Not that he was likely to forget. Within the hour they had won through to a paved road leading south from the city; the forest closed around them. The Great Forest of the New World, Palestrina thought. It was legendary. Savages had lived here once. The automobile sped between endless aisles of trees. The clouds opened to show a gaudy sunset; the night came on quickly. The shadows behind the automobile seemed suddenly very dense, and Palestrina thought about wood sprites, elementals. But those were wholly European terrors—he had read that somewhere. In the New World the dangers were mainly secular.
Neumann spoke into the silence: “I’ll be your liaison for the duration of your stay here, Your Eminence. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to having me around.”
He smiled. Palestrina did not.
Neumann went on, “I can’t help but wonder about your name. Are you related to, uh, the famous Palestrina?”
“You mean the Palestrina who wrote the Marcellus Mass?” “That’s right.”
“Are you a historian, Mr. Neumann?”
“Music lover,” Neumann said modestly. “I collect records. It was the Missa Papae Marcelli that settled the issue of music in the liturgy, right?” Added, “A terrific piece. Very moving.”
Cardinal Palestrina disapproved of the secular recording of liturgical music. Though he himself did own one recording, Giovanelli’s Jubilate Deo on a Spanish lacquer disk, a secret love: he played it on his tiny electrical Victrola. “No,” he said primly. “No relation.”
Neumann seemed disappointed.
Palestrina said, “I’m really very tired. If you could tell me where you’re taking me—?”
“I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I assumed you’d been briefed. We’ll be in Washington by midnight. There’s a hotel room for you and I’ll be your guide, your contact, whatever. Then, of course, you’re looking at a daily commute to the Defense Research compound. There are people there you’ll need to meet …”
“We’ll be driving five more hours?”
“Afraid so, Your Eminence.”
God help me. “And then,, in Washington, I’ll be allowed to see him?”
“See whom, Your Eminence?”
“This prodigy, of course. This monster you’ve created. The man who walks between worlds.”
The silence in the automobile was brief but intense. The wheels ground against pavement. The headlamps played over deep grottoes of autumn woodland.
Neumann said, “Why, I assume so, Your Eminence.”
2
Cardinal Palestrina’s personal encounters with evil had been very limited.
Nevertheless he had a great respect for evil. Evil, this last century, had been what the Americans would call a growth stock. No one seemed exempt from it. Even the Church—he allowed himself a mildly blasphemous thought—even the Church had committed acts that might be called excessive. The Teutonic Inquisition, its oppression of the Jews and the Poles, doctrine wielded for political ends while Rome herself stood mute…
But that was history. History was replete with oppression. More important was that, lately, Christendom itself seemed threatened. Islam had swept like a brushfire through northern Africa, fomenting revolution against the Dutch, the French, the British; the Russians were battling rebellious Moslems on their southern borders. The Oriental races had evicted the military forces of the Novus Ordo from their Pacific outposts and banned commerce with the West. There were small wars everywhere and larger ones seemed inevitable.
All the portents were ominous. On Palm Sunday in 1982 the image of the Prince of Darkness had appeared in a cloud of trichlorophenol above San Pietro in Vincoli—hundreds had been hospitalized. This last Christmas, a rain of doves had fallen on the Palazzo Venezia. Sicily had nearly succumbed to the Turkish fleet; the Mediterranean was endangered; troops had been mustered throughout Italy and Spain. The situation was desperate, or why would he have been sent here, eking out this dubious liaison with the Americans on the chance that they might in fact have produced a secret weapon?
Because, Palestrina thought, for all their naive Protestantism and unrepentant superstition, they are more like us than the Arabs. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitude-. It went without saying. Also: politics makes strange bedfellows.
He slept a little in the automobile. When he stepped out into the fierce artificial light of the hotel vestibule he felt permanently bruised. His spine shrieked in pain. Neumann, perversely, was as fresh as ever. He smiled up at Palestrina through the window of the automobile like the framed painting of an especially insolent harlequin. “Can I see you to your room?”
“I’ll find it myself.”
“I’ll be by tomorrow to pick you up. I imagine you can use the rest.”
“Thank you,” Cardinal Palestrina said dryly.
The hotel—it was called Waterwheel or Waterfall or some such fanciful name—overlooked the Potomac. It was in the Gothic style that had been so popular a half-century ago, a maze of courtyards and false spires. He checked in, rode the lurching elevator to the fifteenth floor, opened the door to a roomful of stale air, and collapsed into the bed. He slept without changing his clothes.
He woke in the dark hours before morning. He had slept deeply but briefly and he felt as exhausted as ever, dead in spirit. He offered a silent prayer and washed his face in the echoing tiled bathroom.
Feeling claustrophobic, he opened the curtains. Across the black gap of the Potomac he could see this American city breathing flame from its night foundries, sooty and dark. He pulled up a chair and sat drinking tap water from a hotel glass. The glass had been wrapped in paper: a novelty. So many new things. It occurred to him then that he was old… for the first time in his life, he felt old. As if to underscore the point, his belly clenched in a spasm.
He was old and he had never been so far from home.
So far from God.
Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
But here, he thought unhappily, I am the Church.
He glanced at the phosphorescent hands of the bedside clock. It was 4:20 a.m. He felt bereft, spiritually empty. He put the glass on the windowsill; his head nodded forward.
He blinked, and suddenly it was dawn; the window was full of light and Carl Neumann was hammering at the door.
3
“It’s an old project, really,” Neumann said. “It began in the forties. A lot of research came together then. We had the talent—mainly refugees.”
They drove through the city of Washington toward the Defense Research Institute. Traffic was light and mainly equine. The day had dawned cold and windy, and Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could smell snow in the air. Last winter a freak storm had struck Rome; ice had battered down the hydroelectric lines. The wet, pervasive chill had invaded his office in the Vatican and etched itself in his memory. Now the same unpleasant air poured in the automobile’s ventilator grills and made Palestrina’s knees ache hideously.
“Heretics,” Palestrina said. Neumann seemed puzzled. “What?” “Heretics. Not refugees.”
“Maybe both, Your Eminence. In any case, useful men. We had Einstein and Heisenberg on the run from the Inquisition, we had Russians like Lysenko. We had Dirac and Planck. And we supported their work. Some very unique ideas began emerging from that.”
Palestrina had read profane philosophy; he was familiar with their ideas. “They were deemed heretics for a reason, Mr. Neumann.”
“But surely the fundamental notions aren’t terribly heretical? I know I’m treading on dangerous ground here”—his smile was fixed—“but the duality of nature, the light and dark creative forces, those are things your order recognizes, are they not?”
“Please don’t lecture me on theology.” To Neumann’s chastened expression he added, more gently, “We also recognize a moral order.”
“But it’s not new—the idea of looking at nature objectively.”