by Tom Fox
Or that was the theory. The reality was that the thoughts he avoided in his office seemed intent on finding him in his sleep, however long he put it off.
He rose from the bed, unbuttoning the sweat-soaked shirt he’d worn through the night, and made his way toward the kitchen and the encouraging prospect of a pot of coffee. Perhaps the caffeine would counteract the pulse he could feel beating against his temples. He hadn’t had a headache like this since seminary.
Must have been a later night than usual. He tossed the shirt aside. General stress or not, it wasn’t a good sign. Alexander couldn’t think of the last time he’d worked himself into such a state of exhaustion that he didn’t undress, or, for that matter, even remember what time he’d come home.
I have to stop this. It’s not healthy. I can’t go on in—
The double buzz of the telephone tore through his self-accusation. His body tensed involuntarily, and an instant later his hand was at the side of his neck, his eyes narrowing from the pain of muscles that were stiff and knotted.
He fumbled his lips around a profanity as he reached for the receiver and pulled it from the wall.
“What?” he blurted on impulse. Then, catching his tone, “Sorry, I just …” He stopped himself. Start over. “This is Alexander Trecchio.”
“Alexander,” said a familiar though not-often-heard voice. Old. Wise. It belonged to a man who was himself old-fashioned and stodgy, yet who had always had the link of adopted family to keep him young in Alexander’s mind. Carlo Molinaro had been one of his uncle’s closest friends, older than the recently deceased cardinal by many years. The man was practically a third grandfather to Alexander, and his post as senior curator of the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, or the Gallery of Maps, in the Vatican Museums meant that Alexander still saw him from time to time when he visited the extraordinary collection, simply to relax and immerse himself in the intangible beauty of history.
But in all the years he’d known him, he had never known Carlo Molinaro to ring him during the night.
“Alexander,” the venerable old man repeated, “you need to get down here right away. Something’s happened.”
Chapter Four
5:05 a.m.
Rain pelted the windows of the small blue Peugeot as Alexander rounded the familiar corner of the Via Leone IV into the Viale Vaticano. The storm this morning was unlike anything he’d seen in Rome for years. Lightning had flashed twice since he’d left his flat on Via Varese, the thunder shaking the road. The tarmac glistened wet and black beneath the street lamps, its sloped edging—still following the design of Roman roads of three thousand years ago—submerged in fast-flowing streams that jostled along toward the sewer drains.
Alexander’s telephone call with Carlo Molinaro had been brief and urgent, quite unlike his family friend’s normal modus operandi. No jokes, nothing of the familiar and stereotyped curmudgeon only too eager to convey, in graphically Old World tones, that he was none too eager to face modernity and its monuments. That fabricated but beloved persona had been entirely absent. Only after he’d hung up had Alexander realized it was 4:15 a.m. Carlo Molinaro, calling Alexander Trecchio, at home, at 4:15 a.m. And the old man hadn’t apologized for the hour. It made his urgency all the more poignant.
Alexander urged his car forward in the drenched early-morning darkness. The coffee and kitsch shops on his right were hours from opening, and on his left the Vatican Museums—always referred to in the plural, as each gallery in the interlinked complex technically constituted a separate museum of the ancient city state—hulked behind its vast stone walls. The ancient ramparts shouted, “Back away!” as much as they teased and tempted, “Come, seek what lies within.”
This morning, the courtyard before those walls was not sleeping.
Alexander pulled his car into a vacant space at the side of the road, his attention now wholly focused on the sea of police-painted Alfa Romeo 159s and Iveco response vans filling the imposing space in front the museums. Normally the courtyard—really little more than an indentation in the wall, providing space beside the road that ringed Vatican City—was the peaceful home only to queues of tourists and the occasional vendor’s cart. Before him this morning, however, blue lights swirled and portable flood lamps whined atop their stilts, giving the whole scene a disturbing, other-worldly pallor. The sun wouldn’t bring its light for hours yet, but modern man had means of his own.
Alexander exited the car and made his way toward the main gate. A uniformed guard—not a police officer, but a member of museum security whom Alexander had seen many times before—stood post. The man was older, post-retirement, with more gray hair than black on his nearly perfectly spherical head, but he was still an imposing figure when he needed to be. He held up a hand as Alexander approached.
“I’m sorry, signore, there’s no one in or out for the time being.”
Alexander gaped around them at the surge of unexpected activity. A forensics van was parked to the side of several smaller cars. Other vehicles, unmarked but obviously law enforcement, were drawn up on the pavement.
He faced the guard. “My name is Alexander Trecchio, a reporter for La Repubblica.” The man tensed visibly at the mention of the press. “My uncle was Cardinal Trecchio,” Alexander added, hoping that the name of the senior member of the Vatican curia, a close friend of the Pope, might curry some favor. Especially as news of the cardinal’s murder was still on the lips of most Romans. The guard, however, was unmoved. “I know one of the curators inside,” Alexander continued. “I received a call at home about twenty minutes ago. He told me to come down.”
“I’m sorry,” the man repeated, wagging his round head. “‘No one’ includes friends of the staff. And it definitely includes reporters.”
Alexander was about to protest, but an older, stooped figure beyond the gate and the yellow tape had spotted him and was walking in his direction. Catching sight of him, Alexander nodded toward the octogenarian frame of Carlo Molinaro, urging the guard’s attention toward the man on the inside.
“It’s all right,” Molinaro announced as he reached the gate. He wore a long coat, entirely soaked and glistening in the electric lights. However long he’d been inside, it hadn’t been long enough to dry off from the rain currently pelting down, and in any case, the short journey from the door was ample to soak him again. He walked with a wooden stick that only in recent years had become a necessity rather than a fashion accoutrement. “You may let him in. He’s here on my instructions.”
The guard grunted, but appeared to consider Molinaro enough of an authority to comply and stand aside. Alexander moved forward, and in a matter of steps had passed beneath the great stone papal seal above the famous entrance, which announced in simple engraved lettering: MVSEI VATICANI.
“Alexander, I’m so glad you’ve come,” Molinaro said nervously, extending a hand. Alexander noticed with surprise that the old man looked unusually haggard—and it was not in the affected style of the disheveled academic for which the senior curator normally strove. He looked wearied, and confused, and shocked.
“I didn’t know how to tell you on the phone,” Molinaro sputtered, his voice at the edge of frantic. “I wasn’t even sure if I should call you at all. I didn’t know who to turn to. But your postcard arrived in my letter box only yesterday. The random power of postal coincidence, I suppose. I still had it on my kitchen table, so your name came to mind when … when this happened.”
Alexander lifted an eyebrow. “My postcard?”
“It was nice of you to think of me, but …” Molinaro’s agitation was visible. “With your involvement in things next door a few months ago, with your uncle, and with your writing to me, I just thought … I thought maybe you’d, you’d …”
“What is it, Carlo? What’s happened?” The familial emotions Alexander had always harbored for the old man were suddenly tugging at him, and he forced his confusion aside. He didn’t like to see Molinaro so upset. He’d never encountered it before.
; The older man’s tone went from frantic to harried in an instant.
“One of our most sacred treasures has been … desecrated.”
He said the word with such pained emotion that Alexander nearly missed the unconscious tightening in his own stomach that came as he took in the response. Almost, but not quite.
“Which treasure?”
The tightening intensified. Alexander felt the unexpected force of dread as he awaited an answer.
“The treasure. The one that towers over all the rest.”
Molinaro spun his graying eyes directly into Alexander’s. An old man’s tears brimmed at their edges.
“Someone has desecrated the Sistine Chapel.”
Chapter Five
5 hours 22 minutes ago
The carotid artery would be accessible on either side of the neck. When the time to confront him came, the man with the slender fingers could therefore take either side as his target, but he had already decided he would take the right. He was right-handed from birth, and the syringe would be easier to control in a familiar grasp.
It meant, though, that when he made his attack, he would have to grab the betrayer with his left hand, which was a risk. He did not know if the man would fight back, or if there was strength in his frame to make for any real resistance if he did. Bastard always wore traditionally conservative clothes—long sleeves and trousers down to tended leather shoes. He’d never seen his arms, so he had no idea of his physique beneath the labels.
Asshole. Deceiver. Betrayer!
He calmed himself. Breathe. It shouldn’t matter. The drug he’d selected was extraordinarily fast-acting. What was required of him was not strength but speed.
The approach, then, would be simple: left arm around the body, coming up from behind. Syringe in the right hand, thumb prepped on the plunger. Slam the needle into the betrayer’s neck, and squeeze.
He could then simply let go. Back away.
Let the other man flail about if he wanted. Let him try to spin, to run and counter-attack. Let him flex whatever muscles he hid beneath those clothes and lunge.
He would never make it more than a few steps.
Chapter Six
5:17 a.m.
Alexander moved through the ornate entryway of the Vatican Museums slowly, his eyes more than normally observant. The subway-like turnstiles had been locked open and he passed through them deftly. He was taken, as always, by the fairly modern entrance into museum wings that housed some of the most astonishing treasures of antiquity. He had been here a hundred times before, coming frequently to visit the collections. Even as a man of no faith—or perhaps more accurately, of a faith that had been lost—he still found the history inspiring.
But he’d never seen the entrance filled with so much law enforcement. He’d never approached the great spiral staircase of Giuseppe Momo, itself a treasure of modern architecture, with one of the institute’s most senior curators walking a step ahead, ashen and mumbling to no one but himself.
As he moved forward beneath the inset ceiling, Alexander could hear the rain pelting down on the stone rooftop high above them. The windows set into the walls rattled in the harshness of the storm, and occasionally the reds, oranges and golds of the painted interior flashed blue and white with the lightning of a different brush.
“To the left, over here.” Molinaro muttered the instruction as if Alexander didn’t know the way perfectly well. The Sistine Chapel was the most famous treasure in a museum filled with famous treasures. Whether one came for the Borgia Apartments, the paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael, the statue halls or the famous galleries of maps that Molinaro himself curated, everyone—everyone—stopped to see the chapel. When they could avoid the scrutiny of the guards, they lay on the floor and took pictures of its ceiling, awestruck beneath images that were amongst the most famous in the world. They saw Adam’s finger reaching out to touch the finger of God. They mused at how much smaller, how much further away it was than they’d expected. The chapel affected everyone. It was one of those rare treasures that, no matter how much it was hyped, always lived up to—and exceeded—expectations.
“Just beyond them,” Molinaro muttered again, motioning toward a wall of men standing in the square narthex that preceded entry into the Sistine Chapel itself. The doors that were famously bound and locked during papal conclaves were open, the way blocked instead by the huddled officials. They all had their backs to Alexander and Carlo as they approached.
“Let us through, let us through!” Molinaro commanded loudly, his voice old and stern and accustomed to authority. He approached the center of the line of men and pushed them aside. Their reaction was unpleasant, but they recognized Molinaro and accommodated the demand.
Alexander stepped forward. The equipment-stocked vests of the Polizia di Stato at his sides bulged, flexing with the accoutrements of the authority they bore.
And there were guns.
He paused at the sight of the only-too-familiar weapons he so despised. He’d grown to loathe them more over the experiences of the past months. He could still feel the trigger beneath his finger, the coldness of the metal in his palm …
But he hadn’t been expecting an armed force here, of all places. Why in God’s name would there be firearms officers in a chapel? In the chapel?
Just what was going on here?
“Alexander!” Molinaro called him back to attention and beckoned him forward. taking a step aside.
And then Alexander froze.
Before him, by means his mind could not comprehend, was a scene he felt certain he had seen before.
Chapter Seven
5:22 a.m.
The Sistine Chapel was as majestic as always. Haunting. Inspiring. But what stopped Alexander’s heart was the vision that faced him on its far wall.
The largest painting in the whole room, perhaps one of Michelangelo’s most famous works, The Last Judgment, was covered in blood. Rising from floor to ceiling, the Renaissance masterpiece had been defiled. Blood had been daubed and flung upon it in grotesque arrangements.
It dripped down the frescoed walls.
It was smeared on to the eyes of saints and sinners who were being parted to the left and right of a radiant Christ.
It flowed from the tips of their exquisitely painted fingertips.
But there was more. There was blood—so much of it—covering the stone altar table that stood beneath the monumental painting.
Alexander stood frozen to the spot. The peals of thunder high above accentuated the explosions of disbelief pounding in his head.
The table is red. He could not take his eyes away, the sight horrifyingly, incomprehensibly familiar. The altar’s normally white front surface looked almost as if it had been painted, blood smeared across its every inch in wide strokes.
My eyes aren’t deceived. My heart thumps inside me.
The familiar scene is red, dripping with blood.
The dim lighting gave the scene a mysterious air, the officers having apparently ordered that nothing—including the chapel’s light switches—be touched until Forensics could gather prints and other evidence. Hand-held torches, however, were gradually being switched off as larger stand-alone lamps were brought in to flood the room with a more powerful illumination. The Sistine Chapel’s artistry, some of the most recognizable in the world, began to brighten its way out of the shadows.
Alexander swallowed. How could this be? How had he seen this before?
He finally managed a step, the act of forcing his leg up and forward requiring an almost Herculean effort. The altar came closer.
He’d kept his eyes squarely on the center of the altar’s front surface, assiduously avoiding looking up. His peripheral vision could already sense something atop the table, however, and in the frightening absoluteness of his memory, Alexander already knew what it was.
He forced his gaze to the top edge. There, perched on its flat surface, was a human hand.
The thunder pealed, a flash of bright lightning pr
eceding it by a millisecond, piercing the early-morning blackness. The whole scene went electric blue for an instant that was gone as fast as it came.
When was the last time we had such a storm in central Rome? Alexander thought, irrationally, given the far deeper concerns facing him. It seemed almost stereotypical, as if anything could be in these circumstances. A cliché in a scene that had no precedent. Then, in another instant, the equally irrational Why isn’t Gabriella here with me?
Then there was only the hand. It sat upon the altar showing every evidence of the violence by which it had been severed from its body. The flesh at the wrist was mangled and torn, the bone beneath jagged, fragmented. The fingers were curled inwards, forming a loose fist.
Alexander took another pace forward, uncomprehending. His bedraggled looks and mystified expression were attracting the glances of the officers closest to the altar, but Carlo Molinaro, though himself baffled at the younger man’s suddenly strange behavior, held out his stick and kept them at bay as Alexander gained another step.
He could smell the blood now, tinged with iron, strangely sweet in the air. He had seen blood in such quantity only once before, in a dark corridor of the Apostolic Palace, staining the robes of a pope and pouring from the wounds of the woman he loved. He was repulsed by the familiarity of its sickening scent.
“… unclear how the perpetrator broke through the chapel’s security.” The conversation of the officers nearest to him gradually wafted into Alexander’s consciousness. “There are a number of different systems in place. Pressure sensors. Temperature. It’s a highly secure space.”
“What’s the way through?” another officer asked the first.
“Specialized knowledge, and a pretty damned extensive skill set.”
“Someone had to know what they were doing.”
“Absolutely. We’re talking a pro. But still, they had gaps. One alarm system wasn’t on their radar: the pressure platform on top of the altar table itself.”