Degrees of Freedom

36

There was more to do, but Petrovitch was content to let others do it. Once he’d matched jobs to people, he saw no reason to fret about their competence. He’d done enough for one day—enough, it felt, for a lifetime—and it was true what he’d told Mackensie; he was tired.

He’d talked to presidents and prime ministers, he’d talked to ambassadors and representatives. He’d had a very poignant conversation with the Secretary General of the United Nations, who inexplicably reminded him of his mother, and he’d choked up completely.

His mother: now that was a situation he was probably going to have to deal with at some point. Just not yet.

A mere cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church didn’t really rank at all compared with the rest of the great and the good. Still, there he was, sitting on the steps of a bizarre Italianate building that had somehow squeezed itself between a town house and a pizza restaurant, sadly closed for the duration.

Carillo had found an unbroken bottle of bourbon in the wreckage of the Mount Street church and had brought it out to share. He lowered himself onto the cold marble and arranged two glasses on the step next to him.

Petrovitch picked up the bottle by its neck and read the label.

“Proof that there’s at least something American you’ll appreciate,” said the cardinal.

“I’m not that knee-jerk.” Petrovitch passed the bottle back, and the cardinal cracked the seal. “Am I?”

“I think that’s a whole different conversation to the one I planned on having.” Carillo bent low over the glasses, pouring carefully so he didn’t spill a drop. “If this was any stronger, I wouldn’t be able to carry it on commercial flights. As it is, it shouldn’t dissolve your guts if you take it in moderation.”

“And all this on an empty stomach. You’d think being a multi-billionaire and leader of what’s left of one of the world’s great cities would mean lunch at some point.”

Carillo passed Petrovitch his drink and looked out from under the porch at the darkening sky. “Can’t help you there. I brought the booze.”

“At least I’m a cheap date.” Corn whiskey wasn’t his usual, but he’d make the exception, just this once. He twisted his wrist and emptied the contents of the glass into his mouth. He held the liquid there for a moment, then swallowed.

He let out a puff of air, and screwed up his remaining eye.

“Stagg’s a decent drop. The bottle’s yours to keep, by way of an apology.” Carillo sipped his bourbon and drew his knees up against the cold. “You’ll be getting a letter from the Pope at some point, too.”

“Yeah, well. You didn’t know. And it’s only your God that’s supposed to be omniscient, not his followers.” Petrovitch hefted the bottle again, and worked the stopper free. He poured himself another two fingers and stared at the light through the dark oak whiskey. “This is self-medication. I’m due in surgery.”

“The eye?”

Petrovitch touched his pirate’s eyepatch: Lucy’s idea. “I don’t even need a local for that, just plug and play. It’s the arm. It bled inside, and it’s… easier if they amputate.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. You going organic?”

“Probably not. My flight from this meat-sack continues, Tetsuo-stylee.”

“What does Madeleine say about that?”

“I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like ‘at least the next time someone tries to break your arm, you can break theirs right back’.” Petrovitch drank half the bourbon in his glass. “She understands me. I don’t know if that’s good or scary.”

“She is your wife.”

“Yeah. We’re still just a couple of kids, though. We have no role models: both our fathers are dead, her mother was an alcoholic and, when she sobered up, she became an Outie and tried to kill Maddy. I abandoned my family back in St. Petersburg. I don’t even know what marriage is supposed to look like, let alone the rest of it.”

Carillo sipped and contemplated. “So why did you get married?”

“Apparently it was the only way we could get to bang each other’s brains out without incurring God’s wrath.”

After they’d both stopped laughing, Petrovitch felt he should explain.

“The whole living together, being with each other thing. I didn’t need a piece of paper for that. She did: she has this irrational belief that it means something extra. So that’s why I agreed.” He drank more, poured more. “I don’t want to be with anybody else. She’s…”

“What?” said Carillo after a suitable wait.

“Did I ever tell you about how fantastic her breasts are? They’re just breathtaking, amazing, a work of art from a Renaissance master. They’re the sort of breasts Leonardo would have drawn.” He looked sideways at the cardinal. “There is a point to this.”

“I was wondering.”

“When she takes her top off, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. I know it’s a function of biochemistry, my age and my complete lack of experience in these things, and mostly I’m just pathetically grateful she wants to be with me. But it wasn’t her breasts that I missed while we weren’t together. It was her.”

“What you’re saying is that you love her.” Carillo made a half-smile. “Which is right and proper. I know a lot of my colleagues don’t approve, but I do.”

“You’ve talked about me and Maddy?”

“At a surprisingly high level. She is, as I’m sure you realize, an extraordinary young woman. A great loss to the Order, and some have agitated this past year for your marriage to be annulled.”

Petrovitch’s fingers tightened around his glass. “So Father John didn’t act on his own.”

“So it would seem. You’ve already caused two revolutions today, why not a third?” Carillo hunched over further. “Maybe I will have some more of Kentucky’s finest.”

Petrovitch slid the bottle across the gap between them. “Strange days for both of us, then. I take it you’re not going to name names.”

“Having seen what you do to people who cross you, no. There’ll be an inquiry, held in curia, and the results will not be divulged. I’m sure you can create some pattern-recognition software that’ll track appointments and retirements, but I’d rather you didn’t.” Carillo held the bourbon bottle up and frowned at the amount already missing. Then he shrugged and dealt himself another shot. “We might move slowly, but we are very thorough.”

“Like the Americans.”

“You keep forgetting I am one.”

“You keep having to remember you are one. I’d hardly call what’s happening over there a revolution, though. It’s still Reconstruction to the core.”

“Mackensie went within the hour, and you got everything you wanted. That’s a victory, of sorts.”

“The cost of it. Chyort, we lost so much to get so…”

“Little? I could list your achievements, but that won’t make you feel better.”

“I can’t unsee: with my set-up, I can play it again with perfect clarity any time I want. And I can’t undo: I’ve killed people today, and they’re not coming back.”

“They so rarely do,” murmured Carillo. “Shall we get this over with, then? Assuming you still want to go through with it.”

“Yeah. I’ve thought about it, and what with me being such a yebani genius I have to be right at least some of the time.” Petrovitch saw off the last of his drink and pulled his arm back ready to throw.

The cardinal caught his wrist and retrieved the glass. “Enough broken things for one day.” He set the glass down with his own, and got up stiffly. The cold had seeped into his bones and he hadn’t taken as much whiskey as Petrovitch.

He led the way up the steps to the tall wooden doors. He knocked, rapping with his knuckles: the door opened a crack, then further. Sister Marie, dressed in her full habit, stood aside. When they were between the outer doors and the inner ones, she stood close to Petrovitch and looked him up and down.

“Weapons, please,” she said.

“What makes you think I have any?”

“If you don’t, I think you ought.”

“This is the Freezone, not the wild west.” Petrovitch raised his arm over his head anyway. “Feel free to pat me down, sister. You won’t find… huy, you know what? I’m going to cut the cheap innuendo and let you get on with your job.”

“Thank you.”

If he thought she was going to wave him through, he was mistaken. She was thorough in her way, just like the men she protected. When she was done, she faced him, blinking.

“You can have my gun on the way out if you want,” she offered.

“That’s very kind. But I’m being picked up, and they’ll have all the guns I need.” Petrovitch put his arm down, and started forward, but Sister Marie put her hand out and blocked him.

“A couple of ground rules, mon ami. Do not touch him, at all, ever. Even if I think you’re going to shake his hand, I’m stepping in. Second: you’re here against my advice and I’m yet to be convinced this is a good idea. If this looks like it’s taking a wrong turn, or even if it’s not going anywhere, I’ll call a halt to it. Oui?”

Petrovitch nodded. “I’m fresh out of anger, Sister.”

“I don’t believe you. You make anger like you make electricity: out of nothing.” But she pushed through the second set of doors and held them open to make sure they didn’t close on him.

It was so bright inside: so many lights, so much white and gold. The ivory marble columns supported an achingly high ceiling, and the nave was designed in a way that drew the eye irresistibly toward the baroque canopied altar.

“Yobany stos.” Petrovitch turned around and caught sight of the curve of the organ pipes and the choir gallery. “You lot are so full of contradictions, it’s a wonder you don’t explode every morning. How could anyone justify this level of luxury when…”

“It was built in an age when such things were done to glorify God.” Carillo stood beside him and looked at the statues in their niches, at the paintings in their distant splendor. “I’m just a simple Jesuit priest. I neither seek nor avoid places like this: it is what it is and, ultimately, it’s just a building.”

Petrovitch spotted a single lit candle off to one side, placed in a banked metal holder that held a century of melted wax. Kneeling before the candle, his face so close to the flame that his breath made the light flicker, was Father John Slater.

Behind him was another Joan, and there was a third waiting in the shadows. Perhaps they really did think Petrovitch was going to try and kill him. They still might be right.

Sister Marie dogged his footsteps all the way up the aisle, and stood with her back to one of the pillars, her hand resting on her holster.

In front of the candle holder was a low bench on which to kneel. Father John took up most of it and seemed so intent on staring unblinking at the yellow flame that he appeared oblivious to the movement behind him.

Petrovitch slid into the front pew and eased himself along until he was in the priest’s peripheral vision. “I understand you’ve got something you want to say to me.”

He seemed to have survived the last two days unscathed. He even looked well-fed. “Yes,” said Father John without turning away from the candle. “That was the message.”

“I find myself a suddenly busy man. Why don’t you get on with it, and I can go and, I don’t know, get my arm chopped off.”

“If you wish.” The priest finally moved his head, and looked at Petrovitch with his pin-prick-pupilled eyes. “I’d do it all again tomorrow, if I thought this time it would work.”

The three Joans had their guns out and pointed at Petrovitch in less time than it took to say “hail Mary.” For his part, all he did was snort.

“Yeah. They say repentance is good for the soul. At least, I think that’s what they say: I never really paid much attention to that sort of thing. Winning, now that’s good for the soul. Losing, and losing badly? Not so great. And you seem to be the biggest loser of all. Unless you’re going to kill yourself like Sonja did, then you get to live knowing you fucked up completely. Everything you were aiming for, you missed.”

“I made you suffer. Not as much as I wanted, but you suffered all the same.”

“What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Never thought I’d get to quote Nietzsche in a church, but here we are. That must make me pretty much invincible at the moment, considering what I’ve been through. How about you, priest? Not that you’ll be that for much longer. I understand the Holy Inquisition would like a chat.”

“Whatever they do to me, it’ll have been worth it.”

Petrovitch pursed his lips. “Yeah. By the way, thanks.”

“For what?”

“It’s like this,” said Petrovitch, leaning forward. “I wouldn’t have half of what I have now if it hadn’t been for your inept meddling. To be fair, you were almost as much a pawn in Sonja’s plot as I was, which means you get downgraded from criminal mastermind to unwitting accomplice, but those are the breaks.”

Holding up his little finger, he continued. “I get Pif back. Never would have happened otherwise. And I get a bonus Dalton thrown in—he loses his wife and children and everything he knows, but escapes from the lynch mob with his life.” He raised another finger. “Anarchy. The kid who wrote that? I egged him on. Now he’s on the same flight as the other two. Three: Michael. I would have got him out anyway. But now he’s out and he’s free. That’s a real gift you’ve given him. He has so much to tell me: I can feel him just at the back of my head, waiting for the right moment to show me the wonders of the universe, if only I can understand them.”

“Which I doubt,” said Father John.

“You don’t get to speak,” said Petrovitch quietly, to the accompaniment of an automatic’s slide being dragged back. He looked up, and he was still the target of three handguns. “Four. I have a future I can only dream of. Suddenly everything is much clearer, much more obvious. I know what I have to do now, and again it’s partly down to you. And five: I get the girl. I get Maddy and I get everything else with her. You made her choose between your world and mine. She chose me. She’ll keep choosing me. When we were on our own, underground, in the dark and the damp, and a nuclear bomb about to go off in the next room, she made me choose too. I chose her. I’ll keep on choosing her, too, till the end of time.”

He got up slowly, so as not to scare the Joans.

“You and your cabal are history. I can trust Carillo to make sure of that. And next time—if there is a next time, which I’m guessing there won’t be—don’t go in with someone so paranoid that she doesn’t even tell her CIA masters her plan. It really won’t work.”

Petrovitch edged back along the pew to the side aisle.

“Is that it?” said Father John, rising. “Is that it?”

“Yeah,” replied Petrovitch, “I’m done. What did you think I was going to do? Lunge for your throat and force Sister Marie to kill me? You are so yebani transparent. And as I walk away, you’re going to try and wrestle one of the Joans’ guns from them. Good luck with that. You’re going to need it.”

He turned his back to the sounds of a brief but intense scuffle and went to join Carillo at the back of the church.

The cardinal looked rueful. “You’re right. I don’t know everything.”

“Meh,” said Petrovitch. “My lift’s outside. I’d better go.”

“You know where to find me if you ever need any relationship advice.”

“From a celibate priest? Even if you do have a decent taste in liquor, I don’t think so.”

“Like I said, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I want you to do well.” Carillo proffered his hand. “Look after yourself.”

Petrovitch had no reservations in shaking it. “Here comes the future.”

“We’re all traveling into it, one second at a time.”

Petrovitch pushed at the doors with his back, and started to place a call to his tame Bavarian dome-builders.

“I think you’ll find,” he said, “that some of us are going much faster than that.”