The Lady in Blue Page 4

  “I concede the point, Corso.” Baldi didn’t argue. “My indiscretion . . . The bad news is that they want me to appear in the Vatican to state my case, before Sunday. And as you know, it would be extremely unpleasant for me if they canceled our project.”

  “I think Zsidiv would be opposed to that.”

  “Nevertheless, if they decide to open a dossier on me I fear that the project could suffer a new setback. Nobody in Rome is really aware of the deep implications of our investigation; all our reports have been sent in code, and I feel certain you could continue with the project, even if you no longer keep me informed of what’s happening. It would be dangerous for you to do so.”

  Corso, or rather Saint Matthew, was silent.

  “You heard what I said?”

  “I heard, Luke. But it is very late in the day for what you propose,” the man on the other end said in an irritated voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some goon who works at the Holy Office got in touch with me last night. He gave me all the latest news about what they plan to do. He advised me that our discoveries are now out of our hands. The Vatican needs our latest research. Their idea is to apply it to Church projects. Seemingly, we have no choice in the matter.”

  Father Baldi was crushed.

  “IEA called you? From the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?” He spoke just above a whisper.

  The IEA, or Institute for External Affairs, was the Vatican “agency” that acted as the liaison between the secret police protecting the Pope and the old Sant’Uffizio, or Holy Office, now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Its tentacles extended in all directions. If Luigi Corso had given in, Baldi knew the battle was lost.

  “In that case, Brother, it is very late . . .”

  The Benedictine leaned on his elbows, cupping the receiver in his left hand.

  “My God!” he groaned. “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Come to Rome, Luke,” said Father Corso, trying to lift his colleague’s spirits. “Resolve the issue personally. Furthermore, if you want some good advice, never speak about the project in public again. Remember what happened the first time you let your tongue loose: Pius the Twelfth classified Chronovision as riservatissima, top secret, and even though Pope John later loosened the gag, things have never been the same for us.”

  “I will bear it in mind,” Baldi agreed. “And thanks. Obviously I have yet to open the envelope you sent me. What does it contain?”

  “My last report. In it I detail how we refined our method for accessing the past. Last week Dottore Alberto discovered the missing frequencies that will enable us to break the three-century barrier. Do you recall?”

  “I remember. You already told me a good deal about the work of this Doctor Alberto. How did it turn out . . . ? ”

  “An incredible success, Luke. Incredible.”

  EIGHT

  SIERRA DE CAMEROS, SPAIN

  Over the course of the next five hours, Carlos and Txema drove out from Madrid to the foothills of the Cameros Mountains, without paying much attention to the traffic or the rain that was slowly turning into snow. The Rioja wine country lay before them, its rugged peaks looming over gentle valleys, its enigmas shrouded. Carlos made use of the time on the road to tell his photographer the strange story of finding the medal, and how it had stirred memories of everything he knew about the Holy Shroud. The time he had spent working at a Catholic magazine in Madrid had not been wasted.

  “The worst was in 1988, when a team of scientists dated Christ’s supposed burial sheet between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” he told Txema. “You cannot imagine the stir that announcement caused! Carbon-fourteen dating left no doubts: the Holy Shroud was a fake.”

  Txema observed him without commenting.

  “I remember how the editor searched desperately for arguments to convince his readers that the scientific diagnosis must be wrong. And one of them was that, way before the fourteenth century, there were copies of the Shroud of Turin circulating with this image on it. So, how could anyone have copied something that had yet to be created? If there were earlier copies, it was because the original must be much older than all of them. Logical, no?”

  Before they stopped to refuel, the photographer had already figured out what was preoccupying his friend. “Sudden inspiration,” the “incredible coincidence” of finding the medal on the same morning as the news of the Holy Shroud in the Cameros. . . . But something, nevertheless, had yet to make sense to him. A few minutes before they drove into the heart of Rioja, Txema broke his silence for the first time.

  “Can you please tell me why you’ve abandoned your other investigations for nonsense like this?” he asked. “Searching for copies—copies!—of a relic. And the truth is, I can’t swallow all that stuff about the medal.”

  Txema had managed to wipe the smile off his friend’s face.

  “What are you referring to?”

  “You know . . . Ever since I met you, you’ve tried to avoid news of religion, spiritual subjects, mystical themes. You simply left that sort of thing to others. So why now?”

  Carlos stared straight ahead at the road, his lips drawn.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, what about your work on the teleportations?” Txema was warming to his task. “Remember those dudes you took me to see, the ones who said that they drove into a heavy cloud and then reappeared who knows how many miles farther away? Not the guy in Seville, who I missed, but those guys in Salamanca. And the night we spent in Alicante, going back and forth on Highway 340, trying to let something ‘teleport’ our car? Or that priest in Venice a few months ago who suggested there were people capable of traveling into the past, hundreds of miles from where he started, enabling him to watch any historical event he wanted to? It took you a while to wring that out of him!”

  “Those are all very different things, Txema,” Carlos chided him, drawing his words out slowly.

  “Perhaps. But any one of them is more interesting than searching for phony shrouds!”

  Carlos grimaced. In fact, he had spent a good deal of time avoiding that other investigation: for the last several months he had been busy interviewing witnesses who were convinced they had undergone “teleportations.” People who spoke about how, while traveling across a rarely visited region, something had happened to change their plans. In most cases a cloud bank suddenly appeared, but in some of the accounts that “something” was nothing more than a chill, or a burst of light like the flash of a camera. And then right away everything changed: the highway, the landscape, their itinerary. Everything, down to the smallest detail.

  In less than a year he had located some twenty people who told him the same story. He spoke with airline pilots, priests, travel agents, truck drivers, and even the ex-husband of a famous singer. He went so far as to establish a set of rules that, according to him, governed the behavior of those incidents. Carlos knew this was the surest route out of his crisis: if, in the process of a close encounter with the supernatural, he was able to encapsulate it inside a rational, scientific vision, he would perhaps come face-to-face with that evasive Programmer. Perhaps he could even interview him someday, or so he told himself.

  But the journalist had badly estimated his powers. The investigation quickly got out of hand. The funds set aside by the magazine dried up, and his work came to a dead end.

  Deeply frustrated, he felt he had failed. And Txema knew it.

  “If you were so enthusiastic about teleportation, why did you drop it?”

  Carlos looked at him out of the corner of his eye and decelerated, downshifting into third. He answered reluctantly.

  “I’ll tell you if you then let it drop. The blame lies with two historical incidents. I thought I had something important within reach: two references, both very old, to incidents similar to the ones I was researching. But when I started to dig for information, I came up with nothing, not a shred of proof. I was chasing after meaningles
s urban legends, so I let it go. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Like hell! You never told me anything about it. What were those two incidents that defeated you?”

  “They did not defeat me!” Carlos insisted. “The first was a Spanish soldier who lived in the sixteenth century. Legend has it that while he was stationed in Manila, he traveled, in the blink of an eye, to the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City—”

  “When did this occur?”

  “The date is one of the few things I could find out: October 25, 1593.”

  Txema shifted in his seat. The boy really did have a prodigious memory for names, dates, and places.

  “Can you imagine: the infantryman crossed eight thousand miles over land and sea in a matter of seconds, was planted at the other end of the world, and never told a single soul how he did it.”

  “And the second case?”

  “That was even more spectacular: only forty years after the ‘flight’ of the soldier, a Spanish nun named María Jesús de Ágreda was interrogated by the Inquisition as a result of her repeated visits to New Mexico. They accused her of having Christianized various tribes of natives in the area of the Rio Grande, flying mysteriously from Spain to America. The really amazing thing is that she never left her monastery.”

  “She went back and forth to America whenever she wanted? As if she were walking over a bridge in the air?” Txema asked incredulously.

  “So it seems. This simple nun in a cloister was able to control this capacity to ‘fly,’ while evading the charge of witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition.”

  “Did you manage to track her down?”

  “Neither her nor the soldier.” His voice was resigned. “In the case of the nun, I found her name, but no place or monastery where I could start to look. As for the soldier, I knew the dates when he went to the Philippines and when he returned, as well as the date of his voyage, but didn’t have a clue about his name, or any document from that era recording his feat. In fact, I left the subject at a standstill. If you remember, in my last article I cited those two incidents without giving them much importance. I then filed everything away and decided to dedicate myself to other things.”

  “To religion, from what I can see,” Txema said, laughing under his breath.

  “Not only.”

  “Right; you also published the piece on the priest in Venice.”

  “Ah, yes. Right again. I mentioned that strange machine that, according to him, enabled him to recover images from the past. What was it called? The Chronovisor! That was a dead end, too.”

  “No doubt.”

  The Ibiza’s diesel engine was straining uphill with increasing difficulty. As the photographer had foreseen, the countryside was growing steadily steeper and the road to the town of Laguna de Cameros, where the copy of the Holy Shroud was being kept, narrower and more winding. The temperature had dropped below freezing. The grapevines were no longer visible beneath the snow. Even worse, the tiny shortwave radio that was clamped onto the dashboard had gone dead. Txema had been a radio fanatic for years, and had taken it with him on every trip. The mere suggestion of traveling “unplugged” was enough to make him insufferable. To which end, he got out of the car on several occasions to redirect the antenna so he could make contact with whoever was out there.

  “Nothing,” he said, surrendering at last. “Not even somebody else’s static. It’s dead.”

  “Things could be much worse. With a bit of luck, we’ll sleep in Logroño tonight. We can get the radio repaired there.”

  “How far do we have to go before we get to this shroud of yours?”

  “An hour, maybe more.”

  “If only we could teleport ourselves.”

  It was Txema’s first stab at humor during their trip.

  NINE

  LOS ANGELES

  Have you ever heard of the Stendhal syndrome?”

  Dr. Meyers’s question surprised Jennifer Narody, who responded in the negative with a shake of her head. They were taking a break from the therapeutic session, sipping from two oversized coffee cups as they shared an animated conversation. Linda Meyers’s office encouraged people to talk. Its big picture windows looked down on the bustling city, where traffic was winding its way down Broadway, as well as the imposing stone façade of the Hall of Justice and the City Hall’s immaculate tower, where workers were constantly scurrying about. But inside Dr. Meyers’s room, everything was hushed, peaceful. The office of Los Angeles’s most prestigious and unconventional psychiatrist imparted a strange sensation of power, of mastery over time, as if all the activity around it was something foreign from the condition of those who peered down from that privileged vantage point. The room they were sitting in was decorated with sculptures and vibrantly colored canvases from Africa. Meyers was proud of her ancestry, and, in fact, the entire office emanated the palpable allure of the African continent. As did the imported coffee.

  “The Stendhal syndrome?”

  Jennifer took a sip.

  “It describes a common psychological condition that tourists who visit Europe, above all Italy, can suffer.”

  Meyers smiled broadly. It seemed that she had waited until that moment to make a small confession.

  “Stop looking at me like that!” she told Jennifer with a laugh. “Stendhal is not a dangerous virus! This is, in reality, a very common illness, easy to treat. It takes its name from the nineteenth-century French writer who, after spending an entire day passing among the marvels of the city of Florence, began to suffer palpitations, vertigo, fainting spells, and even hallucinations. It seems that his condition was caused by an overdose of beauty. Not everyone can handle the excess of history and art that the Italian streets exude!”

  “Wherever are you going with this, Doctor?” Jennifer looked amused.

  “Well, you started having these dreams immediately after your return from Rome. That mysterious lady who appears to the Indians really resembles an Italian Madonna, and I was asking myself if—”

  “If I have a similar kind of strong reaction to the beauties of Rome? Come on, Doctor! You can’t be serious! For two years I lived in the middle of the Via Aurelia, near the Vatican. I had plenty of time to get used to the many attractions of the city: its ancient archways, its bridges over the Tiber, its churches, basilicas, convents, statues, obelisks, frescos. Believe me, none of that impressed me by the time I decided to leave.”

  “Do you know something? I envy you, Jennifer,” the doctor said as she took another sip of her coffee. “So tell me, why did you decide to live in Rome for an extended period?”

  “I needed to get away for a while.”

  “An unhappy romance?”

  “No, nothing of the sort! I never had trouble like that with men.” She was more relaxed now. “The fault was, as always, my work. Although I am prohibited from talking about it.”

  “You’re prohibited from talking about what?” Dr. Meyers placed her cup down on a ceramic platter adorned with zebras. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Look, I warned you. My work is complicated, and, furthermore, I took an oath of confidentiality when I worked for the military. Most of what I did is off limits to civilians.”

  “So you were in the military?”

  The perplexed look on the psychiatrist’s face made Jennifer smile. It was the same face her mother made when she found out, and the priest she confessed to as well. Perhaps that was why Jennifer had avoided mentioning the fact when she filled out the doctor’s forms with her personal data. She simply described herself as an artist, without giving any revealing details. And that was basically how she felt since her return from Italy. She had made plans to obtain a small studio where she could paint and eventually exhibit her work.

  “Not exactly the military. I worked with the Department of Defense on a project that, in the end, affected me more than I had realized. You know how those things are, Doctor: they made me sign an agreement not to reveal any details about my activities. ‘High treason,’ as they put it.�
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  “No secrets are given away when you respond to my questions.” Dr. Meyers’s face bore a determined expression now. “I, too, have a confidentiality agreement with my patients. Nothing you say ever leaves this room.”

  “Maybe I should forget about resolving all this business concerning my dreams.”

  “Let me be the judge of that, don’t you think? And now, please explain to me why your work made it necessary for you to return to America.”

  TEN

  ROME

  At the same hour and over six thousand miles from Los Angeles, the Eternal City was experiencing its usual early-evening traffic jam. The first warm days of springtime had already arrived, and each new day extended its hours of light.

  Giuseppe Baldi was oblivious to it all. He had caught the train to Rome at the Santa Lucia station, and now, six hours later, was walking across Saint Peter’s Square at full speed, not bothering to enjoy Rome’s priceless evening spectacle.

  Baldi’s plan was simple. No one would suspect that there, in the shadow of the imposing Egyptian obelisk that Domenico Fontana had installed in the heart of Vatican City, he was about to violate the first and most important protocol of the “four evangelists,” or “the saints,” as the porter at San Giorgio liked to call them.

  The rule of that elite team of scientists was unequivocal: never, under any circumstances, were two “evangelists”—that is to say, the persons in charge of one of the four constituent groups in the program—to meet without the additional presence of the coordinator, “Saint John,” one of the Vatican’s scientific advisers, or a representative from the special committee constituted for that purpose. The rule was an attempt to ensure loyalty to the project and to prevent splinter groups from forming.

  But to hold no meetings under any circumstances?

  To Baldi, a scrupulous lover of order, this imminent “sin” did not seem to be eating at his conscience. His need to meet with Father Luigi Corso had become much stronger than the iron discipline of the Vatican. He felt they still had time. He could straighten out certain things with the First Evangelist before making his appearance at the hearing to which he had been urgently summoned. Baldi was certain that Saint Matthew had in his possession privileged information about Chronovision; facts that, for whatever reason, no one had wanted to share with him after his encounter with the Spanish journalist, and which perhaps would help him to leave the disciplinary hearing without a scratch.