The Day of Atonement (42 page)

“Because you want her. You’ve done enough damage. Killing my soldiers and the men at the Palace. And robbing the Inquisition! Did you think I would not hear of that? You think yourself some sort of avenger, but you are nothing but a thief, taking our money.”

“And where did the Inquisition get that money?” I demanded, moving slightly to the right and in, crowding his sword, making it more difficult to gain any momentum with it. I was nearly in position to strike. “Does the Inquisition have any purpose but to hoard more gold? I’ll not quibble with you, priest, about which of us is evil. I only wish to know if I was mistaken in my belief that priests were not allowed to use swords.”

“I shall have to confess the sin,” Azinheiro said.

“I doubt you shall live long enough to do so.”

Azinheiro laughed, and he appeared to believe in truth the advantage was his. “How can you stop me? If I see you reach for a weapon, I will run you through.”

It was time. I could move now, reach in, grab his wrist hard and twist it. The sword would drop. I already heard in my ears the clang of metal on stone. I would twist his arm, and he would cry out and fall to his knees. I would take his head, and twist, and it would be over.

Why, then, did I not take the opportunity? Why did I still talk? “You may be willing to commit the sin of wielding a blade, but I have observed in a dozen ways that you have made no habit of studying its use. I’ve spent the past ten years of my life training in the arts of fighting. Are you so certain you can have the better of me?”

Azinheiro blinked several times. I suspected he was still trying to
think of a way out of this situation that did not involve a direct confrontation with me. Likely he knew he had made a mistake, he had challenged in arms a man who outclassed him in every conceivable way. He wanted only an honorable means to escape.

“Look around you,” I said. “The city is in ruins, and the Inquisition is scattered. Your world has come to an end, but this child’s has not. Let her go, and I will let you go.”

The words were out of my mouth before I understood them. Did I mean it? I did. I did not want to kill him, though I knew he did not deserve to live. Perhaps I did not want to be remade. Perhaps I did not want to let go of the anger and be transformed. Perhaps I did not want to discover that killing him made no difference, that I would always remain who I now was. All of those things were true—but they were not, I realized, the main reason.

I simply did not want to kill a man, no matter how terrible, in cold blood. The desire was nothing but memory.

“Let her go,” I said, “and you can live. Never cross me again, and I shall not come after you.”

“If I let her go, you will have no reason not to kill me,” he said.

“You deserve death,” I told him. “You deserve it a thousand times over, but more than that, the girl deserves to be free. Release her, and I will leave you. I will leave Lisbon. I will be done with all of it.”

“I don’t believe you.” With his free hand, Azinheiro reached out and grabbed Mariana from the nun and pulled her close to him. He pressed her to his body and laid the blade across her chest, just under her throat. Her eyes went wide, but she held still.

“Now you dare not attack me,” the priest said. “You are going to let us both walk out of here, otherwise the girl dies. All the fighting skills in the world won’t be able to prevent it. Whatever else you have done, you will not do this. I will not let you return this child to her English father.”

Rage pulsed in my head. I felt my fist tighten into a hard ball. I had offered to let him live. I had agreed to walk away from my reasons
for being here. After all I had endured to get to this moment, I was prepared to show mercy, and now he pressed a blade to this girl’s throat.

Azinheiro said, “You think me cruel, but I am trying to save this girl. Better she should come of age in the true church than with a drunk and a thief for a father.”

“That is not your decision to make,” I told him.

Azinheiro grinned. “It looks to me like it is. She will stay in my care or she will leave this world entirely. She can enter the kingdom of heaven as an innocent. Which shall it be?”

I hesitated a moment. I liked to consider myself a man of principle, and there were things to which I did not like to stoop. That said, I decided that no one in that room—including myself—mattered except Mariana. Getting her back to Settwell was my purpose, and everything and everyone that stood in the way of that was expendable. I had tried the path of clemency and forgiveness and it had yielded nothing. It was time for another way. And so I lunged forward and around Azinheiro, yanking the priest’s mother to her feet.

I did not trouble myself with threats. I simply caught the old nun in a headlock and began to squeeze. Her thin body, bony and delicate, writhed against me. Her skin was dry as paper, and what little air she could suck in rattled in her chest.

The nun who had helped us screamed, but Franklin grabbed her arm to hold her back. His expression was neutral, like a man at an execution who knows nothing of the condemned’s crimes.

The old nun began to thrash. I moved to tighten my grip on her, but relaxed it slightly instead. I did not want to be hurting old women no matter whom I was trying to save. I could not go through with it. Even threatening her was more than I could endure.

Azinheiro, meanwhile, pretended toward bravado. “Ha, you think I care what happens to some old nun? Kill her for all I care. It will get you nothing.”

“The old nun is your mother,” I said, stalling while I figured out
how I could extract myself from this nightmare. “You don’t want her to come to harm.” And then I knew what I would do. “But it’s too late!” I shouted.

I pushed her head to one side and tossed her toward the other nun to break her fall. Pretending to kill her was a risk. Azinheiro might have struck at Mariana out of retaliation, but I knew human nature well enough to expect that he would, if only for an instant, look over to see what had become of his mother.

When he did, I reached out to his wrist and twisted. The sword fell, and I released my grip, catching the blade smoothly. Meanwhile, with my other arm, I pulled Mariana toward me.

I now had the weapon and the girl. Mariana hugged me. I felt the moisture of her tears dampen my shirt, but she made not a sound.

I looked up. Franklin had the priest in a headlock, much as I had held his mother. He struggled, but Franklin, as he had said, was strong, and Azinheiro could not escape.

“Put him there,” I said to Franklin, pointing with the sword to a chair in the corner. Franklin gave the priest a rough push, and he went crashing into the chair.

I then gently removed Mariana’s arms and handed her over to Franklin. “Go with my friend downstairs. I shall be there in a moment, and then we’ll go to your father.”

“I don’t know him,” she said, looking at Franklin. “I want to stay with you.”

“You can trust him, Mariana. I promise.”

“I’ll take good care of you,” Franklin said. “A man would be a fool not to do as Mr. Foxx wishes.”

Mariana nodded and they left.

I stood in the room with Azinheiro and the nun who had admitted us, who was now bent over Sister Juana Maria. The old woman sat on the floor, looking somewhat dazed. Later, I would feel remorse for how I had treated her, but I pushed those thoughts away for now. She had been treated roughly, but no one had been hurt. Not yet.

“She will be well,” the nun said to Azinheiro. “She only needs some air and rest.”

She turned and glared at me, but her gaze conveyed nothing I hadn’t already said to myself.

“Take her away,” I said to the nun. “I have business with the priest.”

“There will be no violence in a house of God,” the nun said.

I laughed. “Is this a new rule? I spent my childhood in Portugal, and I have never heard of such an injunction before. I suggest you visit the torture room of the Inquisition Palace.”

The nun helped Sister Juana Maria. She turned back only once, looking at her son mournfully.

The priest sat in the chair in the corner, looking small and defeated.

“I shall let you walk out of here,” I said. “No priest of the Inquisition has ever done so much for a Jew, but I will grant you this gift today. I suggest you take it.”

“Why?” the priest asked.

“My reasons are my own,” I told him. I had not fully sorted them out for myself, and I was in no mood to explain them to him.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

I shrugged. “I can’t change that, but all the same, I am letting you live, and I am letting you leave. Perhaps when I am gone, you will believe me.”

I turned to walk away, and the priest hurled himself out of his chair. Apparently, the sword was not the only blade with which he had armed himself. He had produced a small knife, which he thrust at me. He was slow and clumsy, however, and I easily sidestepped, grabbed his arm, and pushed him roughly against the wall. He landed hard, and his head smacked against stone. The knife fell from his hand and his eyes rolled momentarily, but he did not collapse.

With my left forearm, I pinned the priest to the wall by his throat, while with my free hand I took a blade from my belt. I was having
difficulty coming up with reasons not simply to kill him and be done with it.

“Perhaps I made a mistake,” Azinheiro gasped. “You are not a murderer. What you did to my mother was vile, but I understand you did it for the girl. You don’t wish to harm me, so let me go.”

“So you can try to kill me again?” I asked. “So you can abduct children and destroy families?”

“I must do those tasks appointed to me,” he said, “but you need not hurt anyone. You are not so cruel.”

“I am what you have made me.”

“I did not make the Inquisition,” Azinheiro said. “I was but a poor child. I would have starved, ended up a soldier or worse, had I not found a home there. And if I had not been the one to arrest your father, it would have been another. You may hate the institution if you like, but its agents are only fallible men.”

“It is a poor excuse. I shall not have it.”

“Revenge gets you nothing, my son. Seek forgiveness instead. If you kill me, how will you feel later?”

“It is difficult to say,” I mused. “But I know if I don’t, you will hurt others, and their pain, their blood, shall be on my hands.”

“Do not your Jewish practices have a day of atonement?” the priest asked. Seeing my startled reaction, his eyes sparkled with hope. “Yes, I have studied your beliefs, and I know such things. Men may atone for their sins. Is it not wrong to rob me of my chance to atone?”

I let go of the priest and then pushed him to the stone floor. “How will
you
make amends, priest? How will you atone for killing my parents? How will you atone for destroying people simply because their ancestors were once Jewish? How will you atone for the pastry man, whom you destroyed because you did not like his customers? What can you say to me that will unstain your hands or give me back my family, my friends, the wife I will never have? Let me hear what you have to offer.”

The priest said nothing.

I kneeled over Azinheiro and put my hand against the priest’s throat once more. His pulse thrummed under my grip. “If your Inquisition survives this earthquake, will you go back to them? Will you work all the harder to make up for the money they have lost by arresting more New Christians? Or will you tell your masters that you now know what you did was evil? Will you tell them you must wash your bloody hands and repent? Which is it?”

The priest closed his eyes. “I am what I am,” he said. “I cannot be anything else. But you, my son, have a choice now to be one thing or another. When you killed before—that was violence meeting violence. You fought to survive. You must now decide if you want to be guilty of murder.”

If I let this priest live, he would continue to do evil. He would use his authority to take and ruin lives. I could prevent that. I could make it so this madman never hurt anyone again. Perhaps there was no pleasure or even satisfaction to be had from killing Azinheiro, but killing the priest was the right thing to do. Letting him live was weak.

I chose to be weak.

“I can’t make you be someone other than who you are,” I said. “It is not my place to do so. That is what the Inquisition does. It is not what I do.”

I turned toward the door. Azinheiro rose, coming shakily to his feet and steadying himself against the wall. He was silent. It would have been beneath him to thank me for my mercy. I was not even sure it was mercy; I was even less certain it was the right thing. I only knew that it was what I had to do.

As I began to descend the stairs I saw a shadow pass behind me. I turned in time to see Kingsley Franklin, having once more picked up the axe, bringing the weapon down toward Azinheiro. The priest managed a startled cry and raised his hand, but it was too late. The axe struck the top of his head and drove in, almost perfectly centered, to the bridge of his nose.

Franklin, surprisingly agile, jumped back to avoid the spray of blood and brains as the priest toppled over onto the floor. I remained motionless, looking at the body of the priest as a halo of blood formed around his prone body. Franklin now stepped toward me, hands raised.

“I thought you might suffer a bout of morality,” he said, “so I figured it best to be on hand to do the business.”

“Why?” I asked, my single word catching in my dry throat.

He shrugged. “I told you. Your father was a friend. Figured it was the least I could do. You get to enjoy knowing you made the hard, righteous choice,
and
you get to see the priest get what’s coming to him. It’s a thing of beauty, when you consider it.” He wiped with the back of his hand at a few drops of blood that had collected on his forehead.

My eyes shifted back to the dead priest. “That may be putting it strongly.”

Franklin shrugged again. “You’re not angry, I hope.”

“In truth I hardly know what to feel,” I said, “but it is not anger toward you.”

“Good enough for me,” he said, and headed down the stairs.