The Clowns of God by Morris West Read Free Book Online

continue to conduct the Eucharist.
    “God Almighty! He’s really done it now.” Mendelius heard his own voice echo round the attic room. Fiction or predestined fact, this, from the pen of a Pope, was the unsay able the absolutely unprintable. If the press of the world got hold of it, they would make Jean Marie Barette look like the maddest of mad mullahs, the craziest of all prophets of doom. And yet, in the context of an atomic calamity, it was a matter of simple logic. It was a scenario which, in one form or another, every national leader kept locked in his most secret files, the script for the aftermath of Armageddon.
    Which brought Mendelius, by a round turn, to the third and final document: the list of those who, Jean Marie thought, would be prepared to believe his message and his messenger. This was perhaps the most startling deposition of all. Unlike the letter and the encyclical it was typewritten, as if it had once formed part of an official file. It contained names, addresses, titles, telephone numbers, methods of private contact, and terse, telegraphic notes on each individual. There were politicians, industrialists, churchmen, leaders of dissident groups, editors of well-known journals, more than a hundred names in all. Two sample entries set the tone of the record.
    U.S.A.
    Name: Michael Grant Morrow Title: Secretary of State Private Address: 593 Park Avenue, New York Telephone: (212)689-7611 Religion: Episcopalian Met at presidential dinner. Firm religious convictions.
    Speaks Russian, French and German. Respected in Russia but Asian relations weak. Deeply aware of hair-trigger situation on European frontiers. Has written a private monograph on the function of religious groups in a disintegrating social framework.
    USSR.
    Name:
    Title:
    Private Address:
    Telephone:
    Sergei Andrevich Petrov Minister for Agricultural Production Unknown Moscow 53871 Private visit Vatican with nephew of Premier. Aware of need for religious and ethnic tolerance in USSR. and satellites, but unable make headway against party dogmatists. Concerned that Russia’s problems with food supplies and oil may precipitate conflict. Close friends in high military; enemies in KGB. Vulnerable in event bad harvests or economic blockade.
    On the last page was a note in Jean Marie’s own handwriting:
    All of the people on this list are known to me personally.
    Each in his own fashion has demonstrated an awareness of the crisis, and a willingness to confront it in a spirit of human compassion, if not always from the standpoint of a believer. Whether they will change under the pressure of coming events, I do not know. However, each has reposed a degree of trust in me and I have tried to return the gesture. As a private person you will be regarded at first with suspicion and they will be much more reserved with you. The risks of which I have warned you will begin at your first contact, because you will have no diplomatic protection, and the language of politics is contrived for the concealment of truth. J.M.B.
    Carl Mendelius took off his spectacles and tried to palm the sleep out of his eyes. He had read his brief with the devotion of a friend and the care of an honest scholar. Now, in this lonely hour after midnight, he must pass judgment on the text, if not yet on the man who had written it. A sudden cold fear took hold of him, as if the shadows of the room were haunted by old accusing ghosts: the ghosts of men burned for heresy and women drowned for witchcraft and nameless martyrs bewailing the vanity of their sacrifice.
    In these sceptical years of middle age, prayer did not come easily to him. Now he felt the need of it; but the words would not come. He was like a man locked in darkness so long that he had forgotten the sound of human speech.
    “Now, we’re really in cloud-cuckoo-land!” Anneliese Meissner munched on a pickled gherkin and washed it down with red wine.
    “This so-called encyclical is a nonsense a hotchpotch of folk-lore and