by David Perry
He awoke with a start. He could tell without attempt at movement that his hands and feet were bound, tightly. The numbness from lack of blood to his extremities was proof enough. His head, however, he could move. At first, he thought that the sickly- sweet mask was still over his face, but then he realized that his eyes were open. Slowly, his sight adjusted to the darkness. Like a lifting mist, his prison revealed itself, dank, dark, wet, and empty. Every second allowed him to make out its outline. A drip of water echoed in the chamber. With no competition for sound, it ricocheted like a bullet against the walls. He was sitting in a chair, wooden it seemed from the creaking it gave beneath his squirms, but the floor was metal, a hollow, vibrating thud confirming its composition. To his left and right was an iron railing and beyond, a circular stairway of stone ascending into nothingness. He twisted his neck, with no little discomfort, to look around. A dim and moss-covered emergency light next to the floor cast a hazy glow. Just underneath, he could barely make something out: a torn ticket stub inscribed “Pozzo San Patrizio.” He was at the bottom of St. Patrick’s Well.
Today was a holiday. The well would be closed for Christmas. No one would know where he was.
A gentle squeak grabbed his attention. In the corner, he could just make out its source. A rat.
The thought crossed his brain like a ticker tape. No emotion, just information. This is how I die, alone, to be eaten by rats.
“Lee!” he cried out. This time his vocal chords responded and echoed upward against the pitiless stone. As the reverberation died, Adriano hoped as much as feared an answer. Please be all right. Please don’t be here. Please be safe.
“He is not here, yet.”
A single match flamed in the darkness, briefly illuminating the speaker’s face.
Adriano recognized it from the photo Lee had shown him. Cardinal Giorgio Maltoni of the Vatican Press Office.
“What have you done to my husband?”
The assassin laughed softly. “My goodness, such political correctness. Don’t you know there is no such thing as gay marriage in Italy? Actually, in most of the world?” Maltoni chuckled again and took a drag. In the intervening seconds he closed the space between his shadowy perch and Adriano’s chair. He drew close to his captive’s face and exhaled thick, sickly-sweet Egyptian tobacco. Expensive. It lingered like a toxic halo around Adriano’s head, dizzying him with its smell and that of something else—something even sweeter, nauseatingly so. Cinnamon.
“Fuck you.” Adriano spit into his face.
Maltoni laughed again, the spittle dripping from his nose. He licked it off.
Adriano turned away and wretched.
“What did you expect?” Adriano’s torturer was quite jovial. “A slap? Doing the unexpected is so much more terrifying, don’t you think?”
Adriano said nothing. I am seconds away from death. Lee, I love you.
“Please, please don’t hurt Lee,” Adriano finally got out. “Please. I beg you.”
The assassin carefully extinguished his cigarette in a small puddle of water and then dropped the butt carefully into a sealed plastic bag and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He’s getting rid of clues, Adriano thought. The Cardinal wrinkled his face as if littering was distasteful to him.
“There’s no need to beg,” the perverse cleric said matter-of-factly. “Your beloved will be here shortly. I’m waiting for him myself.”
At just that moment, the creak of a rusty hinge echoed from above, cascading down the circular cavern punctuated by a flashlight beam.
“You see. Right on time,” said the murderer, as calmly as if announcing an approaching train. “We’re down here,” he said, speaking upward to the shimmering beam. “Take your time. It’s a long walk down, 175 feet and 248 steps to be exact. Don’t slip.” The Vatican spokesman seemed to be enjoying himself.
For the next ten minutes, everything was silence, except for the echoing steps edging ever closer to the bottom of the well. Two sets of footfalls. One, certainly was Lee, he thought. But he hoped not. At least one of us needs to live through this. The other, figured Adriano, was Maltoni’s accomplice. Finally, the beam of an electric torch pierced the darkness and Lee was pushed from the descending staircase by an unseen arm. He fell at Adriano’s feet, hands bound behind him. Then Archbishop Arnaud emerged from the shadows.
“What a touching tableau. A gay Pietà,” the Cardinal hissed, lighting another cigarette. “Now we can begin, and end, this tiresome distraction. I do hate loose ends.”
“You killed Deacon Andrea,” Adriano said, a question asked and answered in one breath. “And now you’re going to kill us.”
“No.” It was Lee, in a voice of absolute calm. The voice of the first time that Adriano had heard Lee say I love you. The voice of certitude. “He could have killed us back at the apartment. He needs us. All of us. He brought us here to find out what we know.”
Maltoni smiled as he took a drag, flaring the cigarette like a candle. He slowly walked over to the Bishop. Then, with a cruel suddenness ground the cigarette into Arnaud’s right eye.
Arnaud’s screams echoed against the damp stones as he slumped to the floor clutching his disfigured face. The Cardinal waited until the howls became a whimper, then spoke directly to Lee, who was kneeling next to Arnaud. “The next one is for your dear Adriano.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Very good, Lee, very good. Graceful acknowledgment of defeat is the mark of a true gentleman.” Maltoni grabbed Lee by the ropes and pulled him to his feet.
“Lee, don’t!” Adriano begged. “It doesn’t matter what you tell him, there’s no way he’s not going to kill us in the end.”
“But not before he gets his answer,” Lee said, looking straight at the criminal. “He answers to someone else. He’s just an errand boy.”
This time, Maltoni’s hand stopped short of a slap, centimeters from Lee’s cheek. Lee didn’t wince as the murderous face pressed in close to his.
“I am my own boss,” he growled, re-exerting self-control. “I answer to no one. They think they control me, but without me, without my information, they are nothing. All of them. And yes, tonight, they want a very important piece of information. The information that was hidden in the garment of that migrant piece of shit named Maryam. The final move in a game that started with—”
“—with September eleventh,” Lee said simply. “You killed my family.”
“Lee.” Adriano struggled against his bindings to move toward his husband. “No, don’t.”
“Did I, hmmm?” Maltoni stated simply. “Well, if they died that day, then yes I suppose I did have a hand in it. The Lord, after all, does work in mysterious ways.”
“And you call yourself a cardinal,” Lee spat out.
At this, Maltoni laughed loud and long. When he stopped, the only sound was the muffled cries of the wounded Bishop Arnaud huddling on the floor. “Yes, I am, indeed, a cardinal. His Eminence Giorgio Maltoni. Prince of the Church. Mouthpiece of the Vicar of Christ. It is quite an exalted position, and no one dares question me, even the Pope.”
Maltoni leaned in quite close to Lee with these last words.
Adriano winced.
“What made you turn against the Church?” Lee asked, fear pushed aside by genuine curiosity.
“Turn against the Church?” Maltoni scowled and turned away for a second. “I was never with the Church. Pathetic relic, but useful as pathetic relics go. I have never loved God, or the Church. I spent years getting ready for this mission. Decades working my way up to the level of cardinal. God, the hypocrisy of it all. The right prayers and the more than occasional blackmailing of a member of the curia. They all have secrets, and they all feel so guilty about them. Before you know, I am seated at the right hand of the Bishop of Rome.”
“Why?” Lee continued.
Maltoni was upon him in a second, an inch from his face. “You should have asked your friend Don Bello.” “You’ve been following us.”
“W
ell, more to the point, having you followed, yes,” the murderer acknowledged almost politely. “Precisely. If you hadn’t been so curious, you could have spent a lovely sabbatical here in Orvieto and returned to your life in San Francisco in a few weeks. Just another spoiled American enamored of the dulce vita.”
“Dawud, the CD peddler,” Adriano answered suddenly figuring it out. “Dawud followed us and reported back to Bishop Arnaud.”
“I didn’t know,” the Bishop whimpered from the damp stones at their feet. “I didn’t know about the rest.”
“True enough,” the assassin sighed, looking down at Arnaud. “You were a handy and malleable tool for passing on information whose importance you feigned to ignore, and all the while pretending to be a servant of Christ helping poor migrants leave a troubled land and a heretical belief for conversion to the one true faith of Mother Church. You and God deserve each other.”
“Dawud and Maryam,” Adriano gasped. “And others! You were helping traffic migrants into Italy.”
“Migrants, some of whom carried encoded messages sewn into their clothes that got translated into coordinates courtesy of the purgatory board at San Donato in Bagnoregio,” Lee said. “Some, you supposedly sent to work in area businesses or churches, but most ended up as prostitutes along the backroads of Umbria.”
“I didn’t know.” Arnaud was weeping now, tears mingled with blood from his now-destroyed eye.
“Bravo.” Maltoni chuckled. “I didn’t think I’d enjoy this so much.” He lit another cigarette and motioned for Lee to continue. “Please, go on.”
“Arnaud would be notified when a shipload of trafficked migrants would arrive and be told how to recognize the ones with the coded message. Then, Dawud would translate the message from Arabic and give it to Arnaud, who would write it out as a prayer for the purgatory board, stamped with the seal of Opus Dei to distinguish it from the other ordinary prayers. For a terrorist to pick up later during a tourist visit to Bagnoregio.”
“Very good.” Maltoni inhaled. “Very good. You’ve figured it out exactly.”
“But not this time.” Adriano spoke up, suddenly understanding the last few hours. “This time, Dawud didn’t turn over the message. The messenger was his sister. He knew that once her usefulness as a courier was done, she’d be enslaved as a prostitute, or worse. So, he hid his sister and stole the prayer box as an extra precaution. Which means…”
“Which means”—Lee finished the sentence—“that you don’t know what was on the code sewn into Maryam’s blouse. More importantly, you don’t understand the meaning of the code, the coordinates for another spectacular terrorist attack.”
The assassin’s applause reverberated against the ancient walls of St. Patrick’s Well. “Brilliant, truly brilliant. You are correct. And now, please, I would like to know what the message said, and what are the coordinates for the next attack.”
The Bishop pulled himself up from the floor. “Fear!” Bishop Arnaud said. “You’re afraid. They’re on their way to kill you! The men on the phone! They know you haven’t found Maryam yet, or had time to decode the message.”
“Which means there’s a terrorist cell en route to Bagnoregio to get their attack plans,” Adriano said. “But the prayer box is missing, so they’re coming here to Orvieto.”
Lee suddenly found himself pinned against the wall, the back of his skull held hard against the cold, mossy stones by Maltoni’s grip. “Yes,” the Cardinal-turned-killer hissed. “Except, they are already here, somewhere in town, looking for me now, looking for Maryam, looking for that clue. I want it now. I need it now.”
“Or they will find you and kill you,” Lee said quietly. “Either way, all of us are dead. I won’t tell you.”
“So be it,” the assassin spit, as he pulled a revolver from his pocket and cocked it against Adriano’s head. He maintained his grip on Lee. “I was the cause of your family’s death, but you will be the cause of your husband’s.”
In the darkness, the sudden explosion of sound and light momentarily robbed Adriano of sight and hearing. He screamed for Lee, could see nothing but thick smoke. A few seconds later, his ringing ears calmed down and he heard…
“Adriano!”
“Lee!”
All was chaos as four men in tactical gear descended from above on rappel wires and harnesses. They quickly threw Adriano and Lee to the ground for protection and untied their ropes. Adriano realized it wasn’t a gunshot that had stunned them. It was concussion bombs. Someone, somehow, had found them, sent in the cavalry, and rescued them. However, in the melee, the assassin and the Bishop had escaped.
“Are you OK?” one of the soldiers asked.
Adriano shook his head. He couldn’t believe it.
“Grigori!” Lee acknowledged the name of their rescuer.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” Grigori said. “Let’s go! They can’t escape. There’s only one way out. But we have to beat them to the top.” The Swiss Guard hooked both Lee and Adriano up to grappling wires and motioned upward with his thumb, sending both of them flying upward like they were on an all-too-real and all-too-frightening carnival ride.
Two, Adriano thought as he flew upward through the stone cylinder. There were two ways out of St. Patrick’s Well. Two ramps constructed like a double helix. There was no way of knowing into which one the assassin had fled.
“Doesn’t matter,” said another soldier as if reading Adriano’s mind as the couple was helped over the lip of the well and through the open glass ceiling that usually protected the historic site from rain. Beside them, a black, unmarked van stood next to the tourist entrance. Next to it was an equally ebony limousine with consular license plates. In the back seat, Adriano could just make out the dull glow of a cell phone in a white-gloved hand.
“We’ve got men coming down each staircase now,” Grigori said, hauling himself over the ledge, having just followed them up. “This will all be over soon. We have a team and a negotiator heading down now.”
A single gunshot echoed through the well.
Adriano, Lee, and their military rescuers all looked down to see Maltoni standing in one of the well’s seventy semicircular windows lining the ramp. In front of him, the loaded revolver pressed against her skull, was Reverend Vicky Lewis, the negotiator. Dear God, Adriano thought. They’re all in on this. A wounded guard lay bleeding nearby. At their feet, on the edge of the ledge abutting the precipice, was Archbishop Arnaud.
“Pull back, now, or I’ll kill her,” Maltoni shouted. “The Bishop too. Do the Swiss Guard special forces want the death of two ordained on their hands, including a woman?” Even now, he laughed. “Let me pass, or they both die here.”
“No!” Arnaud screamed, and from his bloody crouch he pushed against Maltoni’s legs, sending him tumbling into the abyss as the gun went off, narrowly missing Reverend Vicky’s head. Adriano cried out despite himself. He waited for the thud of the body hitting the cistern floor a hundred feet below.
The sound never came.
“Jean Claude! Hang on!”
In the hazy smoke now lit by portable military torches, the final tableau was played out in front of them all.
“Jean Claude, don’t let go!” Vicky was kneeling on the sill of the masonry window, legs braced against the stone for support, desperately clutching Arnaud’s hands in hers. Below, the assassin clung to the Bishop’s feet in a precarious dangle.
“Don’t shoot!” someone shouted from above. “You might hit the lady priest, or the Bishop!”
“Vicky,” the Bishop’s gentle whisper cut through the horror. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, for everything. Ignosce me, sacerdos.”
With tears in her eyes, she spoke. “Episcopus Jeanne Claude Arnaud, in nominee Dei, ego te absolve.”
Bishop Arnaud let go, sending himself and Maltoni plunging to the bottom of the well.
For several seconds, all was silence and darkness. Suddenly, a single beam of light pierced the gloom and a flurry of hands were pushing Ad
riano and Lee toward the van.
“Wait!” a familiar voice called from the back of the parked limousine. The door swung open, and a cell phone light shone down on a pair of insanely long legs in red stilettos stepping out of the car. Lee and Adriano cried out as one.
“Magda!”
CHAPTER LVII
Repeat Performance
Tuesday, December 24, 2013, Christmas Eve, 7:29 a.m., Orvieto
He stood on the cliff and prayed.
Useless, he thought, to turn my thoughts to God. Behind him, the lights of Orvieto reflected in a million icy crystals. Below, the road was deserted. He wondered who would find him. Someone would, of course, and for that he was sorry. What a horrible thing to see, to discover. The body of a reprobate, crushed against the rock. And yet, this man had sought forgiveness. This man would see the face of God. But, yesterday had been his final sunrise.
The dawn this morning should be beautiful, and he smiled. He had often come here to sit near the altar and wait for the dawn. Even now, its rays were reaching out to warm the city across a quilt of virginal frost. He had seen it before, prisms of color in the ice. Like a miracle it had seemed to him as a child.
For the body now lying at the foot of the cliff below San Giovanale, there would be no more. No more dawns, no more rainbows, no more miracles.
“Don Bello?”
The elderly priest turned to face them.
“You’re needed at the hospital, Don Bello.”
The old man nodded. “He has died.”
“No,” the Reverend Vicky Lewis said quietly, coming forward from the group and gently laying her hand on his shoulder. “He lives.”
Don Bello started to weep uncontrollably and fell to his knees.
“Nicolo, caro.” La Donna Volsini knelt beside him in the damp grass overlooking the Rupe. “Nicolo. It is done.”