by Tom Fox
But how I wish it would all slow down, even for just a moment. Just long enough for the world to be set right.
The tourist waves came in undulating cycles. Their movements at first had seemed just as random as the beetles now imaged in Angelina’s mind, just as unpredictable, and only after a season of careful observation did it become clear that there was a pattern to their frenetic behaviour. Apparently aimless bouncing from fountain to church to corners of particular squares concealed a widespread, consistently focused desire: to stand in just the right position before just the right landmarks, to take a selfie – the absurdity of the word! – that would make tourists X, Y and Z look precisely like tourists A, B and C, and every other gawper who’d ever bought summer tickets to the Italian Mecca.
Beetles. Maybe they’re lemmings?
Shit.
She knew she had to foster a different mindset. It’s a necessity, at this point in my life. She ruminated, not without a hint of bitterness, on her reality. There’s no other way.
She drew her white leatherette handbag more squarely on to her lap, the knock-off gold of the cheap Versace Aurora clasp glimmering in the Italian sunlight and reflecting its rays into her brick-red hair. At the same time, she straightened herself to a less deflated posture at the metal coffee table. Beyond, framed into cramped place by surrounding buildings that had gone up over the centuries but no less impressive for it, the round hulk of the Pantheon marked the periphery of her present urban landscape.
For a woman whose livelihood came from the insatiable appetites of those wide-eyed visitors, at least a thousand of whom were currently milling about just beyond her table, filtering in great queues between the columns of the ancient temple to all the gods of Rome, now dedicated to the martyrs of the Christians, their constant presence was tantamount to job security. No tourists, no tours. And for a tour guide, no tours meant no cash, which meant no ability to buy overpriced espresso and sit at an outdoor café lamenting that she hadn’t found a better lot in life.
But it wasn’t easy to accept a reality that went against everything in her bones. Angelina Calla had brought herself up to be a scholar. She’d trained her mind, surrounded herself with wisdom and antiquity and history, certain since her afternoons as a small girl wandering through the cultural history museum in Lanciano that one day she would call those kinds of surroundings her own. Dedicating herself to the study of Classical Akkadian at university – a language tied to a culture that had flourished in Babylon and Mesopotamia almost five millennia before she had been born, long predating the Christians – Angelina had set herself on the knife-edge of a scholarly field undertaken by very few. The language itself had appealed to her linguistic interests: its characteristically angular, rune-like appearance had been one of the features that had attracted her to it when, as a teenage girl, she’d chanced upon a copy of Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts and found herself entranced in the stories of Gilgamesh’s deluge and the Enuma Elish, of the goddess Astarte and the Code of Hammurabi, all of which had opened up to her in the splendour of ancient wonder and fantasy. Other people had religion and revelled in the myths of Abraham and Noah, but Angelina – conscientious humanist and, by association, convinced atheist – had never scraped after such fables or the faiths that went with them. She had ancient Babylon, the spiritual rush of human history without the burden of religious ideology, and that was more than enough for her.
By the time she’d finished her masters degree in Akkadian language and culture, Angelina was one of only a few people in the world who could consider themselves genuinely proficient in the long-dead script, and her PhD had led her into even narrower circles of expertise. It had been more than simply her academic field or the aim of her future career. It was her passion.
In the end, it had amounted to little else. A hoped-for career had been forcibly relegated to a hobby, Angelina’s dreams of academic loftiness shattered by a scholarly world that just didn’t seem to want her. A long string of unsuccessful job applications and discouraging interviews had left her to take whatever employment she could find – currently, as the most overqualified tour guide in Rome.
‘Is that the place where Caesar got his water?’ Angelina dragged a bent wooden stirrer through her coffee as her general malaise coalesced into concrete memories of the two tours she’d given that morning – stock-in-trade hour-long walks through ‘The Rome of Ancient History’ that were the staple nourishment of her present existence. The bizarre question had come from a particularly inquisitive member of her second group, just before lunch, as the woman had posed in a floral muumuu for a stream of photographs her trigger-happy husband never stopped taking. She’d asked it while pointing to a marble fountain with a massive depiction of the Graeco-Roman god Triton at its centre, whose date of construction, ‘AD 1643’, was clearly carved into its central spire.
‘No, my dear. Close, and a very good guess, but not quite.’ The reply that came out of Angelina’s mildly chapped lips had been gentle, friendly and understanding – characteristics that had come with practice. ‘This is the Fontana del Tritone, and came slightly later than that, as a gift to Pope Urban VIII by one of our most famous Renaissance sculptors and architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also designed much of St Peter’s Square. Though Julius Caesar did live in this part of the city.’ Twenty centuries before. She’d smiled, which had taken tremendous effort.
The tourist had nodded knowingly, as if this had been what she’d suspected all along. A plastic sun visor protruding from her forehead like a duck’s bill cast a purple glow over her features, through which her expression suggested that it was sheer politeness by which she condescended to be corrected by a tour guide. Angelina could see the computation of her tip decreasing in the other woman’s sour expression.
This was a common phenomenon, to which Angelina had grown accustomed over the past thirteen months of this strange but necessary employment. The average tourist came to Rome ‘knowing’ only two things about the ancient city: that Julius Caesar lived and died here, and that gladiators – who in their minds all spoke with dispassionate, monotone Australian accents and looked unsurprisingly like Russell Crowe – fought their way through the streets on a more or less daily basis. Every spot such people passed was assumed to be the locus of one or the other of these events, until forcibly persuaded otherwise; and then, the corrections were only grudgingly received.
That had been her morning. Just like yesterday. And the day before. Just like tomorrow.
And so there was a sigh, and another espresso, and another interior lamentation, and Angelina’s day proceeded like all the rest.
The weight of her thoughts was almost enough to keep Angelina distracted from the strange movements of the crowds around her. Thoughts can be like an anchor, the more discouraging ones forged of a heavy iron that roots us in our own spot in the sea, oblivious to the swells of the world around us, stuck and immobile, her interior monologue had lamented more than once. But though Angelina’s anchor was heavy at that moment, her ship going nowhere, she could see over the waves just enough to notice that something about the course of the bodies in the ancient square was – unusual.
Yes, many still queued at the pillars of the Pantheon, waiting to stand atop the classical marble floor and gaze up at the square-recessed dome whose bronze and gold had been stripped away in the sixteenth century to be melted down for the artistic decoration of St Peter’s Basilica. And yes, many continued to sit at small tables in front of coffee shops all around the square, just like her.
But there was a motion away from the square that was entirely out of the ordinary. Hordes of bodies pushed to make their way out of its arteries – the picturesque Via della Rotonda to the south and the Salita de’ Crescenzi to the west – as well as the smaller streets that broke away to the north. Normally every avenue of access to the Pantheon was a way in, but at this moment, they all appeared to be exits. All except those directed eastward, which remained almost empty.
A curiosity, Angelina mused. The only direction that doesn’t point towards the river.
Something was drawing them, like a magnet pulling them away from the landmark site.
Because Angelina Calla had nothing better to do, she rose from her table, dropped a few euros into the glass dish she hadn’t used as an ashtray, and followed the crowds towards the water.
3
Staff offices
Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum
Vatican City
Dr Ben Verdyx sat at his office in complete silence. No earbuds dangled from his ears, and he tended never to power up his computer unless there was an immediate need to use it. Apart from the gentle whisper of the ventilation system flushing fresh air into the enclosed basement space, Ben’s surroundings were pristinely silent, just as he liked them.
He was also alone, which was, again, exactly the situation Ben Verdyx preferred. One of the great perks of his position was that it, unlike so many others in the world, was decidedly not people-centred.
Ironically, gaining a post in the Vatican’s ‘Secret Archives’, as the old Latin archivum secretum was generally and erroneously translated, had involved the same sort of public advertisement and interview process as any other. All those years ago – it would be five in a few months’ time – encountering the phrase ‘Enjoys working well with others’ on the job description had sent Ben into spasms of anxiety, nearly sufficient to forgo applying altogether. But he’d held his resolve, only too relieved to learn in due course that it was merely Human Resources verbiage and had little to do with the actual expectations of the job. A senior archivist for the venerable Archives needed to be in love with books and manuscripts, with brown-edged folios and historical memoirs, not with the sound of his own, or anyone else’s, voice. Ben Verdyx loved the former things as much as he detested the latter, which had made him essentially perfect for the position.
His family had of course urged Ben on to far greater and higher things. His parents, God rest their immortal souls, had never ceased pushing Ben towards higher-profile, and consequently higher-income, professions from his youth through to their deaths – both within eight months of each other through the predictable, if unpleasant, ravages of age. It had been hard to lose them both so closely together, but that was the way of God, Ben had reminded himself at the time. Always mysterious, rarely explicable, but generally in control of the broader sweep of life.
Ben had always been clever, perhaps even brilliant, and so his mother had wanted him to be a lawyer, his father a politician; but Ben’s profoundly introverted personality had more or less ruled out such suggestions. The mere thought of the interpersonal contexts those positions entailed was enough to bring a physical pain into his chest, two great hands squeezing out his breath and constricting his heart. Even the little photo of him on the left-hand wall of the entrance to the Vatican Secret Archives bore witness to his general social discomfort. For the past five years Ben’s visage had been a part of the small collection of staff member portraits presented there, caught frozen on film with his brow covered in sweat and his eyes appearing to point in two different, equally uncomfortable directions, looking for all the world like a man nailed for a mugshot on his way to the local jail.
But at least Ben himself didn’t have to look at the photograph. He could walk straight past it on his way in each morning, moving through security and down the stairs into the Archives’ second sub-level, into an office that was his oasis from the present and portal into the past. There, the only voices that spoke to him came through the long-silent words of the dead, and the only sounds that disturbed his peace were those his historically minded imagination crafted – the sounds of horse hooves along well-trod trade routes between Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century, or the ominous clanking of metal sounding from six hundred swords in a Roman phalanx in the third, or the stolid, serene voice of a poet speaking Attic verse into an amphitheatre of enrapt Greek hearers a half millennium before that. These were the sounds of life that Ben could handle. The sounds he loved.
Though occasionally this peace was shattered, and when it was, it never boded well. As the small telephone on his office desk suddenly lurched to life, dancing on the panelled surface as its shrill ring echoed through the recycled air, Ben could feel his insides constrict and his peace race from him like a charioteer from too long ago, fleeing the grounds of battle.
Five minutes later, Ben was standing outside the entrance to the Archives, surrounded by the ancient stonework of the courtyard that nestled it cosily into the heart of Vatican City. It lay beyond the Porta di Santa Anna, inside one of the three open squares of the immense structure located due north of the Sistine Chapel, known by most simply as Vatican Palace. To Ben’s chagrin, the courtyard outside the Secret Archives was the only one of the three that had been, out of necessity, converted into a car park. All the glory and splendour of man’s best approximation of the City of God, and his office opened on to tarmac.
He desperately wanted a cigarette, but Father Alberto had told him it was ungodlike to smoke, and Ben’s devotion drove him to obey. Ben had been trying his best to give it up for months. He’d followed the teenagers he saw everywhere by taking up ‘vaping’, which as near as Ben could tell was all the hassle and display of smoking without the fun of a legitimate nicotine rush, but it was better than nothing. The little red light indicated his e-cig was powered on, and as Ben drew in a long inhale, the cloud that resulted removed any doubt.
The telephone call had disturbed him deeply. He didn’t like calls in general, but he disliked the anonymous sort even less, and this was the second one that he’d received within a month. It was not a pattern he wanted to become established.
Especially if they were going to bear only on nonsense. Ben had always been a man of a deeper faith than most. His parents had loathed his inclinations towards the mystical bents within Catholicism, and it was only by grace that they were both with their Maker by the time Ben had discovered the Catholic Charismatic Movement and its sidelined, Pentecostally minded commune of devotees in the eastern reaches of the city. Hands raised in praise and rushes of prophetic tongues would have mortified his conservative mother beyond salvage, despite the stirring effect it had on Ben’s soul. Simply mentioning prophetic ecstasy would have likely given his father a bigger stroke than the one that had killed him.
But even Ben’s mystic bent knew the realm of prayer and hope was different from the realm of everyday experience and encounter. There were avenues for faith and vision in church, and there was the way the world worked, day by day, outside its doors.
But, the phone call . . .
He puffed another digital drag and walked across the car park, through two interconnected archways that led to the maze of passages linking the Apostolic Palace to the Sistine Chapel and ultimately St Peter’s. Emerging on to the grand circular piazza that was among the most famous public squares in the world, he prepared to suck another dose of chemical into his lungs.
Instead, Ben stopped, his feet and his breath suddenly frozen.
Before him, the motion of the world appeared . . . Ben struggled a moment for the right word. Backwards.
Every day of his working life here, Ben had crossed at some point into St Peter’s Square, and every time the landscape was the same. Tourists and faithful flocked to the holy site and stared at the grandiose edifice of the basilica, or at the overwhelming statuary of Bernini’s twin-armed Tuscan colonnades, its four rows of columns gargantuan around them. Like sunflowers turning towards the sun, they always faced the same way, their eyes always on the same sights.
At this moment, however, they faced the opposite direction. Never before had Ben seen anything like it: hundreds of bodies, all turned away from the capital of the Catholic world, facing out of its confines and moving towards a vision beyond.
Then Ben glanced further in the same direction, and saw something even stranger.
A moment later, his feet were moving in the same
direction as theirs.
4
Governatore building, Vatican City
Office of Cardinal Giotto Forte
‘You cannot send this kind of information on to the Swiss Guard without bringing us in, Giotto.’
The reprimand aimed at Giotto Forte, Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, came from his fellow Cardinal Dylan Camaugh, the Irish-born prelate who had spent the past forty years cloistered within the walls of the city, once serving as Cardinal Secretary of State and now, years past the Church’s formal retirement age, ranking as one of the highest advisory members in the Curia. His voice bore the unique tinge of displeasure only the Irish can effectively accomplish: dismissive and disinterested, yet somehow personally invested enough to be fiercely annoyed.
‘This is the kind of material that concerns all of us.’
‘I’m not sure it really needs to concern anyone,’ Cardinal Forte answered. He kept calm at his desk, though his rising irritation was in evidence. ‘It’s likely nothing. Certainly nothing that concerns the Curia directly. I contacted the Guard only as a matter of protocol. If events are taking place that others might consider to have religious significance, it’s always best for the Guard to be informed. Mobs form quickly, and act sporadically.’
‘You think there will be mobs?’
‘There already are,’ came another voice. Archbishop Jovan Wycola sat in one of the red chairs at the far corner of Giotto’s office. He’d been party to meetings such as these for almost as long as Cardinal Camaugh, though his robes were still purple instead of crimson. ‘Along the river, even now. What would you call those?’
‘I’d call those crowds, Your Excellency,’ Cardinal Forte answered, ‘curious crowds eager to see something which, while it is certainly out of the ordinary, is hardly miraculous.’