The other confessional door banged wide with a curse. I opened my door. The priest reared as if I had shot him.
It was Rattigan Déjà Vu. Not svelte in ninety-five pounds of suntanned seal-brown flesh, but marrowed in a wire-coat-hanger skeleton-thin Florentine Renaissance priest. Constance’s bones hid there, but the flesh skinned over the bones was skull pale, the priest’s lips were ravenous for salvation, not bed and sinful breakfasts. Here was Savonarola begging God to forgive his wild perorations, and God silent, with Constance’s ghost burning from his eyes, and peering from his skull.
Father Rattigan, riven, found me harmless save for that word, jerked his head toward the vestry, led me in, and shut the door.
“You her friend?”
“No, sir.”
“Good!” He caught himself. “Sit. You have five minutes. The cardinal is waiting.”
“You had better go.”
“Five minutes,” said Constance from inside the mask of this genetic twin. “Well?”
“I’ve just visited—”
“Califia.” Father Rattigan exhaled with controlled despair. “The Queen. Sends people she can’t help. She has her church, not mine.”
“Constance has disappeared again, Father.”
“Again?”
“That’s what the Queen, ah, Califia said.”
I held out the Book of the Dead. Father Rattigan turned its pages.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Constance. She said someone sent it to her. To scare her, maybe, or hurt her, or God knows what. I mean, only she knows if it’s a real threat.”
“You think she might just be hiding to spoil things for everyone?” He deliberated. “I myself am of two minds. But then there were those who burned Savonarola then and elevate him now. A most peculiar sinner-cum-saint.”
“Aren’t there similarities, Father?” I dared to say. “Lots of sinners became saints, yes?”
“What do you know about Florence in 1492 when Savonarola made Botticelli burn his paintings?”
“It’s the only age I know, sir, Father. Then Savonarola, now Constance …”
“If Savonarola knew her, he’d kill himself. No, no, let me think. I’ve starved since dawn. Here’s bread and wine. Let’s have some before I fall.”
The good father pulled a loaf and a jug out of the vestry closet, and we sat. Father Rattigan broke the bread, then poured a small wine for himself, and a large for me, which I took gladly.
“Baptist?” he said.
“How did you guess?”
“I’d rather not say.”
I tipped back my glass. “Can you help me with Constance, Father?”
“No. Oh, Lord, Lord, maybe.”
He refilled my glass.
“Last night. Can it be? I stayed in the confessional late. I felt … as if I were waiting for someone. Finally, near midnight, a woman entered the confessional and for a long while was silent. Finally, like Jesus calling Lazarus, I insisted, and she wept. It all came out. Sins by the pound and the truckload, sins from last year, ten years, thirty years past, she couldn’t stop, on and on, night on dreadful night, on and on, and finally she was still and I was about to instruct her with Hail Marys when I heard her running. I checked the other side of the confessional but only smelled perfume. Oh Lord, Lord.”
“Your sister’s scent?”