Blood of the Lamb (49 page)

“I . . .” Thomas felt himself reddening. “When you put it that way, it does sound idiotic.”

“It’s not idiotic.” Her voice softened. “I just don’t know. There have always been legends—we hear them just as you do. But there’ve been legends about us, too: that we turn into bats, that we can’t be seen in mirrors. On book covers we’re shown with eyes like red-hot coals, in films with skin like dirty snow. Some of those ideas, we’re guilty of fostering, once they start making the rounds. Bram Stoker, who was one of us, did us a great service. Stories about us had started to circulate, interest had been renewed. It was a daring move to write
Dracula
. Some Noantri were horrified, but it turned out to be brilliant. He made us seem at once completely outlandish, and identifiable. Anyone who could go out in daylight, who didn’t have pointy teeth and didn’t smell like rank earth, couldn’t possibly be a vampire. Those kinds of myths allow us to live among the Unchanged more easily. I’d imagine if other”—she paused—“other varieties of people, people with different natures, do exist, they’re not much like the stories about them, either.”

Pondering that, the meaning and possibilities, how wide the world was and how narrow human knowledge, Thomas found himself beside Livia rounding the corner into Piazza della Rotonda without being quite sure how they’d gotten there. To their right, the Pantheon itself, one of the world’s truest gems of architectural creation. To their left, a café, people relaxing with a morning coffee or using the coffee to rev up for the day: contradictory uses, the same pleasure. Livia led the way past tourists getting an early start and up a little street called Via della Rosetta. A few short, shadowy blocks, and then straight ahead rose the elaborate Baroque façade of Santa Maria Maddalena, golden limestone glowing.

Thomas and Livia entered the open church doors, stepped through the small entry on the right into the sanctuary. Thomas dipped his fingers in the font of holy water and crossed himself, Livia waiting for this brief ritual to be complete before, together, they walked forward. Reaching the last row of pews, they stopped. Soaring marble, polished wood, gilt and silver and a blood-red cross in the stained glass of the rose window; but nothing offered a direction, a hint of what Lorenzo might have meant.

“Damiani’s notebook,” Thomas said. “Maybe there was a poem . . . ?”

But Livia shook her head. “They were all in Trastevere, the places he wrote about.”

Thomas hadn’t really expected that to work. “Well,” he said, scanning the ornate ceiling, the patterned floor, the side chapels with their marble tombs, none of which sparked any flashes of inspiration, “I guess it’s time to ask someone.”

“Ask what?” Livia said, but Thomas was already striding down the center aisle.

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Livia followed Thomas to the front of the church, where a black-robed monk whose habit bore a large crimson cross laid an altar cloth in one of the side chapels.

“
Buongiorno
, Father,” Thomas said, and continued in Italian. “Thomas Kelly, SJ, and
Professoressa
Livia Pietro. Do you have a moment? We have some questions about this church.”

The monk turned his lean, unsmiling face to them. “Emilio Creci. I’ll be glad to help.” Meeting his eyes, “glad” was not the first word that sprang to Livia’s mind.

“Thank you.” Thomas smiled, not reacting to the monk’s frostiness. “We’re both historians, Livia and I. We were advised to come here by . . . another historian, who has since died. We’re hoping to honor his guidance, but we don’t know what it was he particularly wanted us to study. I’m sure your church has many treasures, but does anything stand out to you, something a pair of bookish academics might have been sent to see?” He spoke with a self-deprecating diffidence, clearly calculated to make the other man feel both superior and impatient. This wasn’t exactly flimflam, Livia thought, but it could without fear of contradiction be called misdirection. What he’d said over breakfast was true: Thomas Kelly wasn’t the same man he’d been yesterday.

And, Livia was delighted to find, she liked this one even better.

Father Creci shrugged. “We’re a poor order, dedicated to the sick. This church is grand, but in Rome”—he smiled thinly—“undistinguished. Like many of the smaller orders, we’re . . . honored with the responsibility of maintaining a property whose demands threaten to outstrip our resources. Not a problem I believe Jesuits encounter often?”

Oho,
thought Livia.
Sibling rivalry: so that’s his problem.

Thomas smiled beneficently. “If that’s the case, you’re due even more praise, Father.” He spread his hands to indicate the gleaming marble and glowing stained glass, the elaborate side chapels and polished wood pews. The church’s rococo interior was wild with gilt and Technicolor frescoes: in Livia’s opinion, over the top, but admirable nonetheless. “The beauty of Santa Maria Maddalena—and of the obvious treasures here—is a testament to you and your brothers,” Thomas said. “You must spend a great deal of time working here. Each of you must come to know this church intimately.”

Thomas was obviously trying to steer the conversation back to the church building and its contents, but Father Creci still had a point to make.

“As much as needed. As I said, our mission is to the indigent sick. The resources I spoke of include our time. We resist as well as we can being caught up in the needs of the material world.”

“And yet you serve your immediate material world—your obligation to this church—so well.”

“Thank you,” said the monk. He was forced to acknowledge the compliment, but rose to the defense of his fellows and how they spent their time. “The endowment helps a great deal, of course.”

Thomas and Livia glanced at each other. “Endowment?” Thomas asked.

“Strictly for the upkeep of the church and its possessions. Not for our ministry, which is always in need.”

“Really?” Thomas murmured. “How narrow. Who is your benefactor?”

“We’ve never known,” the monk answered with a combination of resentment and pride. “The endowment dates to 1601. It enabled us to maintain our first church, and later build this one. We’re charged with the particular responsibility of the Maddalena statue, but in return for constant vigilance with regard to that, the endowment enables us to provide for, as you say, this immediate material world, while allowing my brothers and myself to focus on our true calling.”

Livia felt her pulse quickening, but she didn’t speak, letting Thomas continue. Betraying no excitement, he said, “The Maddalena statue? An endowment—that must be an important piece.”

“To us it is, for the freedom its upkeep allows us. It dates from the late fifteenth century. Personally—though of course I haven’t a Jesuit’s erudition, so I can only think what I think—I find it neither good nor particularly beautiful. It was of obvious value to someone in 1601, however.”

Smiling, Thomas asked, “May we see it?”

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The grudging Father Creci led them across the front of the church to a chapel on the right. Tucked in a corner on a two-foot marble plinth stood a large wooden statue of Mary Magdalene. Life-size, Livia thought, if you took into account people’s smaller stature then. Of course, it wasn’t made in Mary’s time, it was made in the fifteenth century. Still, people were smaller during the Renaissance, also. It was an ongoing source of needling from the Elder Noantri to the Newer, if one of the relatively few made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should show himself to be no physical match for a smaller, slighter—but no less everlasting—senior.

Examining the statue with a practiced eye, Livia found herself agreeing with the belligerently untutored monk. As a work of art, it wasn’t very good. Its proportions were off, its carving in some places clumsy. The iconography was here: the long loose hair, the left hand holding the unguent jar, that marvelous contradiction signaling Mary Magdalene’s dual nature: her debased early life as a prostitute, and her later devotion, because it was that same costly unguent with which she washed Christ’s feet. This Magdalene wore no jewels or gold chains, and neither her clothing nor the body beneath it could be called voluptuous. Those facts and the half-closed eyes and pensive face told Livia the sculptor was depicting Mary after her repentance and conversion.

“Livia,” Thomas said, in casual tones that belied the rise in his pulse rate and adrenaline level, which Livia could feel, and which echoed her own. “I think this might be it, don’t you? What we were sent to see.”

“It could be,” Livia answered, putting doubt into her voice although she felt none. She turned and smiled at the monk. “Father Creci, you’re obviously dedicated to your mission and we’ve already taken you from it for too long. Might we be allowed to spend some time with your sculpture? I understand you have a great deal to do. I think I speak for Father Kelly, also, when I say your devotion to your ministry is inspiring. If I may be allowed to make an offering?” She slipped three one-hundred-Euro notes from her wallet. “Or shall I place this in the offering box on our way out?”

The monk all but snatched the bills from her hand. “No, no need to trouble yourself, I’ll take care of it. Thank you. Yes, please, take as much time as you like. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask.”

They watched him walk quickly away, a bit more bounce in his step now than before.

“Do you think he thought I wasn’t actually going to stuff the bills in the box?” Livia asked Thomas.

“I’m sure of it.” Thomas grinned. He turned his attention to the statue and his face grew serious. “If this is it, what Lorenzo meant, what about it did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” Livia said slowly, considering the piece. “Either its iconography conceals something . . .”

“Or it conceals something.”

“Another Damiani poem?”

“Possible,” said Thomas. “Personally, I hope not. I’d like to think we’re done with that.”

Livia walked slowly around, leaned to peer behind the statue. She put out a tentative hand, felt it, pushed gently. Firmly positioned on its base, solid and tremendously heavy, it didn’t move. Returning to the front, she stood and looked, letting her eyes move slowly over the piece, as the art historian in her would with any new work.

The statue’s face wasn’t beautiful: elongated and flat, with a high forehead, a crooked nose, a cleft chin. The folds of cloth, so often a breathtaking element of Renaissance art, were uninteresting, and the unguent jar was held at a strange angle. The face had an undeniable power, its emotions growing deeper and more complex the longer Livia regarded it. The force exerted by it, though, required time spent before it. In a church—and a city—so full of glories, this statue would almost assuredly have passed unnoticed through the centuries; Livia herself, whose vocation gave her reason to be familiar with many more pieces than most people could claim, couldn’t recall having seen it before. A strange piece to carry its own endowment.

Unless that were the point.

“The face is beautiful,” Thomas said. “No, I don’t mean beautiful. But I can’t stop looking at it.”

“I think the sculptor felt the same way about his model.” The tiny contractions in Livia’s muscles were showing her the artist’s path through the work. “Thomas, look at this. The jar is tipping—if you really carried oil like that, you’d spill it. And the right hand—it looks like it’s pointing straight to it.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it’s saying what the jar holds is important. And isn’t liquid.” She looked around. The few resolute early tourists they’d passed on their way up the aisle might make their eventual way to this chapel, but right now, none were near. Livia handed Thomas her shoulder bag and stepped up lightly onto the plinth. Balancing easily, she ran her hands over the unguent jar. She rapped with her knuckles, listening for a change of tone. “Thomas?” she said quietly. “It’s hollow.”

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