I reached the central fountain, which wasn’t playing at that time and didn’t even have any water in the basin, and glanced around, trying to look as casual as if I were only expecting to meet some boyfriend. Children skateboarded on the concrete slopes and old people sat in the sun. Three priests sat on a bench and threw bread to the pigeons, talking earnestly to one another.
I thought of the red-brick church I’d passed on the road to the park. I’d wondered whether to go in and make confession, but I hadn’t dared. It was funny really—brought up in a priestly family, I’d simply assumed throughout my childhood that I was included among the sheep rather than the goats. Faith had never seemed something that needed a lot of work and sin never seemed a burden; not even my furtive visits to the prisoner, which I’d privately counted as acts of compassion. In America I’d gone to church when Vera took me, without either resentment or pleasure. Now—oh now—I knew what guilt felt like at last, and uncertainty too. My place among the saved could no longer be taken for granted. I needed to make sure I was forgiven, but I balked at the thought. What confessor would believe me if I told him the whole truth? He’d assume I was out of my mind.
I looked away from the priests, shivering. I was alone, without the sympathy of either God or man. My transgression, in fact, must be entirely unique. Nobody else in human history had screwed up quite the same way I had.
A man was looking at me from the other side of the fountain. He was bald and middle-aged and wore a jacket over a stripy sweater-vest. Was that what a black-market antiques dealer looked like? I double-looped the plastic bag around my wrist and fished my phone out of my jeans pocket.
Here waiting, I texted Branko.
The man looked at his own phone, got up from his bench and sauntered over to me. I could feel the plastic bag growing clammy against my hand.
“Miss Milja?” he asked. He didn’t know my surname. Father had used a nom de guerre.
“Uh-huh.”
“Branko. You’ve got the picture?”
I nodded. He looked fussy and down-in-the-mouth, and there was something so tawdry and dull about him that it was hard to believe we were doing anything criminal.
“Come over here, and let’s have a look at it.” He touched me on the shoulder, steering me around the basin of the fountain.
“Come where?”
“Just over here out of the way.”
I followed him a few paces, then stopped. I liked it right here in the middle of the park, where there were lots of witnesses. He wasn’t a big man, but he was bigger than me. “This is fine,” I said, teeth gritted.
He sighed down his nose. “You think I should hand over a stack of notes where anyone could be watching?”
Personally I preferred anyone to nobody, but I got his point. “On the wall there,” I suggested, pointing my chin at the fountain. “There’s no one close by.”
He shrugged and we found a point on the low wall where we could turn our backs to the world. Drifts of litter stared up at us from the tiled basin. “Want an orange?” I asked, opening the bag.
He smirked. I passed him the small square parcel.
“Have a cigarette,” he told me, offering a pack from his jacket pocket.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Have,” he said, “a cigarette. You don’t have to inhale, eh? Make like a president.”
I accepted the cigarette and a lighter and lit the one clumsily from the other while he unwrapped the little wooden icon and looked it over critically.
“Keep the pack,” he said. I looked down to see a little wodge of colored euro notes folded inside the cigarette packet, and I realized that I’d been expecting a brown paper envelope like in the movies.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
He slipped the painting into his inside pocket where the cigarettes had rested. I bowed my head as I tried to casually pocket my own pack. A shadow came between me and the sun.
“Selling Church property is a grievous sin,” said a voice.
When I looked around, the three priests from the park bench were lined up behind us.
With an uneasy smile, Branko sidled out of their direct line of attention.
“Good afternoon, Miss Milja,” said the one in the middle. They were all bearded, of course, and all wearing black cassocks, but he was the oldest and the slightest, his long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. The other two were big—one with a rufous beard, one with a badger-striped black one—and I realized that they both looked a lot like they’d been brought along for their muscle.
My heart and my stomach collided with a clang.
“There’s no need to worry,” said the one with the gray hair and the spectacles, seeing the look of panic that widened my eyes. “We just want to talk to you about this photograph.” Reaching into the leather bag that hung at his shoulder, he held out a black-and-white print. “My name is Father Velimir,” he said pleasantly. “What’s yours?”
“Milja,” I said numbly, my brain a blank. It was a picture of some sort of statuette, but I was mostly wondering what sort of awful trouble I was in and how to get out of it. Screaming at the top of my lungs seemed an option.
“I meant your surname, of course. Your father’s name. We know you’re working on behalf of your father. Why didn’t he come himself, this time?”
I opened my mouth, looked him in the face—and said nothing. His expression hardened for a moment, then relaxed. “Look at the picture, Milja,” he said gently, as if talking to a simpleton—which was probably the impression I’d managed to give him. “Do you recognize it?”
It was a crudely worked female form, very pale and with almond-shaped eyes, cupping its breasts for the viewer. Her pubic area was nothing more than a hatched triangle. There was no scale in the picture but the lack of detail made me think it was quite small. I shook my head, reasonably truthfully. There’d been several similar idols in the tunnel, before I looted them out, but I didn’t recognize this one in particular.
“Your father sold this one to Branko here a year ago. It’s not the first item he’s sold, is it?”
I bit my lip and kept silent.
“He must have uncovered quite a cache. But this one found its way into my hands. Do you see the writing on the pedestal, Milja?”
I risked a slow nod. There were letters of some sort scratched into the base beneath the statue’s feet.
“Do you know what language they’re in?”
“No,” I answered in a small voice.
“It’s a very old one called Proto-Canaanite. It’s the script that eventually gave rise to the first form of Hebrew. That means it’s a particularly ancient statue, Milja. And not many people can read that writing. Not many people at all. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, father.”
“But I can. And it says something very strange.”
“What?”
“That doesn’t matter, child—it’s a prayer. To a heathen goddess. So, it’s nonsense, of course. What I want to know is, where did this come from? Where did your father find it?”
I shook my head and whispered, “I don’t know.”
“Really? What about this one? And this one? And this?” He drew more blown-up photographic prints from his bag: a potbellied Egyptian dwarf; a multi-breasted Diana of the Ephesians; an ivory crucifix; a golden mother and baby that might be the Virgin Mary Theotokos…or again, might not. “Where is your father stealing them from?”
“He’s not stealing them,” I said, knowing I was lying but unable to think of a better excuse.
“Where’s he getting them from, child?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well then, I think you should take me to see him, and he can tell me himself.” With a twitch of his head Father Velimir signaled to the priest with the red beard, who reached out a heavy hand and took hold of my arm.
I didn’t stop to think. I stabbed my lit cigarette into his long beard, and the moment he let go of me to beat in instinctive panic at the smoldering ha
ir, I jumped backward onto the wall and into the basin of the fountain, dashing for the far side. Chip packets skidded under my feet. I didn’t hear anyone pursuing, and as I scrambled over onto the concrete beyond the fountain I risked a glance back. Father Velimir and his sidekicks, looking flustered, were stomping around the circle in my direction but without any great speed. The gap between us was already considerable.
I grinned to myself, knowing there was no way a priest would shame the cloth by chasing me through a public park.
Unfortunately, it turned out that they didn’t need to. Father Velimir pointed at me and shouted at the top of his voice, “Thief! Pickpocket! She’s stolen my wallet! Stop her!”
Heads turned. A man in a T-shirt rose from his bench and began to lumber in my direction. So I fled. Under the plane trees, across the scorched grass, right through a shrubbery, my heart so high in my throat I could hardly breathe to keep my legs pounding beneath me. The blasted bag of oranges was looped so tightly around my wrist that it was cutting off the blood to my hand, but I couldn’t pause to unwind it. I put everything I had into running.
But it wasn’t enough. The good citizen caught up with me as I was almost at the park gate, grabbing my shoulder and whirling me round.
“Got you!”
His grip was harsh enough to hurt. Someone nearby was shouting in English.
“Get off me!” I squealed, and swung the bag of oranges at my captor’s head. He staggered, swore—and then slapped my face hard enough to make me see stars.
“Bitch!”
chapter five
THE FALL
Hey—hey—HEY!” There was a man, another man, running in. “Stop that!” he yelled as he rushed up to us, forcing me and the righteous guy apart. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”
I was shocked to recognize Egan.
And my assailant was surprised enough by the sudden intervention to let go and step back a little. “She’s a thief! A dirty Gypsy pickpocket!” he snarled in Montenegrin.
“You don’t do that! You don’t do that to a woman!” Egan was shouting—in English, of course.
“She stole a wallet! I saw her!” His imagination might be getting the better of him, but it hardly mattered—my white knight of course did not understand a word of his language.
“Leave her alone!” Egan was coldly furious, one arm thrust out before him to fend the guy off at chest height. “She’s with me!”
“Yes,” I joined in, in English, as inspiration hit me. “Leave me alone! This is my boyfriend! We will call the police!”
My fellow countryman did a double take as his grasp of the situation turned to sand in his hands. He obviously didn’t expect to have come across a dirty English pickpocket. I reinforced the message by grabbing Egan’s shirt-sleeve and clinging to him.
“Go away and leave us alone!”
The guy looked totally confused.
Egan swept an arm around my shoulders protectively. “You heard her. We’ll call the police!”
The language barrier was too much. Mutual incomprehension made his heroic arrest of a sneak thief farcical. He scrunched up his face in disgust. “Fucking Americans!” he growled, then spat on the floor at our feet and slouched away.
“What did he say?” Egan asked under his breath.
“Um. He said ‘Welcome to our beautiful country.’”
“I bet he did.” The Irishman looked down at me. I could not imagine anything I wanted to see more at that moment than his too-cute spiky crop and his cautious smile. Even the pressure of his arm around my shoulders felt just perfect, as he squeezed me gently. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I touched my slapped face, testing the tender skin, and then giggled unsteadily as I felt the incongruous weight still dangling from my wrist. “D’you want an orange?”
He took me three streets away to a cafe with a vine-shaded yard. It was, after all, his lunch hour, he explained as he ordered us punjene paprike: he’d been taking a short cut through the park when he saw me. “What are you doing in Podgorica, Milja? I thought you were out in the sticks somewhere?”
“I was.” I took a sip of the chilled Nikšićko beer the waiter had plunked down in front of us both. “My father’s been transferred to hospital here.”
Egan asked the right questions and listened sympathetically as I brought him up to date on Father’s medical condition. He passed me a paper napkin when I got teary and squeezed my hand, before withdrawing his own as if embarrassed by its boldness.
“I shouldn’t be dumping all this on you,” I mumbled. “It’s not fair, really…I’m just this girl you bumped into and I keep offloading all my crap. I’m—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry! It’s no problem at all. I like… listening.”
“You’re good at it.”
“Thank you. Are you still sure we shouldn’t go talk to the police?”
“Absolutely sure.”
He looked unhappy, but nodded. “So what was going on in the park, with your man there?”
I sniffed wetly, ashamed. “Nothing. Just a stupid misunderstanding.”
“Ah now.” Egan narrowed his lips. “He hit you. That’s not nothing.”
“Yeah well, that’s just my luck with men. And you’re lucky he didn’t hit you. This is a land with a fine tradition of machismo and blood feuds, remember.” I balled up the damp tissue paper. “Thank you, for coming to my rescue. That was really good of you.”
He laughed. “I’m glad I was there.”
“So am I.” I dabbed again at my eyes as my throat swelled up, and managed only to mumble, “Oh, screw it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not doing anything right at the moment. Oh—I just wish I was back home in Boston.” I waved my hands helplessly. “I’m sorry…I miss my own place, and my cat and my friends and everything. This doesn’t feel like my country…I mean, I’ve never lived in this city before. I only saw it on the way through to the airport. I wish Father was better.”
“He will be soon, I’m sure. You’ll be able to take him home.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to go back to the village either. I can’t.” The vehemence of that last word startled even me, and I looked at Egan in sudden embarrassment.
“Can’t?”
“It’s…oh, it’s complicated.”
“Ah.” He raised his blond eyebrows and looked meek. “A bloke, I’m guessing?”
The word was unfamiliar. “Bloke?”
“Uh… Fellow. Dude.” He pulled a wry face. “Two nations divided by a common language, eh? Sure, when a woman says ‘It’s complicated,’ it usually means there’s a man.”
I managed a lopsided half smile. “Yeah.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I looked down at my hands. I couldn’t go to confession in a church, but I desperately wanted to offload some small part of my burden. My head filled with stone and shadows again. My voice came out husky. “There’s this…man, back in the village. I grew up with him around. We had a relationship…sort of…when I was eighteen. But when I went back this time…it all went really wrong.”
Egan frowned. “Are you all right?”
He meant Were you assaulted? I realized. For a moment I relived the bruisingly fierce intercourse on the mountaintop. But though Azazel had been rough, there was no doubt that I’d wanted it, fear or not. “No,” I answered. “No, it’s nothing like that. It was just…not what I’d pictured.”
“Ah, well.” He looked sympathetic but relieved. “People do change, over the years.”
“No, it wasn’t that.” My tears were threatening to spill again and I hated that, hated my weakness. It made me harsh in my self-condemnation. “He hadn’t changed at all, that’s the thing—it was just I’d never seen what he was really like. How bad he was. My father had warned me all along, but I never listened. I was a stupid teenager and I thought I knew better than everyone else, and I was wrong.”
“Ah: with the an
cient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding,” he said ruefully, and with the unmistakable air of someone quoting a higher authority.
I swallowed my tears, glad of the distraction. “Who said that?”
“Er…it’s something biblical.” He looked nervous, all of a sudden. Quoting the Bible is a sure way of making most young women run for the hills, I guess. “Book of Job, maybe,” he admitted.
“Well, yeah, there you go. I was young and really stupid. Bottom of the class.”
“I don’t know. You strike me as pretty smart.”
“You don’t know how dumb teenage girls can be.”
“Dumber than teenage boys?” He lifted a brow. “Oh, I doubt that.”
That was a challenge. I sniffed and gave him a narrow look. “So what’s the worst thing you ever did as a boy?”
“Me?” Egan’s eyes widened a little in alarm and he drummed his fingers on the table before answering with a sickly grin. “Sure, my bad habit was mooning after gorgeous girls who already had much older, cooler boyfriends. With cars.”
I shook my head sympathetically, trying not to laugh.
“They never even knew I was there,” he sighed. “I spent…no, I’m not going to talk about it: it’d just sound too stalkerish. Believe me, I made a total arse of myself.”
“That’s the pits.”
“It is.”
I shook myself inwardly, trying to gather my shredded dignity. “Still, I suppose the only way from the pits is upward.”
“Ready to mount to the stars.” He smiled, clearly relieved I hadn’t fled after the first one. For an I.T. guy, he certainly liked his classical quotations, I thought.
“And that’s from Job too?”
“Uh, no. That’s Dante. The Divine Comedy.”
Yeah, I said to myself, suppressing a shiver. It’s a comedy all right. Hear me laughing.
By the time I left Egan, feeling much the better, I had a stomach full of food and yet more insistences that I should call him if I needed help, any help at all. I smiled to myself as I walked back to the hospital.
He was nice, I thought, a little wistfully. Really nice. And cute, in a totally normal, not-like-a-fallen-angel way. You could pass him in the street and idly think Hmm, yeah that’s fine. Azazel was more like…Oh God I want to lick him and feel my tongue burn.
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