I know you, Michael.
He felt the truth in this.
I know you better than they do.
Walker moved toward the headland now. His motion was cautious, delicate; his eyes were on Michael’s eyes. Even over that distance Michael felt the pressure.
The Gray Man said, Come with me. Where? Michael wondered. Where does he want me to go?
The answer was immediate. He blinked and in the darkness behind his eyelids he saw an ancient industrial town, cobbled streets, tall black buildings, a stone gate engraved with the image of an eye and a pyramid. Well, hell, Michael thought, I could go there if I wanted. He was proud of his new abilities. I could find that place.
We can go there together.
It wasn’t very far…
But he was distracted by a flicker of color on the beach. A little girl ran up from the shore, bright yellow one-piece bathing suit. She ran toward the Gray Man. She can see him, Michael realized. She was something his magic had neglected. She ran toward him and then hunkered down and stared at him, this mystery, the Invisible Man, or at least a man who wasn’t dressed for the beach.
The spell broke as Michael’s attention shifted. He gasped for air, realized that he had been on the verge of a terrible capitulation.
He felt the Gray Man’s irritation radiate up from the shore like a brutal heat. In a gesture that was almost casual, Walker waved his hand at the little girl, and the little girl fell backward out of time: a motion Michael could only barely perceive, out and away into some chaos of possibility. The girl had vanished silently from the beach.
Michael hesitated a second, stunned by what he had seen. It was an act of murder as casual as the swatting of a fly.
He glanced back one more time at the Gray Man —at Walker—then turned to race down the grassy slope of the promontory, past these old whitewashed houses and their winter gardens, Emmett’s guitar banging out crazy discords against his hip.
Far away, he heard a woman’s voice calling a name.
His mother seemed paralyzed by the news. His aunt reacted more swiftly. She bolted the door and instructed Michael to pack his things. “I’ll tell Emmett to lock up downstairs.” And moved off toward the bedroom.
“Aunt Laura?”
She paused to look back.
Michael said, “Who is he?”
Her frown deepened. “We don’t really know. I think… maybe we have to find out.” “We’re leaving in the morning?” “Yes.”
“Where are we going?”
His mother broke the silence. Her eyes looked bruised; her voice was faint.
“A long way,” she said. “Back home.”
Interlude
NOVUS ORDO
1
Cardinal Simon Palestrina—of the Vatican Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and now de facto a legate to the Court of the Novus Ordo— wrapped his cloak against the October wind and grimly regarded the approaching coast of the New World.
The bleakness of the coast was mirrored in the Cardinal’s face. The severity of his expression, the pallor of his cheeks, had won him a reputation as a dour, almost Jesuitical scholar. In fact he was a Manichean Brother, and his countenance derived more from the periodic attacks of gastritis that had marked his entry into middle age than any surmised ecclesiastical purity. His friends were of course aware of it… but Cardinal Palestrina had very few friends. He suffers best, Palestrina often thought, who suffers alone.
For similar reasons, he had kept his own counsel through the course of this long transatlantic journey. In a sane world he would have made the trip by dirigible. The airships had been improved immensely since the days of the Teutonic tragedies. But the Curia was shamefully underbudgeted, even in light of events in the Mediterranean. Vatican conservatism, Palestrina thought dolefully; fear of potential allies … it could lose us this war.
Clutching the rail, he chastised himself with a vision of the Islamic hordes overrunning civilized Europe. A muezzin calling from the cathedral at Orvieto, ulemas hacking off the limbs of honest Christians. And here I stand, he thought, delayed a month on the tarry Madonna of Avignon.
It was not even a new ship. The rigging was ancient, the sails of much-mended hemp; the coal-oil engine belowdecks did more to pollute the immediate environment than to expedite the voyage. Cardinal Palestrina had spent his first week out from Genoa in a condition of relentless, rolling nausea. I will go home, he thought, and there will be wild Moslems in the basilica of St. Peter’s, and I will seek out Fr. Oswaldo of the Funding Subcommittee in whatever dungeon they have clapped him in, and I will say, I told you so.
He relished this fantasy as the Madonna of Avignon entered the windy harbor of Philadelphia.
The city appeared to be everything Cardinal Palestrina had been led to expect of the Americans. The harbor stank. It smelled of dead fish and marshland. Every summer the yellow fever bred in this miasma and ravaged the city. The piers were old, the pilings layered with the dung of the harbor gulls. The distant towers of the city itself rose huge and black, sooty monuments to the industrial supremacy of the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas. How desperately they had striven to emulate the festering valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone, how thoroughly they had succeeded.
Cardinal Palestrina, allowing the other passengers to crowd past him onto the dock, felt a pang of nostalgia for Rome. An old-fashioned city, obviously— it was older by several proud millennia than anything the Americans had built. He thought of the Vatican Garden, the Leonine Wall; he thought of the street sweepers crossing the Giardino della Pigna like an army, leaving the cobbles wet and gleaming in the morning sun…
A marvel. At least when the wind was not running from the Tiber.
But this was not an authentic nostalgia, he told himself, merely a reluctance. He did not relish his work here. He was a scholar, not an Inquisitor. He was only truly at home in the company of books. He had written a hagiography of St. Eustace that the Curia Romana declared “blemishless,” and so he had been deemed trustworthy, bright but essentially incorruptible—or at least doctrinaire—and therefore suitable to carry out an act of ticklish ecclesiastical calculation. Perhaps more important, his English was very good. But the questions at hand were questions of means and ends, heresy and power, war and peace… above all, he thought, good and evil. And the dark powers were dauntingly active nowadays.
The thought was unwelcome. A spasm shot through his belly.
Sighing, Cardinal Palestrina clasped a handkerchief to his nose and descended into the New World.
He was met at the docks by a man named Carl Neumann, who drove an automobile.
The automobile was significant. The Jihadic Wars had interrupted oil traffic through the Persian Gulf; gasoline was prohibitively expensive. The Americans (Palestrina used the archaic term privately) possessed their own oilfields, of course. And their endless border crises with the Aztecs often involved mineral rights. Still, even here, an automobile was a rare indulgence.
Especially an automobile like this, large and low, immensely heavy—a kind of land boat. Palestrina, impressed in spite of himself, stowed his two small black bags in the auto’s capacious trunk and climbed in beside Neumann. The smell of upholstery was sharp and oppressive.
Neumann said, “We’re pleased you could make the trip, Your Eminence.”
Palestrina understood instantly that Neumann was one of those government functionaries who would refer to himself constantly in the plural. Neumann wore a blue tailored suit, a narrow black tie, a fedora. They shook hands; Neumann engaged the engine. Periodically, as they worked their way south through a crush of horse-drawn trucks and cabriolets, Neumann glanced over at Cardinal Palestrina’s black robes. Palestrina supposed this was the Waldensian legacy the Secretariat had warned him about: this mixture of curiosity and disdain. Annoying but, in its own way, useful. It would keep him on guard. It would remind him that he had entered a foreign country.