The Genesis Code

by John Case

  Every so often, the gloom went nova as a bolt of lightning skittered through the sky. Suddenly, the courtyard was as brightly lighted as a stage, and for a long moment he could see the rain drumming on the puddled surfaces, the wet walls gleaming, the faint shapes of the buildings beyond. As the lightning faded, a thunderclap exploded, so loud it seemed to shake the room, its baritone rumble taking a long time to fade.

  Lassiter listened to the rain’s hiss, rattled the ice in his glass, and thought about what he knew and what he didn’t know. Children conceived at a fertility clinic in Italy were being murdered. By a religious fanatic. Who seemed to be working for a strange Catholic cult called Umbra Domini.

  But how, exactly, was Umbra Domini involved? That Bepi had been investigating the group when he was killed was suggestive, but so what? He might not have been Bepi’s only client, Lassiter told himself. Bepi was undoubtedly involved in a lot of things. As for the beating in Naples, Lassiter suspected that della Torre was responsible – but once again, so what? There was no evidence of that responsibility, only his own suspicion. And then there were the holy-water bottles that Grimaldi and della Torre carried. As curious as that was, it proved nothing. Maybe the bottles were given to Umbra Domini’s most devout followers, the ‘Blues.’ Maybe the water had been blessed . . . by della Torre or the Pope. Maybe it came from Lourdes. In any case, so what?

  Which left the wire transfer.

  The purpose of the money – and it was a lot of money – was unknown. It might have had to do with Grimaldi’s work for Salve Caelo, buying guns or bribing Serbs. But that was a stretch. The wire transfer took place immediately prior to what had become a string of infanticides. The fact that the murders followed hard on the heels of the wire transfer didn’t prove that the one caused the other. What was the fallacy? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc – after the fact, therefore because of it. Still . . .

  Lassiter sipped his scotch, savoring its smoky, almost medicinal, flavor. He knew a lot more than he’d known a month ago, but it still came to the same basic question: Why?

  That, he still didn’t know – and, worse, he couldn’t imagine why anyone, much less a religious person, would go on a killing spree, targeting children. He had no theory, not one.

  As for Umbra Domini, why would a religious order – no matter how reactionary – make war on children? The cult’s pamphlets spoke out against modern reproductive technologies, and a lot more, but that was hardly an incentive to murder. Something else was involved, something darker. But what?

  The night pulsed. Lightning sizzled and, once again, thunder rattled the room. Lassiter paced before the windows, sipping his drink. Whatever the answer was, the most likely place to find it was at the Clinica Baresi. Which meant a flight to Rome in the morning, a rental car, and a three-hour drive to Montecastello. He’d book a room at the Pensione Aquila and take it from there.

  Retrieving his computer from the closet, Lassiter wrote some memos to himself about the Henderson and Peña murders, fleshing out the notes that he’d made on paper. He stored the file to the hard disc, encrypted it, connected the hotel’s phone to the computer’s modem, and sent the file back to the computer in his house. Then an E-mail to Judy, telling her where to reach him for the next few days.

  It was almost three-thirty by the time Lassiter drove through the medieval gates of Todi – a lovely and prosperous town perched on a steep hill above the Umbrian plain. He’d been told that he could find a map of the area at the tourist office, just off the main square, and so he headed for it, following the signs for Centro. Chased by an impatient taxi, he hurtled up and down a series of increasingly narrow streets until, in the end, he emerged in the Piazza del Popolo.

  This was a vast expanse of gray stone, surrounded by a thirteenth-century palazzi constructed of the same material. Lassiter drove past a cluster of tables to a cliff-side parking lot that looked north toward Perugia.

  An attendant in a green uniform asked him for money. Lassiter shrugged and, like the dumbest tourist, allowed the man to pick lira bills out of his hand. The man took six hundred lira, then delicately pinched a hundred-lira note between two battered fingers. He raised his eyebrows and pointed to his chest. Lassiter understood – a tip – and nodded. The attendant wrote what seemed like a lot of information on a small slip of white paper and stuffed it under the windshield wipers.

  ‘Tourist bureau?’ Lassiter asked.

  ‘Ahhhh, si,’ the man said. ‘Si, si.’ Whereupon he launched himself into a three-minute peroration of rapid-fire Italian that culminated in a snakelike movement of his wrist. ‘Shu, shu, shu,’ he said, turning his palm toward the sky in a gesture of presentation. ‘Ecco!’

  It amazed Lassiter that after following these directions, which in fact he had not understood, he arrived directly at the door of the tourist office. The woman in charge spoke little or no English, but she understood what he wanted – and then some. Moving quickly from one wooden filing cabinet to another, she gave him a detailed map of Umbria, a map of Todi and environs – including Montecastello – a list of festivals, a small poster with the city’s coat of arms, and four postcards of the region.

  Lassiter thanked her and, taking a pen and paper from her desk, wrote out the words: Clinica Baresi – Montecastello?

  Seeing what he’d written, the woman frowned and entered upon an elaborate pantomime, her hands swooping up toward the ceiling, then crossing each other and sweeping to the side. She coughed and wiped her eyes. ‘Pouff!’ she said.

  Lassiter had no idea what she was trying to say, but he smiled and pretended to understand. ‘Si, si,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  The woman gave him a skeptical look, but shrugged, and efficiently marked his map, showing both the route to the clinic and a second route to the Pensione Aquila. She marked each location with an asterisk, and handed the map back with a ‘Buona sera.’

  Lassiter reclaimed his car from the man in the green uniform, unfolded the map on the passenger seat, and set out in the direction indicated. The road took him down the hill, then out through the gate and into the countryside. After a dozen switchbacks, he found himself on flat ground, running beside a narrow river.

  Five miles farther on, he arrived at the central landmark, an Agip gas station. The river was barely fifty feet wide in this spot, but his map identified it as the mighty Tiber, and a sign on the bridge gave its name in Italian: Tevere.

  Turning left, he drove a few miles farther, until he passed a nest of blue Dumpsters, and then a tree plantation. It was strange to see trees like that, planted as a crop, in tidy lines. Beyond the trees was a fork in the road. Lassiter pulled to the side of the road and consulted his map. To the right was Montecastello, a walled village clinging to a dome of rock, eight or nine hundred feet above the valley floor. He recognized it from the postcard on Kara Baker’s refrigerator – which, in fact, seemed to have been shot from somewhere nearby.

  The left fork was the one that the woman had marked on the map. And so he followed it up a gentle rise, past cornfields in winter stubble, groves of olive trees, and a few modest houses.

  And then he arrived. On the left were a pair of massive stone pillars, their centers filled with dead vegetation. A sign lettered in elegant cursive swung from a wrought-iron arm: Clinica Baresi. Tall, thin cedars lined the long pebble drive that curled up an incline. He drove past the pillars, and half a mile farther on crested the hill.

  Then he saw the building, and it was like a blow to the heart.

  If the building hadn’t been made of the same gray stone as the pillars down the road, there would have been nothing left but blackened rubble. Which, of course, is what the woman at the tourist bureau had been trying to tell him.

  Smoke. Fire. Pouff!

  In so far as it was possible for a building made of stone to burn, the Clinica Baresi had burned to the ground. Where the heat had cracked the mortar, the stones slid to earth in blackened heaps, so that on the right side of the building, nothing was left but a gray
chimney surrounded by scorched debris. The west side was more or less intact – but open to the sky. Roofless, and with its windows and doors blown out by the fire, the clinic seemed like a much older ruin than it actually was.

  He stepped out of the car and gaped.

  The sight of the burned clinic reminded him of that first terrible morning, his arrival at Kathy’s house, the smell of scorched plastic and metal. He could exactly recall the house as he’d first seen it, a charred wreck of burnt timbers and snarled, blackened metal.

  The sight of the burned clinic also reminded him of Brandon’s exhumed grave. The police had done their best, but he remembered the residue that remained. The fallen headstone, the flowers churned into the dirt, a few streaks of soot against the raw red earth, a scatter of black ash . . .

  A tide of gooseflesh rippled up each arm and raced across his shoulders, colliding at the back of his neck. He felt an icy sizzle down the length of his spine, and then a helpless feeling. Sinking back against the car, he let its weight support him. It seemed to Lassiter that everywhere he turned for answers, he found scorched earth.

  And now, with the Clinica Baresi reduced to ruins, his investigation might as well be over. Finally, he had a lead, something that linked his sister’s death to the others. It was the lowest common denominator of the case, and now it, too, had been factored out by fire.

  With a sinking feeling, Lassiter listened to his own sigh. He was losing heart. It was as simple as that. For the first time since his sister’s death, he was beginning to doubt that he’d ever learn why she and Brandon had been killed.

  He drove unsteadily back to the spot where the road split, and turned left, heading up the hill to Montecastello and the Pensione Aquila. The sun had just begun to set, and from a distance the town looked fortresslike against the flaming sky.

  Gently, at first, and then steeply, the road began to climb, ascending in a graceful spiral to the walled town at the top of the hill. Shifting from third to second, and second to first, he kept an eye on the car’s slowly rising temperature gauge. After ten long minutes he reached a level area just outside the walls of the town. Cars going the other way were tapping their brakes.

  He was in a sort of outdoor waiting room for the town. A few houses clung to the hillside at the edge of a small park, a piney place where women sat in the shade beside a pretty fountain, watching their toddlers. The rest of the level space was devoted to parking, and Lassiter saw that five of the spaces were reserved for the Pensione Aquila. Pulling into one of the slots, he shut off the engine and got out of the car. Nearby, on a rusty metal light pole was a red box with the word MAPA hand-painted in large white letters. He lifted its hinged lid and extracted a stiff card.

  On one side of the card was a hand-drawn map that showed the way to the pensione. On the other side was a sketch in two panels. The first panel depicted a bellboy – striped pants, enormous smile, and a hat inscribed Aquila. The boy was leaving the parking area with two suitcases in each hand and a fifth tucked under his left arm. The second panel showed the bellboy in the lobby of the pensione, executing a low bow before a regal old woman. Nearby, the suitcases waited in a neat row. Lassiter thought it a very efficient communication. But he didn’t need a bellboy.

  Map in hand, he strolled to the edge of the parking area and looked out over the precipice. He could see the dark ribbon of the river winding through the landscape, and off in the distance, the lights of Todi, glittering. From directly below where he stood, he heard the shouts of children and, looking down, was amazed to see a small soccer field. There, a dozen boys were playing six-on-six in the fading light.

  The field clung to the hillside, half attached to the earth, the second half was cantilevered and hanging out into space. The entire field was surrounded by a wall of black netting, supported by metal poles – a clear necessity if balls were to be kept from flying off the mountain.

  Ordinarily, he would have stayed a few minutes to watch, but it was getting dark and he thought he’d better walk to the pensione while he could still see.

  Obviously, cars were not permitted in the town, and when he walked through the arched entryway, he understood why. They wouldn’t fit – anywhere. He walked through a cramped stone tunnel cut through the town’s walls. The tunnel emerged at the foot of the ‘Via Mayore,’ a flight of steep stone steps that led to a medieval ‘street’ so narrow that he could have touched the buildings on either side. Farther on, the little lane tunneled through the ground floor of a gray, stone building – only to emerge in a tiny square on the other side.

  It was all uphill, and Lassiter was breathing hard by the time he saw the brightly painted oval sign, fastened to the stone beside a massive wooden door:

  PENSIONE AQUILA

  He was surprised. Pensiones were usually modest places, but the Aquila was an elegant building, clearly once some kind of small palace.

  The old carved door had a sign reading ‘Enter,’ and he did, stepping into the sparely furnished marble-floored entry hall, noting the tapestries on the walls, a jet-black grand piano, and a few ancient, Oriental rugs. Behind a huge wooden desk – nothing on it but a round metal postcard rack and a leather-bound ledger – sat a man of about fifty. He had curly gray hair and wore a navy-blue blazer with a gold crest. He was almost theatrically handsome.

  ‘Prego?’ the man asked.

  Lassiter approached the desk, still slightly out of breath from the climb. His ribs pulsed with pain. ‘Joe Lassiter,’ he said. He was searching for the Italian word for ‘reservation’ when the man surprised him by speaking English.

  ‘Oh yes. Welcome to the Aquila,’ he said in a British accent. ‘Any more luggage? I can send Tonio.’

  ‘You speak English,’ Lassiter blurted.

  ‘Well . . . yes,’ the man said. ‘Actually, I am English. Originally.’

  ‘Sorry. I was surprised.’

  ‘Most people are. One doesn’t hear the mother tongue much in Montecastello, although . . . in summer . . . we get the spillover from Chiantishire.’

  Lassiter laughed. ‘Tuscany?’

  ‘Ummmm. There, you hear nothing but English – in August, at least.’ He smiled. ‘We don’t generally see many tourists – certainly not in January.’ He hesitated, a genteel pause to allow Lassiter to explain why he’d come to Montecastello at such an unseasonable time of the year. Lassiter returned the man’s smile but made no reply. ‘Well! If you’ll sign the register, and let me have your passport for a few hours . . . I’ll take you to your room.’ He turned the ledger around, opened it to the current page, and offered a pen.

  The fact that the man spoke English was lucky. He might know something about the Clinica Baresi and the doctor who’d run it. But first, Lassiter wanted a shower, and a little time to think.

  He followed the man, who insisted on carrying his suitcase, down a wide corridor. Along the walls were wrought-iron sconces in the shape of eagles, their talons joined to hold fat white candles.

  The room was large, high-ceilinged, and furnished with antiques. The man pointed to a worm-distressed armoire: ‘Telly’s in there.’ However old the room, there were new radiators, and a very modern marble-floored bathroom. There was even a heated towel rack, and a white terry robe hanging on a hook from the door.

  ‘You’re surprised,’ the man said.

  ‘Happy’s more like it,’ Lassiter replied.

  The man inclined his head, then opened a curtained set of French doors that led to a small balcony. They both stepped out onto it. It was dark, except for a faint violet smear on the horizon. ‘If it’s clear, like tonight,’ the man said, ‘you can see Perugia.’ He gestured toward a gauzy blur in the distance. ‘Just there.’

  They stepped back into the room and the man headed toward the door. He hesitated. ‘If you require a fax machine, copy machine, we have one, of course. And if that black bag contains a computer, there’s a surge protector on the outlet near the desk. Also –’ He hesitated. ‘– will you take dinner? To be honest
, unless you’re inclined to drive to Todi or Perugia, you probably won’t do better. We serve at eight.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  By the time they were done with their gnocchi, Lassiter knew quite a bit about Nigel Burlingame – the handsome man who’d registered him – and his companion, Hugh Cockayne. Hugh was fifty or so as well, and as homely as Nigel was handsome. Tall and gangly, he was all nose and ears and thinning hair.

  As Lassiter discovered, they were two gay Oxford lads who’d come to Italy in the sixties to paint. ‘Well, of course,’ Hugh said airily, ‘we were terrible at it, weren’t we, Nige?’

  ‘Dreadful, really.’

  ‘Still, we found each other.’

  For a time they’d lived in Rome, and then, when Nigel’s father had died (‘of apoplexy, I expect’), they’d bought a vineyard in Tuscany.

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ Lassiter said.

  ‘It was worse than the painting,’ Nigel remarked.

  ‘Dusty –’ Hugh said.

  ‘Sweaty –’

  ‘Do you remember the midges?’

  Nigel laughed. ‘Teeth like broken glass!’

  ‘And the viperi!’

  ‘Vipers?’ Lassiter asked.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Hugh replied. ‘Deadly, you know – although everyone has antivenin in the fridge. And they weren’t just on the ground. They’d get up in the vines. Pickers were terrified, weren’t they, Nige?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘I remember giving a tour . . . you know: “And these are our sangiovese grapes. The vines came from blah blah. We planted them in blah blah blah” . . . and I lifted up a handful of grapes and – my God! I was face-to-face with – hold on! – face to what? Face to head?’ Hugh turned to his better-looking half. ‘Does a snake have a face?’

  Instantly, they were off on a discussion of what comprised a ‘face,’ at the end of which Hugh sighed. ‘Well, anyway, that was the vineyard.’

  ‘We were helpless with the field hands,’ Nigel said. ‘I mean, you can imagine. And Tuscany was overrun with ex-pats, so the vineyard went –’