Blood of the Lamb (16 page)

Jorge Ocampo stood still, an island buffeted by the waves of tourists in Saint Peter’s Square. The Gendarmes had escorted him out after that belligerent Neapolitan detective had suddenly decided to let him go. Jorge had been pleased that his protestations of innocence had finally gotten through to the man.

His satisfaction was short-lived, though.

Anna was angry. Very angry.

He flinched at the voice issuing from the phone at his ear. “Forget it, Jorge. Go home. Go take a nice coffee. Go back to Argentina! I don’t care. You’re an idiot! Worse than useless. I’ll do it myself. No—I’ll find someone else. Franklin, from California—yes, I’ll call him.”

Jorge’s blood froze. Franklin had recently joined the group that met in the back room of Circolo degli Artisti, where Anna led them in planning the world they would create once the Noantri took their rightful places. Franklin was young, Newer than Jorge, and impassioned. He believed in Anna and their mission, and the last thing Jorge wanted was to give up his place at Anna’s side to the fresh-faced American.

“No, no, Anna!” Jorge heard himself croaking. He swallowed and went on, “I’m sorry. Let me try again. I’ll find the book. I’ll find out who that woman is and I’ll get it from her. I’ll get it for you, Anna. I will.”

“You can’t, Jorge. You’re not the man for the job.”

“I am!”

A short pause. “I don’t know.”

“Anna—”

“All right. One more chance. Do not screw this up, Jorge.”

“I won’t! I’ll find out—”

“I already know who she is.”

“What?”

With an exasperated sigh: “I asked around. Livia Pietro. An art historian. Three different people recognized her from your description. Not even Noantri—they were Mortals, art students. She’s well known. She lives in Trastevere, in that really old house in Piazza dei Renzi that used to be the watchtower. Do you think that gives you enough to go on, Jorge? Do you think you can do it right this time?”

“Yes! Yes, Anna. Thank you. I’ll go there now. I’ll get the book.”

“You’d better.” She clicked off.

Jorge slipped his phone back into his pocket and wiped the sweat from his upper lip. He stood for a moment more, watching the crowds surge this way and that in their eagerness to take in everything they could in their time here. Benighted fools, Anna called them. Far too shortsighted to understand their own best interests from one day to the next. No wonder they’d made such a mess of the world! They fundamentally didn’t care about anything that didn’t affect them immediately, because in their hearts they knew they’d be gone by the time things got bad.

Was what she said true? Anna was deeply passionate and completely serious about everything she believed, but still, Jorge wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember feeling that way when he was Mortal. His Change was much more recent than Anna’s. She’d been Noantri for four hundred years, so maybe she’d forgotten. Back home in Argentina, where they’d met, Jorge had joined the Communist Party because he and his comrades shared the revolutionary dream of a better future. They knew freedom fighters like themselves were unlikely to live to see it, but they were willing to fight and die for the dream.

Though he couldn’t deny that a longer view had its advantages, too. And Anna had done a great deal of thinking about these things. She had been a member of the Party, also, and had urged resistance to the military dictatorship with fiery speeches and acts of breathtaking bravery. Even now, when he understood that, being Noantri, she hadn’t been risking, perhaps, quite what he and his friends had, his heart still swelled with pride at her fierce valor.

Bueno
. Enough dreaming. The parking lot, that’s where he needed to go now, to fetch his
motorino
. As he turned to head in that direction he pulled out the phone again to switch the ringer on. It was required to be off in the Library, and with all that had happened he hadn’t thought about it since. He and Anna had just hung up, but she might call back. With new instructions, or to say she’d thought it over and she understood that it wasn’t his fault. She had her own ring tone, Anna did: Fuerte Apache’s
“
Vida Clandestina
.”
Hearing it always caused a clash of emotions in Jorge: joy that Anna was calling him and a stab of longing for home. He missed home. Sometimes, before he caught himself, he almost, almost, wished he’d never met Anna, never become Noantri. That the vicious military dictatorship of his beloved Argentina had made him a
desaparecido
like so many of his friends. That he’d died a martyr hero of La Guerra Sucia. It was the fate he was surely headed for until Anna intervened.

But those moments passed. How could he not want what he now had, what everyone would want if they knew it was possible? He had eternal life! He had the power to heal his body, develop his talents, advance his mind! Anna had told him how it would be, in those moments after the Fire, after the Change, when he lay paralyzed and bewildered. He’d been dying, she said; she’d had no choice. He would be grateful, she promised, he’d welcome what she’d done, when he understood. When he learned what she was, and what he now was. The news that he’d been dying had surprised him—the wound was excruciating, but even as he lay writhing he’d known the pain was from a bullet-shattered collarbone—but Anna had risked a great deal, she explained later, to save him. She’d chased off his assailants, but the real risk was what came next. To make someone Noantri without the Conclave’s prior assent was forbidden; for Anna, already in exile for previous infractions of the Law, the penalty for such an action could be— Jorge shuddered. He wouldn’t think of it. What she had done for him, without his asking or even knowing to ask, proved her love. He owed her this wondrous new life, and he would do whatever Anna needed, whatever Anna desired, for as long as she wanted him to.

For eternity.

And Anna, Anna had a goal! The world would not remain as it was, continuing, day to day, day to day. . . . Anna’s ambition held that everyone, Mortal and Noantri, deserved to lead rich and magnificent lives. Lives like hers. It wouldn’t be long now until her plans—their plans—succeeded. When they were triumphant and Noantri jurisdiction was established, he could go home then. Once the Church was destroyed, there’d be no reason for Rome to remain the center of Noantri power. He and Anna would go back to Argentina. She would rule from Buenos Aires, and they would be happy.

The ringer was on now, but although Jorge stared at the phone as he walked, it sat inert in his hand. Resigned, he put it away when he reached the parking area and took out his keys. He mounted the
motorino
, revved the engine, and headed for Trastevere, as Anna had told him to do.

19

For the second time that day Thomas Kelly charged blindly out a door. His racing footsteps slapped and echoed through the ornate marble corridors as he ran from the Librarian’s suite the way he had from the House of Crazy People. But this time it was much, much worse. Because according to Lorenzo, according to Cardinal Cossa, according to Thomas’s friend and rock and spiritual anchor, those people weren’t crazy.

It was a nightmare. Wait, yes, that was it! Literally. It was a nightmare, this whole day. He was actually asleep in his bed in the
residenza
, exhausted, disoriented, probably even under the influence of Lorenzo’s good red wine from dinner. A nightmare. Thomas slowed his footsteps and waited: in his experience, once you knew you were having a nightmare, you woke up.

He didn’t wake up. The crowds still milled in Saint Peter’s Square, cameras clicked, groups of tourists swirled this way and that. The vast curve of the Colonnade swept away to encircle the great piazza on two sides, but Thomas saw no grandeur now: only vertigo.

It wasn’t a nightmare, then. It was a horror worse than that.

Picking up his pace again, he made his way to Via del Pellegrino. When Lorenzo had informed him he’d be staying in the Jesuit
residenza
inside the Holy See while on this mission, he’d been awed and thrilled. Now all he wanted was to leave as soon as he could, to run as fast as he could, to flee from here to somewhere far, far away.

He heard,
“Buongiorno, Padre,”
as he brushed past another priest, a man heading out into the sunshine, a man who still lived in a normal world. He couldn’t answer. At the door to his room he jabbed the key at the lock, could not find the keyhole.
Get a hold of yourself, Thomas!
Who had said that? Lorenzo! Lorenzo dared! Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa, who’d proved, in this last hour, that he’d been lying to Thomas since the day they’d met.

•   •   •

An hour before, in a different lifetime, Thomas had waited in Trastevere as Lorenzo had requested until he’d seen a dark blue Carabinieri Lancia roll to a stop near the café that shielded him. The car parked where it couldn’t be seen from the small piazza at Santa Maria della Scala, and when the business-suited young man who got out rounded the corner, he glanced toward the historian’s house. All right, the police were here. Thomas jogged to Piazza Trilussa and got in the first cab at the stand. The cab bounced over the cobbles, swung onto Ponte Garibaldi to cross the Tiber, and headed up the broad, busy street on the other side. Thomas tried to think of nothing at all as the
platano
trees slipped rhythmically past the windows. By the time he arrived at the Vatican he’d calmed down. He paid the driver and reported to the Librarian’s suite.

He hadn’t been kept waiting this time. He was shown in immediately by the young African priest. As Thomas thought back now, did he see a glint in the young man’s eye? Did he know, too? Lorenzo had said not, had said no one knew except a very few in the Church’s highest ranks. But how could Thomas trust anything Lorenzo said ever again?

When Thomas arrived Lorenzo had dismissed the young priest, pointed Thomas to a chair, and poured cognac into crystal snifters. Thomas, even at this ridiculously early hour, had been grateful for that, but the strong drink made what followed even more surreal.

“Thomas,” Lorenzo had said in quiet, measured tones, “tell me what happened. Start in the Library.”

So Thomas had recounted the meeting with Livia Pietro, the fight, the flight. Lorenzo said nothing, just sat puffing on a cigar, his eyes searching Thomas’s face. Thomas, sure by then the whole thing was an inexplicably elaborate attempt to terrorize him, felt calm, almost amused; but suddenly, when he reached the discussion in Spencer George’s study, he had trouble going on. Lorenzo advised him to finish his cognac, and gave him more.

“What happened there, Thomas?” Lorenzo asked. “What did they tell you?”

Feeling the comforting burn of excellent liquor, Thomas continued. “At first, nothing. Just that someone they both seemed to know, someone named Jonah, knew where the Concordat was. And that she—Livia Pietro—was ordered to find it by some group they call the Conclave. Whoever they are, they told her to get me to help her. They know why I’m here.”

He looked to Lorenzo but Lorenzo just nodded.

Thomas said, “She’s afraid of them, or of something, but I don’t know what. He—” Spencer George’s face flashed in front of Thomas and his stomach clenched. “Nasty, sneering man. He—he—”

“He what, Thomas?”

Thomas took another sip. The cognac was warming him. He felt it in his fingertips and along the back of his neck. He was loose, he was safe. “I wouldn’t help them. They wouldn’t tell me how they knew about the Concordat or what it was or why they wanted it, and finally I told them I’d leave unless they did. I started to go and she said no, sit down, and she told me what they are—what they say they are. Do they believe it themselves?” he suddenly wondered. “Can they be that crazy? How could anyone—”

“Thomas. What did they say?”

Thomas snapped his eyes back to Lorenzo. “Yes. I’m sorry. She said . . .” He drew his brows together and concentrated, peering down at the light reflected in the amber liquid he was holding. As he spoke, the glow shimmered and danced. “She kept using the word ‘Noantri.’ It’s a Romanesco word, a contraction of
noi altri,
it means ‘we others,’ and residents of Trastevere use it about themselves but she said even though that’s what most people mean by it, it didn’t just mean that, it meant her people.”

“Her people? Thomas, who are her people?”

Thomas lifted his eyes again to meet Lorenzo’s. Why was the Cardinal looking so solemn? Thomas burst into a grin. He realized he was tipsy and that this was the most absurd thing he’d ever say to Lorenzo. Dramatically, he lifted his hand toward the ceiling. “
Vampires!
” He started to laugh. Guffaws rocked him and he shook helplessly. The cognac sloshed in his snifter as he cracked up.

Lorenzo reached forward and took the glass from Thomas’s hand. He set it down and softly asked, “What else?”

Instantly, the comic mood vanished; instantly, Thomas was sober. “The historian,” he heard his own voice in monotone. “I refused to believe them, anything so ludicrous. He said all right then, I should leave, but she said it was important that I stay, important that I help them. So the historian—Spencer George, yes, that’s his name—he shrugged and picked up a knife from his desk. He took the flowers from a glass vase—I think they were irises, but I’m not good with flowers—”