Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Tim always fought me.” Willis rubbed his big callused hand across his face. “He hated me. You said as much.”

  “And when we moved,” Karen said, “it was because of the Gray Man.”

  “I might see him in the street. Or one of you kids might mention him. Or Jeanne might see him. And so we would run.”

  “But he would always find us.”

  “Eventually.”

  Karen said, “You should have warned us before we left home.”

  “I always thought—it seemed like Timmy he was after. And I believed sometimes that it was Timmy who would bring him. Timmy was not afraid of that man. I don’t know everything that went on… Timmy may have had some commerce with him.” He ground the stub of his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “For years I believed that man was the devil.”

  Karen understood that this was literally true, that her father had come out of an old tradition of hair-shirt fundamentalism, that he was quite capable of believing in a devil in an old gray hat. Considering what he had seen, maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

  She said, “Do you believe that now?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  She watched her father staring morosely out the window. The afternoon light had faded. The air rushing over the sill was icy cold. She said, watching him stare into the gathering dark, “You wanted us to be afraid.”

  “Yes,” Willis said tonelessly.

  “Because you were afraid.”

  But he did not answer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1

  The day before they left, Jeanne Fauve took her daughter Laura aside and said in a whisper, “Where are you going from here?”

  They stood in the parlor with the faded Persian rug and the relentless tick of the mantel clock. The air was still and dry; the furnace was humming. Upstairs, Michael and Karen were busy packing.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. “Up to Burleigh, maybe—see what we can find out.”

  “I think,” her mother said, “if you’re determined to do this, what you need is to talk to Tim.”

  Laura said, “You know where he is?”

  “Not really. But we got this from him at Christmas… maybe it’s useful to you?”

  Jeanne took the card from the pocket of her quilted housecoat. It was not a Christmas card, just an ordinary postcard, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air, and the white buildings on the hills beyond it like some painter’s dream of a city.

  It was the only communication she had received from her son in the past ten years.

  Laura accepted the card from her mother. She turned it over and read the message there. Merry Christmas was all it said, but she recognized the handwriting—after all these years—as Tim’s. The message was mysterious; she could not discern either sincerity or irony in it.

  But there was a return address there, too, crabbed and small at the top of the card. Someplace in San Francisco.

  Laura looked up somberly.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Be careful,” her mother said.

  2

  That last night in the old house in Polger Valley, Karen stayed up and wrote in her journal.

  Rustle of cold wind at the window, scratch of pen on paper.

  I think about Daddy, she wrote.

  The pen hesitated on the page.

  She wrote, I carry him inside me and I have carried him inside me longer than I knew.

  He means well, she wrote.

  But then she scratched it out.

  She wrote, We think we live in a place or we know a person or we have a parent, but it isn’t true. We are those things. They build us. They’re what we’re made of.

  I’m made out of Willis, Karen wrote. I see him in the mirror more often than I like. I hear his voice in my voice.

  She discovered that her hand was shaking.

  She wrote—bearing down hard with the point of the Bic—I think about Michael, too.

  Michael is made out of me.

  And in this dangerous thing we have begun— dear God, she wrote, I wonder if that is enough.

  She closed the journal and was about to switch off the small desk light when Laura said, “Wait.”

  Karen turned abruptly. “You scared me … I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  They were alone in the room with midnight snow heaped on the windowsill and the faint, far hum of the furnace. Karen wore a quilted robe over her nightgown; Laura was tucked up under a comforter.

  “Been quite a visit,” Laura said.

  Karen smiled. “Hell of a visit.”

  “Foundlings,” Laura said.

  “Gypsies,” Karen said.

  “That’s us.” Laura sat up in bed hugging her knees. “Have you looked in the bottom drawer?”

  Karen frowned. She had never been especially fond of surprises. And she was tired. But she opened the big drawer slowly.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  “You remember them, too?”

  From among the toys Karen picked out the pink, fleshy baby doll. It was tiny; it was naked; dust had infiltrated the pores of the plastic.

  “Baby,” she said. She looked at Laura wonderingly. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “None of it was ever a dream. That’s the scary part, isn’t it?”

  Karen explained about the dream she had dreamt periodically almost all of her life, the house on Constantinople and Tim’s doorway into that cold industrial city. Laura nodded and said, “That’s more or less how I remember it. Tim was always the explorer. Still is, maybe.”

  She replaced the doll where she had found it. There was something unpleasant in the feel of the plastic. “You think we can find him?”

  “I think we have to try.”

  “You think he still hates us?”

  “You think he ever really did?”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said. The question troubled her. “It’s been so long …”

  She yawned in spite of herself.

  “Hey, me, too,” Laura said. “Bedtime. Long drive in the morning.”

  But they left the light burning through the night.

  3

  Willis helped Karen carry the last bag out to the car.

  Jeanne stood on the porch with a heavy cloth coat clutched around her. It was a cold day but clear; the sky was a deep winter blue. Everybody had said goodbye; everybody had waved. Michael and Laura were huddled in the car now; the engine was running impatiently.

  Willis hesitated with his hand on the open lid of the trunk. His eyes were inscrutable behind his bifocals.

  He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder. He said, “You understand why I did it?”

  She knew instantly what he meant by that. The fear, she thought, the not-talking… and the beatings.

  She nodded once, uncomfortably.

  Willis said, “But that’s worth jack shit, right? Understanding doesn’t make it better—right?”

  She regarded him in his checkerboard winter jacket and his hunting cap, his gray Marine-cut sideburns and his stubbled cheeks.

  “No,” she said sadly. “It doesn’t.”

  Willis said, “I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “If I could help—” But he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there. His hands were limp and motionless.

  Karen climbed in the car up front with Laura, and rolled up the window and did not look back. She did not want Daddy to see her, because she was crying, and how had that happened? What sense did that make?

  4

  Willis stood a long time watching the car disappear up the road.

  There was a raw wind coming from the north down the valley of the Polger and his cheeks were red and burning, but Willis didn’t care. He watched the car vanish around the corner from Montpelier onto Riverside, and stood a long time after that, hand up to shield his eyes against the sun, staring down these old row houses
toward the far brown ribbon of the Mon.

  He was surprised when he felt Jeanne’s hands on his arms, his wife steering him gently up the porch.

  “Come in and warm up,” she said.

  Her voice was kind. But the cold air lingered, the rooms were all too big, and the shadows were crowded with voices and time.

  Interlude

  NOVUS ORDO

  1

  Cardinal Palestrina was introduced to the upper echelons of the Washington diplomatic community, a few of whom were aware of his task here: the German envoy Max Vierheller and a man named Korchnoi from the Court of the Tsar.

  Korchnoi drew him aside at a party at a Republican senator’s Virginia estate: led him out to a glassed veranda and lectured him as snow fell beyond the perimeter of the hothouse plants.

  “Of course you know,” the Russian legate said in English, “it’s not simply a matter of this weapon or that weapon.” He gestured effusively with a goblet of Aztec wine. “What the Americans are offering is their involvement in the war. Does it really matter what gift they choose to signify it? It’s ceremony. Theater. The important thing is the prospect of an alliance between Rome and America. The infidels are terrified of it.”

  “Until recently,” Cardinal Palestrina observed, “the Americans were the infidels.”

  “Hardly,” Korchnoi said. “Heretics perhaps. A mongrel nation of Freemasons and Protestants—isn’t that what the clerics say? But the industrial power, the wealth, the military strength… these are things you can see for yourself.”

  “Clearly,” Palestrina admitted. “I have no objection to the alliance. Nor does Rome—the Vatican and the Senate are agreed on that. But there’s more at stake than the fortunes of an alliance. You must have read De Officiis Civitatum. Adrian is a realistic pontiff but hardly a pragmatist. If we lend ecclesiastical approval to this project in particular—”

  “Pardon me,” Korchnoi said, “but you begin to sound like an ideologue … a Jesuit.”

  No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. The Jesuits had a rather more hard-nosed view of political reality. What I am, he thought, is a provincial bishop caught up in affairs beyond his station. I should never have gone to Rome. He might have been happy in some rural parish, vineyards and simple farmers and so on. He might have kept his scholarship down to a less conspicuous level. It was the unwise love of wisdom that had drawn him into ecclesiastical politics in the first place: a sin of pride or hubris.

  Cardinal Palestrina was powerfully homesick.

  “ Rome and America,” Korchnoi said, his eyes beginning to glaze. ” America and Europe. Think of it… think of it.”

  In the morning Palestrina registered a Marconi message at the Vatican Consulate—essentially, that he had arrived and that the intelligence branch of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs had been largely correct in its surmises—and then hired a taxi to carry him to the DRI.

  He despised this building. He had official identification now, a photocard clasped to his clothing. He walked from the front gate through the snow to the inner building, the tiny portion of it in which he had learned to navigate. He went directly to Carl Neumann’s office.

  “Is Walker still in the building?”

  “For a time,” Neumann said. “I thought you’d finished with him.”

  “A few more questions.”

  “Well, if it’s necessary. We’re happy to cooperate, Your Eminence, as long as circumstances allow. But do understand, we’re approaching something of a cusp with this effort. Can you find the interrogation room by yourself?”

  “No,” Palestrina confessed. Humiliating but true.

  “I’ll take you there,” Neumann said. “And I’ll arrange for Walker to be waiting.”

  Once again, Cardinal Palestrina joined the Gray Man in this cold and windowless cubicle. Walker regarded him with blank expectation.

  Palestrina extracted a notebook from his robes. He had jotted down some of the questions he meant to ask. Too, the notebook gave him something to do with his hands … an excuse for avoiding Walker’s eyes.

  He felt the hard contour of the chair beneath him. He felt an unpleasant churning in his stomach.

  He began, “I want to make sure I have a fair and accurate understanding of what you’ve told me. I apologize if I repeat myself. You were one of three original, ah, products of this research?”

  “There were three of us,” Walker agreed.

  “And the other two escaped.”

  “Yes.”

  “They bore children.” “Yes.”

  “You killed those two, but the children survived.”

  The question seemed to trouble Walker. “The killing,” he said, “was a mistake. I’ve admitted to that. I was punished for it. I had sorcels to bring back Julia and William, but it was the children we were most interested in. But the children weren’t there! And William wouldn’t say where they’d hidden them! So I reached out …”

  The Gray Man faltered.

  Cardinal Palestrina said, “You killed them both— with your own hands?”

  “I sent them home,” Walker said primly. “Certain parts of them. But of course you can’t be in two places at once.” He shook his head. “It was very bloody.”

  Cardinal Palestrina closed his eyes briefly.

  He said, “You were instructed to do this?”

  “No,” Walker said. “I told you—I was punished for it.”

  “And you couldn’t simply recover the children yourself?”

  “They were too young to follow. They had no—” He seemed to search for a word. “No song. I couldn’t hear them.”

  “But I assume you were able to trace them at a later date.”

  “When they began to exercise their talents.”

  “But you didn’t bring them back.”

  “We wanted to make certain. No more mistakes.

  We understood… Mr. Neumann explained… work like this takes time. There are spells that are best developed slowly. They come to maturity. But we planted the seed,” Walker said, “when the children were very young.”

  “The seed?” Cardinal Palestrina asked.

  “Bindings,” Walker said.

  “Bindings of what nature?”

  “Vanity and anger and fear.” The Gray Man smiled to himself. “A mirror, the kingdoms of the earth, her firstborn son…”

  “Spells that would come to fruition in the future,” Palestrina interpreted.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see the future?”

  “No. But there are people here in the building who can. One of our other projects. ‘As through a glass, darkly’—you know the expression? We rely on their advice. It isn’t infallible but in this case it seems to be accurate.”

  “The sorcels are coming to fruition.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And you’re certain you can recover the third generation—the male child?”

  “He’s the one you want,” Walker said. “I can bring him back.”

  Cardinal Palestrina looked up from his notes. “One other thing… something you said at our last session, something I didn’t understand. You mentioned that you had help. What did you mean by that?”

  Walker—his face old and lined but still disturbingly childlike—beamed at Cardinal Palestrina. “His name,” the Gray Man said, “is Tim.”

  Cardinal Palestrina stood to leave the room, hesitated a moment, and finally turned back. An unscheduled question had occurred to him; he wasn’t sure how to ask it.

  Or whether he should. An Antiochene bishop from Malabar, visiting Rome for some ecumenical event, had once confided in Palestrina his belief that the profoundest of the venial sins was longing. As pride is the sin of the angels, longing is the sin of the clergy. Then, Cardinal Palestrina thought, I must be guilty.

  He said, “What you call the plenum … is it infinite in extent?”

  “There are worlds upon worlds,” Walker said
. “An infinity. That’s what they tell me.”

  “But surely you can’t see it, or feel it, or whatever you do—not all of it?”

  “No. Not all of it. And I can only travel where they go. But sometimes I dream of other places.”

  Palestrina whispered, “Is everything out there— everything we could imagine?”

  “Maybe,” Walker said.

  “Is—” But the Cardinal was embarrassed by his own question. “Is God out there?”

  The Gray Man smiled faintly. “God is everywhere… isn’t he?”

  “And Paradise?” Palestrina said. “A world where mankind never fell from grace? The Garden, Mr. Walker? Is that out there too?”

  Walker laughed.

  “If it is,” he said, “I’ve never found it.”

  Cardinal Palestrina turned away before Walker could see him blushing; the door clattered shut with a shocking finality.

  2

  Walker watched in bewilderment as the Papist emissary left the room.

  He was inclined to like Cardinal Palestrina, who seemed like a well-meaning person. But he was disturbed by the Cardinal’s nervous tics, his expression of barely restrained queasiness. And now this business about Paradise. It was not something Walker had encountered before, least of all in the corridors of the DRI.

  Lacking other instruction, Walker returned to his own room deep in a subcellar of the Institute, down a corridor where sweating pipes ran overhead.

  Walker’s room contained a carpet and a framed photograph of the Rocky Mountains; a spring-mattress bed with a thin cotton blanket; and a television set with a round, bulky tube on a gooseneck swivel. He used the television sparingly. There was never anything to watch but the government channel, news and public affairs and a few shabby variety shows. Of these, Walker preferred the news. He liked the maps, the animated arrows darting across the Mediterranean toward Sicily. He liked the aerial photos of Turkish cities as European aircraft flew over them, props whirling, bombs tumbling like confetti.

  He understood the political stakes that had brought Cardinal Palestrina across the Atlantic; he understood the war in the Middle East. Walker wasn’t stupid. But—although he understood— Walker simply didn’t care very much. There had always been wars and there would always be wars; there were wars everywhere. War had nothing to do with it. It was the search itself that obsessed him: the nagging sense of presence across those unfathomable distances. The complex, luminous web of magical obligation. A longing for the completion that this effort would bring him: a fulfillment.