Father Carrol Childers was a friend, and that’s why they sent him. Coast Route One grudgingly bent and complained its way down the sharpedged coast of California from the border of Oregon to Mexico. Ordinarily, he savored any opportunity to drive it, and was especially fond of the stretch between Carmel and San Simeon.

As a native of Monterey he’d sailed up and down the coast road countless times, many of them while in a state not legally suited to navigation. In their teens, he and his brother Tripp had a Porsche-powered sixty-four Volkswagen. In that car, with wheel camber reversed, an auxiliary radiator, and tuned exhaust, they could blast from the Carmel River bridge to Esalen for a midnightblue hot tub in a shade over an hour. On peyote, in times long before seminary, even less.

Powering into the curves before the Highlands Inn, Carrol began to feel sorrow making an effort to break into his self-imposed tranquillity. Bishop Crane hadn’t spent any considerable time with him on the phone.

"Father Childers, sorry to wake you, but there’s evidently been an accident involving Monsignor Woeslau. The Highway Patrol called and asked if we could send someone down to identify the body. Since the two of you were close friends and associates, I thought you were the logical first choice to ask."

Body? Kurt Woeslau? Identify his body?

"Pardon me. You did say body, didn’t you Bishop Crane?" He found himself whispering, as if someone might be disturbed by the very audacity of the question.

"Yes, father. I regret having to be the one to tell you. I know he was a dear friend." He paused, allowing the courtesy of absorption, time to draw a breath forgotten. "If you could drive down to San Simeon and identify his remains we would be grateful for the effort."

At Hurricane Point he pulled off. Stepping out of the car, a scythe wind rushed his knees, buffeting his torso. This at least was constant, the assault unabated on the shoulder of the Pacific. High winds shoved against the wall of decomposing granite relentlessly, battering, lifting, surging into the thousand foot plaque of cliff, gradually wearing against it the way time leans on consciousness. Pressing until it cannot be ignored, reducing a grain at a time the support for a structure that appears impervious right up until the instant it fails.

Staring down into the spume of faroff surf, life fell away. He wiped his eyes and turned his back on the deep summons of laquerblack water.

He drove the remaining seventy miles of tortuous two lane road with renewed aggressiveness.

Kurt’s remains were actually in a cool room at the Cambria Health Clinic, not at San Simeon. Cambria held memories for Carrol. He and his brother came here several summers in a row before he was ten. They visited the Whites, family friends who came as inherited goods from the absent father’s side of the family. But John and Fiora White liked Marty Childers just fine, with or without a husband. There’d been tide pool diving, sea urchin spines, and abalone barbecues on the beach. Spanish moss and Hearst Castle were all that remained of that time now.

It was just as well there was no coroner's vault. Carrol took heart from the fact that his friend had come to earth in a place where people exhibited some sense of propriety toward the dead. "It’s unfortunate we have to meet under these circumstances," were the first words out of Doctor Jacob Fore’s mouth.

Squeezing into the room together, both men were plainly aware of the disquiet attending the dead. Carrol moved to the side of the sheet, using one gloved hand to lift it. The body was revealed from the palm inward. Without raising his eyes to view the corpse's face directly, Carrol knew it was Kurt. The right hand alone sufficed.

Kurt Woeslau was famed for his unerring ability to penetrate the most painfully labyrinthine problems of religious philosophy. As one of the foremost students of Canon Law in the Society of Jesus, he gained notoriety across all boundaries of association for his insightful, thoughtful and provocative commentary on the nature and origin of church dogma.

Noted for formidable thoroughness, as well as an occasionally wellcriticized doggedness, his friends and enemies often shared the same names, depending upon the subject in question.

But apart from all those insights, the estimable and formidable Monsignor was renowned for his armwrestling skills. Carrol had never met anyone else with such disproportionately enormous hands. For a man of moderate stature, perhaps five foot eleven and no more than two hundred pounds, he possessed huge, paw-like hands. The mere sight of these protrubances emerging from under his robes to unfold in a gesture or handshake was unnerving. Just as fascinating was the sense of wonder Carrol felt when watching his friend delicately grasp the most fragile threads in his ancient textile collection as he set them under a microscope while preparing a slide for analysis.

In polite circles, the intellectual’s capacity to engulf an opponent's hand and snap an arm down with dismissive ease went undiscussed. Quietly, over wine or beer, cards and a good cigar, fans and detractors alike would rumor and recount supposed episodes of interest in the life of the sixty-year-old former pireti who was not only famous ,but highly regarded as someone whose eccentricities were enforceable, if the need arose.

Certainly there was no doubt to Carrol that his friend lay on the table. As the sheet was drawn back the corpse lay fully revealed. "In death all is known, and all is concealed." Carrol recalled hearing that old saw as an acolyte.

He asked himself now, what is it I can observe here, and what of that is really so? Across from him, the doctor stood patiently, ensuring that the light did not waver. All that is here can be seen, Carrol told himself. Everything true lies before me.

"What happened?" The question escaped. "I mean, I haven’t been to the Highway Patrol, haven’t seen the report. Tell me what happened." He watched the other's face, waiting for an answer to issue from the brushy knoll of mouth.