Blood of the Lamb (12 page)

Camera-draped tourists flowed through the piazza, swarming after colorful umbrellas and pennants on poles. They circled water- and trinket-sellers like feeding fish. At the curb, buses disgorged them and, more importantly, waited in patient lines to scoop them up again.

“What are you—”

“Shhh.” Livia scanned the crowd. The visored Taiwanese would do them no good, and the Americans were just arriving, but beyond, a group of mixed Europeans—Italians, Poles, and a gaggle speaking Greek—were loading onto a bright blue bus. “Come.” When they were close to the bus she slowed, waiting until the guide turned away to answer the inevitable question from the inevitable guidebook-thumbing tourist. “Now!” she said, and hopped onto the stairs and into the bus. The engine was already running. She moved through to the back, smiling at her fellow passengers as though they’d been together for days on this whirlwind tour of Italy. She’d found a seat and was looking through the window when Thomas Kelly dropped beside her.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded in a whisper.

She turned to him with a smile. He was red-faced and sweating. “You’re a tourist,” she said quietly. “Act like one.”

He dropped his voice. “Give me the notebook.”

“I will. I will, and you can replace it in the Library. But we need it first.”

“Need it for what? You can
not
just
do
that.” He was spluttering sotto voce. “Who
are
you?”

“A historian, as you are. We can’t talk now. Wait until we get where we’re going.”

“No. Give me the notebook or I’ll call the police.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will!”

The harried guide climbed the stairs. The driver left the door open for the last of the straggling tourists.

“You could have called for help at any time in the museum,” Livia said, “but here you are. You’re curious.” On his face, guilt fleetingly eclipsed confusion and anger. “Father Kelly, trust me, please. We’re after the same thing: the lost copy of the Concordat. Damiani’s notebook may be vital, and as soon as we get somewhere safe I’ll tell you why.”

“Safe? We were perfectly safe until you stole it!”

“No. The clerk was trying to steal it. I stopped him.”

“The clerk? Who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Kelly frowned. “It’s ridiculous anyway. Why would he bring it to me and then try to steal it? He could’ve stolen it anytime, if that’s what he wanted.”

“I think it was my interest in it that called his attention. My interest coupled with yours, I mean. I think he was in the Library to watch you.”

“Me? To watch me? And you say you came for me? I see. Thomas Kelly from Boston is the clueless center of a vast Vatican conspiracy. That’s what you mean?”

“When you put it that way—”

“Well, maybe it’s okay.” The priest threw up his hands. “Maybe that clerk is after the same thing we are, too. Just another member of our happy clan.”

The desperate edge of Father Kelly’s sarcasm was impossible to miss but she answered him seriously. “No. If the people who sent me already had an agent in the Vatican Library, they’d have told me. I’m afraid he might be working for the other side.”

“
What
other side?”

She touched his arm and nodded to the aisle, where the guide was working his way along, greeting the group, answering questions. “Don’t say anything. You don’t speak Italian.”

“Of course I—”

She stopped him with a look.

When the guide reached them he gave them a quizzical raise of the eyebrows. Before he could speak, Livia grinned and said in Italian, “Hi! Are you the new guide? Where’s Aldo?”

“Aldo? Who is he?”

“Our guide from this morning. And yesterday, too. He’s so funny! He made us laugh so hard when we were at the Trevi Fountain, didn’t he, Thomas? Even though Thomas doesn’t really speak Italian, but he understood Aldo! Everyone did, even those sour Scots! Does Aldo have the afternoon off or something?”

“
Signora
,” the guide said carefully, “I have been with this group since Saturday. There is no one named Aldo.”

“Oh, but—” Livia suddenly stopped. She looked blankly at the guide and glanced around. “Oh!” She clapped her hands together, then buried her face in them. “Thomas!” she said in English, muffled and laughing. “We’re on the wrong bus!”

“
Signora
—”

She dropped her hands, switched to Italian again. “Our bus was blue, too! And we were so late that I was afraid everyone would be mad—oh, this is mortifying!” She craned her neck to look out the window, then giggled like a schoolgirl caught in a prank. “It’s gone! We’re so late they already left!” She rooted around in her bag and dug out her cell phone. “Don’t worry.” She peered at the guide’s name tag. “Sergio? Don’t worry, Sergio. I’ll text Aldo. It’s lucky he gave us his phone number! I thought, why would we ever need that, but you see? He was right! Where are you going next?” Her thumbs hovered above her phone’s buttons. “This group—where are you going?”

Sergio blinked. “To the Colosseum,
Signora
.”

“So were we! Oh, good! Oh, marvelous! I’ll text Aldo and tell him not to worry about us and we’ll just get off and meet the group there and thank you so much, Sergio! I’m sorry to cause you trouble! Oh, how ridiculous!” She laughed again and bent over her phone, thumbing rapidly. “Thomas, what a pair of idiots we are! Why didn’t you say something? You know I have no sense of direction! This is so funny!” She was still giggling and thumbing when Sergio nodded, said something about having been put to no trouble at all, and walked quickly back up the aisle.

13

The doors finally closed and the tour bus inched along the curb in front of the Vatican, the driver eagle-eyed for a gap in the traffic.

“Look.” Pietro nodded back toward the piazza. Thomas leaned across her. The clerk, in the center of the tourist scrum, snapped his head left, right, left again, clearly at a loss and clearly livid. In the patternless milling another disruption caught Thomas’s eye: two men in blue uniforms and a third in a dark suit charging the wrong way through the entry and shouldering through the crowd. Gendarmerie: the Vatican Police. Thomas saw the clerk catch sight of them, too, and fade back into the shadows.
Why?
Thomas wondered. The Gendarmes would have been alerted by the alarm, but they wouldn’t know what they were chasing. The clerk not only knew what, but whom. Why not race over to the police and tell them? Help them?

Unless what Pietro had said was true: the clerk had been trying to steal the book for himself.

Thomas flopped back against his seat as the bus found an opening and dove into the stream of cars. What was he doing?
This is pride, Thomas. The sin of pride. You should have stood your ground in the passageway and shouted for help. You should have summoned a guard on the piazza as soon as the alarm bells rang. You should have wrestled Damiani’s notebook right out of this mad historian’s hands.
Though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d have done that, given her baffling physical strength. Admittedly he had little experience of the female body, but he’d seen her outwrestle the clerk and he’d felt her iron grip—he touched his arm; it was tender and, under his sleeve, no doubt turning colors—and he didn’t think he was wrong in suspecting Livia Pietro was, comparatively, a powerhouse. Still, that he’d likely lose a cage match against her didn’t mean he shouldn’t have tried. But she was right. He was, as ever, curious. Pride: his right to have his questions answered trumping ethical imperatives, like Thou Shalt Not Steal.

He turned his head to look at Livia Pietro. She was still watching out the window.

“Well,” Thomas said softly. “Gendarmes. You’d think someone had committed a crime. Theft, perhaps. I wonder if they’re worried, the criminals.”

At that she sat back also, and shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“I can.”

She raised an eyebrow to him. She hadn’t removed her sunglasses, dark against her pale skin. Thomas found himself, irrelevantly and annoyingly, wanting to see those ocean-in-moonlight eyes again. Those eyes that had found their way so easily through the black passages in the Vatican, where he’d been blind as a bat. He pushed away the thought of Pietro’s eyes as she asked, “You can what?”

“Back them off,” he answered. “But you’ll have to give me the notebook.” If she did, he’d call Lorenzo. The Cardinal would tell the Gendarmerie it was just a misunderstanding. The police wouldn’t argue with the Librarian. They’d smell a fix but they’d drop it. Then Livia Pietro would owe Thomas, and he’d insist she tell him what the Concordat was and how she knew about it. And why she wanted it. And who—

“No.” Livia Pietro looked straight at him, planting her handbag more solidly on her lap as though issuing a dare.

Thomas, after a moment, settled again in his seat and stared at nothing. He should probably call Lorenzo anyway. He was cheered by the thought that Lorenzo would by now have gotten a report and that the events in the reading room would make Thomas look like a hero: madwoman steals book, clerk fails to stop her, Thomas runs after her. The body-block he’d thrown on the clerk might put things in a different light but even if Lorenzo heard about that—even from the clerk himself—the Cardinal would believe the Thomas-the-Hero version until he was forced to think otherwise. Which would be never, if Thomas called right now.

But he didn’t. He meditated on the relationship between curiosity and pride, a relationship he hadn’t noted before, as the tour bus honked its way down the Lungotevere, headed for the bridge.

The bus was pulling up at Piazza del Colosseo when Pietro, once again peering out the window, stiffened. “Gendarmes,” she said quietly. Thomas looked past her, saw the same two uniformed men he’d seen at the Vatican now emerge from a tiny black-and-white Alfa Romeo. The man in the dark suit was already in the piazza, scanning the crowd from beside an unmarked Peugeot. The comfortable vehicle, a privilege of rank. “I didn’t think they saw us get on this bus,” she said.

Light dawned for Thomas. “I’m sure they didn’t,” he replied, with a smug smile he couldn’t help.

“Then how?”

“That book.” He thumbed at her bag. “Cardinal Fariña, before he retired. He spent years renovating the Library and Archives. Most of it was about security. The chip that set off the alarms, I’ll bet it’s also got a GPS. They tracked us.
Professoressa
Pietro? You’re busted.”

To his surprise she grinned as their bus squealed to a stop. “Think so? Watch.” She pulled the notebook from her bag and turned it over, to the marbleized paper that had once been the last leaf inside the missing back cover. The security chip, wafer-thin and about an inch square, was attached to the blank page before that. Which, after Pietro gave it a quick rip, was no longer attached to the book.

“
What?
No! You can’t!” Thomas, appalled, grabbed for the notebook but as always, she was faster. She stuck the book deep in her shoulder bag and the chip in the pocket of her flowing skirt. A part of Thomas, nonplussed, thought,
A lot of good that’ll do: it’s still on you. Why not toss it?
The rest of him was appalled to see himself abetting this thievery, even if only in his head. Pietro jumped to her feet as the rear door opened. Thomas couldn’t believe he’d just sat and watched her vandalize a book from the Vatican Library. He was nearly ready to stay behind. Let her hop off the bus and get scooped up by the Gendarmes. On the other hand, that might not happen. If it didn’t this would be a ridiculous time to stand on principle and lose the notebook.
In for a penny, in for the crown jewels.
He stood.

The doors opened and Pietro jumped out onto a bright sidewalk boiling with tourists. The crumbling hulk of the Colosseum towered a half-block in front of them, but Pietro dashed the other way, across the street. She wove between taxis, sedans, and Smart cars. Thomas, close in her slipstream and fully expecting to get flattened, muttered an automatic Hail Mary. Though he wondered whether prayer was effective when you were stealing from the Vatican. At least he was wearing his clerical collar. Maybe people would try harder not to hit a priest. In the end both he and Pietro made it across unsquashed, and Thomas caught up with her at the entrance to the Colosseo Metro station—caught up only because she’d screeched to a halt.

Standing between them and the turnstiles was the clerk.

Clerk before, Gendarmes behind, end of the road,
Professoressa;
but before Thomas quite finished that thought Pietro said, “Do you have a ticket?”

It took him a moment to understand she was speaking to him, not the clerk, and what the question meant. “A monthly,” he stammered.

“Use it now. Wait for me.”

He could see the Gendarmes, one of the uniformed men with a handheld device, the other frantically and uselessly trying to stop the traffic. They dodged and wove as Thomas and Livia had done, working their way across the frenzied lanes. A screech of brakes, a scream of metal on metal, a tinkle of breaking glass, and then a symphony of curses and car horns. Thomas stared into the street and saw the Gendarmes still coming, crumpled fenders, stopped cars, and furious motorists in their wake. One way or another, Thomas decided, the far side of the turnstile might be the place to be during whatever mayhem was about to erupt. He swiped his card; the clerk paid no attention to him, but stepped up to Pietro, to block her way.