Paulo poured the La Tâche—probably worth several thousand—very carefully into the decanter and let it sit a moment as he excused himself. I thought he might be going to use the lavatory, but instead he expertly wound his way to the back through the miles of piled-up carpets and slid aside a curtain to reveal a wall safe.
He asked to see my passport.
“No—I prefer not giving it over to someone standing in front of a safe, thank you very much.”
He laughed gently and said, “O ye of little faith…”
Not that again. Can’t these guys come up with anything more original?
“Okay,” he said, “then read me your passport number.”
“Well, I don’t have my passport. I have this other one on me.”
“Perfect,” he shouted, practically jumping for joy.
I pulled it out and read the endless sequence of numbers and—voilà!—the whizzing sound of the safe electronically unlocking began.
I could see in the dim light Jacobi removing a diary-sized leather-bound book.
He walked back to the table, laid it on the altar cloth, opened it, and said, “This will not always be flattering to me, I’m sorry to say, but I was suffering then from the sin of vanity, I know. Please understand. I had been chosen for a great task, and I assumed, of course, that because I had been chosen from all other men, that I was different from all other men.
“I have since learned I was no better, only fated.” Sure.
He began reading:
“Recorded December 25, 1990, 2:30 A.M.
“We have returned to the place of His birth. It is time to once again see where it all happened and to fulfill my promise to finally record it all as I experienced it.
“March 26, 1982, House of the Virgin, Selçuk, Turkey.
“It was over, and I was crying.
“As I lay in the bed in the tiny, ancient two-room stone house, surrounded by candlelight and machines, I kept repeating over and over almost like a mantra that could soothe me, ‘Can I go home now? Please, may I go home now?’
“But the mantra didn’t soothe me, didn’t help me. In fact, I was becoming more terrified and agitated by the second. The worst—the physical part, the dangerous part, the giving birth part—was over, but still the other three couldn’t console me.
“I was clutching the sheet and looking around wildly for my mother, who wasn’t there. Who had never been there—not in this place.
“They all knew that if they didn’t do something, anything, to calm me down, I might hemorrhage—or even, God forbid, harm the baby somehow.
“They brought Him to me in an attempt to get me to breast-feed.
“I turned abruptly away from them and pressed myself against the wall, a shock for the others who’d planned it all out so well. I felt as though my baby was something monstrous and foreign to me.
“‘Get away from me!’ I cried. ‘Stay away from me! He’s not my baby, and you know it! He’s not my baby!’
“My will was simply no match for my body, and I flopped back down, defeated. My long red-brown hair was matted to my head from having been through such an ordeal.
“As I drifted away in my mind, I could see the nun retreat, cuddling the Baby, but she was clearly confused and, I later learned, more than a little frightened herself.
“‘Blessed One! Turn, look at your beautiful boy.…’ the nun implored me.
“The older of the two men, the priest, a forty-year-old renegade American Roman Catholic cleric, moved in closer. He then gently pushed the nun aside.
“‘Take the Baby to the trough. Try the bottle. Please,’ he directed her. ‘Try the bottle—it has the special formula,’ he said in a way that wasn’t so much a request as a command.
“The nun, a thirty-five-year-old woman, did as she was told, holding the Baby and retreating into the far corner of the cold room. He was her superior and therefore had to be obeyed.
“My future husband, who was also in the room, moved to the other side and seemed oblivious to the commotion around him.
“The young man chosen to be my betrothed was an armed mercenary. His address was whatever it needed to be anywhere he needed to be in the world and was subject to change without notice, as I would later learn.
“He was almost forgettable in his looks, as he was bred to be and as he had worked hard to become. But he was a dangerous creature, and that always lay right beneath the surface. Sandy brown cropped hair, six feet tall, hazel eyes that saw everything but showed nothing. Mostly he didn’t look like what he was: deadly.
“On the stone bench lay his stash of weapons—two semiautomatics, hundreds of rounds of ammo, and one rapid-fire machine gun.