The Day of Atonement

by David Liss

At last came a knock on the door. I gestured for the woman to answer it. If it was anyone other than the man I had sent for, I would need to act quickly.

  When she pulled open the door, I let out my breath. It was Kingsley Franklin.

  I pulled the large man inside and closed the door. Franklin looked around, and watched the woman seat herself once more in the corner. Franklin smiled at her.

  “I suppose you’ve paid her so you could hide out here for a few hours. But maybe someone ought to sample the goods.” He grinned at me, but seeing my expression, lost his own sense of humor.

  “Have you heard anything of this afternoon?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I believe they’ve heard of those events in Rome by now. You struck down fifteen soldiers of the Inquisition.”

  “It was somewhat less than that,” I said.

  “They came to the inn and seized your things. They found a book of Jewish prayers among them. They nearly arrested me, but a parcel of Factory men descended upon them like locusts.”

  “Factory men?”

  “They may care nothing for me,” Franklin said, “but I am an Englishman, and that is sometimes enough. The Factory will do all it can to protect its own. I’m safe for now.”

  “By the time I am done with them, there won’t be anyone left to arrest you.”

  Franklin shook his head. “I understand your anger, but you can’t fight your way out of this. Fighting is why you are a fugitive.”

  “I had no choice. I was discovered. They were coming for me. It was resist or be arrested.”

  Franklin nodded. “You’ll be wanting a way out of the city now, I suppose. I’ll do what I can for you. Money. Documents. You must tell me what you need.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t leave.” I quickly told Franklin about the Nobrezas and Settwell’s daughter. I did not tell him about Roberta Carver. The truth was too bitter for words.

  Franklin shook his head. “Your friends are gone, Mr. Foxx. They’re beyond your help. As for the little girl, you might be able to get the priest to tell you where she is if you are still determined to harm him.”

  “Yes, but I need to find him. Soon.”

  “Then you’re in luck,” Franklin said with a grim smile. “Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day. The streets will be crowded. You’ll never have a better opportunity to approach him unseen.”

  It was obvious. I should have thought of it myself. “I know the priest’s church, so it will not be difficult to intercept him on his way. I then find out where he is keeping Mariana, and I kill him. Before word spreads, before mass is even over, I must find and liberate the girl. If I get Settwell and his daughter to you, will you see them out of the city? Can I depend upon you for this?”

  Franklin nodded. “You can, sir.”

  “Then I will deal with my friends in the Palace dungeons.”

  “I understood you until that last part. How exactly will you attend to that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I shall manage something. If I have to kill every priest in the Palace, I will get them out.”

  Franklin shook his head. “By the very devil, sir, I know you mean it, and I half think you can do it.”

  I studied the innkeeper. His face was red, his beard patchy, his eyes heavily bagged—and yet for all that, there was a spark about him, as though he were enjoying the adventure.

  “Why are you so eager to help me, Mr. Franklin?” Perhaps I wanted to hear him confess. Perhaps I merely wanted to make certain his motives were good.

  Franklin laughed. “Because I must, Mr. Foxx. I hate this city, and I hate what it’s done to me. You’re not the only one who wants revenge.”

  It was a clear morning, bright and cloudless, and the streets were full. The bakers fired up their ovens early, and the stalls on the Rossio were filled with breads and pastries and fruits. An hour after dawn, despite the brilliant sunlight, there were candles in every window. An hour after that, the streets were lined with processions as the penitent brought flowers and offerings to their dead before church. There were beggars and soldiers and fidalgos, priests and nuns and monks. Rarely had I seen the city so full of people.

  There was only one procession I cared about, making its way to the Igreja de São Domingos. I found an alley and waited. I pressed my back against the wall and allowed the chants and the songs to wash over me. This was the moment so long delayed. This was the reason I had come to Lisbon, but any sense of satisfaction had vanished. No matter what happened next, it would not change the fundamental facts that Mariana was in the hands of the Inquisition and Gabriela was in the Palace dungeon. None of these things would have happened if I had not been here, and yet I wanted to believe I was not to blame.

  When the Inquisitor passed, it was like picking fruit. He walked in a group of penitents, candles thrust forward, eyes down, mouths mumbling song. Ordinary people surrounded the priest, not other clergy, not other Inquisitors. I simply reached out, grabbed Azinheiro’s shoulder, and pulled him into the alley between the São Domingos church and the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos. I released the priest and let momentum do its work. Azinheiro skidded along the ground, sliding through beggars’ excrement and dirty rags.

  The buildings on either side of the alley were both tall, and it was twilight dark toward the center. I squinted as I looked at the priest upon the ground, enjoying his confusion for only a fleeting second. This was not about pleasure. It was about necessity. Before Azinheiro could cry out, I pulled him to his feet and hurled him forward into the wall. The priest’s head struck, and he was dazed, which had been my intent. Grabbing his arm, I pulled him deeper into the alley’s darkness. The priest complied, unable to resist. Quiet groans escaped his lips, but nothing more. His mind would be racing, trying to find a way out of this, trying to find the words that would save him.

  I shoved him forward again. Azinheiro stumbled, but did not fall. He struggled to right himself, to stand like a man and be master of his own fate. For decades he had watched as men were helpless against his power. He would not like knowing what it felt like on the other side.

  I moved farther in. The buildings to either side of us leaned closer as the alley progressed, and there was just enough space for me to walk without angling my body. The light of the bright November morning hardly penetrated. All was gray and shadow. I thrust the man up against the wall once more, and the back of his head again made contact. The priest cried out and this time slumped to the ground. He sat still, looking up. His full lips moved soundlessly. He showed no sign of trying to rise.

  “You know why you are here?” I asked.

  “I do not care,” the priest said. He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and then gazed at me with an expression of outrage, as if I were violating the fundamental laws of the universe itself. “You are an unrepentant Jew, and your every word and deed proves why this Inquisition’s work is vital.”

  I knew there was no point in debating a man such as this. The world bent and contorted itself to fit his understanding, not the other way around. I could not make him see reason, could not make him regret his actions. It would be a mistake to try. My business wasn’t persuasion—that was the Inquisition’s concern. I merely resolved injustice long neglected.

  “You have destroyed countless lives,” I said. “Your actions have caused people to die, including my mother and father. You have robbed the innocent to fill the Inquisition treasury. You have stolen my friend’s daughter and you have dragged others, for whom I care, to your dungeons.”

  The priest looked up. “I have done no wrong, and I fear no judgment, certainly not from a Jew, and least of all from an English Jew.”

  I took out my long knife. “We shall see,” I said. “Where is the girl, Mariana Settwell?”

  The priest’s dark eyes were wide with disbelief and fear. Had he ever felt powerless before? Had he ever worried for his own safety? In all his years of stoking the fires of terror and inflicting pain and extracting confessions, had he ever wondered
what it would be like to feel those things himself?

  I put the knife to the Inquisitor’s face, just under his eye, and slid it along, making a shallow cut. The wound bled freely but not copiously. It was meant only to suggest the seriousness of the situation.

  The priest began to weep. “What are you,” he asked, “that would do this to another man?”

  The question was like a blow to my belly. “How can you ask me that? You who have done such things for longer than I’ve been alive?”

  “But I served the Holy Inquisition. You serve nothing.”

  “I serve the ideas and the people I honor,” I said. “I’ll ask you once more, and then I’ll take out your eye, so consider your next words carefully. Where is the Settwell child?”

  The priest nodded. “She’s with my mother, in the Conceição dos Cardais.”

  I knew it: a small Carmelite convent dedicated to the care of the infirm, in the Bario Alto. I could get Mariana and bring her back to her father. Then I could—I could do what? I still had no clear notion of how I would get the Nobrezas out of the Palace, but I knew one thing for certain: if the Inquisitor left this alley, Mariana would not remain at that convent for long.

  Yesterday I had killed in self-defense. Could I truly kill a man in cold blood? I had always believed that when the moment came, I would be equal to the task. Now here it was, and it was no longer simply a matter of rebalancing the scales of justice. A child’s life, a parent’s love, hung in the balance, and yet I found that murdering a man, even the most hated of men, was a harder thing than killing in the heat of conflict.

  The priest managed a weak smile. His eyes grew bright. He knows, I thought. He sees my hesitation, and he means to exploit it.

  “You turned me into something vile,” I said. “I will not let what little is merciful in me spare you.”

  The priest shook his head. “Can you not see the hand of God in this? You think yourself a demon, but like all men, the struggle between heaven and hell rages within you. You have come all this way, done all these things, only to discover what you could have known all along: that you are not so bad as you believe. Perhaps you are no worse than other men.”

  “Your talk won’t save you,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if it was true. Where was my rage now? I thought about my parents: my mother’s hasty farewell on the Factory quays; my father, whose face was hard to recall. I remembered my love for Gabriela and how she was gone forever, married to Eusebio.

  “Do what you must, my son. I have never acted in any way not in accordance with the teachings of my faith. I am at peace.”

  The priest did, indeed, appear to be at peace. “Your delusions of rectitude mean nothing to me,” I said as I probed myself for the will to strike. “All that matters is that I will know I have done what I have to do.”

  The priest’s smile grew. “Kill me if you think it will help. I will answer to my God in heaven, and I have no fear of what is to come.”

  I did not recall seeing him rise, but the priest was now on his feet. He wiped at his bloody face with his sleeve and took a few slow steps away from me, never taking his eyes off me. He looked like a man easing himself away from a vicious dog. That was how he saw me—as an animal, dangerous and deranged, but one that might yet be soothed. Even now, at this moment, he did not understand what he had done to me.

  I took a step forward, but only one, before I heard something—a great beast hidden in the earth, groaning in pain. I felt it in my feet, vibrating up my legs. Then the noise came from everywhere. It was like the voices of the damned, breaking free of hell, a deep and awful rumbling. The walls all around began to shudder until the stones sprouted veins. I was stilled by the realization that something immense and dreadful was happening.

  A brick fell from high above, grazing the priest along his skull. Azinheiro cried out, and blood gushed from his forehead. Another brick fell, exploding into dust, and then the ground was no longer vibrating, but heaving and rolling like the waves of the sea. Cracks erupted in the soil, and the earth began to spit forth dust and pebbles. The rumbling grew louder and from everywhere there were screams and the sounds of stone grinding, grinding, grinding against stone. Bricks and tiles were now raining down, creating a wall of debris in the space between me and the priest. It had been mere seconds since I first noticed the growling, and now I could not reach Azinheiro. The alley had become a death trap. It would, in seconds, become a tomb. I knew I had to do the thing that came least naturally to me.

  I fled.

  It was like an invisible hand had pulled free the thread binding together the alley and it had unwound into a pile of rubble. The air was full of dust. I escaped from the narrow confines, though my face and arms had sustained a hundred small wounds. A trickle of blood ran into my eye from a cut just above my hairline.

  It was more than the alley. More than this street. All round me, buildings shook upon their foundations, folding in upon themselves and crumbling as though made of sand. I had run uphill, away from the Rossio, so I could not see how the great church and the hospital and the Palace fared, but I watched as house after house fell forward or inward, Lisbon’s structures unmaking themselves. Statues toppled like toy soldiers. Crosses spun from church roofs, becoming deadly, spiraling missiles. The worshippers packing the streets dropped their effigies and candles and ran, but where could they go? The entire city was ripping itself apart. I looked up at a distant hillside and watched as houses—dozens of them—buckled and slid into the sea. How many died in that one instant? Already the injured and the dead lay in the street, struck by debris and trampled by the crowd. There was blood everywhere. Shrieks of terror and cries of pain echoed through the broken city, which had only minutes—seconds!—before been a glittering jewel, the pride of Portugal and the envy of Europe. Now it was a landscape of hell.

  Then, all at once, it was over. The ground ceased to shake and the buildings no longer trembled. From every direction came snapping as stone and brick settled. Distant crashes sounded as structures weakened by the quake gave out, but these were sporadic, like the popping of wood in fire. The massive church I stood near remained standing, though fissures marked the walls.

  An eerie quiet began to spread across the city. Everyone held themselves still, stopping where they were. That a city could collapse had, minutes ago, surely seemed impossible. Now the fact that it could stop seemed equally unlikely, and the survivors gaped in wonder and respite.

  Then came a new chorus of cries of pain and loss, and the screams of the injured and the dying. Horses and donkeys brayed. Dogs barked and howled. Broken bells clanged. Women called for their children, those from whom they were separated and those who lay dead on the ground or in their arms.

  From across the expanse of these many hills rose a collective wailing. It swept across the city like a wave as tens of thousands of people fell to their knees and cried toward the heavens.

  “You have been punished!” called out a priest. “You have tasted God’s wrath, and he has punished you. Repent! Repent lest you anger God further.”

  I took quick stock. What mattered? What was important? There were wounded who needed tending and the trapped who needed rescuing, but anyone could do such things. What needed doing that only I could do? The priest? I looked back toward the Rossio, but that course was futile. The priest was buried under rubble or had fled to safety. There was nothing to be done there.

  Gabriela? She was in the Palace, and even a casual glance around the city told me that the largest buildings had survived the quake. Smaller structures lay in rubble, but the palaces and great churches, the mansions and fine houses, though scarred and cracked and beaten, yet stood. Gabriela would be as safe as anyone, ironically enough, inside the Inquisition dungeon.

  But what of Roberta, in her house upon the Bario Alto? She might be alive but buried under rubble. She might need my help. I had destroyed her life, but perhaps I could now save it.

  I ran uphill and to the west. As I rose higher, I could see t
hat the Palace of the Inquisition indeed still stood. Everywhere else lay the injured and the dead, stood the weeping and praying. Houses were but stews of stone and tile and wood, as though crushed by giants. In places it was hard to find the streets, so covered was the ground with the splayed remains of homes. The air smelled heavy with dust from the broken brick and ceramics, and smoke from the fires that were burning everywhere. They were small fires now, but they would grow. With all the candles lit for the holiday, there could have been no more dangerous time for a disaster of this sort.

  A man lay upon the rubble, his left arm crushed to pulp, his eyes wide and unreasoning. I sped past him. A woman tried to recruit me in the search for a missing priest. I ran past her. It was not that I did not care. I wanted to help them all, but I could not. Until I had seen to the people I cared for, the strangers would have to fend for themselves.

  The Carvers had rented a fine detached house on a street of sturdy buildings, and here the city seemed strangely untouched. Roberta’s house was comparatively sound. Part of the roof had fallen into the street, the windows were all broken, and the door was open and askew, but the house remained. I ran inside and stopped in my tracks. There was a body on the floor, a woman of middle years, a Portuguese servant by her dress. Her throat had been cut. There were footprints and streaks in the pool of congealed blood. There had been a struggle.

  I rushed ahead, calling Roberta’s name. I could smell no fire burning, but the air was full of shit and piss and vomit. Other people had died here. Paintings had fallen from the walls, which were cracked and smashed, but still stood. The ceilings had fallen in places, coating the furnishings with dust and knocking chairs and statues onto their sides.

  Then I heard the weeping. I ran to the stairs, but they too had collapsed. Then I realized that the weeping did not come from above, but from the parlor. There, amid the debris and chunks of plaster and brick, sat Roberta upon the floor. Her face was bruised, black where she had been struck, and her lip and nose were bloody. She wore a nightgown that had been torn down the middle, and clutched the ragged sides to hold them together. A blanket rested over her shoulders.