A Vial Upon the Sun

by James Codlin

  Martín started to tell Gallego that he and Gina were no longer an item, but was met with a knowing wink. “I think things are not over yet between you two.”

  With that, Gallego disappeared back into his office while Martín stood in the kitchen facing a closed door, wondering how Gallego knew so many things so quickly.

  *

  Lenin was up early the next morning studying the notes they had taken the previous night. Gina came into the kitchen cradling the mug of freshly brewed coffee that her mentor had delivered to her room. She wore a borrowed sweatsuit—far too large for her small frame—while her own few clothes were in the washing machine.

  “I have called friends of mine at various Spanish universities,” Lenin said without looking up. “Broch did some research at a law school in Madrid, at another in Zaragoza, and just in the last few days at another one in Sevilla. They are pulling up computer data on the nature of his research. I hope that will help.”

  Gina nodded, started to say something, but fell silent.

  “Nothing yet from Martín,” Lenin said, anticipating the question that she hadn’t asked. He set the papers aside. “Will you go to San Juan Diego?”

  Gina sipped her coffee and mulled the question. “I have press credentials to cover the pope’s visit. I thought about it last night. Maybe I should just get on with my work despite my paranoia.”

  Lenin considered this. “Perhaps. But you are wise to play it safe.”

  “Will you go?” she asked.

  “I have an invitation, and I made the flight reservations. Seems like I still have some stature in Latin America! I think yes.”

  Gina gestured at the papers “Have you come up with anything?”

  “No. I haven’t seen any patterns yet. I—” He looked over her shoulder and through the kitchen window into the yard outside. There was a pickup truck parked on the grass belonging to the house next door, and a man in a uniform stood in the bed of the truck checking the electrical service hookup.

  Lenin turned back to Gina. “That phrase David used, ‘You’re choice.’ Is that part of the current vernacular of you young people?”

  Gina snorted. “I haven’t seen it on Instagram yet, if that’s what you mean.” She saw his unsmiling reaction and revised her answer. “No, I haven’t heard Dave use it before, and I don’t know of anyone else who would say that.”

  Gina noticed that Lenin was looking past her again, and she glanced over her shoulder. The pickup was now parked by Lenin’s kitchen window and the uniformed man was checking the wire connections to Lenin’s house. He typed something into a handheld tablet and walked out of view.

  “I’ve never heard my students use it,” Lenin said. “I had a thought last night about choice, choices, chosen… possibly chosen people…”

  Lenin was again staring at the truck by the window. His eyes opened wide and he lunged from the breakfast table, clamped his hand on Gina’s wrist, and jerked her out of her chair. Gina’s mug was flung from her startled grasp and shattered against the dishwasher, spraying coffee across the floor. She yelped in surprise as Lenin broke into a run, dragging her small body behind him like a kite as she struggled to maintain her footing. Lenin sprinted across the living room toward the closed sliding glass door that led out to the patio and swimming pool, gathered Gina close to his body, and threw his shoulder and back into the glass. Pellets of tempered glass flew in a sparkling shower as they smashed through it. They sailed across a few feet of brick paving and plunged over the pool’s edge into the water. As they fell, a brilliant flash like a lightning bolt erupted with an ear-splitting whoosh.

  *

  Martín sat in the cockpit of his sailboat, which was moored in front of his condo building. The sun was just up and the air was damp, but not yet hot. He studied the Miami skyline, watching the sun glint off the glass skyscrapers.

  Martín had gone home after the meeting with Gallego. He wanted to see Gina but didn’t know what to say. Restless and unable to sleep, he had called the military crew of his union jet, telling them to move up the departure time to ten in the morning.

  Martín thought back to what Gallego had said about working for Takeshi Ishikawa. If the Cuban knew about it, who else did too? And what were his brother and his guerrilla movement doing? And most perplexing, what did he have to fear from priests?

  At the bottom of these swirling questions was Gina Ishikawa. He remembered the first time he saw her at the Miami Ballet, having been dragged there by a girl he was dating. He was stunned when he saw Gina on stage. The other dancers were good, but her grace stood out. He knew nothing of ballet, but her every move spoke to him.

  A month later the new semester had started at the University of Miami. On the first day of Lenin’s class for history majors, The European-Indigenous Clash: 1492, Gina strolled in wearing jeans and a white blouse. She made pointed eye contact with Martín, walked up, and sat beside him—challenging him with her eyes to make the next move. He had hesitated, intimidated by her good looks, grace, and sophistication, and waited until the third day of class before getting up the nerve to ask her out.

  They moved quickly into a relationship that was both passionate and comfortable. Then he decided to transfer to Cornell and study architecture. When he told her that he was leaving Miami, she shocked him by urging him to do so. “You have to go in order to become the best,” she said without the slightest hesitation.

  Relieved that his revelation had not resulted in a tearful scene, but also feeling slightly wounded that it hadn’t, Martín steered the conversation back to Gina’s dancing, education, and dreams for the future. A few minutes later there was an awkward pause in the conversation, the perfect opportunity for him to tell her where he saw their relationship going. But he said nothing, hoping the situation would somehow resolve itself.

  He moved to upstate New York and she traveled to Ithaca to see him during semester breaks, and he returned to Miami periodically. Each time, they easily picked up where they had left off, resuming the relationship with the ease and comfort of putting on a well-loved T-shirt. Neither of them knew whether the other was seeing people during their long periods apart, and neither asked.

  When he graduated, Gina and Martín left his parents at their hotel and went back to his apartment. There she looked at him with those wise, expressive eyes and wordlessly posed a question: What now?

  Once more Martín hesitated, saying only that he loved her, but nothing more. Gina, unfazed, enrolled in a language study program in Geneva and became a stringer for a newspaper. Martín went to work for a Coral Gables architectural firm, and both he and Gina crossed the Atlantic regularly for joyous reunions, exchanging daily emails and texts in the interims.

  Without his being consciously aware of it, Gina influenced Martín’s design work—strong and resilient internal structures supporting graceful, dignified, and understated exteriors. He won several awards for office buildings he designed for the rising Miami skyline, and his career blossomed.

  After finishing her studies in Geneva, Gina returned to São Paulo and was caught up in the dizzying world of politics during her father’s campaign for the Brazilian presidency and subsequent electoral victory. A short time later he was named to head up the new Latino Union. In her telephone calls and emails to Martín she obliquely referred to the increasing pressures on her father, which seemed to be affecting her in unspoken ways. When Martín was brought in for the San Juan Diego project, he was able to spend more time with Gina and also came to know her father, as much as anyone could know such a distant and deep-thinking man. Martín quickly realized that the newly minted president had serious concerns about his daughter having a relationship outside of her race.

  On his boat in the early Miami morning, Martín groaned out loud at the shame brought about by the memories of how things had culminated in San Juan Diego. He was preparing to leave for the airport to fly back to Miami when Gina called him. There was more tension in her voice than he had ever heard before. She told him
that she was leaving home immediately and wanted to accompany him back to Miami. The woman who occupied his thoughts day and night, who flowed from his mind through his fingers to his conceptual drawings, was implicitly stating that she wanted to make him a permanent part of her life and that she wanted that life together to begin immediately. Something significant had clearly been the catalyst for her to reach out to him in that moment, over the phone rather than in person, but she didn’t say what it was.

  Again, Martín had hesitated.

  For what seemed like the smallest measure of time he didn’t respond. The pause likely didn’t last the time to take a breath—hardly a heartbeat—but it was too long. Martín tried to recover, effusively expressing his love for her and his desire to take her with him, but that fatal silence had proclaimed his reluctance louder than any Wagnerian opera singer could have. In a quiet voice Gina said that she understood his hesitation and told him that she would never want to push him into a commitment unless he was completely enthusiastic about it. With that, she hung up the phone.

  Martín returned to Miami alone, and a few days later Dave Broch called to tell him that Gina had taken a job as a Rome-based reporter for a São Paulo newspaper. She had asked Dave not to give Martín her address or her new number. A few months later, Martín heard that she was inexplicably engaged to a powerful Japanese businessman—a pairing that made no sense at all for the woman he knew, and seemed to have her father’s fingerprints all over it.

  Last night at Professor Lenin’s house, an unexpected chance to do something about Gina had again presented itself. And yet Martín, now seething with self-loathing at the fresh memory of lost opportunity, had hesitated yet again.

  Martín looked up at the rising sun cresting over the Atlantic Ocean. The slight rocking of his boat, together with the pungent smell of saltwater and seaweed, heightened his awareness of his surroundings. He contemplated how every element of his life that mattered the most to him pivoted upon a single fulcrum: Gina Ishikawa. In the clear morning air this simple fact was so manifest and focused, he marveled at his past indecisions. It was as if a fog of madness had suddenly cleared. He was certain that he wanted to spend his life with Gina. And he also realized that some of the emotion driving him to this realization was his fear for her well-being.

  The dead priest in France.

  Dave Broch’s disappearance.

  Gallego’s warning about priests.

  Something was wrong, and there was no more time for hesitation. It was time to move—to take her irrevocably into his life and to confront this danger together.

  Martín leaped from the cockpit and hopped onto the dock. He ran to the parking lot, jumped into his car, and spun the tires as he accelerated away from the marina. He raced through intersections, ignoring yellow and red lights, not wanting to waste a single moment more. He had wasted enough time already.

  His car fishtailed wildly as he turned onto Lenin’s street. He stomped on the brakes and whipped the steering wheel to the right, causing the car to careen over the curb. There were two police cruisers blocking off the street, and he had nearly plowed into them.

  Martín jumped out of his car and sprinted past the cruisers, ignoring the shouting of an officer ordering him to stop. He rounded a curve to see part of a concrete slab sitting next to a smoking crater. A blackened metal lump was all that was left of Lenin’s Toyota that had been parked in his garage. A thick pile of debris floated on the surface of the swimming pool. There was not a single stick of Lenin’s house still standing above ground.

  Martín ran up to a fireman who was rolling up a length of hose. “What happened? What happened?”

  “Can’t say for sure yet,” the fireman stammered. “But it went up quick. Probably a bomb. Forensics will confirm.”

  Martín looked wildly around the scene of ruin, spotting three ambulances parked just beyond the fire trucks.

  “Survivors?” Martín asked.

  “We haven’t found anyone,” the fireman said. “If anybody was in there, they didn’t make it. We’ll know more soon.” Peering at Martín’s stricken face, the fireman reached out to steady him. “I’m really sorry, buddy. Were you a relative of the homeowner? If so we can contact you if you give us your—”

  Martín shook off the fireman’s hand and stumbled back to his car.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Barcelona, Spain—1917

  The Hispano-Suiza automobile drew stares as it parted the people on the street and pulled up in front of the Café Catalán. A man in a crisp navy suit and homburg hat seated at an outdoor table watched the priest step down from the vehicle and look around at his surroundings. He made eye contact with the man at the table and walked toward him, extending his hand.

  “Accountant Las Casas?”

  “Yes. Father Cisneros?”

  “At your service.”

  They sat and the priest ordered coffee. For a half-hour they talked about inconsequential things—Las Casas asking about automobile travel from Burgos, Cisneros asking about the accountant’s family.

  “Never married, and no prospects for now,” Las Casas said.

  “You specialize in international banking, I understand.”

  “Father, you seem to know a lot about me. You contacted me. Tell me about yourself.”

  “Just an ordinary priest of the Augustine order,” Cisneros said. “I serve in a monastery in Burgos, Santa Maria de la Vid. Do you know it?”

  “No, I’ve never been to Burgos.”

  Cisneros shifted in his chair. “Allow me a personal question. How do you stand with God?”

  Las Casas looked back steadily, mulling the impertinence of the question for a moment, but decided to go forward—business was business. “I am a good Catholic. I was educated in the Church. I attend mass regularly.” Las Casas paused, tried to read the priest’s expression, and found it inscrutable. “How did you find me and why are you so interested in me?”

  “What about your parents and siblings?” the priest pressed.

  Las Casas sighed, but decided to continue playing the priest’s game a bit longer. “My parents died 11 years ago. My brother was killed fighting the Germans with the French.”

  “And what do you know about your ancestors?”

  “My grandfather used to say we had Jews in our heritage, centuries ago.”

  “Hmm.”

  Las Casas laughed. “Does that matter? This is the twentieth century, you know. We Spaniards don’t keep track of ‘tainted blood’ anymore.”

  Cisneros smiled. “No, of course it doesn’t matter,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced.

  “We need to get to the point,” Las Casas said. “Why are you here, and why am I meeting with you?”

  “I need a banker I can completely trust,” Cisneros said. He looked around to make sure that no one was listening. “Come to work for me and I can make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.”

  Las Casas laughed. “You’re a priest—an Augustinian, no less. You’ve taken an oath of poverty.”

  “Do you know the Rothschild Bank in Frankfurt?”

  “Of course. I communicate with them every day,” Las Casas said.

  “Do you know the Ono Osaka Bank?”

  “Absolutely. Millions of marks and yen are exchanged each year between my bank and theirs.”

  “Before we say any more,” Cisneros said, “I must take your confession and then I will require you to take both a blood oath and a brotherhood oath.”

  *

  Las Casas and Cisneros sat across from each other in a small chapel, a crude wooden table between them. A week had passed since they met outside the café. Two days after that, Las Casas had punctured his own arm and dripped his blood into a chalice on the altar at Sagrada Familia in the middle of the night. Father Cisneros officiated, with no one else in the cavernous nave. Afterward, they each pricked a fingertip and mixed their blood while chanting in Latin.

  “If I decide to work for you, must I resign my post at the bank?�
�� Las Casas had asked before agreeing to the ceremony.

  “No,” Cisneros said. “It is important that you continue to work there. But you must understand that your first loyalties must be to God and to me.”

  “You have my oaths.” Las Casas had been wired an enormous sum of money the previous day. For more of that, the banker was willing to give an oath swearing to just about anything the old priest asked of him.

  “You have not spoken to anyone about this meeting, correct?” Cisneros asked.

  “Correct.”

  “And you never will?”

  “Never.”

  “You are the first outside of clergy and kings to receive the information I will impart to you now,” Cisneros said. He set a stack of papers in front of the other man. “Please note the amount on deposit in this bank account.”

  Las Casas studied the account page from Rothschild Frankfort. “What currency is this?”

  “German marks.”

  “Then there’s an error in the placement of the decimal point.”

  “No. It is accurate.”

  The banker’s eyes widened. “Impossible. This is larger than the gross domestic product of some countries!”

  “What is important is that it is in a German bank. The war—it concerns me. What do you think will happen to Germany?”

  “The Americans are in it now. I believe the Germans will lose.”

  “And what about the German economy?” Cisneros asked.

  “France and Britain will demand very large reparations,” Las Casas said. “The Germans will face the demobilization of millions of soldiers. I believe there will be serious inflation, possibly even hyperinflation. The mark will become essentially worthless.”

  “Exactly my opinion. In addition, this fortune has grown to an unwieldy size, calling for a need to diversify. I want you to move the assets in the account I just showed you to the banks on this list.” Cisneros slid a piece of paper over to the banker, who eyed it warily.