The Power of Five Oblivion (57 page)

“Come in! Come in!” she rasped and Pedro relaxed a little, hearing his own language.

He followed her into a hallway with black-and-white tiles, a gold mirror and solid oak furniture. There were doors opening into rooms in every direction and a wide, marble staircase, leading up. Classical paintings, mainly portraits, hung on the walls. As soon as the woman had closed the front door, she turned and looked at him.

“Your name is Pedro,” she said.

“Yes,
signora
.”

“You were with Francesco Amati in Naples?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true that the entire city has gone?”

“The volcano erupted. I don’t think there can be very much of it left.”

“Dear God!” The woman crossed herself. “Where will this end? What is expected of us?” She examined him. “You’re wet. You look worn out. Have you eaten?”

“I’m very hungry,” Pedro admitted.

“Then come with me. We do not have much but you are welcome to what we have.”

She led him into a gloomy kitchen with a high ceiling, a wooden table, and pots and pans hanging from hooks. There were no lights on anywhere but Pedro knew the house must have electricity. Both the doorbell and the front gate had worked. The woman gestured and he sat down at the table while she opened various cupboards and produced some rough brown bread, ham and salami, cheese and salad. Finally, she uncorked a bottle and gave him a glass of wine. The food looked meagre, spread out on the empty table, but Pedro wolfed it down as if it were a banquet. The wine was the best of all. The liquid was dark red, almost black, and warmed him inside, at the same time making him sleepy.

The woman examined him intently while he ate. It was only when he had nearly finished that she continued with her questions. “My name is Carla,” she said. “Emmanuel told me you were a prisoner in Naples. What did they want with you?”

“I don’t know.” As always, Pedro wasn’t sure how much to say. “I think they wanted to kill me.”

“You are one of the Five.”

Pedro said nothing.

“You must tell me! I have a son in the Vatican … he is a priest, with high office. With his help, I have been given access to books in the Vatican library and I know about the Five, the Gatekeepers, the Old Ones. So you have nothing to hide from me. Are you one of the Gatekeepers?”

“Yes,
signora
.” Pedro nodded. He saw no point in lying.

“It is unbelievable. It is extraordinary to have you here in my house. All my prayers have been answered. My son, Silvio, will be home in a few hours. He will wish to speak to you at length. For now, I thank God for sending you to us.”

Pedro was becoming uneasy. Carla Rivera was gazing at him with a sort of fervency he had never experienced before. He was also very tired. The events of the past twenty-four hours had finally caught up with him and the wine had helped to knock him out.

She saw this. “You need to change your clothes,” she said. “You’re soaking wet. And you must sleep. I do not know what you have been through and you will tell us everything when Silvio arrives. I cannot imagine how much you must have suffered. But that is over now.”

“Am I safe here?” Pedro asked.

“You are not safe in Rome. I do not think anyone is safe anywhere in Italy. But while you are in this house, you are protected.”

Pedro yawned and as if taking this as her cue, Carla rose to her feet. “We have a spare room where you can rest,” she said. “Please, follow me.”

She led him out of the kitchen and up two flights of stairs, passing a long line of gloomy-looking portraits, hanging in gold frames. The house was empty and silent, the carpet threadbare, but Pedro got the impression that this had been a wealthy family once. They arrived at a hallway with an antique cabinet in front of them and a chandelier above. Two doors stood facing each other. Carla led him to the one on the left, but even as he went, for reasons he couldn’t understand, his eye was drawn to the door opposite.

She noticed this. “Do not go in there,” she said. “It is my daughter’s room. She is resting. She is not well.” She opened the other door. “Here you are.”

Pedro found himself in a small, square room dominated by a brass bed and with a double window looking over the garden where he had entered. There was a chair and a wardrobe but no other furniture. A wooden cross hung on the wall. A second door led into a bathroom and toilet.

“The water is warm,” Carla said. “Leave your clothes outside the door and I will wash them for you. Silvio will arrive after dark, at eight. The Pontifical Commission is meeting today so he will be kept busy. You do not need to worry about anything, Pedro. We will look after you and we will help you get to where you want to go.” That puzzled Pedro. How could they know where he was going when he wasn’t even sure about that himself? But the woman seemed kindly enough and, although he hated to admit it, he was almost her prisoner. He had nowhere else to go. “Sleep well,” she said. “If there is anything you want, I will be downstairs. Do not call out. I don’t want to wake Maria.”

She took one last look at him, then bustled out, closing the door softly behind her.

Pedro was desperate to lie down but first he peeled off the wet clothes, dropping them on the floor outside the door. He went into the bathroom, his bare feet slapping against the floorboards. The bath was old-fashioned with heavy, golden taps and a brown stain leading down to the plug-hole where water had dripped for perhaps a hundred years. He turned the tap. The water coughed then came spitting out in a steady stream and, as Carla had said, it was warm. Pedro got in and washed himself. He even had a block of soap, hard and gritty but effective nonetheless. All around him, the water turned dark brown and he realized that even after everything he had been through, despite the tons of water that had fallen on him when he was on the
Medusa
, he was still filthy from the Naples sewers. What must Carla Rivera have thought when he turned up in her home?

He used the soap twice, lathering himself all over and then washing it off. He held his head under the tap, letting the water stream through his hair and over his neck. Finally, he got out and dried himself. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. Although he had been well fed when he was staying with the Incas, he had gone back to being thin to the point of scrawny. His black hair was long and unkempt. His eyes had sunk into his face. He examined the hand with the broken finger. Despite everything, it had finally begun to heal. At least that was something to be grateful for.

Finally, he climbed into the bed. The mattress was hard but the sheets were clean and the blankets warm. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that he could still be in danger. What did he know about Carla Rivera or her family? Almost nothing. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t have run any more, even if he’d wanted to.

Downstairs, the woman waited for her son to return. Upstairs, on the second floor, Pedro slept.

The meeting for the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City state had come to an end. The seven cardinals who were its members took their leave of the Holy Father, bowing but saying nothing. Pope Pius XIII was a very old man, well into his nineties, and it was quite possible that he had been asleep for the last half-hour. These days, it was impossible to tell. He seldom spoke and when he did mutter something, his words often made no sense at all. “Dogs! Magicians! Murderers!” He repeated the words endlessly. It was possible he was thinking of the Bible … some said the Book of Revelations. Nobody knew for sure.

The cardinals all looked very grand in their bright scarlet cloaks and berrette – the square caps with four peaks and tufts that they were entitled to wear. The room where they had met was equally magnificent, with pillars and tapestries, thick velvet curtains, a swirling marble floor and a ceiling covered in gold leaf. The curtains were closed. The Holy Father could no longer bear to look outside. He spent much of the day in bed with his eyes closed and a young priest reading to him in Latin from the Old or New Testament.

Cardinal Silvio Rivera left the meeting with a sense of dismay. The country was crumbling. There were people starving in the streets … and there were too many of them. It seemed as if the whole world had chosen Italy as a final refuge, and with all the overcrowding, crime and violence were everywhere. The government had responded with a ferocity that he preferred not to think about. He had heard the stories about the transportations, about the prison camps outside Arezzo. How could it have come to this? Could the world really be as evil as it seemed?

The cardinal returned to his office, where his secretary was waiting for him, to help him disrobe. But Silvio shushed him away. He wanted to be on his own. There was a heavy crucifix made of solid gold around his neck – he could always feel it dragging him down – and he clutched it in both hands, dropping to his knees. The crucifix had a precious stone, an amethyst, in the middle, and as was his habit, he stroked it with his thumb, trying to find comfort there.

He knelt beside the desk and prayed.

“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come…”

The words came out in a soft whisper. The priest had tears in his eyes and as he thought about the state of the world, the tears trickled down his cheeks. He felt the pain of the world as if it were his own. He hoped that he was a good man. It horrified him that there was so little good around him.

He knelt there, praying intently, for two hours. Then, finally, he went home.

FORTY-THREE

Pedro woke up feeling a lot better. He was clean, he had eaten and he had slept for a solid five hours. His only disappointment was that he hadn’t returned to the dreamworld. He was still very much on his own. But as he sat up, throwing back the covers, he noticed that Carla had come into the room while he was asleep. There were new clothes, folded on the floor next to the door; jeans, a jersey, a belt and trainers. Pedro tried them on. The trousers were a little loose and he had to tighten them using the last hole of the belt, but otherwise he looked – and felt – human again. What now? Carla had said that her son would be home soon. She had said that the two of them would talk. Once again, Pedro wondered how much he could safely tell them, how much they already knew.

He heard movement in the house. Somebody had arrived. Softly, Pedro opened the door and stepped out onto the upper landing. Yes, there was a man here. He could hear voices a long way away, perhaps in the kitchen, talking in Italian. He was about to go down when he noticed that the door opposite his was ajar. He remembered Carla telling him to keep his voice down. She had a daughter, Maria, who was sick.

Acting on an impulse, Pedro crossed the landing and pushed open the other door. He found himself looking into a room identical to the one he had just left, except that this one contained a hospital bed surrounded by medical paraphernalia that he recognized at once. There was a saline bag with a drip hanging from a metal frame, a heart and pulse monitor, bleeping softly, an oxygen tank, a tray with various pills and liquids. In the middle of all this, a young woman lay on her back, breathing so faintly that it would be hard to tell when she stopped breathing at all. She was wearing a white nightgown with a silver cross around her neck. There was a cross on the wall opposite her too. Her long hair was brushed back and rested on her pillow, forming a crown around her head and shoulders. Her face was very thin and pale. Pedro knew at once that she was close to death. She had been ill for a very long time and she had stopped fighting. And now she was patiently waiting for the end.

She was too young to die, Pedro thought. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. She must have been a late arrival, given her mother’s age. He thought for a moment, then stepped quietly forward. There was a wooden chair beside the bed. He could imagine Carla Rivera spending many hours sitting here. He sat down himself. Then he reached out and rested a hand on the unconscious woman.

This was Pedro’s gift, his power. He was a healer. For much of his life in Lima, he had looked after his friends – the other thieves, pickpockets and street urchins who surrounded him – without even knowing that it was his power that was keeping them well. It was only when Matt had been hurt in the Nazca Desert that he had begun to understand what he could do. He had deliberately set out to save Matt, to bring him back from the brink of death. He would do the same now to heal this woman he had never met.

It was a strange feeling … as if he was allowing some sort of heat or energy to flow out of himself, through his hand and into the woman. At the same time, it could have been the other way round. He could have been drawing something out of her. The truth was that he had no idea how it worked. The two of them were together, in a sort of vacuum, and nothing else mattered. Pedro no longer had any idea of the passing of time. He was only aware of his own hand and arm, stretched out with the palm facing down, and the soft rise and fall of the woman’s stomach. Without even knowing it, his heart was beating at the same pace as hers. The two of them had become one. The young woman’s illness was sharing itself with him.

“Pedro!” It was Carla Rivera, calling him from downstairs.

Pedro opened his eyes. He had done everything he could and he knew that it would be enough. Already there was more colour in the young woman’s face. She was breathing more easily. He had no idea at all what had been wrong with her in the first place. Pedro had barely been to school. He couldn’t read or write. People were sick or people were well … that was as much as he knew and all that mattered to him was that he could turn one into the other.

He left the room, closing the door behind him, and went downstairs. Carla was waiting for him in the hall and it seemed to Pedro that something had upset her. She smiled when she saw him in his new clothes, but the strain still showed behind her eyes.

“How are you feeling, Pedro?” she asked.

“I’m much better, thank you. And thank you for these clothes.”

“I went out and bought them for you. I didn’t know if I would get the right size.” She smiled, but a little nervously. “Silvio is here. I have told him about you. He wants to meet you.”