Selected characters #2
In the HolyPhone Confessional Crisis there are four main antagonists (oaka the bad guys). Each has distinctively different motivations for participating in the scam to rip off the Church. They are:
- Miriam Smith
- Noach Weizmann
- Michele Severino
- the Condesa de Arenas de Ávila (Inma).
Miriam is the daughter of the founder of a US fundamentalist church that is semi-permanenetly broke. Once a high flying banker she is now a real estate agent in New Jersey whose sister is married to Noach Weizmann, a financial computing expert. She is also a past lover of Michele.
Noach Weizmann is Israeli. Married to Judith, Miriam’s sister, they live where Moshe Dayan iss buried. Noach has history. He had to leave New York in a hurry and return to Israel after the Arab bank where he worked myseriously collapsed. He is a devoted supporter of the Settlers, those Israelis trying, often illegally, to ensure that the West Bank remains part of Israel and never becomes the home of the Palestinians.
Michaele Severino is a priest now working in the Vatican. Before the financial crisis he was a reasonably successful financier but lost his job and savings when Lehmann Brothers crashed. He had always thought to be a priest and returned to his vocation before being summoned to work for Cardinal da Ferraz on the independent financial arrangements needed to back the HolyPhone. He contacted Miriam for the first time since their relationship broke up, before he became a priest, to involve her and her sister’s husband.
Inmaculada Concepción (Inma for short) unexpectedly became the Condesa de Arenas de Ávila after the premature death of her two elder brothers and then her father, the count. A devotee of Opus Dei she is devout, chaste and determined to protect the Catholic Church in Spain, which she fears is about to suffer the same accustations about priestly paedophilia as has happened in the USA, Netherlands, Ireland and elsewhere.
Their motives may be different. But their purpose is common – to sidetrack soem of the Church’s HolyPhone payments.
The HolyPhone Confessional Crisis 