Vicious Circle

“Are you telling me there wasn’t any loose talk behind the confessionals on a Saturday night?”

He frowned. “There were rumors, obviously. Contradictory, and based on nothing more than hearsay. Felix, the Catholic Church isn’t a vast, secret conspiracy, whatever you happen to think—in terms of freedom of information, it compares favorably to most governments.”

“Set your bar a little higher,” I suggested sourly. “Matty, I’m not talking about the Little Sisters of Maria Assumpta—I’m talking about a group within your church that’s using werewolves to run their errands. Are they reaching out to our hairier brethren? Is ‘deal with’ a polite way of saying ‘recruit’? And they have daggers made to their own design, for fuck’s sake. You think they open a lot of mail? Cut a lot of cakes, what?”

“I don’t know what they do,” Matty repeated patiently, refusing as always to lose his temper with me. “I will tell you, though, if you’re interested, why an up-to-date listing of church groups would leave the Anathemata out.”

“Go on,” I said. I was distracted by the TV images over his shoulder. Broken windows, and policemen in riot gear charging forward in a solid line.

“Because they were disbanded,” Matt said, with just an edge of smugness. “The new pope questioned their methods and their usefulness. He ordered the seniors of the order to stand down, after first reallocating their members to other groups and tasks. This was all quite recent—only a year ago.”

“And did it take?” I asked pointedly. I glanced down at the knife. “Because that thing on the table was even more recent.”

That reluctance came back. “The prelates of the order took issue with His Holiness. I gather that they argued . . .” He hesitated, and then didn’t seem to know how to start up again.

“They argued . . . ?” I prompted.

Matty nodded curtly. “Don’t try to browbeat me, Felix, please. I’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t make it sound too sensational. They argued that the rising of the dead, and the appearance of infernal creatures as the shepherds of the dead, were an indication that the Last Days had begun. They felt—many of them felt—that their own dissolution would leave the field open to hell, and that they would be remiss in their spiritual duty if they accepted it.”

He’d been looking at the knife. Now he looked up and met my gaze. He’d clearly reached the thing that he hadn’t wanted to say, and I was impressed by how well he swallowed the pill.

“So they refused. En masse. And they were excommunicated.”

I whistled, long and low. “That’s strong stuff,” I said.

“Yes, Felix, that’s strong stuff. It put their souls and their bodies outside of the church’s communion and comfort. It denied them the possibility of a place in heaven.”

“It left them with nothing to lose,” I summed up.

Matty opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him with a raised hand. “Matty, do you know where these people operate out of?”

“No.”

I considered that bare monosyllable. It seemed to me to be concealing at least a moderately sized multitude of sins.

“Would you know how to contact them, if you had to?” I asked.

Matt breathed out, long and hard, through his nose. “The Anathemata are historically linked to the Douglas Ignatieff Biblical Research Trust in Woolwich,” he said. “I say historically, because it’s been a long time since anyone in the movement published any papers or took part in religious debate. I doubt very much that the connection is an extant one.”

“But would there be someone there who—?”

I stopped dead, my brain finally catching up with my eyes, and leaned over to the right to get a better look at the TV on the wall behind him. It was showing a scene of chaos on the nighted streets of a city: running people, a yellowish flare of distant flames, and in the foreground the corner of some building, one wall of red brick, the other of glass with a huge hole in the middle of it like a jag-toothed mouth. The camera was handheld and the light wasn’t good, but it looked like an office block of some kind—low-rise, only three stories above a street of shopfronts.

“Wait.” I got up and crossed to the set. “Can you turn up the volume?” I called out to the waiter. The resolution was still as clear as mud, but I could read the strap line at the bottom of the screen well enough: it said WHITE CITY SIEGE.

The waiter looked a little indignant. “We keep it low so it doesn’t disturb the other diners.”

“Yeah, I know. Just for a moment. It’s important.”