A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  Hanrahan was wrong there. Gino Fosse found these strange depictions of martyrdoms fascinating. He had spent hours in the church of San Stefano Rotondo, not far from the Villa Celimontana, watching the workmen renovate the startling images on the walls there. These pictures spoke to him, saying something he could not quite understand. On the martyrs’ lips, as they endured their agonies, there was some cryptic eternal secret they could share across the centuries if only he knew the key.

  When they reached San Lorenzo in Lucina and fought their way through the lazy crowds of shoppers into the small church in the square, Hanrahan had stood him in front of Reni’s Crucifixion and asked what he thought. Fosse was indifferent. It seemed, he said, somewhat romanticized, unreal. A man would not die on the cross quite so prettily. Hanrahan had grinned with pleasure and pointed out the monument marking the grave of a French artist Fosse barely knew, Poussin. ‘Another romantic,’ Hanrahan declared. ‘You know Caravaggio?’

  ‘Of course,’ Fosse agreed. ‘He’s wonderful. He paints real people.’

  ‘Quite,’ Hanrahan continued. He kicked the Poussin monument. ‘This idiot derided him for his “partiality for ugliness and vulgarity”. By which he meant, of course, Caravaggio’s wilful attempt to portray humanity as it was, not as seen through a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. We mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking we’re more than we are, Gino. Caravaggio was a thug and a lunatic and he knew it too, just as well as he understood his genius.’

  He had agreed and Hanrahan had led them into the Fonseca chapel where the Bernini busts sat like frozen decapitated heads on their plinths. They then returned and spent a few minutes in silence on the hard seats in the nave.

  Finally, Gino Fosse asked the inevitable question. ‘What happened to Lorenzo?’

  ‘Dead, of course,’ Hanrahan said with a mock mournfulness.

  Fosse was in no mood for black jokes. He was mildly disturbed. He had been looking into a small side chapel which contained a strange, glinting object. An elderly man was on his knees in front of the iron railings which separated it from the nave. He seemed intent on the odd, metallic frame beyond the bars. Then something had moved there. A rat, he was sure of it. And, in the shadows, a half-visible figure too, dressed in a dark-red cardinal’s robe, looking much like Michael Denney. A man who may, in some way Gino Fosse could not quite envisage at that moment, be some kind of martyr too.

  ‘Of course he’s dead,’ he said. ‘But what happened?’

  Hanrahan stood up. Gino Fosse followed him to the bars of the side chapel, standing next to the praying man, his head hurting. There was no mistake now. A rat was moving underneath the altar, scampering in and out of the light. At least it appeared to be alone. The figure in red was gone and he knew it was simply some strange creation of his imagination.

  ‘When Lorenzo failed to find any gold the authorities were very cross. All the normal punishments seemed somehow inapposite for a crime of this nature. So he was sentenced to be roasted to death over a slow fire while strapped to an iron grille so that he was, very gradually, cooked.’

  Fosse watched the shining eyes of the rat gleam from the shadows.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard,’ Hanrahan said. ‘Think of Tertullian. The blood of the martyrs … Lorenzo was among the bravest, which is why he’s named in the canon of the mass. Several senators converted on the basis of his courage alone, believing that God must have spared him the true agony of his martyrdom, since he was in good humour throughout the entire ordeal. The poet Prudentius later wrote that he laughed and joked for the duration, telling his torturers at one point, “I’m done on that side; turn me over, and eat.”’

  The kneeling man rose and walked away, cursing under his breath.

  ‘The grille is preserved,’ Hanrahan said with a sudden dramatic gesture. ‘There. You may admire it.’

  He followed the direction of the Irishman’s arm and saw the cruel iron structure in its enclosure, finally realizing what it was.

  Gino Fosse had checked out this story afterwards. Hanrahan was being truthful, after a fashion. The gridiron was, some believed, a later invention. Prudentius was not born until eighty years after the event. In all probability, Lorenzo had been beheaded like most of those who figured in the early, bloody history of the Church. Perhaps all the martyr stories he had heard in Rome – Bartholomew carrying his skin, Lucy with her eyes on a plate, Sebastian shot full of arrows – were inventions too. There was no way of knowing and never would be; no archaeologist had dug up the evidence, as they had in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Everything was conjecture, dependent on faith; without it Lorenzo became simply a character in a fairy story, a player in a fourth-century tale from Grimm designed to cow the gullible into submission.

  Then Brendan Hanrahan leaned over and whispered in his ear, the close, hoarse whisper of a man in the confessional. The words burned in his head. The rat scuttered across the floor in front of the altar once more. In his mind’s eye – and he knew this could not be real – Cardinal Michael Denney really did lie on the rack now, over a slow flame, like that of some country barbecue, grinning at them both and laughing through a dead mouth, asking, ‘Am I done yet? Are any of us done yet? Will she be here soon? Is she getting hungry too?’

  It had occurred to him that there were so many stories concerning instant conversions, from Paul onwards. The Church revelled in them. Yet there must be some counter-balance to these: events, sights, sounds, perhaps even an odour that destroyed a lifetime’s faith in an instant. How many Catholics walked into Belsen and walked out atheists? How many, on a more mundane level, felt some darkness enter their soul while walking down the street, put one foot in front of the other and found their previously held beliefs were gone for ever? That they had lost twice over, spending half their life in ignorance and the rest in the solitary despair of knowing there was no salvation and never had been?

  He looked again. There was no cardinal roasting slowly on the rack. Only the rat, running on the iron bars, bright eyes glittering back at him in the darkness.

  A rat could steal away the last few remnants of your faith, snatch it from your mouth, then shred it to pieces with its sharp, sharp teeth, slowly, silently in some dark, dusty corner away from the sight of man. It was always the small things, the unexpected things, which would kill you.

  Recollecting all this with a grim precision Gino Fosse shook his head, wishing the memories would disappear for ever. They clouded his judgement. They stole from him his determination. There was no time for thinking, only action. He’d killed two cops, something he’d never envisaged when this began. There would be repercussions. This was, he thought, the precursor to the end. Events were circling around him like crows eyeing a coming meal. Within the next twenty-four hours everything could surely be accomplished. It was a welcoming thought. He was growing tired of the game. He was impatient for the inevitable resolution.

  How quickly that happened depended on what he did next. Denney had proved himself a stubborn man, unwilling to run, to let himself be exposed to risk, in the face of the most severe provocation. There had to be a final exertion, a turn in the savagery none of them expected.

  Gino Fosse had rubbed off the white make-up, as much as he could. He wore his old clothes again: jeans and a black T-shirt. He was sweating like a pig. The night was unbearably close. The city felt like an oven. He felt conspicuous, as if the darkness was full of eyes, glittering rodent eyes, greedy human ones, glancing feverishly in his direction. He stuck his head outside the van window. The piazza was empty. A few lone figures wandered down the Corso, past the shuttered shops and the flashing neon signs in the windows.

  He picked up the sack of keys he had stolen six days before from the administration office in the Vatican when he called to pick up the rest of his belongings. He sorted through them until he found the set marked for the church. He had reversed the van so that the rear door was tight against the locked entrance into the building. No one would see Arturo Valena being dra
gged inside. Behind those heavy wooden doors, in this deserted part of the city, no one would hear what then ensued.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  They stood in the corridor on the landing, unable to find the words. It was quiet downstairs now. The house was silent, filled with some strange happiness, an oasis of sanity hidden from the sight of the hard, bleak world beyond the gates. Sara thought of the other times; how she had allowed herself to be used, how her own desires were always secondary to theirs.

  Then, gingerly, she walked up to him and looked into his eyes. Was there fear in them? Perhaps, but not doubt. He had stepped beyond its reach. Something had happened in the old farm that night, moving them all: Bea, in her search for love before it disappeared, Marco in his quest for some meaning in this fast-diminishing period of life which had been left to him. She, too, had been touched by their closeness, their frank questions and answers. This was so unlike the world she had inhabited before. Here no one asked for anything except her presence and understanding. This small, enclosed universe – and Nic Costa – now existed for her satisfaction, to do with as she wished.

  Sara Farnese reached out, touched his hair, waiting, mouth tentatively open, for his kiss. He hesitated. She brought her lips up to his, felt his response, letting her tongue wander into his mouth, touch the wetness there, feeling the hard outline of his teeth. His hand came behind her back, strong, determined, and moved below to her thighs, gripping them. In a single powerful movement he lifted her from the ground. Her legs wound around his waist. She tore at his hair, kissed him hard and deep.

  Then he carried her purposefully into the bedroom, let her legs slip to the floor and slowly, nervously, with no small wonder, they undressed each other, coming to stand naked by the bed, breathless, full of anticipation.

  Again he hesitated.

  ‘Nic,’ she whispered.

  His dark eyes tried to look inside her, beyond the surface he scarcely knew. ‘And tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow I plant seeds for your father,’ she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  She looked at the bathroom and the small marble shower in the corner.

  ‘Here,’ she said, taking him by the hand.

  He followed her into the cubicle. She turned on the water, letting it run down on their heads, soaking their hair, stone cold at first, then lukewarm.

  He laughed.

  She took the liquid and began working it into his soft white skin. His head came down to her neck. His lips closed gently on a nipple. Her face arched upwards, teeth clenched, charged by a new and sudden determination in his grip. She felt his hardness, reached down, let her fingers run up and down its length and leaned back against the cold wet tiles, opening her legs, guiding him.

  For a minute, no more, he entered her, making a few measured strokes, shallow at first, then gradually deeper until she clung to him, hand tight in the back of his head, legs wrapped around his back.

  She sighed, anguished, as he withdrew. Nic led her to the bed, watched as she spread herself across the white coverlet, beckoning. He was thinking about where to begin, what to consume first. His head went down, his teeth suckled briefly at her breasts and moved on to probe her navel. Her breath caught and shortened to brief snatches. This was new to her. In the past she had always been the one to serve, who sought to deliver satisfaction. Nic was determined to deliver that gift to her. His tongue licked lower, pressed beyond her hair, found her widening, warm crevice, entered fully, writhing inside with a powerful, muscular intent. She held his scalp, forced him down further into her, arching her back, wishing she could open herself so wide he might be consumed in the rich fleshy dampness of her sex. Then, with a certain, relentless rhythm, he began to work upon the smallest, sweetest part of her, raising its tumescence until her head had lost all reasoning, her mind knew nothing but the fiery delight he brought. And at this last gasping moment he revealed another secret too: his little finger sought another entry, pressed insistently from a second direction so that these secret, private doors to her ecstasy became a single coursing torrent of wild and shapeless pleasure.

  When her shrieks gave way to panting he paused, rising from the bed to peer at the pale, lovely body on the sheets, as surprised by himself as he was by her. She laughed, wiped away the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, then cupped his face with her hands. His fingers moved across her cheek. She sucked greedily on the tips, tasting herself on the skin and the nails. He moved onto her. She lifted her legs, placed her feet around his back, gripping him, tugging him, demanding more, taking him into her with anxious fingers.

  He hesitated again, waiting in front of the unfolding entrance like an uninvited guest unsure of his welcome. Then she held him more tightly and the game ended. In the small bedroom of the farmhouse off the Appian Way, where Nic Costa turned from man to boy, where his personality was forged, through happiness and pain, the oldest ceremony of all was enacted with joy, enacted again and again until a sated exhaustion took them into a sleep undisturbed by dreams, untainted by the memory of a fallen world beyond the open window and the vine-twisted veranda.

  FORTY-NINE

  Arturo Valena stumbled out of the back of the van, grateful to leave the dogs behind. He sniffed the petrol-stained breeze from the Corso hopefully, then screeched in terror and pain as Fosse fetched him a hard blow on the side of the head with the butt of the gun.

  That was a mistake. Fosse was shocked by his carelessness. He’d half hoped the fat man would fall to the floor unconscious, making what came next easier. It was stupid. He should have realized this before the attempt. Valena was too heavy to be manhandled around a quiet piazza just a few yards from a street that still had its stragglers, even after midnight.

  Fosse watched the fat man reeling in pain, wondering whether to run perhaps, and forced himself to think. Then he hit him once again, in the same place on the head but with a little less force, waved the gun in his face and hissed at him to go to the church railings. He had the keys in the small shoulder bag he’d brought with him from the van. He knew the place: where the light switches were. And where to find the instruments for the rest of the artistry.

  Valena complied, shambling the few metres to the entrance. Fosse fumbled at the lock, opened the gate, and pushed the terrified man through into the gloom of the portico. In the space of a minute he had unlocked the door to the church, sent Valena in and set the lights to low.

  They stood in the nave, Fosse unable to detach his attention from the small chapel on the right which Brendan Hanrahan had revealed to him. Somewhere beyond the low, glittering frame of the iron grille a tiny voice squeaked. Fosse wished he could see them, not just hear their scuttering in the dark corners: tiny feet running, going nowhere, just like him. In his mind’s eye he could imagine their yellow rodent teeth, ready to snatch away his soul the moment he faltered. He could picture their bright eyes glittering, the colour of polished jet. In those black pupils stood another universe, a black one that went on for ever, in time, in every direction, an endless place that could swallow up an entire world and still leave space for millions more.

  Valena was trembling, holding himself by a pew. His face was a waxy yellow under the lights and there was an unmistakable flicker of hope there. His abductor had hesitated. Something had spooked him. Perhaps there was a chance.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, his voice husky with pain. ‘Money?’

  ‘Just you,’ Fosse said flatly.

  Valena’s piggy eyes glistened, damp and pathetic. ‘I never did anything to you. I never hurt anyone.’

  ‘It’s the not doing that counts,’ Fosse said. ‘You can go to Hell just as easily for your omissions as your deeds. Didn’t they tell you that? Didn’t you even begin to suspect?’

  Valena fell to his knees, put his hands together. ‘I’m just a stupid old man,’ he pleaded. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘Your life.’

  ‘Please …’ His voice rose with that, turning almost into a squeal. It sou
nded like a rat. It sounded like the end of everything.

  ‘Don’t pray to me. Pray to God. And pray for yourself.’

  The fat man sobbed. His hands went more tightly together. He closed his eyes. His lips moved, fleshy, blubbery lips, a mouth that had once caressed Sara Farnese. Gino Fosse knew that. He’d been the driver that night. He’d taken the pictures. It was one more stain to erase, one more station of grief along the way.

  He reached into the shoulder bag and took out the pack he’d stolen from the hospital. The hypodermic was ready. The liquid sat in the barrel. He walked behind the praying Valena and stabbed him hard in the upper arm. The fat man got up, screeching.

  ‘What are you fucking doing?’ His eyes were burning black coals, full of hatred and pain. ‘For the love of God …’

  ‘Be grateful,’ Fosse said. ‘Hope it lasts.’

  They danced slowly around each other for a while. He wasn’t letting the fat man make for the door. Eventually Valena’s eyes started to turn dull.

  ‘What?’ He swayed once. Then his pupils rose, went upwards into his head. His large frame collapsed like a building that had suddenly lost its foundation. Gino Fosse looked at the pile of humanity that lay on the floor, no more than ten metres from Lorenzo’s altar.

  The drug was the easiest option. There was much preparation to be done to achieve the required effect. This would be the last before the final deed. He knew that somehow.

  He bent down over the unconscious Valena and began to tug at his clothing. Five minutes later the TV man was naked on the tiles of the church. He’d pissed himself at some stage. Fosse was disgusted but not surprised. Ordinary men feared death, failing to understand the need for the transformation. They lacked the sense and the courage to greet it smiling, welcoming its inevitable embrace.

  He turned Valena to face the small altar in the chapel. With no small amount of effort he dragged the iron grille into the nave. It was cold and shiny to the touch, polished for centuries, a perfect instrument alive with its past. Perhaps the story of Lorenzo’s death was apocryphal. To Gino Fosse it seemed irrelevant. So many people had come to believe in it that this elaborate construction of iron, with its curlicues and its flamboyant grating, became what they imagined: the gateway to Paradise, the ultimate redemption. Even Arturo Valena deserved that.