A deep sigh. The play of light and shadow on her face aged her; or perhaps it was the bitterness.
"I didn't let myself think about what had happened," she continued. "It was like a nightmare I desperately wanted to wake up from. One day, three months after I left the clinic, I went into the bathroom while Pencho was taking a shower. We'd just made love for the first time. I sat on the edge of the bath watching him. He smiled at me, and suddenly he wasn't the man I loved but a stranger. A man who'd made me lose my chance of having children. I felt then worse than I had at the clinic. I packed my things and came back here. Pencho didn't understand. He still doesn't."
Quart breathed in slowly. "That's why you're hurting him," he said.
"Nobody can hurt him. His selfishness and his obsessions are like armour. But I can make him pay: through that church I can strike at his prestige as a financier, and at his pride as a man. Seville can turn on you very quickly. My Seville, I mean. The Seville whose recognition Pencho wants."
"Your friend Gris claims you still love him."
"Sometimes she talks too much." She tried to laugh but couldn't. "Maybe that's the problem, that I love him. Anyway, it makes no difference."
"And me? Why are you telling me all this?"
"I don't know. You told me you're leaving, and suddenly that bothers me." She was now so near that when the breeze blew, her hair brushed Quart's face. "Maybe it's because by your side I don't feel so alone. As if, despite yourself, you embody the old ideal of a priest that so many women have always cherished: someone strong and wise to trust and confide in. Maybe it's your black suit and your collar, or the fact that you're also an attractive man. Perhaps your arrival from Rome and all that it represents has impressed me. Maybe I'm Vespers. Maybe I'm trying to win you over to my side, or simply trying in a twisted way to humiliate Pencho. It might be some of these things or all of them. In what my life has become, you and Father Ferro stand at opposite edges of reassuring terrain."
"That's why you're defending that church," said Quart. "You need it as much as the others do."
She gathered her hair and lifted it, exposing the lovely curve of her neck. "Maybe you too need it, and more than you think," she said. She let go of her hair, and it fell about her shoulders again. "As for me, I don't know what I need. Maybe the church, as you say. Maybe a handsome silent man who'll make me forget. Or at least stop the pain. And another man, old and wise, who absolves me of blame for seeking oblivion. Do you know something? A couple of centuries ago it was wonderful to be Catholic. It solved everything: you just told the priest the truth, and waited. Now even you priests don't believe. There's a film called Portrait of Jennie. Do you know it? At one point Joseph
Gotten, who's a painter, says to Jennifer Jones: 'Without you I'm lost.' And she answers, 'Don't say that, we can't both be lost.' Are you as lost as you appear, Father Quart?"
He turned to her, but he had no answer. He wondered how a woman's mouth could be both mocking and tender at the same time, so shameless and so timid, and so near. He was about to say something, though he didn't quite know what, when a nearby clock struck eleven. The Holy Spirit must have just ended his shift, thought Quart. He lifted his hand, the injured one, to the woman's face, but managed to stop himself halfway. Unsure if he was disappointed or relieved, he caught sight of Don Priamo standing in the doorway, watching them.
"The moon's too bright," said Father Ferro, a small dark figure by the telescope, looking up. "It's not a good night for watching the stars."
Macarena had gone downstairs, leaving the two priests in the pigeon loft. Quart was standing by Carlota's trunk, which he had just closed.
"Turn off the light," said Father Ferro.
Quart obeyed. The books, Carlota's trunk, the engraving of seventeenth-century Seville, all melted into the darkness. Now the man at the window looked more compact. "I wanted to speak to you," said Quart. "I'm leaving Seville."
"Berenice," Father Ferro said after a while. "I can see Berenice's hair."
Quart went to the window, the telescope between him and Father Ferro.
"Those thirteen stars there," said Father Ferro. "To the northwest. She sacrificed her hair to achieve victory for her armies."
Quart looked not at the sky but at the priest's dark profile. The lights illuminating La Giralda went out, and the tower vanished suddenly, but as Quart's eyes adjusted, he could again distinguish its shape in the moonlight.
"And there, further away," the old priest continued, "almost at the zenith, you can see the Hunting Dogs." He said the name with disdain: intruders invading beloved territory.
This time Quart looked up, and he could make out, in the north, two stars, one big, one smaller, that seemed to be travelling together through space. "You don't like them much," he said.
"No. I despise hunters. Even more so when they hunt on others' behalf. In this case, they're the dogs of adulation. The bigger of the two stars was named Cor Caroli by Halley, because it shone more brightly the day Charles II returned to London."
"So it's not the dogs' fault."
The older priest laughed his grating laugh. In the moonlight his untidy hair almost looked clean. "You're a very suspicious man, Father Quart. And I'm the one who's known for being suspicious. No, I was referring only to the stars." He reached into the pocket of his cassock and brought out his cigarettes. His wrinkled, scarred face and unshaven chin were visible as he lit one, cupping the flame in his hand. "Why are you leaving?" he asked. The ember of his cigarette was now a point of light in the darkness. "Have you found Vespers?"
"Vespers' identity is the least of it, Father. He could be any of you, all of you, or none of you. It makes no difference."
"I'd like to know what you're going to put in your report to Rome."
Quart told him: the two deaths had been regrettable accidents, and Quart's investigation supported police findings. As an entirely separate matter, an elderly priest was waging his own personal battle, with the support of several of his parishioners. It was a story as old as Saint Paul, so Quart didn't think anyone in the Curia would be shocked. If the hacker hadn't sent the message to His Holiness, the matter would have gone no further than the ordinary of Seville.
"What will happen to me?" asked Father Ferro.
"Oh, nothing special. Monsignor Corvo has already drawn up a document summarising the disciplinary proceedings against you, and it'll be attached to my report, so I should imagine you'll be discreetly pushed into early retirement. You may possibly be given the chaplaincy of a convent, but I think it more likely that you'll be sent to a rest home for elderly priests."
The ember of the cigarette moved in the darkness, "What about the church?"
"That's outside my jurisdiction," Quart said. "But as things stand,
I don't see much of a future for it. There are too many churches in Seville and not enough priests. Anyway, Corvo has already said a requiescat."
"For the church or for me?"
"Both."
The priest's grating laugh rang out again. "You have all the answers," he said.
"To tell you the truth, there's one I'm missing. About something in your file. I don't want to put it in my report without hearing your version. You had some trouble when you were a parish priest in Aragon. A certain Montegrifo, if you remember."
"I remember Mr Montegrifo perfecdy."
"He says he bought an altarpiece from your parish, from you."
"It was a small Romanesque church," Father Ferro said after a long silence. "The beams were rotting, the walls were cracked, and it was full of crows' nests and rats. The parish was very poor; sometimes I didn't even have the money to buy communion wine. My parishioners were spread out over several kilometres. Humble people - shepherds, peasants. They were old, sick, uneducated, without future. I said Mass every day beneath an altarpiece in danger of collapse from woodworm and damp. On weekdays the church was completely empty. There were places like that all over the country, with works of art that were stolen by dealer
s or that disappeared when the church roof caved in, or that just remained open to the elements. One day a man came to see me. I'd seen him before. He was with another, very well-dressed man; he said he was the head of an auction house in Madrid. They made an offer for the Christ and the small altarpiece."
"It was very valuable," said Quart. "Fifteenth-century."
"What does it matter?" snapped the old priest. "They were willing to pay. Not a great sum, but enough for a new roof and, above all, enough to help my parishioners."
"So you did sell it?"
"Of course I did. Without a moment's hesitation. I had the roof fixed, bought medicine for the sick, repaired some of the frost-damage, and saved some livestock. I helped people to live, and to die."
Quart gestured towards the church "But now you're defending this church. A contradiction."
"Why? The artistic worth of Our Lady of the Tears matters as little to me as it does to you and the archbishop. I leave all that to Sister Marsala. My parishioners, though few in number, are more important than any painting."
"So you don't believe ..." began Quart.
"In what? In fifteenth-century altarpieces? In baroque churches? In the Supreme Watchmaker up there turning the cogs one by one?" The ember of Father Ferro's cigarette glowed more brightly as he took his last drag, then he threw it out of the window. "It doesn't matter," he said. "They believe."
"That business of the altarpiece left a black mark on your file," said Quart.
"I know." The old priest swivelled the telescope. "I had a very unpleasant meeting with my bishop. If somebody had done the same thing in Rome, I told him, it would have been a different matter. But here, we're all dancing to Saint Peter's tune. It's all tears and Quo Vadis Domine and crucify me. Meanwhile we stand outside, suppressing our conscience while the beatings go on in the hall of judgement."
"I sec you don't think much of Saint Peter either."
The old priest laughed. "No. He should have let himself be killed in Gethsemane, when he drew his sword to defend his Master."
It was Quart's turn to laugh. "If that had happened, we wouldn't have had our first pope."
"That's what you think." The old priest shook his head. "In this business there are plenty of popes. But none with balls." He looked through the eyepiece. He turned the wheels, and slowly the tube of the telescope moved up and left. "When you look at the sky," he said, "things occupy a different place in the universe. Did you know that our little Earth is only a hundred and fifty million kilometres from the Sun, whereas Pluto is almost six billion kilometres away? And that the Sun is a tiny dot compared to an average star like Arcturus? Not to mention Aldebaran, which is thirty-six million kilometres across, or Betelgeuse, which is ten times bigger than that." He moved the telescope to the right. He pointed out a star to Quart. "Look. That's Altair. At three hundred thousand kilometres per second, its light takes sixteen years to reach us. It might have exploded in the meantime, and we could be seeing light from a star that no longer exists.
Sometimes, when I look towards Rome, I feel as if I'm looking at Altair. Are you sure everything will still be there when you get back?"
At Father Ferro's invitation, Quart looked through the eyepiece. As he moved away from the brightness of the moon, between the stars appeared myriad points of light, clusters and nebulae that were red, blue, white, flickering or still. One of them gradually moved and then disappeared in the glare of another - a shooting star or maybe a man-made satellite. Quart looked for the Great Bear, following the line through Merak and Dubhe upwards, four times the distance, if he remembered correctly. There was the Pole Star, large, bright, confident.
"That's Polaris," said Father Ferro, who had followed the movement of the telescope. "The tip of the Little Bear, which always indicates the Earth's zero latitude. Always but not immutable." He told Quart to point the telescope to his left. "Five thousand years ago the Egyptians venerated another one, the Dragon, as the guardian of the north. It has a 25,800-year cycle, of which only three thousand have passed. So in another two hundred and twenty-eight centuries the Dragon will be the pole star again." He drummed his fingers on the brass tube. "I wonder if there will be anyone on Earth then to notice."
"It gives one vertigo," said Quart, taking his eye away from the lens.
The old priest clicked his tongue, nodding in agreement. He seemed to enjoy Quart's vertigo, like an experienced surgeon seeing medical students go white during an autopsy. "Funny, isn't it? The universe is amusing. Polaris, the star you were looking at a moment ago, is four hundred and seventy light-years away. That means we're orientating ourselves by light that comes from the beginning of the sixteenth century." He pointed at another spot. "And over there, in the Cat's Eye Nebula, concentric shells of gas are all that's left of a star that died a thousand years ago." He walked over to another window and his features were more visible in the moonlight. "What are we?" he asked. "What part do we play in this great scene spread out above our heads? What do our miserable little lives and desires mean? Your report to Rome, the church, the Holy Father, you and I, what does all this matter to those lights?" His grating laugh rang out again.
a world that guided itself by starlight five centuries old, the litde boy's shadow was cast on the wall that protected him from the bitter cold outside. His shadow moved closer to the other shadow waiting beneath bougainvilleas and orange trees, until he could breathe in her fragrance and her warmth, and her breath. But a second before he ran his fingers through her hair to escape loneliness for one night, the shadow, the boy, the man watching the naked body in the sunlight filtered through the blind, the exhausted Knight Templar, they all turned to look up at the dimly lit window of the pigeon loft, where an old priest, unsociable, sceptical and brave, deciphered the terrible secret of a cruel sky, in the company of a ghost searching the horizon for a white sail.
XII
The Wrath of God
He has disappeared before our very eyes and we have no idea how.
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Through the pipe smoke, the archbishop of Seville looked exultant. "So Rome's giving in," he said.
Quart put down his cup and wiped his mouth with a napkin embroidered by a local order of nuns. He smiled and sighed. "That's one way of looking at it, Your Grace."
Monsignor Corvo blew out another cloud of smoke. The two men sat facing each other across a coffee table. It was the archbishop's custom to have breakfast with his first visitor of the morning. The coffee and toast before them had been intended for the dean of the cathedral, but the archbishop offered it to Quart instead when Quart arrived unexpectedly to take his leave, disrupting the schedule. The archbishop hated his coffee to get cold.
"I told you, didn't I, that this business wouldn't be easy to resolve," said His Grace.
Quart leaned back in his armchair. He would have preferred to deprive the archbishop of this opportunity for sarcastic remarks and smiles wreathed in pipe smoke; but form required that he pay his respects before leaving. "I would remind Your Grace," he said, "that I didn't come here to resolve anything. I came simply to inform Rome of the situation. And that's exactly what I will do now."
Corvo was delighted. "You never learned who Vespers was," he said.
Quart glanced at his watch. "No. But Vespers is not really the problem. The hacker getting through to the Pope is a trivial matter; they'll find out who he is sooner or later. The important thing is Father Ferro and Our Lady of the Tears. With my report, whatever decision is made will be made with full knowledge of the situation."
The yellow stone in the archbishop's ring glinted as he raised his hand. "Don't give me your Jesuitical waffle, Father Quart. You've failed." The pipe smoke could not hide his glee. "Vespers has made fun of both you and Rome."
"Neither I nor Rome would have intervened," Quart said coldly, "had Your Grace nipped things in the bud. Father Ferro and Our Lady of the Tears are in your diocese. And you know the saying: straying sheep, shepherd asleep."
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Corvo clenched his teeth over his pipe, indignant. "Listen, Quart," he said, his voice hard. "The only straying sheep here is you. Do you take me for a fool? I know about your little visits to the Casa del Postigo. And all the rest of it, the walks and the dinners."
His Grace, whose talents in the pulpit were well appreciated by the diocese, proceeded to vent all his scorn and spleen in a harsh homily that lasted several minutes. His main point was that the IEA agent had allowed himself to be taken in by the priest of Our Lady of the Tears and his own personal pressure group made up of nuns, aristocrats and devout old ladies. Quart had lost his sense of perspective and betrayed his mission in Seville. And the daughter of the duchess of El Nuevo Extremo - who was still, by the way, Gavira's wife - had played no small part in the seduction.
Quart listened impassively to the tirade but stiffened at this last remark. "I'd be most grateful if Your Grace would put any allegations concerning this last matter in writing."
"I will indeed." Corvo was delighted to have touched a raw nerve at last. "I'll send it to your bosses in the Vatican. To the nuncio. To all and sundry. I'll do so by letter, by telephone, by fax, and to the accompaniment of a guitar." He took the pipe from his mouth and leered. You'll lose your reputation just as I lost my secretary."
That was that. Quart folded his napkin, dropped it on the tray and stood up. "If there's nothing more, Your Grace . . ."
"Nothing more." The archbishop looked at him mockingly. "My son." He remained seated, regarding his own hand, wondering whether to deal a final blow and require that Quart kiss his ring. But at that moment the telephone rang, so he simply dismissed the priest with a wave and went to answer it.
Quart buttoned his jacket and went out into the corridor. His steps echoed beneath the painted ceiling of the Gallery of the Prelates, and then on the marble steps of the main staircase. Through the windows he could see the courtyard where the prison La Parra once stood, in which the bishops of Seville placed unruly priests. A few centuries earlier, Quart thought, Father Ferro, and maybe Quart himself, would have ended up in there, while Monsignor Corvo sent his version of events to Rome by the slowest means possible. Quart was on the bottom flight of steps, reflecting on the advantages of modern technology, when he heard someone call his name. He stopped and turned. It was the archbishop himself, and no longer looking so pleased.