The Book of Q (32 page)

The rest stop had clearly been designed for the onetime bus tours destined for the St. Nikita monastery, its minimalist cafeteria—glass as its walls—nestled into an opening in the trees. The pump here was pristine compared to the first he had seen, the name of the gas something unpronounceable, accents and consonants in the vast majority. Pearse pulled around to the back, grabbed the pack, and headed for the building. He left the keys in the ignition. If someone wanted the car, they were more than welcome to it. Let the men from the Vatican chase after an opportunistic refugee.

Inside, the place was equally bare, save for a man and woman at one of the far tables, both under a cloud of cigarette smoke. At the first sign of Pearse, the man jumped to his feet.

“Dobro utro.”
He beamed as he made his way across. A few more incomprehensible words, then a hand indicating the tables.

Pearse shook his head, and smiled, the international sign for “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

No less genially, the man continued. “How am I helping with you?” A nod. “You make to understand?”

Pearse returned the nod and said, “Telephone?” Immediately, he saw the disappointment in the man’s face. “And food,” he added, the man’s expression at once brighter. Pearse then pulled out a few of the American bills. The man’s face again beamed.

“Telephone. Food. Excellent.”

Two minutes later, Pearse was doing his best with the operator. Eight minutes after that, he was being pulled away from a plate of something utterly unrecognizable, though surprisingly tasty, his call having gone through.

Professor Angeli’s voice was a welcome relief. It took him no time to bring her up to speed on Phôtinus and the little bound book.

“Yes, but where are you?” she asked.

Pearse hesitated. “Probably best if you don’t know that.”

A pause on the other end of the line. “I see.” When he didn’t answer, she admitted, “I suppose you’re right.” He could sense her unease, the reality of his situation—and her own reacquaintance with it—a bit too much. “All right…. You say it’s from a Spanish monk. Coded language. What did he call it?”

“‘Language alchemically transformed,’” answered Pearse.

“No, no. The other phrase. The one from Pliny.”

“Oh.” Pearse turned to the page, quickly skimming through several passages.
“‘Quaestio lusoria,’”
he read.

“Yes.
‘Quaestio lusoria,’”
she repeated. Clearly, his warning had unnerved her more than he realized; her tone remained distant. More than that, it wasn’t like her to need any kind of reminder when it came to the world of esoterica. “I might have a book on that. Hold on for a second” Pearse listened to the sound of her receding footsteps, followed by almost a minute of silence. When she picked up again, she seemed no less edgy. “Carlo Pescatore,” she said. “
The Art of Renaissance Wordplay
. I knew I had it somewhere.” He could hear her scanning the pages, the usual hum conspicuously absent. “Yes. Here it is,” she began. “According to Signore Pescatore, a
quaestio lusoria
was a kind of puzzle….” Another flip of a page. “Primarily the domain of poets. Steeped in classical references.” She stopped, the first hint of the old Angeli creeping though when she continued. “Now that’s interesting. He says it could be considered the great-grandfather of the modern cryptic.” A few more flipped pages before she said, “You’ve always been very good at these. Like that Greek poem with Ambrose, remember?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s similar to that,” she explained. “Except with this, it’s more about anagrams and word reconfigurations, not just transpositions. That sort of thing.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Good. Because, in some form or another, I believe that’s what Señor Ribadeneyra has given you. It ties in perfectly with the Manichaeans. Meaning hidden within language.” Again a pause. “How many entries are there?”

Pearse counted out the lines of text. “About twenty-five.”

“I see.” Again, a pause. “Might be a bit tricky in Latin. If you want, you could … read them to me over the phone. I’m not so bad with these things myself.”

Pearse hadn’t heard the request; he was already trying his hand at the first entry. It took him a moment to adjust his thinking. As he read, he began to see what she was talking about. On its own, the phrase made no sense whatsoever. Reading it as a cryptic—a bit of repunctuation here and there—he saw at once what Ribadeneyra was after.
He wants an anagram of a word that means “He that walks in battle,”
Pearse thought. He continued to stare. “He that walks in battle.” Something so familiar to it, hours and hours of Catholic school and seminary Greek and Latin swimming in his head. His “gift” as he’d so often been told. He closed his eyes. “He that walks in battle.” A moment later, he had the answer. Gradivus. From the
Aeneid
—the epithet of Mars. He quickly jotted down the letters on his palm. He read the rest of the clue. “Who turns the seventh to a fifth.” The seventh. He let his eyes drift.
A musical seventh? The seventh Commandment?
He stared back at the word.
Or is it easier than that?
His eye stopped on the
u. The seventh letter?
“Turns … to a fifth.”
The fifth letter of the alphabet?
With nothing else to go on, he replaced the
u
with an
e
. An anagram of Gradives. He then wrote the letters in a circle, the surest way to work out an anagram. Ten seconds later, he had the answer.

Visegrad.

“There is a town on the Drina….”

At the same moment, Angeli broke through on the line. “Father?” Again, a pause. “Hello? Why don’t you read me the first one?”

He was about to answer, then stopped. To this point, he’d attributed her hesitation to a concern for him. Now, something in her voice told him otherwise. “Is something wrong, Professor?”

“No.” Her response seemed devoid of any emotion. “Nothing.” Before he could answer, Angeli screamed into the phone. “Destroy the book! Destroy it! They—”

A momentary clattering on the other end, followed by silence, then the sound of another voice on the line. “Listen carefully, Father.” It was a man, the accent familiar. The Austrian. “Find the ‘Hodoporia.’ Bring it to us. Do you understand?”

The line disengaged.

Pearse walked to Blace in a daze, the couple from the rest stop having insisted he take something strong to drink before setting out. Language aside, they had seen enough in his expression to know what he needed.
Rakija
, homegrown brandy. Though far more lethal than the stuff Andrakos had served him, it went down easily, the color returning to his face with the second shot.

Now, alone on the road, he continued to see the image of Angeli in front of him. Screams, then silence. The men of the Vatican had been there all along, heard everything. He couldn’t remember if he had told them about the Drina, Kosovo, the car. Had he mentioned Visegrad? All of it flew through his mind, the shock and the brandy making accurate recall impossible.

And yet, what did it matter? There was no need to track him now. No need to find out where Ribadeneyra’s book would lead him. He was a priest. He wouldn’t let her die. He would give them what they wanted. No matter what the consequences.

A reasonable argument four days ago. Now, he didn’t know. Delivering the “Hodoporia” would assure both his and Angeli’s deaths. That much, he did know. A surprisingly cold bit of analysis from a man of faith. Perhaps he was learning the ways of the Manichaeans too well. But to abandon her—and to convince himself that their methods were dictating his own callousness—was that really his only choice?

With no answers, he found himself on the ridge of a hill, below him the first signs of the madness sprawling out from Kosovo. A group of outsized tents appeared along the border, impromptu barricades circling large tracts of what, until recently, had been open land. Just beyond them, the rim of another mountain rose up thick with trees. He had been told that the police had cleared the camp weeks ago, a resettlement agreement with the Serbs all but signed. Naturally, it had fallen through, and Blace—a village of perhaps a hundred homes—was once again teeming with refugees.

From his vantage point, he saw the array of initials painted on the roofs of the tents—UN, NATO, IMC, ICRC, ACT, UNICEF, and a host of others he didn’t recognize—all cataloging the impotence of a world unable to deal with the most recent Balkan flare-up. Seven hundred years of emperors, sultans, presidents, and kings hadn’t managed to bring resolution. Why these thought they could, he didn’t know. From the looks of it, most of those posted to Blace were simply trying to hold whatever they could in check.

The closer in he walked, the more unbearable the smell became. The first of the tents was still a good half mile off and already the stench of urine hung in the air. It was difficult to delineate the smells as he
approached the first barricade: soiled clothes, unwashed flesh, an animal-like odor—wet fur doused in something sickly sweet—impossible to avoid. Not even a hand to the nose could keep it at bay, the air so thick with filth that it seemed to attach itself to every fiber of clothing, skin, hair. And yet, Pearse had little trouble ignoring it, the sights beyond the fence enough to overload his senses. Even from this distance, he could make out the faces, the thick frames of kerchiefed women, children—too big to be carried—clutched in weary arms. Some wandered about; others crouched in small groups, none talking, all with a stare of resigned helplessness, disbelief having long ago abandoned them. Bosnian, Kosovar—it made little difference. A new locale. Nothing else to distinguish them save the passage of eight years.

Pearse hadn’t expected the place to jar him as it did, the “Hodoporia,” Angeli, and all he had learned on Athos momentarily erased from his thoughts. Even he had let himself believe that the worst had ended a year ago. Not from what he saw now. No doubt it was the reason he failed to notice the soldier driving up from his left, the man outfitted in field camouflage, the Jeep with the UN insignia on its hood. The man pulled to a stop and stepped out.

“Oproste te, Tatko. Mozam li da go vidam identifikacija?”

Pearse turned, needing a moment to refocus his attention. Unsure what he had just heard, he shook his head.

In a slow, deliberate English—the accent pure Brit—the soldier repeated, “Your identification, Father.”

“You’re English,” Pearse answered, pulling out the worn Vatican passport and handing it to the man.

“Yes,” he replied, scrutinizing the papers. “And you’re not Italian.” After a few moments, he handed back the passport, a taut smile on his lips. “An American Vatican priest. Rather interesting. And what exactly are you doing here, Father?”

Pearse tried to return the smile. He needed something that sounded convincing. “I was supposed to join a relief group in Skopje, but my plane was delayed. They told me to come here. I managed to get a lift to St. Nikita.”

“A relief group?” The soldier’s smile widened. “We’ve plenty of those, Father. I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

With only a momentary pause, he answered, “The International Catholic Migration Committee.” It was the first thing he could think of, a dim recollection from a recent edition of
L’Osservatore Romano
that
the ICMC was somewhere in Macedonia tending to the refugees. Pearse had to hope the Holy Mother was still by his side.

The soldier sized up the priest. “You’re traveling rather light for a man on a relief mission.”

“My bags are with the group,” he answered, once again allowing the words to spill out on their own. “My itinerary, my contacts. All I’ve got is my Vatican passport.”

“I see.” A voice over a radio suddenly broke through, the soldier quick to respond. As he talked, he moved out of earshot, his eyes, though, never straying from Pearse. After several minutes, he returned.

“May I ask what you have in the pack, Father?”

Pearse shrugged. “A change of clothing. A few books.”

The soldier reached out his hand. “May I? Security. I’m sure you understand.”

Pearse nodded and handed the man the pack. He watched as the soldier tossed through it. He nearly flinched when the man pulled out the Ribadeneyra. He began to flip through its pages.

“It’s … Orthodox prayers,” Pearse said. “I thought, perhaps, being in this region—”

“Certainly, Father. I just have to check for anything concealed.”

Pearse nodded again. The soldier moved on to his Bible. Again, a quick flip through. He then placed it inside, rezipped the pack, and handed it back to Pearse.

“Terribly sorry about that, Father, but we’ve had a bit of a problem with … people trying to get inside.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yes.” The soldier smiled. “The ICMC. Nice chaps.” Again, he waited, then said,“Well, we can’t settle it out here. Hop in. We’ll see if we can’t find someone inside to straighten this out.”

Grazie, Madonna.

Fifteen minutes later, Pearse sat inside a Red Cross tent, awaiting the attention of a harried young woman behind a makeshift desk. It became readily apparent that a lost priest didn’t rate as a priority amid the constant flurry of activity. Pearse was more than happy to be viewed as an inconvenience, something to be shuffled along without too many questions.