Free The Holy Bullet by Luis Miguel Rocha Page A

beings who liked airline food.
    The menu ended with coffee for Rafael. Phelps, recovered from the sharp pain, asked for another glass of water, which he drank in one gulp.
    “You’re making a mistake not eating,” Rafael warned.
    “I’m really not hungry,” the Englishman excused himself. “And airline food isn’t very good for you. You really like that?” He pointed at the crumpled-up plastic that a few minutes ago wrapped the sandwich.
    “When you have gone days without eating and without knowing when you will eat another decent meal, this will seem like the best food in your life.”
    Phelps swallowed saliva. Not so much for the hellish scene suggested, but the coldness of the voice.
    “What are we doing?” he asked curiously, nervously. The anguished feeling returned to his lungs. What have I gotten myself into? he thought once again, while he took out the white fastener from the collar of his shirt and opened the first button.
    Rafael took his time answering. His thoughtful expression showed he was choosing his words and, at the same time, adding to the English priest’s tension second by second.
    “It depends,” he answered at last, opting for subterfuge, but forcing another unequivocal question.
    One could see more and more alarm in Phelps’s eyes. Seventy years, adding one or subtracting a couple, spent almost completely in devotion to Christ in study, with everything carefully planned, from a to c , passing over b , with the most detailed schedule possible, no adventures or hungry days. And now this. A trip, the unknown, dark and dangerous, and what most dismayed him, the calm of his companion in the seat beside him, looking out the window into the empty air, after calmly eating. But it was best not to think of that, since everything had started with a visit to the papal apartments and whatever they are going to do had the endorsement of the Vatican, perhaps of the Supreme Pontiff, the great Joseph Ratzinger. At the moment what most tormented him was the sparse reply to his last simple question.
    “On what?” he insisted. It was logical that something that depends is subject to variables that can be explained.
    “If we arrive on time . . . or not.”

Chapter 13
    T he tracts, testimony, medical examinations, bureaucracy, conditions, evaluations, impressions, interrogations, positive or not, that form part of the process of beatification or canonization are countless. Laws and rules exist, rigorous in most cases, that have to be followed scrupulously by the functionaries, emissaries, and prelates of the Holy See responsible for the case. A miracle, just one, is enough to unchain the machinery of verification. It can take years, sometimes decades, to legalize the facts, depending on the candidate in question and the interest of the Church in the matter. Much interest results in a faster process; little interest in delays capable of blackening and pulverizing the stones of the paved road. Preferably the candidate for sainthood should have been dead for more than five years in order to initiate the process of beatification, except in certain cases of sanctity in attitude or way of life. The venerable Mother Teresa of Calcutta is an example; in life she was more holy than many saints after death. Abu Rashid, the Muslim, seated on a narrow chair in a room on the seventh floor of the King David Hotel, might also fit that description.
    Through the window the foreigner watched the ancient city, polemical but peaceful. Today was Friday, not yet noon, but already loudspeakers were heard calling to prayer from the tops of the minarets of the Al-Aqsa mosque. In former times it would have been the muezzin who called the faithful for the hour of prayer to Allah, facing the sacred city of Mecca.
    “Tell me everything, Abu Rashid,” the man asked, not taking his eyes off the church cupolas of the Christian and Armenian quarters.
    “What can I say that you don’t already know?” he answered.
    The foreigner