The Sparrow s-1 Read online

  In the silence, John's eyes met those of Brother Edward, who had seen the same man in the rearview mirror, and he watched Ed's smile fade, just as his own did. They were quiet after that, so Brother Edward could better concentrate on feathering the turns and smoothing out the ride while driving as fast as he dared.

  The routinely awful traffic through the Rome-Naples sprawl was made worse by additional security checkpoints, but Giuliani had eased their way and they got through relatively quickly, stopping only to let young soldiers mirror the undercarriage and make cursory searches through the luggage. It was just dusk when they arrived at the Naples house, a Tristano design from the early 1560s—uninspired but sturdy and practical. They were met at the door by a mercifully taciturn priest, who escorted them without fuss to their quarters.

  Brother Edward accompanied Sandoz inside his room and watched as Emilio lowered himself to the bed and lay back, inert, an arm thrown across his eyes against the overhead light.

  "I'll unpack for you, shall I, sir?" Edward asked, setting the valise on the floor.

  There was a small sound of assent so Edward began putting clothes in the bureau. Taking the braces out of Sandoz's bag, he hesitated: it was he and not Emilio who had begun to look for excuses to avoid the practice sessions. "Skip them tonight, sir?" he suggested, straightening from the bureau drawer and turning toward the man on the bed. "Let me bring you something to eat and then you can get some sleep."

  Sandoz gave a short hard laugh. " 'To sleep: perchance to dream. No, Edward, sleep is not what I need tonight." He moved his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, holding an arm out. "Let's get it over with."

  This was what Edward had come to dread: the moment when he had to help Emilio fit the terrible fingers into their wire enclosures and then tighten the harnesses around his elbows, making sure the electrodes were seated firmly against atrophying muscles now compelled to do double duty.

  The bruises never went away. Often, as tonight, clumsy in his desire to be gentle, Edward took too long with the task and Emilio would hiss with pain, strain engraved in his face as Edward whispered useless apologies. And then there would be a silence until Sandoz opened his damp eyes and began the methodical process of activating the servos that brought thumb to finger, from smallest to largest, one by one, right hand and then left, over and over, as the microgears whirred spasmodically.

  I hate this, Brother Edward thought again and again as he kept vigil. I hate this. And watched the clock so he could call a halt to it as soon as possible.

  Sandoz never said a thing.

  After unpacking, John Candotti found the refectory. Having ascertained that Brother Edward had already taken care of Emilio's meal and his own, John took a light supper in the kitchen, chatting with the cook about the retreat's history and what it was like to be there when the volcano erupted.

  "There's a real wood fire lit in the commons," Brother Cosimo told John while he finished a plateful of mussels and pasta. "Illegal but not likely to be detected out here on the coast." The wind would disperse the evidence. "A brandy, Father?" Cosimo suggested, handing Candotti a glass, and since John could think of no sensible objection to this remarkably attractive idea, he followed the cook's directions to the hearth, where he intended to luxuriate in the warmth shamelessly.

  The common room was dark, except for the flickering light from the fireplace. He could dimly see little groups of furniture around the edges of the room but headed straight for one of a pair of high-backed, upholstered chairs facing the fire and sank onto the nearest, settling into the comfort with no more thought than a cat. It was a beautiful room—mellow walnut paneling, an ornate mantel, carved centuries before but dusted and polished on this very day—and he found he could imagine a time when trees were so abundant that wood could be used freely like this, for decoration, for warmth.

  He had just stretched his feet out toward the fire and was wondering idly if the next Pope's election would be signaled with a sign that said "White Smoke" when, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized that Sandoz was standing near the tall mullioned windows, looking down at the shoreline far below, its rocks glimmering in the moonlight, waves lacing the beach.

  "I thought you'd be asleep by now," John said quietly. "Rough trip, huh?"

  Sandoz didn't reply. He began to pace, restless despite the obvious fatigue, sat down briefly in a chair far from Candotti, and then stood again. Close, John thought. He's very close.

  But when Sandoz spoke, it wasn't what John hoped for or expected—a cleansing breakdown, a confession that could make way for the man to forgive himself, the pouring out of a story with a plea for understanding. Some sort of emotional release.

  "Do you experience God?" Sandoz asked him without preamble.

  Odd, how uncomfortable the question made him. The Society of Jesus rarely attracted mystics, who generally gravitated to the Carmelites or the Trappists, or wound up among the charismatics. Jesuits tended to be men who found God in their work, whether that work was scholarly or more practical social service. Whatever their calling, they devoted themselves to it and did so in the name of God. "Not directly. Not as a friend or a personality, I suppose." John examined himself. "Not, I think, even 'in a tiny whispering sound. " He watched the flames for a while. "I would have to say that I find God in serving His children. 'For I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, imprisoned and you came to me. »

  The words lingered in the air as the fire popped and hissed softly. Sandoz had stopped pacing and stood motionless in a far corner of the room, his face in shadows, firelight glittering on the metallic exoskeletons of his hands. "Don't hope for more than that, John," he said. "God will break your heart." And then he left.

  And went alone to the room he'd been given and stopped short, seeing that the door had been closed. He felt a volcanic anger well up as he struggled with his hands but forced himself to beat the rage down, to concentrate on the simple tasks of opening the door and then leaving it open a hand's breadth behind him, the horror of being caged now only barely stronger than the urge to kick it shut. He wanted very badly indeed to hit something or to throw up and tried to control the impulses, sitting in the wooden chair, hunched and rocking over his arms. The overhead light had been left on, making the headache worse. He was afraid to stand and walk to the switch.

  The nausea passed and when he opened his eyes, he noticed an old ROM periodical with a windowed memo overlaying the text, lying on the night table next to the narrow bed. He stood to read it. "Dr. Sandoz," the memo said, "there has been a reconsideration of Mary Magdalene in the years of your absence. Perhaps you will be interested in the new thinking.—V."

  The vomiting went on long past the point when there was anything left to bring up. When the sickness abated, he stood, sweating and trembling. Then he willed his hands to grasp and smash the ROM tablet against the wall, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned toward the door.

  7

  CLEVELAND AND SAN JUAN:

  2015–2019

  Finished at John Carroll and asked for a preference, Emilio Sandoz requested that he be sent back to La Perla in Puerto Rico. The request should have gone through the Antilles Province for administrative review, but Emilio was not surprised when Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, the Provincial in New Orleans, called him.

  "Milito, you sure? We got a professorship for you up at Le Moyne, now we done jerkin' you around. Ray's been chewin' everybody's ear off 'bout getting you for that linguistics position," D.W. said. The Texas twang was nearly impenetrable unless you knew him well. D.W. could speak standard English when he pleased but, as he told Emilio once, "Son, with the vows we take, there's a limited range of opportunity for eccentricity. I get my laughs where I can."

  "I know," Emilio said, "and Le Moyne's got a great department but—"

  "Weather ain't that bad in Syracuse," D.W. lied cheerfully. "And La Perla ain't fo
rgot nothin', son. Won't be no welcome-home parties."

  "I know, D.W.," Emilio said seriously. "That's why I should go back. I need to put some ghosts to rest."

  Yarbrough thought that over. Was it affection that made him want to agree, or guilt? D.W. had always felt about half responsible for the way things had turned out, good and bad. That was arrogant; Emilio had made his own decisions. But D.W. had seen the potential in the boy and hadn't hesitated a minute when he'd gotten a chance to pull the kid out of La Perla. Emilio had more than lived up to his expectations; still, there'd been a price to pay. "Well, okay then," D.W. said finally. "I'll see what I can do."

  Entering his office two weeks later, Emilio spotted the glowing message light. His hands shook a little as he opened the file and he was tempted to blame this on the Turkish coffee he'd developed an unholy taste for, but he knew it was nerves. Once he admitted that, he was able to bring himself back to calmness. Non mea voluntas sed Tua fiat, he thought. He was prepared to do as he was bidden.

  His request had been accepted without comment by the provincials concerned.

  In December, he called Anne and George Edwards from San Juan, spending the extra money for a viewer because he wanted to see their faces and them to see his. "Come and work with me," he said. The clinic was losing its National Service doctor and no one was willing to replace him. Would Anne? George, with the omnicompetence of a lifelong engineer and householder, could renovate buildings, teach kids a hundred practical arts, reactivate the net that would link Anne with the larger hospitals and the kids with outside teachers.

  Before they could react, he told them about La Perla, in stark statistical detail. He had no illusions and refused to let the Edwardses harbor any. All they could hope for was a chance of salvaging a few lives out of the thousands of souls cramming the slum.

  "Well, I don't know," Anne said doubtfully, but he could see her eyes, and he knew. "Promise me there'll be lots of knife fights?"

  Hand raised, he swore, "Every weekend. And gunshot wounds, too. And car wrecks." They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with "stomachaches." Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the kapok factory. Hands opaline with infected cuts, gone bad from the bacteria and toxins in the offal at the fish-processing plant. Sepsis, diabetes, melanomas, botched abortions, asthma, TB, malnutrition, STDs. Liquor and drugs and hopelessness and rage pounded deep into the gut. "The poor you will always have with you," Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?

  He saw Anne look at George, who sat thinking awhile. "The whole damned baby boom is retiring. Sixty-nine million old farts playing golf and complaining about their hemorrhoids." George snorted. "It's only a matter of time until someone opens up Funerals 'R' Us."

  "I can't see either of us taking up golf," Anne said. "We may as well go, don't you think?"

  "Right. We're outta here," George declared.

  And so, in May of 2016, Anne and George Edwards moved into a rented house in Old San Juan, eight flights of stairs up the hill from the clinic Anne took over. Emilio took some time off to help them settle in. Once they had a bed, their first concern was finding a big wooden table with an assortment of chairs to go around it.

  Emilio began his own work simply: cleaning up the mission's physical plant, organizing and surveying things, quietly getting acquainted with the neighborhood again. He worked within the existing programs, at first—the baseball league, the after-school stuff.

  But he was always alert to the possibility that this child or that one could climb out and escape, if someone cared. He bought a lot of bolita tickets, giving the numbers away but keeping track of children with a talent for statistics, luring them to George, who let them play with his web links and who began tutoring a couple of kids who might do well in math. He found a child, a young girl, weeping over a dog hit by a car, and brought Anne her first assistant, Maria Lopez, eleven and good-hearted and ready to learn.

  And there was a little horror named Felipe Reyes who hawked stolen goods right outside the clinic, a boy with the foulest mouth the widely experienced Anne Edwards had ever encountered. Emilio listened to the kid using two languages to excoriate passersby who wouldn't buy from him and said, "You are the worst salesman I ever met but 'mano, can you talk!" He taught Felipe to curse in Latin and eventually got him to serve Mass and help around the Jesuit Center.

  Anne spent the first months in the clinic reading through the records, getting a grim feel for the kind of medicine practiced here. She dealt with the business of inventories and inspections, upgrading the equipment, restocking the supplies, while tending to the immediate calls for care: the severed finger, the infections, high-risk pregnancies and premature births, the giardiasis, the gunshot wounds. And she gradually learned who among her medical colleagues on the island was willing to take referrals from her.

  George settled in as well, making endless lists, changing the locks on every door, window and storage cabinet in the clinic, overhauling the software linking the Jesuit Center with webs and libraries, installing the used but serviceable medical equipment Anne ordered. For his own satisfaction, he signed up at the Arecibo Radio Telescope as a docent, indulging his own long-latent interest in astronomy.

  That was where he met Jimmy Quinn, who would lead them all to Rakhat.

  "George," Anne asked at breakfast one morning, a few months after they'd moved to Puerto Rico, "has Emilio ever said anything to you about his family?"

  "No, I don't believe so, now that you mention it."

  "Seems like we should have met them by now. I don't know. There are undercurrents in the neighborhood I don't understand," Anne admitted. "The kids adore Emilio, but the older people are pretty distant." More than distant, really. Hostile, she thought.

  "Well, there're a lot of little evangelical churches in La Perla. Maybe it's some kind of religious rivalry. Hard to tell."

  "What if we gave a party? At the clinic, I mean. Might break the ice."

  "Sure," George shrugged. "Free food is always a good draw."

  So Anne took care of the refreshments with the help of a few women in the neighborhood she'd made friends with. To her surprise, the very unpaternal George waded into the preparations and the fiesta itself with great enthusiasm, handing out sweets and little toys, setting off homemade rockets, blowing up balloons and generally being silly with the kids. And Emilio astonished her as well, doing magic tricks, of all things, working the crowd of children with the timing of a professional, provoking screams and peals of laughter, drawing in the mothers and grandmothers, the aunts and older brothers and sisters as well.

  "Where the hell did you learn to do magic tricks?" she whispered to him afterward, as shoals of kids passed around and between the legs of adults dishing out ice cream.

  Emilio rolled his eyes. "Do you have any idea how long the nights are near the Arctic Circle? I found a book. And I had a lot of time to practice."

  When it was all over, Anne walked back into the office after seeing the last of the children off and found herself in the midst of an argument between her two favorite men.

  "He believed you," Emilio cried, sweeping up the colored paper and confetti.

  "Oh, he did not! He knew I was kidding," George said, stuffing trash into a bag.

  "What? Who believed what?" Anne asked, going to work on the ice cream debris. "There's a dish under that desk, sweetheart. Can you get that for me?"

  Emilio fished the bowl out and stacked it with the others. "One of the kids asked George how old he was—"

  "So I told him I was a hundred and sixteen. He knew it was a joke."

  "George, he's only five! He believed you."

  "Oh, swell. Nice way to get to know people in the neighborhood, George. Lie to their kids!" Anne said, but she was grinning and laughed as the two men launched into a good-natured dispute over the moral distinction between lying to children and stand-up comedy. Both of these guys should
have been daddies, Anne thought, watching them, alight with the simple satisfaction of pleasing children. It saddened her a little, but she didn't dwell on it.

  The first fiesta was such a success that others, larger and even more fun, followed. There was always some health issue tied in. Anne handed out condoms and birth-control information to everyone over the age of eleven, or did immunizations for kids under six, or checked for head lice or took blood-pressure readings. The week after a fiesta always brought in more patients than usual, people with "little questions," which often turned out to be serious medical problems they'd endured for years. George started spending more time at the J-Center and a couple of new kids began to meet him there. It was small stuff but enough to make them feel they were making some headway. People seemed glad they had come.

  As time went on, Anne heard pieces of Emilio's story, which seemed to involve a seriously screwed-up family and a fair bit of ugly commerce. Not terribly surprising, considering. As a member of a generation that spilled its guts in public with unedifying displays of Olympic-level whining, Anne had mixed feelings about Emilio's silence. Unexamined nastiness could fester and poison lives; on the other hand, she admired the ability to shut up and carry on. Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations. So, while she was curious, Anne felt her interest was intrusive and never asked him about his family.

  Of course, that didn't keep her from looking for people in the neighborhood who resembled him. To her anthropologist's eye, Emilio's face had a distinctive changeable quality. One minute, he could look like a Hollywood Spaniard—black beard and imperial eyes, his face vivid and alive with intelligence; the next, all she could see was the enigmatic structure hard beneath the skin, the Taino endurance bred in the bone. She saw the same qualities in a dignified woman at the flower market who could have been his older sister. But Emilio had never even mentioned if he had sisters or brothers, and Anne knew that when someone is that reticent about something so ordinary, there is usually good reason. So she was not completely unprepared for the way she found out that Emilio did indeed have a brother. What took her by surprise was her own response to the priest himself.