The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [6]
For eight months, he’d had the luxury of feeling vindicated. Now, it looked like Eileen Quinn had been right after all.
He gathered the debris from his lunch, deposited it in the proper bins and made his way back to his cubicle, swerving and ducking, bat-like, to avoid the doorways and low light fixtures and conduits that threatened to knock him cold a hundred times a day. The desk he sat at looked gap-toothed, and for that blessed state of affairs he was indebted to Father Emilio Sandoz, a Puerto Rican Jesuit he’d met through George Edwards. George was a retired engineer who worked as an unpaid, part-time docent at the Arecibo dish, giving tours to schoolchildren and day-trippers. His wife, Anne, was a doctor at the clinic the Jesuits had set up along with a community center in La Perla, a slum just outside Old San Juan. Jimmy liked all three of them and made the trip to San Juan as often as he could tolerate the tedious, traffic-choked forty-mile drive.
At dinner that first night with Emilio at the Edwardses’ place, Jimmy kept them laughing with a comic threnody, listing the hazards life held for a regular guy in a world built by and for midgets. When he complained about smashing his knees into his desk every time he sat down, the priest leaned over, the handsome unusual face solemn but the eyes alight, and said quietly in a nearly perfect North Dublin accent, "Take d’ middle drawer outta d’ desk, y’ fookin’ tosser." There was only one reply possible and Jimmy supplied it, blue eyes wide with Irish admiration: "Fookin’ deadly." The exchange convulsed Anne and George, and the four of them had been friends ever since.
Grinning at the memory, Jimmy opened a line and shot a message to Emilio’s system, offering "Beer at Claudio’s, 8 P.M. RSVP by 5," no longer amazed by the idea of having a drink in a bar with a priest, a notion that had initially stunned him almost as much as finding out that girls had pubic hair, too.
Emilio must have been in the J-Center office because the reply came back almost immediately. "Deadly."
AT SIX THAT evening, Jimmy started down through the karst hills and forest surrounding the Arecibo telescope site to the coastal city of the same name, and from there drove eastward along the coast road to San Juan. It was twenty after eight before he found a parking spot within sight of El Morro, a huge stone fortress built in the sixteenth century, reinforced later with the massive city wall that surrounded Old San Juan. Then, as now, the wall left the slum of La Perla unprotected, clinging to a strip of beach.
La Perla didn’t look too bad when you were standing on the city wall. The houses, tumbling down six or seven levels from the heights to the sea, appeared substantial and fairly large until you knew that, inside, they were all cut into several apartments. Anglos with any kind of sense stayed out of La Perla but Jimmy was big and competent and known to be Emilio’s friend, and he was gratified to be greeted now and then as he jogged down the cascade of stairways toward Claudio’s tavern.
Sandoz was sitting in the far corner of the bar, nursing a beer. The priest was easy to pick out of a crowd, even when he wasn’t in clericals. Conquistador beard, coppery skin, straight black hair that parted naturally in the center and fell over high, wide cheekbones, which narrowed to a surprisingly delicate chin. Small-boned but nicely made. If Sandoz had been assigned to Jimmy Quinn’s old parish in South Boston, his exotic looks would surely have drawn the traditional title bestowed on attractive celibates by generations of Catholic girls: Father What-A-Waste.
Jimmy waved to Emilio and then to the bartender, who said hi and sent Rosa over with another beer. Picking up the heavy wooden chair opposite Sandoz and rotating it one-handed, Jimmy sat wrong-way around and folded his arms on the chair back. He smiled up at Rosa as she handed him the beer mug and then pulled a long swallow, Sandoz watching him peaceably from across the table.
"You look tired,"