The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [66]
She stared at him. "Does that mean ’yes’?"
He grinned. "Yes."
Standing at the window now, she could see the Kotel, the Western Wall. Too far away to hear the murmur of prayers, she could watch the tidal ebb and flow of tourists and pilgrims, pointing, davening, weeping, placing small pieces of paper bearing petitions and prayers of gratitude into the spaces between the ancient stones. And she knew why she was here. She had come to Israel to say good-bye to the past.
She heard her system’s message signal and opened the file, read Ian Sekizawa’s one-word reply and smiled.
"Done," the screen said.
THAT YEAR, SEVERAL superb works of Renaissance art were sold without publicity to private investors. At an auction in London, a price was found for what had previously been considered a priceless collection of seventeenth-century Oriental porcelains. Long-held pieces of property and stock portfolios quietly went on the market at calculated times and in carefully selected locations where considerable gains were available upon sale.
It was a matter of taking profits, liquidating some assets, redeploying capital. The total needed, as Sofia Mendes predicted, was not an inconsiderable amount of money, but it did not beggar the Society by any means and did not even affect Jesuit missions and charitable projects on Earth, which were operated under current cash flow from educational and research facilities, leasing agreements and patent licenses. The sum accumulated in this way was deposited in a reliably discreet Viennese bank. Jesuits around the world were instructed to monitor the public news media and private data nets for any mention of Jesuit financial activity and to relay that information to the Father General’s office at Number 5. No pattern was detected, all that year.
14
NAPLES:
MAY 2060
NOT EVEN VESUVIUS could delay spring forever. As the weather moderated, Emilio Sandoz found he could sleep more easily in the open, lulled by waves and bird cries, his back against sun-warmed rock. He thought perhaps it was the sunlight on his closed eyes that banished the darkness even in sleep; he was less likely to awaken sweating and nauseated. Sometimes the dreams were merely puzzling, not terrifying. Or vile.
He was on a beach, with a child from La Perla. He was apologizing because, though his hands were unharmed in the dream, he couldn’t seem to do the magic tricks any longer. The child looked at him with the strange and beautiful double-irised eyes of the VaRakhati. "Well," she said, with the confident practicality of the half-grown, "learn some new tricks."
"Padre, c’è qualcuno che vuol vedervi. "
He sat up, breathing hard, disoriented. He could still hear the dream-child’s words and it seemed important to him not to forget what they were before he’d had time to think about them. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his forearm, resisting the impulse to shout at the boy for waking him.
"—un uomo che vuol vedervi."
A man who would see you, the boy was saying. What was his name? Giancarlo. He was ten. His mother was a local farmer who sold produce to restaurants in Naples. Sometimes the retreat house ran short when there were extra people in the refectory, and Giancarlo brought vegetables to the kitchen. He often hung around, hoping to be sent on an errand, to bring a message to the sick priest, perhaps, or to help him up the stairs sometimes. "Grazie," Emilio said, hoping this was thanks in Italian, but unsure. He wanted to tell the boy that he could manage the stairs on his own now but couldn’t find the words. It was so long ago, so many languages ago.
Pulling himself together, he stood carefully and climbed slowly off the huge weathered rock that was his sanctuary, using his bare feet to find purchase, startling badly when Giancarlo suddenly produced a stream of treble Italian. It was too fast, too complicated,