CHAPTER 45
The church was cool and dim, its pale, uncluttered nave brightened only by the lights of a few votive candles in front of a statue and the gleam of brass on the altar. The ranked wooden pews were empty. There was no sound, no sign of anyone there.
Thomas inched forward, aware of the way his footsteps echoed. He felt the old mixture of awe and anxiety that churches had always produced in him, heightened this time by anticipation. He couldn’t begin to guess what the strange old priest would tell him. He inhaled, tasting the trace of incense and candle wax, and then began to walk down the side aisle toward the front. At the altar rail he paused, repressed an impulse to genuflect, and went through a door in the wall.
The door gave onto a passage leading to a tiny sacristy that was as empty as the church.
“Hello?” he called. “Monsignor Pietro?”
Nothing.
In the corner he saw and climbed a cramped staircase up to the priest’s equally cramped living quarters: a single room with a hot plate and a sink. The toilet was off the sacristy passageway. The bedroom had no central light and the desk lamp was meager indeed, so that the room was bathed in a dull copper glow.
He looked around the bare room.
“Father McKenzie, darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there . . .”
His eye fell on a book. Hymn of the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The name was familiar and the book was in English. One of Ed’s.
He flipped it open at random, found a passage marked by a vertical pencil line, and read.
Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in pursuit of truth.
 
Thomas turned to the frontispiece and read about the author: an early-twentieth-century French Jesuit.
Weird, he thought. And unsettling, that conviction, that strange, intense mysticism, particularly in service of so concrete a subject. Matter? What brand of Catholicism sung hymns to matter?
Thomas brooded, listening to the silence, his mind wandering back to what Pietro had said. He had known Satoh, apparently, though he had called him Tanaka, and his death seemed to have changed things. Why?
The cry that tore the silence—a long, trailing wail that snaked up the stairs from somewhere far away—snapped Thomas to his feet, carried him toward the stairs on a wave of horror and despair.