The Devil Will Come

by Glenn Cooper

  Except, Elisabetta thought, there was one more she’d keep to herself: the fleeting image of her attacker’s hideous spine on the awful night when Marco was killed.

  De Stefano rubbed his hands nervously together as if cleansing them. ‘So we’re not in a position to weave them together into a cohesive hypothesis?’

  She shrugged. ‘From my knowledge of the period, astrology was highly important to the Romans. Aristocrats and common citizens alike placed a great deal of value in the predictive value of star charts. Maybe for this particular cult or sect, the stars and planets were of pre-eminent importance. Its members’ physical abnormalities clearly made them different from most of their contemporaries. We know that they clung together in death. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that in life they were associated in some cultural or ritualistic way. Perhaps they were intensely guided by astrological interpretations. Or maybe they were a sect of actual astrologers. This is all pure conjecture.’

  ‘And you think this cult or sect might persist to this day?’ De Stefano asked incredulously. ‘Is that what this Ottinger is telling us?’

  ‘I wouldn’t begin to go that far,’ Elisabetta said. ‘That would take us beyond the boundaries of proper speculation. For a start, we need to understand the message on the envelope and to decipher the meaning of the tattoos.’

  De Stefano had been growing more haggard and sallow-looking by the day and she was becoming worried about his health. He seemed to labor at the simple act of pushing himself up from the chair’s armrests. ‘Well, the good news is that the media hasn’t gotten wind of the columbarium yet. The bad news is that the Conclave begins in four days and as it gets closer my superiors are certain to get more and more anxious about the risk of a leak. So please keep working and please keep me informed.’

  Elisabetta turned to her computer screen, then caught herself. She decided she ought to devote a few minutes to prayer. As she was about to close her eyes she glanced at the title of a search result at the top of the next search page and to her shame, she found herself clicking on the link and postponing her devotions.

  The title read: The Marlowe Society calls for papers to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Marlowe.

  There was a thumbnail photo of a mild-looking man with sandy hair, the Chairman of The Marlowe Society. His name was Evan Harris and he was a Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in England. The posting on the Society’s web page was an international solicitation for academic papers to be published in book form in 2014 on the milestone anniversary of Marlowe’s birth.

  Clicking through Harris’s biography, Elisabetta learned he was a Marlowe scholar who, among his other interests, had written on the differences between the A and B texts of Faustus.

  It took little effort to click on his contact button and type a brief email.

  Professor Harris:

  In my work as a researcher based in Rome, I recently received the gift of a 1620 copy of Doctor Faustus. I attach a scan of the title page for your inspection. I have a number of questions about the topic of A versus B texts and wondered if you might be able to help me. As the matter is somewhat pressing, I enclose my telephone number in Rome.

  She hesitated before signing her name as Elisabetta Celestino. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d used her last name on anything but a government form. Sister Elisabetta seemed, in general, to suffice these days but it wouldn’t, she thought, for a Cambridge don.

  Elisabetta took the Marlowe book to the copier room, gently pressed the book against the printer glass and scanned the title page to her email address.

  On her way back to her office she saw the tall young priest again. He was standing at her door and from the position of his head she was sure that he was staring straight at the symbol on her whiteboard.

  When she got halfway down the hall he shot her a sidelong glance and scurried away like a startled deer.

  Unsettled, Elisabetta returned to her desk, attached the Marlowe file to the Harris email and sent it off. She felt the need for a strong cup of coffee.

  There were two nuns in the canteen who were drinking coffee. She knew them by name but hadn’t gotten much beyond that. She cleared her throat. ‘Excuse me, Sisters, I wonder if you could tell me the name of the very tall young priest in the department?’

  One nun answered, ‘He’s Father Pascal. Pascal Tremblay. We don’t know him. He arrived the same day as you. We don’t know what he’s doing here.’

  The other nun added, ‘But then again, we don’t know what you’re doing here, either.’

  ‘I’m here on a special project,’ Elisabetta answered, sticking to Professor De Stefano’s instructions about secrecy.

  The first nun huffed, ‘That’s what he said, too.’

  The phone was ringing when she returned to her office.

  It was an English voice. ‘Hello, I was trying to reach Elisabetta Celestino.’

  ‘This is Elisabetta,’ she answered suspiciously. This was the first time her office phone had rung.

  ‘Oh, hi there, it’s Evan Harris, replying to the email you just sent.’

  She’d been out of academia for a long time but she was incredulous that in the interim people had become so responsive to requests for assistance. ‘Professor Harris! I’m quite surprised you came back to me so soon!’

  ‘Well, ordinarily I’m a bit more tardy with my inbox but this copy of Faustus you’ve obtained – do you have any idea what you’ve got?’

  ‘I think so, roughly, but I’m hoping you can further enlighten me.’

  ‘I certainly hope you’ve got it in a safe place because there are only three known copies of the 1620 edition, all of them in major libraries. May I ask where you got it?’

  She answered, ‘Ulm.’

  ‘Ulm, you say! Curious place for a book like this to land but we can, perhaps, go into its provenance at a later date. You say you have questions about the A and B texts?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And, if I may ask, are you with a university?’

  Elisabetta hesitated because the answer would inevitably lead to more questions. But she was hard-wired to be as truthful as she was allowed to be. ‘Actually, I work for the Vatican.’

  ‘Really? Why is the Vatican interested in Christopher Marlowe?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say that the Faustus story relates to some work I’m doing on the attitudes of the sixteenth-century Church.’

  ‘I see,’ Harris said, drawing his words out. ‘Well, as you can gauge by my lightning response, this B text of yours interests me a great deal. Perhaps I could come to Rome, say the day after tomorrow to see it in person, and while you have me as a captive audience I can tell you more than you probably care to know about the differences between Faustus A and B.’

  Elisabetta thought that would be wonderfully helpful and gave him the Institute’s address on Via Napoleone. But when she hung up she wondered if she ought to have added, ‘By the way, Professor, I should tell you that I’m a nun.’

  The Piazza Mastai was deserted and the convent was quiet. Elisabetta was happy to be in the silence of her spartan room. An hour earlier she’d pulled her curtains closed and removed her layers of clerical garb before gladly putting on her nightdress, which by comparison was weightless.

  The feeling had crept up on her, the sense that her robes were becoming heavier and more stifling. When she’d first donned the habit after taking her vows, there’d been something magically light about the garb, as if the meters and meters of black cotton were but filmy gauze. But the past few days in the secular world of buses and airports and city streets and young women in their easy spring dresses had taken a subtle toll. Self-aware, Elisabetta launched into a fervent prayer for forgiveness.

  Afterward, she was ready for bed. Although her praying had helped to soothe her spirit, she felt no closer to an explanation of the skeletons of St Callixtus. Tomorrow she would immerse herself in Faustus and the B text and
become as knowledgeable as she could before Professor Harris arrived. But first she had to navigate a turbulent night. The old nightmares of her attack had resurfaced and had become mixed with newer terrors. She dreaded now the jumbled nocturnal world of labyrinths filled with macabre human remains and foul demons with monstrously naked tails.

  With one last prayer for her safe passage through the night, Elisabetta slid between the cool sheets and switched off her light.

  When Elisabetta’s light went out, Aldo Vani tossed a butt into the fountain and lit another cigarette. He’d been discreetly loitering on the Piazza Mastai for an hour or more, watching the windows on the dormitory level. He had a compact monocular scope hidden in his palm and when he was sure there were no passersby he’d swept the lighted windows repeatedly. In the two seconds it had taken for Elisabetta to pull her curtains, he’d spotted her. Third floor, fourth window from the west side of the building. He needed her window and the others on the top floors to go black before he could move.

  It took nothing more than a diamond-tipped glass cutter and a small suction cup to quietly remove a pane from a ground-floor classroom window at the back of the school. Vani would have bet his life that the premises weren’t alarmed and he grunted in satisfaction when he unlatched the window and slipped through silently. Using a penlight he negotiated the rows of small desks. The hall was dark except for the red glow of exit signs at either end. His rubber soles were noiseless on the staircase at the western side of the convent.

  Sister Silvia’s eyes opened at the familiar realization that her bladder was twitchy. From long experience she knew she had under two minutes before she’d suffer an accident. She embarked on the first of several night-time visits to the communal toilet.

  It was a journey that began with bracing her arthritic knees for the weight of her heavy hips. Then she had to push her swollen feet into slippers and pull her bathrobe from the peg. With under a minute to spare she turned her doorknob.

  The door from the stairwell to the third floor squeaked on its dry hinges so Vani had to push it open ever so slowly. The hallway was too bright for his liking. There were night lights at each end and one in the middle. He unscrewed the bulb of the closest one and paused to count the doors. The fourth door on the Piazza side of the building corresponded, he was certain, to the fourth window. It would be better if it was unlocked but it hardly mattered. There were few locks that could slow him down for more than several seconds, especially in an old building. And worse case, with a shoulder to the frame, despite the noise, he’d have his blade through her carotid in no time and would be down the stairs before anyone raised an alarm.

  This time he wouldn’t fail. He’d promised K. He’d linger just long enough to watch the blood stop spurting from her neck as her arterial pressure dropped to zero.

  Sister Silvia washed her hands and shuffled slowly back into the hall. Her room was two down from Elisabetta’s. She began to blink. The hall seemed darker than before.

  She stopped blinking.

  There was a man standing at Elisabetta’s door.

  For an infirm old woman who sang her hymns in a soft, thin voice, she let out a monumentally piercing scream.

  Vani took his hand off the doorknob and coolly assessed his options. It would take ten seconds to rush the screaming nun and silence her. It would take ten seconds to breech the door and finish the job he’d come to do. It would take three seconds to abort his mission and disappear down the stairs.

  He made his decision and turned the knob on Elisabetta’s door. It was locked.

  Other doors began to fly open.

  Nuns and novices poured into the hallway, calling to each other as Sister Silvia kept pumping out the decibels.

  Elisabetta woke with a start and fumbled for her light.

  More doors opened. Vani’s options shrank. He knew there was only one thing worse than failing, and that was being captured.

  When Elisabetta unlocked her door and swung it open she saw a man dressed in black disappearing down the stairs.

  TEN

  Cambridge, England, 1584

  IT WAS PALM Sunday.

  It had been four long years.

  Every minute of every hour of every day had led to this moment. His final public disputation.

  In many ways the scholar’s life had been as arduous as a laborer’s or a tradesman’s. Six days a week, awake at five in the morning for chapel. Then breakfast and lectures on logic and philosophy. Midday meal at eleven a.m., no more than a bit of meat, bread and broth, then classes on Greek and rhetoric. For the entire groaning afternoon, the study of debate and dialectical disputation, an intellectual tennis match to train young minds. Supper was little better than dinner, then study until nine o’clock when the day was done for everyone but him. While his roommates slept, he would sit at the farthest corner of the room and write his precious verses for another hour or two. Sundays were hardly easier.

  Alone, he paced the dusty floorboards outside the lecture hall in his plain black gown. Through the closed doors he could hear the audience shuffling to take its place in the gallery. A few would be supporters but most were a sneering lot who would take more pleasure in seeing him fail.

  Success would mean the granting of his BA degree and automatic admittance into the MA curriculum. From there, London would be his oyster. Failure would mean an ignominious return to Canterbury and a life of obscurity.

  He balled up his fists, stoking his morale.

  I am meant for greatness. I am meant to trample their small minds under my boots and crush their skulls like egg shells.

  Norgate, the Master of Benet College, tall and gaunt, opened the doors and announced, ‘Christopher Marlowe, we are ready for you.’

  Four years earlier Marlowe had made his way from Canterbury to Cambridge, a journey of seventy miles and three days of begged rides on turnip wagons listening to the blather of country folk. Left by a merchant on the outskirts of town he had walked the last mile toting his rucksack. Passersby would have hardly noticed him entering the city through the Trumpington Gate, one more lad streaming into the university for the new December term.

  The sixteen-year-old had to ask his way. In an alleyway beside a tavern he saw a man pissing.

  ‘Which way to Benet College?’ Marlowe had loudly demanded of the fellow. No ‘please, Sir,’ no ‘might you’. It wasn’t his way.

  The man had swung his head around, displaying a frown that suggested an inclination to throw the young man into the mud as a reward for his impudence – as soon as he put his member away. But he’d changed his mind after looking the student up and down. Perhaps it was Marlowe’s hard, dark eyes or humorless tight lips, the curious gravity of his juvenile beard or the imperious way he carried his slight frame but the man yielded meekly and provided the information the boy had sought.

  ‘Cross over Penny-farthing Lane, go past St Botolph’s Church, right turn on Benet Street, into the quadrangle.’

  Marlowe had nodded and soon arrived at the place that would be his home for the next six and a half years.

  He’d won his position as a Parker Scholar by dint of a laudatory performance at the King’s School in Canterbury. That first day in Cambridge he’d been the last of the roommates to arrive at their assigned room at the north-west corner of the quadrangle. His fellow Parker Scholars, Robert Thexton, Thomas Lewgar and Christopher Pashley, all poor as dirt like himself, had been arranging their meager possessions and haggling over the few pieces of furniture allotted them: two beds, two chairs, a table and three stools, some chamber pots and basins. They’d stopped arguing and had taken the measure of the slender, brooding latecomer.

  Marlowe hadn’t bothered with pleasantries. His stare had darted around like that of a feral animal scoping out a patch of territory. ‘I’m Marlowe. Where’s my bed?’

  Lewgar, a plump boy with a spotted face had pointed at a mattress and said. ‘You’ll be sleeping with me. I trust you’ll keep your breeches on at night, Mister Marlowe.’<
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  Marlowe had thrown his rucksack onto the mattress and managed his first smile in days, a fleeting sardonic one. ‘Of that, my man, you can be sure.’

  Marlowe stood facing his questioners with his chin thrust out and his arms quietly at his sides. In four years he had grown taller by the better measure of a foot and all traces of boyishness had vanished. His beard and moustache had grown thicker and framed his longish, triangular face in a rakish way. His silky brown hair fell just short of his starched ruff. Whereas most of his contemporaries were beginning to develop the bulbous noses and prognathous jaws that would mark their later years, Marlowe’s features had remained delicate, even boyish, and he carried his good looks with an air of haughtiness.

  The Master of the college was flanked by three older students taking their MA degrees, all of them with the countenance of sadists aiming to skewer their prey. Once the thesis for the disputation was given, Marlowe would verbally joust with them for four grueling hours and by supper his fate would be known.

  Someone in the audience insistently cleared his throat. Marlowe turned. It was his friend, Thomas Lewgar, who would undergo the self-same ordeal the following day. Lewgar winked his encouragement. Marlowe smiled and faced his panel.

  ‘So, Mister Marlowe,’ the Master began. ‘Here is the final thesis subject of your baccalaureate. We wish you to consider the following and commence your disputation without delay: According to the law of God, good and evil are directly opposed to one another. You may begin.’

  Marlowe could hardly suppress his delight. The corners of his mouth curled up, ever so slightly, but enough to unnerve his inquisitors.

  The cat’s in the bag. The degree is mine.

  At the dining hall, the 120 faculty and students of Benet College habitually sat with their own kind. The dirty leaded windows filtered some of the early evening light but as it was spring, the Sizars had no need to light the candles yet.