AS THOUGH HE READ DISAPPROVAL in Jane’s face, Ferrante Escobar said, “We sell only to wealthy, reputable clients needing protection in an increasingly dangerous world. They don’t want to risk having their weapons known and confiscated if some crisis leads to martial law. Many of them have large security staffs, and they buy in bulk, but we don’t sell to anyone who might intend to resell.”
His self-justifications were self-delusions, but Jane couldn’t afford to alienate Ferrante Escobar. She must be in Borrego Valley this afternoon. She’d already needed more time to put together this operation than she would have liked. Further delay was unthinkable.
Nevertheless, instead of responding to his declaration that he would not accept money from her, that he wanted something else in return for the pistol, she said again, “How much?”
Anxiety molded his face. “This is a world of lies and always has been. We live in a time of even greater deceptions than in centuries past. So much of what we’re told, what we see on TV, what we read in the newspapers or on the Internet, is invented to conceal the truth, protect the wicked, increase the power of those who already have more power than all the kings of history combined.”
“I don’t disagree,” she said. “But what does that have to do with the price of a pistol?”
He became more excited, speaking fast. Earlier he’d been unable to endure her stare for more than a moment. Now he was unable to look away.
“They claim you’re a true monster. No redeeming qualities. So dangerous, vicious, hateful. But all they’ve done is make you as unreal as the supervillain in some bad Batman movie. All over the Internet, they’re talking about what you really might be. They think you know something that could bring down a lot of powerful people.”
Ferrante continued to meet her eyes, but his demeanor changed. He pressed his right hand over his heart, his left over the right, as if his heart must be pounding so hard and fast that pressure needed to be applied to quiet it. With this strange posture came a change in his voice. He spoke neither as fast nor as loud as before, and there was a new tone that she could not at first name.
“They say maybe you have proof of something big. But you can’t find a way to use it or get it out to the public. Because everything is so corrupt these days. Because you have to run as fast as you can just to stay alive.”
When he fell silent, Jane said, “And what do you think?”
Anxiety faded from his face, and a tenderness replaced it. “I think you’re the truth in a sea of lies. There is a painting in the Louvre in Paris. I own a print of it. She’s shown in armor when Charles the Seventh was crowned the king of France.”
“No,” Jane said.
“You look nothing like her, but you’re armored, too.”
Disturbed by what she now realized was Ferrante’s reverence, she said, “I am nothing like her. God talked to Joan of Arc, or she thought He did. He’s never talked to me. I got into this for selfish reasons, to restore my husband’s good name, to save my son’s life. If it’s grown into something larger than that, it’s not anything I ever wanted. I’m not made to carry that kind of weight. I can’t save an entire freaking nation. I could be dead tomorrow. Chances are I will be dead. I’m tired and lonely and scared, and I’m under no illusion that God or some guardian angel will spare me from a bullet in the head if the bastard who pulls the trigger knows how to aim.”
Ferrante’s hands pressed over his heart looked melodramatic and foolish, but the esteem in which he held her was genuine, not at all diminished by her refusal to be what he imagined her to be. He said, “If I had been there in the fifteenth century, at the coronation of Charles the Seventh, I would have asked her for what I’m asking of you, the only thing I want from you.”
“Ferrante, listen, I can’t play something I’m not. I’m no saint in the making. The things I’ve done. Damn it, listen, I’m no good at make-believe. I’ve got both feet in the mud of reality. I slog from here to there. I don’t fly. I screw up. Both feet in mud and blood.”
He would not be deterred. “All I want is your blessing. Touch my head and bless my life.”
If she did as he asked, just as a kindness, with no illusion that her blessing had any power, Ferrante would nonetheless receive it as a sanctification of his heart, as a hallowing of his life. Knowing what false value he would place on it, if she still did as he wanted, she would to some degree be a fraud. She should do it anyway, do it for Travis, to avoid risking this man’s displeasure. After all, she would kill for Travis, lie for him, commit any sin to save him. So she should be able, just for a moment, to pretend to be a conduit for divine grace. Yet she couldn’t move toward him or bring herself to speak a benediction. She didn’t understand her reluctance, nor was she able to put a name to the particular fault in herself that brought her to this impasse.
She looked beyond Ferrante to the four grotesque paintings, and she thought about what Enrique had said. He’s a weird duck.… He’s got this blood obsession. You meet him, you’ll see.
Yes, but it turned out not to be the blood of violence and vengeance and hatred that enthralled Ferrante Escobar, but instead the blood of sacrifice, the concept of redemption through suffering. To some extent, that was an obsession that Jane, with both feet in the mud of life, could understand.
Her gaze traveled from the paintings to the acrylic plinth on the desk, on which rested the bristling sculpture that had seemed strange and abstract when she’d first noticed it. She realized it was intricately braided brambles fashioned into a crown of thorns.
If for whatever reason she could not bring herself to give him what he wanted, she could give him an alternative that might not leave him alienated. She stepped to the desk and, not with her gun hand but with her left, firmly gripped the sculpture and lifted it from the display pedestal, clutched it. She clenched her teeth to bite off any expression of pain and met his eyes for a moment before returning the sculpture to the acrylic.
The thorns had dimpled her flesh in a dozen places, but blood bloomed only in tiny blossoms from three points on two fingers and from four punctures in her palm.
Ferrante Escobar stared at her hand for a long moment, his face solemn, his dark eyes unreadable. Without another word, he picked up the box containing the pistol, went to the door, led her down the hallway to the client lounge, and left her there with the new gun.
An adjacent restroom served the lounge. She cranked on the water and pumped soap from the dispenser and washed her hands. After she dried off, she clenched her left fist around a wad of paper towels, applying pressure to stop the thorn pricks from bleeding.
She wondered if Ferrante would blot the drops of blood from the floors of his office and the hallway—and what he might do with the rag that absorbed them. She decided that she would rather not know.
In the client lounge once more, she sat on a sofa. She looked at the box containing the pistol. She raised her head and stared at the frosted windows, which were set as high as those in Ferrante’s office, and she thought about how strange her life had become and about how many moments of it were resonant with cryptic meaning that would remain forever beyond her powers of interpretation.
7
A WARM BREEZE, BLADE SHADOWS scalping the barren earth, the ceaseless slish-slish-slish of carved air, perhaps one of the two windmills pumping water from a well in addition to cleaving energy from the breath of Nature …