The Devil Will Come (8 page)

Before Elisabetta could reopen her eyes, disturbing images began to invade her thoughts like unwelcome visitors. Pictures of partially mummified bodies with bony tails wafted through her mind.

Then she was seized by a flash, a painful memory she’d all but blocked from consciousness: the half-naked backside of the man who’d stabbed her, that
thing
protruding from his spine, ringed by small black tattoos looking for all the world like a swarm of angry insects.

That thing. It
was
a tail, wasn’t it?

Suddenly woozy, she exhaled, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

It was as if she’d always known.

Elisabetta felt small and vulnerable, a sparrow in a hurricane. God was inside her; He was all around her. But for the first time in a very long while she craved the warm sanctuary of a physical embrace.

‘Are you coming?’

Elisabetta heard Marco’s impatient baritone through the bathroom door. ‘Yes!’ she shouted back.

‘You said “yes” ten minutes ago. We’re going to be late.’

‘This time I mean it.’

She put the finishing touches on her eye make-up and stood as far back as she could in an attempt to turn her reflection in the mirror over the sink into something more full-length. She liked her new dress. It was red and summery and it made her look especially
shapely
. She only needed to pick out a necklace, something nice and long, to show off her cleavage.

She opened the door and watched the impatience melt from Marco’s face. ‘That was worth waiting for,’ he said. ‘Look at you!’

She asked if he liked the dress and he responded by running his big hands over the silky fabric and up her stockings.

Elisabetta laughed and pulled away. ‘I thought you said we were going to be late.’

‘It’s only my cousin’s wedding. I don’t even like him.’

‘Well, I’m not going to let you mess up my dress and make-up. Not to mention your new suit – which looks really good, by the way.’

Marco checked himself out in the hallway mirror. ‘You think so?’

‘Yes, I think so. You’re going to make the girls go crazy.’

‘They can’t have me,’ he said, lightly. ‘I’m spoken for.’

‘For that, I’ll kiss you, but later. I’ll be right back. I need to get a necklace.’

At that moment he stopped looking like a hulking man and took on the demeanor of a small, excited boy. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and removed a slim velvet box. ‘Maybe this will work.’

‘Marco, what have you done?’

She opened it and loved it immediately. It was a heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain, half the design done in pavé diamonds, half in rubies.

‘You like it?’

‘Oh my God! I love it!’

She ran back into the bathroom to put it on and came out glowing.

‘It looks beautiful,’ he said. ‘Like you.’

‘Half is me, half is you,’ Elisabetta said. ‘Which am I, the diamonds or the rubies?’

‘Whichever you like.’

She took a couple of steps forward and turned her face upwards to his. He encircled her in his strong arms and tenderly squeezed her ribs. She closed her eyes, put her arms around his waist, and her ear against his heart, feeling as happy and secure as she’d ever been.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

Startled, Elisabetta opened her eyes. Professor De Stefano was at her door. ‘No, please come in.’

The old man looked apologetic. ‘I just wanted to make sure you had everything you needed.’

‘Yes, it’s all here,’ she said, composing herself. ‘My box of papers arrived this morning from my father’s flat. The computer seems to work.’

‘Do you need someone to help you with it?’

‘We have computers at the school, Professor. I’m quite proficient.’

‘Good, good. I’ll have my secretary give you access to my files of photographs from the site.’

‘That would be useful,’ Elisabetta said.

De Stefano lingered. ‘Do you have a plan?’ he asked
abruptly
. ‘I know it’s only your first full day and I wouldn’t press you, but I’ve already had calls this morning from the Vatican. They’re anxious for a report.’

She tapped on her copy of
Astronomica
. ‘I’m thinking about the symbols. I want to try to understand their meaning, the significance they may have had to these … beings. And I need to understand the phenomenon better – the tails.’

De Stefano nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, this is critical. We need to solve this mystery quickly. Who were these people? How did they come to be in this place? How did they die? By fire? Were they murdered? If so, who was responsible? Was it mass suicide? If so, why did they do it? What do their tails and their symbology tell us about who they were? Were they Romans? Were they pagans? Is there even the remotest possibility that they could have been Christians? It’s going to be impossible to prevent the public from finding out about this forever. These things always leak. I only hope that we have some credible explanations to offer if it comes out before the Conclave starts or while it’s in session. I’ll leave you to it. But let me know as soon as you’ve made progress.’ His voice had a pleading tone.

She opened the small volume to a bookmark. Marcus Manilius was a Roman astrologer whose life straddled the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, a figure who would have been lost to the sands of time were it not for his epic poem
Astronomica
,
intended
to teach the art of the zodiac to his contemporaries.

Nor did man’s reason set bound or limit to its activities until it scaled the skies, grasped the innermost secrets of the world by its understanding of their causes, and beheld all that anywhere exists. It perceived why clouds were shaken and shattered by so loud a crash; why winter’s snowflakes were softer than summer’s hail; why volcanoes blazed with fire and the solid earth quaked; why rain poured down and what cause set the winds in motion. After reason had referred these several happenings to their true causes, it ventured beyond the atmosphere to seek knowledge of the neighboring vastness of heaven and comprehend the sky as a whole; it determined the shapes and names of the signs, and discovered what cycles they experienced according to fixed law, and that all things moved to the will and disposition of heaven, as the constellations by their varied array assign different destinies
.

This much Elisabetta recalled: the ancient Romans had been astrology mad, passionately convinced that the heavens ruled their fate. Some Emperors, those who were cocksure like Tiberius, encouraged the practice. Others, like Augustus, convinced that the populace was actively trying to predict his demise, banned astrological consultation outright.

But despite the pervasiveness of the zodiac in everyday Roman life she knew that astrological symbols were rarely found on the frescoes of homes or tombs. The symbology splashed across this columbarium was unique and given its context, disturbing.

Elisabetta compared her old notes on the original, now disintegrated wall with her new jottings. The pattern of symbols was identical, the twelve astrological signs simply but beautifully rendered in a large circle in their traditional longitudinal order from Aries to Pisces, followed by seven planetary signs in a peculiar order: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And in each circle Pisces was always upright, like a standing man.

And what of the mummified and skeletal remains? She’d need to study De Stefano’s photos carefully but, more importantly, she needed to get back into the catacombs with a trowel and brush and spend some time with the remains. She started to write a reminder to ask the professor about arranging another visit but she became distracted by a sticky note with an exclamation mark on it that she’d left protruding from a page of
Astronomica
years ago. She opened the book to the mark.

A superior power often intermingles the bodies of wild beasts with the limbs of human beings: that is no natural birth … the stars create these unprecedented forms, heaven introduces their features
.

Monstrous births.

Elisabetta shuddered, trying to recall why she had flagged the passage.

Her computer chimed the arrival of her first email. She wheeled her chair around and clicked to the inbox, expecting the photos from De Stefano. But it was a message from Micaela – the subject line simply read
CIAO
.

Here’s a bunch of articles for you. Hope they’re what you’re looking for. It’s driving me crazy that you won’t tell me what’s going on. Mic.

Elisabetta sent the documents to the shared printer in the copier/file room and hurried to pick them up before anyone could see them.

She was relieved to be alone, away from prying eyes as the articles dropped into the printing tray. She stapled each one and waited for the next. Then she realized that she wasn’t alone. A young priest had emerged from the rows of filing cabinets and was looking at her.

She turned and stared too long.

He was very tall, certainly two meters, with an oblong face and fine blond hair that made him resemble the screaming man in Munch’s painting. He was wearing black plastic glasses with lenses so thick that they magnified and distorted his eyes. But it was his long torso and absurdly long arms that struck Elisabetta most. The arms were too much even for a body as
stretched-out
as his, and his thin, bony wrists protruded from the too-short sleeves of his black clergy shirt.

She was embarrassed at her involuntary gawking and was about to say something when he scooted out the door and disappeared without a word.

At her desk Elisabetta slipped the journal articles into her bag. Night reading. She would spend the rest of the afternoon poring over De Stefano’s computer file of excavation photos.

Gian Paolo Trapani had taken hundreds of shots. The excavation work was rudimentary and the skeletons were only partially separated from one another and the surrounding matrix of rubble. She studied each photo carefully. Her first impressions were that these people were well-off. They had gold and silver bracelets and jeweled pendants on their persons. There were clumps of silver coins here and there suggesting long-ago-decomposed purses. The bodies were pressed together rather uniformly, indicating, Elisabetta supposed, crowding in a small space. But one feature jumped out after she had seen enough shots. The skeletons of children and even infants seemed to be randomly scattered among the adults. She couldn’t find one example of an infant sheltered in the arms of one of the adults. Where was the evidence the maternal instinct?

Then a photo of one skeleton stopped her in her tracks.

It was a male, she thought, judging from its overall length and the bulkiness of its skull. As to mummification,
it
was among the better-preserved, with a good portion of tight brown skin sticking to the facial bones. She knew that post-mortem changes made these kinds of judgment difficult, if not absurd, but there was a frozen look of tortured rage on that rudimentary face.

The skeleton was dripping with gold. Heavy gold bracelets on the wrist bones. A beaten-gold pendant lying among the ribs. Elisabetta searched for a close-up of the pendant but there was none. She magnified the area with a photo-tool but it was no use. If there were markings she couldn’t make them out. She made a mental note to seek it out the next time she went to St Callixtus.

But it was the final photo of this skeleton that really seized her imagination. There was something in one of his bony hands: a broken silver chain with a silver medallion. A shiver of expectation ran through Elisabetta. She zoomed in. The resulting image was blurry but she was almost certain what it was: the chi-rho cross, one of the earliest Christian symbols, made by combining the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ.

What was this symbol of the early Church doing in the decidedly un-Christian context of a Roman columbarium decorated with pagan astrological symbols? Elisabetta clicked the folder of photos closed and rubbed her dry eyes.

Yet another mystery.

Elisabetta arrived at Piazza Mastai too late for evening chapel and was obliged to pray on her own while the other sisters took their evening meal together. Because the chapel was at the opposite end of the hall from the kitchen it was peaceful and quiet. When she was done, she crossed herself and rose. Sister Marilena was seated in the last row.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Elisabetta told her.

‘Good,’ the old nun said. ‘Mama put aside a plate for you. She doesn’t like it when someone skips a meal.’

Mama was Sister Marilena’s 92-year-old mother. Marilena had years ago sought and received dispensation from the Mother General of their order to allow her mother to live with them rather than going into an old-age home. They had plenty of space. The third and fourth floors of the convent were home to only eight sisters – four Italian, four Maltese – and ten novices, all African. It was hard going these days, recruiting young novices into the fold, particularly from Italy and the rest of Europe, so the women rattled around the facility and had the luxury of their own rooms.

‘Making an extra prayer?’ Elisabetta asked.