I’d been holding his hand and now I put my arm around him, pulling him closer. “You can’t be on watch every minute—you’re just one man. Your father is a slippery scumbag who’s been in the business a lot longer than you and has a lot more resources.”
“He’s always been willing to put others in danger.”
“I doubt it was quite as extreme as this in the past—kidnapping his own granddaughter is a bit out there. He must be deteriorating, mentally, over time. He bailed you out a few years ago. He let your mother and your sister get away.”
“My mother didn’t exactly escape him.”
I turned a curious look on him, but he shook his head. “Not now. I can barely manage my rage over what he’s done to my sister and her kids. If I start talking about Mom, I’ll lose it.”
I would have asked him to try, but as we stepped out from between the buildings and into the plaza beyond, I was struck dumb: The square ahead of us was huge, open, and flat, about three times the size of the square the doll hospital faced. It was anchored at each end by a large, tiered bronze fountain. Right in the middle, straight ahead, stood a soaring marble column with a bronze statue on top. Poking up above the buildings beyond the column was what looked like the ruins of a medieval cathedral, dripping blackness and fiery red streamers of Grey, and all the way around the square were Baroque and later buildings much more ornate than those in the Praça da Figueira. One end of the square was dominated full width by a three-story stone building with a neoclassical front, complete with columns and a pediment. At the other end was a bright yellow facade, pierced by a large stone archway leading to another smaller road, smack in the middle of a row of ornate buildings. At the end of the avenue on our side, far down the road, another impressive arch, standing at least three stories tall, spanned the whole boulevard. The entire open court had been tiled in the ubiquitous black and white stones to create a geometric wave pattern that played on my eyes so the surface seemed to be under a thin sheet of clear water, rippled by the wind. Trees lined the long boulevards that ran north to south the length of the square. Near the great white stone building on the north end, another phantom horror movie played out, but this one predated the earthquake.
Quinton noticed my horrified stare. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure. . . . Did Portugal have an Inquisition, like Spain?”
“It’s a Catholic country. I’m pretty sure it did.”
I closed my eyes and turned my head away. “At the north end of the square where the big white building is now, there used to be another building. In front of that is where they had the public trials, the penance, and the executions. They’re piled up there—the images—like overlapping film.” My knees wobbled and I swayed a little.
Quinton steadied me, putting one arm around my waist, mirroring my hold on him. “That bad?”
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Let me get you out of here. We need to catch a train anyway.”
He steered me away from the scene of burnings and beatings, to a wide staircase leading down to a subway station. “Keep hold of your purse at all times,” he warned. “This area’s famous for its pickpockets.”
“I don’t have anything but a map and two keys,” I replied. “No money, no ID . . . nothing.”
“I’ll take care of that later. For now, stick close to me. Oh—keep your head down near cameras. Portugal doesn’t use an on-the-fly facial recognition system, but if any of Dad’s creeps have access to the feed, they may start looking for us in the tapes later.”
“All right,” I replied, adjusting my hat. “I was planning on sticking close to you anyhow.” I was disturbed by his lack of response. Even in the Grey, he was not quite himself, distracted from me, but focused on other things, and the energy surrounding him was dark, bleak, streaked with orange anxiety and red anger.
He paused and looked around. “I’d better tell you the rest once we’re on the train—we have too much moving around to do here. I’m barely keeping my thoughts together and this gets complicated.”
“The metro or the story?”
“Both.”
“Can you tell me where we’re going, at least?”
“First we have to get to the train station, and then I’ll tell you.”
I frowned at him and he saw it. “Lisbon was full of spies during the Second World War. I don’t know why, but the place makes me feel like I’m being watched, like those old, dead spies are still around, doing their work. And with what my dad does, I’m not sure they aren’t. Humor me.”
It wasn’t hard to do so—Lisbon fairly crawled with ghosts. I nodded and followed him past a sign that identified the station as Rossio.
FIVE
As best I could tell, the metro station took up a large part of the space under the central square with a complex of stairs and concourses leading downward. As with the streets above, the tile work was distractingly beautifuclass="underline" One bit of floor had an old-style compass rose of tiny mosaic squares. A wall had a long panel of painted tiles running at shoulder height of a woman in a voluminous coat walking along with us, rendered in delicate blue brushwork on white. A staircase descended past a mural of abstracted leaves and flowers in squares of green and gold. It was like walking through a museum collection. I was surprised that most of the people in the station paid it no attention, flowing along in their colorful streams of busy energy to destinations I couldn’t guess, accompanied by the ghosts of commuters past.
“What’s with the tile?” I asked as we continued toward our platform. Determined not to force him to discuss the case, I was still hungry to talk after the long silence of eight months apart.
“I’m not really sure,” he said, still distracted though making an effort, “but much of Portugal was controlled by the Moors for quite a while and I would guess it’s some kind of artistic holdover of their influence. You saw the tiles on the doll hospital building and others, I’m sure. Even the street signs in most places are plaques of painted tiles mounted on the walls. It’s not as common to see the sort of signboards you and I grew up with. On the highways, yes, and in a few very modern ‘designed’ communities, but otherwise, it’s mostly the tiles.”
It was still early for rush hour, but the station was busy and we got a little turned around finding our train and buying tickets. Once we were on the metro, the ride was only a few minutes long. It almost seemed ridiculous not to have walked it, but we did have the advantage of being in a crowd and therefore harder to spot.
We exited the metro outside the Cais do Sodré rail station, which had another breathtaking view of the river—when you could see it past the trains and the people. I was momentarily disoriented by finding myself walking through the ghostly hull of an ancient wooden ship instead of the halls of a modern train station.
“I’d guess this used to be a shipyard,” I said.
Quinton shrugged. “I’m not sure, but it would make sense. Right here where the river widens before joining the sea would be ideal and Portugal was, once, the greatest maritime nation in the Western Hemisphere. That required a lot of ships. You know—Vasco da Gama, Henry the Navigator, and guys like that sailing off and discovering India and Japan and a quarter of Africa, and so on. I’ve never really been able to figure out how they went from being the masters of the seas—the greatest navigators in the world—to this.”
“What do you mean . . . ‘this’?” I asked.
“Saudade—which roughly translates as ‘yearning.’ Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to notice, but there’s a sort of sadness to the Portuguese—especially the Lisboans. Sometime after the earthquake and the loss of Brazil and before the Great Depression, they began to look backward instead of forward. Terrible things happened and although they rebuilt, they didn’t spring back. There are still ruins of the earthquake here in Lisbon—like that church you saw from Rossio. Two hundred and fifty years later, the shells of buildings, the arch of a church doorway . . . They’re still as they were, not cleared away but not really memorialized, either. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think they were just urban blight—people paint graffiti on the walls as if they were the remains of burned-out tenements in South Central L.A.”