The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “I hope you get your hands on the manuscript before they tear it to pieces and sell it as individual pages,” he groaned as his hand retrieved an agenda from the pile. “It’s hard to believe the unlucky streak we’re having with those manuscripts right now.”

  “Streak?” The police officer was intrigued. “What are you referring to?”

  “Aha! So no one told you when you came to investigate the theft? A week ago we suffered a separate attack on our historical records. And curiously enough, an attack on a text intimately related to the missing manuscript.”

  Carlos and José Luis exchanged looks of surprise.

  “It was at the end of March,” Valiente continued. “An Italian citizen, a woman, came to our reading room and requested a copy of a book printed in 1692, written by a Jesuit from Cádiz named Hernando Castrillo. It is certainly a strange book,” he said as he searched the top of his desk. “Its title is History and Natural Magic, or the Science of Occult Philosophy. A sort of popular encyclopedia of the period.”

  “And why do you say it’s intimately related to . . . ?”

  “Hold on. I’ll get to that.”

  Enrique Valiente reached for a copy of that same volume, pulling it from a table that sat behind his desk.

  “Here it is! This is the book in question.”

  The volume he held up to them was a solid, leather-bound tome whose well-stitched spine bore the author’s name.

  “The woman was in the process of tearing out one of the chapters,” he said as he flipped through the pages. “The one entitled ‘Has the Faith Been Carried to the Farthest Reaches of America?’ ”

  Carlos was startled, and blurted out, “A work on the evangelization of America! The same as the Memorial of Benavides!”

  “And what happened with this Italian woman?” José Luis, somewhat more practical than his friend, brought the subject back to the attempted theft.

  “This is the strange part. The librarian surprised the woman in the act of trying to cut the pages out of that chapter. Naturally, she prevented the woman from doing so and asked her to stay where she was, seated at one of the raised desks in the reading room, until a security guard arrived.”

  “And?”

  “And she vanished!”

  “How?”

  The head of the library looked straight at José Luis. His hands rested on top of the shifting chaos of paper as he leaned over his desk toward his visitors; his expression was utterly serious.

  “Exactly as I just said, Officer. She vanished. Vaporized. Disappeared. As if she were a ghost.”

  “You’re not going to tell me the library has ghosts, too, like Linares Palace?”

  Carlos relished the chance to refresh the director’s memory about that little incident. A few city blocks away, at Paseo de Recoletos 2, a deserted old mansion had become a hot topic when rumors spread that it was infested with ghosts. It was a little over a year ago. The press had gone to town with the story, and several magazines even went so far as to give away cassette tapes that purported to be voices of the spirits trapped inside the house.

  “What I am telling you is deadly serious,” the director said, his eyes still fixed on Carlos. “The woman was real. She registered at the entrance. She took out her library card. She filled out the form requesting Castrillo’s book, and then she evaporated.”

  “Like a ghost,” José Luis said with finality, remaining skeptical.

  “Could I take a look at the book?” Carlos asked.

  The journalist’s request did not surprise the head of the library, who handed it to him.

  “Go ahead, my friend!”

  Carlos opened the book to the “injured” chapter. José Luis leaned closer, trying to identify the source of so much interest. The pages were stitched to the spine, although a strip of gray fabric tape covered the cut inflicted by the “ghost.” The wound was deep.

  “So what does it say, Carlos?”

  “Look at this. The author asks if anyone successfully proselytized in the New World before Columbus arrived.”

  “You must be joking.”

  Enrique Valiente observed them closely.

  “It states in no uncertain terms that the Lady in Blue was not the first. It says that the first Jesuits to reach South America already discovered that other Christians had preached there centuries before.”

  “This is a curious book indeed,” the director broke in. “It asserts that Columbus himself realized that the Indians of the Antilles worshiped adulterated forms of the Holy Trinity. And it refers to Paraguay, where at that time they still remembered the visit of one Pay Zumé, who, with a cross on his shoulder, preached the good news of the resurrection two hundred years before the Spaniards arrived.”

  “And this book takes that for a fact?”

  “Catholic missionaries in America before Columbus?” José Luis looked as if he was listening to undiluted nonsense.

  “Well,” Director Enrique said in a doubtful tone, “what the Jesuits said at that point, in order to avoid, I imagine, going against the interests of the Spanish crown, is that the prodigy must have been the work of Saint Thomas. Which is ironic: he was the Apostle known as Doubting Thomas!”

  “So why choose him?”

  “They believed that the ‘Pay Zumé’ of the Indians was a corruption of the name ‘Santo Tomé’ or ‘Saint Thomas.’ Although the most curious thing of all is that there exists archaeological evidence that suggests that, in fact, missionaries did visit the Americas before 1492.”

  “Really?”

  “For example, at the Tiahuanco ruins near Lake Titicaca. At that site high up in the Bolivian plateau, there is a stone monolith, six and a half feet tall, that depicts a bearded man. As you probably know, the Indians at those latitudes have no facial hair. Even today you can view the statue in a large semienclosed space, known as Kalasasaya, something like the kivas of the North American natives. It is thought to represent a preacher.” He paused and then added, “And very nearby there are other statues that the Indians call ‘monks,’ which could well represent the first Christian evangelists, who came well before Columbus or Pizarro.”

  José Luis shrugged his shoulders.

  “But why would anybody want to rob this chapter?”

  “I asked myself the same thing. The woman could have requested a microfilm. But it seems she was interested in something else: she wanted to make that chapter disappear. This kind of thing happens sometimes; people do this because they don’t want anyone else to have access to certain information.”

  That caught the police officer’s ear. “Was there anything else about that visitor that struck the librarian’s attention?”

  “Now that you ask, yes. After filling out her request slip, she said that she had just come back from Brazil.”

  “Brazil?”

  “Yes. She said that she had gone there, to Bahia de Todos os Santos, the capital of the State of Bahia, to see a rock on which the imprint of human footprints can still be seen. The Indians say that they are Pay Zumé’s footprints. She also said that more footprints like those existed elsewhere in Brazil: in Itapuã, in Cabo Frio, and in Paraíba. The librarian who took care of her coincidentally happens to be a Brazilian, and she had never heard anything about this before.”

  “I see.”

  José Luis stared at the man on the other side of the desk.

  “What can you tell me about the call you received from the United States yesterday?”

  “The one that asked about Benavides’s Memorial?” Valiente asked incredulously. “That one even caught me by surprise!”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “Well, just imagine: it’s hardly normal for a manuscript by a seventeenth-century Franciscan to be stolen, and then a few hours later for me to receive a call from a psychiatrist in the United States, asking me about a friar who is cited in the stolen book.”

  “There’s no such thing as normal. Don’t you agree, José Luis?” Carlos added ironically.

&nbs
p; Enrique Valiente continued.

  “The relevant thing here is that I took her address and telephone number so I could inform her if I managed to learn anything about this friar she was so interested in. She told me one of her patients was having strange visions that took place during that period.”

  “Did she mention the Lady in Blue?”

  The head of the library nodded.

  “In fact, yes. All of this is very strange, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Do you think you could share her contact information with us?”

  The director searched through his pile of notes, and handed the policeman a piece of paper.

  “We’ll do what we can,” José Luis said as he accepted the note. “Although it is outside of our jurisdiction, thanks to Interpol, the FBI generally collaborates on this sort of case. Especially when it is related to national patrimony.”

  “Is there anything stopping us from going to the United States ourselves?”

  If José Luis hadn’t covered his mouth, he would have laughed out loud.

  “Us? It was hard enough for me to get the Federal Police to pay the expenses for our jaunt to Bilbao, so imagine what they’d say about a flight to”—he looked down at the note in his hands—“to Los Angeles.”

  The journalist had an idea. Maybe it was nothing more than a crazy idea, but what did he have to lose by trying it?

  “Maybe the police won’t pay for your trip to Los Angeles,” he said, “but my magazine might make the effort for me. If you get me a pass and hook me up with a contact at Interpol, I could learn a few things. And whatever I come up with, I will, of course, share with you before we go to press.”

  “And why not?” Enrique Valiente leaped in enthusiastically. “It would restore the library’s prestige to know where exactly this book has ended up.”

  José Luis rubbed his chin as he thought it over.

  “We can give it a try. Perhaps the director can give me a solid lead so I can stay on the case here in Madrid, while we send Carlos off to the United States.”

  José Luis’s words did not go down well with the director of the library. In reality, the policeman wasn’t asking anything, but just searching for an excuse to end the conversation on a friendly note. And yet this pressure inspired Valiente to come up with something unexpected.

  “How would you like another detail about the Italian who tried to steal the pages from the Castrillo book?”

  The question caught José Luis off guard.

  “Just a detail about how the woman was dressed,” he said, downplaying its importance. “The librarian told me that the woman was wearing the most eye-catching red shoes she had ever seen in her life.”

  “What?”

  “The woman, who was dressed impeccably in black, was wearing red shoes that completely clashed with the rest of her outfit.”

  Something inside José Luis reacted at that moment. He would have bet his badge that this was a good lead.

  FIFTY-ONE

  ROME

  The man is a bloody eccentric,” Baldi thought to himself, but would later regret the thought.

  Giuseppe Baldi reluctantly walked through the gate designed by the architect Filarete in 1433, which opened onto the Loggia delle Benedizioni, the portico of blessing, and into the most famous basilica in Christendom, headed toward the area where tourists were lining up to ascend to the dome of Saint Peter’s.

  After a quick glance at the confessionals along the south wall, he sought out number nineteen. The identifying Roman numerals near the top of the tall wooden booths were barely legible, but looking closely a keen observer could discern what were once resplendent numerals hand-painted in gold, with the designation “Heavenly Listening Room” in the upper-right corner. Number nineteen was the easternmost booth, closest to Adrian VII’s extravagant tomb. Visible at its entrance was a plaque, laden with years of grime, which announced, CONFESSIONS WILL BE HEARD IN POLISH BY THE DESIGNATED PRIEST, FATHER CZESTOCOWA.

  Baldi felt like a fool. Just thinking about it embarrassed him. It must have been more than a hundred years since members of the clergy used the confessionals for clandestine meetings, much less in these times when the Vatican had entire auditoriums equipped to counter illegal listening devices. Still it was unlikely that the sophisticated listening devices the Holy Office’s secret service and other foreign agencies liked to plant in the offices of the cardinals had been installed here.

  The Benedictine had no choice. The message in the mailbox at the residence where he was lodging had made it perfectly clear.

  Thus, obediently, Baldi entered booth nineteen on the right-hand side and knelt down. As he might have guessed, there were no Polish Catholics in line at that hour to receive absolution. The Holy Father’s countrymen tended to use that time of day to sleep or watch television.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he whispered.

  “Conceived without sin, Father Baldi.”

  The voice on the other side of the screen confirmed that he had made the right choice. The “evangelist” tried to camouflage his enthusiasm.

  “Monsignor?”

  “I am glad you have come, Giuseppe,” he said. “I have important news for you, and I have good reason to believe that even my office is no longer secure.”

  Stanislaw Zsidiv’s unmistakably nasal voice bore a certain funereal air that disturbed the “penitent.” His heart began to beat faster.

  “Have you learned anything new about the death of Father Corso?”

  “Analysis of the adrenaline content of his blood indicates that our beloved Saint Matthew had some sort of grave crisis before he died. Something that so overwhelmed him, he made the decision to take his own life.”

  “What could it be, Your Eminence?”

  “I have no idea, my son, but doubtless something terrible. Now, as Doctor Ferrell will tell you, we must make every effort to find out who was the last person to see Corso alive, and what his or her influence was on Corso’s decision, if any.”

  “I understand.”

  “But I did not make you come here for that, my son.”

  “No?”

  “Do you remember when we spoke of Benavides’s Memorial in my office?”

  “If I remember correctly, it was a report assembled by a Portuguese Franciscan in the seventeenth century concerning the apparitions of the Lady in Blue in the southwestern United States.”

  “Exactly.” His Eminence nodded with satisfaction. “That document, as I already told you, fascinated Corso at the very end of his life, because he believed that he had discovered in it a description of how a cloistered nun was physically carried from Spain to the New World in order to preach to the Indians in 1629!”

  “I see.”

  “What you may not know is that Corso was in the process of requesting an unpublished manuscript by the same Friar Benavides, in which he identified the Lady in Blue as a nun by the name of María Jesús de Ágreda, and that he had learned the method she used to transport herself, through bilocation, to America.”

  “The formula for bilocation . . . ?”

  “Just so.”

  “And he discovered it? Is it in the manuscript?”

  “This is where things get murky, my son. We are talking about a text to which no one has paid the slightest attention until now. Corso searched for it in the Pontiff’s archives the very day before his death, without success. Nevertheless, someone entered the National Library in Madrid and stole a manuscript belonging to King Philip the Fourth.”

  The Cardinal took a deep breath and continued before the Benedictine had a chance to react.

  “Yes, Giuseppe. It was the very same Memorial that Saint Matthew was looking for.”

  The Venetian monk struggled desperately to find some sort of logical connection between the disparate events.

  “According to what we learned this morning,” Zsidiv went on, “the Spanish police have not as yet detained any suspects, but everything points to the robbery being the work of professional
s. Perhaps the same criminals who stole Father Corso’s files.”

  “What makes you suspect that, Your Eminence?”

  “It is my impression that someone wants to make all information relating to the Lady in Blue disappear. Someone on the inside who wants to block the development of our Chronovision, and who does not seem inclined to settle for half measures in order to succeed.”

  “But why go to so much trouble?”

  “The only thing that makes sense to me,” Zsidiv whispered, “is that this someone has developed an investigation parallel to ours, has obtained promising results, and is currently erasing each and every clue that led them to their accomplishment.”

  Baldi protested.

  “But that is nothing more than conjecture.”

  “Which is why I asked you to come here today. I don’t feel safe in Saint Peter’s, my son. The walls have ears. The Holy Office has called a meeting to review the latest developments on the project. A meeting at the very highest level.”

  “Do you think the enemy resides in the very heart of the Church, Your Eminence?”

  “And what alternative would you propose, Giuseppe?”

  “None. Perhaps if we knew the contents of that purloined document, we would know where to start looking.”

  Zsidiv made an effort to stretch his legs inside the sort of vertical coffin that is a confessional, then added laconically, “But we know what is in it.”

  “Really?”

  “Certainly, my son. Benavides wrote his Memorial of New Mexico here, in Rome. He made two copies of the document: one for Urban the Eighth and a second for Philip the Fourth. The second is the copy that was stolen.”

  “Which means, we still have it!”

  “Yes and no . . . ,” he clarified. “You see, Friar Alonso de Benavides was Father Custodian of the Province of New Mexico until 1629. After interrogating the missionaries who had collected data on the Lady in Blue, he went off to Mexico, whence his superior, the Basque archbishop Manso y Zúñiga, sent him to Spain to bring a certain investigation to a close.”