"Coyne, John - The Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coyne John)

The person left the vacant lot and came toward the rectory, walking straight now, directly down the empty center of Church Drive. The short street was ankle deep in snow, and the lumbering figure plowed forward, coming closer to Jamie's building, the last row house before the Cathedral parking lot.
It seemed to be a woman. She was going for the church, Jamie figured, to find some warm corner. He had encountered shopping bag women before, and he knew he couldn't let her stay inside the Cathedral. The smell was worse than having a dead rat trapped in the walls.
It was better to stop her before she got inside. Perhaps he could get someone from the precinct to pick her up and take her over to the Community Center. They would delouse her, get her into clean warm clothing.
Still it tore at him, the sight of the pitiful creature stumbling through the storm. Yet there was nothing more that he could do besides pray for her soul and see that she was cleaned up and fed.
There were just too many of them in MacPatch. The river-front parish was full of the city's castoffs: winos, derelicts, runaway kids, the old and the infirm.
He looked out the third-floor window again. The woman had reached the rectory and he pressed his face against the glass to see directly below him. It was difficult: the swirling snow, frost forming on the pane. He wiped his hand across the window. The wind subsided for a moment and the shopping bag woman was visible again. He saw how wretchedly she was dressed, her head wrapped in rags with a baseball cap holding it all in place, tied down around her ears with rope.
The snow had drifted and was knee deep in front of the rectory. She was having difficulty walking, and the huge shopping bags were too much for her. She stumbled a second time and fell forward into the drifts.
"Oh, Christ," he whispered. He would have to get her into the rectory. She might die otherwise, freeze to death. But then the woman rose up out of the drifts. She struggled to her feet, fought her way another few steps.
Then she stopped, as if giving up, and the young priest hesitated. He did not want to leave the window until he saw what she would do next. If she collapsed he would wake Monsignor O'Toole and have the older priest help him carry her into the rectory.
Jamie pressed against the windowpane once more to be sure of what he was seeing. It was now daylight, the steely cold light of dawn, and the street was no longer full of shadows.
The old woman slowly raised her head and looked up at him, as if she had known all along that he was watching her. Jamie saw then that he had been wrong. It wasn't a woman.
The wretched figure in the snow below the rectory was a man, a disheveled creature with long hair, an unkempt beard. Jamie knew him. He was willing to swear it. He pressed his cheek against the cold glass, looked harder. The snow picked up, blew in blinding swirls around the tramp, who kept staring up, watching Jamie now, as if waiting for something in the deep snow and freezing weather.
It took Jamie a moment longer before he recognized the face. Stunned, Father Ignatius stood gripping the window frame, meeting the man's steady gaze with his own. Except for the beard, the man staring up at him could have been his twin. Stopping only to jam his feet into a pair of loafers, he slammed out of his bedroom and down the stairs, not pausing till he had reached the bottom of the three flights.
"Father Jamie!" the housekeeper scolded. She had come out of the front parlor, where she drank her morning cup of tea, to confront him disapprovingly. "What's the point of your taking the early mass if you're going to wake the Monsignor anyway with, your clatter?"
"Mrs. Windmiller, I'll explain in just a moment," he said, easing himself around her as quickly as he could.
The housekeeper had come in the back entrance, so the three locks on the double front doors were still in place. By the time he had unlocked them and thrown the door open, the man in the snow was gone.
Father Ignatius squinted up and down Church Drive searching for a hint of which way to follow. But any traces the man had left were covered by the silent, drifting snow.


CHAPTER THREE
December Twenty-fifth,
Morning Feast of the Nativity

"A vision, perhaps, Jamie?" Monsignor O'Toole suggested, serving himself from the plate of scrambled eggs. "There was a saint in the seventh century, Saint Cuthbert, who as a child was watching his flocks in England and saw the heavy clouds part and then a multitude of floating figures, all of them shining. The next day he learned that a holy man from the abbey at Melrose had died. It was his soul that Cuthbert had seen, being carried to heaven by God's own angels. Would you care for more eggs, Jamie?"
The two priests sat away from each other, at opposite ends of the long dining room table. Usually they had their meals in the small alcove off the kitchen, but it being Christmas, Mrs. Windmiller had served them upstairs on the second floor, in the formal dining room they seldom used.
"I doubt if I'm saintly enough to be having miraculous visions, Monsignor."
"Well, which of us is, Jamie?" O'Toole replied, letting the young man's sarcasm pass.
The Monsignor's face was thin and elongated. As a young man he had resembled an El Greco, stylized and romantic, but he had aged poorly and now his features seemed mismatched. It had taken Jamie awhile to realize what was wrong. The face had no dominant feature; it had no real character.
"Did you see the man again?" O'Toole asked, peering over his glasses. Then holding his knife and fork like surgical instruments, he cut into the soft eggs. "Did you find him inside the Cathedral? You know how those tramps like to hide back there by the baptismal font."
"No, Monsignor, that's the whole point of the story. He simply disappeared. I ran downstairs and into the street and he was gone. The Cathedral was locked; I walked around and checked every door. He wasn't anywhere."
The Monsignor forked a small portion of scrambled eggs onto a thin slice of toast and bit into it. The crackling sound silenced Jamie, who returned to his own breakfast. The silence grew around them as the old man munched his food.
It was a shame he'd had to tell O'Toole, Jamie thought. The Monsignor had nothing useful to suggest. A vision in the snow, for Christ's sake. Jamie sighed and ate his food. But it was his responsibility to seek guidance from his superior, and to get his approval in advance for any course of action. That was part of the vow of obedience, and in theory Jamie saw its value in the subjugation of his own will to that of God, in the form of his superior. What tested the vow, of course, was having a superior like O'Toole.
"Did you ask Clarence about him?" O'Toole asked, after a moment.
"No, I didn't, Monsignor." If there was anyone even less likely to be helpful than O'Toole, it was the simpleminded sexton.
The Monsignor kept nodding, as if Jamie had agreed with him. He had lifted a corner of his large linen napkin and tucked it into his stiff Roman collar, letting the napkin fan out over his suit. Now he took one end of the linen and dabbed his mouth before speaking.
"Mary McGrath telephoned me on Thursday last and was nice enough to ask me out there for Christmas dinner. I told Hilda to leave early. She has family, you know, out in Clayton. Cousins, I believe; they've invited her for the day. You have dinner plans yourself, I'm sure..." The old man kept eating, avoiding Jamie's eye.
"Oh, yes, ah...I'm going out to dinner later."
O'Toole sighed, relieved, then went on chatting about Mary McGrath. She lived in Christ the King parish now, across the river.
"Mary's a Doyle. Her mother and father came to Saints Peter and Paul from Kerry. Mary herself was for years the president of our Rosary Society, and she stayed down here with us longer than most."
The old man kept talking but Father Ignatius was no longer listening. He had no Christmas invitation. Earlier that week the Cardinal had phoned and asked him uptown, but he had declined, not wanting to leave the Monsignor alone.
Well, it wasn't O'Toole's fault, Jamie thought. He should have investigated the pastor's plans in enough time to make his own arrangements. Yet he knew also that neither he nor the Monsignor really wanted to be left to spend the whole of Christmas Day in each other's company, alone in the rambling rectory.
"I'll tell Hilda then to be on her way." The pastor pushed back from the dining table. As he stood, he waved a brief blessing over the remains of breakfast, mumbling, "Thanks be to God for all His gifts."
Jamie scrambled to his feet, still holding a slice of toast in his hand.
"It's all right, Jamie. Finish your meal." The pastor walked quickly by and out of the dining room, but at the top of the curving oak staircase he hesitated. "Oh, we had a call, Jamie, while you were saying the seven."
The young priest looked toward O'Toole. The storm had cleared and daylight filled the front windows of the brownstone, silhouetting the older man and hurting Jamie's eyes as he looked that way.
"Someone from the Community Center," the Monsignor went on. "I left her number downstairs in the office. She wanted to know if one of us would stop by there later this afternoon. They're having a Christmas dinner for the needy and she asked if one of us would come by and say grace. Seems quite a few of the homeless are Catholics."
"Would you mind then, Jamie? I'm sure they'd appreciate it, having a priest with them on Christmas Day." Knowing the younger priest's answer, O'Toole did not wait to hear it. He disappeared down the front stairs and Jamie could hear him in the hallway below.
Jamie let him leave. Smiling, he wondered if the old man would ever take up meditation in the hope of seeing Saint Cuthbert's angels. He could see O'Toole relaxing his mind and never returning to reality.
Not, he reflected, as he got up from the table and headed downstairs himself, that the pastor had much to do with reality as it was.