I bent down. “You’re a lucky guy—usually a blow like that knocks you out or cracks your skull. You must have a head like a rock.”
He made a weak attempt to hit me and I batted his hand aside. “Give me the wallet, or do you want me to go through your pockets myself?”
He muttered something I suspected was both derogatory and physically impossible, but he dug the stolen wallet from his pocket and handed it to me. “I need it more than you do.”
“This isn’t for me. It’s for your soul—robbing a priest? Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
He glared up at me, shaking. “I need the money. You think I’d rob a priest for nothing? I had to do it. I need the money!” I almost had to admire his skilclass="underline" It must have been tricky lifting the guy’s wallet through the side slits in the cassock and clothes beneath, but now the pickpocket was shaking so hard, I was surprised he’d managed it.
“You didn’t have to choose a priest.”
“Those priests, they aren’t so pure. Look, I just . . . You don’t know what it’s like. You—what do you want? You want to help somebody? Give me the damned wallet!”
I studied him for a moment. He was shivering now, sweat oozing off his bruised forehead and his nose running. He was in a bad way and what did it really matter to me, in the end? He hadn’t done anyone physical harm and unless the priest was carrying something unusual in his wallet, he wasn’t going to be as badly off as this guy.
I looked into the wallet and saw a few euros, two slips of paper with notes in Portuguese, and some ID cards—nothing that seemed significant and nothing that gleamed with threads of Grey.
I sighed. “I’m going to regret this. . . .” I scooped the money—which wasn’t much—from the wallet, but retained the rest and handed the cash to the skinny, quivering thief. “Here. Now, find another part of town to work for a while. And see a doctor about your head—you hit the wall hard enough to break something.”
He clutched the thin stack of bills to his chest and squirmed against the wall as I left, making no move to follow me. I eased back into the temporacline, shivering, and made my way to the corner.
Quinton didn’t jump when I reemerged into the normal world, but he did raise his eyebrows at me as I reclaimed my things. I put on the hat, tucked the wallet into my purse, and started walking up the hill toward a white building that I could see on the right-hand side of the road. It had a Roman cross on the roof and a Maltese cross carved into the pediment below it, as if the builder had wanted to be sure to cover his bases. Quinton caught up in a step or two.
“How’s the thief?”
“Has a headache, may have given himself a concussion, but considering how perfectly his language centers were working, I think he’ll be OK.”
“‘Given himself a concussion’?”
I nodded. “Ran headfirst into a wall. All I did was direct the course. He’s one messed-up little addict.”
“Addict? How can you tell?”
“Aura color, too thin, has the shakes—I’m surprised he could lift the wallet at all with the way his hands were trembling.”
Quinton made a speculative noise. “Huh . . . That’s odd. . . . Addiction and teen usage rates are down since Portugal decriminalized personal use.”
“Down doesn’t mean none. This guy is one of those who fell through the cracks.”
“Well, they don’t have much in terms of prevention and rehab programs right now because of the austerity measures. They had to cut them.”
“Makes it hard to get on your feet when there’s no one to help you up. I let him keep the money. I hope I didn’t do the wrong thing, but the guy was so pathetic that I figured it was better to let him go.”
Quinton shook his head. “For him, I think nothing’s ever going to get better. But for a lot of others, it might if there was money and hope. The lack of economic support for education, rehab, and other programs leaves a hole in the social structure that is too easily exploited by the fearmongering of people like my father.”
I thought about it as we walked on.
On our right, the road opened out into a large terraced garden that hung at the top of a cliff overlooking another part of Alfama and the river beyond. The view as the sun dipped lower in the west was breathtaking, gilded and burnished with red and gold and delineated by purple shadows. At the top of the rise on the terraced side stood the small white church—Santa Luzia—with the Roman cross gleaming on the roof in the golden light of the westering sun and beaming in its own time-built corona of pale blue—very much like the aura of the priest who’d been robbed.
I walked through the heaving memory of the earthquake and what seemed like endless fire to the doors of the church and slipped inside with Quinton in my wake.
It was a very traditional little Catholic church and it had a collection box for donations to the needy. I put the priest’s wallet into the box, sure it would be found soon and hoping that I hadn’t made a big mistake.
Twilight was descending rapidly on this side of the hill when we left the church to find our way back to the house. I could see shadows lengthening in the narrow streets ahead, taking on strange shapes as a whistling sound wound down the road. Something black rose up into the sky, thinning to nearly invisible once it climbed into the dying light of the sun above the hill. I followed its flight over the castle and Quinton looked up with me.
“What is it? I can barely see. . . .”
“It’s familiar, but I don’t know. I think I saw something like it earlier in the day, but that one was a lot farther off. It’s something Grey, but that you can see it, too, is worrisome.”
“Something of Dad’s?”
“I hope not.”
The shape that now looked more like a ripple in the wind than something solid turned on an updraft and began back toward us. The light seemed to tear it into pieces as we watched and things began falling from it. In a moment, nothing remained but falling debris.
A few people ran out from the street ahead, looking back at the pale objects falling from the sky, chattering and nervous. We both began running toward the spot not far away where the falling bits had disappeared behind stucco walls. We came out from the throat of a narrow road where the Grey began to sing high, shrieking discords, into sudden, ancient devastation. Directly before us stood the graffiti-adorned ruins of perhaps half a dozen old houses knocked down by the earthquake of 1755. Windows had been bricked up to hold back the hillside, weeds and flowers grew over the remains of tiled floors, and a couple of cars had been parked among the crumbling walls near one of the rebuilt sections that was painted a slapdash white, allowing the ghosts of graffiti past to peep through. Pale green things, like sticks, lay scattered all over the abandoned foundations, smoking a little as if they were hot or burning with acid.
Before I could think of what they reminded me of, my knees buckled and I felt as if someone had punched me in the chest. Quinton caught me as the unexpected blow of remembered anguish and death made me stumble and fall. He swore and pulled me up, hitching his arm around my waist to haul me to his side and run for an archway that pierced the whitewashed wall ahead. As I wound my arm around his back, I felt something hard in his pack that wasn’t a laptop, but I had no breath with which to ask him about it.
We dove into another narrow, roofed passage between tall plastered buildings. Every step away from the untouched ruins brought relief from the keening pain of the skeletal buildings and their song of death and loss. I was able to unbend and walk more upright, but the ache of death was still with me and my lungs felt like they were too heavy to fill. I gasped short breaths as we went forward. We stepped out into a luxuriously tiled courtyard where expensive cars had been parked on this side of a gateway. Ignoring suspicious glances, we hurried through the tiny square and out into the street.