Blood of the Lamb (21 page)

Sergente
Raffaele Orsini remained seated at his table at the café in Piazza della Scala. The call he’d made half an hour ago to his uncle, Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa, about the priest’s arrival at the house Raffaele had been sent to watch had gone to voice mail. He made another call now, and when the Cardinal once again didn’t answer, Raffaele called the
maresciallo
.

“The subject has just come out of the house. She’s with two people I don’t know. One’s a priest. I can’t reach the Cardinal.”

The cell phone in his ear was briefly silent. Raffaele could picture his boss’s exasperated frown as he weighed the options. On the one hand, the
maresciallo
was losing the use of one of his men and would eventually have to account to his own superiors for Raffaele’s unproductive time. Then again, this was a favor for a cardinal. Sooner or later the
maresciallo
would be able to call it in, thereby impressing his superiors with his Vatican entrée. Good personal connections with the Curia, outside the professionally cordial relationship the Carabinieri were at pains to maintain with the Church, were no small advantage for an ambitious cop on the climb. Raffaele had seen how his own stock had risen in the
maresciallo
’s calculating eyes when his uncle was elevated to cardinal and brought to Rome. He found his boss’s transparency amusing, but Raffaele was an ambitious cop, too. That he was a cardinal’s nephew was nothing but luck, but he wasn’t ashamed to take advantage of what it could bring him. His partner and senior, Giulio Aventino, always said police work was five percent doggedness, five percent luck, and ninety percent the skill to recognize and doggedly use the luck that came your way.

Of course, Giulio Aventino must be the reason the
maresciallo
was hesitating at all over Raffaele’s instructions. The work Raffaele should have been doing right now, whether in the office or in the field, would naturally have fallen to his partner. Giulio, with his mustached hangdog face, dislike of paperwork, short temper with technology, and aversion to the Church, had no doubt been grousing nonstop for the past hour and a half about his missing sergeant. This would’ve been true if the
maresciallo
had given Raffaele the afternoon off to see the dentist; how much truer was it now, when Giulio was left to shoulder their mutual burden because Raffaele was running some nepotistic errand for a cardinal?

Finally the
maresciallo
growled into his ear, “Stay with it. Follow her.”

Curia one, Giulio nothing. Raffaele grinned to himself. But his boss’s vacillation, though short, had been just long enough to bring up another problem. “They’re heading for the church.”

“What church, Orsini? Where are you?”

“Sorry, sir. Santa Maria della Scala. In Trastevere.”

“They’re going in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And one’s a priest?” Another moment of thought, much more brief. “Don’t go in after them. All we’ve been asked to do is to keep track of the woman. You sure it’s her?”

“I have a photo.”

“Well, whatever they’re doing in there, they’ll have to come out eventually. Wait for them. I don’t want you barging into a church. It’s always a nightmare even if a crime’s been committed, and we don’t know that one has. Besides,” he added, “I know Santa Maria della Scala. It’s small enough that they might notice you.”

Showing off,
Raffaele thought, but the
maresciallo
couldn’t see his smile and he said nothing.

“Just wait for them,” his boss said again. “If they go back to that house, keep up your surveillance. If they go somewhere else, follow them, but, Orsini, keep trying your uncle. I want you back here sometime today. Aventino is driving us all mad.”

29

Across the cobbled piazza, through the wrought-iron fence, and up the stairs. Not the
scala
for which the church was named; those had belonged to a nearby, long-ago-demolished house. There the miracle of an ill child’s recovery had been granted to a mother praying to an icon in a stairway alcove. Thomas hadn’t been to Santa Maria della Scala before, but he knew the story. He knew so many of his Church’s stories.

The entry doors stood open. Thomas paused minutely and then stepped through as though he were any priest, in the company of any pair of historians, visiting any church in Rome. He felt acutely the presence of Livia Pietro beside him and that of Spencer George a few paces behind. Could they really enter a church? Step onto consecrated ground as easily as he could? A part of him expected—no, admit it, hoped—that they would be struck down at the threshold, reduced to dust and ashes for defiling the sanctified air. Though it was true his crucifix had had no effect. Nor had the mid-morning light in the piazza, any more than the glare of the early sun through which he’d raced with Livia Pietro from the Vatican Library, back in the good old days a few hours ago when he thought she was merely insane.

Livia Pietro followed him and Spencer George followed her and they all crossed the wooden sill and nothing happened. Resigned, Thomas turned through the vestibule to the right-side door. He pushed it open and stopped a few steps in at the marble font to dip his fingers into the holy water and cross himself, perhaps a bit more fervently than usual. He was horrified by the idea that Pietro or Spencer George, as an element of subterfuge, might attempt to do the same. But maybe they couldn’t? Maybe contact with holy water would do to them what the sight of a crucifix had not? Maybe they’d melt, and sizzle, and—
Stop it,
he ordered himself,
you sound like a Dominican.
Pietro looked at the font, at him, smiled slightly, and shook her head. Spencer George passed the font without a glance.

Thomas, behind them now, found himself blinking in the dimness. He squinted to adjust his eyes while Pietro slipped off her sunglasses and seemed quite comfortable. Spencer George had also donned shades and hat as they left his house, even for the brief walk across the piazza. It must be habitual with them. Every time they go outdoors, the way a real person, a human person, puts on clothes. Thomas suddenly flashed on a college friend, an affable physicist who wore photosensitive glasses, their lenses darkening automatically at the first touch of bright light. . . . And a baseball cap, the physicist was rarely seen without his baseball cap . . . No. It couldn’t be.

Thomas shuddered that thought off. He couldn’t bear, suddenly, the close presence of the two Noantri. He strode along the center aisle toward the altar. Of course they followed. What had he expected? To avoid the sight of them, Thomas looked up, down, around. Santa Maria della Scala was itself a miracle, though a common enough miracle in Rome: its sedate, slightly crumbling façade opened from a small, dark entry into an interior well kept, grand, and imposing. A patterned stone floor—incorporating, as in so many churches, gravestones, identifying the dead who slept beneath your feet—polished wood pews, a soaring vaulted ceiling supported on marble columns; and everywhere, art. None of it, on first glance, exceptional, but its profusion making up for its lack of distinction. Paintings, frescoes, sculpture, gilded candlesticks. Crystal chandeliers over the altar and side chapels, the gift of some pious—or guilt-ridden—nineteenth-century worshipper. They struck an odd note, the chandeliers. But every church had its own oddnesses, its own eccentricities. Its own secrets.

They had come here to find one of those secrets. Father Thomas Kelly, SJ, and two vampires. Thomas felt his composure hanging by a thread.

He stopped at the altar rail, and the other two stopped beside him. “What do we do now?” Thomas spoke not out of hope of an answer, but to keep himself from losing hold.

“I think we were anticipating you’d take the lead from this point, Father Kelly,” Spencer George replied. He had, Thomas noted, removed his hat. Anger flared in Thomas at the hypocrisy of the gesture.

“Just how do you expect me to do that? I didn’t know Mario Damiani. I’ve never been in this church before. I first heard of the Concordat just a few days ago and I can’t tell you how dearly I wish I never had!”

“Father.” Livia Pietro spoke softly, laying a hand on his sleeve. She nodded toward two old women lighting candles in a side chapel.

Thomas pulled back from her touch and dropped his voice to a sarcastic whisper. “Of course, we mustn’t disturb the faithful. I know how that upsets you.”

Spencer George rolled his eyes. Pietro said, “Actually, it does. I was raised in the same Church you were and I think faith is a precious thing, to be protected wherever it’s found. But I know you don’t believe that of me and I’m not asking you to. I’m suggesting that you focus on the reason we’re here.”

Thomas stared at her for a long moment. Then he blew out a breath and looked around helplessly.

Santa Maria della Scala had nave and transept, it had side chapels and high windows. Great bouquets of flowers had greeted them at the church entry with still more standing in the side chapels and others flanking the altar. Because Mass had recently ended, thick incense hung heavy in the air, threading its scent through that of the flowers. What footsteps and soft words were to be heard did not disturb the peaceful hush common to so many churches. It was all comforting and familiar, and Thomas thought he felt a faint echo of his old sense of home.

But as to a hiding place for a six-hundred-year-old document that detailed a satanic bargain, he could think of none.

“This church,” Spencer George said. “What’s special about it?”

“You live across the piazza from it! You should know it much better than I do!”

“Really, Father? How much time do you imagine I’ve spent here? What is it you’re thinking I would do if I came? Kneel and pray?”

“No, I can see there’d be no point. Even prayer can’t save your mortgaged soul!”

“Then why would I come?”

“Spencer?” Pietro said, speaking to the historian but throwing Thomas a disapproving glance. “Did Mario come here?”

Spencer George unlocked his gaze slowly from Thomas’s and looked to Pietro. He nodded. “He loved them all, these little churches. Loved them as art and as history. Once or twice I came inside this one with him. It had always been one of his particular favorites, and he became even more strongly attached to it during the Rebellion because it served as a field hospital for Garibaldi’s troops. Mario was an officer in the war against papal power, you know.” Spencer George looked pointedly at Thomas again. Thomas bit his lip and refused to rise to the bait. “Mario’s mission,” George went on, “the mission he’d given himself, was to take these little jewels back from the stranglehold of the Church and return them to aesthetics and to true spiritual meaning.”

“True spiritual meaning?”
Thomas hissed, finally unable to contain himself. “As though there were some question? Of the spiritual meaning of a church?”

“As it happens I agree with you. I thought his whole project was absurd. I’ve spent nearly three centuries in Rome avoiding every church I could.”

“You’d have done better—”

“Father? Maybe we can have this conversation later?” As she spoke, Livia Pietro looked back up the center aisle. An elderly monk moved stiffly toward them, his cinctured tan habit whispering. Pietro and George smiled in greeting. Thomas struggled to do the same.

“Buongiorno, Padre,”
the monk greeted Thomas.

“Buongiorno, Padre,”
Thomas replied. He continued in Italian, “I’m Thomas Kelly. From Boston. This is Dr. Pietro and—Dr. George. They’re historians. As I am,” he added.

“Giovanni Battista. Welcome to Santa Maria della Scala.” The monk’s thin hands were misshapen by arthritis, and his voice rattled with an old-man quaver.

“Thank you,” Pietro replied politely. Spencer George murmured some noncommittal courtesy, also, though Thomas could swear his lip was curled. Pietro continued diffidently, “We’ve come here as part of a project. We’re studying the art and history of Trastevere’s churches. Each church is unique in some way and we’re very interested in seeing the special pieces here.”

Father Battista’s thin smile told Thomas the monk was well aware of his church’s relative lack of artistic riches. Nevertheless, he answered, “Then I’m sure you’ll want to see the icon of Our Lady, that holy painting that cured the child. It’s in the transept altar, on this side.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to lead the way. Not knowing what else to do, Thomas started after him, peering around, hoping for—what? A ray of heavenly light to strike a painting, an angelic chorus to sing as he passed a piece of sculpture? He walked behind Father Battista, surveying the sanctuary, listening distractedly to the monk’s sandals slapping softly on the stone.

Sandals.

Father Battista was a Discalced Carmelite.

Discalced. Shoeless.

“Shoeless” meaning in sandals, not barefoot. They didn’t go barefoot.

But they and their order’s founder, Saint Teresa of Avila, were often portrayed that way. Even Bernini’s celebrated sculpture of Saint Teresa depicted one bare foot peeking from under her robe.