by Bunn, Davis
“You haven’t failed anyone.”
“Did you hear what I just said? They’ve won. Everything we might have accomplished is over. The commission will be formed with the banks’ puppets in control. There will be no governance. The public will assume they are protected, and it will be a lie.” He sighed. “I’m so tired.”
“Antonio.”
“I’m so sorry, Elena.”
“Listen to me. Get out of there. You and your team.” The silence between them was charged with all that could not ever be put in words. “When can you leave?”
36
Perhaps it would be best if Shirley and I moved into a hotel.”
“Don’t you dare.”
Janine was clearly having difficulty finding the right words. “But shouldn’t you like to have some time alone with your young man?”
They worked at the kitchen counter, preparing salads. Elena had no idea what Antonio might want to eat, if anything. A trio of salads seemed suitable. There were sliced tomatoes and fresh mozzarella from the Italian deli in the Covered Market. Endive with blue cheese and walnuts and tangerines. Fresh bread. Elena fried bacon for a spinach salad. “My young man? You make me sound like a teenager.”
“You know exactly what I am saying.”
“You can’t leave. First of all, it’s late. Second, Antonio is not my anything.”
Janine lay out Parma ham alongside a selection of cheeses. “Then why is it you flush every time you speak his name?”
“Don’t make this any more difficult for me than it already is.”
“I’m just saying.”
Elena pulled the bacon from the pan and lay the strips on a paper towel. “The only way this works is if you two are here also.” She glanced at the wall clock. The train took just over two hours from Brussels to London. Another hour to cross London. Trains ran from Paddington Station to Oxford every twenty minutes. Which meant he could be here at any—
The front doorbell rang.
Elena cut off the stove, wiped her hands on a towel, and asked, “How do I look?”
Janine had the sort of face that lost both cares and years when she smiled. “Like the teenager you claim not to be.”
Elena’s rush carried her past Shirley, who had stopped midway through setting the table and was seated in one of the dining room’s chairs, staring at the side wall. Her expression was as blank as her gaze. She had drifted away like this several times since Nigel had shown her the photographs. As though learning that her suspicions were real proved too much for her to take in. Elena slowed long enough to step over and give the woman a one-armed hug. Then she checked her reflection in the hall mirror, took a long breath, touched her hair, took another breath, and turned to open the door. “You came.”
Exhaustion stained Antonio’s features as deeply as a tattoo. Even so, he gave his smile as much as he possibly could. “How could I go anywhere else?”
The words were perfect. Why, she had no idea. But any reserve she might have still felt was gone now. There was no reason not to do what she had longed to do for what seemed like years.
Elena stepped across the threshold and embraced him. His arms were strong and welcoming. She had always envisioned Italian men as being short. But Antonio was tall enough that she had to go up on her tiptoes to fit her chin into the space between his shoulder and his neck. She breathed away the tension and the lack. Her senses became filled with starch from his shirt and stale fragrances from the trains and something else, perhaps his aftershave, a faint fragrance of cloves and mystery. She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“Not at all.” She could not say what the outside temperature was just then. Nor did she care.
“How is it possible,” Antonio murmured in her ear, “that your arms can knit my world back together?”
She released him, not because she wanted to, but because it was time. She looked into his sad and weary face and put all she had into her smile, holding nothing back. Then she drew him inside. “Welcome home, Antonio.”
They dined by candlelight. Antonio sat at the head of the table, his back to the curtained window and the night. Janine sat opposite Elena. Shirley was seated in the chair closest to the kitchen doorway. She stared at her plate and toyed with her food. No one was particularly hungry. Antonio’s features had turned craven by the strain he carried. Even so, every time he glanced her way, the shivers returned.
She cleared the table with Janine’s help and made tea. When she returned to the table, Antonio asked, “What are we to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You are comfortable with this absence of direction?”
“More today than yesterday.”
He nodded slowly. “I have spent the trip today thinking about my father. My father was an avvocato, a lawyer in a village near Milan. As a boy, Papa always thought he would enter the priesthood. But when he was fifteen he met my mother. They fell in love. Her father was a doctor from the next village. When I was young, the two of them meeting and falling in love was the family’s favorite story. Everyone would laugh, except my father, who always turned very quiet as the story was told, very sad. My mother would always reach over and take his hand. And the love between them was strong enough to draw him back from the halls of regret.”
Elena poured him a cup of tea. She did so because she wanted an excuse to draw closer. His voice had taken on the rich accent again, as though he held a special Mediterranean talent, one that granted him the ability to turn English into song. Antonio said, “I know he wanted me to enter the priesthood for him. But I was fascinated with numbers from an early age. Numbers and statistics and the ability to measure things like risk and buying patterns and economics. I read Adam Smith’s famous treatise on free-market economics for the first time when I was nine.”
In the candlelight his eyes gleamed like opals at the bottom of a dark river. Antonio went on, “My faith has always come easily. Even in the darkest moments after Francesca’s death, I never found a need to question God. Italian society went one way, I went another. Faith was my deepest connection to my father’s memory, my way of honoring the finest man I have ever known.”
Only when Elena was certain he would not say more on his own did she speak. “And now everything has changed.”
His nodding became a subtle shift of his head, the grave gesture of a prince of the realm. “No longer am I able to lose myself in the soft comfort of ritual and memory. I am being challenged to—”
“To grow,” Elena said, aching in a manner that redefined her interior world. “To trust. To walk into the unknown. To reach out for a hand that might not be there.”
There came a terrible wrenching of his features and his voice. “Have I failed God?”
“No, Antonio. Of this I am certain.”
“He sent me to do a thing. I have been cast out. Even my own assistants have left me. When we said farewell today in Brussels, they treated me as they would a corpse.”
“They were wrong to do so.”
“I’m so tired, Elena.”
“I know.”
“I just wish …” Antonio rubbed his face with one hand. “I wish I knew what to do.”
“All I can give you is the next step.” She rose from her chair and offered her hand. “It’s time you went to bed.”
Elena settled Antonio into the extra bedroom that had its own private bath. She had been using it as an exercise room because the ceiling was a foot higher and she could stand comfortably on the stair machine. Before starting dinner the three women had slid her equipment to the side wall and fashioned a pallet of blankets on the floor. Elena had hesitated, then taken a quilt from her hope chest and used it as the cover. The quilt had been sewn by members of her Durham church as a wedding gift. It smelled slightly of age and dust, which was hardly a surprise, as it had not seen the light of day for five years. Elena sat at her desk and listened to Antonio settling into the next room, glad she had been able to make that small and secret step.
There was a knock on Elena’s door. “Yes?”
“Can I come in?” Janine entered wearing a robe sewn from multicolored strips, draping her in a terry-cloth rainbow. Then she noticed the two open books on Elena’s desk and said, “Perhaps I’m interrupting.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I just wanted to thank you.”
“Stay. Please.” Elena rose, walked to the side wall, and lifted her clothes off the bedroom’s other chair. She dumped them on the bed and pulled the chair over beside her own. “I’m not getting anywhere.”
“You do this every night?”
“And morning. I—”
Another knock and Shirley Wainwright asked, “Mind if I join you?”
“You should be asleep.”
“Tell my mind that.” Plum-colored stains rimmed her eyes. “I shut my eyes and see Terry and that woman.”
Elena walked down the hall, past Antonio’s closed door, and brought back a chair from the dining room. “Join us.”
“What are you doing?”
“Not a lot.” She included the image and the Bible in one motion. “I study a little each morning and evening. I find a passage to begin the next gathering.”
Shirley squinted at the image. “Does the book speak to you?”
“Does God,” Janine corrected.
“Of course. That’s what I meant.” Her nose was inches from the vellum page. “I just can’t get over the age of this book.”
“And the legacy,” Janine agreed. “Were they all women, the people who studied it before you?”
“I have no idea. I can’t see any reason why they should be,” Elena said.
Janine said, “Tell me what we’re supposed to do.”
“There are no instructions. I treat these times like prayer. Sometimes I feel a remarkable closeness to God. Rarely.”
Shirley asked, “Which verse is this again?”
“‘Holy is thy name.’”
“Why do you suppose the letters are bunched up around the top of the page like that?”
“Holy means separate. Isolated. Inviolate. I’m assuming it means God remains apart from the world he created, giving us the power and liberty of free will.”
Janine nodded distractedly. “Why don’t you turn the page?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should. I just keep waiting for a sense that I’ve done what I’ve supposed to here. That God is ready for me to move on.”
They sat in silence for a time. In the distance, a motorcycle raced up Boars Hill. Then the night closed in once more.
Shirley murmured, “I miss Teddy so.”
“I cannot imagine,” Janine said, “what you must be feeling.”
“Friends from church keep saying how glorious it was that Teddy accepted Christ before he died. Like that’s supposed to make his absence better. Like I should be able to dismiss the sorrow as easily as they do.” She gave her cheeks two impatient swipes. “I was glad for a reason to get away.”
Another silence, then Janine said, “Sitting here like this reminds me of church when I was a child.”
Shirley cleared her cheeks a second time. “Where was that?”
“A farming village to the west of here. My family raised sheep. And they fought. Continuously. Sunday mornings were the only real peace I knew.” She addressed her words to the page. “Everyone dressed up in their best clothes. Our church was over a thousand years old, with very thick walls and narrow windows. Even in the height of summer it was like entering a cool, dark cave.”
“A safe place,” Shirley murmured.
“Our community followed the old tradition of arriving early and sitting in silence. I loved those times. The scent of old incense, the candles, the quiet. This was God’s gift to a frightened little girl. Allowing me to escape from the world one morning each week. And sit in his house and imagine a different life.”
Elena rose to her feet. “What a brilliant idea.”
Janine looked up in surprise. “What did I say?”
“I’ll be right back.” Elena went into the front of the house and returned with the candlesticks from the dining table. She lit them and placed them around the room, then turned off the lights and set the last candle beside the book. “There.”
“That is indeed lovely,” Janine said.
The silence fashioned a haven for secrets and shared mysteries. Elena’s mind flitted about like a winged night creature. Small sounds crept through her closed window. An owl cried in the distance. Shirley said, “Antonio seems like a very nice gentleman.”
“And handsome,” Janine added. “Let’s not be forgetting that little item. Not for one second.”
Elena shifted over the book. “I’ve spent years in one-way arguments with Jason. Angry with him for leaving and with God for taking him away. Now when I think of him, there’s a sense of him watching me with approval. But from a new distance. Not like he’s moved farther away. He’s where he’s always been. Like I’m finally accepting his absence.”
Shirley lifted her gaze from the book. “You love Antonio.”
“We’ve only met a few times. It’s too early to use the word love.”
Janine smiled at her. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I was in love with Brian the instant I set eyes on him.”
Afterward, it seemed as though they all saw it at the same moment. Janine said, “Is that a crease?”
“It’s too broad.” Elena leaned closer still. “Look, it doesn’t continue to the edges like it would if the page had been folded.”
Shirley reached over and switched on the desk lamp. Instantly the crease disappeared. She turned the light off. The line was there, a faint gray shadow perhaps an inch wide. It cut across the page, just below the cloud of golden script. “Someone did this on purpose.”
“It’s part of the page,” Elena agreed. “And the message.”
Janine squinted over the page. “What do you think it might mean?”
Elena touched the cloud of golden script. “Our Father in heaven. Holy is your name.” She slid her fingers down to the lower third of the page, an empty space cut off from the golden script by the invisible wall. “Here we are. On earth.” Elena then touched the line. “Separated from our Father by the invisible barrier of sin.”
Janine looked at Elena, then back at the image. She touched her lips with her tongue. She might have spoken. But it was at that moment that Elena lost the capacity to hear.
Quite simply, the image came alive. Elena ran her finger along the invisible barrier. The wall that most of the world did its best to ignore, to claim it did not even exist. Freeing them to do whatever they wanted, as often and as harshly as they wished. Without restraint. Without any remorse or need to change direction. Without heroes or purpose or beacons of hope. A world without the promise of eternity.
Elena felt a trace of eternal sorrow then. Just a trace. And it seemed as though everything she had known since Jason’s death, all the anguish and the loss and the empty hours, were merely a faint scent of the truth. That man would never know what God suffered because of the invisible barrier, separated from his most precious creation by sin. Because man did not know the true and full meaning of love.
Elena traced a finger along the line and saw a wall that remained invisible unless a person sought with a questing heart. A heart searching for wisdom. A heart open to the message the world sought to destroy. That God had so loved the world that he released man from the barrier, erased it from vision, so long as man took the steps to repent and believe.
Then she smelled it. The eroding odor of old smoke. Cold and sulfuric. The stench grew until it threatened to cut off her air. The reek of ancient wrong. Timeless and vicious. And now. Here. In the room with them.
Elena rose from her chair and shut the book. She said, “We have to get out of here. Now.”
37
The two women did not want to go with her. Elena saw the doubt and confusion in their expressions. Particularly after she had woken An
tonio and insisted that he had to come with them now.
Elena rushed them into the kitchen in the dark. She opened the rear door, then stood listening for what felt like hours. Long enough for the two women to share another worried glance. When Shirley started to say something, Elena hissed at her. Quiet and sharp. Both women drew back another step. Clearly regretting their decision to overnight with this strange woman.
Antonio, however, showed no such hesitation. His hair was tousled and his face creased with heavy sleep. He wore a shapeless T-shirt, the trousers to his suit, and his dress shoes without socks. But he was fully alert. And close enough for Elena to feel his warmth. He breathed, “Anything?”
“No.”
“Then we should move. Waiting does not help.”
“I was hoping to find Charles.”
“Your guard, yes? Elena, you say the threat is real and now. What does that tell you about Charles?”
He was right, of course. Elena breathed the question she should have asked hours earlier. “Where are your guards?”
“They came with the job,” Antonio replied. “I am unemployed.”
These three friends were Elena’s responsibility now. She did not need to consciously work through this. It was embedded in her bones. She had to get them to safety. Which meant entering the dark.
Janine lifted her cell phone and whispered, “Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“When we’re safe,” Elena said. She held the book of dreams in both arms. It was wrapped in the sheet off her bed. The bundle formed a comforting solidity across her chest, like a shield against everything that waited to pounce.
Janine protested, “But they could help us.”
“They can do nothing until they arrive,” Antonio said.
Elena gestured the women in tight. Her words were a faint shift in the air, softer than the ticks of the kitchen clock. “The rear garden has a hedge. The section closest to the rear ledge has a gully washed out by rain. That’s our goal.”