Jacob Atabet Read Free Page A

lives. Zimbardo told me that. Even though he sometimes goes to church—he even taught a class here I think—no one has his address. I don’t know how you’ll find him.” He smiled faintly as if he were secretly pleased. “So how can we pursue this?”
    “We can talk to some of the other people who were there. What about the altar boys? Did they see anything strange?”
    “No. At least neither of them has said so.”
    “Can I talk to Father Zimbardo?”
    “No. I’m sorry. The doctor said he should rest. But why don’t you come back tomorrow or the next day? He should be up by then.”
    “How long do you think you were standing there after Zimbardo fell down?” I persisted. “It seemed like two or three minutes.”
    “Oh no.” He made a sour look. “It couldn’t’ve been more than a couple of seconds. I picked him up at once.”
    “And you didn’t feel anything strange?”
    “Just the shock of seeing him on the floor there. That made me jump. But no light. No strange sounds. No nothing. So you study these things?” He smiled urbanely. “Have you written a book?”
    I said I was working on one, and we talked for a few minutes more. But I felt an impatience building. Would he help me find Atabet’s address? He said that he would, and stood with a look of relief. As I left he said he would try to find it from people who were friends of Atabet’s landlord.
    Outside, the church doors seemed to beckon. I stopped abruptly. The woman who had seen a light around the chalice was coming down the steps.
    “I was looking for you,” she said. “I want to talk about that thing in the church. To prove I’m not the only crazy.” We crossed to the Square and sat on a bench. A moment later she was talking to me freely. She was a dark attractive woman in her thirties, who had come into the church on a whim. The event had shaken her badly. “The same kind of thing happened to me once in high school,” she said. “Just like this—hard as it is to believe. Yes, just like this. Both times there was a light in the chalice. I was looking directly at it when it happened. And then the light from that man’s body. Right from him. God! It seemed to pulse.” She clenched and unclenched her fist to suggest a throbbing. “Then it was gone, and no one else had seen it. Everyone seemed stunned.”
    “There was someone like this man involved the first time?”
    “No, wait.” She shook her head. “There wasn’t another person the first time—just the priest. It was another priest. The two experiences weren’t exactly alike. But there was that noise both times. That crack of electricity. Did you hear it?”
    I said that I hadn’t.
    “No one else I talked to did. It was like some kind of short circuit in the wires. The other time something like this happened, when I was in high school, no one else heard it either. It was at the church here, the very same place. Can you believe it? Maybe there’s some kind of defect in the wiring!” She smiled, as if she were finally getting distance from it. “Yes, maybe that’s what it was. Bad wiring . . .”
    “And no one else was involved?”
    “No, just the priest that time. Just the priest. You don’t think I’ve got a screw loose?”
    “If you do,” I said, “we both do. I didn’t hear any sounds, but I saw that light and saw the priest fall over. No, something definitely happened even though most of the others deny it.”
    We talked for several minutes more, but she couldn’t remember anything else that seemed significant. She had never seen Atabet in the church or neighborhood, but that was not surprising. She lived in a different part of the city and rarely came to Sts. Peter and Paul’s. There was no reason she would have seen him. We traded addresses and she promised to let me know if she recalled anything else unusual.
    A man with a doctor’s bag was coming down the steps of the parish house. If it was the doctor, I thought, Zimbardo might be alone. Crossing