love of money and power. I will not get my ships if I do not promise a profit. Gold, silver, and spices.”
“This is a world I despise.” She picks up the blade and pushes it into his hands. He throws it across the room and it clangs loudly against the stone wall.
“All right, Beatriz,” he says. “All right. Mostly I wonder what is there. I have a mad wonder in me. Is that what you wish to hear?”
“You’re not just saying this to please me?”
“No. I have to know what’s out there.” Columbus sighs, walks across the room to a window, looks down into the courtyard. A cat stretches, then sits in a shady spot, licks its paw. There are no clouds in sight. Just sunlight and perfect blue from the horizon all the way into the heavens. “Sometimes I get so caught up in the money, and ships, and crewmen, and supplies I will need that I begin to lose sight of the reason.” He turns around. “It’s simple, Beatriz. I have always wanted to find out what’s out there in the unknown.”
“Now I wish to live again,” she says, smiling.
“But still, I will have to beg the bankers and the scholars and the kings for the ships to satisfy this wonder.”
“Can’t you convince them that you are right?”
He smiles. “It is difficult when one does not know if one is right.”
“I am certain that you are right,” she says.
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Yes, I should.”
“In the end, it comes down to one woman,” Columbus says. “I have to convince one woman that I might be right.”
“One other woman.”
He sighs and sits down heavily on a chair against the wall. “I must convince a queen. All of this game playing and risk is to persuade one damned woman. It’s not going to be the steadfast scholars, or the bankers, or the shipbuilders, or really anybody in Spain, except for that one woman. Her and her aristocratic friends.”
“The queen,” Beatriz says.
“Yes, the queen,” he says. “Remember, Beatriz, nothing truly inspired or beneficial to mankind has ever been accomplished by asking for an agreement from the masses. It’s the elite. It’s the elitists who drive society forward.”
“To the queen then.” Beatriz raises her glass.
“Yes,” Columbus says. “To Isabella.”
Two days later, just before he leaves for the university, Columbus makes one of his most important discoveries. He finds a crease in the chart-the one upon which he and Beatriz made love. He makes an important decision. He takes a huge leap of faith. He looks at his top chart. It’s one of the charts made by his brother, Bartholomew, who is in France seeking funding from a different royalty. Columbus decides the crease is the route to the Indies. He decides he will follow the map of his love for Beatriz. From the crease in the far western unknown area where he hopes to find the Indies, he draws a line back toward the known world, across the Western Sea, to find his starting point: the Canary Islands.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Emile places the TV remote on the bedside table. He’s been in Cordoba for two days-poking around, looking for something, anything that might be a clue to the whereabouts of his mysterious man. It’s 5 A.M. He crawls into the shower to try and shake off his dream, which was more a lucid memory. Perhaps the dream is a bit more violent than the memory. There’s more broken glass. More screaming. More shame.
It was six months after the shooting and he was slated to return to duty. Emile shows up at the Lyon office. Everyone is smiling and happy to see him back at work. He’s ushered into a meeting before he can get settled. In the boardroom, there’s a man wearing a bad tie and a cheap suit talking about the importance of something called an augmented business planning process and managing risk. There’s a three-day seminar on risk management this man highly recommends. He somehow segues into the vision and values of their organization. When he fires up his PowerPoint presentation, with whirling text and fading screens and headings that outline the levels of bureaucratic functioning of Interpol’s role in the overall security scheme for the European Union, Emile starts to lose control. At first it’s just a twitch. He’s holding tightly to a company coffee mug and the twitch jerks his hand-creates a splash that almost escapes the mug. He wants to run from the room before anything bad happens. He knows something bad will happen if this man continues his earnest presentation. Emile starts to actually see hazy silos of information, silos of processes, silos of small-brained bureaucrats like this man, and none of these silos communicate in person- they all e-mail each other, copy subordinates and sub-subordinates, obscure information; rewrite memos dozens of times, make simple memos into academic dissertations so laden with cover-your-own-ass modifiers that they become meaningless. Emile breaks into a cold sweat. His breathing becomes shallow and quick. He worries that he’s going to say something stupid. But he can’t move. At least not right away. Emile remembers thinking: It can’t last much longer. It’s got to be over soon. But it doesn’t end. The presentation goes on for another fifty minutes, with no end in sight. Finally Emile has had enough. The dull man asks if there are any questions. Emile stands up. “What is the relevance of any of this?” he says. He draws his gun and fires two shots at the projector, which is suspended from the boardroom ceiling. The projector falls and shatters the glass table, which collapses on top of the people who have taken cover under it. Emile remembers holstering his gun and going home. They let him go home. They admit his return to work was premature. His bosses insist on more therapy. He was apparently suffering from something called post-traumatic stress disorder. Nothing to be ashamed of, they said. Happens to the best of us.
In his dream about shooting the projector, there are glass windows all around-nothing made of glass ever makes it through his dream intact. In one version of the dream, the presenter gets shot. Just shot, not killed. His therapist had a field day with that particular wrinkle.
He’s been to most of the bars and cafes around the main roads that skirt the edge of Cordoba. He’s tried to stay away from the A-4, but he now finds himself in a small nook of a bar called El Gatito, just off the Autovia del Sur-the highway that runs mostly uninterrupted from Madrid to Cadiz.
Emile sticks his nose into the opening of the glass, inhales the peaty, sweet aroma of the whiskey, then looks up to meet Carmen’s eyes. “I have no doubt in my mind, addled as it is by this brilliant whiskey, that God is a human invention. We invented God, and now he’s got to go. It’s time we grew up.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that you are too much with the Scottish beverage,” she says.
The day he’d arrived in Cordoba, Emile had done a circuit of bars and cafes closest to the train station, asking his open-ended questions, gently prodding. “He probably has better Spanish than I do,” Emile would say, a line that always got them smiling, and added an immediate layer of trust. Emile used this self-deprecatory statement about his ability to speak Spanish when, actually, his Spanish is very good. As is his English. His Italian? Not so good. Spanish was a cradle language for Emile. His mother was Spanish; his father, French. There was a nanny for a few years, a woman who spoke English-loved American films. His limited Italian can be credited to a lover-long before his wife.
Emile had started to doubt this approach. Four days in Cordoba and nothing. He would be hard-pressed to say what it was exactly that caused him to strike up a conversation with an elderly man feeding the birds in the park just off Avenida de Cervantes. It was just after noon. He’d been on his way to visit Carmen at El Gatito. Maybe it
