The Sparrow

9

NAPLES:

APRIL 2060

John Candotti was awake and dressing when he heard the knock, just after dawn.

"Father Candotti?" It was Brother Edward, calling quietly but urgently in the hallway. "Father, have you seen Emilio Sandoz?"

John opened the door. "Not since last night. Why?"

Behr, rumpled and pudgy, looked almost angry. "I just came from his room. His bed wasn't slept in and he's sicked up and I can't find him."

Pulling on his sweater, John pushed past Brother Edward and headed for Sandoz's room, unable to believe the man wasn't there.

"I cleaned up the mess. Lost everything he ate yesterday," Edward called behind him, wheezing, as they hurried down the hallway. "Although that was little enough. I already checked in the lavatories. He's not in there, I tell you."

John stuck his head into the room anyway and caught the lingering odor of vomit and soap. "Damn," he whispered fiercely. "Damn, damn, damn. I should have expected something like this! I should have been nearby. I would have heard him."

"It was my place to be here, Father. I don't know why I didn't insist on the room next door. But he doesn't usually need me at night anymore," Edward said, trying to explain his lapse to himself as much as to Candotti. "I would have looked in on him last night but I didn't want to interfere if he was—He told me he wanted to talk to you. I thought he might—"

"I thought so, too. All right, look. He can't be far away. Have you checked the refectory?"

Trying not to panic, they searched the building, John, for one, half-expecting to find Sandoz's body at each turn. He'd begun to wonder about contacting the Father General, or the police, when it occurred to him that Sandoz was from an island and might be down by the water. "Let's look outside," he suggested, and they left the main building on its western side.

The sun had hardly begun to climb and the stone balcony was still in shadow, as was the shoreline far below. Stunted trees, contorted by the prevailing winds off the Mediterranean, were covered with a gold and green haze, and farmers were already plowing, but the spring had been gray and cold—Vesuvius, everyone said. Anxiety and chill combined and John began to shiver as he leaned over the wall, eyes sweeping the coast.

Then, awash with relief, he spotted Sandoz and shouted against the wind, "Brother Edward? Brother Edward!" Edward, hunched against the cold with round arms crossed over his barrel chest, had headed for the garage to count the bicycles. He heard Candotti's voice indistinctly and turned back. "I see him," John yelled, motioning downward. "He's on the beach."

"Shall I go down and bring him back?" Edward called on his way back to the balcony.

"No," John yelled. "I'll get him. Grab a coat for him, okay? He must be freezing."

Brother Edward trundled off to get three coats. Returning minutes later, he helped John into the biggest one, handed him another to bring to Sandoz and pulled one on himself as John started down the long line of stairs that zigzagged downhill to the Mediterranean. Before he'd gotten far, Brother Edward stopped him with a shout.

"Father? Be careful."

What an odd thing to say, John thought, wondering for a moment if Brother Edward was concerned about his slipping on the damp stone stairs. Then John remembered the way Sandoz had come at him, that first day, back in Rome. "I will. It'll be okay." Brother Edward looked doubtful. "Really. If he hasn't done anything to himself, I don't think he'd hurt anyone else."

But he sounded more sure of that than he was.

The wind was carrying the sound of his footsteps away from Sandoz. Not wanting to startle him, John cleared his throat and made as much noise as he could, scuffling through the gravelly sand. Sandoz didn't turn but he stopped moving and waited near a large stone outcropping, part of the geological formation that had tithed its substance to the ancient buildings on the hill behind them.

John stopped as he drew even with the man and looked out over the water himself, watching shorebirds wheel and dip and settle on the gray water. "I have been suffering from horizon deprivation," he declared conversationally. "Feels good to be able to focus on something that's far away." John's own face and hands ached with cold. He was shuddering now and did not understand how Sandoz could be so still. "You gave us a scare, man. Next time, let somebody know when you're going out, okay?" He took a step closer to Sandoz, the jacket held casually in one outstretched hand. "Aren't you freezing? I brought you a coat."

"If you come near me," Sandoz said, "you'll bleed for it."

John let his arm drop, the coat brushing the rocky sand, u

Sandoz turned back toward the Mediterranean, sparkling now in the morning light, and with the grace of an old ballplayer, cocked and threw. The fingers did not loosen in time and the rock thudded into the sand. Methodically, he went back to the shelf and once again gripped a stone, turned, stanced and threw. When he exhausted his supply of rocks, he went out to collect them again, leaning from the waist, grasping them with his left hand, gasping sometimes with the effort, but releasing them carefully one by one, in a row on the rocky shelf.

Most of the stones, heartbreakingly, were only a few steps from where he stood to throw them.

By the time the sun was overhead, Candotti had discarded his own coat, and he now sat on the beach, watching silently. Brother Edward had joined him and he watched as well, the tears rolling down his plump cheeks drying quickly in the wind off the sea.

Around ten o'clock, when the bruises had broken through to frank bleeding, Edward tried to talk to Sandoz. "Please, Emilio, stop now. That's enough." The man turned and looked through him as though one of them did not exist, the dark eyes unfathomable. John saw then that there was nothing to do except bear witness, and gently drew Ed away.

For two hours more, he and Brother Edward marked the painful progress Sandoz made, his fingers working more consistently for him, the stones begi

"Not Magdalene," he said. "Lazarus."

If Vincenzo Giuliani was moved by what he witnessed that morning from the balcony, there was no sign of it in his face as he watched the three men make their way along the stone steps leading upward from the beach. Emilio stumbled badly, twice, on the way up. The white heat of anger that had seen him through the dawn had burned down to a dangerous snarling resentment and Giuliani could see him shake off the help he was offered by John Candotti and Brother Edward when he fell.

The men below had no idea that the Father General was not in Rome. He had, in fact, preceded them to the Naples house, taking up residence in the room next to the one given to Sandoz, where he waited patiently for the breakdown he was engineering. In the thirteenth century, the Dominicans proposed that the end justifies the means, Giuliani mused. The Jesuits took up that philosophy in their turn but multiplied the means, doing what seemed necessary in the service of God, for the good of souls. Deception, in the case before him, he deemed justifiable, preferable to a direct approach. So Vincenzo Giuliani had signed the note "V," knowing that only Voelker addressed Sandoz as "Doctor." Emilio's reaction tended to confirm the Contact Consortium's allegations about what had happened on Rakhat. And as Giuliani had gambled, the very idea that Voelker knew was enough to snap Emilio's brittle self-control.