by Brian Hodge
"Pack a bag. You're on the next flight to Rome," he said, in that basso profundo voice that could soothe infants or rattle windows, depending on his mood. "And don't forget to bring your sea legs."
Chapter 5
Coming up with a secure way to transport the Masada Scroll halfway around the world...that was the easy part.
It wasn't as though Hellboy had never transported sensitive documents before. Several years ago, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he'd played the role of courier to get a crumbling fourteenth-century alchemical text out of East Germany and into the southwest of England. In the port city of Bristol, at the site of a mass burial pit--six centuries old but newly discovered--members of the British Paranormal Society had used the text to stop a virulent incursion of plague-spreading revenants.
If not for the Vatican's initial reluctance to fully admit what the situation was here, that an ancient manuscript was involved, he could have shown up prepared for the same kind of duty.
The custom-made case he had used before was right where he'd left it after the Bristol run: back at BPRD headquarters in Connecticut. Liz would be bringing it, but she was no errand girl. She was going to be every bit as important as the case in transporting the scroll safely.
"I'd rather be moving," Hellboy said. "I hate sitting here waiting to see if the same thing's gonna happen all over again."
Although, as Abe pointed out, while they may not have been on the move, they were hardly hunkering down in hiding. There was boldness, honor, and more than a little recklessness in that, wasn't there?
At the moment they were keeping a vigil at the very pinnacle of the Vatican, strolling around the railed parapet of the lantern tower that crowned the enormous dome of St. Peter's. It would prove to be either the cleverest of their limited options or go up in flames as a fool's gambit: They had the scroll up here with them, locked in a steel storage drawer, similar to a bank's safe deposit box, and resting on the floor of the tower. Nearby stood Bertrand, their ever-present Swiss Guard, doing a yeoman's job of trying not to look worried that he could be just feet away from an incendiary time bomb.
Not an ideal solution, but it would suffice for the hours it was taking Liz to cross the Atlantic, and it was born of need: no more hiding for the scroll. By now they had to assume that, with the confusion of the fire having died down, the scroll's would-be destroyers knew it had survived. Stashing it in the museum complex, or even in the hideaways and passages that honeycombed the old thick walls, could be an invitation to another inferno. No hiding place, however short-term, could be entirely safe, because you never knew who might be a spy.
Instead, they had chosen to hide it in plain sight--Abe's idea, a chess-player's stratagem. The first fire had been publicly explained as an explosion from improperly stored chemicals used in the cleaning and restoration of artifacts. A tragic accident, and easy enough to accept at face value. Conceivably, though, whoever had summoned the fires of Heaven, in defense of Church tradition, might feel bold enough to try it once more, so long as the fire was again confined inside the walls.
But would they go so far as to instigate the destruction of the top of St. Peter's Basilica? In front of Rome and the world?
For Hellboy and Abe, it was defense by bluff: They wouldn't dare.
Although once the scroll left this place, all bets were off. Maybe all restraint, too.
"You don't think she'll change her mind, do you?" Hellboy said.
"Liz?" Abe sounded incredulous that he would even ask. "Of course not. She's never left in the middle of anything before."
"But she does leave. That's the point." Standing at the railing, he tipped his chin, jutting and spotted with a patch of beard, at the city that sprawled below. At the vibrant streets and the red-tile roofs and the winding murky ribbon of the Tiber. "That's Rome down there. These people know how to live. Suppose she just decides to get lost in the crowd."
Again, he almost said, but didn't, because they both knew that if Liz walked, it wouldn't be the first time. Twenty-two years with the bureau--her entire adult life and adolescence, plus a big chunk of childhood too--and in that span, she had quit twelve times. On average, once every year and ten months. She always came back into the fold, and made the best of it once she had. Always committed, always competent. Yet she always seemed to come back not because she really wanted to, but because the world wasn't as welcoming as she'd hoped, or she didn't fit, or normality was either an illusion or just plain not all it was cracked up to be.
But one day it might be. It might be. After so many false starts, the restlessness inside could finally drive her in the right direction so that the pieces of her life's puzzle might one day click, and that would be it--no coming back.
Hellboy supposed he could conquer any fear but that one.
How could he presume to tell her she belonged in only one place?
"She'll be here," Abe said. "She wouldn't let either of us down."
Hellboy shrugged. "For all she knows, she's just delivering a souped-up briefcase. She could've changed her mind and sent somebody else."
"Ah," said Abe. "You didn't tell her about the rest?"
"That she'd be our secret weapon in case we need to fight fire with fire? I thought I'd cover that once she was here." He looked sideways at Abe. "Mistake?"
Abe thrust out his chin. " 'Oh, by the way--I may need you to flambe some angels, if they don't fry you first'? I think she might've appreciated an earlier heads-up than she'll be getting."
Hellboy scowled. "Been meaning to tell you. Of all you guys who do imitations of me? Yours is the worst."
Abe looked unfazed. With his features, it took a lot for him to look any other way. "Bad as it was, what about the rest?"
"I'll make it up to her, all right?"
And he couldn't have the opportunity to do so any too soon. Most times, a job was a job, and that was about it. Some bit of percolating weirdness needed a looking into by someone who understood the terrain better than most? He did it. And if, in the course of events, something rude needed squashing? He did that too. It kept life interesting, and left him feeling that he was earning his keep in a world that would otherwise have no place for him.
Most times, whatever came up, he rolled with it. A job took as long as it took, and he spared little thought for how long that might be. He had time, and reserves of energy--plenty of both.
But this one...this one was an affront on so many levels.
He had no illusions about where he was. Not even the most fawning apologist could deny that the Church's history had its share of dark, dark episodes. They were a small minority, to be sure, but there had lived popes who'd been among history's most wicked men. They'd raised armies, they'd waged wars, they'd robbed and cheated, they'd condemned the innocent for the sake of expediency and made allies of tyrants for the sake of power.
But not lately.
And through it all, faith had endured. Somewhere, out in those streets, there were people who in the name of the Church and its Christ were at this moment bringing food and clothing and comfort, hoping for no more than that they be accepted in the same loving spirit in which they were delivered.
Because the faith had endured. Look at them all down there, walking upon the stones of St. Peter's Square. Even on the most secular day, they couldn't all be tourists. Embraced by the great curving arms of Bernini's colonnade, the piazza was big enough to hold the population of a good-sized city, and even though there was nowhere near that this afternoon, it would fill again soon enough.
For the faith had endured. He respected that about this place above all, more than its longevity, and in spite of the terrible plots that had sometimes been hatched under its gilded ceilings. It gave strength, that faith, and if it wasn't the whole picture--which he knew from experiences both bitter and sweet--it was plenty big enough for those who needed it to make their way in a world that seemed to do everything it could to crush them. It kindled warmth here on the fragile side of the void.
How dare someone hide inside its walls, summoning down a fire that burned as deadly as any that Hell had to offer.
As they'd been scanning the sky, they'd been keeping an eye on things below, as well, Hellboy sweeping a pair of Carl Zeiss binoculars over the grounds, and especially the piazza of St. Peter's Square. When a familiar shape caught his eye, he slapped Abe on the shoulder and pointed, handed over the binoculars.
"Who's that look like down there to you?"
"Where?" said Abe. "There's a lot of there down there."
"This side and to the right of the obelisk," he said, referring to the ancient stone spire that had been brought over from Egypt when it was still freshly carved. "Firing up a cigarette."
Abe gave it a game try but shook his head. "Sorry. I'm still not finding..."
Hellboy took another peek. Maybe it was his imagination, but he could swear the man was staring straight up at the lantern tower.
"Well, I see somebody I'd like to have a talk with," he said, and gave the railing an experimental shove with his normal hand, to see how much weight it might hold.
"Hellboy, no," Abe said. "Don't do this..."
On the dangerous side of the railing, the great gray dome of St. Peter's swelled outward and sloped sharply down and away from them, like a waterfall of stone. At even intervals, it was braced by vaulted ribs that helped support the immense weight of Michelangelo's design, and centered between them, small portals let the light of day stream inside the cupola like rays from a benevolent Heaven.
He braced his hand on the railing and flexed his legs.
"No--we're supposed to be keeping a low profile," Abe tried.
Hellboy glanced behind them, past the twinned pairs of columns that held up the tower's roof, and gave a wave to their guard. Poor guy, standing there with his halberd and knowing there was nothing he could do.
"Sorry, Bertrand," Hellboy called out with a wave of his big right hand. "I'll put in a good word for you, tell them you did a great job."
With that, he shoved up and over, vaulting the railing in one fluid move, clearing the platform and landing astride the nearest rib. At first he took it like a playground sliding board, guided by the indentation of the shallow trough down the middle of the rib. But the slope quickly turned so sharp it was almost like a freefall, the air whistling up past his face and the back of his coat skimming along the stone beneath him, as the striated junctures of the dome's individual sections whizzed past in a blur.
He braced for the landing, touching down for a moment atop a small platform at the bottom of the rib and springing forward, in true freefall now as he hit first one elevated section of roof, then bounded onto the main flat roof over the basilica's long central nave, absorbing the shock of each landing with a flexing of his legs. Had to give it up for Baroque architecture. You could never do this with today's glass and steel towers.
He sprinted along the roof toward one end of the portico, its front edge lined with statues of Jesus and his disciples carrying crosses and swords. From here Hellboy launched out over the roof of Bernini's colonnade. One final bounce and touchdown later and he was standing on the stones of the piazza, ignoring the murmuring of onlookers and the rapid-fire click of camera shutters. Mostly he wished Abe could've been up there timing him with a stopwatch. He'd just put the world's express elevators to shame.
He crossed the rest of the distance at a leisurely jog until he reached the man in the smartly tailored black suit, who'd barely had time to smoke enough of his cigarette so that you'd notice.
"Monsignor," Hellboy said.
From beneath the wide brim of his hat, Burke, the sole American who had been at this morning's subterranean council, gave him a tight smile. "I've heard you have a knack for flamboyant entrances."
"Me?" Hellboy demurred. "Most of the time I creep around on cat feet."
"Really. Which I might even believe if cats' feet were"--with an arch glance downward--"cloven."
Hellboy still wasn't sure if he liked this guy. He just couldn't imagine Burke, with his cropped steel gray hair and ice blue eyes and chiseled skull, bringing comfort to people. Personal prejudice, probably, that priests should be these doughy guys with marshmallow hands and eyes that twinkled. He could imagine Burke boxing in his younger days, and even now running marathons, and above all, shrewdly holding his own at the conference table in a boardroom. But hearing confession, sending the person off motivated to go and sin no more? Restoring peace to an anxious deathbed? No. He couldn't picture it.
Still, Hellboy supposed he could forgive Burke all that. Like it or not, the Church needed men like this too. Mystics, on the whole, made lousy administrators.
"I heard you were up there on top of the world," Burke said. "And I'm glad you spotted me. Saves me the trouble of tracking you down. Although...I would've thought you'd be looking after the scroll now."
"It's in good hands."
"In transit?"
"Something like this, it's not like you can just take it to FedEx, now, is it?" Hellboy said. "I've done what I can for now. It'll be a few more hours before all the pieces are in place."
"Dare I ask how?" Burke and his tight smile again. "Speaking informally, of course."
Earlier, his colleagues had made it clear that they hadn't wanted to know much about how the scroll would be making the trek from the Vatican to Connecticut. Ignorance could be more than bliss. Sometimes there was security in it, too, and this was one of those occasions.
"By sea," Hellboy said, and left it at that. "But if you really thought about it, you probably could've figured that out for yourself."
"I suspected as much. What better protection against fire than all that water?" Burke took a long, smoldering pull on his cigarette. "You seemed in a hurry to reach me. Maybe you have something on your mind too?"
"Some unfinished business from this morning. I just didn't think I'd get very far pressing the matter down in the hidey-hole."
"That matter being...?"
"Whoever it is you guys suspect of calling down the attack dogs," Hellboy said. "Father Laurenti, wasn't he the one looked like he'd dug his suit out of the charity bin? He seemed set on keeping the information close to the vest, and everybody else seemed content enough to follow his lead."
"And you have a problem with that?"
"It felt like it was getting treated as a need-to-know item, except we had two different opinions on who might need to know. If I have people putting their lives on the line because of this conflict you've got brewing under the surface here, then I'd say I've got a need to know."
"So why come to me, if we presented a unified front earlier?"
"Because you seem like more of a pragmatist than the other five put together."
Burke's grin was looser now. "I believe if you wanted to, you wouldn't have to strain yourself at all to make that sound like an insult."
"I just have that kind of face."
"And you may have just come to the right pragmatist, too. As fate would have it, you and I are on the same wavelength. Do you have an hour or two to spare before you take off?"
Hellboy thought of Abe in the tower, babysitting the scroll and bluffing out the possibility of Armageddon, and Bertrand up there, babysitting them both. He hoped Abe was in a forgiving mood.
"Because if you do," Burke said, "there's something you need to see."
Chapter 6
They took a taxi--easily the most harrowing experience of this trip so far, careening along streets tight as clogged arteries, mere inches from brown brick walls, and engaging in swerving showdowns with candy-colored motorscooters whose riders, if not suicidal, gave a heart-stopping impression of it.
The ride ended in east Rome, in a neighborhood where the buildings started to thin out, a place of abandonment and obsolescence. As the light of day began to seep from the sky to leave behind a firmament of rose-stained clouds, Burke pointed out to their driver where he should stop. It was a rounded, ramshackle turret of a place, three floors tall, and l
ooked as though it might have begun life as some wealthy Renaissance scholar's idea of an observatory...and had then been left to deteriorate at some point in the past century or two.
Burke paid the driver for the fare, plus a bonus for him to return in forty-five minutes. They watched his taillights shoot down the street. Only when he was gone did Burke turn to a nearby building, half a block away and in marginally better repair, and lift his hand in a subtle greeting to someone unseen. It wasn't a simple wave, but rather some quick gesture that may have been an all-clear signal that he was in no trouble.
"We're being watched?" Hellboy asked.
"Not us so much as the osservatorio."
"By other priests?"
Burke gave him the tight smile. "How about we just call them believers."
Hellboy got the general drift. Over the centuries, even priests sometimes needed things done that required a harsher set of skills.
They paced up the walkway, past a small garden that had run riot, then died in a choked heap. Now the breeze rustled through brittle veins of dead ivy, and the husks of fallen leaves swirled at their feet.
Though bristling with splinters, the building's door, broadly curved at the top, still looked durable. The face-level slit, ringed with iron plating and sealed with a small door, seemed to be a later addition. Burke produced a key and let them inside.
It took a moment for Hellboy's eyes to adjust to the gloom, but when they did, what he could see of the place was what anyone might expect from the outside: peeling walls and unswept floors, old frescos cancerous with mildew. More rooms remained to be seen, but there was no reason to expect them to look any better. Near one wall was a hulking wooden staircase, twisting upward not in a smooth spiral, but in cruder, squared-off segments.
"Don't worry," said Burke. "It's sturdier than it looks."
They took it up past the second floor, where a glance around showed only more dirt and emptiness, then on to the third floor. It was brighter up here, the last of the day straining through tall windows, then Burke let in more light by turning an old iron crank. This forced a set of gears into groaning motion as they pulled toward opposite sides the overlapping series of panels that comprised the roof. These, at least, must have been scrupulously maintained over the years. When closed, they looked to fit together as snugly as the hull planks of a Viking long-ship.