Blood of the Lamb (23 page)

Carmelite monks devoted themselves equally to meditation and service. Giovanni Battista had always considered it one of his own many failings that, though he tried his best to be diligent when performing his pastoral tasks, such as guiding visitors through Santa Maria, he much preferred the solitary, silent hours of contemplation and prayer. Vatican II, which had issued its directives nine years after Giovanni had taken his vows, had greatly disappointed him. The changes, all in the direction of secularization, had been in aid of bringing the Church nearer the flock. In Giovanni’s view, this was a great mistake. The Church should be the City of Gold high on Saint Peter’s rock: unattainable, but always the glowing goal to strive toward. It was the flock that needed to be helped to come nearer the Church.

But these historians, what a pleasant surprise. He’d thought only the priest would want to pause in the chapel and pray, but the woman—yes, he knew they’d been introduced, but there was no point in trying to remember her name—had given Father Battista a warm smile and a big thank-you. Such lovely, kind eyes! She’d told him he had no idea how much this meant to all of them, and even the supercilious older gent—older compared with the other two, of course just a pup to Giovanni—had nodded and smiled, also. The priest had seemed a little surprised at his companions himself, but such is the power of the Holy Spirit. Giovanni left them to it.

A warm glow filled him when he thought of the quiet delight with which his brothers would receive this story at the evening collation. Imagine: even Americans, even Jesuits, could still catch one unawares.

With a new spring in his crotchety old bones, Giovanni Battista strode forward to greet the thin young man approaching down the aisle.

34

“Don’t look so dismayed, Father,” Livia said to Thomas Kelly, turning from the chapel door to face the priest.

“Well, he’s disappointed,” Spencer said. “He was hoping to have the relic all to himself.”

“I’m the one who thought of it,” Thomas Kelly snapped.

“Oh, yes, and very clever of you,” Spencer acknowledged. “All those feet and steps of Mario’s?”

“This is the severed limb of a saint,” the priest said coldly. “Teresa of Avila. She founded the Carmelite order.”

“Yes, now I remember Mario telling me about it. This chapel was locked when we came, though, so he couldn’t show it to me. As it was just now. A lovely bit of subterfuge you used to get us in, by the way. Wanting to pray. My compliments.”

The priest stepped forward, fists clenched. Livia couldn’t blame him, and it would almost be worth letting him take a swing at Spencer just to see the look on Spencer’s face. But she put up her hand. “Father Battista’s not going to leave us alone in here forever. Spencer, do you think it’s possible this is the place Mario wanted you to find?”

“Oh, very likely. It’s right up his street. The double meanings in the poem, plus the quirky oddness of worshipping desiccated body parts—oh, no offense, Father.”

Spencer clearly meant to give offense and Thomas Kelly equally clearly took it, but to the priest’s credit, he remained silent. “The chance he took,” Spencer continued, “was to imagine I remembered anything at all about what this church contained. That was a mistake. If I had, though, yes, I’d have come straight to this little room.”

Livia turned to the priest. “Father Kelly? Now that we’re in this chapel”—to make up for Spencer’s “little room”—“what are you thinking?”

Thomas Kelly didn’t answer her. After a glare at Spencer, he turned and strode through the gap in the altar rail, where he stood looking up at the pair of golden boxes, one inside the other. With a sharp glance Livia pinned Spencer to his spot on the marble floor. Spencer shrugged and remained where he was as she followed the priest.

The reliquary’s glass front was answered by worked gold panels on the sides and, as far as Livia could see, at the back. The box stood on its raised lion’s legs, while inside, its leathery, shrunken, jewel-studded treasure wore a golden sandal and rested on a velvet cloth.

Thomas Kelly hesitated. Stretching his arm, he was just able to reach the bottom of the outer box. He hooked his fingers under the gold frame and tried to pull it open, but it didn’t give. He turned to Livia, the set of his shoulder conveying, equally, failure and triumph. “It’s locked.”

She stepped up. “Let me try.”

“I just told you. It’s locked.”

“And I didn’t tell you, but I can open it.” She slipped a probe from the zippered pocket of her shoulder bag, plus a nail file to use as a shim. Handing the bag to Spencer, she appraised the high altar and then set herself and jumped. A five-foot vertical leap from a standing start was not an everyday feat even for a Noantri, but Livia was strong and she was motivated. She landed lightly on the marble, to the priest’s horrified gasp and Spencer’s laughing, “Brava!” She took out her tools and had the flimsy lock open before the priest found words to express his horror.

Spencer was still laughing when she pulled the glass door wide. “Livia! I had no idea.”

Livia looked down at Thomas Kelly. “Father?”

His eyes widened. “Me? What do you— Come up there? Onto the reliquary altar? No, no possible way.”

“Shall I bring it down, then?”

“No! Don’t touch it!” Kelly glanced wildly around. He spied a heavy, brocaded chair near the wall, used by the celebrant while hymns were sung during Mass. He dragged it over and stepped onto it. She extended a hand to help him but he placed his palms flat on the altar and swung himself up with surprising athletic grace.

Standing beside her on the narrow marble shelf, he gave her a resentful glance and then shifted his attention to the reliquary itself. After a moment he said, “See those scrolls inside?” She leaned nearer to look. “They’re authentications, blessings, prayers. Maybe Damiani rolled up the Concordat and slipped it in with them. No one ever looks at those scrolls, once they’re placed with a relic.”

Livia peered skeptically at the beribboned, wax-sealed papers. “I don’t think that’s likely. They’re very small. The Concordat . . . But let’s look at them. I imagine you’d prefer to handle them yourself?”

“I certainly would!” She stood aside, letting him be the one to test whether the reliquary was locked, which it wasn’t; to ease open the front panel; and to slip out the five scrolls, fastidiously avoiding the saint’s foot itself. He stared at the delicate cylinders; then, looking pale, he set his jaw and untied the ribbons and broke the sealing wax scroll by scroll. His face fell as he scanned each and put it aside, until they were all opened and read.

“I’m wrong,” he finally said, deflated. “It’s not here.”

Livia glanced over the scrolls, all in Latin and none anything other than what it purported to be.

From below, Spencer spoke. “No,” he said, “this is just too Mario to be wrong.” Raising his eyebrows at Livia, he took a step forward. “May I join you up there?”

“No, you may not!” Kelly snapped.

Spencer sighed. “Then you do it. See if there’s anything stuck up under the top. Not underfoot, you see. Overhead.”

After a moment, with great care, the priest reached inside and felt around the peaked gold cover. He stopped still. Seconds later he drew his hand out again. In it was a single sheet of paper, folded small and yellowed with age.

35

Raffaele Orsini sighed. He hated surveillance. Giulio Aventino didn’t seem to mind when they had to sit for hours in a parked car or on a park bench, waiting for someone to appear or something to happen. Raffaele always found it painful, though he was grateful that right now he at least had a chair and a coffee.

To be fair, he had nothing against idling his time away in a café. Before their children were born, he and Elena had spent many pleasant hours over coffee and the morning
La Repubblica.
Even in the past few very busy years they’d made it a point to spend time together doing nothing in languid indolence. The trouble with surveillance was that to do it right you needed to look languid and indolent, while being anything but. Raffaele had found—Giulio had taught him, give the man his due—that often the vital information a surveillance yields comes from some event that takes place before the subject is spotted. It was important to note all comings and goings, to remember faces and clothes, cars and license plates, while lounging lazily and being bored to tears.

Automatically, partly to sharpen his skills of observation and partly to keep his mind from wandering, Raffaele, since he’d arrived, had been cataloging the people crossing the piazza, his fellow café guests, the infrequent cars, and the buzzing
motorini
. Since his subject, the dark-haired woman, had left the house and entered Santa Maria della Scala he’d been particularly focused on visitors coming and going from the church. There had been very few, just four laughing Americans with cameras and one skinny young man who’d been moping in that very café, a few tables over. The signs of lovesickness in him were unmistakable. He’d probably gone to pray to the Virgin to solve his romance problems. The Americans had come out already, consulting guidebooks and wandering away. Raffaele was confident he could describe them all if need be, equally sure he’d never be called upon to do so, and proud of the professionalism with which he committed them to memory just the same. He was wondering idly how many more people besides his surveillance subjects and the skinny young man were actually inside the church when a frantic old woman came out screaming.

36

With fingers he had to order to stop trembling, Thomas unfolded the paper he’d discovered wedged up into the reliquary’s roof. It was a small, single sheet, but until he’d flattened it completely, he held on to hope that he’d found the Concordat. Once he opened the last crease, though, that hope was gone.

Still, there could be no question that this paper was what they’d been sent here for.

It was another poem.

“Oh, my God,” Spencer George breathed, staring up at the paper in Thomas’s hand. Thomas didn’t even bother to rebuke him for his blasphemy. “Mario, Mario,” George whispered. “What were you up to?”

Livia Pietro leaned over the unfolded poem to examine it. She began to speak, but before she could, she and Spencer George both snapped their heads up.

“What?” said Thomas. “What’s happening?”

Pietro shushed him. She stood still, listening, and then even Thomas heard it: a distant shrieking coming from outside the church. Pietro turned to him. “Replace those. We need to close these boxes.”

“Those”? For a moment Thomas was lost. Then he realized she meant the prayers, the supplications of devout worshippers to the saint. Of course. What good would prayer do him now, in any case? Thomas slipped the scrolls back into the reliquary and shut the front. He swung the larger door closed, also, and, with the poem still in hand, jumped down. Pietro followed. He replaced the chair he’d climbed up on while Pietro stood still, frowning in concentration. Finally she spoke low. “He’s here! The clerk. The incense, the candles—they’re confusing me. But I think he’s here.”

“By ‘clerk,’” asked Spencer George, “you mean the Noantri from the Vatican Library?”