Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [131]
Slowly Palestrina swiveled his chair, turning to the antique credenza behind him and the sculptured figure that sat on it—the head of Alexander of Macedon, carved of Grecian marble in the fifth century.
“I was born the son of the king of Macedonia.” He was talking to Farel, but his eyes were on the sculpture. “Aristotle was my tutor. When I was twenty, my father was assassinated and I became king, surrounded everywhere by my father’s enemies. In a short while I learned who they were and had them executed, and then, gathering those loyal to me, I moved out to crush the rebellion they had begun…. In two years I was commander of Greece and had crossed the Hellespont into Persia with an army of thirty-five thousand Greeks and Macedonians.”
Slowly, deliberately, Palestrina turned toward Farel, the angle at which he sat and the spill from the lamp on the credenza behind him making his head and Alexander’s appear almost as one. Now his eyes found Farel’s and he went on. And as he did, Farel felt a chill cross his shoulders and creep down his spine. With every word Palestrina’s eyes grew darker and became more distant as he was drawn ever deeper into the character he was convinced he was.
“Near Troy I defeated a force of forty thousand, losing only one hundred and ten of my men. From there I pushed southward, meeting King Darius and the main Persian army of five hundred thousand.
“Darius fled in our wake, leaving behind his mother and his wife and his children. After that I took Tyre and Gaza and moved into Egypt, and thereby controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean coast. Next came Babylon and what was left of the Persian empire beyond the southern shores of the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan… and then I turned north into what is now called Russian Turkestan and Central Asia…. That was,” Palestrina’s gaze drifted off, “in 327 B.C…. and I had managed most all of it in three years.”
Abruptly Palestrina swung back to Farel, the distance in him gone.
“I did not fail in Persia, Jacov. Priest or not, I will not fail in China.” Immediately Palestrina’s voice lowered, and his stare cut into Farel. “Bring Father Bardoni here. Bring him, now.”
102
Bellagio. 10:50 P.M.
ELENA LAY IN THE DARK, LOOKING AT THE square of light that came in through the small window high on the wall above her.
They were in the convento, the friary, behind the church, which served as housing for the priests. Except for Father Renato, the short, affable priest who had gone to the truck with her, and two or three others, the rest of the clergy were away on retreat. It was a happenstance that provided her with the tiny bedroom she was in and the one next to it, where Father Daniel slept, and the similar room across the hall, where Harry was.
She still regretted her delayed return to the truck and the anxiety she knew she had caused Harry, but she’d had little choice. Father Renato had been hard to convince, and it was only when she reached her mother general by phone in Siena and he had spoken to her personally that he’d relented and gone with Elena, waiting with the wheelchair in the church’s shadow until the police on motorcycles had passed.
Then they’d brought Father Daniel in, given him tea and rice pudding, and put him to bed. Afterward Father Renato had taken them to the convento’s tiny kitchen and served them a pasta-and-chicken dish left over from the evening meal. And then he had shown them the rooms where they could sleep and gone back to his room, warning them that tomorrow the priests would return and that they would have to leave before they did.
“Leave…,” Elena thought, her eyes still on the square of light high on the ceiling above her. “To go where?”
The thought, while deliberate, triggered something else—her own sense of freedom, or, rather, her lack of it. The turning point had come when she’d broken down so emotionally in the water cave, and Harry had left his brother to come to her and hold her and comfort her even though she knew he was exhausted and must have been at wits