Location: Rome
The office faced northeast.
Sabatini had been in it forty times, maybe more, and had never attended to this. It was a window. It admitted light.
That was the extent of the professional relationship he had maintained with it across four years of coming here to deliver things.
Or to receive instructions or sit in one of the chairs by the far wall while Ferrante read what he'd brought. He had never once looked at what the window was looking at.
He was looking now.
The Palazzo del Sant'Uffizio occupied the southwestern approach to the square, its upper floors level with the drum of the Basilica's dome.
And at five-forty in the morning the view from the third floor was this:
Bernini's colonnade curving away in both directions, the two great arms of it reaching into the Roman dark.
The obelisk at the centre of the square catching the first pale grey of the east and returning it as something slightly warmer than it had gone in.
The basilica's facade pale and enormous. Above it the dome, the lantern at its crown, the cross at the lantern's tip -- each one an increment of height that the eye climbed without deciding to, arriving at the cross and finding nothing above it but the sky.
Which was doing what Roman skies did at this hour: lightening through its lower register without yet committing to blue.
He had not slept.
He had tried. In the second-floor room he kept for late work, and his mind had declined in the specific way of minds that have found something worth chewing and will not set it down until the chewing is finished.
The annotation. She will not know what she carries. But he will.
He had run it for ninety minutes and given up and come here, because there was a light on and the folder was still on the desk.
And the folder had, he had decided, the quality of something that needed to be in the same room as a person who understood what was in it.
He had been in the same room as it for forty minutes now. The understanding had not increased.
The crucifix was the largest thing in the room.
It had always been the largest thing in the room. He knew this the way he knew the window faced northeast -- technically, without ever having truly registered it.
It occupied the full wall behind Ferrante's desk: dark carved wood, the grain of it deepened to near-black with age, the corpus in pale bronze that had gone to gold where decades of incense smoke had touched it and stayed pale.
Where the smoke had not reached, which gave the figure a quality of emergence, as though it were still arriving out of the wood rather than attached to it.
The arms of it spread to within a hand's width of either wall. The head was bowed. The scale was not ceremonial.
It was not the scale of a devotional object. It was the scale of a claim -- of a room that had decided, at some point before Sabatini was born and before Ferrante was born and likely before anyone currently living had walked into it, exactly what it was and what it stood beneath.
Below the feet, on a plate of tarnished silver fixed to the wood, the inscription. He had looked at the crucifix three hundred and eleven times and had not once looked at the inscription.
It was the kind of thing you didn't look at in a room like this because looking at it implied you had needed to read it, and in a room like this you were not supposed to need to read it.
He looked at it now.
In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1
He stood in front of it for a moment.
He thought about a garden forty-three metres below a desert in which something had been in the dark for a span of time that had no number, and which was not in the dark anymore.
He thought about the woman sitting in that garden this morning who was, by now -- he checked his watch: five forty-seven -- almost certainly already awake.
Already doing what people like her did when they had found something that needed understanding and the night had given them enough time to decide where to start.
He thought about the first thing she was likely to try to give it. The first bridge. The first shared skin between one mind and another.
He looked at the inscription beneath the bronze feet.
In the beginning was the Word.
The folder was on the desk. The silence that had settled in with him at one o'clock in the morning was still there, patient, with no intention of going anywhere.
He sat down in one of the chairs by the far wall.
He looked at the obelisk catching the light.
He looked at the crucifix.
He did not touch the folder.
· · ·
Ferrante came in at six-fifteen.
He had, Sabatini could see immediately, also not slept. He carried this without apology or acknowledgment, the way he carried most things that were not useful to discuss.
He sat behind his desk. He looked at the window. Then at the folder. Then at Sabatini.
"Vantini," he said.
Not a question.
The name arrived in the room the way Ferrante's decisions arrived -- as a thing that had already happened and was now simply being stated.
Sabatini had the page ready. He gave it to Ferrante, who read it once and set it down.
Father Luca Vantini. Thirty-six. Milanese.
Twelve years in the Dicastery, the last four in field liaison work -- the kind that did not appear in the public record and was not designated to. A doctorate in comparative sacred archaeology from Bologna.
The specific kind of quietness that certain work produced in people who were suited to it: not the quietness of someone with nothing to say, but the quietness of someone who had learned, precisely, when saying something cost more than it returned.
He did not publish. He remembered everything. He had been to the Negev twice.
"He knows the terrain," Sabatini said. "He knows Mizrahi by reputation. Mizrahi won't know him."
Ferrante looked at this for a moment. The calculated nuance of it.
Then: "He goes with the archive authorisation. Full access. Case 14 included."
"Yes."
"He goes as academic liaison. Not as --"
"Yes."
Ferrante looked at the window. The colonnade below was beginning to catch the early light in its travertine the way travertine caught light -- reluctantly at first, then all at once, as though the stone had been waiting for a reason.
"She will ask questions," he said.
Sabatini said nothing. This was not because he disagreed. It was because the questions were not the thoughts he had been sitting on since one o'clock in the morning.
"The name," he said. "Adjei-Levi. Whether Vantini tells her --"
"She reads it herself," Ferrante said. "In the archive. When she's ready. Not before."
He stood. He picked up the folder.
"Forty-eight hours," he said.
It wasn't a reminder. It seemed like the calling of something unseen
· · ·
Vantini left Rome at eight-fifteen.
He took the folder. He took a carry-on bag he had packed before the call came, because that was the kind of person four years of field liaison work made you.
If it didn't make you into something else first.
He took the window seat on the Tel Aviv flight and looked at the runway and then at the city receding and then at the sea.
He opened the folder somewhere over the Mediterranean.
He read it once. He closed it. He looked at the water, which was blue and vast and entirely unconcerned with field reports.
He looked at the water for a long time.
He did not open the folder again.
Outside: the Mediterranean. The same water it had always been.
· · ·
Forty-three metres below the Negev Desert, a garden held its light.
· · ·
Location: The Garden
The first thing was warmth.
It came from everywhere, the way warmth came when it was genuine -- without a single source to locate, without a direction to face toward.
It was in the grass under his hands, in the air at his face, in the light that sat above him at no particular height which came from no particular place and simply was.
The way the garden simply was, the way he simply was.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was stone. Distant, arched, the quality of something that had decided on its shape a very long time ago and had found no reason to revise the decision.
He had looked at it before. His body knew this without knowing how the knowing worked: the ceiling, the height, the particular quality of the arch.
He had not been looking at it from here before. He had been looking at it from below, from a different dark, and there had been a recess. The recess had been cold and then there had been a sound. Then there had been a face and then there had been a hand.
He turned his head.
The garden.
The grass caught the sourceless light and gave it back in the particular way of things that knew how to do the thing they were made to do.
The wildflowers. The six trees, each one its own quality of attention -- the amber one, the silver-white, the deep green, the fourth with its light-changing quality that he had no name for yet.
The indigo, the ember-copper at the edges. None of them named. All of them fully there.
He pressed his palm flat against the grass.
The blades moved around his fingers and settled. Cool and real and solid, with the texture of something that had been here a long time and intended to continue.
He was interested in this. The intention of it. The way it settled with the quality of something that had no anxiety about settling, that knew exactly what it was and had no reason to be otherwise.
He did this for a while.
Around him: the people. Five of them, sleeping in the specific positions that bodies took when they had been awake too long and had finally allowed the decision to be made for them.
One on her side with her hand open on the grass, palm up, the way hands opened when the rest of the person had let go. One on his back with an arm across his face.
One sitting against the trunk of the ember-copper tree, chin on his chest, the tree warm at his back in a way the person would be feeling even in sleep.
One cross-legged, upright even in sleep, with the patience of someone whose default mode was patience.
The woman who had found him was not sleeping.
She was at the far edge of the camp, back against the ember-copper tree, looking at a small flat thing in her hands that made a faint light. She had been looking at it when he woke.
She looked up from it in the same moment he looked toward her -- the way attention recognised attention, across a space, without the eyes needing to decide first.
She put the flat thing down.
She sat up.
The expression on her face was the one he had filed yesterday: ready. He had encountered it three times.
The first was from the ledge, when she had held out her hand and he had looked at her face before he took it and the face had said exactly what it was saying now.
The second was when she had pointed up and there had in fact been an up, which had confirmed something about her he was still in the process of understanding.
The third was just before she had said hi, which was a sound he still had in him, which was the first sound anyone had ever made at him.
He waited to find out what she was ready for now.
Author's Notes: (First of all, IM SORRY!!! Dear Readers.. I wasn't able to fulfill my promise of 3 Chapters Yesterday so here I am with a Double feature!! With Chapter 14, we now have the first POV of our MC >.>)