Robert Wilson - Gypsies

“Pardon me,” Korchnoi said, “but you begin to sound like an ideologue … a Jesuit.”

No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. The Jesuits had a rather more hard-nosed view of political reality. What I am, he thought, is a provincial bishop caught up in affairs beyond his station. I should never have gone to Rome. He might have been happy in some rural parish, vineyards and simple farmers and so on. He might have kept his scholarship down to a less conspicuous level. It was the unwise love of wisdom that had drawn him into ecclesiastical politics in the first place: a sin of pride or hubris.

Cardinal Palestrina was powerfully homesick.

“ Rome and America,” Korchnoi said, his eyes beginning to glaze. ” America and Europe. Think of it… think of it.”

In the morning Palestrina registered a Marconi message at the Vatican Consulate—essentially, that he had arrived and that the intelligence branch of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs had been largely correct in its surmises—and then hired a taxi to carry him to the DRI.

He despised this building. He had official identification now, a photocard clasped to his clothing. He walked from the front gate through the snow to the inner building, the tiny portion of it in which he had learned to navigate. He went directly to Carl Neumann’s office.

“Is Walker still in the building?”

“For a time,” Neumann said. “I thought you’d finished with him.”

“A few more questions.”

“Well, if it’s necessary. We’re happy to cooperate, Your Eminence, as long as circumstances allow. But do understand, we’re approaching something of a cusp with this effort. Can you find the interrogation room by yourself?”

“No,” Palestrina confessed. Humiliating but true.

“I’ll take you there,” Neumann said. “And I’ll arrange for Walker to be waiting.”

Once again, Cardinal Palestrina joined the Gray Man in this cold and windowless cubicle. Walker regarded him with blank expectation.

Palestrina extracted a notebook from his robes. He had jotted down some of the questions he meant to ask. Too, the notebook gave him something to do with his hands … an excuse for avoiding Walker’s eyes.

He felt the hard contour of the chair beneath him. He felt an unpleasant churning in his stomach.

He began, “I want to make sure I have a fair and accurate understanding of what you’ve told me. I apologize if I repeat myself. You were one of three original, ah, products of this research?”

“There were three of us,” Walker agreed.

“And the other two escaped.”

“Yes.”

“They bore children.” “Yes.”

“You killed those two, but the children survived.”

The question seemed to trouble Walker. “The killing,” he said, “was a mistake. I’ve admitted to that. I was punished for it. I had sorcels to bring back Julia and William, but it was the children we were most interested in. But the children weren’t there! And William wouldn’t say where they’d hidden them! So I reached out …”

The Gray Man faltered.

Cardinal Palestrina said, “You killed them both— with your own hands?”

“I sent them home,” Walker said primly. “Certain parts of them. But of course you can’t be in two places at once.” He shook his head. “It was very bloody.”

Cardinal Palestrina closed his eyes briefly.

He said, “You were instructed to do this?”

“No,” Walker said. “I told you—I was punished for it.”

“And you couldn’t simply recover the children yourself?”

“They were too young to follow. They had no—” He seemed to search for a word. “No song. I couldn’t hear them.”

“But I assume you were able to trace them at a later date.”

“When they began to exercise their talents.”

“But you didn’t bring them back.”

“We wanted to make certain. No more mistakes.

We understood… Mr. Neumann explained… work like this takes time. There are spells that are best developed slowly. They come to maturity. But we planted the seed,” Walker said, “when the children were very young.”

“The seed?” Cardinal Palestrina asked.

“Bindings,” Walker said.

“Bindings of what nature?”

“Vanity and anger and fear.” The Gray Man smiled to himself. “A mirror, the kingdoms of the earth, her firstborn son…”

“Spells that would come to fruition in the future,” Palestrina interpreted.

“Yes.”

“Can you see the future?”

“No. But there are people here in the building who can. One of our other projects. ‘As through a glass, darkly’—you know the expression? We rely on their advice. It isn’t infallible but in this case it seems to be accurate.”

“The sorcels are coming to fruition.”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Oh yes.”

“And you’re certain you can recover the third generation—the male child?”

“He’s the one you want,” Walker said. “I can bring him back.”

Cardinal Palestrina looked up from his notes. “One other thing… something you said at our last session, something I didn’t understand. You mentioned that you had help. What did you mean by that?”

Walker—his face old and lined but still disturbingly childlike—beamed at Cardinal Palestrina. “His name,” the Gray Man said, “is Tim.”

Cardinal Palestrina stood to leave the room, hesitated a moment, and finally turned back. An unscheduled question had occurred to him; he wasn’t sure how to ask it.

Or whether he should. An Antiochene bishop from Malabar, visiting Rome for some ecumenical event, had once confided in Palestrina his belief that the profoundest of the venial sins was longing. As pride is the sin of the angels, longing is the sin of the clergy. Then, Cardinal Palestrina thought, I must be guilty.

He said, “What you call the plenum … is it infinite in extent?”

“There are worlds upon worlds,” Walker said. “An infinity. That’s what they tell me.”

“But surely you can’t see it, or feel it, or whatever you do—not all of it?”

“No. Not all of it. And I can only travel where they go. But sometimes I dream of other places.”

Palestrina whispered, “Is everything out there— everything we could imagine?”

“Maybe,” Walker said.

“Is—” But the Cardinal was embarrassed by his own question. “Is God out there?”

The Gray Man smiled faintly. “God is everywhere… isn’t he?”

“And Paradise?” Palestrina said. “A world where mankind never fell from grace? The Garden, Mr. Walker? Is that out there too?”

Walker laughed.

“If it is,” he said, “I’ve never found it.”

Cardinal Palestrina turned away before Walker could see him blushing; the door clattered shut with a shocking finality.

Walker watched in bewilderment as the Papist emissary left the room.

He was inclined to like Cardinal Palestrina, who seemed like a well-meaning person. But he was disturbed by the Cardinal’s nervous tics, his expression of barely restrained queasiness. And now this business about Paradise. It was not something Walker had encountered before, least of all in the corridors of the DRI.

Lacking other instruction, Walker returned to his own room deep in a subcellar of the Institute, down a corridor where sweating pipes ran overhead.

Walker’s room contained a carpet and a framed photograph of the Rocky Mountains; a spring-mattress bed with a thin cotton blanket; and a television set with a round, bulky tube on a gooseneck swivel. He used the television sparingly. There was never anything to watch but the government channel, news and public affairs and a few shabby variety shows. Of these, Walker preferred the news. He liked the maps, the animated arrows darting across the Mediterranean toward Sicily. He liked the aerial photos of Turkish cities as European aircraft flew over them, props whirling, bombs tumbling like confetti.