The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [86]
Urpi spoke and wrote every known dialect of Chinese. He had all but forgotten Portuguese, however, and when Christopher had brought him a letter from a relative in Macao, Urpi had had to construe it into Latin before he could understand it. Urpi’s relative had wanted him to find a place in a nunnery for one of his nieces. The girl had never taken the veil; she went to live with a policeman. But Urpi had rediscovered his family through Christopher.
“Paul,” he said, “have you brought me some photographs from Macao? How are they out there?”
“Not this time, Alvaro. I’ve come to ask a favor.”
“Ah.”
Urpi moved a stack of books from his desk to the floor, so that he would be able to see Christopher when they sat down. Urpi worked at a carved table, surrounded by battlements of volumes with ideograms stamped on their spines. A great pile of Chinese manuscript, Urpi’s lifework, stood in the middle of the desk.
Christopher handed him the dozen strips of paper he had clipped from the borders of Yu Lung’s horoscopes.
Urpi examined the calligraphy through a magnifying glass. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses pushed up on his forehead, but Christopher had never seen him use them. Urpi was very near-sighted. When he read, he used the magnifying glass and put his face close to the print, giving soft grunts of frustration.
Urpi touched Yu Lung’s ideograms with his blunt farmer’s fingers. “Lovely work,” he said. “A very fine brush.”
“Can you translate these for me, Alvaro?”
“Yes, yes,” Urpi said, “but it will take some time. These are complex thoughts, very poetically expressed. This man writes a very old Chinese, and he uses Taoist imagery. How odd. What is he?”
“A horoscoper.”
Urpi looked up, shocked at the word. “Oh, my, Paul.”
“Don’t you want to do it?”
“But of course. I didn’t know you had these superstitions.”
“I haven’t. I just want to know what the manuscript says. In great detail.”
“It will be difficult to render the spirit, you know. This is a rare idiom. May I have a little time?”
“Three days?”
Urpi looked at the long strips of paper again. “All right. But in the end, it may mean nothing to you. You’d have to know what and whom he was writing about and make deductions, even after it was translated. What language do you want it in?”
“Whatever suits you best, Alvaro.”
“Latin is easiest for me—that’s what I’m used to, and I have the Latin equivalents for Chinese words already in my mind.”
“Latin will be fine.”
“Good. The day after Christmas, then. I’ll be here from six in the morning, as always. When do you go to Macao again?”
“Not soon, Alvaro. What do you hear from the family?”
“No Christmas message. I thought you might be bringing it to me. It takes me back, you know—I have grand-nephews now who are as old as I was when th.3 Franciscans took me in. I’m sure they’re as bad as I was—thieves, liars, full of lust. Ah, well, God is waiting for them.”
“I expect so, Alvaro. Please guard those papers well. I’ll want them back.”
“They’re safe here,” Urpi said, indicating the thick walls and the slow figures in black that moved among the books. He waved a hand and put his head down among his books and papers, the magnifying glass against his eye.
3
Christopher slept on the train, protected by three nuns and a schoolboy who shared his compartment. In Bologna he leaned from the window and bought a sandwich and a bottle of beer from a platform vendor. One of the nuns peeled an orange and handed it to him, with the skin arranged around the fruit like the pointed leaves of a lily. She was young, with a sensual face from which prayer had scrubbed all traces of desire. However, the pretty orange, handed across the compartment as if she were feeding a horse and was wary of its teeth, was as much a gift of flirtation as of charity.
When Christopher arrived in midafternoon, Milan was bathed by the nickled light of the winter sun. He stayed long enough to buy two hundred feet of nylon climbing rope, a dozen pitons and a mountaineering hammer, a