by Sam Cabot
“It’s sending us somewhere else,” she repeated.
“Ah.” Chuckling, Spencer George snapped his fingers. “Of course. For one thing, there’s the matter of the missing leaves. There are seven of them, not just one.” Thomas thought about the implications of this as the historian went on. “For another, Mario never did things by halves. Once he’d hidden something as important as the Concordat, he’d make sure it was difficult to find.”
The two Noantri froze again and this time Thomas heard what they had: the two-note howl of an approaching siren. No: more than one siren. The ambulance and more police.
“Livia,” said Spencer George, “you and the priest must leave.” He handed over her shoulder bag. “Whatever happened, if it’s important enough for a herd of Carabinieri, you don’t want to get tangled up with them. I’ll stay and if the subject comes up I’ll explain that you two are long gone. And the clerk—he must have followed you. He’ll need to be diverted, also.”
“You said he’d been arrested.” Thomas glared at Livia. “If he’d been arrested he couldn’t have—”
“Yes, he could.” Pietro dismissed Thomas, turned to George. “Spencer, we need you. Damiani’s poems. You might know—”
George was shaking his head. “I told you, I hadn’t seen any of them. They’d be as new to me as they will be to you. You know more about the churches of Trastevere than I do. Most importantly, you’re the one charged by the Conclave with retrieving the lost Concordat. You, and your priest.”
“I’m not her priest!” Thomas snapped. “And short of a little lockpicking and thievery, which they won’t be looking for, what do we have to worry about? Why don’t we just go out there, tell them we were back in here and don’t know anything about whatever it is that went on, and—”
George waved Thomas silent. “If something dire has really happened, this church will be closed down. The authorities will interview everyone here and your search could be delayed for hours. Time, according to both of you for your different reasons, is critical. Your situation, Father, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t move me, but I’m quite fond of Livia and I hate to think of the consequences to her if she does not succeed.” He looked at them both. “Go now, before they—and that clerk—find you.”
“And how are we supposed to get out?” Thomas demanded. “Tiptoe up a side aisle while you distract them with a juggling act in the nave?”
“That does sound like fun. But I’m sure there’s a more sensible way.” He looked up at the high, thin windows. Thomas followed his gaze. Neither John of the Cross nor Saint Teresa looked as if they’d moved on their hinges in five hundred years.
A bell began to toll in the monastery behind the church. It was a single note, repeated and clanging: not a call to prayer, but a declaration of calamity.
“Yes!” said Pietro suddenly. “Yes, there’s another way. Father, come.”
Thomas stood rooted to the stone floor. His eyes met Pietro’s. A second of stillness, nothing but the tolling: then in a flash Pietro snatched the poem from his hand and stuffed it in her shoulder bag. “Come with me. Or stay here with Spencer and at least buy me some time.”
Stay with Spencer George, swear to whatever sneering lies he was going to tell? While Lorenzo’s only chance at mortal life—and natural death, and the eternal blessed rest that followed upon that—vanished with this creature? As Livia Pietro slipped out of the Reliquary Chapel and behind the nave screen that separated cloistered monks from parishioners, Thomas sped after her.
37
Giulio Aventino couldn’t decide whether to sigh in frustration, snarl in anger, or give in to a satisfied grin. He settled on the grin as he piloted his Fiat through the Trastevere traffic. His dominant emotion at the moment, he had to admit, was smugness. He’d come back to the station to find his sergeant, the well-heeled and pious Raffaele Orsini, out doing the bidding of his cardinal uncle. Not entirely Raffaele’s fault, of course: he’d quite properly taken the Cardinal’s request to the maresciallo. Everything Raffaele did was quite proper. The boss, obviously seeing visions of himself on the Vatican’s IOU list, had dispatched Raffaele to sit in a café watching someone the Cardinal, for some secret Vatican reason, wanted watched. Giulio didn’t care about the Vatican and its secrets and he wouldn’t have given a damn, except that he did.
Two damns.
Damn the maresciallo for sending Raffaele out on, basically, an extended coffee break, and thereby sticking Giulio with the mountain of unfiled witness reports on a case he and Raffaele had closed last week.
And damn the Vatican for thinking it could call at any time and the Carabinieri would jump because it said to.
No, three damns.
Damn the Vatican again, for being right.
Still, neither the Vatican’s secrets nor the maresciallo’s naked ambition nor even the shorts-clad, bottled-water-slugging tourists ambling through the streets as though any car they ignored couldn’t hit them quite pierced Giulio’s satisfaction. Raffaele’s little café break had turned, right under the sergeant’s patrician nose, into a homicide. News of which had made the apoplectic maresciallo explode from his office and order Giulio Aventino to Santa Maria della Scala immediately, posthaste, and soonest, to go see how much of the situation he could salvage.
The boss, Giulio had noted, and here’s where the satisfaction had begun, had showered a few damns of his own on the absent person of Raffaele Orsini.
38
Thomas Kelly was right on her heels as Livia slipped behind the carved wooden screen to the far side of the apse, then through the blue folds of a velvet curtain and around a chapel to an unremarkable door against the far wall. Anyone might think, she reflected, that people made a habit of slinking around Santa Maria della Scala without being seen. Of course, since an order of cloistered friars had lived here for six hundred years, they probably did. The lock on the door was easy and Thomas Kelly, though he tsk’ed in obvious unhappiness when she picked it, had the sense not to speak until it was closed again and they were on the other side.
“What now?” he demanded in a whisper, glancing at a staircase that led up into dimness. “This doesn’t look like a way out.”
“No. We need to work out what this poem means before we go anywhere. This is a place where we won’t be disturbed.”
“What happened to ‘you and your priest must leave’?”
“I’m not the one who said that. Look, Spencer can be hard to take, I know. But he has a marvelous mind and he’s a loyal friend. And his work has been very important to the Noantri.” At that the priest scowled. Without knowing why—did she really think Thomas Kelly would ever feel kindly toward her and her people? And did it matter if he did?—Livia went on, “Spencer studies the history of the Noantri, of our people. It’s an odd thing, to have lives as long as ours but no sense of continuity as a people, no shared history, until a few hundred years ago. I could introduce you to Noantri who rode with Genghis Khan or sailed with Christopher Columbus. Others who helped build the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China. Each of them, for centuries, knew only that he was different from those around him. Knew only guilt and fear as he tried to satisfy hungers over which he had no control. Each knew only his own story, do you understand? Since the Concordat it’s been possible for us to try to bring our stories together. That’s Spencer’s work: to help us begin to understand who we are as a people.”
She stopped abruptly, feeling her cheeks grow hot. She’d never spoken to any of the Unchanged about her people’s history and yearnings, the power of their need for connection, the relief and joy of Community. The few Unchanged outside the inner ranks of the Church who knew about their existence, and the even fewer who were considered friends, were nevertheless rarely presented with any evidence of Noantri misgiving, unhappiness, or doubt.
Livia brushed past Thomas Kelly and started up the curving stone stairs, though she noted as sh
e did that his aversion seemed to have been neutralized, however briefly, by interest, as the scholar in him considered what she’d said.
She led the way up to a landing with a window in the left-side wall and glass-doored cabinets to the right. On the shelves stood ranks of bottles of red, blue, and amber liquids. Most bore labels describing the contents—Perle della Saggezza, Tonico del Missionario—in precise and fading script, though on a few of the more recent ones the labels were the work of that at-the-time cutting-edge technology, the manual typewriter. Livia briefly left Thomas Kelly to his surprised inspection of the shelves and worked on the lock on the door between the cabinets. Kelly didn’t cluck his tongue this time, though he did catch his breath when she got the door open and they walked into the room beyond.
What had taken him by surprise was not, Livia knew, the trompe l’oeil drapery or the aged wooden counter, not the Murano glass bottles or the ceramic jars with their bright painted lids. This was the eighth or ninth time Livia had been in this room, and the glorious aroma that greeted a visitor as the door creaked back was one of the reasons to keep returning.
Thomas Kelly stood in awe, as most first-time visitors did, though Livia knew he couldn’t parse the wave of scent as finely as she could: sweet columbine and spicy goldenrod, the faint rankness of deer’s antlers and the astringent bite of arsenic. And so many, many more: the air was a tapestry of olfactory threads, thick and thin, sharp and soft, bile-bitter and honey-sweet. Over two hundred herbs, flowers, leaves and barks, fruit essences and tree saps, ground minerals, cracked bones, and crumbled earths were stored in this room, in drawers, in jars, and in bottles, waiting.
“What is this place?” Kelly breathed.
“The old pharmacy, from the fifteenth century.”
“Is it still in use?”
“Not since 1954.”
“But it looks so complete. So . . . ready.”
She shook her head. “When it closed, the last apothecary monks just locked the door and walked away. Their order had been pharmacists to the Popes for six hundred years. I think they didn’t really believe they’d never be called on again.”
Now Kelly turned to her. “You think. You knew those monks, didn’t you? In 1954. You were here.”
Livia faced him, calmly but squarely. “I’d moved away for a time, before the Second World War. We have to, every now and then, no matter how committed we may be to our hometowns. We stay away for years and change our identities before we return. We call it ‘Cloaking.’ It’s our own kind of internal exile, and it’s hard on us. But yes, by then I was back.”
Once again, she’d told him more than she’d meant to. She braced for his shudder, even a curled lip of disgust; but to her surprise, they didn’t come. Nor did a kind smile, or sympathetic eyes, but those would have been too much to ask. Kelly just nodded, as though an academic hypothesis had been confirmed, and returned his gaze to the room.
Above the counter where the apothecary friars had traded herbs and elixirs for customers’ coins, a painted angel peered over the trompe l’oeil curtains. He was there, a monk had once told her, to ensure honest dealing.
39
Jorge Ocampo was running like the wind. He shouldn’t, he knew. Anna said he must never let the Unchanged see the extent of his Noantri abilities. Their minds were small and they would get frightened; they would shun him, perhaps even attack him, if they felt him to be vastly different from themselves. She assured him they couldn’t harm him if they did attack: any pain would be transitory, and in the centuries since the Concordat the Unchanged had lost the understanding of the effects of fire. Still, she said, if Jorge were to arouse suspicion, he would become less valuable to her. That was an alarming thought, but still he sped around the corner at Vicolo del Piede until he reached his goal: the abandoned cinema. The startled gasps as he raced past (“Madonna! Did you see that guy?”) would reduce his value to Anna less, he was sure, than being identified as the man responsible for what had happened in Santa Maria della Scala.
The old theater sagged and creaked in the shade of the vines that colonized its flanks. That Vicolo del Piede was never busy was one of the reasons Jorge had chosen this place for his private hideaway. Even Anna didn’t know he came here. The street was empty now, as usual, no one to see him leap onto a sill and slip through a half-open window.
Immediately, as it always did, the still darkness of the derelict interior quieted Jorge’s heart. His Noantri eyes adjusted immediately to the low light that seeped through the few filthy, cracked windows, but even if they hadn’t that would have been all right; he knew every inch of this theater. No films had been shown at Il Pasquino for a decade, but as so often happened in Rome, though the building was now useless it had not been demolished. It had merely been abandoned, as those who’d loved it had moved on to something new.
Anna. He had to call Anna. What would he say? He had to tell her the truth, but he so dreaded her inevitable fury—Anna could detonate with an incendiary heat, just like an Argentinian girl—that though he forced himself to take out his cell phone, he couldn’t, for a moment, go further. He gripped the phone tightly and sat where he always did: third row, right side, on the aisle, the seat he’d taken every chance he’d had at any of the movie houses on Avenida Corrientes, back home. Before he’d gotten involved with his brothers of La Guerra Sucia, before he’d met Anna and become part of an even bigger revolutionary movement, Jorge’s happiest hours had been spent in the dark theaters of Buenos Aires. Even with the torn upholstery and the spiders and the musty smell, even with no film to watch on the ripped and mildewed screen, Jorge felt more at home in Il Pasquino than anywhere else in Rome.
Oh, how he wanted to go home. He yearned for the day when Anna’s plans were accomplished and they could fly off to Argentina, finally together, with only each other to think about. Anna would always be concerned with the welfare of the Noantri, of course, and he would always support her in her efforts on behalf of her people. Their people! How many times had she reprimanded him, reminded him that he was Noantri, too, now and forever? But once the last obstacle to Noantri rule had been removed, he and Anna would be free to change their priorities, to trade this necessary work of freedom fighting for the joy of each other’s arms.
And though he’d made a bad mistake today, Anna would know how to fix it. She’d give him new instructions, he’d carry them out faithfully, and her plans would not really be disrupted. They’d continue on their path to victory, and home.
Feeling much calmer now, he lifted his phone.
40
Anna Jagiellon threw her phone into her shoulder bag as though to dash it to pieces against the rocks inside. Of course there were no rocks and the phone nestled comfortably next to her makeup kit. She really shouldn’t be blaming the phone, anyway, just because that idiot simpering Argentinian was always on the other end. What a mistake he was. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, making Jorge Ocampo Noantri. He already followed her around like a puppy dog, the skinny premed student (premed, because Che had been a doctor: always one for hero worship, Jorge) enraptured by the fiery foreigner. Her Hungarian heritage, which she’d alternately hidden and revealed as she cycled through identities in the years she’d spent in Argentina, had been on full display at the university at the moment Juan Perón returned to power in 1973. They’d all been Communists, all the hottest boys and fiercest girls, out to change the world, and Anna was ever their most articulate organizer, their bravest leader. Oh, the slogans she’d written, the speeches she’d made! On the streets she’d marched and chanted and then, with the others—as though such things could harm her—fled from the tear gas and the bullets down backstreets and twisting alleys. In smoky rooms packed with eager, sweating young bodies, all leaning forward to hear her, to see her, she’d shown them the beauty of the world that could be, the world being kept from them by the rich and the powerful.
They were fools, of course, bu
t that wasn’t their fault. The Unchanged, Anna had found, only grew into anything resembling wisdom as they neared their own deaths. Not that it was the approaching obliteration that brought about understanding. Quite the contrary, it was, simply, the years. Wisdom took decades to bloom, and most of the Unchanged were not allotted anything like sufficient time. That might be sad, but it was true. Anna’s fellow Party members, her comrade leaders and her wide-eyed followers, were fools because they were young.
• • •
Anna had also been young, many years ago, when John Zapolya ascended to the throne of Hungary and Anna was torn from the life that was rightfully hers. Silk and velvet, meat and wine and music, were replaced overnight by sackcloth and filth, coarse bread and foul water. Though she was her father’s natural, not legitimate, child, Anna was nevertheless the only remaining heir to the house of Jagiellon, and as such had, of course, to be exterminated. The golden-haired daughter of the soon-to-be extinguished royal line was thrown into a stinking cell where her wishes meant nothing and her degradation was complete.
Until what she thought was to be her final night on earth, with her execution scheduled for dawn. The priest had come to hear her confession in her last hours. Anna had refused to speak to him. They had been a devout family, hearing Mass daily in the palace chapel, taking Holy Communion. Her father was the patron of the monastery on the hill. That the God they’d worshipped with such certainty had allowed this carnage and desolation, and that one of his priests was now offering Anna forgiveness—no, no, the man should be on his knees, begging her for hers! She’d turned away stonily, and he’d crept out, and Anna waited in exhausted relief for the dawn and her release from this hell.