The Sparrow (56 page)

John Candotti closed his eyes and turned his head away, and Edward Behr wept silently.

"Distressing, isn't it. It gets worse," he assured them with savage cheer, moving blindly. "Extemporaneous poetry was recited. Songs were written, describing the experience. And the concerts were broadcast, of course, just like the songs we heard—is Arecibo still collecting the songs? You must have heard some of the ones about me by now." Not prayer. Christ! Not prayer—pornography. "They were very beautiful," he admitted, scrupulously accurate. "I was required to listen, although I was perhaps inadequately appreciative of the artistry."

He looked at them one by one, each of them pale and speechless. "Have you heard enough? How about this: the smell of my fear and my blood excited them. Do you want more? Would you like to know precisely how dark the night of the soul can get?" he asked, goading them now. "There was a moment when it occurred to me to wonder if bestiality is a sin for the beast, for that was certainly my role in the festivities."

Voelker suddenly moved to the door. "Does it make you want to vomit?" Sandoz asked with thin solicitude, watching as Voelker left the room. "Don't be ashamed," he called. "It happens to me all the time."

Sandoz spun back to face the rest of them. "He wanted it to be my fault somehow," he said informatively, looking at each of them, eyes lingering on Candotti's. "He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business, gentlemen, or it was a God I cannot worship."

He waited, shaking, daring them to speak. "No questions? No argument? No comfort for the afflicted?" he asked with acrid gaiety. "I warned you. I told you that you didn't want to know. Now it's in your minds. Now you have to live with knowing. But it was my body. It was my blood," he said, choking with fury. "And it was my love."

He stopped suddenly then and turned away from them at last. No one moved, and they listened to the ragged breathing stop and hold and then go on in defiance. "John stays," he said finally. "Everyone else: get out."

Trembling, he faced John Candotti, waiting for the room to clear, Giuliani gracefully sidestepping the wreckage on the floor, Brother Edward hesitating by the door, waiting for Felipe Reyes, white-lipped, to pass, but leaving finally and pulling the door shut with a quiet click. John wanted more than anything to look away, to leave with the others, but he knew why he was there and so he stayed and tried to be ready for what he had to hear next.

When they were alone, Sandoz began again to pace and talk, the soft awful words pouring out as he moved sightlessly from place to place in the room.

"After a while, the novelty wore off and it was mostly the guards who came. By that time they were keeping me in a little stone-walled room without lights. I was alone and it was very quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing and the blood ringing in my ears. Then the door would open and I would see a flare of light beyond it." He paused then, seeing it, no longer able to tell how much was real and how much was dream turned nightmare. "I never knew if they were bringing food or if—if … They kept me isolated because the screaming disturbed the others. My colleagues. The ones in the drawing you saw, back in Rome, do you remember? Someone from the harem must have drawn it. I found it in with my food one day. You can't imagine what that meant to me. God left me, but someone remembered where I was."

He stopped then and looked directly at John Candotti, who stood paralyzed, a bird caught by the cobra's gaze.

"I decided finally that I would kill the next person to come through the door, the next one who … touched me." And then he was pacing again, the hands rising and falling as he tried to explain, to make John understand. "I—There was nowhere to escape to. But I thought, If I'm too dangerous, they'll leave me alone. They'll kill me. I thought, The next time someone comes in here, one of us is going to die, I don't care which. But that was a lie. Because I did care. They used me hard, John. They used me hard. I wanted to die."

He stopped again and looked helplessly at Candotti. "I wanted to die, but God took her instead.
Why,
John?"

John wasn't following this. But it was a question he'd had to answer before, asked so often by survivors, and he was able to say, "Because, I suppose, souls are not interchangeable. You can't tell God: Take me instead."

Sandoz wasn't listening. "I didn't sleep, for a long time. I waited for the door to open and I thought about how I could kill someone without my hands …" He was still standing, but he was no longer seeing John Candotti. "So I waited. And sometimes I would fall asleep for a few minutes, I think. But it was so dark. It was hard to tell when my eyes were open. And then I could hear footsteps outside my cell, and I got up and stood in the far corner, so I could use the momentum, and the door opened, and I saw a silhouette, and it was so strange. My eyes already knew but my body was so primed. It was like—the nerves fired without my telling them to. I crashed into her so hard … I could hear the bones in her chest snap, John."

H
E TRIED DESPERATELY
to take the force against his ruined hands, to cushion the shock, but before he could make his arms come up, they'd both cannoned into the stone wall and Askama was crushed by the impact.

He found himself on the floor, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms, with Askama crumpled beneath him, her face so close to his that he could hear her whisper. She smiled at him, blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth and seeping from a nostril. "You see, Meelo? Your family came for you. I found you for them."

He heard the voices then, human voices, and looked up from Askama's corpse half-blinded by the brilliant light of second dawn pouring through the door. Saw their eyes, single-irised, as frightening to him now as his own eyes must have been to Askama when she first met him. Recognized the look of blank shock and then of revulsion.

"My God, you killed her," the older man said. And then he fell silent, taking in the jeweled necklace, the naked body decorated with scented ribbons, the dried and bloody evidence of the priest's most recent employment. "My God," he repeated.

The younger man was coughing and holding his sleeve over his nose, to filter the stench of blood and sweat and perfumes. "I am Wu Xing-Ren, and this is my colleague, Trevor Isley. United Nations, External Affairs Committee," he said at last. He was almost but not quite able to keep the contempt out of his voice as he added, "You must be Father Sandoz."

There was a sound that began as laughter, as shocking and outrageous as anything they could see or smell, and ended as something more difficult to listen to. The crisis went on for some time. Even after the hysteria was exhausted, they got nothing sensible from the man.

"W
HY,
J
OHN?
W
HY
did it all happen like that, unless God wanted it that way? I thought I understood …" His voice trailed off, and Candotti waited, not sure what to say or do. "How long has it been for you, John?"

John, the sudden shift taking him by surprise, frowned at Sandoz and shook his head, wanting to understand, but not able to follow the train of thought.

"I figured it out once. Twenty-nine years. I get confused about the time, but I was fifteen and I'm supposed to be forty-five now, I think." The frayed nerves holding him up snapped abruptly, and he sank to the floor. John went to him and knelt nearby and listened, and Emilio wept as he whispered, the words thin and silvery. "See, I know a lot of men make accommodations. They find someone—someone … to help them. But, the thing about this is: I didn't. And I—I thought I understood. It was a path to God, and I thought I understood. There are moments, John, when your soul is like a ball of fire, and it reaches out to everything and everyone equally. I thought I understood."

And then suddenly, Emilio wiped his eyes and pulled in a shuddering breath and when he spoke again, his voice was normal and ordinary and tired and, for that reason, sadder than anything John Candotti had heard before. "So, anyway, I was about forty-four, I guess, when it—when … it happened, so it must have been about twenty-nine years." His lips pulled back into a terrible smile, and he began to laugh, the glistening eyes bleak. "John, if God did this, it is a hell of a trick to pull on a celibate. And if God didn't do it, what does that make me?" He shrugged helplessly. "An unemployed linguist, with a lot of dead friends."

His face hardly moved, but the tears began again. "So many dead, because I believed. John, they're all dead. I've tried so hard to understand," he whispered. "Who can forgive me? So many dead …"

John Candotti pulled the smaller man to him and took Sandoz in his arms and held him, rocking, while they both cried. After a time, John whispered, "I forgive you," and began the ancient absolution, "Absolvo te—absolvo te …" but that had to be enough, because he couldn't say the rest.

"T
HAT WAS AN
abuse of power," Felipe Reyes hissed. "You had no right—My God, how could you
do
that to him?"

"It was necessary." The Father General had left the building, walking swiftly from his office down the long echoing hallway, throwing open the French doors and passing outside to the garden, hoping to pull his thoughts together in sunshine and in quiet. But Reyes had followed him, furious, outraged that Emilio Sandoz had been made to speak with so many witnesses.

"How could you do that to him?" Reyes persisted, implacable. "Did you get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to—"

Giuliani rounded on him and silenced the other priest with a look that froze the words on his lips. "It was necessary. If he were an artist, I'd have ordered him to paint it. If he were a poet, I'd have ordered him to write it. Because he is who he is, I made him speak of it. It was necessary. And it was necessary for us to hear it."

Felipe Reyes looked at his superior for a moment longer and then sank abruptly onto the cool stone of a garden bench, surrounded by summer blossoms in dazzling sunlight, shaken and sickened and unconvinced that any of it was necessary. There were sunflowers and brilliant yellow daylilies, delphinium and liatris and gladioli, and the scent of roses from somewhere nearby. The swallows were out now, as the evening approached, and the insect noise was changing. The Father General sat down beside him.

"Have you ever been to Florence, Reyes?"

Felipe sat back, open-mouthed with disgusted incomprehension. "No," he said acidly. "I haven't felt much like touring. Sir."

"You should go. There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called
The Captives
. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. Broken and damaged as he is, Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all."