The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “Excellent,” Friar Bernardino said with evident pleasure. “Your Majesty is a good king and a better Christian.”

  Philip smiled.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ROME

  Three quick blasts resounded inside Saint Peter’s, echoing in the confessional where Zsidiv and Baldi had been talking. The two men sat there frozen. What was happening? It sounded as if the colossal statue of Saint Longinus, Bernini’s masterpiece, had tumbled from its pedestal and its entire fifteen-foot length had shattered on the floor. Had it been destroyed? The blasts sounded as if they came from close by. Baldi instinctively shifted position in the booth, leaning away from the screen in an attempt to determine their origin. The bursts of noise emanated from the gigantic statue of Saint Veronica. From where he sat in the confessional, all he could make out was a cloud of billowing smoke rising toward the roof of the nave.

  “An attack!” he muttered fearfully.

  “What did you say?” Zsidiv was paralyzed.

  “It looks as if someone tried to destroy the statue of Veronica,” Baldi enunciated loudly.

  “Impossible. Saint Veronica?”

  There was no time to react. Two seconds later, a woman with an athletic build, swathed in black, emerged from the cloud of smoke and dust. Moving like a cat, she eluded the crowd watching the unfolding events and ran straight toward Father Baldi and the door leading to the dome.

  “One minute, thirty seconds,” she said, panting.

  The Benedictine lost his balance and stumbled backwards, while the fugitive seized the moment—and took a deep breath—before delivering a cryptic message.

  “Ask the second, Giuseppe. Pay attention to the sign.”

  Baldi nearly lost his balance again. Did she say his name? And what was that about a sign? Zsidiv had just said the same thing.

  “The second?” Baldi quickly went to the heart of the message. As he turned around to look in the direction of the fugitive, he raised his voice and shouted, “Were you speaking to me? Listen! Was that for me?”

  “The second,” she repeated.

  It was the last he saw of her.

  A burly German tourist, wearing an ugly jogging suit and armed with a silver Canon, began taking one photo after another while standing alongside one of the tombs near the confession booths. The overwhelming glare from the camera’s flash disconcerted the Benedictine.

  “Santa Madonna!” he groaned aloud, his eyes still irritated by the flash.

  The woman in black had quickly disappeared, leaving both men with their mouths hanging open. The German tourist was inspecting the front of his camera.

  “Did you see where she went?” Baldi shouted at him.

  “Nein, nein.”

  The Swiss Guards were the next to arrive. They raced to the scene at full speed without losing the solemn composure expected of the Pope’s personal guard.

  “Father, we are searching for a woman who fled in this direction,” said the guard at the head of the first group of sampietrini to arrive. He was a redhead, a robust young man whose face was pitted with acne. “Do you know if she fled to the terrace?”

  “A fugitive?”

  “A terrorist,” emphasized the impeccably dressed Swiss Guard.

  “She passed right in front of me . . . She flew by . . . But I swear to you I have no idea what became of her. The man over there, the tourist, he photographed her!” Baldi stammered.

  “Thank you, Father. Please remain inside the basilica.”

  The patrol took care of business skillfully: they pulled the German aside and took possession of the film in his camera. They then returned to Father Baldi, wrote down his name and temporary address at Via Bixio, as well as the telephone number at Vatican Radio, and asked him not to leave Rome for two days. Two other guards raced up into the dome overhead. Baldi somehow suspected they would return empty-handed.

  “Can you tell me what is happening here?”

  Baldi sensed the guard’s disappointment.

  “It was a fanatic, Father. We get plenty of them each week, but we usually intercept them in time.”

  “I can see that.”

  “She tried to blow a hole in the marble base supporting the statue of Saint Veronica. All that just so she could jam a note in it!”

  Baldi was perplexed. He prudently remained silent about what the terrorist had whispered to him.

  “A note? And what did it say, if I may ask?”

  “Here, take a look, Father.” The youthful redhead smiled as he held the piece of paper in question out to him. “Can you make that out? ‘Property of Ordo Sanctae Imaginis, Order of the Sacred Image.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

  “No, to tell you the truth.”

  “The majority of these people are only trying to scare you. Crazy people, believers in the Apocalypse. Deranged people who would put an atom bomb under the Pope’s chair if they could get away with it.”

  “It is . . . shocking.”

  “If we catch her, Father, we’ll call you. We need you to identify her, although perhaps this may be of help.”

  The Swiss Guard held the roll of film in his hand with a sense of satisfaction before slipping it into a small breast pocket of his uniform. A moment later, he then took his leave, bowing slightly to Baldi as he did so. At the same time the two guards returned from the dome at full speed. They came back covered with sweat and shrugging their shoulders.

  “She vaporized!” Baldi heard them say.

  Baldi, who could hardly think straight at the moment, walked back to Confessional 19 in search of answers. But the Cardinal had disappeared as well. He must have taken advantage of the confusion to slip out without being seen.

  The Benedictine was overcome by an odd feeling of isolation.

  “I don’t understand,” he repeated several times just above a whisper, as if he were imploring someone to help him. “I don’t understand anything.”

  The priest stood there, lost in his thoughts, for several more minutes. What was the meaning of everything that had happened? Was it mere chance that “Saint John” and the mysterious woman both told him, in a matter of seconds, to pay attention to the signs? The clouds of smoke, the fugitive who suddenly disappeared, the tourist who nearly blinded him, and the phrase “Ask the second” directed at him (“Who could it be?” Baldi thought); he turned all of it over and over again in his mind like an outstanding play repeated on television during a sporting event.

  “What sign?”

  Sunk deep in thought, he retraced the sixty-odd feet that separated him from the five-sided column where the explosives had gone off. He still had time to take a quick look at the damage caused by the attack before the Swiss Guards finished cordoning off the area. There was nothing to show for the three blasts: the marble plinth at the base of the statue suffered no damage; the inscription that Pope Urban VIII had had engraved at the statue’s feet appeared to be slightly blackened, but that was all.

  “How curious,” Baldi mused to himself. “Was not Urban the Eighth the Pope to whom Benavides sent his Memorial? Is that the sign?”

  Not convinced in the slightest, the evangelist wandered through the adjacent part of the basilica until he arrived at Bernini’s spectacular canopy above the pulpit. An astonishing work. He had heard it said that the sculptor designed it when he was barely twenty-five. He must have been one of those who are touched by the hand of God, Baldi thought. And there, overwhelmed by so much beauty, the priest raised his eyes to the dome and begged that same God to let him see the blessed sign.

  Baldi had no way of knowing his gesture was going to resolve his confusion.

  The priest was hardly concentrating when he lowered his gaze toward the base of that celestial section. His eyes lingered on the curvilinear triangles immediately beneath the dome itself. The spectacle of Michelangelo’s work of genius was unique: its size—137 feet in diameter and 446 in height—made it the largest vault in all Christendom. There were the four Evangelists, the authors of the four most import
ant books of the New Testament. Mark, staring distractedly into the heavens, held a pen, a meter and a half long, while Matthew appeared to be eyeing him challengingly from above.

  “Domine Noster!” he blurted out when he realized. “It really is right in front of my nose!”

  The likenesses of all four Apostles seemed to be laughing at him from inside the huge, round bas-reliefs, each of them twenty-six feet tall.

  “It was obvious the whole time. I was an idiot to miss it! The Second Evangelist is the sign I was looking for.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  MADRID

  The interview with the king left Friar Bernardino with an uneasy feeling. The short, combative commissary had watched as his interests passed through a moment of danger, and he made certain Friar Alonso knew it as they exited the royal palace.

  “What made His Majesty think the Lady in Blue was the Virgin?” he demanded, raising his voice.

  “He has a point, Father. You yourself said that the Lady was covered by a blue cloak, as was the Virgin of Guadalupe; she was wearing a white habit, as did Guadalupe. She even descended from heaven like her. I, too, was tempted to defend that idea. Nevertheless, following your instructions and those of the Archbishop of Mexico, I defended the hypothesis of the Franciscan who bilocates.”

  “And continue to do so! If the king, the Jesuits, or the Dominicans were able to turn this subject around and lead everyone to believe it was the Virgin who appeared, we can say good-bye to the Franciscan claims of authority! Do you understand me?”

  “I would prefer that you explain to me.”

  “It’s very simple really,” said Friar Bernardino in a whisper. “If we don’t manage to convince His Majesty that it has been a Franciscan Conceptionist nun, aided by Divine Providence, who was responsible for the conversions in New Mexico, he could confer the evangelization of our overseas territories to another order tomorrow. You know how capricious the will of kings can be. And if the idea spreads that these conversions have been the work of Our Lady of Guadalupe, you can be sure that in less than a week the Dominicans will be asking the king to intervene. And then the Jesuits will arrive. That could put an end to our primacy in America! Now do you understand?”

  “Of course, Father. The Virgin belongs to everybody—not so, a Conceptionist nun. Please rest assured, the message is clear to me.”

  After crossing the patios, the two friars were led to the palace gates. From there, they walked through the streets and alleys of the capital on their way to the convent of Saint Francis.

  “As soon as we have the first copies of your Memorial in our hands, I want you to travel to Ágreda to interrogate Sister María de Jesús.”

  The commissary’s harsh tone was even more inflexible than usual.

  “I will pave the way for you by writing the orders for her to speak to you, and will bring you up to date with information about her so that you go fully warned.”

  “Warned?”

  “Sister María de Jesús is a woman of strong character. Before reaching the minimum age required, she had already obtained the permission to become abbess, and she enjoys a good reputation in the province. It will not be easy for you to convince her to promote our interests.”

  “Well,” Friar Alonso interjected as they walked toward the Plaza Mayor, “perhaps that may not be necessary. Perhaps she is the person truly responsible for the bilocations.”

  “Indeed. But we cannot run any risks. When I met her, she was much younger, and I discovered that she inherited her mystic abilities. She would never, and permit me the choice of words, deliberately lie. Now you understand me.”

  Friar Alonso shook his head.

  “What do you mean that ‘she inherited her mystic abilities’?”

  “Clearly you do not know her family history. Sister María is the daughter of a wealthy family that later came down in station, and that some years ago decided to relinquish the family holdings in an unusual manner. Her father, Francisco Coronel, entered the monastery of Saint Julian of Ágreda, while the mother converted the family’s residence into a cloistered monastery, obtaining the permissions to do so in an unexpectedly short time.”

  “Interesting . . .”

  “The fact is that, years earlier, the bishop of Tarazona, Monsignor Diego Yepes, had already confirmed María Jesús at the young age of four.”

  “Monsignor Yepes?” Benavides marveled. “The biographer of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the great mystic?”

  “Just imagine. Yepes saw very early on that the young girl had mystical leanings, and that is not surprising, either.”

  “No?”

  At that midday hour, the center of Madrid was crowded with people. Friar Alonso and the commissary crossed the Plaza Mayor, making their way past vendors hawking breads, fruits, and fabrics as they continued their conversation.

  “Her mother, Catalina de Arana, was a woman with great ecstatic gifts: she heard the voice of Our Lord. In fact it was she, following the instructions of that voice, who pushed her husband toward life in a monastery. Later on came her trances, visions of extraordinary lights in her cell, angels. . . . These things are beyond me!”

  “Angels?”

  “Yes. Not angels with wings, but flesh-and-blood people with extraordinary powers. When I visited Ágreda for the first time, Sister Catalina herself told me how, from the time when work began on the monastery in 1618, a pair of young men came around who, almost without eating or drinking, and without being paid, worked from sunrise to sunset on building the monastery.”

  “And what does that have to do with angels?”

  “Well, for example, they saved a number of workers from falls and from wounds caused by sudden accidents. And what is more, they managed to become good friends with Sister María de Jesús, exactly during the period from 1620 to 1623, when she was undergoing her fiercest mystical attacks.”

  “That is certainly curious.”

  “Curious? What seems curious about it to you, Friar Alonso?”

  “Well, I remember what the two friars from New Mexico who investigated the Lady in Blue’s apparitions among the Jumanos told us. In their report they stated that the woman spoke to them about several ‘lords of the sky’ who are able to move among us, who can invoke all kinds of extraordinary phenomena.”

  “What kinds of phenomena?”

  “All sorts, Father. She even explained that it was those angels who carried her through the air.”

  “Good Lord, Friar Alonso. Find out whatever you can on this subject. Angels who can camouflage themselves while living among us and who can carry people through the air make me very agitated. And the Holy Inquisition, too, believe me.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  EN ROUTE TO LOS ANGELES

  Carlos couldn’t get the image of Txema Jiménez, his bulky silhouette standing beside the road sign to Ágreda a few days before, out of his mind. As he settled into seat 33C on American Airlines Flight 767, which would take him to Los Angeles, he did some serious thinking about the bizarre series of events, subtle connections, discoveries, and fortuitous encounters that had brought him to the present moment.

  “I’m convinced that we all have our own destiny,” the ghost in his mind repeated in the photographer’s boastful voice, “and that sometimes the force of that destiny pushes us violently, like a hurricane.”

  The previous afternoon, after leaving Enrique Valiente’s office, Carlos had called the Mysteries editor in chief. José Campos, already accustomed to his best writer’s sudden enthusiasms, had given in and agreed to pay for Carlos’s unexpected flight to the United States. “But you better bring back a good story,” he threatened unconvincingly. “Or two.”

  This time Carlos was not afraid of failure. The succession of synchronicities was pushing him into the realm of confidence, toward a belief in his own star. And from there to faith was only a short step.

  He had been so involved in his own thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the plane was almost empty. It was a Wednesday, in an unlikely mo
nth for anyone in Spain to take a vacation.

  From his first visit to Ágreda, and then to Bilbao, and now onto the plane, everything had happened so rapidly. It seemed almost as if those events, including the theft at the National Library, had been determined long before and he was merely playing a part according to a preestablished script. “What I wouldn’t give to know the librettist of this opera!” he mused. The feeling reminded him of when he was a young child copying wild, meaningless phrases written in someone else’s hand, imitating the letters that appeared in a workbook.

  For example, what explanation did he have for the fact that the editor of the magazine approved his trip to the other end of the ocean without asking for an explanation? None whatsoever.

  That everything had come together so easily disturbed him. Even Interpol had failed to raise objections about assisting him. In his carry-on luggage he had the fax from Mike Sheridan, the head of the Los Angeles office of the FBI’s Cultural Patrimony Department, confirming their meeting in less than twenty-four hours. And yet, far from comforting him, all of that made him nervous, as if he were being manipulated. The question was, by whom? And for what reason?

  What higher force was dragging him to the United States in search of a woman whose only crime had been to ask about a stolen document at the wrong time? Most likely that clue was a mere illusion. Even so, with his editor’s approval and the plane ticket in hand, he could hardly turn back.

  “Violently, like a hurricane.”

  Carlos whispered the phrase again. And without opening his eyes he closed his notebook and after that the book he was reading. It was written by a Princeton psychologist, one Julian Jaynes, and it attempted to explain in a scientific manner some of the most outstanding mystic phenomena of history.

  “Mystics . . . crazies!” Carlos grumbled.

  His plane, with its Pratt & Whitney engines, flew like a breeze across the Atlantic, cruising at an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet when the pilot announced to the passengers that they were leaving the Azores to the south.