The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  As he strolled past Bernini’s colonnade, his mind became agitated: why was it, from one day to the next, that the Sant’Uffizio had become so interested in the investigations by Father Corso and the team in Rome that it had decided to bring them to a halt? What had Saint Matthew discovered in his laboratories that was provoking such a sudden shift in authority?

  On the train that brought him to Rome, Baldi tried to figure out the answers by rereading Saint Matthew’s latest report. He could not find the source of the conflict there, nor in the letters from Saint Mark and Saint John. When those texts were placed in the mail, neither Father Corso nor the other evangelists could have suspected that the project was about to be hijacked by the IEA.

  All of which was forcing him to violate the rule forbidding meetings.

  Threading his way through the stands selling postcards, soft drinks, ice cream, and commemorative coins as he headed directly toward the obelisk, Baldi remained vigilant. Nothing should come in the way of his meeting with Saint Matthew. He had carefully prepared each detail: even the telegram to Corso indicating the day and the hour had been written in an exquisitely detailed code.

  “Take it easy,” he said to himself again. “Everything will turn out fine.”

  One thing was obvious: he was nervous, very much so. He was beginning to think, and not without reason, that the letter he had received from the secretary of state calling him to Rome, and the interruption of Corso’s work, could be the first salvos in a witch hunt involving the evangelists. Mere paranoia? If so, it was unavoidable. As he stood only a few steps from the obelisk, a chill scurried up his spine. This was the place he had chosen for the meeting and this was the time he had set. Nothing could go wrong.

  Or could it?

  Had Saint Matthew received his telegram? And, most important, did he understand it? Would he also be disposed to violate the project’s primary rule? There was even a worse possibility: would Corso denounce him in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Chronovision’s new overseers?

  Saint Luke carefully slowed his pace as he drew closer to the spot. He decided to remain in the shade of one of the colonnades surrounding the obelisk while he waited. Corso should be along any minute.

  He swallowed hard.

  At each passing second, new uncertainties assaulted him. Would he recognize Saint Matthew after so many years? Could he be one of the priests hurrying across Saint Peter’s Square at this hour, en route to the basilica?

  Impatient, he glanced at his watch: 6:30. “This is it,” he mused. “Just a matter of minutes.”

  The Benedictine surveyed the various individuals who passed through the open space around the obelisk. Four long-faced Swiss Guards were decked out in their dazzling period uniforms, their wooden lances sheathed in silver. They kept watch at the Arch of the Bells, the principal access to the Vatican. “Ah, the faithful Swedish guard,” mused Baldi, referring to them by their common nickname, “who never once surrendered a Pope . . .”

  He also detected the carabinieri as they made their way among the tourists, and even distracted himself watching a group of foreign students admiring Bernini’s colonnade and the imposing height of the obelisk.

  But there was not even a trace of Saint Matthew.

  “Damned Roman traffic!” he cursed under his breath.

  It was a ridiculous situation: he had come all the way from Venice and arrived punctually for his meeting, while his colleague, coming from a neighborhood in the heart of Rome, was going to arrive late. Corso was also a writer. Had the saint sailed to heaven while seated at his typewriter?

  By 6:43, Baldi was still at his spot, anxiously looking about.

  The wait was beginning to feel unbearable.

  “If meeting with me at this hour was impossible, he should have said so,” he grumbled.

  For Saint Luke, lateness was worse than a mortal sin. He pardoned no one: neither conservatory students nor his monastic brethren, much less his friends. He believed God sent each of us into the world with a chronometer that counted out our time of life, and thus it was an insult to the All Powerful to squander that time in waiting.

  “If the bastards in the secret service had intercepted my telegram . . . they would have already apprehended me,” he consoled himself by considering the worst case. “There must be some other reason why he’s late.”

  His relief lasted as long as it took for him to take in a deep breath.

  At 6:55 sharp, the Third Evangelist could no longer resist, and sped off hurriedly, looking straight ahead and directing his footsteps toward one of the square’s exits. He crossed the Piazza Pio XI and headed toward the Galeria Savelli, the large gift store, which was just about to close. Inside was a public phone, discreetly placed at the rear. It was just what Baldi needed to put his doubts to rest. It would only take a minute, the time required to dig out a token and telephone the First Evangelist.

  “May I please speak with Father Corso?”

  The voice that always answered at that number asked him to wait. It was a man’s voice, the voice of someone soured on life. The call was transferred to another extension. Someone answered very quickly.

  “Hello. Who is it?” asked a surly voice that Baldi failed to recognize.

  “Ah. You aren’t Father Corso. They must have made a mistake.”

  “No, they didn’t make a mistake. Father Corso . . .” The speaker hesitated. “Father Corso cannot come to the phone now. Who are you?”

  “A friend.”

  Baldi decided to try his luck and put the plainspoken man on the other end of the line on the spot.

  “Do you know if he went out?”

  “No, he’s right here. But who is this?” the surly voice asked a second time.

  The Venetian was a little disturbed. It was very unusual, this insistence upon identifying oneself.

  “And you? Who are you? And why won’t you let Father Corso come to the phone?”

  “I told you, he can’t right now.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll call back later,” Baldi barked. He was angry now.

  “You want to leave a message?”

  “Just tell him”—and here Baldi paused, considering his words—“tell him the Third Evangelist called.”

  “The Third Evangel—”

  Saint Luke slammed down the receiver and walked straight out of the store without waiting for the pay phone to return his unused lira. He needed fresh air to clear his head. “What a cretin!”

  Baldi soon realized, however, that something was out of place. For Corso to meet with him at 6:30 at the foot of the obelisk in front of Saint Peter’s, he would have had to leave his residence a good while earlier. And not only did they not just say, “He went out,” but a strange person insisted on stating that Corso was unavailable, while trying devilishly hard to find out who Baldi was. Was Corso sick? Being held hostage? And if so, by whom?

  More paranoia?

  Or was it simply another indication that, as he feared, the hunt had already gotten under way in earnest?

  Baldi’s head was about to explode.

  There was no other choice: for the sake of his own mental health he had to resolve the issue in person, right away. Standing in the middle of the street, he opened the small briefcase he carried with him and rifled through everything as if he’d just been robbed, finally pulling out a bundle of letters held together by a rubber band. Saint Matthew’s address was printed on the envelope that contained his final report:

  S. Matteo

  Via dei Sediari 10

  Roma

  Baldi approached a carabiniere.

  “Sediari? That’s not so far,” the carabiniere told him.

  “Can I get there on foot?”

  “It’ll take you over half an hour, but you can do it.” The officer was smiling broadly. “Stay on the Via della Conciliazione to the end, turn right, and continue on straight until you hit Ponte Vittorio Emanuele. Cross the bridge, and head down the avenue almost to the end. When you get to the Corso de
l Rinascimento, it’s close by on the left.

  “Perfect. Thanks.”

  His stroll took Father Baldi forty-three minutes. He stopped twice along the way, just to be sure he was headed in the right direction, passing through a Rome steeped in serene splendor, from the Piazza Navona’s fountains, which were already illuminated at that hour, to the aroma of fresh pasta escaping from the trattorie.

  He could not understand Saint Matthew’s silence. He was beginning to fear the worst: the Institute for External Affairs must have had a hand in this. And if they weren’t responsible, then had Corso missed his meeting on account of those damned vows of obedience? That, at least, would explain why he was reluctant to answer the phone.

  Baldi’s questions would soon be answered.

  ELEVEN

  SIERRA DE CAMEROS

  The visit to the Holy Shroud of Laguna de Cameros was a complete disaster. The town, always deserted that time of year, welcomed Txema Jiménez and Carlos Albert with absolute indifference. Certainly no one who lived there was aware that the town’s name had appeared that very morning in the newspapers, in a report from a major news agency. What importance could any such thing have in that lost corner of the world? The only noteworthy news was that a heavy snowfall had begun in the middle of April and spring was still refusing to show its face. So, naturally, the area around the Leza River was deserted, and the only sign of life the strangers saw was smoke spiraling out of four or five chimneys on its way to a leaden sky.

  The journalists had the good fortune to find the parish priest, by the name of Félix Arrondo, right away. They met him as he was coming out of the Church of the Assumption, a rustic stone edifice perched on the highest promontory in town, and soon became acquainted. Father Félix was a robust fellow somewhere around fifty, cordial, good-natured, with a beret pulled down to his ears, and a wonderful sense of humor. As there was no reason to wait, he quickly acceded to his visitors’ request. “So you want to see the relic? But of course, gentlemen! Although I have no idea where the newspapers got the idea that we just discovered it,” he snorted as he grew more comfortable around the two men. “I have lived in this area for twenty years, and I learned about the existence of the shroud the very first day I arrived. It so happens we never used to show it, and Holy Week this year was the first time we put it on display. Everybody will have a chance to see it now, definitely. It is a beautiful cloth.”

  The journalists regarded him warily. They were about to discover that their long hours of travel, on curving mountain roads under bad driving conditions, had all been in vain: the chest that housed the shroud, which was swathed in red velvet, bore the exact same date as the copy of the relic.

  “Seventeen ninety,” the curate pronounced proudly, after dredging the box out of an old armoire in the sacristy. “How does it look to you? Not so bad, eh? From the eighteenth century!”

  The world was piling up on top of Carlos.

  It was painfully clear to him now that they had driven three hundred miles in one stretch for nothing. The fabric, adorned with the profile of a man on a cross, was of much more recent provenance than the supposed copy of the Shroud of Turin made in the fourteenth century. And no matter how many photographs Txema took, they were still going home to Madrid empty-handed. Furthermore, because of their haste, they had left without snow chains, and the storm had buried the highways under a heavy and, by this hour, frozen white mantle. From the church tower it was the only color to be seen in the surrounding landscape.

  “And the snow will be falling all afternoon,” Father Félix prophesied. There was a worried expression on his face as he carefully went about folding the cloth. “You’ll have to stay overnight. Tomorrow, once the ice melts, you can continue on your way.”

  And that is exactly what happened.

  Father Félix found a modest refuge for the two men in one of the houses in town, and that night they dined on garlic soup and country sausage. When they grew tired of talking and sampling the robust wine from the nearby vineyards, their hostess, an old crone of some eighty-five years who lived alone but who never stopped bustling about, led them to their sleeping quarters. There, curled up in a freezing room with walls of coarse stone, they slept on straw mattresses. Carlos stretched out, his hand holding the medal that had gotten him into this trouble.

  “Still believe in your sudden inspirations, pal?”

  Hidden beneath the blankets on the other side of the room, the photographer was laughing at him. The blankets were pulled up to his ears, and his cheeks were flush with the warmth of the evening meal and its hearty soup.

  “To hell with you, Txema!”

  TWELVE

  LOS ANGELES

  The session that got under way that morning in Dr. Meyers’s office lasted until lunchtime. Her patient’s unusual intensity forced the doctor to look at her schedule to see if she could find another opening for her later that day. She could only find one at seven PM. The doctor was not accustomed to seeing a patient in the evening, when she would normally be going over her notes to prepare for the following day’s sessions, but Jennifer Narody had seemed anxious to unburden herself more fully.

  She showed up at the doctor’s office in an unusually talkative mood. The setting sun, which the doctor could see from her desk, was spectacular this evening, bathing the sculptures of wood and ivory that lined her African sitting room in gold and ochre tones. Her patient thanked her for making this exception, grateful at the chance to finally open up to someone. It was the first time in a long while that she felt able to do so.

  This young woman, with her dark green eyes and a gaze that suggested fragility, had lived a turbulent inner existence that few others knew anything about. Her life had been marked by emotions that isolated her from the world and helped to forge her unique character.

  Jennifer Narody had been born in Washington, D.C. Her parents, an evangelical pastor of German ancestry and a Mexican from the border states who was the granddaughter of a Navajo shaman from Arizona, gave Jennifer a normal upbringing from infancy to the age of sixteen. When she reached that age and was beginning to think about which university to attend, her problems surfaced for the first time: she began having premonitions about friends at school or family members. Premonitions that were accurate and precise, and which she never learned how to control. Many times she knew about domestic accidents, fights, or intimate dramas among close friends before they occurred. She “saw” them whenever she closed her eyes or took a nap. At first she had no qualms about communicating her visions to those who were involved, but as her predictions came true time and again, she began to have the reputation of being a witch. Her friends began to reject her, stopped inviting her to parties or to join them at the movies. And little by little her personality became taciturn and solitary. Plans for attending a university soon became less important as Jennifer concentrated on searching for answers to what she was going through. Without success.

  Things changed for the worse on the day her high school mathematics teacher, Clive Brown, was killed. Brown had been her favorite. An Irishman with copper-colored hair and exquisite manners, he always came to class in a bow tie and a striped shirt. He was a strict man but he was also kind. The night before final exams, Jennifer had a terrible nightmare: she watched as her professor’s blue tie was torn off his neck by a blunt object. Wherever it was happening was very dark. The space looked something like a deserted parking lot, with a basketball court close by. It was too dark to make out any details except for her professor’s tie coming undone and flying away, and then a broad-shouldered man, with thinning hair, appeared. He stepped toward her professor and walloped him in the stomach. She watched in terror as he fell to his knees, convulsed in pain, and then, without the slightest warning, was shot in the back of his neck. Brown had no time to see the weapon. That was when Jennifer’s dream ended.

  That dream vision terrified her. She was unsure if there was enough time to contact her teacher. The next day, after she had finished her math ex
am, she waited for Brown to collect the materials and then joined him en route to the faculty lounge. Maggie Seymour, the guidance counselor, was there and listened in on the conversation, although neither of the two teachers paid too much attention to her dream. “You had a nightmare,” they said. “Exams sometimes play games with your head.”

  When Clive Brown’s body was found the next day, hanging in the parking lot of a supermarket near his house in Alexandria, Mrs. Seymour gave the details of the student’s dream to the Washington police. Everything matched what Jennifer Narody had seen: the shot from behind to the small of the neck, the out-of-place bow tie, and even the unlit basketball court.

  Since that incident, Jennifer Narody’s life had taken a very different course.

  For reasons that never became clear, her statement to the police found its way into the office of the nearby army base at Fort Meade. And in September 1984, Liam Stubbelbine, a colonel in military intelligence, recruited Jennifer to participate in a secret program that was, as he said, “of great importance to national security.” The project, code name Stargate, was an espionage operation that attempted to use persons gifted with clairvoyance in military maneuvers or in antiterrorist activities. The term “clairvoyance” was rejected in favor of the euphemism more in keeping with the times: “remote viewing.”

  Fort Meade had received a generous budget allocation for the development of the project, and some of its efforts were concentrated on searching for subjects with intriguing “psychic potential.” Such as Jennifer. And so, over the course of six years, they submitted her to all kinds of tests to examine her extrasensory abilities. It was thanks to those very abilities that the police were able to identify Clive Brown’s killer.