7. “The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic, Part Seven
15. The White Gentleman and the Kind Lady
Meredith woke with a sense of accomplishment. In her morning grogginess, she knew she had passed a test, achieved something grand, but she couldn’t recall what it was.
She put on some Lavazza to boil in a moka pot… a gift from Stefano, but he had taught her how to use a moka, and it made really good coffee. She sliced an apple, munched a leftover marmalade brioche, sipped hot coffee, and then went to the tiny bathroom to put her hair in order.
She rinsed her face in cold water from her cupped hands, looked into the mirror, and the face of Luigia Sola looked back.
All right, she told herself calmly, this is a nightmare here, this is lucid dreaming. You are are asleep in that bed over there, Meredith, you only think you are awake…
She was wearing her flannel nightgown, an oddity she had to wear since the dorm’s heating was too cold, and she lifted the hem, had a look… Moles, birthmarks, this was the body of Meredith, a woman from California, she even had the remnants of her summer tan-lines… And, placed on her skull, the living face of a Turinese murderess.
A long, solemn face, under old-fashioned, brunette curls, the kind of curls that were burned in with a crimper… A tapered upper lip, and darting brown eyes that couldn’t seem to meet the mirror…
Meredith opened her mouth and looked: Oh my God, she had the mouth of a woman from the 19th century, teeth that leaned and were of different colors. No wonder the brioche had tasted strange… She stuck her tongue out in the mirror, it looked pink and healthy, but oh no, it was a pointy, supple Italian tongue, not even her own tongue…
Meredith had to rub Luigia Sola’s face then, massaging it… the eyebrows were wrong, too much brow ridge, her forehead was sloping back and she had a widow’s peak… The Luigia face looked terrified, but in a very Italian-girl manner, like an Italian actress in a horror film…
A rather attractive face, actually, but very Turinese…
Turinese men would go for a face like this. Luigia had the kind of face that could get a girl into trouble… Meredith had to try some expressions with the borrowed face, scowling, leering… winking with one eye….
She was under a curse… This was some kind of terrible payback… For the spirits of the dead to invade the body of a medium, well, that was what a medium was about, wasn’t it?
But to have your face taken away and a dead woman’s face put on… She pinched the cheeks, and it wasn’t a dead face, it was living flesh, it hurt, it turned pink with the pinches… She was gazing into the face of Turinese woman, and a really old- fashioned, old-school homegirl, too….
There were little hairline wrinkles of suffering already visible, a young woman aging before her time, cheerless, oppressed, taken for granted… Not loved and not giving love. Her mother never wanted or loved her, her husband too and she didn’t love her children either. She only had one love and then he abandoned her too…
Hot, living tears began to leak from the dark’s Luigia Sola eyes, but they were Meredith’s own distress, leaking through… “Oh my God,” she moaned aloud, “what has become of me now, what is this injustice, what kind of death sentence is this…”
She was speaking aloud in Italian, and she had lost her American accent. It wasn’t even a proper, schoolbook Italian, because the mouth and tongue of Luigia Sola were used to Piemontese, the regional dialect… “What can I do?” she said, in her Turinese voice, to the Turinese face in the mirror. “I have to do something, this is terrible… What if Jelena comes in…”
If Jelena came in she would find a monster in her apartment, a cursed woman with a double face… She would scream and call the police, if they came Meredith would get arrested…
And no ID because her face didn’t match her picture… My God, probably even her DNA didn’t work…
As her thoughts swirled in rising panic she jumped into her clothes, she packed her laptop bag with anything handy and was out the door in two minutes…
Then out into the daylight morning streets suddenly her nightmare faded into a more lucid state… She seemed to see the city through different eyeballs, and more to the point, the people were seeing her… They weren’t seeing her like a tourist or foreigner, someone their eyes would slide over, half-seen…. No, she realized suddenly, they were admiring her old-fashioned hairstyle. They were appreciating her as one of their own, and they were intrigued by her extra-ness…
Meredith had to stop, block by block, to glance at her reflection in a shop window… She couldn’t believe how awful her fate was, and yet, the people around her were actually approving of her… The women were giving her looks of mild envy, like, my goodness, that hair would look good on me, while fatherly older businessmen were frankly ogling her, with significant looks. She had never gotten the looks Italian men gave Italian women, because she wasn’t one… But now they thought she was, the whole atmosphere of the town felt different; it was like Turin had become a giant ballroom and everyone assumed she could waltz… She had moved from Clandestina to Impostor, a medium who was a dead woman’s Turinese doppelganger…
Her nerves began to crack, she was having an identity crisis, the exposure on the streets was too much… She needed shelter, a place to be calm where she could think, and be protected….
A library, maybe, but no, too many strange, important books… A church, she thought, and there was comfort in it.
Turin had so many churches, grand cathedrals even, huge, lofty places with thick baroque curls of plaster, stained glass, brass organ pipes…
She walked block after block, but was too timid to go into the churches that had worshippers. Some were locked shut, because Turin had been an extremely Catholic city once, and there were just more nunneries and monasteries than the population could possibly fill, a lost world where Italian men and women retired into separate camps and never had to look at each other….
Finally, footsore and increasingly desperate, she came across the wonderfully named “Sanctuary of Consolation,” a church of tall sheltering walls topped with vast baroque domes.
She slipped inside, and there was scarcely anyone there… a few women in a pew in the back, kneeling, head-down, and the place was spectacular inside.
It was the Madonna’s Sanctuary of Consolation, and it was sacred to the women of the Savoy Royal Court. Generations of pious queens and duchesses, and it was all theirs, a feminine stronghold where they celebrated their good works and acts of charity… It was a church of majestic good will, where pity abounded, and the wretches who fell to their knees would be picked up and dusted off…
Meredith crept up the aisle toward the colossal altarpiece, which was framed in a mind-boggling vista of marble and iron, with a radiant golden sunburst and a squad of carved angels. Then she chose a pew and sat, trembling…
After a moment she found herself spiritually rallying, with a kind of compulsion… She was able to slip from the pew and kneel, to join her hands together…
“Higher powers,” she murmured, in the Italian voice of a different woman, “I implore your help, I am in so much trouble, I know I don’t deserve it, but take pity on me, give me shelter, give me consolation…”
Then she sat back, not really knowing what to say, or how to behave in a Catholic church.
Presently a priest emerged from some anteroom behind the altar… Maybe not a priest but some kind of bishop or other high functionary, because he had white hair, a white beard, a white three-piece linen suit… White socks, white banker’s shoes. He drew near, briefly knelt, crossed himself, and slid into the pew beside her.
The White Gentleman looked very solid and human. He even had a smell, something odd and comforting, like roasted chestnuts.
“Well, Meredith,” he said to her in Italian, “it’s good that you have come.” He was using the familiar tense that a father might use with a child.
Meredith gazed into his face, with hope dawning. His face wasn’t quite all there — he was too supernaturally radiant for that — but he was starting to look like a father, a little, the way her father had looked when she had been knee-high, and she had to gaze up at him, and stretch out her hands to be picked up.
The White Gentleman reached out slowly, with two fingers extended, like a ritual blessing. He touched her two eyelids, and closed them, the way a priest at a bedside would close the lids of a dead woman.
When Meredith opened her eyes, she was still in the church, but she was Meredith. She quickly put both her hands to her face, ran her tongue over her teeth.
“Oh thank you God, thank you so much,” she babbled in English. “I’ll never sin again, it’s a miracle!”
“Please speak Italian, Meredith,” said the White Gentleman, wincing a little. “Also, I am not God.”
“Who are you, then? Thank you for saving me. I’m so glad you are here.”
“I am a nobleman of Turin,” said the White Gentleman, “and I was once a mortal man, much like you were once a mortal woman…. And, like you, I began to meddle with higher powers, and one thing led to another. Much like you were led here.”
Meredith gazed as his shining, unstable face, and had to look away. “Have I done something terrible? Am I a mortal sinner? Am I unforgivable?”
“You are still alive,” the White Gentleman hedged. “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
“How long have you been dead?” said Meredith.
“Thank you for asking,” said the White Gentleman with dignity. “It’s an interesting question that you rudely asked, but like most questions here, it doesn’t have just one answer. As a man, I’ve been deceased since the founding of the University of Turin. But there is a great sustaining power. He is close to me, he inspires me, he enforces the Will of God, and his name is Micha-El, the Archangel.”
“Saint Michael.”
“Yes, he’s a saint as well as an archangel, and no one knows why he is both. All the other saints are dead — although still with us, of course! — but as for Michael, the enemy of Satan and the patron saint of all policemen, he is mysterious. He is the majesty of the law, and the right arm of militant goodness.”
“I don’t understand,” Meredith admitted.
“And you never will, not as a mortal woman, but Michael is a warrior-saint in the battle of divine light and infernal darkness. He answers prayers, so if you implore Michael for protection from the darkness and the infernal chaos and you turn toward the light and duty, he can help you. He will send an agent.”
“And he’s in this church, for women?”
“That would be him up there,” said the White Gentleman, with a polite nod toward a marble statue where a winged and armored being had knocked an offender to the soil and was standing on him. “And those women behind us, in the last pew of the church of Consolation here, all huddled together, attempting to pray…. They’re all dead women. Not one of them died in an odor of sanctity, not one of them ended well. They ended in violent exceptions to the dignity and decency of Turin. That’s why they are here. And so are you.”
Meredith craned her neck and had a look. The ghosts seemed to be, just, women. Women much like herself, and rather a lot of them.
“Then my mission,” she said, “would be their redemption.”
“It is,” the White Gentleman agreed, “but you’re not much good. Much better women than you have tried to redeem them — Queens in Turin, women of the noblest birth, saints, some of them, women who built this cathedral — and there they are, murderesses, prostitutes, slaves of drugs, schemers, thieves, brigandesses, corrupters of the youth….”
The White Gentleman paused meditatively. “Turin is a city of White and Black Magic. Turin wasn’t always that way. Once it was just a nice farming village on a pretty river, like other villages in Piedmont. But then we founded our University in 1404, where we applied ourselves to alchemy and theology… And, although I am the most powerful White Magician ever produced in Turin — and I have been dead for quite some time, and I continue to advance spiritually — I cannot say we are winning. Here in Turin, the White Power often reels in defeat.”
“That’s bad.”
“Yes. You are a foreigner, and there is much you don’t know about Turin, and even more you will never know. But you do have a mission here, so we must see to it that your work is ‘systematized.’ That is the method of Turin. Turin is a city which is White, and unfortunately Black, but it is a city with a system. Turin is the system, and God willing, it will get better.”
“White Gentleman, am I good? Am I a force for good?”
“It’s good that you ask yourself these questions,” said the White Gentleman evasively. “You should listen to the voice of conscience, and confront the darkness within yourself, and pray sincerely, and go to confession, and pray forgiveness for your failings, and do penance. More than that I cannot say, for I am merely a White Magician. But I have an associate, a counselor, who can help with your integration into Turinese society. She’s familiar with cases like yours. You will have to wait a while for your case to reach the front of the queue, for she is a very busy woman. But she is methodical, so presently, she will join you.”
The White Gentleman then rose and left. He simply walked away, in dignified fashion, through a different archway of the very complicated Church.
As she waited for her appointment, Meredith had time to contemplate Turin’s Sanctuary of Consolation. It was grand, and deeply comforting, and yet it had a baroque floor plan of endless nooks and crannies, with chapels, dedicated altars, velvet curtains, baptisteries, booths… even the ceiling was densely crowded divine real-estate, with gilded arches, and symbolic entities in obscure struggle, distant portholes pouring dusty beams of sunlight, and tricks of the eye that made the perspectives of the church interior even taller and grander than they really were.
Meredith rubbed the sudden ache in her craned neck, and glanced to her side — a nun had silently sidled into the pew, next to her. She was sitting straight, with regal, perfect posture, and she was young — younger even than Meredith, blonde, with slanting blue eyes.
The nun carried an antique Little-Red-Riding-Hood big wicker basket, with a rough dishcloth over it, full of fresh-baked bread, all brimming over with blooming, odorous roses.
Also, the nun was literally dressed in a sack. Just a humble sack: it was draped around her, and over her blonde hair like a nun’s habit, but it was the roughest, itchiest cloth that Meredith had ever seen a woman wear. It was not a dress, but some cloth to haul potatoes in, and held together with a fraying rope around her waist.
The big sack was all she wore: no blouse, socks, hat, no gloves, no bra, no watch, jewelry, no shoes, bare small wounded feet… A naked queen wrapped in sackcloth.
The queen also had a dusting of black ashes on her uncombed blonde bangs, and, above her hood of sackcloth, a golden halo.
Meredith had seen halos in paintings in Turinese art classes — hundreds of halos, even — but she had never met a woman who actually had one.
The golden halo was the color of the saint’s golden hair, because it belonged to her and was part of her and it was glowing like a hallucination. It didn’t go away, whether you wanted to see it or not. It was a ring of unearthly spiritual radiance that was round and thin and looked like it could cut through glass. It was not human, and it conveyed great beauty and also holy terror. It was so impressive that it made you forget that she was naked under a loose, ugly rag.
“Are you ready to speak with me about your mission?” said the Queenly Saint, or the Saintly Queen.
“I guess, Your Highness.”
“If you feel unready for your mission, don’t be ashamed or fearful. You can seek me out again, when your heart is ready. I will always be here for you.”
Meredith was surprised by the Turinese saint’s peculiar Italian. She spoke with an Eastern European accent.
“Are you Serbian?” Meredith said.
“I am Hungarian, my daughter. I am Elizabeth of Hungary.”
“Will you be my friend?” Meredith begged suddenly. “I don’t have many friends, I need one.”
“My child, we can be more than friends, we can be sisters,” said Saint Elizabeth. “I have been assigned your case, because I understand girls like you. You want to be seen, you want to be loved. I will oversee you, and you may be sure that I love you, for even if one hates the sin, one must love the sinner.”
The saint reached into her charity basket and silently offered a small loaf of bread. It was warm, and smelled good, and Meredith took it.
Then, with an effort, she ripped off a chunk of it, because that was what one did in Italy, and then she had a bite, right in the church. That was some tasty bread, or at least it was strongly flavored: rugged, stone-ground, all-natural, downright medieval bread. It was as brown as the dirt the grain had grown in, and that grain wasn’t wheat, or even corn, it was something like rye-bread or maybe horse oats.
Meredith had to chew the medieval bread with harsh effort, and the Saint took that opportunity to serenely explain herself.
“That is the bread of charity and kindness, and don’t be shy to eat it, because, I always have plenty more,” said the Saint. “Henceforth, I will be your counselor, and aid you in your mission to the less fortunate, because I know a great deal more about that than you. I gave away everything I owned to help the needy and the desperate. Once I washed a leper in my husband’s bed.”
“You did?”
“Don’t doubt me,” Saint Elizabeth chided, mildly. “My husband, the king was dead, and I wished I was dead, too, so it didn’t matter — I found grace in doing such things. Now, my child, you may think, in your heart, that you are lost — and you are. I see your heart, and I love your heart, and you cannot lie to me. I know you give yourself to men you have not married, and you drink liquor, and you never go to church. You are a pagan girl from a distant land, benighted in confusion. So you long for Sanctuary and Consolation, and I can get that for you. But these other women, in this church — those women, far in the back, all huddled together — no, don’t look at them, pay attention when I’m talking to you — they are much, much worse than you. They are wretches beset by the Black Magic of Turin, and barely able to creep here. Every woman among them, burdened, crushed, by some dreadful tale of woe and cruelty, and no one sees them, and no one loves.”
“Not even you, Your Highness.”
“I see them and I love them — I know all about them — I can introduce them to you, I can name them, and their mothers, and their daughters, and the hairs on their heads. But they don’t have a mission — and you do. You have to see them, and love them, and redeem them.”
Meredith sneaked a quick look back across the ranks of pews.
“That seems like a lot of them.”
“Those are just the ones here today,” said the saint gently. “They don’t live in this cathedral, they just come and go, like other women. Some many times, some so hardened against the divine that they scarcely come at all. They are dangerous, and for you to mingle with them, is to court martyrdom. They could kill you. They have killed others.”
“Really.”
“You could kill for justice too. But if you act in good faith for the force of good you might achieve the Palm of Martyrdom, and the Crown of Martyrdom.”
“Is it better than a halo?”
“No, it’s lesser, but for you it would be a great achievement. These women behind you, they have been through terrible things, but only for trifling, secular reasons, dark and confusing. Women who die for the White Power and the Light of Goodness, for Justice, they have their eyes gouged out, they have their breasts sawed off. They are roasted on hot gridirons, their heads chopped off with swords. Young, beautiful, chaste and noble, refusing to bow the knee to lustful men or to Satan either, they are torn on racks by their tormenters, whipped and beaten with rods, branded with hot irons. I died at age twenty-four, without a penny, in a hair-shirt, starving. By my choice. And we saints never wavered in our faith! That is glory!”
The Saint had a rosy, exalted look, for bearing witness to the innate goodness of women, and giving due credit to her many sisters, which was her duty and also her joy.
“Why me?” said Meredith, her eyes leaking tears. “Why did I ever come to Turin?”
“You came for your lessons,” said the saint. “In the city you were born in, women die in misery and darkness — many, many women more than here. They die with more cruelty and less reason. And did you see them or love them? Did you leave your car when they lay at the side of the road, without a roof — did you wash their feet with your hands?”
The saint adjusted her sackcloth hood, and set her basket to one side. She took a Bible in her hands, opened it randomly, started muttering in Latin, and then she bestowed a vision.
16. The Vision of Meredith of Perugia
What good luck! Meredith was going to art school in Italy — to a small, exclusive school in the town of Perugia. Someone at the admissions office had noticed her Italian letter and praised her language skills.
From her first day in the town of Perugia, she felt seen and appreciated. The Perugia railway station was small and grimy, while the old town was surrounded by new, tall, rather ugly buildings, but somehow she fitted in.The scale seemed right, like being a tiny figure in a Bosch painting. Even Dante’s Inferno had an Italian system to it, all those circles in circles.
Even if Italian food wasn’t the best food in the world, it was arranged the best. In Perugia the school had no dormitory, but she got an apartment owned by one of the professors.
This woman had dashed off to Morocco with her lover, but everybody in the school’s little faculty was like that — a bunch of delightful eccentrics who were more like colleagues than teachers.
Living in the absent teacher’s fabulous, arty apartment — even though Meredith couldn’t quite afford it — was an education in itself. The woman had simply dropped everything to pursue her romance, and it felt magical to step into this abandoned life, like a room in Pompeii. Everything her landlady owned was so well-chosen and pretty — in Italy, to be beautiful was to be intelligent, it was the same thing.
Even polenta, which was poverty food, just a mush like oatmeal, was beautiful in Perugia. The professor’s kitchenware was lovely, and every appliance worked — the stove and dishwasher looked like they were wearing fancy dress.
The professor had enough plates, cups and saucers to entertain parties, too — she had no children, but she was obviously a warm-hearted, sociable woman.
Meredith wanted to share her good fortune with the great apartment, so she asked some of her classmates to come over and help her cook Italian dishes. It turned out they were delighted to help her. Most of the Perugian kids had never met anybody from Los Angeles. They considered Meredith to be a Hollywood girl, and assumed she was rich.
Soon her new friends were in and out of the apartment all the time, bringing big jugs of wine, blasting weepy pop music by “cantautore” singer-songwriters, smoking marijuana and having midnight discussions of politics and philosophy.
Meredith had never been the center of so much attention. It seemed that Perugia was a friendly city where everybody knew everybody. Even the professors showed up for Meredith’s parties — because they all knew the address, and were used to going there. But they brought friends, who were polite small-town intellectuals who took Meredith seriously.
She was Meredith, the Belle of Perugia. There were rumors about her; that she had high-tech computer money, that she was in the Los Angeles movie biz but keeping a low profile by going to school. Denying these lies didn’t help at all; on the contrary, her girlfriends in class were enjoying making them up. Her friends enjoyed pumping up Meredith’s air of mystery. Italians were gossipy and gullible, and it was a fun party game for them.
Perugia was kind, and it was fun to tag along with friends, who knew every cobblestone downtown. Perugia’s streets were narrow and steep, the houses stoney, elegant, otherworldly, but she was welcome there. So many fine things, steep staircases, ancient furniture, tapestries, lacy dresses, huge paintings casually piled against walls in old shops, hole-in-the-wall dumps with fabulous spaghetti….
She had to phone-call to Serbia to exult to her mother. Things had worked out in Perugia even better than she had dreamed. She had come to Italy to learn Italian habits, to get better at the language, to learn, change, take on some new qualities: and it was all happening. She was accomplishing it. The food was good, her health was excellent, she had cut and dyed her hair, bought new clothes, walked in high heels….
To avoid her clumsy American name, her girlfriends had given her a new nickname, “Mez,” and Meredith liked being Mez. She was the only Mez in town, and people liked to be around Mez. She was a foreign girl, but she was sunny, unpredictable and fun.
Sometimes she felt she had been born in Perugia, and the thought of returning to Los Angeles was saddening.
“Italians are superficial,” her mother counselled, over a scratchy Internet phone connection. “Italians are like the skin of this world, like we Serbs are the liver, constantly surviving through big troubles, and being the big trouble ourselves. If you want to be Italian, you’ll have to marry an Italian man! Who would advise that! Not me!”
If she had a problem in Perugia, it was big, but simple — money. To go out, to be lively, to rent a nice apartment, those were expensive. Also, her student visa would not allow her to work or earn money in Italy.
There just weren’t many options. It was like being nailed in a box where the water of debt poured in and there was no way to drain it out.
Help arrived in a way she didn’t expect. There was a guy in Perugia everyone seemed to know, named “Carlino,” or Charlie. He was a portly, owlish-looking guy who’d once been in a successful Italian rock band. Now he was a harmless old hippie who came to parties and played his acoustic guitar, but he was still the local boy made good.
He offered to teach Meredith the guitar, but she didn’t have time for that, and especially she didn’t have time for a guy who was sweet on her but obviously her father’s age. But Carlino did her a favor: he fronted her half a kilo of marijuana, and told her she could pay him back.
Meredith had some qualms about this, but once she had it she had to get rid of it, and it was amazing how fast it went.
She told everyone that the pot was Californian and from Humboldt County, and of course they believed her, or pretended to.
Then she had some money, or some cash in small bills anyway, but after paying Carlino back, there wasn’t much.
Then he drove her outside town, to a little farm he owned, and suddenly everything made sense.
Italy was “the garden of Europe,” where you could stick practically anything in the ground and grow it, and Carlino was growing hemp out there that was twenty feet high. He’d been at it for quite a while, decades even, and he had two big problems: the cops and the mafia. The Perugia cops would leave him alone if he didn’t sell anything in Perugia, while the mafia were the cops of the criminal world and they were seriously dangerous, even to a small-timer.
Then Carlino offered Meredith a job on his grass farm, and he wasn’t all that small a timer. There was enough money involved to keep her afloat till she graduated, and that was for a week of labor. All she had to do was bring in the crop and keep her mouth shut about it.
She had to chop the giant weeds down, hang them upside down in a barn from the rafters, dry them out with fans, chop the dry leaves off the stalks, and then compress them into marijuana bricks with an old olive-oil press. Carlino had had some other guys doing this work for him — illegal immigrant farm laborers, but, he said vaguely, they’d gotten deported.
So that left just her, in her new surprise role as a farm peasant, and farm work was all kinds of heavy labor. Carlino had other crops on his farm — fruit trees, olive trees, some goats, grapevines, all to keep up appearances for his only real cash crop, but they needed looking at, too. Working on a farm was sunrise to sunset labor, just no end to it. It was hard, heavy labor, too, with blisters, strains, and dangerous machinery, and even though the farm looked beautiful, she couldn’t believe that Italians on farms had life so difficult.
When Carlino arrived again, he was amazed that she’d done such an efficient job, and even gotten rid of the evidence — not by burning it, because the whole countryside would have smelled, but by chipping-up the bare stalks and hiding them in compost heaps. All the drug was sealed up in blue plastic and duct tape, which Italians called “American tape,” because they believed, correctly, that Americans used it for everything.
He didn’t have enough cash to pay her up front, he said, but not to worry. She could just hide a few dozen kilos in her apartment. She didn’t even have to sell them — just hold onto them as a guarantee for the money he owed her.
Meredith didn’t like this arrangement, but she had no choice about it — she couldn’t very well sue him for wages. It was a typical Italian sly scheme, actually, plus it would give him endless chances to drop by her apartment and make a flirtatious nuisance of himself.
So she had to drive the farm truck into town and haul the stuff up, through her own door, under cover of darkness — of course Carlino didn’t offer to help, claiming that he had a bad knee.
So she was sitting in her own apartment, wondering where to conceal a huge bulk of drugs, when some guy simply opened her front door with a key. He was an utter stranger, someone she’d never seen before, and he seemed as surprised to meet her as she was to meet him.
He didn’t offer any explanations or apologies. He didn’t speak a word. He simply walked quickly and directly across the apartment, grabbed her neck and choked her to death.
Or almost to death. When she came back to consciousness some time later there as another man in the apartment, a confederate. The two of them had taken all the drugs and were just robbing the place, going through drawers, throwing books off shelves. She tried not to speak but her swollen throat hurt so badly that she had to cough, big racking coughs that tasted of blood.
Then the second man looked up with irritation, pulled a flick-knife from his pocket and stabbed her. He just cut her neck open, as fast as thought, and a sea of blood burst down her naked chest. She had just enough time to see that all her clothes were off, and then she went black.
Then she opened her eyes on an astonishing vista — it was the baroque ceiling of the Cathedral of the Sanctuary of Consolation, and she was lying down on a pew.
She was alone, except for a few worshippers way in the back.
She was badly shaken, and prayed.
Presently the Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was there — not even bothering to walk in this time. She simply shimmered and materialized from thin air.
“I got killed,” Meredith confessed. “I messed up and I was murdered. Or was it somebody else?”
“She was the other Meredith, the one with no mission in Turin.”
“Am I dead now?”
“Not yet. The women there are dead,” said the saint, with a polite nod, “and I, too, am long dead. I’ve been dead for eight hundred years. We are shades, and most of us rest in peace — but not all of us. There are those who long to be seen and loved. Like I see you — and like I love you. But these clandestine creatures, there is something hidden in them — they want to be seen and loved in the beating heart of a living woman. Like the other Meredith. That is your mission. And you died her death you have to avenge, she needs to be loved and seen. Her murderers never got caught.”
“I knew that in my heart,” Meredith groaned. “I was so at home there in Perugia.”
“But that was not you or your life, it is the story of other Meredith… the unfortunate girl, who never knew Turin.”
The saint turned and gazed over the back of the pew, adjusting a strand of blonde hair with one lily-white hand.
“But, Your Highness, Your Holiness… What am I supposed to do, exactly? To redeem the souls of the dead? To bring justice to them?”
The saint merely smiled. “Your mission is your journey.”
“But where are the road signs?”
“Be strong and have faith,” the saint suggested. “You have tasted death, you came back from the dead. Now you know that life and death are mysteries.”
The saint gazed again at the cluster of misery. “That flock needs a shepherdess. A strong shepherdess, with a rod and a staff. My dear: although you walk through this city in the shadow of death, there are waters of stillness, waters of peace and rest. The wounded soul of the dead can be healed. Your cup will brim over. You will dine in the presence of murderers. Justice and mercy will follow you. Until you are dead yourself.”
Meredith was meekly silent. She was in a state of holy awe, and couldn’t quibble.
“It is piteous,” the Saint said, “to be a dead woman who can find no peace. Since you must work here, there is one woman among the lot of those wretches who has been here such a long time. Almost as long as myself. Do see that poor creature there, off to one side, proud, resentful and all alone? She was never a Queen like me, but she was a Duchess. Look at that Crusader lady. You should see to her first. And to her shroud.”
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