with a huge head, a man of a thousand jokes they called the Grand Inquisitor; a slim, short, muscular artist, bald with a white goatee and dressed all in black, who saw dead people; and the gaunt profiler with the face of Poe. There were a hundred others, famous sleuths, the FBI agent whose movie double nails Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, investigators of the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, too many to remember.
They said they’d consider taking the case, possibly organize a team.
Then one man, the thin man, got off the plane alone.
And now he watched as the priest sat before him and fielded questions from the police with dignity and poise. The priest sat erect with his elbows on the table, his hands tented as if in prayer. The detectives asked him about the young boys. The priest sat back with umbrage; the mere suggestion was an insult. The detectives pushed harder, with names and dates, until the priest had to admit to sex with the young teenagers. But the priest told the police they badly misunderstood. He was not assaulting the boys. He was teaching them sex education.
There was quiet. A detective looked to the corner and asked if the profiler had any questions.
The thin man leaned forward and removed his glasses to stare at the priest. “To begin with, if I were in charge of this investigation, you would not be wearing that costume.” He spat out the word “costume” as if it were something foul.
“I’m a priest twenty-four hours a day!” the priest objected.
The profiler gave the priest a merciless glare and scowled in deepening disgust. “Here, you are not representing the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in fact, what you’re doing is representing a failed man.”
The priest blanched and fell silent. The police resumed their questioning about the boys. The priest repeated his educational theory, his justifications. Of course, he got them drunk first; they were too ashamed of their bodies otherwise. Then he got them excited. But he didn’t bring them to climax. He was teaching them responsible sexuality. It’s not wrong to get a hard-on, it’s wrong to use it.
The thin man’s voice rose shrilly from the corner. “Ridiculous! You’re a pervert!”
The police asked the priest to remove his cassock. It had been the profiler’s idea. “With this sort of psychopath, we must do everything to rattle him.” Indeed the priest seemed a smaller man after he pulled off the cassock and removed the undershirt beneath. The police compared the tattoo on his shoulder with one a witness described. It was a match.
As the priest pulled his undergarment back on, and then his cassock, the profiler stood and approached him, coming very close, and gave him a death stare. He kept staring, implacable, his eyes as cold and unrelenting as a night wind, until the priest looked down and away. Suddenly, the profiler’s heart leaped in joy, though he kept his face expressionless as a smoothed stone.
The priest was crying!
“A tear of hatred slowly trilled down his cheek,” the thin man noted. “It was quite lovely.”
They were standing two feet apart, the man of law and the man of God. As the tear dissolved into the thick beard, the big man wiped it away, then looked up into the thin man’s eyes with loathing and slowly hissed:
“God . . . damn . . . it!”
The thin man couldn’t contain himself. He was grinning openly.
“Was it a thrill to hear this man of the cloth taking the name of the Lord in vain?” Indeed it was.
“I knew then the bitch was mine.”
THE VOICE OF THE BLOOD
In the beginning of the world all hope was lost. But there were three men:The chieftain, the warrior, the shaman.
The king, the knight, the wizard.
We tell these stories to survive. The story swirls in smoke, fabric, and music; spins in the winds of the gods and the vortex of DNA. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson calls such stories “The Voice of the Species”—the essential stories formed by the “epigenetic rules of human nature ...the inborn rules of mental development.”
This tale, the most enduring in the west outside the Holy Bible, was first written down more than eight hundred years ago. Between the years 1129 and 1151 a Benedictine monk who taught at Oxford translated into Latin, at his bishop’s request, a series of ancient Celtic prophecies, Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin). The monk then wrote Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain),