by James Codlin
Text copyright © 2019 James Codlin and Craig Codlin. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the authors, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN 9781090886958
First Edition: May 2019
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath powers over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.
—Revelation 16:8-9, King James Bible
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
CHAPTER ONE
Spain—1487
Every day it surprised him how loudly a man could scream.
Though the cells were deep underground below a windowless and unremarkable building in Zaragoza, the cries pierced the morning calm, causing the man to look up from his documents. His hair and beard were gray, and his face was thin but not emaciated. His eyes were alert and intelligent, unmoving while reflecting, then animated while writing. The man’s visage was pleasant and had none of the diabolical details depicted in the artists’ renditions circulating throughout Europe. Though he was one of the most powerful men in Spain, his clothes were the humble raiment of the Dominican friars.
The priest scraped a knife over the point of his quill pen, which had been worn down by his energetic penmanship.
A new scream rang out, a woman’s voice this time—high pitched and steady, then wavering, then roughened by hoarseness, and finally dying away. The man of God adjusted his sackcloth robe and turned back to his writing. After thirty minutes, he closed with a flourish of his pen:
Remember, Your Most Royal Highness, this is not just for our time on earth. This we do for one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand years, whatever is required to bring on the Millennium.
Your faithful servant,
Tomás de Torquemada
Torquemada reread his writing. Then, not trusting the work to scribes, he wrote two identical originals—one to retain for himself, and the other two for the king. Each went by separate couriers to King Fernando II in Barcelona to ensure that at least one document would survive the vagaries of fifteenth-century delivery.
The first document went by horseman on the road through Lleida to Barcelona and was in the king’s hands within four days. King Fernando II immediately convened the additional three members of the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition. They reviewed Torquemada’s document and called into their conference a minor official of the Royal Treasury. The accountant, a recent Jewish convert to Catholicism, listened to his liege lord and councilors, wrote detailed instructions to the Royal Treasury, and was put to death. His body was interred along with the corpses of the three council members, the dead courier rider, and the ashes of Torquemada’s papers.
The second document went by boat down the Ebro River and into the Mediterranean, where a storm shipwrecked the vessel on the beach near Tarragona. An illiterate fisherman found the leather pouch containing the document washed up on the sand and was intrigued by the intricate wax seal on the papers. Two weeks later the fisherman’s nephew breathlessly burst into the house, crying that armed men of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were smashing down doors and searching for lost documents. The terrified fisherman hid the papers, never speaking of them to anyone.
In 1720 the fisherman’s long-abandoned house was being torn down to make way for the oceanfront home of a wealthy merchant. A minor municipal official saw a weathered leather pouch in the rubble and took it to his office. The archaic Spanish baffled him. He sent it to a cousin in Seville, suggesting that he take the documents to the royal repository.
In Seville a harried bureaucrat glanced at the seals on the papers, then sharply remonstrated the man, pointing out that his office filed documents pertaining to the House of Commerce and the imperial trade monopoly with the Indies, not the Holy Office. Disgusted, he snatched them from the ignorant commoner and threw them in a pile.
Weeks later, the pile of documents—which had grown with the arrival of a hundred other documents from Madrid and Spain’s colonies in the Indies—was tied into a bundle and tossed onto a dark shelf among thousands of similar bundles in an obscure Seville warehouse that sixty-five years later would come to be known as the Archive of the Indies.
CHAPTER TWO
“Have you seen your face on the newsstand?” Teodoro Lenin asked.
“Yes. Thirty of me spread over almost a whole wall in the airport bookstore. What a handsome bastard!”
Lenin laughed and walked across his study to a magazine rack. His age was hard to pinpoint, but definitely over sixty. His head was completely bald and highly polished. His eyes had heavy bags under them, but the rest of his face was surprisingly wrinkle-free. This was Miami in August, but Lenin wore a brown wool herringbone suit with vest, crisp white shirt, and a paisley bow tie. His wingtip shoes sparkled with a high gloss.
He threw a copy of Vanity Fair to the young man sitting on the sofa and said, “But I forgot, Martín—since you defected to technology you don’t read analog publications anymore.”
“Give me a break, Doc,” Martín said. “I like to think of architecture as the convergence of the old and the new—art and science, joined as one.”
Martín had to admit that he liked his picture on the cover of the magazine—full color and capturing his dark hair and eyes that contrasted with his light skin, reflecting a heritage that traced back to the north of Spain by way of Cuba. His hair was stylishly long and somewhat windblown, hanging over his ears and cascading down to his neck. It was a head and shoulders shot taken on the deck of his fifty-foot sailboat with the Miami skyline in the background. Yellow block letters read: MARTÍN IBARRA PAZ—THE CUBAN-AMERICAN MR. FIXIT.
“Ah, Mr. Fixit,” Lenin said. “I don’t want you to strain yourself, so I’ll summarize it for you.”
Lenin ignored Martín’s exaggerated eye roll and clasped his hands behind his back, tilted his face up, and began pacing slowly back and forth in front of his antique Spanish trestle desk. The younger man, having spent many hours in Lenin’s presence, recognized his former professor’s lecture posture and
sank back in his seat, knowing that there was nothing to do but listen.
“It traces your heritage back to the Ibarras of Zaragoza, Spain—several generations of goldsmiths. It even gets into that unsavory business in 1492 when your ancestors were asked by the Church, ‘Don’t you think you would be happier converting from Judaism to Catholicism?’ To stay alive, your ancestors wisely accepted the Church’s generous offer. But when the Inquisition began persecuting converted Jews, your great-great-great, et cetera grandfather decided it might be a good idea to make a fresh start in the New World. Off they went to Cuba, building a new life as artisans and merchants in Havana, until their neighbors became jealous of the Ibarra’s success—fine clothes, nice home, and big parties—and began to gossip that the Ibarra family never ate pork. What could that mean?”
Lenin beamed at Martín with his best professorial smile—a smile signaling the rhetorical nature of the question. Any student so impudent to answer such questions from Lenin would be subjected to a barrage of savage sarcasm.
“Back in Spain everyone, especially the conversos, ate pork frequently and ostentatiously—if for no other reason than to prove that they were not Jews. But the Ibarra family of Havana—who went to the Catholic cathedral every Sunday, who fasted on Fridays, who fed half the town on Catholic saints’ days, who raised a son who became archbishop of Cuba—didn’t eat pork. What was a good Catholic to think?
“Fast forward to the 1950s and there is the Ibarra family, right hand to the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Enter, stage left, Fidel Castro. Batista bails, and the bearded one from the Sierra Maestra is in charge.
“The Ibarras are worried, thinking about the pogroms in the Soviet Union, but Fidel makes a remarkable announcement: he is proud of his marrano heritage—his ancestors were Jewish converts too! The Ibarras hang in there, now with everyone being discouraged from going to mass or temple or adhering to any organized religion, it being the opiate of the people and all.
“Then Granma runs a front-page piece about the Ibarras, claiming that they were found practicing Jewish rituals in their home. Fidel frowns—not because they are of the Chosen People but because he wants to maintain official state atheism and having such a prominent and politically connected family flaunt its religious practices is quite… problematic. Suddenly the Ibarras are in Miami and Fidel is quite upset that they left without saying good-bye to their old patron.
“Their youngest boy, Martín, their first child born in America, graduates as valedictorian from his Miami high school and gets a National Merit scholarship to the University of Miami, where he has the great fortune to study under the brilliant and witty professor Teodoro Lenin, who has recently arrived from the University of Buenos Aires. The professor does his best to teach this philistine the thinking man’s history of the great world empires, but young Ibarra proves obstinate beyond all reason. During his third year, he shocks the academic world by transferring to Cornell to study—dare I say it out loud?—architecture.
“Ibarra goes on to graduate magna cum laude—blah, blah, blah—apprentices at a prestigious Coral Gables architecture firm—blah, blah, blah—wins awards for his work in North and South America—et cetera, et cetera—but there are also some odd gaps during his career where he apparently spent some time in Guatemalan jungles with shady Cuban exiles. Hmm, what could that be about?”
“Hey, let’s not gloss over that part about the awards,” Martín said. “Let’s go over them in detail!”
“Oh, they did, ad nauseam, with photos and reproductions of your ‘architect’s renditions.’ Next comes the explanation about the formation of the Latino Union—all the Latin American countries, tired of years of hyperinflation and existing essentially as raw materials colonies for the norteamericanos, form an economic confederation akin to the European Union. The new union has its problems but forges forward and realizes that in order to centralize its new government it needs a new and neutrally located capital city. They don’t want to ruin their economies as Brazil did with Brasilia, so they form a team comprised of architects from all the LU countries to design a modest capital nestled among the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes. They fight over the design, and time drags on with the project in limbo.
“In a panic because it doesn’t want the stalled project to be branded as another exercise in Latino mañana escapism and bureaucratic bungling, the union casts its eyes around the world to find an architect who can make peace among a coalition of architectural prima donnas and get the project done. It seems, though, that the best person for the job is a gringo—oh, no! There is gnashing of teeth and rending of garments! But organizationally, there’s none better. What to do, what to do? Aha! There is a technicality—the Gringo’s parents are from Cuba, a non–Latino Union country—ergo, he is a Latino of neutral non-union heritage, so bring him in!
“Enter deus ex machina Martín Ibarra Paz, super architect, super organizer, ‘Mr. Fixit.’ He waves his magic wand and—shazam!—the project is completed on time and within budget.
“There you have it: the whole article in three and a half minutes. I have saved you hours of tedious labor.”
The old professor finished his pacing and turned to face the younger man.
“One more thing, Martín,” he said in English. “Guess who appears with you in one of the photos?”
Martín flipped open the magazine. There was a black and white photograph of his parents and older brothers and sisters on the porch of their grand house in Havana, and another in which he was wearing his mortarboard at his Cornell graduation. In a third shot, which was grainy and blurred but unmistakably him, he was wearing fatigues and crossed bandoleers loaded with bullets. There were several pages of pictures and sketches of his best buildings, and a photographic panorama of the partially finished Latino Union capital city, San Juan Diego, named for the full-blooded Chichimec Indian who had fought Spanish colonists for more than 40 years in the 16th century.
Next were photos of various Latin American leaders: Miguel Días-Canel, of course, along with Osvaldo de Valencia, president of Chile; Agustín Azul Cuahutemoc, president of Mexico; and Carlos VII, king of Spain. Finally there was one showing Martín shaking hands with Takeshi Ishikawa, then-president of Brazil.
And there she was, on Martín’s left arm.
A young woman—mid-twenties with long black hair, the elegant build of a ballet dancer, and a broad smile. Her eyes gave her a look of wisdom beyond her years, like a Tibetan monk, and her high cheekbones tapered down to a strong chin. She was Gina Ishikawa, the daughter of the Latino Union’s president.
Both of Gina’s parents were from the Japanese-Brazilian community in São Paulo, and Gina was a third-generation Brazilian. She looked and spoke Japanese and observed the traditional Japanese etiquette toward her parents, but her daily language, dress, and outlook away from home were 100% Brazilian.
Professor Lenin chuckled. “Still holding a torch for her? If you had gotten off your ass and done something about it, she wouldn’t be engaged to that Japanese billionaire.”
Martín closed the magazine and stared at his face on the cover. His good feelings about the day were gone. He looked up and saw that Lenin was behind his desk at a computer. He turned the monitor around so Martín could see.
“Have you used this yet?” Lenin asked. “Of course you haven’t! You’re an architect now—not the historian you should have been. Carlos VII will dedicate this project at the inauguration of San Juan Diego. It’s an online tie-in to the Archive of the Indies in Sevilla to permit research among the millions of documents there. I remember when it was a dank old building with a few bare light bulbs hanging and they just dumped bundles of documents on your tiny table, allowing just anybody to paw through those magnificent papers. Bring your chair around and sit next to me!”
Lenin surged expertly through menu after menu until two documents filled the screen. The left side showed the paper in its current state—dark, blurred, stained, and torn—and on the right side a computer-
enhanced version reduced the discoloration of the paper and enhanced the lettering that had been penned four centuries earlier.
“Look here,” Lenin said, placing the cursor halfway down the page. “This is a page from the passenger manifest, dated March 12, 1515, for the ship Córdoba. She sailed with the Indies Run spring fleet to Havana.”
Martín squinted at the writing, a cursive called procesal in which letters and words were tied together with long chains of small arcs and flourishes. There was little punctuation or spacing, and the entire page seemed to be made up of a few long words.
The professor moved the cursor to an icon and clicked. The enhanced page on the right suddenly shifted from procesal into modern Spanish printing.
Martín scanned the page. “Sir Francisco de Ibarra and his woman, Gloria Cárdenas de Ibarra and their children Pedro, Maria… and Martín.”
“Your venerated ancestors,” Lenin said. “And look at this notation in the margin.” There was a sketched cross followed by the words “Buenos cristianos, limpios de sangre.”
“‘Good Christians, pure blood.’”
“No Jews, or even conversos, were allowed to go to the colonies,” Lenin said. “Before the ships were cleared to sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, officers of the Inquisition boarded and went over the manifest and the papers of every soul on board—a final rigorous screening during which everyone had to prove the purity of their blood.” He chuckled. “Your relatives must have had good false papers. The Holy Office blessed them, as it were, and they escaped to a new life.”
Martín forgot the funk that had overtaken him since he had seen Gina’s picture and stared at the screen. He tentatively reached out his finger, paused, and then gently touched the screen, stroking the names of his forebears.
*
Gina Ishikawa was out of breath as she walked into the Vatican press office. She had just sprinted from Saint Peter’s Square to get a seat in the pressroom before the official announcement of the election of the new pope.