Read Of Saints and Shadows (1994) for Free Online

his mind.
    Outside, the sun was coming up, the darkness was burning off, and all the things of the night were hiding away. Inside, Peter was fast asleep, sealed off from the day. His alarm was set for sundown: shadowtime.

 

3
     
    HENRI GUISCARD TURNED UP THE COLLAR on his overeoat. It was a chilly day, and the cardinal wasn’t getting any younger. He pushed through the revolving door of the Park Plaza Hotel and turned toward Beacon Hill, walking briskly. He was feeling his age again, but doing okay in spite of it. He looked over his shoulder from time to time, but it didn’t appear as though he was being followed. Of course, he thought, an elephant could be hot on his tail, and he probably wouldn’t notice.
    Ah, he sighed, it’s probably nothing. But after what happened in Rome, he wasn’t willing to take the chance.
    He glanced over his shoulder again.
    Throughout his life and his career serving the church, Henri had been an outspoken and well-respected man of God. Now, he hid in silence from the very establishment he had served, paranoid, angry, and confused.
    Guiscard could feel a storm rising to the north. As he walked he let his guard down slightly and his mind began to drift back past the events that had led to this moment, to this time and place, past his days as a parish priest. He thought about his childhood in Sicily.
    “You’re a Guiscard!” his father said, as he often did. “You’ve got to fight back.”
    He had been beaten up once again by a group of older boys, and his father was angry with him. Within him roared the blood of one of history’s greatest warriors, his father said. The Norman Robert Guiscard and his sons had been the bane of the Byzantine empire for a century. Guiscards would still be attacking the Byzantines, his father insisted, were it not that the family had outlasted the empire itself.
    All of this was fine in theory, but when it came down to it, Henri did not feel much like a warrior. On the contrary, he felt like one big bruise. He was a frail boy, and though he tried to be proud of his heritage, he often wished he could tell his father that he was afraid. But that was out of the question.
    Instead, at his father’s insistence, he developed a sense of false pride, of bravado, and had been beaten by the others all the more frequently because of it.
    “Careful, Father.”
    There was a tug at the cardinal’s sleeve and he looked up at the young businesswoman pulling at him. Before he could ask her, crankily, what she was doing, he noticed the concern on her face, and then the traffic started to speed by. He had been about to step into the street as the light changed.
    Smiling now, he thanked the woman and muttered under his breath at himself. He was nervous and afraid for the first time since he was a little boy, but he was also angry. He turned and looked at his reflection in the window of a restaurant. Bennigan’s, he saw it was called. He was still skinny at sixty-four; over six feel tall and fairly healthy. He stared at the ghostly transparency of his own silver-maned, leathery face, into his own crystal-blue eyes. The ghost’s forehead was furrowed and angry looking, and with good reason, he thought. He couldn’t allow himself to be careless; there was too much at stake.
    An attractive young couple having lunch on the other side of the window looked uncomfortably out at him, a very angry-looking priest staring in at them as they finished their cheeseburgers. He smiled again and chuckled, amused by the scene.
    “Sorry,” he mouthed to them, shrugged his shoulders, and walked on.
    The whole, ugly thing began to play itself out once again in his mind, and he knew it would continue to do so until the situation was resolved—one way or another.
    The little, perpetually bruised Normannic-Sicilian boy had become a humble and intelligent young man. Imbued with his father’s staunch Catholic beliefs and thirsting for more than the precious little education with which he had