The Devil Will Come

by Glenn Cooper

  The Inspector-General of the Gendarmerie Corps, Luca Loreti, was a competent leader, generally liked and respected by his men though the youngest recruits sometimes rolled their eyes at his twisted locutions. The officers who’d been around for a while, like Zazo, always came back to the fact that Loreti consistently stood up to his Swiss Guard counterpart, Oberst Hans Sonnenberg, and defended his men to the hilt against that prick. Not that the officers were completely reverential. Loreti, a lusty eater, had been steadily expanding in girth over time and there was a book running every year on the closest date for his annual uniform refitting.

  Most of the Corps’s 130 gendarmes were now assembled in the auditorium for Loreti’s briefing. The officers sat in the front, the junior ranks behind, all very orderly and hierarchical. Loreti possessed tremendous kinetic energy for a man his size and he strode rapidly back and forth on the stage, making the audience move their heads as if they were at a tennis match.

  ‘First, let me compliment you on the job you did at the Pope’s funeral. Our cardinals, our bishops, our Vatican officials, over two hundred world leaders and their security details – all of them came to Vatican City, paid their respects and left in good health,’ Loreti boomed into his hand-held microphone. ‘But we cannot rest on our laurels, can we? We have five days until the Conclave begins. Many of the Cardinal Electors have already checked into the Domus Sanctae Marthae. As of today, the guest house will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Sistine Chapel will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Basilica and the Museums will be closed to the public. Our tasks will be precisely defined by protocols. I have been working with Oberst Sonnenberg to ensure that we will not be tripping over the Swiss Guards, they will not be tripping over us and there will be no gaps in our security blanket. We will control the guest house, they will control the Sistine Chapel. We will utilize our dogs and our experts to sweep the guest house for explosives and listening devices. The Guards will do the same with their experts inside the Sistine Chapel. I want you to play nice with the Guards but if there’s any trouble, let your superiors know immediately and they will let me know. All disputes will necessarily be answered at my level.’

  Zazo knew the drill. This would be his second Conclave. At the first one he’d been a wide-eyed corporal, dazzled by pomp, grandeur and the heavy sense of occasion. Now he was immune to that. He had squads of men to command and his accountability went far beyond guarding a doorway.

  He nudged Lorenzo Rosa in the ribs. Lorenzo, also a major, had entered the Corps the same year as Zazo and the two of them were now good friends. Initially, Zazo had resisted the urge to befriend Lorenzo because the man bore enough of a physical resemblance to Marco – tall and athletic, crisp facial lines, black hair – that on some level Zazo felt that to make a friend of him would be a betrayal. But Zazo was so naturally gregarious and eager for comradeship that he broke through the psychological block the day both men went through a poison-gas drill together and wound up puking alongside each other in a ditch.

  ‘This isn’t going to be as smooth as he says,’ Zazo whispered. ‘We’ll be at war with the Guards by Friday.’

  Lorenzo leaned over to whisper into Zazo’s ear. ‘The Swiss can kiss my Italian ass.’

  That was why Zazo liked the guy.

  *

  Martin Lang, the Ulm baker, was roused furiously from the sofa by his wife and sent to the bedroom to change his shirt. Over Elisabetta’s protestations, Frau Lang quickly picked up after him, then left the two women in the sitting room while she put the kettle on and began rattling porcelain and silverware.

  Hans Lang came back tucking in a fresh shirt and haplessly combing wisps of hair over a balding pate with his hand. He looked every inch a man who’d been up at the ovens since the middle of the night. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said in halting English. ‘I wasn’t expecting. I’m always the last to know of such things.’

  Elisabetta and Micaela apologized for the intrusion and sat stiffly by, waiting for Frau Lang to reappear. Elisabetta tried some small talk about how nice his shop was but the baker’s English was not up to the task.

  When Frau Lang brought in a tray with tea and cakes, Micaela hungrily tucked into the pastries while Elisabetta nibbled demurely. ‘What can you tell us about Herr Ottinger?’ she asked.

  Frau Lang did the talking. Her husband sat blearily on the sofa looking like he wanted his privacy back. ‘He was a proper old gentleman,’ she said. ‘He lived on our third floor for fifteen years. He kept to himself. I wouldn’t say we knew him well. He’d often buy a meat pie for his dinner, maybe something sweet on a Saturday. He paid his rent on time. He didn’t have many visitors. I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

  ‘You said he was a professor. Do you know anything about his work?’ Elisabetta asked.

  ‘He was retired from the university. I have no idea what kind of professor he was but there were so many books in his flat when he died.’ Frau Lang spoke in German to her husband. ‘Hans says they were mostly science and engineering books so maybe that was his field.’

  ‘And there were no relatives?’

  ‘None. The authorities checked, of course. We had to go through a formal process before we were entitled to sell his belongings to satisfy the unpaid portion of the rental agreement. We didn’t do so well out of the process. The man had no significant possessions. More cake?’

  Micaela nodded happily and accepted another slice before asking, ‘Did you ever notice anything odd about him? Physically?’

  Frau Lang shook her head. ‘No. Whatever do you mean? He was just an ordinary-looking older gentleman.’

  ‘So, there’s nothing left in the flat?’ Elisabetta asked, leaving her sister hanging.

  ‘No. Of course we’ve had new people, a nice couple living there since 2008.’

  Elisabetta shook her head slightly. She’d call the university, see if she could track down any former colleagues. There was nothing left to be done here.

  The baker said something gruffly in German.

  ‘Hans reminded me,’ his wife said. ‘We kept a small box of personal belongings, things like his passport, the items in his bedside table in case a relative ever appeared.’

  The sisters looked up hopefully. ‘Can we see it?’ Elisabetta asked quickly.

  Frau Lang spoke to her husband in German again and Elisabetta made out curse words as he pushed himself off the sofa and headed out the door.

  ‘He’ll get it. It’s in the basement,’ Frau Lang said, frowning after him and pouring more tea.

  In five minutes the baker came back with a cardboard box the size of a briefcase. It was clean and dry, and had obviously been stored with some care. He handed it to Elisabetta, mumbled something to his wife and appeared to be excusing himself with a small bow.

  Frau Lang looked embarrassed. ‘Hans is going to take his nap now. He wishes you a good trip home.’

  Elisabetta and Micaela started to rise but the baker shooed them down with a wave of his hands and disappeared into another room.

  The box was light; its contents shifted in Elisabetta’s hands when she transferred it to her lap. She pulled apart the tucked-in corners and looked in. A stale mustiness escaped, an old-man smell.

  Reading glasses. Fountain pens. A passport. A bronzed medal on a ribbon from, as far as she could tell, a German engineering society. Checkbooks and bank statements from 2006 and 2007. Pill bottles which Micaela inspected and whose contents she declared to be for high blood pressure. A box of dentures. A fading Kodachrome of a young man, Ottinger himself perhaps, in hiking gear on a steep green slope. At the very bottom was an unsealed Manila envelope with a handwritten note on the outside, written finely in black ink.

  Elisabetta lifted out the envelope, prompting Frau Lang to remark that it contained a book, the only one they hadn’t sold because of the personal note. Elisabetta, who had a passable grasp of written German, read the note to herself slowly, translating as best she could.

  To my teacher, my mentor, m
y friend. I found this in the hands of a dealer and I enticed him to part with it. You, more than anyone, will appreciate it. It is the B Text, of course. As you always taught – B holds the key. 11 September is surely a sign, don’t you think? I hope you will be with us when M’s day finally comes. K. October 2001.

  Beneath the date was a small hand-drawn symbol.

  This sight of it made Elisabetta’s head swim.

  There was something strangely familiar about it, real and unreal at the same time, as if she’d seen it before in a long-forgotten dream.

  She tried to shrug off the feeling as she opened the envelope. Inside was a slim bound book. Its cover was plain, worn leather, ever so slightly warped. The pages were a bit foxed. It was an old book in fairly good condition.

  When she opened the cover her head cleared as effectively as if she’d taken a strong whiff of smelling salts.

  Elisabetta didn’t think she’d ever seen the engraving before, but part of it was as recognizable as her own reflection in the mirror.

  It was a 1620 edition of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, and there on the frontispiece was the old conjuror wearing his academic robes, standing inside his magic circle with his staff and his book, summoning the devil through the floor. The devil was a winged creature with horns, a pointy beard and a long curled tail.

  None of that made Elisabetta’s heart race or her skin crawl. None of it made her feel like she was suffocating under her tight veil and gown.

  The source of her alarm lay around and within the rim of the magic circle.

  Constellation signs.

  Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer.

  Star signs.

  The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, presented in the same peculiar order as on the fresco at St Callixtus.

  And peeking out to the right of Faustus’s robes was Pisces, tilted upright, looking for all the world like a man with a tail.

  EIGHT

  Rome, AD 37

  DUSK WAS TURNING to night as two weary boys trudged up the road toward the city centre. An insipid quarter-moon hung limply in the black sky, dimly lighting the way. In silence they kept close to the stinking central gutter to avoid worse piles of refuse that littered their way.

  ‘Where will we sleep?’ the youngest asked fearfully as they passed a gloomy alley.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ snapped his older brother. Sensing the seven-year-old’s abject misery he relented. ‘The father of my friend, Lucius, says he sleeps in the cattle market whenever he stays in Rome. We’ll find a place there.’

  Clasping his brother’s hand, the younger child shivered. His loose tunic barely warded off the chill.

  ‘Are we nearly there? At the cattle market?’ he enquired hopefully.

  Quintus groaned, having heard a variant of the same question at least a hundred times that day.

  ‘Yes, Sextus, soon we’ll have somewhere warm to rest, after we’ve had a bite to eat.’

  They were travelling to their uncle’s brick manufactory in the north of Rome, on the Pincian Hill, and they were hungry and exhausted following a dawn departure from their village. At least they’d made it through the walls, into the city. The two huge Praetorians with scorpion emblems affixed to their breastplates at the Porta Capena had given them a world of trouble and tried to shake them down for a bribe. But they had no coins, nothing at all and they had to prove it by stripping themselves bare and enduring the taunts of the fearsome soldiers.

  Quintus, the older by three years, had wondered if his father had looked like these men. Only the vaguest of memories lingered. He was a toddler when the centurion left for active service in Germania. Their mother had to fend for herself with only the help of two older girls to tend their smallholding and look after Quintus and his baby brother.

  Only a fortnight ago, their mother had gotten notice of her husband’s death in battle against the Cheruscii. On further learning that the bastard had frittered away his accumulated pay on wine and whores all she could do was shed futile tears.

  Faced with crippling debts, she quickly sold her land for a pittance to a rich patrician. She and her daughters would have to survive by hiring themselves out as labourers and cloth weavers, but she could ill afford to feed two useless mouths. Rather than sell them into slavery she made the somewhat more humane decision to send the boys to their uncle to earn their keep there.

  Judging by the smells, they were getting close to the cattle market in an industrial sector where tenements clung to islands of land in a sea of twisting and claustrophobic alleyways.

  At street level, the retaining walls of the tenements were built of stone and reasonably robust. Higher stories listed at precarious angles and looked a good bit flimsier and indeed they passed a block which had suffered a collapse. The dwellings doubled as shops by day, selling bare necessities and cheap, rough wine. The boys dragged themselves along the fetid street towards the ghostly white glow of the stone-flagged marketplace, keeping to the centre, avoiding the glowering shadows.

  The open windows at street level leered at them like black sockets in a cadaver’s skull. Sextus squeaked in fright as he tripped over a pile of offal festering in front of a butcher shop and set a loathsome carpet of rats in motion. With the last of his fading strength, Quintus managed to jerk him upright before the little boy fell into the mess.

  An empty cattle byre beckoned. An emaciated dog emerged from it, interested in seizing the rotting meat before the rats reclaimed their prize. The mongrel succeeded and scuttled off down an alleyway dragging a coil of intestines.

  Inside the animal pen, Quintus looked around and declared, ‘We’ll sleep here.’ They busied themselves raking up stray hanks of unfouled straw and dry grass with their hands, laying out a bed of sorts against the plank walls at the far corner of the unroofed shed.

  ‘We won’t have far to travel tomorrow, will we, Quintus?’ asked the younger boy hopefully.

  Quintus wasn’t at all sure but he said with feigned confidence, ‘If we start early, we’ll be at Uncle’s before noon.’

  He untied the knotted corners of the travelling blanket he’d been carrying over his shoulder and removed the last of their meagre provisions. Handing Sextus half the bread and an apple, the two boys collapsed on the straw bed and ate.

  Balbilus heard a dull pounding overhead, an iron rod smashing against stone, a signal that he was wanted.

  The underground chamber was well lit by sooty lamps. It was a large space – fifty men could assemble there comfortably, a hundred in a pinch. Live men. There was space for thousands of dead ones if most were cremated and tucked inside urns in the tuff walls. It was newly finished. The columbarium was awaiting its first inhabitant.

  Tiberius Claudius Balbilus put down his paintbrush. He disliked interruptions but he was used to them. Many sought him out.

  He was in his thirties, a powerful-looking man with the olive skin of his half-Egyptian, half-Greek heritage, a large nose and a well-tended beard which was trimmed to a sharp point and made his face look like some sort of weapon or chisel tool. He had let his tunic go loose for comfort but before he climbed the stairs he cinched his belt and donned a cloak.

  Balbilus entered the mausoleum by pushing open a concealed trapdoor. The walls were lined with the tombs and shrines of the wealthy. A fresh corpse, no more than a few weeks old, linen-wrapped and stuffed into a loculum, made the place reek of death. The mausoleum had been in his family for a few generations. It was a good, steady source of income, but because of his recent secret excavation it now had another purpose.

  When his time came, he would rest there for eternity, not above ground with these so-called citizens but underground, among his own kind. His followers would rest there too. For the sake of space most would be cremated. But he and his sons and his son’s sons could be laid out – all their flesh, all their bones – in all their glory.

  There was a solitary figure waiting for him, his face concealed by a
hooded cloak. He bowed slightly to Balbilus and said, ‘The others are outside.’

  Balbilus, together with this man, Vibius, emerged from a rear door into the cold December night. They were within a grove only a few paces off the Appian Way. The mausoleum was a rectangular building with a barrel-vaulted roof made of the finest bricks. Balbilus’s lavish villa lay on the other side of the grove.

  The quarter-moon reappeared from behind a shroud of purple clouds. Five cloaked figures moved away from the darkness of the fruit trees. Balbilus lined them up like a military unit in front of the mausoleum wall.

  ‘I’ve studied the charts, and the stars favor action,’ Balbilus said, addressing the men. ‘Tonight we light a fire. Although it will be small at first it will spawn another one, and another and another until, one day, there will be a great conflagration that will consume the city. And when that happens we will gain wealth and power beyond our dreams. It is in the stars and I know it to be true. Tonight we will set the Romans against this new Christian cult. I can see in the stars that they will become powerful one day. Their message is seductive, like bread and circuses for the soul. The masses will, I fear, take to it like sheep. If we allow them to become too powerful they will be a formidable enemy. Vibius has my instructions. Tonight you will spill blood because …’ he took a breath for effect then spat out the rest ‘… this is what we do.’

  And the men answered in unison, ‘And this is who we are.’

  Balbilus left them and went back underground where his paintbrushes awaited him.

  The six men moved out in silence. Making use of the concealment provided by the tombs and foliage bordering the Appian Way they headed north toward Rome.

  After a while they came upon a dim radius of flickering light cast by pitch torches on either side of a broad postern gate. They flitted from shadow to shadow, getting closer.

  The two Praetorians peered dispiritedly into the feeble pool of light and stamped their feet to keep warm.

  Vibius made his move. He weaved onto the main road, garbling the words of a drinking song. The sentries became alert and stared as he emerged from the darkness, swaying gently. He stopped to take a swig from a bulging wine-bag.