Blood of the Lamb (27 page)

“It’s a monastery. I’m a priest.”

She couldn’t argue with that. She followed, and it turned out he was right. He marched confidently through a small door into a cool, dim corridor, then led her along a smooth-worn stone floor past walls hung with crucifixes and a dark, not very good but clearly deeply felt painting of Santa Teresa. After a brief moment of decision at the intersection with a wider corridor he turned right. A few yards later they reached another door and, through it, a small vestibule. Livia’s heart pounded when she saw the sliding scrollwork screen and the desk in the tiny room beyond it, but the vestibule and room were as empty as the corridors. Thomas Kelly crossed to the outer door, eased it open, took a cautious look out, and gestured impatiently as though she were dragging her feet. They issued onto Via del Mattonato, behind the church. No one was about as they hurried away.

“That was impressive,” Livia said.

“Tradesman’s entrance,” was Kelly’s short answer. But after a moment he relented, adding, “The Discalced Carmelites are a semi-cloistered order. Their contact with the outside world is carefully controlled.”

“They have a big gate right smack through the rear wall into the monastery.”

“That would have been added recently. For trucks. Originally a tradesman would have brought his wares on his back or by handcart as far as the vestibule we just came out of. He’d have been paid by the monk behind the screen and gone off. Then other friars would have been summoned to collect the delivery. Which, you can be sure, is a similar system to the one they use now for the trucks. It’s only when the monks are performing their pastoral duties that they have contact with outsiders.”

Kelly had assumed the pedantic tones of the university lecturer again, but Livia took care to keep her amusement to herself. To her surprise, though, the corners of the priest’s mouth lifted into a small smile.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“You might be the only woman ever to have walked that hallway.”

“Don’t tell the monks, they’ll be scandalized.”

Still smiling, Kelly nodded. Then, as if he’d caught himself in an error, his face flushed and he said, “Much more than scandalized if they knew what you really were. What I’d brought to their consecrated halls.”

Livia sighed once again. “Give it a rest, Father.” She strode past him and then, without looking back, turned down a
vicolo
so narrow it was always in shadow. She kept a few paces ahead of Thomas Kelly as they covered the short distance to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

44

Giulio Aventino had to admit that, notwithstanding the Armani jacket, the elegant two-day scruff, and the cardinal uncle, Raffaele Orsini had done an excellent job at the Santa Maria della Scala crime scene. Once you got past the fact that he’d sat drinking coffee in the café across the piazza while it became a crime scene, of course. Raffaele had called in the coroner and the forensics team, used some of the responding officers to secure the church and some to fan out and hunt for the alleged perpetrator; and he’d held on to all the witnesses. That last must not have been easy in the case of the sour historian who was sitting in cold impatience, his arms folded, in a rear pew. He, according to the sergeant, had to have it explained to him that the forces of law and good represented by the Carabinieri would be most grateful for his continuing cooperation. As would the substantial paperwork-generating bureaucratic machine of the civil state, which sadly the Carabinieri could not control once it was unleashed. Giulio nodded. Raffaele was very good at that sort of thing. Giulio himself would just have arrested the man if he’d tried to leave, and sorted it out later.

Not for the first time, Giulio considered the possibility that the
maresciallo
had created their partnership not only because of the things the junior detective could learn from the senior.

The other two witnesses, by contrast, were only too glad to stay. Black-clad
vecchie
, of a type Giulio’s twenty-three years on the force had taught him to know well, they had not only been in the church when the homicide had occurred, they’d nearly seen it happen. They’d turned at the yell and the thud, seen the thin young man flee back up the aisle. It was their solemn duty, they assured him, to help the Carabinieri solve this horrible crime, this desecration, this tragedy that offered further proof, if any were needed, that today’s young people were lost to God and running completely amok. No, they’d needed no persuasion to stay; in fact, Giulio suspected he’d need a pry bar to get these ladies out of the church in the end.

He’d listened patiently to each as she objected, disingenuously but huffily, to being made to go through her story again, having already told it to Raffaele. Then, being reassured of her value to the investigation, each launched into a blow-by-blow (“. . . lighting candles for my late husband, such a good man, God rest his soul, he was Francesca’s brother, we come every day . . .”) that eventually wound round to the raised voices, the scuffle, the fall. By the time each of the ladies had told it twice, the story included bellowed blasphemous curses, an unprovoked vicious attack on a man of God by a wild-eyed degenerate, and a morbidly delighted grin lighting up the face of the killer (“I can never forget it, Madonna help me!”); but Giulio thought not. What he heard, between the self-importantly hysterical lines, played out like this: a young man rose from his knees at the rear of the church and sought access to an area in which he was not permitted; the old monk sought to prevent him; in an attempt to shove his way past, the young man had knocked the old monk down. The monk had hit his head on the ancient marble floor—on a gravestone marking a tomb below, but Giulio was long over the ironies that churches could offer—and died, either of the impact or of a heart attack caused by fright or agitation, the specific cause being for the coroner to determine.

Giulio, again from long experience of such matters, suspected the death had been an absurd accident. An overreaction, you might say, on the part of Fate. A satanic disciple, a specimen of today’s amok youth with eyes like burning coals, would be unlikely to have been found on his knees at the back of the church to begin with. Had the young man stayed, and assuming he had no record of previous criminal violence, it was likely he’d have gotten a slap on the wrist: at worst, a six-month suspended sentence for assault. As it was, because he’d fled the scene, he was now a suspect in a homicide. The longer and harder the authorities looked for him and the more resources they expended, the angrier the judge they brought him before would be when he was finally caught.

It was that he had, in fact, fled that interested Giulio. That, and the fact that he’d been on his knees in prayer in the first place.

The coroner’s men were ready to go, so Giulio dismissed the second
vecchia
, instructing one of the uniformed officers to escort the important lady out. As he’d expected, she balked at leaving, but her sanctimonious respect for authority overcame her desire to be at the center of any tragedy; and finally she went. As was his custom, Giulio went back to the body, lifting the linen over the face for one final look. Raffaele Orsini, standing beside him, crossed himself. That made, since Giulio had arrived, four times. Of course he’d counted; it was one of the little delights of working with Raffaele, the private side bets Giulio made daily about how the sergeant’s piety would express itself. Since this case involved the death of a monk in a church, Giulio was looking forward to some inspired devotion.

Giulio nodded to the coroner’s team, who started the process of packing the body up for transport. From Giulio’s point of view there was nothing of note about the body except the look of peace, even joy, on the old monk’s face. Giulio could tell the man had been bent crooked with arthritis, which probably caused him constant pain; and at his age no doubt he had other health problems as well.
As you will soon enough, Aventino,
he told himself,
and at least this one died happy, expecting to meet his Maker.
As Giulio often did, he considered the cheerless irony of how he and his fellow realists (a word he vastly preferred to “nonbelievers,” which implied something actually existed in which they refused to believe) had outsmarted themselves. Men like this monk—and Raffaele Orsini—might be deluded about their own purpose, about God existing and having a plan, and most of all, about the afterlife; but they generally died happy.

With a stifled sigh Giulio walked over to the pew where the historian sat. The lemon face turned to look at him.

“Well. The majesty of the law is finally prepared to catechize me, is that it?”

Giulio enjoyed the deliberate misuse of the theological verb, partly because he heard, from the pew behind, Raffaele sucking disapproving air between his teeth. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir,” he said. “Professor Spencer George, is that correct?” Giulio pronounced the English badly but with obvious care, and then returned to Italian with equally obvious relief. “I’m Senior Investigator Giulio Aventino. It’s an honor, sir. May I?” Without pausing for an answer Giulio dropped wearily into the pew. “It was those women. They were witnesses to the incident—which I take it you yourself were not,
Professore
?”

He waited, though they both knew he knew the answer. The historian forced out an exasperated “That’s correct.”

“As I thought. In any case, I needed personally to hear those women’s accounts of the situation—as senior investigator on this case I can’t rely on secondhand testimony, even from someone as reliable as my sergeant”—his nod to Raffaele, now leaning forward, caused the historian to swivel around to look—“but frankly, sir, it was also that until they were gone I knew I wouldn’t be able to think straight. Very pious, of course, and no doubt women of great virtue, but exhausting, don’t you find?”

None of this did the
professore
grace with an answer; and all of it was only barely true. Giulio had no special love for the doom-and-gloom sin-sniffing old ladies who came early to Mass and made a point of occupying the pews nearest the confessional, the better to eavesdrop on other people’s transgressions. But they didn’t make his head spin. Belying his carefully cultivated appearance, very little, in reality, made Giulio Aventino’s head spin.

He peered at Spencer George and could tell the historian was seeing right through his rumpled-and-befuddled act. Excellent. George would conclude that Giulio, after having kept him cooling his heels for no good reason, was now making an inept attempt to cozy up to him for the purpose of manipulating him into lowering his guard. Being manipulated tended to irritate people. And, having so easily discovered Giulio’s strategy, the
professore
—in any case no doubt accustomed to thinking of himself as smarter than everyone around him; Giulio could see that in the impatient thin lips and the arrogant set of the shoulders—would allow his own condescension free rein.

Irritated, impatient, and condescending. If any constellation of mind-sets was more likely to cause a suspect to make mistakes, Giulio hadn’t yet come across it.

Not that Spencer George was a suspect, at least, not in the death of the monk, at least, not directly. But when Giulio had first arrived, after he’d seen the body and gotten the lay of the land, and before he’d questioned any of the witnesses, he’d taken his sergeant outside and had a hushed conversation with him on the church steps. Raffaele had filled him in, with exactly the mixture of apology and pride that Giulio had expected, on his surveillance mission for his cardinal uncle. Giulio, over the half-glasses perennially slipping down his nose as though they wanted to bury themselves in his mustache, had interrupted Raffaele’s narrative to ask whether he was absolutely sure he hadn’t noticed anything at all amiss about the visitors going in and out of the church. That was by way of reminding the sergeant that all of this had happened while he’d been lounging in the piazza outside on secondment to the Vatican, so perhaps a bit more apology and a touch less pride would have been appropriate. Then, because they were, at the end of the day, partners, and because Raffaele, at bottom, had the makings of a good, solid cop—and because one of Raffaele’s better points was that he never made excuses for his mistakes—Giulio had filled the sergeant in on what might turn out to be the intriguing next piece of what might turn out to be a larger puzzle: the anticipated arrival of a member of the Gendarmerie. (“Stop smirking, Raffaele, they’re brothers in arms. If anyone should show respect to an officer from the Vatican I’d think it would be a cardinal’s nephew.”) The Gendarme, so Giulio had heard, had an interesting tale to tell about the homicide suspect who, after causing what Giulio was still sure was an accident, had so rapidly disappeared.

45