The Sparrow

were worth fuck-all as things stood. Why not sell one off? he thought. And who gives a damn what it's used for?

Waiting in her small rented room for Ian Sekizawa's response to the proposal, Sofia Mendes stared out the window at the Old City of Jerusalem and asked herself why she had come here.

In her first hours of freedom, she had decided simply to carry on as before. She informed the Jesuits in Rome of her new status, assured them of her willingness to act as general contractor on the previously negotiated terms, and made arrangements to have the agreement rewritten in her own name. There was a 30 percent advance payment and, realizing that she could fulfill the contract from anywhere in the world, she had used the money to buy passage to Israel. Why?

Without her mother to light the Sabbath candles, without her father to sing the ancient blessings over the bread and wine, she'd lost touch with the religion of her truncated childhood. But after years of wandering, she felt a need to go home somehow, wanted to see if she was capable of belonging somewhere. There was nothing left for her in Istanbul—peaceful now, exhausted from achieving its own destruction. And her ties to Spain were too tenuous, too faint and historical. So. Israel. Home by default, she supposed.

On her first day in Jerusalem, shyly, never having done so before, she'd sought out a mikveh, a place of ritual cleansing. She chose a place at random, unaware that it catered to Israeli brides preparing for their weddings. The mikveh lady who took care of her assumed at first that she was about to be married and was distressed to find that Sofia did not even have a sweetheart. 'Such a beautiful girl! Such a lovely body! What a waste!' the woman exclaimed, laughing at Sofia's blush. 'So, you'll stay here! Make aliyah, find a nice Jewish boy and have lots of beautiful babies, naturally!'

It was hopeless to contradict the good-natured advice, and she wondered why she wanted to, as she allowed herself to be preened and cleaned—hair, nails, everything rinsed, smoothed and shined, her body made free of cosmetics, of dust, of the past. Why not stay? she asked herself.

Wrapped in a white sheet, she was escorted to the mikveh itself and then left alone to descend the tiled steps, with their intricate mosaic designs, into the warm, pure water. The mikveh lady, standing discreetly behind a half-closed door, helped her remember the Hebrew prayers and urged her, 'Three times. All the way under, so every bit of you is immersed. There's no rush, dear. I'll leave you now.'

Breaking the surface of the water for the third time, smoothing her hair away from her forehead and pressing the moisture from her eyes, Sofia felt weightless and suspended in time as the words of the old prayers drifted through her mind. There was a blessing for tasting the first fruit after a winter of want, now said for new beginnings, she recalled, when some turning point had come to a life. Blessed art Thou, O God, Ruler of the Universe, for giving us life, for sustaining us, for enabling us to reach this season…

Perhaps it was the mikveh lady's talk of marriage and children that brought Emilio Sandoz to mind. Sofia Mendes had kept her distance from men since that final night with Jaubert—too much, too early. Even so, she found the idea of priestly celibacy barbaric. What she knew of Catholicism was repellent, with its persecutions, its focus on death, on martyrdom, its central symbol an instrument of Roman criminal justice, appalling in its violence. In the beginning, it was an act of heroic self-control to work with Sandoz: a Spaniard, dressed for mourning, heir to the Inquisition and the expulsion, the representative of a pirate religion that took the bread and wine of Shabbat and turned it into a cannibalistic rite of flesh and blood.

She had challenged him on this point one night at Anne and George's, inhibitions weakened by Ronrico: 'Explain this Mass to me!'

There was a silence as he sat still, apparently looking at the dinner plates and chicken bones. 'Consider the Star of David,' he said quietly. 'Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space.' His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. 'I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made sacred.' Then the sunrise smile appeared, transforming his dark face like dawn. 'And that, Senorita Mendes, is the best I can do, after three shots of rum at the end of a long day.'

It was possible, she admitted to herself, that one had misjudged. Out of ignorance. Or prejudice. Sandoz had made no move to convert her. He was a man of impressive intelligence who seemed to her clear-souled and fulfilled. She had no idea what to make of his belief that God was calling them to contact the Singers. There were Jews who believed that God is in the world, active, purposeful. After the Holocaust, it was difficult to sustain such an idea. Certainly her own life had taught her that prayers for deliverance go unheard, unless she wanted to believe Jean-Claude Jaubert was God's agent.

Still, Israel rose from the ashes of the six million. Jaubert got her out of Istanbul. She was alive. She was free now.

Sofia left the mikveh that day with a strong sense of purpose, and when she got back to her room, she contacted Sandoz in San Juan and spoke plainly, without false modesty or bravado. 'I should like to be a part of your project. I want not merely to make arrangements for the voyage but to be a member of the crew,' she told him. 'My former broker, who is in a position to make valid comparisons, can provide references that will establish my intellectual suitability for a project such as this. I respond quickly to new situations and have unusually broad experience, technically and culturally. And I would bring a rather different perspective to the problems the crew may encounter, which may prove useful.'

He did not seem at all surprised. Correct and respectful, he told her that he would relay her offer to volunteer to his superiors.

Then came a meeting with the bizarre Yarbrough. He told stories and asked sly, shrewd questions and got her to laugh twice and at the end, he said in his unfathomable dialect, 'Well, darlin', the Company hired you a while back cause you was smarter'n hell and very damn quick on the uptake, and we already know you work harder'n six mules, and you get along fine with all these other folks who're goin', and I expect you can learn anything you put your mind to, which is gonna count for a whole lot if we ever meet these Singers. But what decides me, bein' as ugly as two warthogs in a mud ditch personally, is that havin' you around while we live for six, eight months inside a rock would prolly keep everyone else from pullin' their own eyes out by the roots. I'll have to check with the boss, but far's I'm concerned, you're in, if you're game.'

She stared at him. 'Does that mean 'yes'?'

He grinned. 'Yes.'

Standing at the window now, she could see the Kotel, the Western Wall. Too far away to hear the murmur of prayers, she could watch the tidal ebb and flow of tourists and pilgrims, pointing, davening, weeping, placing small pieces of paper bearing petitions and prayers of gratitude into the spaces between the ancient stones. And she knew why she was here. She had come to Israel to say good-bye to the past.

She heard her system's message signal and opened the file, read Ian Sekizawa's one-word reply and smiled.

'Done,' the screen said.

That year, several superb works of Renaissance art were sold without publicity to private investors. At an auction in London, a price was found for what had previously been considered a priceless collection of seventeenth-century Oriental porcelains. Long-held pieces of property and stock portfolios quietly went on the market at calculated times and in carefully selected locations where considerable gains were available upon sale.

It was a matter of taking profits, liquidating some assets, redeploying capital. The total needed, as Sofia Mendes predicted, was not an inconsiderable amount of money, but it did not beggar the Society by any means and did not even affect Jesuit missions and charitable projects on Earth, which were operated under current cash flow from educational and research facilities, leasing agreements and patent licenses. The sum accumulated in this way was deposited in a reliably discreet Viennese bank. Jesuits around the world were instructed to monitor the public news media and private data nets for any mention of Jesuit financial activity and to relay that information to the Father General's office at Number 5. No pattern was detected, all that year.