Messi@ Page 3

  But perhaps the Evil One had enabled Andrea to speak such perfect, musical Hebrew. Sister Maria herself knew only just enough of Hebrew to shop in the markets and to deal with repairmen. “Did you hear the child, Rodica?” she whispered.

  “I did,” said Sister Rodica cheerfully. Having understood that the child spoke good Hebrew didn’t startle her in the least. Nor was she unduly bothered by Mr. Rabindranath’s display. She just hated to expose someone of Andrea’s tender years to a man’s ugly privates. She knew that people, including many of the scholars currently in residence, worshiped in all sorts of ways. Mr. Rabindranath himself, embarrassed by one of his earlier displays, had explained this at some length. His own levitation was something called samjama; his spirit separated from the body, and the body, left on its own, became very light and ceased to obey the laws of gravity. For thousands of years, yogis engaged in samjama had startled people with this byproduct of their practice. Mr. Rabindranath related other unusual practices to Sister Rodica, who would have liked him to stop but was fascinated nonetheless. She found out that some Hindus liked to walk barefoot on hot burning coals, that in Africa some tribes cut their faces and incised their privates to please their gods. In the Sonora Desert Yaqui shamans copulated with eagles. There was no end to the kingdom of heathenism, and if the truth were known, there were some Christian practices that made the sister blush. Before Easter, on Via Dolorosa, people on their bleeding knees crawled up the hill with a cross on their backs. And Mother Superior scourged herself late at night with a leather whip. Flagellation was one of their order’s secret rites.

  Mother Superior woke, as was her custom, at 3 A.M., and, after her prayers, walked to the lobby, where the Christmas trees sparkled gloriously. She stood a moment admiring them. They were the most beautiful in all her years in Jerusalem. Then she saw the cardboard tube lying on the reception desk. She took off the plastic cap and slid out a scroll. It was written in Latin, and addressed to Sister Ingeborg, the mother superior’s predecessor. Sister Ingeborg had died, aged ninety-seven, the previous year.

  Forgive me for not writing to you in the lingua franca—which one, I wonder—but as you doubtlessly know, the situation in Bosnia does not ease communication. I have just seen a transport of orphans out of Sarajevo. His Holiness has assured me that these children will be placed in the care of the Holy See. They are all God’s children, but among them is an extraordinary child I trust to your personal care. Her name is Andrea Isbik. She was born a Muslim, but like many Sarajevans, her family were agnostics whose children were educated by the communist state. Her mother may have been Jewish. At least, we were able to make a case for this to the U.N. commissioner for refugees, who arranged her emigration to Israel after a brief stay in Rome. For seven months after her parents were killed she was kept in a Serbian POW camp unequaled for brutality and horror. The girl has experienced things no child should ever have to. She will not speak of her time there. For five months after she was released she lived in my house and demonstrated a miraculous (I do not use this word lightly) aptitude for languages and philosophy. She speaks her native Bosnian dialect, Turkish, Albanian, and Serbo-Croatian, as well as English, Russian, German, and Hebrew (these last two she learned from me). She is a seemingly simple child who might appear poorly developed to the casual observer. She is, I assure you, both brilliant and blessed. I have sent her to you in memory of that day long ago when you said, “I will do anything for you, my dear Father Eustratius!” I now hold you to your word.

  Your elder by one year,

  Eustratius

  Sarajevo, A.D. 1995

  In addition to this letter, the tube contained the girl’s birth certificate, a lyceum registration form, a letter from the U.N. commissioner for refugees, the Israeli reply, a transcript of school grades, a faded photograph of a little school girl with her mother and father, and a rosewood rosary intended as a gift from Father Eustratius to Abbess Ingeborg.

  Mother Superior was touched. She did not know the nature of the promises the priest and nun had made to each other, but she imagined the scene a half century ago in a Vatican portico: Abbess Ingeborg and Father Eustratius bowed together in prayer. Her predecessor had been a Montenegran princess before taking the veil.

  Mother Superior was baffled by the formality of the old priest’s letter. Saint Hildegard Hospice had long had a school for orphans attached to it. The world was a broken place; orphans came to the school from the civil-war-riven countries of the former Soviet Union, from Africa’s wars, Pakistan’s starvation zones, Asia’s dust bowls. No child would have been turned away. There was hardly need for such an elaborate reminder of a past debt. But maybe that was simply a way to underscore how special this girl was.

  Mother Superior was also confused by the date. The old priest’s letter was dated four years before. Where had Andrea Isbik been for four years? And how old was she? These mysteries had to be investigated before any decision was taken about allowing her to stay. Four years was a long time. The hurt child of 1995 was now a young woman, and surely different from the girl Father Eustratius had known.

  Sister Rodica, happy that Mother Superior wasn’t angry at her for opening the gate after ten, led her to the small storage room where she had made a bed for the girl. Andrea was still sleeping. She had thrown off her covers during the night, and sprawled unself-consciously naked under a black crucifix, a pale admixture of child and young woman. The two tiny buds atop her small breasts were blood red. The rest of her was skin and bones. Her brownish red hair didn’t quite reach her sharp shoulder blades.

  Mother Superior smiled. “This one needs to be fed,” she pronounced. She looked around at the clutter in the room, where things no longer useful to the convent had been stored for the past four hundred years. Large trunks full of forgotten belongings were piled on top of one another like a child’s blocks. Dusty shelves crammed with worn books, dented chalices, and torn habits climbed to the ceiling.

  “One day we’ll have to let some air in here,” she sighed.

  The little room stood atop a maze of tunnels that had once served as an escape route out of the city. The nuns of the order were buried in the tunnel walls, beginning with the founders, who were directly below the room. The graves of centuries-dead Sister Marias and Sister Rodicas stretched out toward the old walls of Jerusalem. The entrance to the catacombs was below Andrea’s bed, an old hospital cot with two blankets on it.

  Chapter Three

  Wherein a distraught Felicity is consoled by her uncle with a great dinner and a job

  The spacious proportions of Major Notz’s apartment did little to disguise the impression of his formidable bulk. He came to the door dressed in a crisply pressed World War I British naval officer’s uniform. As usual, he exuded smoke, a lit pipe in hand. At home he always smoked pipes. In public, cigars only.

  “Goodness,” said Felicity. “It’s Lord Nelson at Trafalgar.”

  “Close, close. World War One. Come in, my dear, come!”

  The major folded his adopted niece in his tremendous arms, bathing her in a comforting effluvium of smoke, both new and ancient: the trapped air of his youth, essence of cigarillos, homegrown backyard tobacco, butts relit from overflowing ashtrays, now mingled with the luxury tobaccos of prosperous middle age. His aroma was one of her primal delights. Felicity liked to imagine each of these varieties smoked in one of the myriad perilous situations that constituted the major’s past. Cigarillos in Cuba, training a squad of assassins to take out Castro. Hashish-tipped cigarettes smoked on horseback, crossing the snowy mountains, smuggling guns to Afghan fighters. Hand-rolled in a Siberian jail. Lipsticked filter tips left smoking in whorehouse ashtrays in Istanbul.

  These scenarios were the fairy tales of her childhood. Uncle Notz had often put her to sleep with bedtime stories probably still considered highly classified by the National Security Agency. Many evenings they sat in Grandmère’s jasmine-scented yard, Felicity planted on his enormous lap, while he whispered these stories gra
vely in her ear. They snuggled this way well into her fourteenth year, when Grandmère noticed that Felicity was growing breasts. Vestigial, it’s true, but breasts. This having been noted, Felicity had to content herself with sitting on a lawn chair facing her uncle and listening to his stories from this unaccustomed position. She did get some revenge on Grandmère, though, because now, instead of sinking into the warmth of Major Notz’s comforting flesh, she sat with legs uncrossed in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of her pubescent down, which, unlike her breasts, grew early and luxuriously. But Notz continued to tell his bizarre tales undistracted late into the mosquito-slapping summer evenings, ending them inevitably with a huge sigh: “The world just can’t go on like this, it can’t!”

  On her birthday and Christmas he gave her games like Chinese checkers and a Rubik’s Cube because “the world is complicated, dear Felix, and you have to learn it to undo it.” Oddly enough, because he abhorred television and missed no opportunity to excoriate it, he gave her a home version of the television show Wheel of Fortune. He made her a present of the game with instructions to “get deep into words, because there are word magicians out there who do with words what they can’t even do with bombs.”

  On the other hand, Grandmère watched television continually, particularly religious programming. Felicity did her homework for years to the Christian Broadcasting Network until, mercifully, the major gave her a Sony Discman and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Just how much television she absorbed before blocking it out is an open question. Probably more than she needed, and less than she wanted. She read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Thousand and One Nights, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Idiot, with the television on—and Captain Nemo, Scheherazade, the Yankee, and Raskolnikov crossed wires with Oral Roberts, Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin, and Jimmy Swaggart and came out slightly drunk with hallelujas and smelling of fried chicken. The books, too, were gifts from the major, who was a river of goodwill, a cornucopia of important ideas.

  On Sundays he took her out to Antoine’s or Galatoire’s for pompano or soft-shell crab. She always dressed up for these occasions and tried to be ladylike, though she couldn’t always control her feet, which swung back and forth under the table in their shiny black patent leather shoes.

  At fifteen she lost her appetite for both food and life, and decided to quit eating and living. She was diagnosed manic-depressive and was declared officially depressed by the school psychologist. The major told her that it was not a disease but merely her body’s way of sympathizing with suffering. She was at that age of extreme sensitivity, when the material world seems crass and evil. He taught her to sip peach nectar and honey with a glass straw from a thin rose jar. At sixteen the psychologist added attention deficit disorder (ADD) and borderline personality to her profile and put her on Ritalin and Xanax, and then Zoloft and Prozac. The major predicted that the pills would change nothing. At first, the pills changed everything. She became, by turns, calm, attentive, vacant, unemotional, sociable, adaptive, cunning, clever, clumsy, suicidal, bewildered—and addicted to oysters. She rode an elevator of personal attitudes and changes until she became stable within a long-term depression brought about by lithium salt. Throughout the whole of her journey through the hells of American adolescence, Major Notz stood patiently by, first with peach nectar, then with the whole range of his considerable gourmandise. He led her from oysters to other mollusks, then to shellfish, to merlitons, star fruit, and tiramisù. He snorted indignantly at the ogres of psychiatry counting out her pills, but did not interfere until she had herself realized their inefficacy.

  So you could say he raised her. But Major Notz didn’t just say that he raised her. The major believed that he had raised her to be something special. Something so special, in fact, that he hadn’t yet revealed it to her. She had disappointed him. He’d wanted to send her to Princeton to study engineering and ancient languages, but Felicity had other ideas. Her journey through the shifting sands of her psyche and her reading of Dostoyevsky had made her interested in psychology. She had also read Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, authors who’d made her interested in unraveling criminal mysteries. “Ultimately,” she told the major, “I will discover the crime that led to all my unhappiness, and the guilty will be punished. Isn’t that special?”

  She said it in that special Southern way, and it infuriated the Major. That was not the “special” he meant, and never in that way. They argued strenuously. The major had only contempt for psychology. “People,” he shouted, “no longer have any inner lives! You want to know what’s in them, watch commercials!” He felt somewhat less hostile to detective work and to her understanding of it, if indeed she meant it to be a seeking for clues of “vast crimes, so vast they have gone unreported!” He seemed to refer to crimes other than the one crime she had in mind, but she let it slide. She let slide also his remark that “the drawback to solving crimes is losing precious time for committing them.”

  She had no idea what he meant by that, but they forged a compromise. Felicity went to the University of New Orleans, and the major approved and paid for her study of psychology. She enlisted in the Police Academy, completing the course without taking the police exam. Six months after graduation she’d received her PI license, but one year later she was still waiting for a “vast crime.” She had converted the front room of her street-level apartment into an office, and waited there like Sam Spade, playing with her brand-new nine-millimeter Beretta, taking admittedly ladylike sips from the bottle of Maker’s Mark she kept in the empty left-hand drawer of the desk. It was a good thing that the last installments of the survivor benefit that had accrued to her after her daddy’s “accidental” death in an undeclared Central American war still had eighteen months to go.

  “Am I still your special one?” Felicity half teased him now as she followed him down the hallway, lined with the uniforms of several dozen armies. Major Notz’s was the most comprehensive collection of military uniforms in the South.

  “Why, sweet pea, whatever might cause you to ask such a thing?”

  Felicity sank with what she hoped was some grace into a leather fauteuil in the living room. In front of her, silver Roman centurions faced a legion of brass Persians on the chess table. She decided to get to the point of her visit.

  “She’s dead, Uncle.”

  “Oh, child.”

  The usually loquacious major fell uncharacteristically silent, unable to offer either condolences for the old woman, whom he’d hated with a passion, or congratulations to Felicity, who was now unencumbered and ready to embark on her mission. Which he hadn’t yet revealed to her.

  “I feel for you, child,” he finally said, and patted her spiky bleached head. It melted her tough front, and she burst into a long sequence of sobs, the longest of her entire life. Sobbing was no longer in her repertoire: she despised “weepy women.” But these sobs were not just for Grandmère; they were for her parents, for Miles, for herself, for the whole world.

  Note listened attentively, as if hearing a piece of rare music, nodding his head now and then at a difficult passage. When Felicity subsided, he handed her a monogrammed kerchief and patted her head again.

  “I will cook for you. Divine substances. The Creole cuisine of your forebears. We’ll send Marie-Frances Claire off with a meal of Catholic splendor and tropical excess.”

  Major Notz rose like Zeus and headed for the kitchen, followed closely by his niece. Like the rest of his rooms, the kitchen was partly a museum. Hanging on the brick wall above a large fireplace shone copper and gold sieves from around the world. A collection of ladles was arrayed longitudinally between two narrow windows, and a mahogany bookcase held cookbooks in fifteen languages. The major pulled open a nearly hidden drawer below the range and extracted a stack of papers.

  “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.” After each of these significant “mmm’s,” the major made a little note. Finally, he phoned in an order to Langenstein’s for a pound of t
urtle meat, one mild goat cheese, six soft-shell crabs, one can of cucumber relish. This done, he checked a cabinet and concluded that he had sherry and white truffle oil.

  Felicity followed his deliberations with interest. From the high stool behind the range she could see down the hall to the major’s bedroom. The walls were entirely lined with well-kept bookshelves containing, as she knew, volumes on comparative religion, occultism, philosophy, and manuscript reports of various kinds from one of the hundreds of secret associations Major Notz monitored or belonged to. On the counter in front of her was a red apple. Felicity picked it with a fingernail to make sure it was real (she had bitten into a wax one before) and then took three bites.

  The major glanced over. “Always three bites. Why?”

  “The first is knowledge, the second shame, the third rage.”

  “Well said, bright eyes.”

  The major probed the truffle oil with the corkscrew of his thick Swiss army knife. Felicity loved that knife. She remembered the time he had removed the little tweezers and zinged it in her ear. It hummed perfect C, like a tuning fork. Like the other minutiae to which the major attended, this was not without significance. He told her that this perfect C had saved his life when he was held hostage in Lebanon, when he discovered that the chief guerrilla holding him had been a Cal State music student. He also contended that this note was a key element in an occult musical phrase, a Rosicrucian code known only to high initiates.

  “You are very special indeed. At this moment of sorrow for you, your life is in fact beginning.” He sniffed the tip of the oiled corkscrew and grunted approvingly. “You remember the grand mission I once predicted for you?”

  “Well, I’m still in the dark. Mission impossible. My mysterious benefactor has revealed nothing to me yet.”