Lynn Viehl - Darkyn 1 - If Angels Burn (v1.1) (17 page)

J
ohn had never been to Rome, but he was given little chance to play first-time tourist. A young Italian priest holding a placard printed with John’s name stood by the customs gate, and led him outside to an old SAAB parked behind the long line of taxis. The priest loaded John’s single case into the trunk before climbing in behind the wheel.

“We go, see Brethren,” the priest told him, gesturing toward the outskirts of the city.

John nodded and sat on the passenger’s side, and clipped on his seat belt. Italians had a reputation surpassed only by the French for reckless driving, and he really would have preferred to rent his own car. Hightower had overruled him and told him he would never find the order’s house on his own.

Rome was big and crowded and noisy. There were flowers everywhere, bold scarlet roses, glassy yellow tulips, and stately lavender hyacinth. On the way through the city, they passed more stray cats, restaurants, motorbikes, and rusted-out Fiats than John had ever seen in his life. He thought the Fiats and motorbikes were understandable, given that the city had been built centuries before cars had been invented. Most of the streets were more like cramped alleys, however, with widths better suited to pedestrians, horses, and the occasional cart.

“My name Tolomeo,” the priest, a friendly young man with handsome dark features, said. He drove through snarled traffic with the usual European manic disregard for safety. “You no speaka Italian, eh?”

“No, Father Tolomeo, I’m sorry I don’t.”

“Is okay. You hungry?” The priest slowed down after screeching around the Piazza Navona and parked illegally in front of a small café. “
Zuppa
, you like, eh?”

John looked at the three famous fountains and nodded. Tolomeo jumped out and returned a few minutes later with two Styrofoam containers. In the one he handed John was a steaming, fragrant jumble of bright vegetables in reddish broth.

“Minestrone, you drink, like?” The younger man lifted his container and drank the soup from it directly.

John took a sip and scalded his tongue. “Thank you, ah,
grazie
.”

White teeth flashed as Tolomeo started the car. “
Prego, prego
.” With a twist of the wheel he roared back into traffic.

The hot soup was delicious, once John could taste again, but he concentrated more on not spilling it than drinking it. He wished he had more knowledge of Italian, so he could speak to the young priest, but he had been so upset over his last meeting with Alexandra that he hadn’t even thought of obtaining a phrase book.

Tolomeo didn’t seem to mind. In between gulps of his own soup, the priest zipped through a grid of narrow, cramped streets, muttering what were probably mild obscenities in his native language now and then under his breath, but otherwise leaving John alone to his thoughts.

Thoughts that had grown more dismal by the hour. He had tried to call Alexandra twice before leaving the States, with no luck. She wanted nothing to do with him, and he would have to accept that. If he could only banish the guilt he felt over their last meeting.

You’re hurting me, Father
.

He hadn’t meant to grab her. It had been a reflexive action, nothing more.
No, I was angry, and some part of me wanted to hurt her
. Had he left bruises? Some of the foster parents they had stayed with before the Kellers had adopted them had done that.

She’d had a bruise on her cheek that day they had stood on the curb by the HRS office building, looking into the big Lincoln Town Car where Audra and Robert Keller sat waiting for them to get in. Alex had clung to him, almost plastering herself against his side, her small hands twisting in the dirty T-shirt hanging from his skinny torso.

Johnny, I’m scared. She looks strong
.

John had been grimly prepared as always to do whatever it took to protect his sister. But Audra had been as gentle as she was kind and generous, and Alexandra had been safe with the Kellers. Before he had left for the seminary, John had made sure of that. And when they had been killed, he had used the insurance settlement to put her in one of the best private schools in the country, and later to pay for medical school.

Alexandra had never thanked him. Not once. After the funeral, she had reverted to the little girl at the HRS office, crying and clutching at him. She had begged him to stay. Even screamed filthy obscenities at him when he had pushed her into the taxi taking her to the school.

Alex’s small, knotted fists pounding on the window.
Goddamn you, Johnny, don’t you fucking leave me like this
!

John knew he should have stayed and explained why she would be better off without him. But to Alexandra, there were no logical explanations. She wanted her brother, and there was no arguing with her.

His short-term visa did not allow him the luxury of staying and comforting his devastated sister. He had been released from the prison in Rio only for compassion reasons, only long enough to attend the funeral and settle his family affairs. If he had not returned voluntarily, the American government would have happily extradited him.

John had never wanted Alexandra to know about the charges levied against him in Brazil, or how much time he had spent sitting in that stinking pit of a cell. To this day, she believed he had gone back to minister to the poor, not sit in prison while the archdiocese attorneys dealt with the tangle of lies spun by one disgruntled, vengeful
menina do doce
.

The whole thing had been an ill-timed, messy affair. International attention on the few pedophiles among the Catholic priesthood inflamed the Brazilian government, which subsequently put any suspected sex offender under a microscope. It had taken eight long months for the church to wheedle the government into releasing John. He was escorted from the prison to the airport, and put on a plane. He had not even known where he was heading until the plane landed in Los Angeles, and he was met at the airport by yet another attorney.

The scandal had sullied John Patrick Keller’s spotless record as a priest, and the church wanted him to meditate on his mistakes. As penance, he was sent to a Trappist monastery in the mountains, where he stayed until he was transferred five years ago to Chicago.

“You no say much, eh?” Tolomeo commented.

“No, not much.” All those years among the Trappists, who were bound by vows of silence, had definitely had an effect on John. Silence wasn’t golden—it was a horrible, empty vacuum that weighed on the soul with each passing day spent in it—but it had burned the chatter out of him. He looked down into the soup container, surprised to see it was empty. “Good soup.”

“
Si
, the best.” Tolomeo turned a corner and pulled in through a bay door into what appeared to be an empty warehouse. He gestured for John to leave the container on the floor of the car. “This the place. We go down now.”

Down
is how they went, in a freight elevator that groaned and shuddered with every foot it dropped. John saw through the open iron grating that they passed six different floors, and felt the air change and press on his eardrums. A vaguely unpleasant odor grew stronger the lower they went.

“Where are we?” he asked Tolomeo.

“Down.” The elevator came to a shaky stop, and the priest threw open the grating. “This way now.”

John followed him down a dimly lit corridor made of tufaceous stone blocks so old they were crumbling in places at the stress points. He guessed they must have once been white, but centuries of candle smoke and seeping groundwater had turned them parchment yellow, streaked brown where the water even now ran in narrow rivulets from the ceiling seams.

Despite overhead ventilation shafts, the wretched odor came in waves, stronger whenever they passed one of the open archways leading into some sort of gallery.

At last Tolomeo stopped at a single wooden door. Around the frame the Greek letters chi and rho had been painted over and over, the X- and P-shaped letters entwined in a familiar symbol representing Jesus Christ’s name. He smiled once more at John before he rapped his knuckles on it three times. Someone unlocked it from within, and Tolomeo gestured for John to walk inside.

The room was some sort of chapel, a simple altar beneath a wooden cross, filled with fresh flowers and candles that banished the unpleasant smell from outside. Six short pews, three on either side of a narrow center aisle, were filled with men wearing simple brown robes and cowls. Their heads were bent, their eyes closed, their lips moving in prayer. No one looked up at John.

He turned to ask Tolomeo what to do, but the young priest had not come in behind him.

Obeying a lifetime of training, John paused at the edge of the nearest pew to genuflect. The man sitting at the end of the pew glanced at him before returning to his prayers.

The look wasn’t friendly.

Another monk emerged from a door set off in a corner behind the altar. He wore the same simple cowled robe as the other monks, but his was black with a red cord tied around the middle. Over his left breast was a square of white cloth quartered by a red cross with ends that were split in two. With a glance, John saw that the other monks had the same symbol on their robes; some had two and three of them grouped together.

The simple, splayed-ended red cross of martyrdom, a symbol of the Knights Templars.

The assembly rose to their feet, silent, respectful, but John still wasn’t sure what to do. These men operated outside the Catholic church; he couldn’t apply what he had learned in the priesthood here. The black-robed monk helped by gesturing with a square, brown hand, beckoning John to come forward.

“Welcome to les Frères de la Lumière, Father Keller.” The voice was a smooth tenor, but accented with German, not Italian. The brown hand tugged back the cowl, revealing a round, genial face and a scarlet skullcap over a tonsured scalp. “I am Cardinal Stoss.”

John nearly went down on a knee again. Cardinal Viktor Stoss, one of the most powerful men in the cardinalate, was being considered as a candidate for the papacy. Yet one did not kneel before man, only God, and this little chapel was still a house of God. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

Stoss seemed amused. “Bishop Hightower tells me you are very interested in becoming a soldier of God. We are in grievous need of soldiers, Father, who are pure in mind and soul.”

John stiffened. “Then you will wish to recruit from heaven, Your Grace, not the slums of Chicago.”

Amused, the cardinal nodded. “You are everything August said and more.” He looked past John at the assembled monks, and his expression turned serious. “Here is one who would join our ranks. One who is deemed passable and to be proved worthy. Be there any objections, make them known.”

No one moved or spoke.

Stoss nodded and made the sign of the cross in the air before him. “We accept our brother in Christ, John Patrick, as a novitiate of the Brethren.”

How odd
, John thought.
Like a marriage ceremony
.

One of the brown-robed monks stepped out of the pew and came to stand beside John. He pointed to a side door. “Wait in there, Brother.”

John moved into the adjoining room, which was spacious, lit by electricity, and set up with equipment that would have been found in any modern business office. The walls were not stone here, but huge marble slabs decorated with ornate carvings and miniature recesses for oil lamps. The only sign of true age was the brownish, uneven water stains dotting the plastered ceiling. More flowers spilled from gigantic urns set at even intervals at the base of the walls.

Through the closed door John could hear Latin being spoken, although he didn’t recognize the prayer. It sounded more like an exchange than the chants he knew. The door made it hard to make out the words, so he leaned against it. As soon as he did, the prayer ended, and the sound of footsteps passed by the door.

“Curious, Brother Keller?”

John turned to see the cardinal standing just inside the room. He scanned the walls but saw no other entry. “Your Grace, how did you—”

“Slip in here?” Cardinal Stoss put his hand on a limestone panel, which swung soundlessly out. “This was once the arcosolium of a politically dangerous family. Visitors used this panel when they did not wish to be seen entering through the church.”

“Where am I, exactly?”

“You are standing seven hundred feet below the city, in the center of La Lucemaria.” Stoss took a moment to remove the black robe and hung it in a small armoire before donning the traditional scarlet and gold vestments of his office. “There are more than sixty catacombs surrounding the city, but this one does not appear in any tourist guide or on any map. Sit down, Brother.”

John sat. The cardinal went behind the desk and made a brief call, during which he spoke only in fluent Italian, and then hung up the phone and regarded him. “This is not what you expected, is it?”

“I didn’t know what to expect.” He looked around the room. “Why are you based here, in this mausoleum?”

“An underground cemetery, to be more precise, made up of a labyrinth of tunnels leading to galleries, burial niches, and secret chapels. It was built by Christians in the time of Nero.”

John glanced at the ceiling. “I didn’t realize it was so old.” The watermarks looked much larger than before, and he wondered what lay above the ceiling, and if it was made entirely of plaster.

“During that time, people of our faith existed in an unfriendly, largely pagan society. Emperor Nero completely distrusted Christians and allowed them to be harassed, imprisoned, exiled, and slaughtered without just cause. The poor souls brought their dead down here by the thousands, so they might be buried in imitation of Christ. As you can tell from the lingering bouquet.” He waved a hand around as if to disperse the air. “The Brethren uncovered the catacomb when they relocated to this region in 1417, and decided it was best to establish our order where few, even our brothers from the church, would dare trespass.”

He hadn’t come to Rome for a history lesson, but he squelched his impatience. “Did the vampires dare?”