Revenant

NINE

We meandered toward Alfama by a slightly different route than I’d used coming down the hill. It wasn’t a long walk either way, though we now had only an hour to kill thanks to our stop at the bookstore. I almost wished we had more time. It had been so long since I’d seen Quinton; I wanted to linger with him before the situation grew grimmer, as it certainly would.

We walked up a rising, gently curving road and passed a small rococo church, which Quinton identified as Santo António. It stood right in front of a cathedral with Romanesque front towers and a rose window. The cathedral had been pieced back together with bits of other styles over time and after the earthquake—a bit of Gothic here, a bit of Baroque there. The stonework was now mismatched colors and textures from centuries of construction and repair. I was almost tempted to go inside and look at it, but the shuddering of the temporaclines around it was more than I could take and we hurried farther along the road. We passed several shops with signs that read ANTIGUIDADES—“antiques” I guessed by the displays—and an increasing number of small cafés and restaurants, walls tagged with ubiquitous graffiti. I noticed no one had had the heretical temerity to tag the cathedral or chapel.

I was sure we weren’t in the right place and would never get back to the house, but we passed a directional sign reading ALFAMA with an arrow pointing ahead, and we kept going up a tiled road cut by trolley tracks. Two men in clerical collars—one in a black suit and the other in a brown cassock—passed us coming downhill, talking together with serious expressions as they walked. They were an odd pair being of the same vocation, yet drastically different from each other—one in his suit with an aura a curious shade of ivory threaded with dark blue, the other more traditional in his clerical robes and an energy corona of sky blue that sparked with bright white bolts as they talked. I wondered if the conversation was contentious in some way. They nodded as we made room for them on the sidewalk, but they didn’t interrupt their chat even as they met up with another, older man who seemed to have been waiting for them in the plaza in front of one of the many antique stores. In spite of his smile, the man’s aura—a fit of black, white, and red spikes—gave me the creeps. The dampened violence of it seemed incongruous for a man of his vocation.

I hadn’t passed so many religious buildings or their residents anywhere else in the city and wondered if the strange trio was heading for the cathedral. Even with the presence of servants of the Catholic Almighty, I was still a bit paranoid; having lost one key, I now carried my purse in front of me. I felt less foolish about it when one of the priests spun around and shouted, “Gatuno!” He then hiked up his cassock and ran after a skinny young man who had passed us earlier in a buzzing cloud of pea green energy jagged with white sparks. The pickpocket zipped up the road much faster than his middle-aged mark, jinked under an arch in the wall, and seemed to vanish completely. His victim tried to follow, but gave up, panting, and turned back to his companions, gesturing and talking in a dismayed manner.

“I could catch him,” I said to Quinton. “His aura is so agitated, he left a trail like a comet in the Grey.”

“Would it be worth it?” He kept his hat brim down and pointed discreetly to cameras mounted on a pole at the corner ahead. “I’m pretty sure the local cops record everything and they’d certainly take note of a bystander suddenly finding a thief who did a disappearing act. I’m not saying it’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s got a risk factor. This is a popular tourist area, so it’s got a lot of criminal and police traffic as well.”

It galled me to walk away from something I could fix. After a few steps up the hill, I stopped under the pole on which the cameras hung. I took off my hat and my purse and handed them to Quinton. “Hold on to these. I’ll be right back.”

I threw myself into the Grey, searching for a temporacline in which there had been no cameras, but the buildings were still the same. I found one and slid into it, shivering at the sudden, intense chill after so much heat.

In the silvery world of the Grey past, I walked back to the arch in the wall and stepped through, and then I stepped back out of the Grey, into the normal. The arch led to a narrow covered walkway that opened into a courtyard. The contrast in light made the walkway seem dark as the inside of a dog, but I could see the sickly green glimmer of the pickpocket’s aura as he huddled in a niche, waiting until he thought the coast was clear to emerge. I walked up to his hiding spot and tapped him on the shoulder.

He jerked around to face me, catching one of his bony elbows on the hard stone edge of the niche. “O que você quer? Foda-se!” His whole skinny body seemed to quiver.

“Give me the wallet.”

“Wallet? What are you talking about, bitch?” His manners were horrid, but at least his English was excellent.

I rolled my eyes and held out my hand. “Wallet. Now. Or I scream for the cops.”

He launched forward, tucking his head down to hit me in the face with the top of his skull, but I stepped aside and gave him a shove, using his own momentum to send him across the narrow alley headfirst, into the opposite wall. He hit hard enough to bounce and stagger back before he sat down, shaking his head at the same time he tried to cradle it in his hands. “Ow!”

I bent down. “You’re a lucky guy—usually a blow like that knocks you out or cracks your skull. You must have a head like a rock.”

He made a weak attempt to hit me and I batted his hand aside. “Give me the wallet, or do you want me to go through your pockets myself?”

He muttered something I suspected was both derogatory and physically impossible, but he dug the stolen wallet from his pocket and handed it to me. “I need it more than you do.”

“This isn’t for me. It’s for your soul—robbing a priest? Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

He glared up at me, shaking. “I need the money. You think I’d rob a priest for nothing? I had to do it. I need the money!” I almost had to admire his skill: It must have been tricky lifting the guy’s wallet through the side slits in the cassock and clothes beneath, but now the pickpocket was shaking so hard, I was surprised he’d managed it.

“You didn’t have to choose a priest.”

“Those priests, they aren’t so pure. Look, I just . . . You don’t know what it’s like. You—what do you want? You want to help somebody? Give me the damned wallet!”

I studied him for a moment. He was shivering now, sweat oozing off his bruised forehead and his nose running. He was in a bad way and what did it really matter to me, in the end? He hadn’t done anyone physical harm and unless the priest was carrying something unusual in his wallet, he wasn’t going to be as badly off as this guy.

I looked into the wallet and saw a few euros, two slips of paper with notes in Portuguese, and some ID cards—nothing that seemed significant and nothing that gleamed with threads of Grey.

I sighed. “I’m going to regret this. . . .” I scooped the money—which wasn’t much—from the wallet, but retained the rest and handed the cash to the skinny, quivering thief. “Here. Now, find another part of town to work for a while. And see a doctor about your head—you hit the wall hard enough to break something.”

He clutched the thin stack of bills to his chest and squirmed against the wall as I left, making no move to follow me. I eased back into the temporacline, shivering, and made my way to the corner.

Quinton didn’t jump when I reemerged into the normal world, but he did raise his eyebrows at me as I reclaimed my things. I put on the hat, tucked the wallet into my purse, and started walking up the hill toward a white building that I could see on the right-hand side of the road. It had a Roman cross on the roof and a Maltese cross carved into the pediment below it, as if the builder had wanted to be sure to cover his bases. Quinton caught up in a step or two.

“How’s the thief?”

“Has a headache, may have given himself a concussion, but considering how perfectly his language centers were working, I think he’ll be OK.”

“‘Given himself a concussion’?”

I nodded. “Ran headfirst into a wall. All I did was direct the course. He’s one messed-up little addict.”

“Addict? How can you tell?”

“Aura color, too thin, has the shakes—I’m surprised he could lift the wallet at all with the way his hands were trembling.”

Quinton made a speculative noise. “Huh . . . That’s odd. . . . Addiction and teen usage rates are down since Portugal decriminalized personal use.”

“Down doesn’t mean none. This guy is one of those who fell through the cracks.”

“Well, they don’t have much in terms of prevention and rehab programs right now because of the austerity measures. They had to cut them.”

“Makes it hard to get on your feet when there’s no one to help you up. I let him keep the money. I hope I didn’t do the wrong thing, but the guy was so pathetic that I figured it was better to let him go.”

Quinton shook his head. “For him, I think nothing’s ever going to get better. But for a lot of others, it might if there was money and hope. The lack of economic support for education, rehab, and other programs leaves a hole in the social structure that is too easily exploited by the fearmongering of people like my father.”

I thought about it as we walked on.

On our right, the road opened out into a large terraced garden that hung at the top of a cliff overlooking another part of Alfama and the river beyond. The view as the sun dipped lower in the west was breathtaking, gilded and burnished with red and gold and delineated by purple shadows. At the top of the rise on the terraced side stood the small white church—Santa Luzia—with the Roman cross gleaming on the roof in the golden light of the westering sun and beaming in its own time-built corona of pale blue—very much like the aura of the priest who’d been robbed.

I walked through the heaving memory of the earthquake and what seemed like endless fire to the doors of the church and slipped inside with Quinton in my wake.

It was a very traditional little Catholic church and it had a collection box for donations to the needy. I put the priest’s wallet into the box, sure it would be found soon and hoping that I hadn’t made a big mistake.

Twilight was descending rapidly on this side of the hill when we left the church to find our way back to the house. I could see shadows lengthening in the narrow streets ahead, taking on strange shapes as a whistling sound wound down the road. Something black rose up into the sky, thinning to nearly invisible once it climbed into the dying light of the sun above the hill. I followed its flight over the castle and Quinton looked up with me.

“What is it? I can barely see. . . .”

“It’s familiar, but I don’t know. I think I saw something like it earlier in the day, but that one was a lot farther off. It’s something Grey, but that you can see it, too, is worrisome.”

“Something of Dad’s?”

“I hope not.”

The shape that now looked more like a ripple in the wind than something solid turned on an updraft and began back toward us. The light seemed to tear it into pieces as we watched and things began falling from it. In a moment, nothing remained but falling debris.

A few people ran out from the street ahead, looking back at the pale objects falling from the sky, chattering and nervous. We both began running toward the spot not far away where the falling bits had disappeared behind stucco walls. We came out from the throat of a narrow road where the Grey began to sing high, shrieking discords, into sudden, ancient devastation. Directly before us stood the graffiti-adorned ruins of perhaps half a dozen old houses knocked down by the earthquake of 1755. Windows had been bricked up to hold back the hillside, weeds and flowers grew over the remains of tiled floors, and a couple of cars had been parked among the crumbling walls near one of the rebuilt sections that was painted a slapdash white, allowing the ghosts of graffiti past to peep through. Pale green things, like sticks, lay scattered all over the abandoned foundations, smoking a little as if they were hot or burning with acid.

Before I could think of what they reminded me of, my knees buckled and I felt as if someone had punched me in the chest. Quinton caught me as the unexpected blow of remembered anguish and death made me stumble and fall. He swore and pulled me up, hitching his arm around my waist to haul me to his side and run for an archway that pierced the whitewashed wall ahead. As I wound my arm around his back, I felt something hard in his pack that wasn’t a laptop, but I had no breath with which to ask him about it.

We dove into another narrow, roofed passage between tall plastered buildings. Every step away from the untouched ruins brought relief from the keening pain of the skeletal buildings and their song of death and loss. I was able to unbend and walk more upright, but the ache of death was still with me and my lungs felt like they were too heavy to fill. I gasped short breaths as we went forward. We stepped out into a luxuriously tiled courtyard where expensive cars had been parked on this side of a gateway. Ignoring suspicious glances, we hurried through the tiny square and out into the street.

On our right, where the road turned the corner toward us, was an outdoor urinal that gave me a shudder of another sort, both funny and repulsive with its fancy iron sign that read URINOL and a steel silhouette of a young boy pissing off the top of the sign against the thousand-year-old stone wall. Steel privacy screens ended two feet above the tiled road. The smell was unmistakable.

Catching my breath at last, I muttered, “Out of the frying pan . . .”

“And into the pissoir,” Quinton added.

But ahead I could see the freestanding arch I’d walked under as I came down the steep road from the castle. “I know where we are,” I said.

“Oh, good, because I’m lost.”