Three Marys Read online

  ‘Gareth and Anil just left.’

  ‘I ran into them.’ He bolted the door.

  That was her signal to rise, switch off her desk light and approach him seductively, dangling a bottle of raki. She slowly drew closer until she was in his arms.

  After the first long kiss of the night she came up for air and said, ‘I needed that.’

  ‘There’s clearly more where that came from,’ he said.

  There was a canvas camp bed at the far end of the hut, a relic of the first years of the dig when someone would sleep there to protect the excavated artifacts from theft. Now, the decorative bronze, silver, and gold pieces unearthed during the season were kept in a heavy safe but the more pedestrian items like Geraldine’s ceramics were stored in unlocked drawers. With the arrival of better funding, a security system had also been installed and wired into the police station but the bed remained. Occasionally used for a quick student nap, Cal and Geraldine had pressed it into different service. They were both single, but from Cal’s point of view it would have been unprofessional to flaunt their relationship. Demre was something of a wild town in the summers but Turkey was a conservative country and, as co-director, he was leery of running afoul of the government. He couldn’t bring her over to his house – Zemzem was always there – and she had roommates too, so this had been their modus operandi these past few weeks.

  Their sex was as urgent and ferociously climactic as it had always been and afterwards, in the dark, she went to a place she had yet to venture. The future.

  ‘You’ll be leaving next week,’ she said.

  The bed was too narrow for side-by-side conversation. He got up and began to put clothes on to his sweaty body.

  ‘Next Friday. It went fast, didn’t it?’

  ‘I was trying to slow it down.’

  ‘Oh yeah? That’s a trick I’d like to learn.’

  ‘You do it by being in the moment as much as possible. It takes practice and a good deal of mental concentration.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ she laughed. ‘We’ve got another week. Back to Cambridge, I suppose? I’ve never been to Harvard. Maybe I could visit one day.’

  Cal buttoned his shirt and looked down on her long, naked body. If he was honest he’d tell her that Demre might be their last time together. It wasn’t as if he had lied to her these past weeks. They simply had never gone there, he’d assumed intentionally.

  ‘Actually, I’m heading to Iceland before I go home.’

  ‘Why Iceland?’

  ‘Truth be told, I’m meeting a lady friend there.’

  She sat up and crossed her arms over her breasts.

  ‘I see. Is this a serious friendship?’

  ‘Hard to say. I think the idea is to find out.’

  She reached for her bra just as the doorknob turned and the bolt rattled. Outside a man spoke in Turkish.

  ‘Get dressed,’ Cal whispered.

  A ghostly face briefly appeared at a dark window. Then a crash as a rock punched out a pane. A hand reached through, undid the latch, and pushed the broken window open.

  In Turkish, the man said to his companion, ‘It’s OK. No alarm.’

  Cal whispered for Geraldine to get under a desk.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she whispered back but he was already creeping forward.

  His plan was to make his way to the wall and get the burglar into a headlock before he hit the floor but the guy was fast as a cat and was inside in a flash.

  The best way to deal with a cockroach was light. Cal threw the main switch and the hut lit up in a harsh fluorescence.

  The intruder, a wiry fellow with sunken cheeks, froze when he saw Cal.

  ‘You speak English?’ Cal asked, leaning forward on to the balls of his feet.

  The man was looking at Cal’s hands curled into fists. ‘A little.’

  ‘Good. My Turkish isn’t so good. You need to leave.’

  A second man appeared at the window and said something in Turkish.

  The inside man replied. Cal had hoped they would turn tail but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  He took another step forward to keep the burglar on the defensive.

  ‘Open safe,’ the man said, pointing a steady, slender finger.

  ‘I don’t have the combination. You need to crawl out that window or I’ll throw you through it.’

  With a practiced move, a sheath knife appeared in the man’s hand and the second heftier fellow began to squeeze through the window. It wasn’t going smoothly. He’d probably been waiting for his friend to open the door for him.

  The thin man grinned as Cal backed away but the smile faded when Cal grabbed a push broom propped against the wall.

  Cal moved toward him, bristles forward as the burglar backed toward the open window.

  Cal was one of the faculty advisors to the Harvard intramural boxing club and he taught neophytes to seize the advantage whenever an asymmetry presented itself. It was better to bring a gun to a knife fight but at this moment, a broom would have to do.

  He rushed the guy like a soldier with a fixed bayonet and caught him with the broom head to the Adam’s apple. Grunting in pain, the man attempted to push the broom away with his free hand while thrusting the knife as close to Cal’s body as he could manage. Cal backed off and charged again, bristles to face, pushing the burglar against the wall. When the man tilted off balance, Cal swung the broom in a tight arc, landing the wooden head hard against his skull. The thwock of wood against bone masked the sound of the broom handle splitting in a spiral crack.

  Stunned by the blow, the man’s hand opened. His knife fell to the ground and Cal swiftly kicked at it, sending it skittering under a bookcase.

  Now the stout man’s shoulders were fully through the window. He was about to let gravity do the rest. But before he could, Cal turned his attention to him and swung the broom. Unfortunately for the guy, the broom head fell away leaving a sharply pointed end that Cal used to stab a beefy shoulder. Howling, the man pushed himself back through the window and ran off into the night.

  It was now Cal against the thin man and he traded one unfair advantage – the sharpened handle – for another, his fists, and tossed the spear aside. He edged toward the guy and towered over him in an aggressive stance.

  That was all it took.

  The burglar moaned, ‘I go, I go,’ and sidled toward the door, fumbling with the bolt until it gave way.

  With the danger gone, Cal dropped to a crouch, sweating. He’d been rock-solid during the incident but now he felt himself shaking.

  Geraldine emerged from her hiding place.

  ‘My God, are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ she gasped. ‘How can you fight like this, Cal? You’re a professor!’

  ‘I get angry sometimes,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘It’s something I’ve got to work on.’

  THREE

  The next day Cal was summoned to the police station in Demre to identify a suspect who had been detained. Cal was absolutely certain he wasn’t one of the burglars although the detectives tried to convince him otherwise, to ‘clear up the matter.’ On his way back to the dig, walking through the town, dead quiet at this hour, his phone rang, showing a number from Vatican City. It was a monsignor asking if he was free to speak with the cardinal secretary.

  The delightfully ebullient Cardinal Rodrigo Da Silva apologized in advance if he was interrupting something important.

  ‘I always have time for you, Eminence.’

  The two men were fast friends. Da Silva, a Portuguese-American, had met Cal years earlier when both of them appeared on an academic panel to discuss the history of the Catholic Church in Portugal. Da Silva had been bishop of Providence, Rhode Island at the time. Afterwards the two of them remained in contact and their friendship developed based on good food and good conversation. When Da Silva was elevated to cardinal of Boston, Cal was a
personal guest at his investiture in Rome.

  ‘How’s Boston? I must say I miss it dearly.’

  ‘I miss it too. I’ve been in Turkey all this month on a dig.’

  ‘I can’t keep up with you, Cal. You’re quite the globetrotter. Alas, I am stuck like glue to my office chair.’

  ‘Well, you sound chipper as usual.’

  ‘That’s because I like my boss. You know how important that is.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s well. He sends his warmest regards.’

  It was Da Silva who had introduced Cal to Celestine. The pope had needed someone from outside the Vatican to help investigate a young priest who had developed the stigmata of Christ, and Cal had written a scholarly book on the history of stigmatics. Later, Celestine had called upon Cal from time to time to assist on other delicate matters best suited to someone working outside the groaning Vatican bureaucracy.

  ‘Tell him I’d love to see him again soon. Unfortunately, I’ve got to skip my usual summer month in Rome. Hopefully I’ll be coming around Christmas.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Is there any flexibility to your travel plans? Turkey isn’t a world away from Italy.’

  ‘I’m leaving soon for Iceland.’

  ‘Iceland! What’s there if I may ask?’

  ‘Tundra, hot springs, and a woman. And vodka, of course. Well, they’ve got something sort of like vodka called Black Death I’m keen to investigate. I’m meeting a friend from Boston for a getaway.’

  There was a pregnant pause before Da Silva said, ‘Far be it from me to interfere with your love life or your drinking life, but something has come up that’s urgent enough for the pope to call an emergency meeting of the C8. He was rather hoping you’d be able to make it.’

  The C8 was Celestine’s kitchen cabinet, eight of his closest cardinal-advisors and confidants.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cal asked. He had to sprint past a shop blaring music on to the sidewalk. ‘Is it something you can talk about on the phone?’

  ‘Let’s just say that we’ve got a problem involving four people. One is named George and three are named Mary.’

  Cal instantly knew what Da Silva was talking about. George Pole was the American cardinal from Houston. And the Marys?

  ‘You mean the Virgin Marys?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I thought there were two of them. The one from the Philippines and the one from Ireland.’

  ‘There’s a third girl the press doesn’t seem to know about yet. She’s from Peru. Pole’s threatening to make some kind of open display of opposition if the Church doesn’t affirm them as miraculous. The Holy Father doesn’t want a public spat with the good cardinal but we don’t wish to be seen as caving under his pressure. Even if we had canonical grounds for embarking on a formal miracle investigation, you know how long that takes.’

  ‘Pole knows that too.’

  ‘Yes, well, we all know how George can be when he seizes on an advantageous political issue. We were hoping you might be able to quietly check into the matter and objectively advise us as to the facts.’

  ‘Has Pole given you a deadline?’

  ‘Two weeks from now.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Cal sighed. ‘I suppose I’d better make a call to my future ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Heavens, Cal, you certainly know how to make an old friend feel guilty.’

  ‘Your Eminence, I’m half-Jewish and half-Catholic. I’ve got the guilt thing down to a science.’

  Cal could picture the flare of Jessica’s nostrils. It was a plastic-surgery nose, slightly upturned, expertly sculpted by a top man.

  ‘I should have known better,’ she seethed into the phone.

  ‘This wasn’t planned,’ Cal said. ‘It just came up.’

  ‘If you only knew how many friends of mine warned me about dating you.’ She used to tell him that in a teasing way but now she was being serious.

  ‘It’s hard to say no to the pope.’

  ‘Am I supposed to be impressed that the pope is your best bud?’

  ‘He’s hardly that but we do have a history.’

  Cal knew this was going to be a difficult conversation, but not because his fling with Geraldine was weighing on him. It wasn’t. Sex on a dig wasn’t really cheating. It was a whole other animal. Anyone in the business would tell you that digs were a free-fire zone. The call was going to be tough sledding because he knew how pissed off she was going to get about the change of plans. Optimistically he had hoped that the fact she was Catholic might help. It didn’t. He held his mobile phone a few inches from his head to protect his ear drum.

  ‘We’ve planned this trip for months. It’s carved in stone in my calendar. This was supposed to be our first real vacation together, and here you go, fucking me up by playing the pope card. You may have the luxury of having your summers off like some kid but I don’t. I’ve got a demanding job with a highly programmed schedule.’

  She wasn’t blowing smoke. She did have a big job.

  They had met a year ago via one of these mutual-friend-arranged quasi blind dates, strategically choosing a restaurant in Cambridge’s Central Square, halfway between Harvard Square where he worked and Inman Square, her lair. Neutral territory. The sparks didn’t exactly fly on day one. It took a while for the flame to catch, sort of like lighting damp firewood. But to Cal, a slower burn wasn’t a bad thing. His relationships that had started hot – too many to contemplate – tended to flame out fast. Exhibit 1: Geraldine. This thing he had with Jessica seemed to have some staying power. Maybe it was because of their symmetries. Both were in their forties and never married. Both had high-powered jobs. She was a PhD scientist, the CEO of a large biotech company, and at one time she had been the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded healthcare company. In the annals of Harvard University, Cal was one of the youngest faculty members ever to be named to a full professorship. Both were athletic head-turners and photogenic as hell. And both could hold their liquor – or in her case, wine. Her penthouse condo in Boston had something of a legendary wine cellar but she’d stocked it with a selection of rarified vodkas to keep him happy. Or maybe it was because they both traveled a lot and didn’t see each other incessantly. Whatever the reason for their romantic success, with the anniversary of their first date approaching, Cal was no longer sure they’d make it there.

  ‘Why don’t you come to Rome instead? I’ll take you to meet Celestine, get you a VIP tour of the Vatican.’

  The line was quiet. How long did it take for blood to boil?

  ‘I went to Italy the year before last,’ she said angrily. ‘I’ve toured the Vatican, thank you. I haven’t been to Mass in over twenty years and dressing up demurely and curtsying to the pope isn’t all that high on my bucket list. I want to go to fucking Iceland and I’m going with or without you.’

  FOUR

  Manila, Philippines

  The lettering on the side of the taxi said Golden Boy. Cal wasn’t sure if that was the company’s name or the driver’s. Neither seemed particularly apt. The car was a not-new Toyota with a dent in one of the rear quarter panels and the driver looked like he needed a shave and a cigarette.

  The doorman at the Peninsula Hotel in the fashionable Makati district had suggested that he might want to wait for a better taxi but Cal thought that Golden Boy was the perfect name for a vehicle to take him to a place called Paradise Village.

  ‘You sure you wanna go there, boss?’ the driver said, pulling into traffic.

  ‘I’m sure. Why?’

  ‘Little bit rough place. Even this time of day.’

  This wasn’t a revelation. He’d been warned in an email from Father Santos.

  The driver wasn’t finished. ‘They got a lot of hitmen there. Wanna get a hitman?’

  ‘I don’t think I do. Hey, could you turn up the air conditioner?’ It was only slightly cooler inside than out and it was sizzling outside.

  ‘All the way up
, boss. Gotta get some Freon. Think I gotta leak. Want me to fix it now?’

  Cal rolled down the window. ‘Why don’t you do it after you drop me off.’

  The name Paradise Village was even more ironic than Golden Boy. It was a sprawling shantytown in the Barangay Tonsuya district of Malabon City, riddled with illegal electric and water connections. According to an article he had read, and now essentially confirmed by his driver, the slum was something of a haven for Manila’s contract killers.

  After a slow journey through congested streets, the taxi pulled up to an iron gateway, a rusting piece of scrollwork spanning two utility poles with signage announcing Paradise Village.

  ‘OK, boss, we’re here.’

  ‘Aren’t you going inside?’

  ‘You said you wanted to go here. Here we are.’

  Cal had been told by Santos that there weren’t any street names or numbers. He’d sent a hand-drawn map that Cal showed the driver.

  ‘That’s not so far. You can walk, I think. Besides, not safe to go in there and some places too narrow for cars.’

  Cal reached for a few bills and went easy on the tip.

  Crossing the threshold into the shantytown, Cal immediately attracted attention. Navigating by Father Santos’s map, he began making his way through the narrow, unpaved streets followed by a growing entourage of children and teenagers, pointing at the tall stranger and bantering in Tagalog. Cal smiled and gave a small wave then tried to ignore the teenagers who were aggressively hey-mistering him for cash.

  The streets were lined with makeshift houses constructed from a variety of cheap materials – cinder blocks, corrugated-iron sheeting, plywood. The place smelled of cooking pots and latrines. By the time he arrived at the lane that was his destination, he felt like a Pied Piper of sorts, with a large, aggressive posse of urchins in tow.

  The lane was narrow; the taxi could not have passed. Halfway up the lane a gaggle of men stood guard before an iron grate that was the door of an unpainted, cinder-block house with wide, messy grout lines. As Cal approached the X on the map the gatekeepers pointed at him and moved to block his way. One man, all sinew and muscles in a tank top, angrily shouted at him.