The Dark River

12

On Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, Gabriel found a storefront travel agency with a dusty collection of beach toys displayed in the front window. The agency was run by Mrs. Garcia, an older Dominican woman who weighed at least three hundred pounds. Chattering in a mixture of English and Spanish, she pushed at the floor with her feet and scooted around the room in an office chair with squeaky wheels. When Gabriel said that he wanted to buy a one-way ticket to London-paying in cash-Mrs. Garcia stopped moving and studied her new customer.

“You have a passport?”

Gabriel placed his new passport on the desk. Mrs. Garcia inspected it like a customs official and decided that it was acceptable. “A one-way ticket makes questions with inmigración y la policía. Maybe questions no good. Sí?”

Gabriel remembered Maya’s explanation of air travel. The people who got searched were grandmothers carrying fingernail scissors and other passengers who violated simple rules. While Mrs. Garcia rolled over to her desk, he checked the money in his wallet. Buying a round-trip ticket would leave him about a hundred and twenty dollars. “All right,” he told her. “Sell me a round-trip ticket. On the first flight out.”

Mrs. Garcia used her personal credit card to buy the ticket, and she gave Gabriel information about a hotel in London. “You don’t stay there,” she explained. “But you must give el oficial del pasaporte an address and phone number.” When Gabriel admitted that he didn’t have any luggage other than his shoulder bag, the travel agent sold him a canvas suitcase for twenty dollars and stuffed it with some old clothes. “Now you are a tourist. So what do you want to see in England? They might ask you that question.”

Tyburn Convent, Gabriel thought. That’s where my father is. But he shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the scuffed linoleum. “London Bridge, I guess. Buckingham Palace…”

“Bueno, Mr. Bentley. Say hello to the queen.”

Gabriel had never flown overseas before, but he had seen the experience in movies and television commercials. Well-dressed people were shown lounging in comfortable seats, where they had conversations with other attractive passengers. The actual experience reminded him of the summer he and Michael had spent working at a cattle feed lot outside of Dallas, Texas. The cattle had bar-coded tags stapled to their ears, and a great deal of time was spent picking out the steers that had been there too long, inspecting them, weighing them, sorting them into pens, driving them down narrow chutes, and forcing them into trucks.

Eleven hours later, he stood in the customs line at Heathrow Airport. When it was his turn, he approached the passport officer, a Sikh with a full beard. The officer took Gabriel’s passport and studied him for a moment.

“Have you ever visited the United Kingdom?”

Gabriel offered the man his most relaxed smile. “No. This is my first time.”

The officer ran the passport through a scanner and studied the screen before him. The biometric information on the RFID chip matched the photograph and the information already placed within the system. Like most citizens in a dull job, the officer trusted the machine more than his own instincts. “Welcome to Britain,” he said, and suddenly Gabriel was in a new country.

It was almost eleven o’clock at night when he changed his money, left the terminal, and took the Tube into London. Gabriel got off at King’s Cross station and wandered around the area until he found a hotel. The single room was as big as a closet and frost crystals were on the inside of the window, but he kept his clothes on, wrapped himself in the thin coverlet, and tried to sleep.

Gabriel had turned twenty-seven a few months before he left Los Angeles. It had been fifteen years since he had seen his father. His strongest memories came from the period in which his family lived without electricity or telephones on a farm in South Dakota. He could still recall his father teaching him how to change the oil in the pickup truck, and the night that his parents danced with each other beside the firelight in the parlor. He remembered sneaking downstairs at night when he was supposed to be in bed, peering through the doorway, and seeing his father sitting alone at the kitchen table. Matthew Corrigan looked thoughtful and sad at those moments-as if an immense weight had been placed on his shoulders.

But most of all, he remembered when he was twelve and Michael was sixteen. During a heavy snowstorm, Tabula mercenaries attacked the farmhouse. The boys and their mother hid in the root cellar while the wind howled outside. The next morning, the Corrigan brothers found four bodies lying in the snow. But their father was gone, vanished from their lives. Gabriel felt as if someone had reached into his chest and removed some part of his body. There was an emptiness there, a hollow feeling that had never quite gone away.

WHEN HE WOKE up, Gabriel got directions from the hotel clerk and began to walk south, to the Hyde Park area. He felt nervous and out of place in this new city. Someone had painted LOOK LEFT or LOOK RIGHT at the intersections, as if the foreigners who filled London were about to be crushed by the black cabs and white delivery vans. Gabriel tried to walk a straight line, but he kept getting lost on narrow cobblestone streets that went off at odd angles. In America, you carried dollar bills in your wallet, but now his pocket was heavy with coins.

Back in New York, Maya had talked about the vision of London that she had learned from her father. Apparently, there was a patch of ground near Goswell Road where thousands of plague victims had been dumped into a pit. Perhaps a few bones were left, a coin or two, a metal cross once worn around a dead woman’s neck, but this burial ground was now a car park decorated with billboards. There were similar places scattered around the city, sites of death and life, great wealth and even greater poverty.

The ghosts still remained, but a fundamental change was taking place. Surveillance cameras were everywhere-at traffic intersections and inside shops. There were face scanners, vehicle readers, and doorway sensors for the radio-frequency ID cards carried by most adults. The Londoners streamed out of the Tube stations and walked quickly to work while the Vast Machine absorbed their digital images.

Gabriel had assumed that Tyburn Convent would be a gray stone church with ivy on the outer walls. Instead, he found a pair of nineteenth-century row houses with leaded windows and a black slate roof. The convent was on Bayswater Road, directly across the street from Hyde Park. The traffic grumbled toward Marble Arch.

A short metal staircase led to an oak door with a brass handle. Gabriel rang the doorbell, and an elderly Benedictine nun wearing a spotless white habit and a black veil answered the door.

“You’re too early,” the nun announced. She had a strong Irish accent.

“Early for what?”

“Oh. You’re an American.” Gabriel’s nationality appeared to be all the explanation that was necessary. “Tours of the shrine start at ten o’clock, but I suppose a few minutes don’t matter.”

She led him into an anteroom that resembled a small cage. One door of the cage permitted access to a staircase that went down to the cellar. Another door led to the convent’s chapel and living quarters.

“I’m Sister Ann.” The nun wore old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles. Her face, framed by the black wimple, was smooth and strong and almost ageless. “I’ve got relatives in Chicago,” she said. “Are you from Chicago?”

“No. Sorry.” Gabriel touched the iron bars that surrounded them.

“We are cloistered Benedictines,” Sister Ann explained. “That means we spend our time in prayer and contemplation. There are always two sisters who deal with the public. I’m the permanent one, and then we rotate in another every month or so.”

Gabriel nodded politely, as if this were useful information. He wondered how he was going to ask about his father.

“I’d take you down to the crypt, but I’ve got to balance the accounts.” Sister Ann pulled a large key ring out of her pocket and unlocked one of the gates. “Wait here. I’ll get Sister Bridget.”

The nun vanished down a corridor, leaving Gabriel alone within the cage. There was a rack of religious pamphlets on the wall and an appeal for money on the bulletin board. Apparently, some bureaucrat working for the City of London had decided that the nuns had to spend three hundred thousand pounds to make the convent wheelchair accessible.

Gabriel heard the rustle of fabric and then Sister Bridget appeared to float down the hallway to the iron bars. She was much younger than Sister Ann. The Benedictine habit concealed everything but her plump cheeks and dark brown eyes.

“You’re an American.” Sister Bridget had a light, almost breathless way of speaking. “We get a lot of Americans here. They usually make very nice donations.”

Sister Bridget entered the cage and unlocked the second door. As Gabriel followed the nun down a winding metal staircase, he learned that hundreds of Catholics had been hung or beheaded at Tyburn gallows right up the street. During Elizabethan times there seemed to be some form of diplomatic immunity, because the Spanish ambassador was allowed to attend these executions and carry away locks of hair from the dead. More relics had appeared in modern times, when the gallows area was dug up to create a roundabout.

The crypt resembled a large basement in an industrial building. It had a black concrete floor and a white vaulted ceiling. Someone had built glass cases to display bone fragments and pieces of bloodstained clothing. There was even a framed prison letter scrawled by one of the martyrs.

“So they were all Catholics?” Gabriel asked. He stared at a yellowed leg bone and two ribs.

“Yes. Catholic.”

Gabriel glanced at the nun’s face and realized that she was lying. Disturbed by this sin, she struggled with her conscience for a moment, and then said cautiously, “Catholics and…a few others.”

“You mean Travelers?”

She looked startled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m looking for my father.”

The nun gave him a sympathetic smile. “Is he in London?”

“My father is Matthew Corrigan. I think he sent a letter from this place.”

Sister Bridget’s right hand came up to her breast as if to ward off a blow. “Men aren’t allowed in this convent.”

“My father is hiding from people who want to hurt him.”

The nun’s anxiety was transformed into panic. She stumbled backward, moving toward the staircase. “Matthew told us he was going to leave a sign here in the crypt. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I’ve got to find him,” Gabriel said. “Please tell me where he is.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t say more,” the nun whispered. And then she was gone, her heavy shoes clomping up the metal stairs.

Gabriel circled the crypt like a man trapped in a building about to collapse. Bones. Saints. A bloodstained shirt. How would this lead him to his father?

Footsteps on the staircase. He expected to see Sister Bridget return, but it was Sister Ann. The Irish nun looked angry. Reflected light flashed on the surface of her glasses.

“May I help you, young man?”

“Yes. I’m looking for my father, Matthew Corrigan. And the other nun, Sister Bridget, told me-”

“That’s enough. You have to leave.”

“She said he left a sign-”

“Leave immediately. Or I will call the police.”

The expression on the elderly nun’s face allowed no objection. The keys on her iron ring made a bright jingling sound as she followed Gabriel up the staircase and then out of the convent. He stood in the cold as Sister Ann began to shut the door.

“Sister, please. You have to understand-”

“We know what happened in America. I read in the newspaper how those people were killed. Children, too. They didn’t even spare the little ones. We won’t have such things here!”

She shut the door-hard-and Gabriel heard the sounds of locks being snapped shut. He felt like shouting and pounding on the door, but that would just bring the police. Not knowing what to do, the Traveler gazed out at the traffic and the bare trees of Hyde Park. He was in a strange city without money or friends, and no one was going to defend him from the Tabula. He was alone, truly alone, within the invisible prison.