Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

Petrovitch nodded. “I’m fresh out of anger, Sister.”

“I don’t believe you. You make anger like you make electricity: out of nothing.” But she pushed through the second set of doors and held them open to make sure they didn’t close on him.

It was so bright inside: so many lights, so much white and gold. The ivory marble columns supported an achingly high ceiling, and the nave was designed in a way that drew the eye irresistibly toward the baroque canopied altar.

“ Yobany stos. ” Petrovitch turned around and caught sight of the curve of the organ pipes and the choir gallery. “You lot are so full of contradictions, it’s a wonder you don’t explode every morning. How could anyone justify this level of luxury when…”

“It was built in an age when such things were done to glorify God.” Carillo stood beside him and looked at the statues in their niches, at the paintings in their distant splendor. “I’m just a simple Jesuit priest. I neither seek nor avoid places like this: it is what it is and, ultimately, it’s just a building.”

Petrovitch spotted a single lit candle off to one side, placed in a banked metal holder that held a century of melted wax. Kneeling before the candle, his face so close to the flame that his breath made the light flicker, was Father John Slater.

Behind him was another Joan, and there was a third waiting in the shadows. Perhaps they really did think Petrovitch was going to try and kill him. They still might be right.

Sister Marie dogged his footsteps all the way up the aisle, and stood with her back to one of the pillars, her hand resting on her holster.

In front of the candle holder was a low bench on which to kneel. Father John took up most of it and seemed so intent on staring unblinking at the yellow flame that he appeared oblivious to the movement behind him.

Petrovitch slid into the front pew and eased himself along until he was in the priest’s peripheral vision. “I understand you’ve got something you want to say to me.”

He seemed to have survived the last two days unscathed. He even looked well-fed. “Yes,” said Father John without turning away from the candle. “That was the message.”

“I find myself a suddenly busy man. Why don’t you get on with it, and I can go and, I don’t know, get my arm chopped off.”

“If you wish.” The priest finally moved his head, and looked at Petrovitch with his pin-prick-pupilled eyes. “I’d do it all again tomorrow, if I thought this time it would work.”

The three Joans had their guns out and pointed at Petrovitch in less time than it took to say “hail Mary.” For his part, all he did was snort.

“Yeah. They say repentance is good for the soul. At least, I think that’s what they say: I never really paid much attention to that sort of thing. Winning, now that’s good for the soul. Losing, and losing badly? Not so great. And you seem to be the biggest loser of all. Unless you’re going to kill yourself like Sonja did, then you get to live knowing you fucked up completely. Everything you were aiming for, you missed.”

“I made you suffer. Not as much as I wanted, but you suffered all the same.”

“What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Never thought I’d get to quote Nietzsche in a church, but here we are. That must make me pretty much invincible at the moment, considering what I’ve been through. How about you, priest? Not that you’ll be that for much longer. I understand the Holy Inquisition would like a chat.”

“Whatever they do to me, it’ll have been worth it.”

Petrovitch pursed his lips. “Yeah. By the way, thanks.”

“For what?”

“It’s like this,” said Petrovitch, leaning forward. “I wouldn’t have half of what I have now if it hadn’t been for your inept meddling. To be fair, you were almost as much a pawn in Sonja’s plot as I was, which means you get downgraded from criminal mastermind to unwitting accomplice, but those are the breaks.”

Holding up his little finger, he continued. “I get Pif back. Never would have happened otherwise. And I get a bonus Dalton thrown in—he loses his wife and children and everything he knows, but escapes from the lynch mob with his life.” He raised another finger. “Anarchy. The kid who wrote that? I egged him on. Now he’s on the same flight as the other two. Three: Michael. I would have got him out anyway. But now he’s out and he’s free. That’s a real gift you’ve given him. He has so much to tell me: I can feel him just at the back of my head, waiting for the right moment to show me the wonders of the universe, if only I can understand them.”

“Which I doubt,” said Father John.

“You don’t get to speak,” said Petrovitch quietly, to the accompaniment of an automatic’s slide being dragged back. He looked up, and he was still the target of three handguns. “Four. I have a future I can only dream of. Suddenly everything is much clearer, much more obvious. I know what I have to do now, and again it’s partly down to you. And five: I get the girl. I get Maddy and I get everything else with her. You made her choose between your world and mine. She chose me. She’ll keep choosing me. When we were on our own, underground, in the dark and the damp, and a nuclear bomb about to go off in the next room, she made me choose too. I chose her. I’ll keep on choosing her, too, till the end of time.”

He got up slowly, so as not to scare the Joans.

“You and your cabal are history. I can trust Carillo to make sure of that. And next time—if there is a next time, which I’m guessing there won’t be—don’t go in with someone so paranoid that she doesn’t even tell her CIA masters her plan. It really won’t work.”

Petrovitch edged back along the pew to the side aisle.

“Is that it?” said Father John, rising. “Is that it?”

“Yeah,” replied Petrovitch, “I’m done. What did you think I was going to do? Lunge for your throat and force Sister Marie to kill me? You are so yebani transparent. And as I walk away, you’re going to try and wrestle one of the Joans’ guns from them. Good luck with that. You’re going to need it.”

He turned his back to the sounds of a brief but intense scuffle and went to join Carillo at the back of the church.

The cardinal looked rueful. “You’re right. I don’t know everything.”

“Meh,” said Petrovitch. “My lift’s outside. I’d better go.”

“You know where to find me if you ever need any relationship advice.”

“From a celibate priest? Even if you do have a decent taste in liquor, I don’t think so.”

“Like I said, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I want you to do well.” Carillo proffered his hand. “Look after yourself.”

Petrovitch had no reservations in shaking it. “Here comes the future.”

“We’re all traveling into it, one second at a time.”

Petrovitch pushed at the doors with his back, and started to place a call to his tame Bavarian dome-builders.

“I think you’ll find,” he said, “that some of us are going much faster than that.”

Long-term success in any artistic career—painting, writing, composing, whatever—seems to rest on talent, luck, and perseverance: pick any two. I’ve certainly persevered, but I’ve also been lucky. (The folk band Show of Hands make the point that the harder you practice, the luckier you become, adding that it helps if you can play an instrument. And they’re right.)

Having an agent does help, though, which is why there’s an oft-repeated complaint from authors that it’s harder to get an agent than it is to get a publishing deal. I met mine through another of those unlikely chain of events that happened simply because I’d been hanging around long enough.