They made camp with the same precision as in the previous days, jamming sharp-pointed poles into the ground at the four cardinal points and then tying a strong rope, studded with metal bells, between all of them. That way, should an intruder above a certain size enter the camp, the bells would ring, alerting the sentries. They had to be careful. If their attention lapsed, anyone could mistakenly set off the alarm. After nightfall, the men took turns on watch and tending the campfire in three-hour shifts.
While the Franciscans were preparing their straw mats, the Indians’ sudden excitement drew their attention. The sentries had spotted the shifting outline of a band of men on foot, in the lowest part of the valley, making their way toward them. They were carrying torches, and they had seen the travelers.
“Are those Apaches?”
Friar Juan raced over to Sakmo to hear the news.
“I doubt it,” Sakmo replied. “The Apaches rarely attack once night starts to fall. They fear the darkness just as much as we do. . . . And they never light torches before an attack.”
“And so?”
“Let’s stay on guard. They may be a delegation of traders.”
Ten minutes later, when the plains were wrapped in the dark mantle of night, the torches arrived at the encampment. There were twelve torches, each raised high in the air by a painted Indian. At the head of the troupe was a man with wrinkled skin who walked up to Sakmo and kissed him on the right cheek.
The new arrivals drew close to the fire, ignoring the presence of the white men, and threw their torches into the bonfire where the flames were leaping highest.
“Look at that!” Friar Diego whispered to Father Salas. “Every one of them is old.”
Juan de Salas did not answer. These Indians had weathered faces, with long manes of silvery gray hair. They were about his age, but their skin by no means looked as soft or flabby as his did.
“Huiksi!”
One of the visitors walked up to the Franciscans. It took some effort for Friar Juan to decipher what he was saying. The venerable Jumano was telling them, in a mixture of Tanoan and Hopi dialects, that he prayed for the “breath of life” to always be with them.
The friars bowed their heads in a sign of gratitude.
“We come from Sakmo’s village and the village of his father, the great Walpi, two days’ journey from here. None of our warriors has seen you yet, but we the elders knew you were near. That is why we came out to receive you.”
Friar Juan was translating the long string of phrases to Friar Diego. The elder who had broken the silence looked directly into Friar Salas’s eyes without moving.
“We brought corn and turquoise to welcome you,” he went on, offering a basket laden with objects whose shiny surfaces flickered, reflecting the flames of the fire. “We are grateful for your visit. We want you to speak in our village about this Lord-of-all-Lords, and to initiate us into the secrets of your religion.”
The Franciscans turned pale.
“And how did you know that we were coming at precisely this time?” Friar Juan inquired in the Tanoan dialect.
The eldest of the Indians took the lead.
“You know the answer: the Woman of the Desert descended among us in the shape of a blue streak of lightning, and told us of your arrival. This happened two nights ago, in the same place where she has appeared for many moons.”
“Then she is here?” The Franciscans’ hearts were racing. “What is she like?”
“She is nothing like our women. Her skin is as white as the milk of the cactus; her voice is the air when it whispers between the mountains, and her presence brings peace like a lake in winter.”
The beauty of what the eldest Jumano said impressed the Franciscans.
“You are not afraid of her?”
“No! Never afraid. She won the confidence of the village when she cured our neighbors who carried a sickness.”
“Cured them? How?”
The Indian gave Friar Salas a severe look. His eyes flickered like sparks from the fire.
“Didn’t Sakmo tell you? A group of our warriors led us to the Canyon of the Serpent to see the woman. It was just before the son of great Walpi left the village to look for you. In the sky there was a full moon. The whole field was illuminated. When we came to the place sacred to our ancestors, we could see that the blue spirit was sad. She told us why. She spoke directly to me, chastising me for not telling her my granddaughter was ill.”
“What happened to your granddaughter?”
“A serpent bit her. There was a great swelling on her thigh. I defended myself, saying that none of our gods were capable of curing a wound like that, but she asked me to bring the child to her.”
“And you brought her, surely.”
“Yes. The blue lady took her between her arms and wrapped her in a powerful light. Afterward, the shining ceased, she lowered her back to the ground, and the little one, on her own two feet, ran into my arms, completely cured.”
“You saw only light?”
“That is so.”
“And she never threatened you or asked you for something in exchange for cures like this?”
“Never.”
“Did she ever come into the village?”
One of the other old men, bald and almost toothless, stood up and started speaking to the friars.
“The lady in blue gave this to us as proof that she was among us, and as a sign of her relationship to you.”
The old man straightened up. He was only a short distance from the friars when he started to make a series of gestures. He did so very cautiously, as if he did not want to make an error. He raised his right hand to his forehead and then lowered it to his chest.
“He is crossing himself!” Friar Diego exclaimed. “What kind of marvel is this?”
The night held several more surprises.
Seated around the fire, the visitors related the woman’s first teachings. From everything they said, what struck the friars was that each of them had some personal, private experience with her. They swore they had seen her descend in a blinding light, and that everything in Gran Quivira, even the tiniest field mice, became still and watchful when she appeared. To the Indians, she was flesh and bone, not a ghost or a mirage. They felt she was closer and more real than those spirits called forth by the shamans when they ingested the sacred mushrooms. In fact, such was the coherence of what they related that the friars began to wonder if they were not confronting an impostor who secretly made her way from Europe and hid in the desert for the better part of six years.
Nevertheless, the idea was almost immediately discarded.
THIRTY-EIGHT
ROME
Giuseppe Baldi headed toward the Vatican Radio studios from Saint Peter’s, making his way down the Via della Conciliazione and turning left past the monument to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Piazza Pio, with its sweeping views of the Castel Sant’Angelo. There, at number 3, in an enormous old palace from the eighteenth century, was a double doorway clearly marked with the radio station’s name.
The institution, which is the “official” organ of the Pope, covers his public appearances and his many overseas trips, and coordinates the work of foreign journalists who have an interest in rebroadcasting papal events of special relevance. In short, it has a direct line to the Holy Father. Perhaps for that reason, between the times of Pius XI and the long pontificate of John Paul II, its masthead became exponentially more complex. Four hundred people work at putting more than seventy programs a day on the air, all under the direction of a Jesuit-run board of directors. The station broadcasts in thirty different languages, including Latin, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Armenian, Lithuanian, and Vietnamese.
Vatican Radio displays an impressive technical ability to broadcast its radio waves to the five continents. Its technology is so multidimensional that some observers insinuate that the station is using equipment far in excess of its real needs, an assertion that can neither be proven nor refuted.
One thing
, however, is certain: when Father Baldi arrived at the station’s offices he was ignorant of all these facts. The high-level politics of telecommunications were as close to his heart as a scientific base camp in Antarctica. He had had time to have a cappuccino next door to Ufficio Stampa in Saint Peter’s Square, and then distract himself for a minute in front of the display windows of the nearby bookstores.
After passing through the Vatican Radio doorway and climbing the marble stairs leading to an information desk, the Third Evangelist asked for the studios of Father Corso.
“Second basement. Once you exit the elevator, continue down the hallway in front of you until you arrive at office 2S-22,” the clerk said to him while entering the number on father Baldi’s ID card into the visitor’s log. “We were expecting you.”
The elevator, an old Thyssen with metal gratings, left him facing a corridor punctuated with white doors whose handles had been replaced with large metal wheels. Although at first glance they looked like the portholes on a submarine, he quickly realized that they were in fact large doorways that sealed off the recording studios from any extraneous sound. Over each doorway there were two indicator lights, one red and the other green, installed so that people like Baldi would know whether or not they could enter.
Room 2S-22 was a short distance from the elevator, and was almost indistinguishable from the others, save for a slight difference in its electronic lock. Without thinking about it beforehand, Father Baldi spun the wheel on the door ninety degrees, giving it a forceful turn. The door had been left unlocked, and it gave way. The Benedictine found himself in a circular room with a domed ceiling; its large floor, some seven hundred square feet, was partitioned into various smaller spaces by gray room dividers. Sitting in the center, with space surrounding it, was a black leather anatomical table with medical apparatuses on rolling stands arranged around it.
The studio was dimly lit, and Baldi could just make out the shapes of the various pieces of furniture in the different parts of the room created by the room dividers. There were three: one contained a complete system of oscillators, equalizers, and a table with mixers designed to synthesize various sounds; the second was crowded with boxes jammed with magnaphonic tape and clinical reports; and the last had several office desks, each equipped with current-generation IBM computers, as well as two tall metal file cabinets above which hung an unopened calendar from the Barcelona Olympic Games.
“Look at that! You found it all by yourself,” an animated voice thundered behind the Benedictine in American-accented Italian. “You must be the Venetian priest coming to replace Father Corso, or am I wrong?”
A man in a lab coat walked over, his hand outstretched. “I’m Albert Ferrell, but everybody here calls me il dottore Alberto. I don’t mind.”
“The doctor” gave Baldi a wink. He was a short individual, with a well-trimmed goatee and a rosy face, who tried to hide his incipient baldness by combing his side hair over the top. Vain. A slick seducer. While Baldi took his measure, the American with the transparent blue eyes tried to gain his visitor’s confidence.
“So you like the equipment?”
Baldi reserved judgment.
“We based our design for the room on the ‘dream laboratory’ built by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in the United States a few years ago. The most difficult part was the domed ceiling, as you can probably guess. The work we do with ambient sound makes it necessary to have perfect acoustics.”
Baldi reached for his wire-rimmed glasses so he wouldn’t miss a detail.
“The apparatuses you see behind the anatomical table serve to monitor the subject’s vital signs. And the sounds we experiment with are controlled from the sound board on your right. We direct them to the subjects through stereo headphones, while we measure the balance at the computer. Do you follow?”
Dr. Alberto made every attempt to be friendly. It was obvious that this was his private realm. He was comfortable here, and proud of the equipment that he had installed with funds provided by the U.S. Congress.
“All of our sessions are recorded on video,” he went on. “We keep a record of any changes in the subject’s reactions during the course of the experiment with a special software that lets us compare the data with our previous experiments.”
“Tell me something, dottore Alberto.” There was a certain disdain in Baldi’s tone when he pronounced the American’s nickname.
“Yes?”
“What exactly was the work that you did for Father Corso?”
“Let’s say that I handled the technical elements of his project. The technology developed by you, the ‘Four Evangelists,’ for Chronovision was rather primitive.”
Baldi could have crucified the insolent man. He spoke of the “saints” as if their work applied only to the Vatican and not to a layperson such as himself.
“I understand,” Baldi said, holding himself in check. “And what do you know about the Four Evangelists?”
“Not much, to tell you the truth. Only that there were many other highly placed groups trying, by more-or-less unorthodox and sometimes almost paranormal techniques, to overcome the barriers of time.”
“Well then, you already know more than many people at Saint Peter’s.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Father Baldi. As a matter of fact,” he added with particular emphasis, “just before you arrived, I received a call from Cardinal Zsidiv announcing your visit.”
The priest gathered that the American had more to say on the subject.
“And so?” Baldi encouraged him.
“I received the written report on Father Corso’s autopsy. Cardinal Zsidiv asked me to share its conclusions with you. He believed you would be interested to know the details as soon as possible.”
Giuseppe Baldi nodded.
“Luigi Corso died from a fracture of the neck, after his fall from the fourth floor. He fell headfirst. The first cervical vertebra was pushed through the occipital opening into the cranial cavity, and he died. But preliminary analysis has discovered something more. Father Corso suffered an ulcer from stress. His stomach revealed the striations pertaining to this painful condition.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It’s simple, really. Father Corso suffered an elevated level of stress before dying. The doctor performing the autopsy was almost certain that his anxiety was what led him to throw himself out the window. But he wants to find out if Corso’s adrenaline levels were abnormal before taking his plunge. That will require a little time.”
“And what could have caused this anxiety?”
Like a good soldier, Albert Ferrell was accustomed to questions like that. He had already had to answer several of them when the team of detectives from the carabinieri visited him two hours earlier. They were the ones who had told him what he now was going to reveal to Father Baldi, who, for his part, bravely resisted its implications.
“It seems, from what the doorman at the Santa Gemma residence says, that Corso received a visitor a short time before his death. A woman.”
“A woman?”
Ferrell smiled.
“And quite good-looking, judging from what the doorman saw of her. He described her as tall and elegant, with long black hair and green eyes. What caught his attention were the expensive red shoes she was wearing. Brand name, very pricey. It seems this woman visited Father Corso for some forty minutes, leaving a quarter of an hour before he threw himself out the window.”
“Well,” Father Baldi whispered. “That tells us who took his computer files.”
“You don’t say,” Ferrell jested. “You wouldn’t happen to know this lady, would you, Father?”
THIRTY-NINE
BETWEEN ISLETA AND GRAN QUIVIRA
Dawn was chilly and damp the next morning along the eastern slopes of the Manzano range. The encampment of the Indians and the two friars lay nearly eight leagues to the southeast of the mountain ridges. With the first rays of light, the Indians had already gathered their poss
essions and were covering the embers from the night before.
While the Indians were pulling out the last of the wooden stakes, the Franciscans withdrew to give thanks to God for the harvest of souls he had brought to them. They were well aware that it had not always been so easy, and that the progress the Church made in the New World had been paid for in blood. Soon elderly Jumanos crept up to join them in their prayers, falling down on their knees beside the Franciscans and leaning over to kiss the crosses hanging around the latters’ necks. They carried themselves like Old Believers. It was merely the latest surprise for the Franciscans, repeated evidence that this could not be the fruit of a misunderstanding, but of a divine plan. As soon as the prayers came to an end, the expedition once again set out for Gran Quivira.
The landscape around them changed dramatically as the daylight increased. They traveled from salt marshes to the sloping hills of the south, which were dotted with cactuses that drew the Indian’s attention. These stubby plants had fleshy spikes that they carefully broke off in order, as the Franciscans later learned, to ingest them in their kivas. Everything that grows in the desert has a use, whether sacred or profane.
Friar Juan wanted to learn a little more about their final destination. Over the course of their trek, he walked close to the old man who was farthest behind, asking him many questions.
“Friar,” the old man said, “ours is the only village built out of stone. The first time we saw the Castillas was when I was very young. They were astonished when they saw how we lived.”
“The Castillas?”
“That is right. They told us that that was their country’s name, and that they had come in search of the seven cities of gold, which we had never seen. They only stayed with us a little while. . . . We were not what they were looking for,” he said with a laugh.
“That must have been Vázquez de Coronado.”
“I do not remember his name, Friar. But my ancestors, who came long before me and were wiser, too, told me about his arrogance and his terrifying army. They were dressed in brilliant colors, but were more venomous than scorpions.”
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