The ember of the cigarette moved in the darkness, "What about the church?"
"That's outside my jurisdiction," Quart said. "But as things stand,
I don't see much of a future for it. There are too many churches in Seville and not enough priests. Anyway, Corvo has already said a requiescat."
"For the church or for me?"
"Both."
The priest's grating laugh rang out again. "You have all the answers," he said.
"To tell you the truth, there's one I'm missing. About something in your file. I don't want to put it in my report without hearing your version. You had some trouble when you were a parish priest in Aragon. A certain Montegrifo, if you remember."
"I remember Mr Montegrifo perfecdy."
"He says he bought an altarpiece from your parish, from you."
"It was a small Romanesque church," Father Ferro said after a long silence. "The beams were rotting, the walls were cracked, and it was full of crows' nests and rats. The parish was very poor; sometimes I didn't even have the money to buy communion wine. My parishioners were spread out over several kilometres. Humble people – shepherds, peasants. They were old, sick, uneducated, without future. I said Mass every day beneath an altarpiece in danger of collapse from woodworm and damp. On weekdays the church was completely empty. There were places like that all over the country, with works of art that were stolen by dealers or that disappeared when the church roof caved in, or that just remained open to the elements. One day a man came to see me. I'd seen him before. He was with another, very well-dressed man; he said he was the head of an auction house in Madrid. They made an offer for the Christ and the small altarpiece."
"It was very valuable," said Quart. "Fifteenth-century."
"What does it matter?" snapped the old priest. "They were willing to pay. Not a great sum, but enough for a new roof and, above all, enough to help my parishioners."
"So you did sell it?"
"Of course I did. Without a moment's hesitation. I had the roof fixed, bought medicine for the sick, repaired some of the frost-damage, and saved some livestock. I helped people to live, and to die."
Quart gestured towards the church "But now you're defending this church. A contradiction."
"Why? The artistic worth of Our Lady of the Tears matters as little to me as it does to you and the archbishop. I leave all that to Sister Marsala. My parishioners, though few in number, are more important than any painting."
"So you don't believe…" began Quart.
"In what? In fifteenth-century altarpieces? In baroque churches? In the Supreme Watchmaker up there turning the cogs one by one?" The ember of Father Ferro's cigarette glowed more brightly as he took his last drag, then he threw it out of the window. "It doesn't matter," he said. "They believe."
"That business of the altarpiece left a black mark on your file," said Quart.
"I know." The old priest swivelled the telescope. "I had a very unpleasant meeting with my bishop. If somebody had done the same thing in Rome, I told him, it would have been a different matter. But here, we're all dancing to Saint Peter's tune. It's all tears and Quo Vadis Domine and crucify me. Meanwhile we stand outside, suppressing our conscience while the beatings go on in the hall of judgement."
"I sec you don't think much of Saint Peter either."
The old priest laughed. "No. He should have let himself be killed in Gethsemane, when he drew his sword to defend his Master."
It was Quart's turn to laugh. "If that had happened, we wouldn't have had our first pope."
"That's what you think." The old priest shook his head. "In this business there are plenty of popes. But none with balls." He looked through the eyepiece. He turned the wheels, and slowly the tube of the telescope moved up and left. "When you look at the sky," he said, "things occupy a different place in the universe. Did you know that our little Earth is only a hundred and fifty million kilometres from the Sun, whereas Pluto is almost six billion kilometres away? And that the Sun is a tiny dot compared to an average star like Arcturus? Not to mention Aldebaran, which is thirty-six million kilometres across, or Betelgeuse, which is ten times bigger than that." He moved the telescope to the right. He pointed out a star to Quart. "Look. That's Altair. At three hundred thousand kilometres per second, its light takes sixteen years to reach us. It might have exploded in the meantime, and we could be seeing light from a star that no longer exists.
Sometimes, when I look towards Rome, I feel as if I'm looking at Altair. Are you sure everything will still be there when you get back?"
At Father Ferro's invitation, Quart looked through the eyepiece. As he moved away from the brightness of the moon, between the stars appeared myriad points of light, clusters and nebulae that were red, blue, white, flickering or still. One of them gradually moved and then disappeared in the glare of another – a shooting star or maybe a man-made satellite. Quart looked for the Great Bear, following the line through Merak and Dubhe upwards, four times the distance, if he remembered correctly. There was the Pole Star, large, bright, confident.
"That's Polaris," said Father Ferro, who had followed the movement of the telescope. "The tip of the Little Bear, which always indicates the Earth's zero latitude. Always but not immutable." He told Quart to point the telescope to his left. "Five thousand years ago the Egyptians venerated another one, the Dragon, as the guardian of the north. It has a 25,800-year cycle, of which only three thousand have passed. So in another two hundred and twenty-eight centuries the Dragon will be the pole star again." He drummed his fingers on the brass tube. "I wonder if there will be anyone on Earth then to notice."
"It gives one vertigo," said Quart, taking his eye away from the lens.
The old priest clicked his tongue, nodding in agreement. He seemed to enjoy Quart's vertigo, like an experienced surgeon seeing medical students go white during an autopsy. "Funny, isn't it? The universe is amusing. Polaris, the star you were looking at a moment ago, is four hundred and seventy light-years away. That means we're orientating ourselves by light that comes from the beginning of the sixteenth century." He pointed at another spot. "And over there, in the Cat's Eye Nebula, concentric shells of gas are all that's left of a star that died a thousand years ago." He walked over to another window and his features were more visible in the moonlight. "What are we?" he asked. "What part do we play in this great scene spread out above our heads? What do our miserable little lives and desires mean? Your report to Rome, the church, the Holy Father, you and I, what does all this matter to those lights?" His grating laugh rang out again.
a world that guided itself by starlight five centuries old, the litde boy's shadow was cast on the wall that protected him from the bitter cold outside. His shadow moved closer to the other shadow waiting beneath bougainvilleas and orange trees, until he could breathe in her fragrance and her warmth, and her breath. But a second before he ran his fingers through her hair to escape loneliness for one night, the shadow, the boy, the man watching the naked body in the sunlight filtered through the blind, the exhausted Knight Templar, they all turned to look up at the dimly lit window of the pigeon loft, where an old priest, unsociable, sceptical and brave, deciphered the terrible secret of a cruel sky, in the company of a ghost searching the horizon for a white sail.
XII
The Wrath of God
He has disappeared before our very eyes and we have no idea how.
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Through the pipe smoke, the archbishop of Seville looked exultant. "So Rome's giving in," he said.
Quart put down his cup and wiped his mouth with a napkin embroidered by a local order of nuns. He smiled and sighed. "That's one way of looking at it, Your Grace."
Monsignor Corvo blew out another cloud of smoke. The two men sat facing each other across a coffee table. It was the archbishop's custom to have breakfast with his first visitor of the morning. The coffee and toast before them had been intended for the dean of the cathedral, but the archbishop offered it to Quart instead when Quart arrived unexpectedly to take his leave, disrupting the schedule. The archbishop hated his coffee to get cold.