by Tom Fox
Get away.
The narrower lane led away from the riverside street and was less than a third its width. Rather than trees and a river marking its embankment, it was lined with brick buildings that suddenly felt like friends. Angelina sprinted between them with a speed of which she hadn’t been aware she was capable. Each second, each footstep, was one she was certain would end with the next explosive sound and – and whatever it felt like to have a bullet tear through your body.
Yet somehow she made it into the small Via dei Pettinari in a single piece. Though the sound of gunfire ceased as she entered the narrow lane, she didn’t allow her feet to slow down.
Keep going. Run!
The voice inside her head commanded, and Angelina obeyed. She’d never heard her conscience or her thoughts speak like this before – never been close to a circumstance where her inner self could contemplate commanding such things. But the voice was speaking sense. She had to get far, far from here.
And the only way to get there, to get anywhere other than this spot, was to keep in motion.
A few streets behind
‘Get moving, you jackass!’ Ridolfo was already leaping out from behind the green saloon car he and André had used as a perch for what had been meant to be a simple execution. He should have shot the woman himself, he shouldn’t have trusted his companion with the task. There was a reason André’s father looked down on him as overtly as he did.
But it was a mistake Ridolfo could remedy. Once they caught up with the woman, he would make sure he took her down with his own gun. He could only hope that the other team, located a few kilometres away at another point near the river, was having better luck with their target.
‘She’s gone down the side street,’ he shouted at André as both men tore into the road. Horns blared and cars swerved as they had moments before for Calla, and as they continued to do for the other terrified pedestrians trying to get away from the scene.
‘I’ll follow her there,’ he continued. ‘You go a street or two up and cut across.’ He swung an arm in a direction further along the riverbank, then shot the fiercest look he could muster at André.
‘Don’t let the bitch get away.’
As Angelina ran, terrified that these might be her last moments, she was surprised to discover that the scenes of life really do flash before a person’s eyes in the moments before the end comes. She saw her parents, gathered around her and her younger brother at a Christmas party when they were children, gifts wrapped in bright colours all around them. She saw a rope swing hanging from a tree, on which she’d swung for hours in her youth. She saw her first student accommodation room, spartan and plain, which had inspired and excited her.
The scenes were heavy, joyful yet simultaneously mournful. The flashing of her life had a weight to it she didn’t expect.
She’d lost track of how many times she’d turned corners and altered her path now, though her pace was slowing as the rush of fear and its associated chemicals, which had powered her through her initial bolt away from the gunshots, began to recede and tear through her muscles with the fire of pain rather than strength. The clamminess of shock had given way to the genuine sweat of her sprint, and as a new wave of apprehension turned her skin cold again, her clothes stuck to her chest and back with a sickening, oppressive grip.
She’d only started glancing behind her a few corner-turns ago, terrified that she might see a gun barrel aimed straight at her eyes when she did, but she’d seen only the milling of the crowds through which she’d come, some glancing at her in surprise or bemusement, unsure whether to take her high-speed course through their streets as something fearful on which to exercise compassion, or simply another manifestation of the all-too-frequent craziness exhibited by strangers in their cosmopolitan melting pot.
But her feet were growing heavier. Her legs felt as if they truly were on fire, each step increasing the temperature, until the pain became so intense that tears began to flow down her cheeks.
And that, more than anything else that had happened so far, pissed Angelina off.
She had no idea who was behind her, or why they were shooting. She’d only caught flashing glimpses of men, blurred into visions on which she didn’t have time to linger. She had no idea if she would survive this unexpected, unwanted moment in her life. But she knew one thing about her pursuers. They’d made her cry. And damn it, Angelina Calla was not a cryer.
8
Minutes earlier
Governatore building, Vatican City
High above the crowds that were gathered along the water’s edge, from a window looking down on the whole of Rome from a unique, ivory height, Cardinal Giotto Forte stared out across the dazzling cityscape. It never ceased to thrill him, this strange world into which he had been drawn as he had ascended the ranks from seminarian to priest, to Monsignor serving in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and eventually to the rank of bishop and archbishop. When, some years later, the Pope had informed him that he’d been selected as a prince of the Church and would be incardinated the following March, Giotto’s chest had swelled with pride. Of course, pride was nominally a vice. He was supposed to aim for humility. But how could a man who, since he’d first decided that the desire within his teenage bones was a calling from God and dedicated his life to the Holy Mother Church, not feel a little pride at being handed the crimson fascia and zucchetto of a cardinal?
These days, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, he had one of the nicest offices in the Vatican, with one of the finest views in the whole of the city. It was a fact that had been confirmed for him by none other than the Supreme Pontiff himself, who on a visit to Cardinal Giotto’s offices, shortly after the latter’s investiture, had opened the patio doors and gazed out over the city with an audible intake of delighted breath. ‘My dear Giotto,’ the Pope had said, with all the cheerful humour in his voice for which the current pontiff was known, ‘this is the finest view in all of Rome. And that,’ he’d added, turning towards the Cardinal with a wink to his eye, ‘that’s infallible.’
Giotto Forte smiled at the memory. The Pope was a good man, humble yet strong, able to govern well without losing his humour or simplicity of character. Giotto could only hope that his own life of service to the Church would leave him equally as good a person.
He stepped away from the window, and with the motion his smile fell. The business of the afternoon had been far less inspiring than his memories.
He did not enjoy being reprimanded by his fellow members of the Curia. It was unpleasant, as well as worrying, whenever it happened to occur. A man could ascend to great heights, but the threshold back to the very bottom was one over which many men had fallen. Usually without much notice.
Should he really have informed them earlier about the dossier his office had received a fortnight ago? Had declining to bring it before them really been a mistake?
One of the responsibilities of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, apart from the obvious and well-known role it played in investigating individuals proposed for canonisation by the Church, was the gathering of information on the unusual and out-of-the-ordinary in Catholic life, both within Vatican City and across the Roman Catholic world, which tended to be viewed in conjunction with manifestations of particular holiness and came under the same scrutiny. In this role they were often thought of as the Church’s ‘miracle investigators’, and there was more mythology about their work than just about any other sector of Catholic administration.
Investigating miracles had an obvious public appeal, but Giotto’s teams did more than simply deal with the miraculous. It was his same office that responded to more or less any event or episode that strayed outside the customary flow of the Church’s life. If new congregations with a particular social agenda, following particularly notable leaders, began to appear – such as the rebellious ‘Liberation Theology’ devotees had done in South America in the fifties and sixties – it was Giotto’s offices that would f
irst explore the trend, often in conjunction with his former colleagues in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. If rumours came in that, following a particularly ‘inspiring’ individual’s influence, a whole nation’s Catholics were converting to bagpipe Masses with jazz liturgical dance, it would be Giotto’s office, again, that would look into it. Not that a bagpipe Mass sounds so bad, the Cardinal murmured to himself. His Perugian name notwithstanding, he had Scottish ancestry on his mother’s side, and had always liked the pipes.
It was this scope to his work that had brought the file in question to Cardinal Giotto’s attention. A clay tablet had been unearthed a month ago. It had been of no interest to anyone in the Vatican, beyond perhaps a few scholars. It was written in Akkadian, which as best as Giotto could remember from seminary was a language of the Ancient Near East that had only tangential connections to Christian patrimony.
Yet something about the tablet’s find had disturbed him. Not the bulk of its text, which he had to admit he hadn’t read, but one passage in particular. At the front, the initial lines, which he’d sent away for translation, had predicted of the tablet’s discoverer that ‘his terrible death shall come most swiftly’.
And the man who had discovered it was dead. His death, moreover, had come swiftly, and it had been terrible.
An acidic bubble churned in Giotto Forte’s stomach. Outside, police sirens sounded, as they so often did in the city, though at this moment they seemed designed to emphasise his angst.
He’d been right to contact the Swiss Guard. Surely. The discovery of an artefact on Church property that was linked to a death – they had every right and reason to know about it.
But such a crime, if it even was a crime, hardly warranted the involvement of higher-ups in the Curia more broadly. Old things were regularly dug up in Rome. And people died, even gruesomely. Life went on.
Besides, how seriously could a tablet of old predictions and prophecies really be?
It was a question that had sounded far more compelling prior to this morning. Prior to the infallibly perfect view from his office changing.
Because after the prediction of its discoverer’s death, the first ‘plague’ the tablet described was that the river would flow red.
And that prediction, like the curse upon its finder, had inexplicably come true.
9
The neighbourhood of Campo de’ Fiori
By her best estimation, Angelina had been running, twisting her way in as convoluted a path as she could orchestrate on the fly, for at least ten minutes. Though there had been no further gunshots, and though she’d seen no sign of pursuers since she’d made her way into the tighter quarters of the neighbourhood, she hadn’t stopped. Rome is big. It’s possible, sensible, to get much, much further away.
It was her body, however, that ultimately demanded that she halt. Angelina’s legs would move no more. Her chest had heaved and her heart had pulsed at this rate as long as it could.
Praying that the decision wouldn’t be her last, Angelina slowed, picked out two cars parked perpendicularly to the side of the road, and lunged between them. She crouched down, trying to bring herself out of the sightline of the pavements, then leaned her back against the yellow Fiat behind her, sliding down its passenger door until her bottom bounced against the harsh tarmac of the road.
For at least five minutes Angelina did nothing, thought almost nothing. She simply allowed her heart rate to slow and her breathing to come under control, waiting in silence in the fear that her pursuers would round the row of cars and spot her and it would all suddenly, terribly, be over. But as the minutes passed and the noises beyond remained only the usual stirrings of evening pedestrians out on the stroll, she finally allowed her mental block to give way, permitting her rational mind out of its sidelined cage. It burst immediately into a chaos of thought.
What the hell is going on? What do I do? Where do I go?
She commanded herself to breathe, then forced her mind to order her thoughts into categories, into clear groups of questions. It was the same process she took with an academic puzzle, and it brought her a small degree of calm to approach this shock in her life with a familiar pattern of mental action.
She wasn’t hurt, at least not significantly. Her torso was still smarting with pain from the rock shards that had flown against her from the bridge’s shattering stonework, but as she quickly scanned over her body, it was clear that none had pierced her flesh, and nothing felt broken.
She strove to piece together the structure of her afternoon. What could possibly have led to this? But there was nothing – no cause that fit the result. She might have got on the wrong side of a tour member or two, but she’d done that before and it had never resulted in gunfire.
And the water of the river . . . she didn’t know what the hell to make of that.
Her stomach stirred with panic again. She had to get further away. It wasn’t safe here. She needed to find her way to a metro station, get underground, and then get as far from this spot as she possibly could.
Taking her wits into her two hands as best as she could, Angelina stood.
No bullet tore through her flesh. No men leapt out from behind cars or awnings to renew their chase. So Angelina turned, stepped on to the pavement, and inserted herself into the crowd of pedestrians. Then, as best she could, she disappeared.
A few streets away
Ridolfo didn’t appreciate that he was being made to race at this pace through the side streets of Rome. The span from late afternoon into evening was social hour for urban Romans, which meant that crowds lined the neighbourhood lanes – especially of such an urban stalwart as the region around Campo de’ Fiori, with its tightly interwoven ancient lanes and squares lined with flower sellers, cafés and small local shops. The strange change in the waters of the Tiber had them out in even thicker droves than normal, spilling foot traffic into narrow roadways that barely ran a car’s-width across when they were empty. Not only was Ridolfo being made to run and sweat his way through his clothes, which had been perfectly clean when the day began; he was being made to do so in the midst of crowds whose gazes were drawn to his face like a magnet.
Ridolfo had had his whole life to come to terms with the fact that not only was he – unlike his partner – no gem of masculine attractiveness; he was outright ugly by just about any standard of measure. He remembered visits to the doctor as a young boy, where his family physician had spoken to his parents – always when he’d thought he’d been out of young Ridolfo’s earshot – in terms of ‘birth defects’ and ‘physical deformities’, though his parents had always been careful to shield him from such language. He was ‘special’, in his mother’s caring tones, and ‘unique’ in his stepfather’s.
For a time, in his childhood, the kinds of ‘special’ and ‘unique’ that required tall collars and knitted scarves to cover up the splotched, potted mess that was his neck – these were things he could have done without. He’d been ashamed of, then resented, the strange grooves that ran along his cheeks and created folds of flesh and skin where no human face should have them. And he’d resented, then hated, his fellow children who had done what, he later understood, was only standard for children to do. They’d mocked him mercilessly, ostracised him from their little cliques as thoroughly as they could, and ensured that he always knew he was different, unwelcome and unwanted.
As Ridolfo had grown, he’d learned to live with his looks. Some part of him even uttered a little prayer of gratitude, now and then, for the course they’d forced his life to take. He’d had to learn to be self-contented. To be fierce, to learn to deal with whatever came his way, and to care fuck-all about what anyone else thought of him. They were traits that had served him nicely.
But the looks Ridolfo got from strangers still grated on him. As politically correct as the world had become over the past few years, no cultural force on earth seemed strong enough to stop the open gaping that people exhibited whenever he walked among them.
Wh
ich is why he so rarely did, and why he resented that André’s incompetence with a handgun meant he had to be jogging through the midst of so many now. The stares came from every angle, and given the crowds, they came from up close. He could almost feel the breath of the leering bystanders, withering their stares at him as he pushed through them.
He did his best to ignore it all, but the back of his neck still warmed with anger and resentment.
Killing Dr Angelina Calla had now become something more than just the heeding of an instruction from his boss. Ridolfo would make the bitch pay for his humiliation.
Angelina turned yet another corner, trying to keep her pace below the panicked sprint her nerves wanted to repeat from before. She was walking amongst the crowds now, getting further and further away from the site of her attack. Blending in was better than standing out as a racer among passers-by. She forced deep, long breaths, walking toe to heel and holding down her speed.
She’d fished her mobile out of her handbag a few streets ago and called up Google Maps for a quick view of her location and a route to the nearest metro station. It was only a few turns ahead, and Angelina could feel her pace increasing as she drew closer to it. Would she be safer there, underground and whisked away at high speed from the centre of the city? Or would the men follow her there as well – trapping her in a steel box within a concrete tube beneath the city: a mobile grave from which they would never let her emerge?
The two possibilities duelled within her consciousness as she kept her steps deliberate. It was a risk, going into the metro system. It couldn’t be denied. But she couldn’t think of any better option. She felt far too exposed here. It seemed her best hope.