The Sparrow (32 page)

For the first time it occurred to him to wonder what it was like to be so frail in what should have been the prime of life. Vince Giuliani had never known illness more debilitating than a cold, injury more damaging than a broken finger. Perhaps, he thought, if I were Sandoz, I too would hide my pain and snarl at solicitude …

"Look," he said, relenting, returning to the table. "Emilio. You are, bar none, the toughest sonofabitch I ever met. I admire your fortitude." Sandoz glared at him, furious. "I am not being sarcastic!" Giuliani cried. "I personally have been known to request general anesthesia after a paper cut." A laugh. A genuine laugh. And buoyed by that small triumph, Giuliani tried a direct appeal. "You've been through hell and you have made it abundantly clear that you are not a whiner. But, Emilio, how can we help you if you won't tell anyone what's wrong?"

When Sandoz spoke again, the words were barely audible. "I told John. About my hands."

Giuliani sighed. "Well. You may take that as evidence that Candotti can keep a confidence." The idiot! It was not the sort of revelation that came under the seal of confession. Although it might have felt like that to Sandoz, he realized.

Giuliani got up and went to the private lavatory adjacent to his office. He came back with a glass of water and a couple of tablets, which he placed on the table in front of Sandoz. "I am obviously not among those who believe it is noble to suffer needlessly," Giuliani told Emilio quietly. "From now on, when your hands hurt, take something." He watched as Emilio struggled to pick up the pills, one by one, and wash them down with water. "If this doesn't work, you
tell
me, understand? We'll get you something stronger. I've already sent for Singh. I expect you to let him know exactly what is wrong with these braces. And if he can't make them right, we'll bring in someone else."

He picked up the glass and carried it back to the lavatory, where he remained for a few minutes. Sandoz was still sitting at the table, withdrawn and pale, when Giuliani returned. Taking a chance, the Father General went to his desk and brought back a notebook, tapping out a code that opened a file only he and two other men, now dead, had been privy to.

"Emilio, I have been reviewing the transcripts of Father Yarbrough's reports. I read them last year when we first got word of you from Ohbayashi but now, of course, I am studying them rather more carefully," Vincenzo Giuliani told him. "Father Yarbrough described the initial interaction between you and the child Askama and the Runa villagers much as you have, in outline. I must say that his narrative was far more poetic than your own. He was, in fact, deeply moved by the experience. As I was, while reading of it." Sandoz did not react, and Giuliani wondered if the man was listening. "Emilio?" Sandoz looked at him, so Giuliani pressed ahead. "At the end of his description of the first contact, in a locked file, Father Yarbrough added a commentary meant only for the current Father General. He wrote of you, ‘I believe that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Today I may have looked upon the face of a saint.' "

"Stop it."

"Excuse me?" Giuliani looked up from the tablet he was reading, blinking, unaccustomed to being addressed in this manner, even in private, even by a man whose nights were now a part of his own, whose dreams interrupted his own sleep.

"Stop it. Leave me something." Sandoz was trembling. "Don't pick over my bones, Vince."

There was a long silence, as Giuliani looked into the terrible eyes and absorbed the implications. "I'm sorry, Emilio," he said. "Forgive me."

Sandoz sat looking at him awhile longer, his head turned away slightly, still shaking. "You can't know what it's like. There's no way for you to understand."

It was, in its own way, a sort of apology, Giuliani realized. "Perhaps if you tried to explain it to me," the Father General suggested gently.

"How can I explain what I don't understand myself?" Emilio cried. He stood abruptly and walked a few steps away and then turned back. It was always startling when Sandoz broke down. His face would hardly move. "From where I was then to where I am now—I don't know what to do with what happened to me, Vince!" He lifted his hands and let them fall, defeated. Vincenzo Giuliani, who had heard many confessions in his years, remained silent, and waited. "Do you know what the worst of it is? I loved God," Emilio said in a voice frayed by incomprehension. The crying stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He stood for a long while, staring at nothing Giuliani could see, and then went to the window to look out at the rain. "It's all ashes now. All ashes."

And then, incredibly, he started to laugh. It could be as shocking as the sudden tears.

"I think," the Father General said, "that I could be of more help to you if I knew whether you see all this as comedy or tragedy."

Emilio did not answer right away. So much, he was thinking, for keeping silent about what can't be changed. So much for Latino pride. He felt sometimes like the seedhead of a dandelion, flying apart, blown to pieces in a puff of air. The humiliation was almost beyond bearing. He thought, and hoped sometimes, that it would kill him, that his heart would actually stop. Maybe this is part of the joke, he thought bleakly. He turned away from the windows to gaze across the room at the elderly man watching him quietly from the far end of the beautiful old table.

"If I knew that," Emilio Sandoz said, coming as close as he could to the center of his soul and to an admission that shamed him, "I don't suppose I'd need the help."

I
N A WAY,
Vincenzo Giuliani considered it a great and terrible privilege to try to understand Emilio, now, at this stage of their bizarrely disjointed lives. Dealing with Sandoz was as fascinating as sailing in dirty weather. One had to make constant adjustments to endless changes in force and direction and there was always the danger of foundering and going under. It was the challenge of a lifetime.

In the beginning, he had dismissed Yarbrough's assessment of Emilio's spiritual state. Discounted it as inaccurate or overwrought. He distrusted mysticism, despite the fact that his order was founded upon it. And yet, he was willing to take as a working hypothesis the notion that Emilio Sandoz saw himself as a genuinely religious man, a soul looking for God, as Ed Behr had put it. And Sandoz must have felt, at some point, he had found God and betrayed Him. The worst of it, Sandoz said, was that he had loved God. Given that, Giuliani could see the tragedy: to fall so far from such a state of grace, to be on fire with God and let it go to ashes. To have received such a blessing and to repay it with a descent into whoredom and murder.

Surely, Giuliani thought, there must have been some other way! Why had Sandoz turned to prostitution? Even without his hands, there must have been some other way. Beg, steal food, anything.

Pieces of the puzzle were clear to him. Emilio felt himself to be unfairly condemned by men who had never been tested in such inhuman conditions of isolation and loneliness. Giuliani recognized that even to fail such a test bestowed a certain moral authority upon the man. And for that reason, he found it easy to beg Emilio's forgiveness and give him some measure of respect. The tactic seemed to work. There were moments of genuine contact now and then, times when Sandoz was willing to risk some small disclosure in hope of being understood or of understanding something himself. But Giuliani knew that he was being kept at more than arm's length, as though there were something that Sandoz himself couldn't look at, let alone display. Something that could be dreamt of but not spoken, even in the dark of night. Something that would have to be brought into the light.

It was necessary to consider the possibility that Ed Behr was wrong and Johannes Voelker was right. Perhaps, in isolation, Sandoz had turned to prostitution because he enjoyed it. He had loved God but found rough sex … gratifying. Such a truth, at the core of his identity, held up for public scrutiny, might haunt his dreams and sicken him. Sometimes, as John Candotti was fond of saying, the simplest solution is the best. No less an observer of the human condition than Jesus once said, "Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way."

Patience, Giuliani thought. An old sailor's virtue. First one tack and then another.

His staff in Rome, carefully nurtured and trained these past ten years, was competent. Time, and past time, for him to delegate more of the decisions, to let younger men strengthen as he kept a light hand on the tiller. Time for this particular old priest, for Vince Giuliani, to bring the experience and knowledge of a lifetime to bear on one human problem, to call upon any wisdom he had garnered in his years to help one human soul, one man who called himself, with bitterness, God's whore. Patience. It will take as long as it takes.

Vincenzo Giuliani rose at last and moved toward the windows, where Sandoz had remained all this time, gray as the weather, staring out at the rain. Giuliani stepped in front of him and stood in plain sight, waiting until Sandoz noticed him, for he had learned never to startle the man by coming up behind him.

"Come on, Emilio," Vince Giuliani said softly. "I'll buy you a beer."

23

CITY OF GAYJUR:
SECOND NA'ALPA

VILLAGE OF KASHAN:
SEVEN WEEKS AFTER CONTACT

S
UPAARI
V
A
G
AYJUR PROFITED
from the presence of the Jesuit party on Rakhat before he knew of its existence. This was both characteristic of him and unusual. Characteristic, in that he had recognized a potential Runa fad before anyone else and took steps to capture the market just before the trend took off in Gayjur. Unusual, in that he was not in command of the facts underlying the market before he moved. It was unlike him to risk so much without investigating first. The gamble paid off handsomely but even as the profits were totaled, it left him feeling uneasy, as though he had just missed being killed in a
ha'aran
duel undertaken while drunk.

Moving through the warehouse with Awijan, his Runa secretary, who took down his orders and noted his inquiries, Supaari had spotted one of the Kashan villagers, a woman named Chaypas, standing at a doorway, waiting for permission to speak to him. She was wearing a cascade of ribbons worked into the circlet worn around her head: a waterfall of color, arrayed gracefully down her back. Lovely, Supaari thought, and it would quintuple the number of double-length ribbons desired by anyone who took the fashion up. He turned to Awijan. "Call the runners. Buy ribbon and take possession. Get contracts for all the deliveries available—" Supaari hesitated. How long would it last?

"Someone suggests that the contracts go no further out than Eighth Na'alpa."

Supaari VaGayjur knew better than to second-guess Awijan on a decision like that. "Yes. When you get back, have Sapalla clear out some merchandise to make room for the shipments, even if we have to take a loss on the
berinje
. Delivery after redlight, understood?" One of the many advantages of working with Runa, Supaari had found over the years, was that Jana'ata couldn't see well in redlight but Runa could. It imposed a secrecy that his competitors, sleeping away the red and black hours, didn't even suspect.

He watched as Awijan entered the courtyard, gathering the runners. Having set the transaction in motion, Supaari himself moved smoothly toward the VaKashani woman Chaypas and greeted her in her own language, holding out both hands to her. "
Challalla khaeri
, Chaypas." He leaned forward and breathed in her scent, mingled with that of the fragrant ribbons.

An unusual villager, willing to travel alone and to deal directly with Supaari VaGayjur in his own compound, Chaypas VaKashan returned the greeting without fear. Apart from their attire, they were alike enough to be sisters or near cousins, seen with a casual eye, from a distance. Supaari was more heavily muscled, slightly larger overall, facts enhanced by the padded gown, quilted and stiffened with embroidery; the pattens, which gave him a hand's width of extra height; the headpiece, which provided another measure of stature and identified him as a merchant and, by implication, a third-born child. His clothing today emphasized the differences in their lives, but, when he wished, Supaari could pass for Runa, wearing the trailing oversleeves and boots of an urban Runao. It was not illegal. It simply wasn't done. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, would rather have died than be taken for Runa. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, were not nearly so wealthy as Supaari VaGayjur. It was his stigma and his comfort, that wealth.

Supaari coaxed Chaypas indoors, away from the foot traffic, so that her ribbons would not be noticed by others of her kind before he had a chance to jump the market. Chatting, he walked ahead of her through the warehouse, showing her the way to his office as though she were not already familiar with it, allowing her to rearrange the cushions to her comfort as he prepared a
yasapa
tea he knew she liked. He served her himself, even pouring it, to show respect: Supaari VaGayjur went his own profitable way.

Taking a place across from Chaypas, he reclined comfortably on the cushions, careful to mimic her own posture as closely as possible. They talked amiably about the outlook for the
sinonja
harvest, the health of her husband, Manuzhai, and the prospects for resolution of a potential dispute between Kashan and Lanjeri over a new
k'jip
field. Supaari offered to mediate if the elders couldn't agree. He had no wish to impose himself on them and he did not relish the long tedious trip out to Kashan, but it would be worth the trouble to keep his scent fresh in everyone's nostrils.

"
Sipaj
, Supaari," Chaypas said, coming to the point of her visit at last. "Someone has a curiosity for you." She reached into a woven pouch and pulled out a small packet made of intricately folded leaves. She held it out to him but he lowered his ears regretfully: his hands were incapable of unwrapping the object carefully. Her own ears flattened abruptly in embarrassment, but Supaari took her gesture as a compliment. The VaKashani villagers sometimes forgot he was Jana'ata. In its own way, in context, it was high praise, Supaari thought, although his eldest brother would have killed her for it and his middle brother would have had her jailed.

He watched as Chaypas picked the strands of wrapping apart gracefully, with a Runao's lovely long-fingered dexterity. She held out to him seven of what he took at first to be beetles or unusually small kintai. Then, leaning forward, Supaari inhaled.

It was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever encountered. He knew he was getting esters and aldehydes, and the smell of burnt sugars certainly, but the scent was staggeringly complex. All this from a few small brown objects, oval, incised with a longitudinal line. Supaari covered his excitement with the ease of a man who has made a living of concealment. Even so, it came to him with a jolt that here, at last, was something that might interest Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna.

"Someone's heart is glad," he told Chaypas, raising his tail with mild pleasure, not wanting to alarm her. "A remarkable scent, full of curiosity, as you say."

"
Sipaj
, Supaari! These
kafay
were given to someone by foreigners." She used a Ruanja word meaning "people from the next river valley," but her eyes were open very wide and her tail was twitching. There was some delicious joke here, Supaari realized, but he let her enjoy the amusement at his expense. "Askama is interpreting!" she told him.

"Askama!" he cried, throwing his hands up in delight, elegant claws clicking. "A good child, quick to learn." And ugly as white water in a narrow gorge, but no matter. If Chaypas's household was interpreting for the Kashan corporation, Supaari would have an exclusive trading relationship with the new delegation, by Runa custom if not by Jana'ata law and, in cases like this, Runa custom was all that counted. He'd based his life on that understanding and if it brought him no honor, it nonetheless provided much of what he savored: risk to stalk, intellectual challenge and a certain grudging deference among his own.

They chatted awhile longer. He established that these small
kafay
were only a sample of a much larger store of unusual goods brought by the foreigners, who were staying in Kashan in Chaypas's own household. And Supaari heard with growing interest that they seemed to have no notion of profit, giving their goods away for the food and shelter that was theirs by right, as sojourners. Cunning, he wondered, or some nomadic remnant group, still bartering in the old, clean ways?

Supaari laid the little packet aside and, disciplined, did not allow himself to trail and capture the idea that he had scented in the distance: posterity and a way out of the living death he was born to. He rose instead and refilled Chaypas's cup, asking after her plans. She told him she would be visiting trade partners in the Ezao district. She was in no hurry to return home. All the other VaKashani would be leaving the village soon to harvest
pik
root.

"And the foreigners?" he asked. He was already planning the trip in his mind, maybe in mid-Partan, after the rains. But Kitheri came first. It all hinged on Hlavin Kitheri.

"Sometimes they come with us, sometimes they stay in Kashan. They are like children," Chaypas told him. She seemed a little puzzled by this herself. "Too small to travel like adults but only one to carry them. And that one lets them walk!"

If Supaari was curious before, he was baffled now, but Chaypas was showing signs of nervousness, swaying from side to side, as she often did when she spent too much time in ghost houses.

"
Sipaj
, Chaypas," he said, rising smoothly from his cushions, calculating that enough time had passed for Awijan to have concluded terms with the ribbon suppliers. "Such a long journey you've made! Someone's heart would be glad to send you to Ezao in a chair."

Her tail came up with pleasure and she even trembled a little, her eyes sliding away and closing. This bordered on flirtation and it passed his mind that she was remarkably attractive. He smothered the spark before it caught fire. Third-born, he still had his standards, which were considerably higher than those of his social betters. Urbane and sophisticated in many ways, Supaari VaGayjur was thoroughly bourgeois in others.

He sent a runner for a chair and, stifling yawns, waited with Chaypas in the courtyard until it arrived shortly after second sundown. He could hardly see her as she climbed into the chair but the fragrance of her ribbons was very fine; she had wonderful taste in perfumes, a natural elegance that Supaari admired. "
Sipaj
, Chaypas," he called quietly, "safe journey to Ezao and thence home." She returned his farewell, laughing breathily as the bearers lifted the chair supports, rocking the seat.

It was a luxury few Runa ever experienced, to be carried through the narrow city streets like a lord. Supaari was genuinely pleased to provide her with an evening she would remember, borne through the crowds of urban Runa, safe to go about their personal business in the blushing light of evening, while the Jana'ata slept. The breeze off the bay would carry her new ribbons like cirrus clouds behind her, their fragrance rising like mist from a cataract. By tomorrow, merchants from all over the city of Gayjur would be looking for ribbon at any price, and Supaari VaGayjur would own every scrap of it.

I
T WAS
S
OFIA
Mendes's fate to enrich investors who were unknown to her. The heavy black hair, which had inspired Chaypas to invent a new fashion, was at this moment pushed carelessly back, the ribbons Askama had braided into it slipping into disarray. Irritable as Sofia Mendes was, she'd have cut it all off without a thought, had scissors been handy. She'd brewed a cup of coffee out of habit, but it was too hot today to drink it and it cooled at her elbow; soon, such profligacy would be shocking. At the moment, however, beauty, adornment and wealth were further from her mind than usual, which was very far indeed. Her intellect was wholly occupied with the task of finding some sufficiently uncivil response to Emilio Sandoz's suggestion that she was being stupid.

"I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you."

"You are insufferable," she whispered.

"I am not insufferable. I am correct," he whispered back. "If you prefer to memorize each declension separately, please do so. But the pattern is perfectly apparent."

"It's a false generalization. It doesn't make any sense."

"Oh, and I suppose that assigning gender to tables and chairs and hats and declining nouns on that basis
does
make sense? Language is arbitrary by nature," he informed her. "If you want sense, study calculus."

"Sarcasm is not argument, Sandoz."

Emilio took a deep breath and began again with unconcealed impatience. "All right. Once more. It is not abstract versus concrete. If you try to force that rule on Ruanja, you'll make consistent errors. It is spatial versus unseen or nonvisual." He reached out toward the tablet that lay on the table between them and stabbed a finger down at a section of the display, careful not to jar Askama, who had just fallen asleep in his arms. "Consider this group. Animal, vegetable or mineral: these words all denote something that takes up space in some manner and they are all declined with this pattern. You follow?" He pointed to another section of the screen. "In contrast, these nouns are nonspatial: thought, hope, affection, learning. This group takes the second pattern of declension. Clear so far?"

Concrete and abstract, dammit, she thought stubbornly. "Yes, fine. What I don't understand is—"

"I know what you don't understand! Stop arguing with me and listen!" He ignored her glare. "The overall rule is, anything that can be seen is always classified as occupying space, because seeing things is how you know they are spatial, so you use the first declension. The trick is that anything unseen, including but not limited to things that are inherently nonvisual, takes this second declension." He sat back abruptly and then glanced down at Askama, relieved to see she was still sleeping. "Now. I invite you to disprove. Please. Just try."