by Sam Cabot
It was bad enough he’d had to go racing through the traffic-choked streets of Rome in the company of two provincial dolts whose entire ambition extended to putting in their years finding tourists’ lost purses and then retiring on their piddling Gendarme pensions. Though at least the chase, as opposed to most of the work Luigi did here, had gotten his blood moving. They’d caught their quarry, too, a pale, sniveling clerk who’d stolen a book from the Vatican Library.
The uniformed idiots Luigi was saddled with laughed uproariously at how stupid he must be, this Argentinian punk, to work at the Library and not even think about the GPS-alarm chip in the book. And when it set off the alarm, to rip it out, stash the book somewhere—and forget he had the chip still on him! Oh, what a scemo!
Gritting his teeth, Luigi had thought, No. You’re the scemi. No one’s that dumb, with the possible exceptions of yourselves. Keeping the chip was clearly a well-thought-out red herring. The clerk had passed the stolen book to a confederate—probably the black-haired woman he’d pretended to be scuffling with—and kept the chip so they’d focus on him while she got away. This suggested to Luigi an organized burglary ring. Perhaps specializing in antique manuscripts, or perhaps just in stealing from the Vatican. Why not? There was wealth here beyond comprehension. Furthermore, as far as Luigi could tell, the possessions of the Vatican were like an iceberg. The ten percent that was visible was impressive enough, but the rest, besides being nine times greater, was hidden in murky waters. If you could get a precious item beyond the walls, there was a good chance no one would miss it. Which didn’t mean it was easy to steal from the Vatican, but it was possible, and probably, if you were a certain kind of crook, irresistibly tempting.
Luigi was a cop, not a crook. Scratching out his childhood on the cobblestones of Naples, he’d dipped a toe in criminal waters. Which of his friends hadn’t? He’d boosted the odd TV, raced off with the occasional dangling purse, run errands for a few local malavitosi. But it wasn’t for him. He watched his pal Nino get sent away to reform school, which everyone knew was six kinds of hell; and then his cousin Angelo, at fifteen, was one night advised to leave Naples immediately and plan not to come back. Angelo kissed his tearful mother and didn’t even pack a suitcase. Luigi could see early on that there was toughness and its attendant respect, but no real future, in crime.
There was a future, however, and other advantages, too, on the police. You could be tough and respected, and it was also useful to be smart. Luigi joined the local force, but ran up against a difficulty. His past as a booster and errand-runner wasn’t enough to blackball him. This was Naples, after all; if the police only accepted lily-white recruits there wouldn’t be a dozen cops in the city. But Luigi had been smarter and more enterprising than most ragazzi, reliable, able to think on his feet. Every malavitoso in Naples coveted his services. If he’d elected to join one crime family over another the loser would have felt regret and congratulated the chosen. When he turned his back on them all and declared his loyalty to the other side, it stung. The investigation of crime depends on the cultivation of sources and mutual back-scratching; but no matter what Luigi Esposito offered, the word was out. No crook in Naples would talk to him. All doors were shut.
Luigi knew a cobblestone ceiling when he saw one. He began to despair at the vision of a future spent patrolling garbage-strewn alleyways and directing traffic on fume-filled streets.
One day, as he was responding to a purse-snatching on Via Santa Chiara, in the heart of his old neighborhood, inspiration struck. The American tourist’s pocketbook was long gone—when would they learn not to dangle their bags so condescendingly from their fingertips?—but after he made short work of the report he took his hat off and entered the quiet church. Old Father Carmelo was delighted to see Luigi Esposito and to find he’d done so well. By which, given the nature of the parish, the priest meant that Luigi had graduated from high school and wasn’t in jail. Luigi confided his problem to Father Carmelo, who had a word with a seminary mate whose cousin was a bishop, and so on, and Luigi had gone up to Rome.
It was quite an honor, so he was told, to serve on the Gendarmerie. That might be true, but Luigi soon discovered it to be an honor reserved for men like himself: people who knew people. Talent for the job, which Luigi happened to have, was secondary. In one way that was good. Surrounded by dull lumps of coal, a diamond shines all the brighter. Luigi, unsure he was a diamond but demonstrably not as dull as most of his colleagues, rose to the rank of vice assistente in an impressively short time. Vice assistente was a detective’s title; the problem was that the Gendarmerie had nothing much to detect. The pickpockets of Saint Peter’s Square needed chasing, and the occasional nut who insisted on speaking to the Papa—or insisted he was the Papa—needed to be quietly shooed from the premises. But anything juicy, any criminal activity an investigator could sink his teeth into, ran headfirst into the fact that as far as the Holy See was concerned, silence was golden. Make It Go Away was the Gendarme’s first directive. Find out who did whatever it was, and then explain in a soft and calm way that a dossier had been compiled and they’d best get themselves gone and keep quiet, did they understand? They always did, and the investigations of the few real crimes Luigi had come up against had ended as compiled dossiers in his desk. It was enough to turn a cop into a cynic.
Or to make him long for another move. Luigi began to dream of the Carabinieri. For a kid from Naples by way of the Gendarmerie, this was close to an impossible dream, based equally on the Carabinieri’s heavy pro-Rome bias and the fact that Luigi had little to show for his six years on the Gendarmes.
Until today. This could have been it, this could have been big. Luigi could see that this Argentinian, this Jorge Ocampo, was no scemo and he hadn’t acted alone. When they caught him he didn’t have the stolen book. But Luigi had him. Luigi began his interrogation and it was only a matter of time before he’d have broken the punk down. That would have led to his confederates. As the detective on the case—as, in fact, the man who’d personally tackled the clerk after his bogus fight with the woman (though the skinny kid was unaccountably strong and it had taken all three Gendarmes to subdue him), Luigi would be in a fine position to make Carabinieri hay while this sun shone.
He was, he thought, not far—a few minutes, half an hour—from pulverizing the kid’s innocent-victim act and getting him to spill it, when his soprintendente interrupted him. A call had come from the Cardinal Librarian: it was all a mistake. Nothing had been taken. Nothing was wrong. A faulty alarm system, a chip fallen from a book. A big uproar over zilch. Let the kid go.
Expressing his disappointment and his outrage to the soprintendente had gotten Luigi nowhere, not even winning him a sympathetic shrug. “We work for them, Esposito,” had been his boss’s cold reply. “Most of us are grateful for the opportunity to serve.”
Thus it was that the Argentinian, pale and confused but not checking this gift horse’s mouth, scuttled away, and Luigi Esposito smashed his fist on his desk and bottled up the curses that threatened to singe the office’s air. A cardinal! Luigi’s blue Carabinieri uniform torn from his grasp by a cardinal who was no doubt embarrassed by the traffic-disaster chase and the Metro-stop dustup. Not to mention the obvious involvement of Library staff. Like all of them, the Cardinal Librarian only Wanted It To Go Away and probably considered a missing book a small price to pay for maintaining dignity and decorum at the Holy See.
Luigi stepped outside. He’d been trying to cut down but this situation called for a smoke. He lit up, pulled deeply, and looked around at the groomed, disciplined, cross-eyed boring perfection of this place.
Maybe it was the change in perspective, or maybe the nicotine jolting his brain, but as he was grinding out the cigarette Luigi had a thought. The Librarian, Cardinal Cossa, wanted the problem to go away from the Vatican. If Luigi was right, though, this wasn’t a Vatican crime, as such. It was a burglary ring, a criminal racket, an organized conspiracy, t
argeting the Vatican but possibly other places, too. Secular places. With at least one member inside the Vatican Library and others outside it. If Luigi could crack this racket, could at a minimum point the secular authorities in the right direction, that could be the feather his cap needed to get him in the Carabinieri’s door.
18
Jorge Ocampo stood still, an island buffeted by the waves of tourists in Saint Peter’s Square. The Gendarmes had escorted him out after that belligerent Neapolitan detective had suddenly decided to let him go. Jorge had been pleased that his protestations of innocence had finally gotten through to the man.
His satisfaction was short-lived, though.
Anna was angry. Very angry.
He flinched at the voice issuing from the phone at his ear. “Forget it, Jorge. Go home. Go take a nice coffee. Go back to Argentina! I don’t care. You’re an idiot! Worse than useless. I’ll do it myself. No—I’ll find someone else. Franklin, from California—yes, I’ll call him.”
Jorge’s blood froze. Franklin had recently joined the group that met in the back room of Circolo degli Artisti, where Anna led them in planning the world they would create once the Noantri took their rightful places. Franklin was young, Newer than Jorge, and impassioned. He believed in Anna and their mission, and the last thing Jorge wanted was to give up his place at Anna’s side to the fresh-faced American.
“No, no, Anna!” Jorge heard himself croaking. He swallowed and went on, “I’m sorry. Let me try again. I’ll find the book. I’ll find out who that woman is and I’ll get it from her. I’ll get it for you, Anna. I will.”
“You can’t, Jorge. You’re not the man for the job.”
“I am!”
A short pause. “I don’t know.”
“Anna—”
“All right. One more chance. Do not screw this up, Jorge.”
“I won’t! I’ll find out—”
“I already know who she is.”
“What?”
With an exasperated sigh: “I asked around. Livia Pietro. An art historian. Three different people recognized her from your description. Not even Noantri—they were Mortals, art students. She’s well known. She lives in Trastevere, in that really old house in Piazza dei Renzi that used to be the watchtower. Do you think that gives you enough to go on, Jorge? Do you think you can do it right this time?”
“Yes! Yes, Anna. Thank you. I’ll go there now. I’ll get the book.”
“You’d better.” She clicked off.
Jorge slipped his phone back into his pocket and wiped the sweat from his upper lip. He stood for a moment more, watching the crowds surge this way and that in their eagerness to take in everything they could in their time here. Benighted fools, Anna called them. Far too shortsighted to understand their own best interests from one day to the next. No wonder they’d made such a mess of the world! They fundamentally didn’t care about anything that didn’t affect them immediately, because in their hearts they knew they’d be gone by the time things got bad.
Was what she said true? Anna was deeply passionate and completely serious about everything she believed, but still, Jorge wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember feeling that way when he was Mortal. His Change was much more recent than Anna’s. She’d been Noantri for four hundred years, so maybe she’d forgotten. Back home in Argentina, where they’d met, Jorge had joined the Communist Party because he and his comrades shared the revolutionary dream of a better future. They knew freedom fighters like themselves were unlikely to live to see it, but they were willing to fight and die for the dream.
Though he couldn’t deny that a longer view had its advantages, too. And Anna had done a great deal of thinking about these things. She had been a member of the Party, also, and had urged resistance to the military dictatorship with fiery speeches and acts of breathtaking bravery. Even now, when he understood that, being Noantri, she hadn’t been risking, perhaps, quite what he and his friends had, his heart still swelled with pride at her fierce valor.
Bueno. Enough dreaming. The parking lot, that’s where he needed to go now, to fetch his motorino. As he turned to head in that direction he pulled out the phone again to switch the ringer on. It was required to be off in the Library, and with all that had happened he hadn’t thought about it since. He and Anna had just hung up, but she might call back. With new instructions, or to say she’d thought it over and she understood that it wasn’t his fault. She had her own ring tone, Anna did: Fuerte Apache’s “Vida Clandestina.” Hearing it always caused a clash of emotions in Jorge: joy that Anna was calling him and a stab of longing for home. He missed home. Sometimes, before he caught himself, he almost, almost, wished he’d never met Anna, never become Noantri. That the vicious military dictatorship of his beloved Argentina had made him a desaparecido like so many of his friends. That he’d died a martyr hero of La Guerra Sucia. It was the fate he was surely headed for until Anna intervened.
But those moments passed. How could he not want what he now had, what everyone would want if they knew it was possible? He had eternal life! He had the power to heal his body, develop his talents, advance his mind! Anna had told him how it would be, in those moments after the Fire, after the Change, when he lay paralyzed and bewildered. He’d been dying, she said; she’d had no choice. He would be grateful, she promised, he’d welcome what she’d done, when he understood. When he learned what she was, and what he now was. The news that he’d been dying had surprised him—the wound was excruciating, but even as he lay writhing he’d known the pain was from a bullet-shattered collarbone—but Anna had risked a great deal, she explained later, to save him. She’d chased off his assailants, but the real risk was what came next. To make someone Noantri without the Conclave’s prior assent was forbidden; for Anna, already in exile for previous infractions of the Law, the penalty for such an action could be— Jorge shuddered. He wouldn’t think of it. What she had done for him, without his asking or even knowing to ask, proved her love. He owed her this wondrous new life, and he would do whatever Anna needed, whatever Anna desired, for as long as she wanted him to.
For eternity.
And Anna, Anna had a goal! The world would not remain as it was, continuing, day to day, day to day. . . . Anna’s ambition held that everyone, Mortal and Noantri, deserved to lead rich and magnificent lives. Lives like hers. It wouldn’t be long now until her plans—their plans—succeeded. When they were triumphant and Noantri jurisdiction was established, he could go home then. Once the Church was destroyed, there’d be no reason for Rome to remain the center of Noantri power. He and Anna would go back to Argentina. She would rule from Buenos Aires, and they would be happy.
The ringer was on now, but although Jorge stared at the phone as he walked, it sat inert in his hand. Resigned, he put it away when he reached the parking area and took out his keys. He mounted the motorino, revved the engine, and headed for Trastevere, as Anna had told him to do.
19
For the second time that day Thomas Kelly charged blindly out a door. His racing footsteps slapped and echoed through the ornate marble corridors as he ran from the Librarian’s suite the way he had from the House of Crazy People. But this time it was much, much worse. Because according to Lorenzo, according to Cardinal Cossa, according to Thomas’s friend and rock and spiritual anchor, those people weren’t crazy.
It was a nightmare. Wait, yes, that was it! Literally. It was a nightmare, this whole day. He was actually asleep in his bed in the residenza, exhausted, disoriented, probably even under the influence of Lorenzo’s good red wine from dinner. A nightmare. Thomas slowed his footsteps and waited: in his experience, once you knew you were having a nightmare, you woke up.
He didn’t wake up. The crowds still milled in Saint Peter’s Square, cameras clicked, groups of tourists swirled this way and that. The vast curve of the Colonnade swept away to encircle the great piazza on two sides, but Thomas saw no grandeur now: only vertigo.
Picking up his pace again, he made his way to Via del Pellegrino. When Lorenzo had informed him he’d be staying in the Jesuit residenza inside the Holy See while on this mission, he’d been awed and thrilled. Now all he wanted was to leave as soon as he could, to run as fast as he could, to flee from here to somewhere far, far away.
He heard, “Buongiorno, Padre,” as he brushed past another priest, a man heading out into the sunshine, a man who still lived in a normal world. He couldn’t answer. At the door to his room he jabbed the key at the lock, could not find the keyhole. Get a hold of yourself, Thomas! Who had said that? Lorenzo! Lorenzo dared! Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa, who’d proved, in this last hour, that he’d been lying to Thomas since the day they’d met.
• • •
An hour before, in a different lifetime, Thomas had waited in Trastevere as Lorenzo had requested until he’d seen a dark blue Carabinieri Lancia roll to a stop near the café that shielded him. The car parked where it couldn’t be seen from the small piazza at Santa Maria della Scala, and when the business-suited young man who got out rounded the corner, he glanced toward the historian’s house. All right, the police were here. Thomas jogged to Piazza Trilussa and got in the first cab at the stand. The cab bounced over the cobbles, swung onto Ponte Garibaldi to cross the Tiber, and headed up the broad, busy street on the other side. Thomas tried to think of nothing at all as the platano trees slipped rhythmically past the windows. By the time he arrived at the Vatican he’d calmed down. He paid the driver and reported to the Librarian’s suite.
He hadn’t been kept waiting this time. He was shown in immediately by the young African priest. As Thomas thought back now, did he see a glint in the young man’s eye? Did he know, too? Lorenzo had said not, had said no one knew except a very few in the Church’s highest ranks. But how could Thomas trust anything Lorenzo said ever again?