“Go ahead.”
“What will your Fr. Lulfre do if he decides that B is the Antichrist?”
I laughed, sort of. “I see what you mean. That’s completely unthinkable.”
“It would be unthinkable for him to decide that B is the Antichrist?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the point of sending you here?”
It took me a minute or two to work that out. Incredible as it may seem, I hadn’t seen any reason to work it out before then. I said, “If a stain that looks like a weeping Madonna one day appears on Mr. Smith’s living-room wall, and everyone swears they see tears flowing down her face every Friday at three o’clock, and thousands of pilgrims are streaming past day and night, week after week, and people are claiming that the sick are being miraculously healed at this shrine, then eventually somebody from the Church is going to be sent to look into it. This will be some unlucky priest like me, sent from afar, because it would be too painful for the local priest to point out to his neighbors that this stain appeared right after that big rainstorm last spring, and the Smiths had
in a local handyman to fix their leaky roof the same week, and no one is allowed to get near the Madonna on Friday afternoons but Mr. Smith, and the vial he uses to collect the teardrops could just as easily be used to put the teardrops in place, and even though Mr. Smith doesn’t actually charge anyone to go through his house, there’s a bushel basket by the door and it’s always full of money, and though one or two have claimed to be healed of something, they never stick around long enough to be checked by any doctor.”
“So this priest isn’t sent to see if there’s been a miracle.”
“Of course not. He’s sent there to make sure there hasn’t been a miracle.”
“I’ve afraid that’s too devious for me. If everyone assumes there was no miracle, why send a priest?”
“Because someone has to be sent. No matter how unlikely, no matter how improbable, someone has to be sent.”
“And someone has to read his report.”
“Absolutely. It will be read, scrutinized, confirmed, notarized, and sworn to, and eventually copies of it will find their way into diocesan files and probably even Vatican files, where they’ll sit until the end of time.”
We walked on through the deserted streets of Radenau. As my hotel came into view, I felt one last question brewing in Shirin.
“I’m not quite sure how to ask this,” she said.
“Ask it any way you like.”
“Did you come here thinking of B as a stain on the wall?”
“No, not at all. When you’re sent, you have to take the investigation seriously.”
“Even though the conclusion is foregone.”
“Virtually foregone. Ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent foregone. There is always the remote possibility—almost infinitely remote, but there all the same—that the stain is a miraculous apparition that weeps real tears every Friday afternoon.”
“Or that B is the Antichrist.”
“That’s right.”
“Then the question still needs to be answered: What would Fr. Lulfre do if he decided that B is the Antichrist?”
“He would tell his superiors to prepare for a new era in human history.”
“He wouldn’t care to do that.”
“No, he certainly wouldn’t.”
We paused under the hotel marquee, and I turned to face her. Her eyes came up to meet mine with a look of vulnerable entreaty that sank into my heart like a knife. She held my gaze for half a second, then glanced away.
“I want to believe you’re telling me the truth,” she murmured uncertainly.
“I am,” I said.