Gypsies

Michael? she thought. Was he out there now? Was it really possible to reach for him, to find him?

She felt a faint, sudden electricity … a kind of dizziness, as if the room had fallen away around her.

But that was bad. She knew that for a fact. It would be very bad to allow this back into her life, to give in to it now, to do the wrong thing. She thought of Willis Fauve. She saw his face in her mind, and it was the way he had looked twenty years ago, cropped hair still dark, his eyes like rain clouds under those huge brows. A bad and dangerous thing.

But Willis was just scared, Karen thought. Willis was scared and in the end Willis had lost his children: they had run out of his life altogether. And now Karen was scared and Michael was gone. Maybe that was how it worked. Maybe it was inevitable, like a wheel turning.

All these thoughts flashed through her mind. But he’s out there, she thought. That was the fact of it.

He’s out there and maybe Laura’s right: maybe I can find him.

So she closed her eyes and put away the thought of Willis once and for all and opened herself in a way she had almost forgotten. All you have to do is look, she thought. Worlds out there like petals on a flower. How long since she had done this last? A quarter of a century? But it was easy, and maybe that was the essential secret she had kept from herself all these years—the easiness of it.

And oh, Karen thought, how much she had forgotten.

Energy coursed through her body. Doors and windows, she thought, like a prism, like peering into a kaleidoscope and seeing it shift and change with every motion of your wrist. Every shard of colored glass a door, every door a world. And through one of them she would find Michael. She would spot him from a distance. She would run.

He had passed this way not long ago. Her eyes were squeezed tight, but she saw a city, a dark complex of winding, snowbound streets, pale sunlight filtered through massed clouds, noisy automobiles and horses breathing steam.

She saw a dark building behind dark stone walls. Instinctively, she reached out for Laura. “Take my hand,” she whispered. “Now! I don’t know how much longer I can do this!”

Felt Laura’s fingers twine into hers.

It was as simple, she thought, as stepping over a threshold. You moved—but it was not quite a motion —in a certain direction—but it was not exactly a direction. Here and here and here. And then—

The cold air bit into her skin. She opened her eyes and saw the stone walls, prosaic and quite real, right in front of her. The walls were high and unassailable. But Michael was behind them. She could feel it. And she was lucky. The big iron gate was standing open.

Chapter Twenty-one

1

Cardinal Palestrina was awakened at dawn by the brash clattering of the telephone. Disoriented, he scrambled the receiver to his ear. The hotel switchboard a

“The boy. And not only the boy.”

Plucked out of thin air, Palestrina thought dazedly. From a world beyond the world’s edge. It was—in its own way—a sort of miracle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“Excellent,” Neuma

Cardinal Palestrina dressed hastily and drew a heavy fur coat around himself as he left the room. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a coffee in a waxed-cardboard cup—so hot it scalded his lips—and then hailed a taxi from the icy margin of the street.

2

Laura could not say just when or how she became separated from her sister.

It simply should not have been possible. The words repeated in her head like a cracked record: not possible. They had been together… she had been holding Karen’s hand. It was like that time back in Pittsburgh when they followed Tim into what she guessed now was some distant corner of the Novus Ordo. They were like kids, clinging to each other.

After they arrived here they had moved through the snow to the black iron gates of this ugly building through the long morning shadows across the courtyard. Michael was inside, Karen said. Laura couldn’t feel it but she took her sister at her word. Find him and get out, she thought. Because we can do that: we can step sideways out of here anytime we feel like it.

It was a reassuring idea.

But then, if that was true, why hadn’t Michael come home? How had they contrived to hold him?

But it was an unanswerable question. Just push on, she thought. On down these twining corridors now, corridors like the roots of some immense old tree reaching deep into the earth. The air was stale and smelled like anesthetic, with some cloying scent laid over that, like cloves. Turn and turn and turn in the dim light. It became automatic.

And then she paused and looked for Karen and Karen wasn’t with her.

The loss troubled her, but maybe not as much as it should have. She moved on in spite of it… not quite aimlessly, but without any goal she could name. It just happened. It was like sleepwalking. She felt asleep. She felt drugged.

That was it, Laura told herself: it was like being under the influence of some drug, not a mind drug or a stimulant but some sleepy narcotic, something syrupy and potent, the way she imagined opium must be. She moved down these antiseptic drab tiles thinking, This way to the Emerald City… through the poppy field…

The corridor narrowed until it was only a little wider than her body.

A bell was ringing somewhere. An alarm bell, Laura thought. Some sort of emergency in progress. But she ignored it, walking.

And then the corridor came to an end and there was only a room, a last windowless cul-de-sac revealed dimly through a final archway; and Laura thought, Why, this must be what I want, this is where I meant to go.

She stepped through the narrow doorway and saw a woman.

It took her by surprise. The woman looked so utterly ordinary. She was an ordinary middle-aged woman in familiar clothes, Levi’s and a loose blouse, dressed maybe too young for her age. Her hair was graying faintly and the expression on her face was? poignant, Laura thought, a mixture of bewilderment and longing. This woman, she thought, must have lost her way somehow.

But then Laura took a second step into the room —and so did the woman—and she realized that the far wall was in fact a mirror and that this sad middle-aged person was herself.

Her knees felt suddenly weak. Not me! she thought. That’s not me, I’m not like that at all! I’m the pretty one, she thought—and, incidentally, what am I doing here, and where is everybody? Where was Karen, where was Michael?

She wanted to turn away but could not. Instead she took another step forward (and so did that sad bewildered reflection) and she turned and saw—to her horror—that the side walls were mirrored, too, and facing each other at a canted angle, so that there were suddenly more images of herself than she could tolerate, an infinity of them, multiplied down dark mirrored aisles, all of them staring back at her with this same dumbfounded expression. Not me, she thought again, none of them are me, and she raised her hands as if to push them away, as if they were physical bodies crowding in around her. She wanted to leave… but she was, mysteriously, too weak to move; the door was. too far away. They can’t keep us here, she thought, and groped for a secret way out, a route back to San Francisco and the sunlight, a hidden door or private window.