by Henning Koch
“Michael and Ariel. They’ve gone,” Paolo announced breathlessly at the other end of the line. “I’ve searched their cell more times than I can count, I’ve turned over the straw, I’ve…”
“What do you mean they’ve gone? Where have they gone?”
“Basically they’ve dematerialized,” said Paolo. “We know he’s done it before, Ariel told us. He spontaneously emptied himself and the maggots pulled his skin out of a tiny hole. At the psychiatric ward.”
“What about her?”
“Well, it looks like Houdini found his apprentice.”
“You twat!” cried Giacomo and hung up.
34.
In spite of all the disasters that day, Giacomo’s greatest regret was that he never had time to eat his custard roly-poly when it was ripe and ready. Many hours later he returned to it and recognized that its edges had dried and its custard coagulated like spoilt milk. A thing must always be enjoyed at the perfect moment. Delay imposed a sort of moral inversion on things: what was once considered a general good would become an evil.
Colonization, slavery, industrial development had all at times been considered by various fools and villains to be aspects of progress. Yet, when compared with these monstrous historical facts, Giacomo felt there could never be a compelling argument against a custard roly-poly.
The only argument was that it must be enjoyed.
And that was why he had a strong feeling of regret and sadness as he reached out and pressed the panic button. He knew that his peace was over. Maggot employees all over Rome would spring into immediate action. Intrusive telephones would start ringing everywhere, in the homes of off-duty personnel sitting quietly enjoying a syringe of heroin, or in bedrooms where they lay sleeping, or kitchens, where friends teemed around tables burgeoning with steaming plates. Giacomo licked his lips, filled with the sadness of abstention. What would they be eating? Maybe some grilled St. Peter’s fish with olive oil and grated horseradish, or barbecued pig’s trotters and bottles of home-distilled grappa? How lovely and what a terrible waste. The feasting would be interrupted everywhere as a great number of irritated individuals pulled on their work clothes again and hurriedly set off.
Within an hour at most, hundreds of security men were swarming all over the depots, warehouses, blast-proof air locks, caverns, catacombs, bone-houses and lift shafts.
Michael and Ariel were gone without a trace.
The presence of two rogue maggots in the high security areas of the catacombs was unprecedented and considered highly dangerous.
Giacomo set up his operational HQ in the da Vinci Chambers—he even had his desk brought down from his office on the surface—complete with newly installed hotlines and TV monitors and CAD drawings of the one hundred and twenty-eight known levels of the Gnostic catacombs.
But, as he observed to Paolo, the place was just too enormous to search efficiently—over a mile and a half deep in places. It was even possible that the catacombs merged with natural cave systems that went deeper still to places that could only be plumbed by professional cavers.
At the end of that first day, Giacomo was debriefed by the head of security who had nothing much to say except that no one had been found and nothing discovered. The fugitives had disappeared. That word again.
Paolo had had the foresight to have a cooker installed, and an extractor fan. He was quietly boiling up some pasta in the background, too canny to open his mouth unless spoken to.
Giacomo let slip a long racking sigh and said, quietly. “Oh dear.”
Paolo put down his wooden spoon and turned round. “Have they not found anything? A cigarette end? A splash of urine?”
“We’re not looking for their DNA! This is not a police investigation!” snapped Giacomo. “No, we have nothing on them. We can’t even say how big this place is—for all we know there’s an enormous cave at the bottom with a dragon sleeping in it.”
“Of course, all mysteries are bottomless,” Paolo agreed with a sigh. “Consider this, my old friend: all this time we’ve been taking the living out of circulation and storing the best of them down here. But what if our day never comes? What if we never inherit our bright new world? If we end up as dust instead, buried under millions of tons of rubble?”
“As long as they don’t get out of the Catacombs we’ll be fine,” said Giacomo. “I’ve posted guards at all the exits.” He rubbed his face. “I just wish I knew why they’ve done this. I don’t trust them; they’re up to something and it’s worrying me, I can feel an itch, Paolo, right here.” He punched his chest.
“You don’t think they’d talk to journalists, do you?”
“No, no,” cried Giacomo. “Just concentrate on your pasta, Paolo. You don’t understand. They don’t need us; they don’t want us. They can find themselves a farm to live on, grow their damned vegetables, breed their own maggots, and live without us… also without God. It sets a terrible precedent and it damages our plans. Everyone will know they made fools of us; people will laugh at us.”
Paolo nodded soberly, not quite managing to suppress a satisfied grin as he took out his pièce de resistance from the fridge, a tub of Bolognese sauce that in his view rivaled anything available in Rome’s best restaurants.
Giacomo was still on the rack of his worst imaginings. “They could also stir up a lot of trouble at the Vatican. They could talk to the Liaison Officer. And he’d have a good excuse to say we were incompetent. They could close us down; Lord knows we have enough enemies.”
Paolo placed a bowl of spaghetti in front of Giacomo with a glass of sumptuous Barolo. Then he watched as Giacomo’s expression of anguish slowly melted into a transported smile.
“Bless the bread,” said Giacomo with a grateful nod, then, after a slurp, added, “and the wine.”
The two friends ate in silence, while both thinking to themselves that if all failed, if they were hunted out of Rome like fugitives, then at least they would spend their lives munching their way through all the regions of Italy.
Their bliss was short-lived. Soon there was a commotion outside as a group of guards delivered Cardinal O’Hara—in handcuffs. He’d spent the last few hours being jostled from one cave to another by stressed-out security personnel, unsure in the general pandemonium about what to do with him.
“Leave him there,” said Giacomo, who was now more or less restored. He pointed to an uncomfortable plastic chair in the corner, into which O’Hara was unceremoniously shoved.
For the next few hours, Giacomo and Paolo dealt with a stream of visitors—security personnel, geologists, Vatican officials.
Giacomo stood at his desk like some field marshal—or better still, Winston Churchill—poring over maps, pointing, giving orders, and occasionally downing a shot of Armagnac or hurriedly puffing on his cigar.
O’Hara envied him his power, his freedom to express himself; above all, his utter disregard for notions such as sin.
When all the briefings were over and done with, Giacomo turned to O’Hara and realized that his malingering presence had added a further note of sourness to the night—his constant chuckling from the corner.
Giacomo turned to a guard. “Would you be kind enough to remove this sack of shit, take him downstairs, and keep him under arrest? He’s not to go anywhere until further notice.” He looked at O’Hara. “I’m seriously considering letting you expire… keeping you out of our vaults so you can enjoy your precious mortality.”
As O’Hara was brusquely removed from the room, he threw Giacomo a final lingering gaze, and thought to himself, “If there’s any way I can give this man a painful death, I will.”
This venal thought was a great comfort to him.
35.
When Michael and Ariel reached the ancient catacombs deep under the north transept of St. Peter’s, they found no modern technology or forklift trucks, only dank, dripping passages and compacted silence, in a world where nothing ever moved. The catacombs were so vast that at times one wondered if they had even been made by
humans. Yet it seemed safe to assume they had, for there were carvings everywhere, on every lintel and passage, with names and dates in Romanic numerals and occasionally birds, trees, or fish.
The windings of the various chambers were mostly by a sort of design, not intestinal in their shape but logical.
The first day they just wandered without purpose, descending another level whenever they chanced on cramped stairs winding down like a screw thread.
“Lucky we’re not claustrophobic,” said Ariel. “We’d scream the place down.”
“I am claustrophobic,” said Michael. “Every step I take I’m fighting panic.”
Occasionally they were disturbed by search parties with powerful torches. Whenever they saw or heard anything, they stepped into the nearest side passage, of which there were hundreds, each immediately bifurcating, and then bifurcating again.
If by any chance their pursuers got too close, it was easy to clamber behind a stone sarcophagus and lie very still until they had passed. There were sepulchral niches cut into the rock on either side up to ceiling, and nicely proportioned spaces between the wall and the sarcophagi for hiding or getting a bit of sleep.
“There’s nothing to bloody do down here, is there?” Ariel said after a few days of traipsing about. “Do we actually know why we’re here? Otherwise we could end up walking around for years. And if we ever have the crazy notion of trying to get out of here, we’ll meet plenty of helpful people at the top who’d like nothing more than to stuff our throats with embalming cloth.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted? To sleep?”
She looked at him. He’d grown so sharp and grim; his comments often hit their mark with an edge of cruelty. She swallowed her guilt, knowing that she had made him what he was.
“You know, if we really want to leave this place we can’t head down, can we?” she said. “Are you sure you’re trying to escape, Michael? Are you sure you’re not just playing games with your friends, the graybeards?”
Michael trudged on, considering her question, and then answered: “I’m running because they’re puffed-up frauds; I’m sick of their pomposity. They mystify the maggot and keep it secret; they use its power to make themselves stronger. They tell themselves they’re the custodians of our future, Ariel, but they’re only saving their own skins.”
“You sound a bit like them. Maybe you should also grow a beard? I’m sure it’ll turn gray if you wait long enough.”
“I might have to. I don’t have a razor.”
Their conversation drifted like this, sometimes argumentative, often consoling, but always aimless. They kept moving for the sake of moving, never knowing where they were heading.
On the third day the passages broadened and they reached an ultramodern silo where the Sacred Tomb of Jesus was housed in a lead-lined cavern beyond yet another pair of blastproof steel doors.
The place was absolutely deserted.
They stood, a little awed, looking up at the doors, which were as tall as a three-story building.
“I’ve got news for you,” said Ariel. “Hanging round caves for no particular reason… isn’t my thing.”
“We should go inside at least and have a look.”
Ariel stared dubiously at the steel doors. “I’m not sure I want to. Something tells me once you go in there you’re there for keeps.” Despising herself even as she spoke, she went on: “I’m lost. I don’t know what I want anymore. I don’t even know if I should stand or sit. I miss fruit and sunlight and water.”
Michael nodded at a familiar contraption fixed into the wall, an adjustable double-prong at the top and a retractable hose below. “At least we can top ourselves up when we need to.” He wandered over to the machine, and stood there fingering the controls, while he thought back on the bullshit Mama Maggot had fed him when she emptied him in Sardinia. All that stuff about… what was it she’d called it?—the passpartout—and then the oath of loyalty she had made him swear.
Why did people with power always have to abuse it?
He tested the hose by touching the trigger. A high-pressure burst of wriggling maggots sprayed across the floor.
“Michael, leave that thing and come here.”
She put her arms round him, kissed him and said, “When I am close to you I almost feel human. At least that’s something I can be happy about.”
“I’d say everything is going a bit too well,” said Michael. “Maybe they actually emptied us and we’re hanging up to dry and this is all a coffin dream? If it is, then I’m quite happy being dead.”
36.
Giacomo woke up at six-thirty and made sure he was well tanked up on coffee, raisin rolls, Manchego cheese, and a half-bottle of Armagnac by the time his team of advisers turned up, showered and rosy-cheeked in their pressed suits.
One of the first things Giacomo did when he assumed his position as Grand Master of the Maggot Church was to have a group of top bankers and scientists maggotized and co-opted. He never bothered to learn their names; he didn’t want excessive contact with seculars. They bored him, for one thing, and then of course they didn’t qualify for storage and eternal life—which inevitably meant any friendship would have limited duration.
His chief statistician was a ferocious creature; he knew her simply as Chase, because that was the institution for which she had once worked. His financial analyst, a bit of a pompous dullard from South Kensington, went by the name of Barings. Then there was a smiling, voluptuous biologist, Smithsonian, who in another life would probably have had many happy children. Lastly, an acne-scarred information technology expert from New York—Warburg.
Giacomo watched them settling into their chairs, and as usual he marveled at their apparent ability to find pleasure in this whole ethos of Don’t fuck with us; we’re here to do business and we know what we’re talking about: their salmon-striped cashmere suits, thousand-dollar handbags, polka-dot silk ties, expensive splashes of aftershave or perfume, the hiss of tights as legs were crossed, then those shoes, polished and sharp-heeled, lurking under the table like malevolent insects. Warburg, on the other hand, affected a sort of disheveled slacker appearance, always glum, always arrayed in a baggy tracksuit, long hair shedding a light rain of dandruff, a diamond stud in his left earlobe.
Giacomo frowned: Oh, blast it, it was just a lot of ego-posturing, the whole thing. The trouble was he needed them.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve called you in this morning because we must analyze the state of play. As you know we’re having a problem with mortality; we’re talking here about significant people—bishops, cardinals, proper religious people—dying without any prospect of ever coming back. It’s never happened before.”
“Could I ask…ah…you, whoever you are,” he said awkwardly, glancing at Chase, “to give us a rundown of the situation.”
“Certainly,” said Chase with a repressed frown: “Guys, can I have the projector?” She stood up and walked up to the screen, showing a world map with all the countries color-coded according to their “maggot saturation.”
Using her electronic pointer she clicked first on Beijing. “What we have is a statistical problem that’s pretty damn complex, kind of interesting too…”
“Really?” scowled Giacomo. “What’s so interesting about it?”
“Well, let’s take an example. At current maggot levels available to the Beijing market it’s going to take like two hundred and sixty-three years to neutralize the population.”
“That’s absurd,” said Giacomo. “I’ve got ten or twenty years at most.”
“Right,” said Chase. “The problem we have, sir, is if we move more maggot product into the region we’re looking at significantly higher maggot die-off levels. Even if we ram Beijing with five times more maggot, the projected timeframe only improves by…” Her face froze as her brain crunched into the equation: “…just short of a century.”
“That’s absurd!” roared Giacomo.
“Anyway, we can’t move that much maggot into Chi
na, sir. There’s a political issue. The Chinese secret service is onto us, and according to our information, they’re starting up a maggot program of their own.”
“The Americans are doing the same, and the European Union, too. The technology is very easy,” Smithsonian cut in, with a lovely grin. “Any imbecile can breed them. All they need is oxygen and sugar. Let’s just hope North Korea doesn’t get hold of them.”
There was a thunderous silence.
Chase continued. “The problem is the die-off factor. If we tried to blitz Beijing with a really massive program, say a tenfold increase, the maggots would actually die off before we got them there.”
“What we’ve got here is a sort of entropy,” Warburg whined. “If we could figure out the problem, we might be able to recalibrate the program and stabilize our targets. Or even modify the maggots… change their hard-wiring.”
“But then we’d have to get into genetic engineering,” Smithsonian sighed, with a look at Giacomo. “What does the Church feel about that?”
“I really couldn’t give a fuck,” said Giacomo irascibly. “I’m faced with a classic Patton-Montgomery conflict of interest.” He stood up, grasping his cigar and bottle of Armagnac. “At the end of the Second World War, Churchill wanted to use Montgomery’s armored brigades to punch aggressively through the lines of German resistance and race for Berlin. But the Americans insisted on Patton’s lines advancing very slowly, taking out all the resistance as they went. And this is why we lost Eastern Europe to the Russians.” He stopped, and swigged his Armagnac. “Just in case any of you have any doubts about where I stand, I want you to know I’m more of a Montgomery man, myself. That means I want the populations of Beijing, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Moscow, and New Delhi punched out within ten years… or I’ll decommission you all… and I won’t put you in coffins. I’ll throw you in the fire.”
He sat down.
Barings had been very quiet up until now. “Sir, what possible advantage would you gain by having us liquidated?” he said in a muted, gentlemanly tone. “Don’t you see? This thing is quite out of our hands: the maggots are a force in their own right. To be frank with you, sir, we are doing our utmost. We have no choice but go along with…”