PRIEST

THOMAS WICKLIFF OCKHAM, a good man, a man who loved God, ideas, vintage movies, and his brothers in the Society of Jesus, wove through the crowded Seventh Avenue local, carefully maneuvering his attache case amid the congestion of pelvises and rumps. On the far wall a map beckoned, an intricate network of multicolored lines, like the veined and bleeding palm of some cubistic Christ. Reaching it, he began to plot his course. He would get off at Forty-second Street. Take the N-train south to Union Square. Walk east on Fourteenth. Find Captain Anthony Van Horne of the Brazilian Merchant Marine, sail away on the SS Carpco Valparaíso, and lay an impossible corpse to rest.

He sat down between a wrinkled Korean man holding a potted cactus on his lap and an attractive black woman in a ballooning maternity dress. To Thomas Ockham, S.J., the New York subway system offered a foretaste of the Kingdom: Asians rubbing shoulders with Africans, Hispanics with Arabs, Gentiles with Jews, all boundaries gone, all demarcations erased, all men appended to the Universal and Invisible Church, the Mystical Body of Christ — though if the half-dozen glossy photographs in Thomas’s attache case told the truth, of course, there was no Kingdom, no Mystical Body, God and His various dimensions being dead.

Italy had been different. In Italy everyone had looked the same. They had all looked Italian…

The Church faces a grave crisis: thus began the Holy See’s cryptic plea, an official Vatican missive sliding from the fax machine in the mailroom of Fordham University’s physics department. But what sort of crisis? Spiritual? Political? Financial? The missive didn’t say. Severe, obviously — severe enough for the See to insist that Thomas cancel his classes for the week and catch the midnight flight to Rome.

Hiring a cab at the aeroporto, he’d told the driver to take him straight to the Gesu. To be a Jesuit in Rome and not receive communion at the Society’s mother church was like being a physicist in Bern and not visiting the patent office. And, indeed, during his last trip to Geneva’s Conseil Europeen pour la Recherch й Nucleaire, Thomas had taken a day off and made the appropriate pilgrimage north, eventually kneeling before the very rosewood desk at which Albert Einstein had penned the great paper of 1903, The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, that divinely inspired wedding of light to matter, matter to space, space to time.

So Thomas drank the blood, consumed the flesh, and set off for the Hotel Ritz-Reggia. A half-hour later, he stood in the sumptuous lobby shaking hands with Tullio Cardinal Di Luca, the Vatican’s Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

Monsignor Di Luca was not forthcoming. Phlegmatic as the moon, and no less pocked and dreary, he invited Thomas to dinner in the Ritz-Reggia’s elegant ristorante, where their conversation never went beyond Thomas’s writings, most especially The Mechanics of Grace, his revolutionary reconciliation of post-Newtonian physics with the Eucharist. When Thomas looked Di Luca directly in the eye and asked him about the “grave crisis,” the cardinale replied that their audience with the Holy Father would occur at nine A.M. sharp.

Twelve hours later, the bewildered priest strolled out of his hotel, crossed the courtyard of San Damasco, and presented himself to a plumed maestro di camera in the sun-washed antechamber of the Vatican Palace. Di Luca appeared instantly, as dour in the morning light as under the Ritz-Reggia’s chandeliers, accompanied by the spry, elfin, red-capped Eugenio Cardinal Orselli, the Vatican’s renowned Secretary of State. Side by side, the clerics marched through the double door to the papal study, Thomas pausing briefly to admire the Swiss Guard with their glistening steel pikes. Rome had it right, he decided. The Holy See was indeed at war, forever taking the field against all those who would reduce human beings to mere ambitious apes, to lucky chunks of protoplasm, to singularly clever and complex machines.

Armed with a crozier, draped in an ermine cape, Pope Innocent XIV shuffled forward, one gloved and bejeweled hand extended, the other steadying a beehive-shaped tiara that rested on his head like an electric dryer cooking a suburban matron’s hairdo. The old man’s love of ostentation, Thomas knew, had occasioned debate both within the Vatican and without, but it was generally agreed that, as the first North American ever to assume the Chair of Peter, he had a right to all the trimmings.

“We shall be honest,” said Innocent XIV, born Jean-Jacques LeClerc. His face was fat, round, and extraordinarily beautiful, like a jack-o’-lantern carved by Donatello. “You weren’t anyone’s first choice.”

A Canadian pope, mused Thomas as, steadying his bifocals, he kissed the Fisherman’s Ring. And before that, the Supreme Pontiff had been Portuguese. Before that, Polish. The Northern Hemisphere was getting to be the place where any boy could grow up to be Vicar of Christ.

“The archangels regard you as rather too intellectual,” said Monsignor Di Luca. “But when the Bishop of Prague turned us down, I convinced them you were the man for the job.”

“The archangels?” said Thomas, surprised that a papal secretary should harbor such a medieval turn of mind. Was Di Luca a biblical literalist? A fool? How many pinheads can dance on the floor of the Vatican?

“Raphael, Michael, Chamuel, Adabiel, Haniel, Zaphiel, and Gabriel,” the beautiful Pope elaborated. “Or has Fordham University done away with those particular entities?” A sneer flitted across Monsignor Di Luca’s face.

“Those of us who labor in the subatomic netherworld,” said Thomas, “soon learn that angels are no less plausible than electrons.” Tremors of chagrin passed through him. Not two days in Rome, and already he was telling them what they wanted to hear.

The Holy Father smiled broadly, dimpling his plump cheeks. “Very good, Professor Ockham. It was in fact your scientific speculations that inspired us to send for you. We have read not only The Mechanics of Grace but also Superstrings and Salvation.”

“You possess a tough mind,” said Cardinal Orselli. “You have proven you can hold your own against Modernism.”

“Let us ascend,” said the Pope.

They rode the elevator five floors to the Vatican Screening Room, a sepulchral facility complete with digital sound, velvet seats, and hardware capable of projecting everything from laserdiscs to magic-lantern slides but most commonly used, Orselli explained, for Cecil B. DeMille retrospectives and midnight revivals of The Bells of St. Mary’s. As the clerics sank into the lush upholstery, a short and tormented-looking young man entered, a stethoscope swaying from his neck, the surname CARMINATI stitched in red to his white vestment. Accompanying the physician was a sickly, shivering, gray-haired creature who, beyond his other unsettling accouterments (halo, harp, phosphorescent robe), sported a magnificent pair of feathered wings growing from his shoulder blades. Something nontrivial was in the air, Thomas sensed. Something that couldn’t be further from Cecil B. DeMille and Bing Crosby.

“Every time he makes his presentation” — Cardinal Orselli gestured toward the haloed man and released an elaborate sigh — “we become more convinced.”

“Glad you’re here, Ockham,” said the creature in the sort of thin, scratchy voice Thomas associated with early-thirties gangster movies. His skin was astonishingly white, beyond Caucasian genes, beyond albinism even; he seemed molded from snow. “I’m told you are at once devout” — he stood on his toes — “and smart.” Whereupon, to Thomas’s utter amazement, the haloed man flapped his wings, rose six feet in the air, and stayed there. “Time is of the essence,” he said, circling the screening room with an awkwardness reminiscent of Orville Wright puddle-jumping across Kitty Hawk.