In Flames by Richard Hilary Weber Page A

around
. “I’m sorry, Padre, we all have our loyalties. But Cuba…”
    His eyes filled with water. “I should have known. But how can you—”
    “It’s wartime, Padre.”
Just keep going
, the Townsley instructions, push back, never yield an inch. “People get killed every day, and you know who finances the killers here, who funnels the money—”
    “A man is ruined because he writes to his wife?”
    “Wife…” My heartbeat ceased.
    “Go ahead, take your time reading my wife’s letters. Or do you need a translation? I can recite them from memory, if you prefer. And you can even record me, if you wish. Please, señor, leave your cell phone on. It doesn’t matter now. Nothing does.”
    I turned off the cell. “Sorry, Padre, I didn’t know.”
    “How could you? Your Spanish is still too poor.” The priest lowered himself into a chair as if carrying an unbearable burden of stones on his shoulders. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his fingers, like a child. Against the powerful and armed and ruthless, you can wage merciless war, but not against the pathetic, then the stones rest on your own body. I wanted to contact the embassy and tell them it was all a mistake, they should simply ignore the letters I’d just sent. “I’ll retract them, Padre.”
    The priest looked up. “I don’t want your clumsy sympathy, señor, it won’t do me any good. You’re young, not married, probably no children. But can you understand that, yes, I have a daughter. I met my wife when I was in Caracas, studying. She had to return to Cuba. I can’t travel to Cuba. As you know, no one from this island is allowed that freedom. Exactly as in your country…”
    “And hers. She can’t leave Cuba and come here. This doesn’t have to go any further.”
    “It already has. Once it’s out, you can’t stop these stories.”
    “Then why write like this? There are other ways.”
    “I’m all alone here. And we’re very anxious, my wife and I, we can’t email or call.”
    I believed him. The priest’s story was bizarre enough to be true, not a bluff. In his own way, he was as honest as the general pretended to be, both believing they could get away with basic truths, as reality didn’t terrify them.
    “Maybe nothing will happen now, Padre, it’s all pretty harmless anyway, like you say. I’m sorry, forgive me.” Even in wartime, you have to exercise your capacity to empathize or else it withers away. I was Townsley’s front man, not his attack dog or performing monkey on a leash, I wouldn’t turn totally inhuman, not for him or anyone else, the extra job wasn’t worth anywhere near that extreme a transformation.
    “What will happen now, señor, is your embassy will know, and your embassy is full of gossips, it leaks like a grass roof in a hurricane. And you know what this means once it’s out, I’m exposed. My superiors in the Church will learn, and at last they’ll throw me to the dogs. They’ve been waiting for a good excuse, my private reading list alone was always too frail a reed to pin an excommunication on.”
    “Doesn’t the bishop or whoever have any charity, no feeling for human weakness—”
    “What do you know about weakness? Since when do yanquis feel for weakness?”
    “I went to a Catholic school.”
    “So?” The priest’s moist eyes regarded me. “They’re all Irish up there, the only weakness they feel is alcohol.”
    “That’s not true.”
    But he appeared to sense that he and I now had something in common. Sacred statues and thorn-pierced hearts. Sins whispered in dark boxes. Miraculous relics and flickering lights in dim chapels, and rising up from incense smells and bells and rituals of Catholic childhood, maybe a residual capacity to understand and forgive and help a suffering man. After all, he could let the whole world know what a fraud I was, and we’d both stand exposed. I handed back the letters and opened the office door. My last glimpse of the priest was of him rushing from