by Sam Cabot
He considered issuing himself a reprimand for his cynical attitude but decided he had a right to it.
Inside the church Thomas’s eyes had to adjust once again to the dimness while Pietro headed without pause down the center aisle. Unlike Santa Maria della Scala, he and Pietro didn’t have this basilica practically to themselves. A few scattered worshippers were kneeling or sitting quietly in pews, and one or two stood in side chapels lighting candles, while dozens of visitors, some with guidebooks, some without, prowled the splendid aisles.
Now capable of seeing, Thomas hurried after Pietro, passing between rows of columns of which no two were alike. They’d come from Roman and even Egyptian buildings, he recalled his art history lecturer saying, and he remembered thinking at the time that this reuse of structural elements was a physical manifestation of the supplanting of pagan thoughts and fears by the sheltering truth his faith offered. Resolutely, he turned his gaze away from the columns and from the astounding ceiling with its gold coffers and devotional paintings, there to remind the flock what awaited them in heaven above if only their faith, while they remained below, stayed strong.
Refusing equally to think about the implications of that and to allow himself another cynical interior remark, Thomas stepped to Livia Pietro’s side. She stood at a marble railing supported on open stone grillwork; the railing bore a stone plaque. Fons Olei, the bronze letters read, marking the spot where, two thousand years before, the miracle responsible for the basilica’s existence had occurred. Oil had bubbled up out of the ground here. According to legend, the Jewish residents of Trastevere had recalled an ancient prophecy and hailed the flow as a sign, a herald of the appearance of the Messiah. A few decades later word came from Bethlehem that a Virgin had brought forth a Son; there followed tales of signs and miracles, and later of the Son’s sacrifice for love of his Father’s flock. The nascent Church declared the prophecy of the oil fulfilled. The building in which it had occurred—by then a social club for retired Roman soldiers—was recognized as sanctified ground, razed, and rebuilt to the glory of the Lord.
That the oil was now understood to have been petroleum, a substance unknown to the locals at the time but not uncommon in the area, and that the ancient Jewish prophecy appeared to be a back-formation of which no trace could be found before the bubbling of the oil, had never bothered Thomas before this.
Pietro turned to Thomas. “‘Fons Olei,’” she said. “We’re here. What now?”
“It’s astounding how you people keep expecting me to know what to do next.”
She pursed her lips. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I was less expecting than hoping, actually.”
In Latin it’s the same word, he thought, but didn’t speak, just squatted and fingered the bronze letters, feeling around their edges. Maybe something had been slipped behind one; but Pietro had apparently had the same thought and already discarded it. “Those letters are too new. They were put there after Damiani’s time. You can tell by the typeface.”
Thomas could tell no such thing, but she was the expert. Still on his haunches, he examined the marble railing. He ran his gaze along the floor’s intricate mosaics, seeking a break in the pattern, a hidden instruction. Nothing presented itself as a hiding place, with one exception: the open stone grillwork on which the railing rested. Behind it, the steps to the altar rose. A piece of paper shoved through the grillwork would have fallen to the floor and could count on resting in that lightless cavern until the entire basilica crumbled to dust. Or until the paper rotted away from mold and damp. Or was devoured by dark-dwelling beetles. From the experience Thomas could claim of Mario Damiani—limited but intense—sliding the next poem, if that’s what they were here for, through the grillwork to lie in the dirt was far too slapdash a choice.
Nevertheless, he pressed his face to one of the openings, for a closer look. He felt Pietro kneel beside him, heard her rummage in her bag, and suddenly the area under the steps was illuminated by a bright light. Pietro peered through an opening beside him as he searched the cavern with methodical care.
It was totally, completely empty.
Thomas stuck his hand through the railing anyway. He felt around: perhaps there was a way to fasten something, attach the paper to the back of the grillwork. If so, he’d have to search behind every opening, a tedious process at best. But the masons had been conscientious. The rear side of the stone, though never intended to be seen, was polished to as smooth a finish as the front.
Thomas stood slowly and Pietro straightened up beside him.
“I thought you could see in the dark,” he said, unhappily belligerent.
“Better than you. But light always helps.”
He saw her drop her cell phone back into her bag.
“That’s not a flashlight,” he said uselessly.
“On the iPhone. It’s an app.” She zipped the bag. “You can’t really be as disgusted as you look. That a Noantri would have the newest technology?”
With a pang of guilt Thomas realized what he’d been doing. Ruefully grateful she hadn’t taken his bait, he said, almost by way of apology, “Some people think it all comes from the devil anyway. There’s nothing here. What are we going to do?”
Pietro looked around, as though hoping for inspiration from the columns, the ceiling, the swirling patterned Cosmatesque floors. Doing that, she reminded Thomas of someone, and then he realized: himself.
“Is it possible Damiani didn’t mean this church?” she asked.
“No.” Thomas shook his head. “‘Fragrant, flowing oil.’ This is the place.”
“But the oil . . . If he was leading us to the oil . . .”
Thomas stared at the bronze letters, and then spun to look at her. “There’s no oil here. There was. There once was. But if he was leading us to the oil, he didn’t mean here.”
“But we just agreed, he had to mean here. This church.”
“Basilica. This basilica. But not here.” Rapidly, he turned and started up the aisle, pausing at each side chapel, glancing inside. Pietro didn’t ask what he was looking for, just trotted beside him. He reached the narthex and gazed at the front wall, then turned to cross to the left-side aisle. He stopped before he’d taken a step. There it was. Across the narthex, in the side wall, maybe ten feet above the floor, a small golden door in a carved stone frame. Pietro followed his gaze.
“What is it?” she asked.
“An aumbry. A lot of older churches have them but they’re not used anymore. This one might not have been opened for years.” He barked a humorless laugh. “I’d have said, ‘not within living memory,’ but—”
“What’s in it?”
Right. Serious. This was all serious. “Chalices and other requisites for administering the sacraments. Sacraments like the anointing of the sick.” He turned to her. “Requisites like holy oil.”
47
Livia stared in wonder at Thomas Kelly. An aumbry. She’d never even heard of an aumbry.
Thomas Kelly turned away from her look to focus, with a frown, on the golden door set high above their heads. He clearly saw the location as an obstacle.
She didn’t.
“Father,” she said, “it’ll take me two minutes if it’s locked, one if it’s not. Can you give me that?”
“What are you—” The priest’s face darkened. He glanced at the offering box at shoulder height directly under the golden door. “You can’t be serious.”
“If it will hold me.”
“No. No, that’s—” He stopped himself. “What am I worried about? Such a minor desecration.” His sarcastic tone made it clear the words weren’t intended for her. After a moment’s pause, Thomas Kelly, looking as though his stomach hurt, turned and walked across the narthex and back up the right-side aisle.
He fell. The priest tripped and plowed into a group of tourists, nearly knocking one man over, clumsily recovering, tripping aga
in in his attempt to aid the man and his flummoxed friends. Voices were raised in apology and forgiveness, Thomas Kelly was straightening the man’s coat, and then a small exclamation, more apology, and three people in the group fell to their knees. They weren’t, Livia realized, praying. They were attempting to recover the contents of a purse knocked away in the confusion.
She looked around. The raised voices and flailing arms had claimed the attention of most people in the church. Good, but it wouldn’t last. This leap was higher than the last one she’d made, and the landing area was a nine-inch box. A stretch even for a Noantri, but what choice did she have? She lightly vaulted up, prepared for the box to give, but it didn’t. Balancing herself, she reached to test the golden door. She was ready with her pick and shim but the door wasn’t locked. Well, really, ten feet above the floor in a basilica, why would it be? She eased it open.
Inside: a pearly marble niche, a shallow gold shelf, a graceful Murano glass flask of pale yellow oil.
And nothing else.
How could this be? Were they wrong? No, she heard Spencer’s voice in her head. This is just too Mario to be wrong.
Then what?
The glass flask, the gold shelf, the marble niche. The glass was clear, the oil was pure, the shelf sat firmly on the pearl gray marble.
Except behind the flask the marble wasn’t gray.
There, it was black. And it didn’t look like marble.
She reached in and removed the stoppered flask with her left hand, taking care not to spill the holy oil. With her other hand she felt the niche’s rear wall. No, not stone. Leather. Wedged into the niche, almost the exact dimensions of the rear wall. An unobservant priest replenishing the holy oil would never notice it. She ran a finger around the edge, found a raised corner, peeled it gently toward her. It came away easily.
It was a book cover. Matching exactly the front cover of Damiani’s poetry notebook.
Fluttering out from behind it came a single sheet of now-familiar paper.
48
Thomas heard a shout. He whipped around in time to see Livia Pietro, paper and something else in hand, leap down from the offering box, shove a ten-Euro note in it, and dash out the basilica’s door. The aumbry was open, the holy oil sitting untroubled within. Three men, clearly more troubled, gave chase, tearing after Pietro while voices echoed around the church in confusion and in umbrage. Thomas’s little commotion was suddenly so sixty seconds ago.
Now, if someone steals something from a basilica, shouldn’t a priest chase after her? The same as if she steals from, oh, say, the Vatican Library? With a final shamefaced smile to the people he’d been bouncing off of, Thomas ran out the door.
The three chasing men were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Pietro. There was no way they would catch her, Thomas was sure. She could probably fly, or something. No, of course she couldn’t. She could run very fast, was all.
What, Thomas? You’re starting to buy the nothing-supernatural-about-it line? Careful there.
Well, whether or not she was supernatural, he wasn’t. He had complete confidence that her pursuers wouldn’t find her. But could he? A cold fear struck him: What if they’d been wrong about how many missing poems they needed to lead them to the Concordat? What if the paper she’d just found was the final one? If she’d realized it would take her to the document and she didn’t need him anymore? If so, she’d find it on her own and deliver it to her Conclave. To her people. And Lorenzo?
Lorenzo would be condemned.
Thomas stood in the piazza, staring around helplessly. Resolute tourists headed into the basilica while indolent locals strolled toward cafés. Pigeons swooped in to perch on the fountain. A little white dog barked at a big black one, which looked down with amused disdain. Nothing offered a clue to Pietro’s course.
Thomas’s heart sank.
Against it, in his breast pocket, his phone began to vibrate.
He almost dropped it fumbling it out. A local number that he didn’t recognize. Lorenzo’s abductors? He thumbed it on and practically shouted, “Thomas Kelly!”
“I know that, Father. Are you coming?”
For a moment Thomas couldn’t speak. “I— Professoressa?”
“Try to call me ‘Livia.’ I’m on Via dei Fienaroli, just past where it intersects with Via della Cisterna. Can you find that?”
“I’m— I will. Stay there. Don’t leave!”
“If I were going to leave,” he heard her sigh, “why would I have called you?”
49
At the sound of the door latch Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa turned from the open window. Jonah Richter stood on the threshold, golden hair tousled, hands in his trouser pockets, wearing that confident grin Lorenzo despised. Truth be told, there was nothing about the man Lorenzo didn’t despise. Starting with the fact that he wasn’t a man.
Richter took a few steps into the room, but, as though he were humoring Lorenzo, did not closely approach. “Don’t you find it chilly with all the windows open?”
“This room reeks of your kind.”
“So strange—before you knew I was Noantri, you didn’t complain that I smelled. My stench seems to have arisen simultaneously with your knowledge. What do you make of that?”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve come to report the hunt is going well.”
Lorenzo didn’t answer.
“It seems,” Richter went on, “that Mario Damiani was a complicated fellow. The trail’s longer than it appeared. My historian and your priest have been to two churches and they’re on their way to a third.”
“What are they finding?” Lorenzo asked in spite of himself.
“I’m not sure. My people can’t get that close without being detected by Livia.”
Lorenzo turned his back on Richter to gaze out the window again. The room was on the top floor of a building on the Janiculum Hill, and the view was grand. “There. As I said: you stink.”
Richter actually laughed. “We can, in fact, detect one another by scent, but we don’t feel about it the way you seem to. In any case—” He stopped as his cell phone rang. Lorenzo turned again to face him as Richter answered it and listened. His cheeriness faded into a thoughtful frown. “Thank you,” he said, and clicked off. “I have to go,” he told Lorenzo.
“Why, is this brilliant scheme malfunctioning?”
“Probably not. But a Noantri who isn’t one of my people has been spotted twice in the vicinity of Livia and Kelly. I’d like to know what’s going on.”
“You can’t even trust one another, is that it?”
Richter laughed again. “And you princes and priests of the Church—you can?”
He shut the door behind himself, the latch clicking loudly into place. Lorenzo stood looking where Richter had gone; then he turned once more to the open window and lit a cigar.
50
It took longer than it probably should have for Thomas to arrive at Via dei Fienaroli. That was the fault of the first man he’d asked, who helpfully gave detailed, incorrect directions. Via dei Fienaroli, in fact, was right around the corner from the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and it intersected Via della Cisterna another fifty yards along. Via dei Fienaroli was a street so narrow it had no sidewalks. The doors of the shadowed, ancient houses opened directly to the road.
On which, when Thomas got there, no one could be seen.
Of course. She’d sent him on a wild-goose chase. She needed to make sure he couldn’t follow her. It wasn’t enough that she was an unnatural demon and he just a man, that this city was her home and he had trouble finding his way around it, that she had an entire Community surrounding and supporting her while he was alone with a secret he desperately wished he didn’t know, that—
“Father Kelly?”
Not two feet beyond him a battered green door had opened. In the doorway stood a thin young woman
with serious eyes and black curly hair. She wore loose white pants and a T-shirt, both of them streaked and splattered with paint, plus a blue stripe on one bare arm and, disarmingly, a smudge on the side of her nose. Smiling, she said, “Father, please come in. Livia’s upstairs. I’m Ellen Bird. I’d shake your hand, but I’ve been told you’d probably rather I didn’t.”
Her English was American, with a New York tinge. For a moment Thomas felt so relieved, so practically at home, that he began to give her a big answering smile. Then he realized what she must mean about not shaking his hand.
He stepped back. “Are you—” Seriously, Thomas? What exactly are you going to ask her and how are you going to explain the question if the answer’s no?
The answer, however, was not no. “Am I Noantri? Yes. Please come in.”
Thomas stared at Ellen Bird. Her curls, her clear skin, her easy air: she might have been one of his undergraduates. This woman was Noantri? A—go ahead and say it, Thomas—a vampire? There was nothing threatening about her. She seemed to be nothing more—or less—than a young American (judging from the paint smudges, an artist) trying her luck in Rome. Not at all like Spencer George, about whom Thomas had gotten an ill feeling from the moment they met. Of course, he reflected, that could have been because the man was arrogant, hostile, and snide. He’d known priests like that whom he hadn’t liked any better. Livia Pietro, on the other hand, could be maddeningly manipulative, confusing, and pushy, but even once he knew what she was, she emanated no air of menace. And this Ellen Bird seemed refreshingly straightforward.