despite all their efforts little head way had been made against the religious purity of Bosco’s Redeemers in the Sanctuary.
Bosco’s belief that the Protocols could be as crude as a four-year-old’s painting of the Hanged Redeemer as long as the faithful were convinced by their origins turned out to be more true than he could have reasonably hoped. The body’s apparently one-in-a-million chance arrival from the sea was proof that there was no conspiracy. So natural did it seem that the question of its fakery never arose. The Office of the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant were reduced to arguing that while the threat was clearly real, the Antagonists were mistaken about the heretics in their ranks. Nevertheless there were mighty purges. Torture as such was forbidden to be used on Redeemers but the Office of Interrogators had no need of racks and branding. A few nights without sleep, followed by ducking in water, soon had entirely innocent men – innocent of heresy at any rate – confessing to collusion and apostasy and trafficking with devils all followed by the naming of names. Bosco watched with considerable satisfaction as a great number of his enemies were burnt at the stake by a great many of his other enemies. The authority he gained as a result of his own rule at the Sanctuary being accused by the Protocols of being a model of resistance to Antagonism gave him a renewed influence sufficient to launch the attack on the Materazzi with its utterly unexpected and magnificent consequences. He was now very much in the ascendant over Parsi and Gant and he had proved to his followers, beyond any shadow of a scruple or doubt, that God had blessed his daring and dangerous plan and that Cale was indeed God’s instrument. Work, and very serious work, remained to be done. Neither Gant nor Parsi were to be underestimated and realizing the threat from Bosco they had joined together to oppose him. The Antagonist purge had eventually been brought to an end by their concerted efforts and they were on the move against Bosco and at any price.
That night Bosco lay on his bed, brooding over the many plans he had set in motion to destroy his rivals and bring about the end of the world. Exhilaration and worry kept him awake. What, after all, could shock the soul so intensely as the decision to bring everything to an end – the terrible vertigo of commitment to the ultimate solution of evil itself ? His wariness was more ordinary but not less important. Bosco was not foolish enough to countenance grand ideas without knowing he needed the wit and competence to carry them out and, of course, the luck. Then there was the wariness and exhilaration he felt about Cale. Everything he had ever hoped for from this boy had come true and more than that. And yet he was puzzled that God had given everything his vision had promised and pressed down into the barrel yet there were still traces of something inadequate about him: pointless anger and resentment not turned into a proper righteousness. He comforted himself before he fell asleep that he had not intended Cale to be made manifest to the world for another ten years at least. If it hadn’t been for that lunatic Picarbo and his ghastly experiments, things would have been very different. Soon after a short fulmination he stopped indulging his bad temper and comforted himself with one of his oldest dictums, ‘a plan is a baby in a cradle – it bears little resemblance to the man’.