The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “Do not attack me,” she continued. “I have something to give you. Something only your grandchildren will understand, in no less than three hundred years.”

  “Three hundred years?”

  “Almost four thousand moons.” She nodded in agreement. “And you will protect it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Soon, when we see each other again, I will give it to you.”

  And with those words, darkness fell once more over the plains.

  SIX

  MADRID, SPAIN

  SPRING 1991

  And where might we be headed today?”

  This was by no means a casual question for Txema Jiménez, who was well versed in his friend’s eccentricities. Just to be on the safe side, he took out his all-weather jacket and loaded it with rolls of film. His stocky silhouette, the figure of a man who ate well and rarely exercised, became even larger whenever he threw on his “equipment.” In regard to the new arrival, which is what he told himself as soon as he saw his colleague Carlos Albert walking over to him, he was not going to play that game again. The week before in Seville, while he was trying to find a filter for his tele-photo lens in a remote part of the Santa Cruz quarter, Carlos had wandered off and left him stranded. He had never before worked with someone quite so high-strung, who lost touch with reality whenever he stumbled upon something that intrigued him.

  The camera bag, a used knapsack Txema had taken with him on countless adventures, was at his feet, packed and ready to go. This time he made sure he had batteries for the flash and a decent supply of film.

  When he was within a few paces of Txema, Carlos smiled broadly, answering his friend’s question with one of his own.

  “Ready for a new mystery?”

  Txema nodded. “I have everything,” he said, gesturing toward his bag and his jacket. “No giving me the slip so easily this time. Your little stunt in Seville won’t happen again.”

  “Let’s go, then. It isn’t as if you missed anything earthshaking. Besides, the jeweler was adamant about no photographs. That was just a tall story about how he had driven a hundred fifty miles in half an hour, after his car had been enveloped by a big cloud on top of the Castillo de las Guardas.”

  “An abduction?”

  Carlos nodded. “If he had seen your camera, he never would have opened his mouth! You have no idea how they are, the people in that town!”

  “Yeah, sure,” Txema grumbled. “And our next destination?”

  “Our assignment today is the hunt for the Holy Shroud, pal.” Carlos checked the route while he took long sips from his second coffee of the morning, which the machine in the lunchroom had just dropped into his hand.

  “The Holy Shroud? Since when are you interested in relics? Weren’t you the one who said they’re for old ladies?”

  Carlos made no reply.

  “I think that sort of thing is best left to graduate students.”

  It’s strange, Carlos Albert thought. He had been asking himself the same questions for the past two months. Why did he suddenly feel such an overwhelming attraction to the religious, if he was not? Although he was an avowed agnostic, the shadow of devotion continued to pursue him since his return from his last trip to Italy. At first he had refused to take it seriously: once or twice he came across a card with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, just like the ones he saw on his grandmother’s night table, except that now it was between pages of a book he happened to open. That was enough for him to revisit the days when he still had faith. At other times, it was Schubert’s “Ave Maria” playing in the background at work, or the painter Murillo’s Immaculada on a postage stamp. Were they signs of some sort? Should he be concerned that the only things that caught his attention were news items about religion?

  Carlos was certainly unusual. At twenty-three, shortly after finishing his studies, a youthful religious crisis had left him permanently estranged from the Catholicism of Communion and Sunday Mass. Like any conflict worthy of being taken seriously, his had evolved over a period of time. And then it burst out into the open one day when he nearly lost his life in a motorcycle accident. When his shiny chrome BMW K75 ran head-on, at fifty-five miles per hour, into a taxi that had run a red light, he knew that his life would never be the same. Everything was suddenly dark and empty. He was unconscious for fifteen hours, and when he came to in the intensive care unit, he failed to remember a single thing that had happened. Nothing. For the first time in his life, Carlos felt cheated. He seemed disgusted by the fact that he was still alive. Angry at everything and everyone. Later, at home with his parents, he explained it like this: when your life is over, there is no light, no angel plucking a harp, no paradise full of loved ones. They had misled him. For the fifteen hours that he was dead, he encountered nothing but darkness. Emptiness. Cold. A vast, empty space in which he had been trapped.

  That had been almost a decade ago. He had spent six months learning to walk again, and by the time he had completed the final stage of his rehabilitation, a profound and permanent change had come over him. It was no secret that after the accident Carlos began to look at life from a very curious angle. He started to take a serious interest in borderline experiences, in psychic phenomena. He believed that a substantial part of what are called religious phenomena resulted from mental experiences that are poorly understood, mirages that one day science would be able to explain.

  Yet even with his increasingly mechanical outlook on reality, he felt that one thing, however odd, was absolutely certain: life attracts life, as he put it. And no longer wanting to be separated from it, he began to make a collection of other people’s existences. His job was the perfect alibi. As a journalist he let himself absorb the air other people breathed, the things they dreamed or did. And his joining the staff at the monthly magazine set him free in a way he would never have imagined. Mysteries was a rigorous publication that kept its ears and eyes open, a journal that for years had been gathering evidence of experiences that bordered on the supernatural. Scientists with pretensions to explaining everything would write for the magazine from time to time, as would theologians who explained that only blind faith could mitigate the suffering in our society. And among the various theories, the editor of Mysteries was content to publish Carlos’s skeptical reports from the field.

  After he returned from Italy, the reporter got to know an elderly professor of mathematics, a retired inventor, who assured Carlos that he had discovered how the universe works. During the interview, the professor explained that the reality we are living is merely part of a vast, invisible precision mechanism in which every action provokes a reaction. “Nothing happens by chance,” he told Carlos. “And if at any point some mysteriously linked events befall you, as if something or someone had orchestrated them on your behalf, don’t hesitate for a moment: study them! Should you manage to figure out their ultimate cause, you will have discovered the true God, whatever that may be. You’ll realize that God is actually a species of supercomputer, a Programmer, and not the ancient bearded gentleman of your imagination. That day, moreover, you will have found the reason for your existence. What else could you possibly ask for?”

  As strange as it seems, it made sense to Carlos.

  In fact, that morning, an hour before his meeting with Txema, something of the sort had happened to him. A succession of innocuous events, suggestions to change the direction of the magazine, had caught his attention.

  It started like this: Shortly before arriving for work, Carlos found a curious gold medal on the street. Someone had lost it, and by chance its chain had ended up wrapped around one of the journalist’s shoes. When he took the trouble to bend over and disentangle it from his shoelaces, he was surprised to see Christ’s profile engraved on one side. An unmistakable image, which he knew well: the face of the dead Savior as it had been imprinted on a piece of fabric, awaiting his resurrection. Someone had lost it a few steps from the magazine’s front door, but who?

  There was no name engraved on the med
al, no date or anything else that would allow its owner to be identified. Carlos put it in his briefcase, but when he sat down at his desk minutes later and began looking over the daily teletypes, he became absolutely certain that his discovery had not been the result of chance. “A Second Shroud of Turin Found in Village in the Sierra de Cameros,” ran one of the headlines.

  The Holy Shroud?

  The face on the medal had been inspired by exactly that image.

  No. This was not mere chance.

  Carlos gave serious thought to what the old mathematician had said. Was he going to let an opportunity to catch God slip through his fingers?

  Little did he imagine how far his instinct would carry him this time.

  “And so?” Txema asked again. He was disguised as a war correspondent as he stood directly in front of the writer, his hands on his stomach. “Where exactly are we headed?”

  “North. To Logroño. Familiar with the Cameros Mountains?”

  “Cameros?” The photographer’s eyebrows arched in playful incredulity. “At this time of year?”

  Txema glanced worriedly out the window. A cloudy front, as dark as a bad omen, was moving in to drop its deluge on Madrid, bringing with it a cold, needle-thin rain. Then, in a somber tone, he went on.

  “I suppose you listened to the radio? The weather report sounds scary . . .”

  None of it seemed to matter to Carlos as he picked up his small travel bag of essentials and headed behind his coworker down the stairs and out to the parking lot.

  “I have a hunch that today we’re going to find a really big story.”

  Txema was in no mood. “First of all, are you aware that your car needs chains, just like everyone else’s, if we intend to go higher than three thousand feet? Your car’s not exactly a four-by-four.”

  The writer opened the trunk of the SEAT Ibiza and without saying a word, threw his things in. He liked his car. He’d crossed half of Europe in it, and it had never let him down. Why would it do so now on account of a little snow?

  “Stop worrying,” he said at last. “You have a day with no set plans. Make the most of it.”

  The magazine’s director let them escape like that from time to time. He knew the two men always turned up in the office with a lively story under their hats. One of those articles that softened the polemics, abounding in rabbis, Sufi masters, and cabalists overflowing with divine truth. But would they find anything worthwhile in the obscure sacristy of some remote village?

  “Aren’t you bringing chains?” Txema insisted.

  Carlos looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “What’s the matter? You don’t trust me? Do you really believe we’ll be brought to a halt by a snowstorm in the middle of April?”

  “You said it,” Txema grunted. The corpulent photographer from Bilbao was little given to joking around. When he groaned, he sounded like a wounded bear. “I know you pretty well, Carlos. We could be stranded on the top of some mountain searching for a hokey relic as we die of frostbite, stuck outdoors at two in the morning, all because we refused to put chains on the wheels!”

  “I know what you think,” Carlos said in a mocking voice. “In your opinion, this is a waste of time, right?”

  Txema didn’t respond.

  “Okay,” Carlos said quietly as he turned the key in the ignition. “Now let me tell you my plan.”

  SEVEN

  VENICE

  Giuseppe Baldi was so angry that his eyes were starting to tear.

  “Un’altra volta lo stesso errore . . . ,” he whispered as he fought his emotions. “The same mistake I made before. . . . How could I have been such a simpleton?”

  Irritated, he stashed the letter in his robe. He should have known that the interview he gave two months ago to a writer at a well-known Spanish magazine would come back to haunt him. Other than talking to a journalist from outside Italy, had he done anything else that the Vatican would consider an indiscretion?

  The memory was still fresh in the old musicologist’s mind: a young foreigner, who must have been about thirty, accompanied by a photographer whose Italian was limited to a few words, turned up at the abbey on the pretext of interviewing Baldi about the unusual pastoral activity he undertook each Wednesday. This alibi, which Baldi would discover only later, served the reporter well, for Baldi gave him permission to record the conversation. As it turned out, his work with those believed to be possessed by the devil had acquired a certain notoriety in the news media, and there were more than a few magazines that asked him for statements or interviews. The Devil was very fashionable in Italy in 1991.

  The Benedictine had approached the subject guardedly. Aware that the majority of his “possessed” were no more than people with a mental illness or, in the best of cases, hysterical people in need of compassion, he attempted to use his sermons as a useful way to underscore the healing power of faith.

  In fact, the magazines Gente Mese and Oggi had lavished so much publicity on him in the week before the Spaniards paid him a visit, and there had been such a great response in the media to his book The Catechism of Satan, that it did not strike him as strange that some foreign journal had taken an interest in his exorcisms. And, clearly, a touch of vanity had led him to accept the interview.

  Baldi realized only later that the reporter had very little interest in his work as an “exorcist.” This journalist was different from the others. Little by little, almost without trying, his interlocutor slowly inched toward the subject that Baldi himself had mistakenly let out into the open in 1972 and which turned him, over the course of a few nearly forgotten days, into a great celebrity throughout Italy. No sooner had his interviewer broached the subject than Baldi felt strangely uneasy.

  “His latest indiscretion.” What else could it be?

  Nineteen years had gone by since his name had appeared in headlines, following his revelation that he had spent more than a decade laboring over a device that obtained images and sounds from the past. The musicologist had stated that this wide-ranging project, in which he worked alongside a team of twelve physicists from around the world, had been approved by the Holy See. In fact, the Domenica del Corriere was the first to print its version of “the time machine.” According to the paper, Baldi’s group had already proved capable of recovering lost musical works such as Quintus Ennius’s Thyestes, composed sometime around 169 BC, as well as an exact transcription of Christ’s last words on the cross.

  Those revelations, which Baldi had imagined were long buried in newspaper archives, shocked a lot of people, and even though the exclusive had long before exploded like gunpowder among the media’s news agencies, the reality of this journalist dredging up Chronovision and confronting him about it left Baldi dazed.

  “Chronovision!” Baldi gasped. “What the devil?”

  He balled his fists just thinking about it. He was certain he had not given the slightest bit of relevant information to those journalists. In fact, he remembered showing them the door at the mere mention of the subject.

  But then, why?

  No matter how he tried, Baldi could not explain the cause of his latest “indiscretion.” Had he made the obvious error of speaking to the reporter about the “four evangelists”? Or perhaps about his latest and very surprising advances in Chronovision? No. He was sure of it. His indiscretion in 1972 had taught him an unforgettable lesson. At that time, the writer from Corriere, one Vincenzo Maddaloni, had decided to mix the priest’s statements with fabrications as extraordinary as a supposed photograph of Jesus that neither he nor his team had ever seen, but which the journalist had dug up from God knows where. In 1972 his machine could recapture distinguishable sounds from the past, but the images left a good deal to be desired.

  Had the second journalist now made exaggerated claims as well? And in what terms?

  “A curse on them all!” Baldi raged. “Maledizione!”

  As if his life depended on it, the Benedictine took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes vigorously, and spla
shed his face in his cell’s tiny sink. “How stupid of me!” he murmured. “I should have thought of it before.”

  Baldi hid the three envelopes in the one desk drawer that he could lock and hurried down to the abbey entrance. Once there, he walked quietly past the large table without disturbing Brother Robert’s absorption in his favorite television show. He turned and moved in the shadows toward the building’s only mahogany door. He needed a telephone and at that hour the abbey’s office, which afforded a small measure of privacy, was empty. He mustered his courage and walked inside.

  “Pronto. May I speak with Father Corso?” he mumbled after dialing a number in Rome.

  “Luigi Corso? One moment, please,” replied the man on the other end.

  Baldi held his breath. A minute later, a familiar voice came on the line.

  “Hello. Who is it?”

  “Matthew,” Baldi groaned, his voice at half the normal volume. “It’s me.”

  “Luke! What are you calling for at this hour?”

  “Something happened. I received a letter from Cardinal Zsidiv, blaming me for some indiscretion. And this afternoon Rome has called twice asking for me . . .”

  “Zsidiv? Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “And what indiscretion did he accuse you of?”

  “Do you remember the Spanish journalist I told you about? The one who came with a photographer who fired off pictures nonstop?”

  “Of course. The one who tried to draw you out about Chronovision, no?”

  “The same. It’s the only thing I can think of. He must have published something that irritated the Holy Father’s advisers.”

  “In which case,” Corso said emphatically, “the letter refers to your indiscretion, not ours. Capito?”

  His tone had stiffened. The professor of music felt himself reproved. He knew he was calling Corso without the permission of the project coordinator.