The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  He realized then that Johannes Voelker had spoken and a denser silence had fallen on the room. How long have I been sitting like this? he wondered. Emilio reached for the coffee cup again, stalling for time. "I'm sorry," he apologized, looking at Voelker after a few moments. "Did you say something?"

  "Yes. I said it was interesting how often you change the subject from the child you killed. And I wondered if you were developing another convenient headache."

  The cup shattered in Emilio's hand. There was a small fuss as Edward Behr brought a cloth to soak up the spilled coffee and John Candotti collected the broken china. Voelker simply sat and stared at Sandoz, who might have been carved from rock.

  They are so different, Vincenzo Giuliani thought, looking at the two men seated across the table from one another: the one, obsidian and silver; the other, butter and sand. He wondered if Emilio had any idea how much Voelker envied him. He wondered if Voelker knew.

  "…power surge," Felipe Reyes was saying, explaining Emilio's lapse to them, covering the embarrassment. "You can get erratic electric potentials when your muscles are tired. This kind of thing used to happen to me all the time—"

  "If I keep my feet, Felipe," Sandoz said with soft venom, "who are you to crawl for me?"

  "Emilio, I just—"

  There was a brief ugly exchange in gutter Spanish. "I think that will be enough for today, gentlemen," the Father General broke in lightly. "Emilio, a word with you, please. The rest of you may go."

  Sandoz remained in his seat and waited impassively as Voelker, Candotti and a white-faced Felipe Reyes left. Edward Behr hesitated by the door and gave the Father General a small warning look, which went unacknowledged.

  When they were alone, Giuliani spoke again. "You appear to be in pain. Is it a headache?"

  "No. Sir." The black eyes turned to him, cold as stone.

  "Would you tell me if it were?" A pointless question. Giuliani knew before it was out of his mouth that Sandoz would never admit it, not after what Voelker had just implied.

  "Your carpets are in no danger," Emilio assured him with undisguised insolence.

  "I'm glad to hear it," Giuliani said pleasantly. "The table suffered. You are hard on decor. And you were hard on Reyes."

  "He had no right to speak for me," Sandoz snapped, the anger visibly flooding back.

  "He's trying to help you, Emilio."

  "When I want help, I'll ask for it."

  "Will you? Or will you simply go on night after night, eating yourself alive?" Sandoz blinked. "I spoke to Dr. Kaufmann this morning. It must have been upsetting to hear her prognosis. She doesn't understand why you have tolerated these braces for so long. They are too heavy, and poorly designed, she tells me. Why haven't you asked for improvements? A tender concern for Father Singh's feelings," Giuliani suggested, "or some kind of misbegotten Latino pride?"

  It was subtle, but you could tell sometimes when you hit home. The breathing changed. The effort at control became slightly more visible. Suddenly, Giuliani found he had simply run out of patience with Sandoz's damnable machismo and demanded, "Are you in pain? Yes or no."

  "Am I required to say, sir?" The mockery was plain; its target was less clear.

  "Yes, dammit, you are required. Say it."

  "My hands hurt." There was a pause. "And the braces hurt my arms."

  Giuliani saw the quick shallow movement of the chest and thought, My God, what it costs this man to admit he's suffering!

  Abruptly, the Father General stood and walked away from the table, to give himself time to think. Emilio's sweat and vomit were familiar now, his body's fragility mercilessly exposed. Giuliani had nursed him through night terrors and had watched, appalled, as Sandoz pulled himself back together, holding the pieces in place with who knew what emotional baling wire. One could not forget all that, even when Sandoz was at his most aggravating, when one felt as though the man perceived the simplest effort to help him as insult and abuse.

  For the first time it occurred to him to wonder what it was like to be so frail in what should have been the prime of life. Vince Giuliani had never known illness more debilitating than a cold, injury more damaging than a broken finger. Perhaps, he thought, if I were Sandoz, I too would hide my pain and snarl at solicitude…

  "Look," he said, relenting, returning to the table. "Emilio. You are, bar none, the toughest sonofabitch I ever met. I admire your fortitude." Sandoz glared at him, furious. "I am not being sarcastic!" Giuliani cried. "I personally have been known to request general anesthesia after a paper cut." A laugh. A genuine laugh. And buoyed by that small triumph, Giuliani tried a direct appeal. "You've been through hell and you have made it abundantly clear that you are not a whiner. But, Emilio, how can we help you if you won't tell anyone what's wrong?"

  When Sandoz spoke again, the words were barely audible. "I told John. About my hands."

  Giuliani sighed. "Well. You may take that as evidence that Candotti can keep a confidence." The idiot! It was not the sort of revelation that came under the seal of confession. Although it might have felt like that to Sandoz, he realized.

  Giuliani got up and went to the private lavatory adjacent to his office. He came back with a glass of water and a couple of tablets, which he placed on the table in front of Sandoz. "I am obviously not among those who believe it is noble to suffer needlessly," Giuliani told Emilio quietly. "From now on, when your hands hurt, take something." He watched as Emilio struggled to pick up the pills, one by one, and wash them down with water. "If this doesn't work, you tell me, understand? We'll get you something stronger. I've already sent for Singh. I expect you to let him know exactly what is wrong with these braces. And if he can't make them right, we'll bring in someone else."

  He picked up the glass and carried it back to the lavatory, where he remained for a few minutes. Sandoz was still sitting at the table, withdrawn and pale, when Giuliani returned. Taking a chance, the Father General went to his desk and brought back a notebook, tapping out a code that opened a file only he and two other men, now dead, had been privy to.

  "Emilio, I have been reviewing the transcripts of Father Yarbrough's reports. I read them last year when we first got word of you from Ohbayashi but now, of course, I am studying them rather more carefully," Vincenzo Giuliani told him. "Father Yarbrough described the initial interaction between you and the child Askama and the Runa villagers much as you have, in outline. I must say that his narrative was far more poetic than your own. He was, in fact, deeply moved by the experience. As I was, while reading of it." Sandoz did not react, and Giuliani wondered if the man was listening. "Emilio?" Sandoz looked at him, so Giuliani pressed ahead. "At the end of his description of the first contact, in a locked file, Father Yarbrough added a commentary meant only for the current Father General. He wrote of you, 'I believe that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Today I may have looked upon the face of a saint. »

  "Stop it."

  "Excuse me?" Giuliani looked up from the tablet he was reading, blinking, unaccustomed to being addressed in this manner, even in private, even by a man whose nights were now a part of his own, whose dreams interrupted his own sleep.

  "Stop it. Leave me something." Sandoz was trembling. "Don't pick over my bones, Vince."

  There was a long silence, as Giuliani looked into the terrible eyes and absorbed the implications. "I'm sorry, Emilio," he said. "Forgive me."

  Sandoz sat looking at him a while longer, his head turned away slightly, still shaking. "You can't know what it's like. There's no way for you to understand."

  It was, in its own way, a sort of apology, Giuliani realized. "Perhaps if you tried to explain it to me," the Father General suggested gently.

  "How can I explain what I don't understand myself?" Emilio cried. He stood abruptly and walked a few steps away and then turned back. It was always startling when Sandoz broke down. His face would hardly move. "From where I was then to where I am now—I don't know what to do with what happened to me, Vince!" He lifted his hands and
let them fall, defeated. Vincenzo Giuliani, who had heard many confessions in his years, remained silent, and waited. "Do you know what the worst of it is? I loved God," Emilio said in a voice frayed by incomprehension. The crying stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He stood for a long while, staring at nothing Giuliani could see, and then went to the window to look out at the rain. "It's all ashes now. All ashes."

  And then, incredibly, he started to laugh. It could be as shocking as the sudden tears.

  "I think," the Father General said, "that I could be of more help to you if I knew whether you see all this as comedy or tragedy."

  Emilio did not answer right away. So much, he was thinking, for keeping silent about what can't be changed. So much for Latino pride. He felt sometimes like the seedhead of a dandelion, flying apart, blown to pieces in a puff of air. The humiliation was almost beyond bearing. He thought, and hoped sometimes, that it would kill him, that his heart would actually stop. Maybe this is part of the joke, he thought bleakly. He turned away from the windows to gaze across the room at the elderly man watching him quietly from the far end of the beautiful old table.

  "If I knew that," Emilio Sandoz said, coming as close as he could to the center of his soul and to an admission that shamed him, "I don't suppose I'd need the help."

  In a way, Vincenzo Giuliani considered it a great and terrible privilege to try to understand Emilio, now, at this stage of their bizarrely disjointed lives. Dealing with Sandoz was as fascinating as sailing in dirty weather. One had to make constant adjustments to endless changes in force and direction and there was always the danger of foundering and going under. It was the challenge of a lifetime.

  In the beginning, he had dismissed Yarbrough's assessment of Emilio's spiritual state. Discounted it as inaccurate or overwrought. He distrusted mysticism, despite the fact that his order was founded upon it. And yet, he was willing to take as a working hypothesis the notion that Emilio Sandoz saw himself as a genuinely religious man, a soul looking for God, as Ed Behr had put it. And Sandoz must have felt, at some point, he had found God and betrayed Him. The worst of it, Sandoz said, was that he had loved God. Given that, Giuliani could see the tragedy: to fall so far from such a state of grace, to be on fire with God and let it go to ashes. To have received such a blessing and to repay it with a descent into whoredom and murder.

  Surely, Giuliani thought, there must have been some other way! Why had Sandoz turned to prostitution? Even without his hands, there must have been some other way. Beg, steal food, anything.

  Pieces of the puzzle were clear to him. Emilio felt himself to be unfairly condemned by men who had never been tested in such inhuman conditions of isolation and loneliness. Giuliani recognized that even to fail such a test bestowed a certain moral authority upon the man. And for that reason, he found it easy to beg Emilio's forgiveness and give him some measure of respect. The tactic seemed to work. There were moments of genuine contact now and then, times when Sandoz was willing to risk some small disclosure in hope of being understood or of understanding something himself. But Giuliani knew that he was being kept at more than arm's length, as though there were something that Sandoz himself couldn't look at, let alone display. Something that could be dreamt of but not spoken, even in the dark of night. Something that would have to be brought into the light.

  It was necessary to consider the possibility that Ed Behr was wrong and Johannes Voelker was right. Perhaps, in isolation, Sandoz had turned to prostitution because he enjoyed it. He had loved God but found rough sex…gratifying. Such a truth, at the core of his identity, held up for public scrutiny, might haunt his dreams and sicken him. Sometimes, as John Candotti was fond of saying, the simplest solution is the best. No less an observer of the human condition than Jesus once said, "Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way."

  Patience, Giuliani thought. An old sailor's virtue. First one tack and then another.

  His staff in Rome, carefully nurtured and trained these past ten years, was competent. Time, and past time, for him to delegate more of the decisions, to let younger men strengthen as he kept a light hand on the tiller. Time for this particular old priest, for Vince Giuliani, to bring the experience and knowledge of a lifetime to bear on one human problem, to call upon any wisdom he had garnered in his years to help one human soul, one man who called himself, with bitterness, God's whore. Patience. It will take as long as it takes.

  Vincenzo Giuliani rose at last and moved toward the windows, where Sandoz had remained all this time, gray as the weather, staring out at the rain. Giuliani stepped in front of him and stood in plain sight, waiting until Sandoz noticed him, for he had learned never to startle the man by coming up behind him.

  "Come on, Emilio," Vince Giuliani said softly. "I'll buy you a beer."

  23

  CITY OF GAYJUR:

  SECOND NA'ALPA

  VILLAGE OF KASHAN:

  SEVEN WEEKS AFTER CONTACT

  Supaari VaGayjur profited from the presence of the Jesuit party on Rakhat before he knew of its existence. This was both characteristic of him and unusual. Characteristic, in that he had recognized a potential Runa fad before anyone else and took steps to capture the market just before the trend took off in Gayjur, Unusual, in that he was not in command of the facts underlying the market before he moved. It was unlike him to risk so much without investigating first. The gamble paid off handsomely but even as the profits were totaled, it left him feeling uneasy, as though he had just missed being killed in a ha'aran duel undertaken while drunk.

  Moving through the warehouse with Awijan, his Runa secretary, who took down his orders and noted his inquiries, Supaari had spotted one of the Kashan villagers, a woman named Chaypas, standing at a doorway, waiting for permission to speak to him. She was wearing a cascade of ribbons worked into the circlet worn around her head: a waterfall of color, arrayed gracefully down her back. Lovely, Supaari thought, and it would quintuple the number of double-length ribbons desired by anyone who took the fashion up. He turned to Awijan. "Call the runners. Buy ribbon and take possession. Get contracts for all the deliveries available—" Supaari hesitated. How long would it last?

  "Someone suggests that the contracts go no further out than Eighth Na'alpa."

  Supaari VaGayjur knew better than to second-guess Awijan on a decision like that. "Yes. When you get back, have Sapalla clear out some merchandise to make room for the shipments, even if we have to take a loss on the berinje. Delivery after redlight, understood?" One of the many advantages of working with Runa, Supaari had found over the years, was that Jana'ata couldn't see well in redlight but Runa could. It imposed a secrecy that his competitors, sleeping away the red and black hours, didn't even suspect.

  He watched as Awijan entered the courtyard, gathering the runners. Having set the transaction in motion, Supaari himself moved smoothly toward the VaKashani woman Chaypas and greeted her in her own language, holding out both hands to her. "Challalla khaeri, Chaypas." He leaned forward and breathed in her scent, mingled with that of the fragrant ribbons.

  An unusual villager, willing to travel alone and to deal directly with Supaari VaGayjur in his own compound, Chaypas VaKashan returned the greeting without fear. Apart from their attire, they were alike enough to be sisters or near cousins, seen with a casual eye, from a distance. Supaari was more heavily muscled, slightly larger overall, facts enhanced by the padded gown, quilted and stiffened with embroidery; the pattens, which gave him a hand's width of extra height; the headpiece, which provided another measure of stature and identified him as a merchant and, by implication, a third-born child. His clothing today emphasized the differences in their lives, but, when he wished, Supaari could pass for Runa, wearing the trailing oversleeves and boots of an urban Runao. It was not illegal. It simply wasn't done. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, would rather have died than be taken for Runa. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, were not nearly so wealthy as Supaari VaGayjur. It was his stigma and his comfort, that weal
th.

  Supaari coaxed Chaypas indoors, away from the foot traffic, so that her ribbons would not be noticed by others of her kind before he had a chance to jump the market. Chatting, he walked ahead of her through the warehouse, showing her the way to his office as though she were not already familiar with it, allowing her to rearrange the cushions to her comfort as he prepared a yasapa tea he knew she liked. He served her himself, even pouring it, to show respect: Supaari VaGayjur went his own profitable way.

  Taking a place across from Chaypas, he reclined comfortably on the cushions, careful to mimic her own posture as closely as possible. They talked amiably about the outlook for the sinonja harvest, the health of her husband, Manuzhai, and the prospects for resolution of a potential dispute between Kashan and Lanjeri over a new k'jip field. Supaari offered to mediate if the elders couldn't agree. He had no wish to impose himself on them and he did not relish the long tedious trip out to Kashan, but it would be worth the trouble to keep his scent fresh in everyone's nostrils.

  "Sipaj, Supaari," Chaypas said, coming to the point of her visit at last. "Someone has a curiosity for you." She reached into a woven pouch and pulled out a small packet made of intricately folded leaves. She held it out to him but he lowered his ears regretfully: his hands were incapable of unwrapping the object carefully. Her own ears flattened abruptly in embarrassment, but Supaari took her gesture as a compliment. The VaKashani villagers sometimes forgot he was Jana'ata. In its own way, in context, it was high praise, Supaari thought, although his eldest brother would have killed her for it and his middle brother would have had her jailed.

  He watched as Chaypas picked the strands of wrapping apart gracefully, with a Runao's lovely long-fingered dexterity. She held out to him seven of what he took at first to be beetles or unusually small kintai. Then, leaning forward, Supaari inhaled.