The Devil Will Come

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘May I?’ Marlowe said, holding up the parchment.

  ‘Of course,’ Dee nodded.

  Marlowe untied the ribbons and unrolled the parchment carefully. He read in silence and for a while the only sound in the chamber came from Poley taking a poker to the logs. When Marlowe was done he let the manuscript roll itself up and re-affixed the ribbons. A smile creased his face.

  ‘Why the wicked grin, Kit?’ Cecil asked.

  ‘An idea has crossed my mind, a trifle, really,’ Marlowe said, closing and relatching the box. ‘I’m already hard at work on revisions to my Faustus play which are extensive enough to have it considered a new version. It had occurred to me that I could do more to ridicule the Pope’s Church and I am in the process of adding more meat to my third act which is set within the papal palace in Rome. I would like your permission, good gentlemen, to encrypt a message to future generations of Lemures, a message of pride and aspiration concerning the Malachy prophecy derived, perhaps, from the differences between my two versions.’

  Walsingham looked to Dee, then nodded. ‘As you know, I have always had a fondness for codes.’

  ‘I think it’s an excellent notion,’ Cecil said. ‘By all means, Kit. I look forward to your masterpiece of encryption.’

  Dee rose and straightened his robe. ‘Come, Master Marlowe, walk me to the street and let us gaze at the night sky together.’

  Left behind, the other three men kept at their drinking.

  ‘I believe Doctor Dee liked him,’ Cecil said.

  ‘He is likeable enough,’ Walsingham said. ‘I don’t understand his compulsion for the theatre but his particular talents are certainly useful.’

  ‘Nero too had a compulsion for performance,’ Cecil observed.

  That made Walsingham snigger. ‘He’s hardly a Nero! Poley, what do you think about all this? You’ve been as silent as a slug all evening.’

  Poley turned away from the fire. ‘I was at the Theatre tonight.’

  ‘Why, pray tell? Have you become a devotee?’

  ‘Hardly. I’ve had my suspicions about Marlowe. I observe him from time to time.’

  ‘And what,’ Walsingham asked, ‘did you observe?’

  ‘I witnessed Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in an amorous embrace. Kyd had his hand upon Marlowe’s posterior parts.’

  ‘Kyd is not one of us!’ Walsingham said sharply.

  ‘Indeed not,’ Cecil said.

  Walsingham gripped the arms of his chair in frustration. ‘Marlowe is brilliant, but he is intemperate and does not share our cautious ways. Accompany him to Rome. Make sure he accomplishes his assigned task. When he returns, we’ll let him write his plays and do our bidding. But, Poley, I want you to keep an eye on him, a very careful eye, and, as always, keep me closely informed.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ELISABETTA’S FATHER MADE Zazo and Elisabetta clear the supper table so that they could gather round the Faustus book.

  ‘Look!’ Carlo said. ‘There’s a difference between your copy and the one I’ve been working from.’

  Elisabetta glanced at hers. ‘They’re both B texts. What’s the difference?’

  ‘Yours is numbered. See the numbers on the right margins? Every five lines, see? The beginning of each act resets the line numbers back to one. It’s a common notation system for plays so actors can find their lines easily and teachers can send their students to a passage. Only my copy didn’t have numbers.’

  Elisabetta grew excited. ‘Yes! I see.’

  ‘I’ve been getting nowhere looking at this as a number-progression or a substitution code. So then it hit me: what if these tattoos refer to line numbers! Lines which differ between the A text and the B text. “B is the key.” That’s what the letter said.’

  ‘But there are so many differences between the two versions,’ Elisabetta said. ‘Where to begin?’

  ‘Exactly. I realized this could be a very difficult task, one better suited to computational power than trial and error and I began to think how I could write a program to accomplish it. But then I remembered something your Professor Harris said. Remember? The biggest differences were in Act III which was much longer in the B text and was turned into an anti-Catholic rant. On a hunch – and don’t roll your eyes, Zazo, mathematicians sometimes have hunches, just like policemen – I went straight to Act III and started playing with the line numbers. If each of the twenty-four numbers in the tattoo array corresponded to a line number then we might have the only solution that wouldn’t require a computer to sort out.’

  ‘Okay,’ Elisabetta said. ‘What was the first number?’

  Carlo put his reading glasses on, then took them off. ‘63.’

  She found the line. ‘May be admired through the furthest land. Now what?’

  ‘Well, again, the simplest solution was going to be taking the first letter of the first word. Believe me, I was prepared to have to dig deeper but I think it’s that straightforward.’

  ‘So it’s M,’ she said. ‘What’s the next number?’

  ‘128.’

  ‘And curse the people that submit to him. A.’

  Zazo almost shouted. ‘Please! I’m starved! Can you please just cut to the chase.’

  Carlo put his glasses on again. ‘The message is: MALACHY IS KING HAIL LEMURES.’

  Elisabetta caught her breath when she heard the word Lemures. She forced her mind to skip to Malachy and barely managed to squeak out, ‘Malachy was an Irish saint, I think. There’s something else about him too. I can’t remember …’

  ‘Me neither,’ Carlo said. ‘And what the hell are Lemures? Anyway, I’m just the mathematician and my work is done.’ He sniffed happily, finally aware of the kitchen aromas, and said, ‘Smells good. Let’s eat.’

  Elisabetta thanked God for the internet.

  Without it she would have had to wait until the morning, then find a library and spend a day or more in the stacks.

  After supper, alone in the apartment and waiting for Micaela to come over, she surfed her way frantically toward an understanding of the coded message.

  From the myriad web pages devoted to Malachy she saw that the saint had become a newsworthy subject, particularly since the recent death of the Pope.

  Elisabetta shook her head at her earlier lack of awareness of Malachy’s topicality. I’m not cloistered, she thought, but it seems that I’m out of it.

  The facts were simple enough: Saint Malachy, whose Irish name was Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, had lived from 1094 until 1148. He was Archbishop of Armagh. He was canonized by Pope Clement III in 1199 and became the first Irish saint. And he was the purported author of The Prophecy of the Popes, a premonitory vision of the identities of the last 112 popes.

  Much of what was known of his life came from The Life of St Malachy, a biography written by his French contemporary, St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great twelfth-century theologian whom Malachy visited on his journeys from Ireland to Rome. Indeed, on his last such visit to Clairvaux Malachy fell ill and literally died in St Bernard’s arms.

  Malachy’s prophecy was unknown, or at least unpublished, during his lifetime. It was the Benedictine historian Arnold de Wyon who first published it in 1595 in his book Lignum Vitae, naming St Malachy as its author. According to de Wyon’s account, in 1139 Malachy was summoned to Rome by Pope Innocent II for an audience. While there he experienced a vision of future popes which he recorded as a sequence of cryptic phrases. His manuscript stayed unknown until it was mysteriously discovered within the Roman Archive in 1590.

  Malachy’s prophecies were short and abstruse. Beginning with Celestine II who was elected in the year 1130, he foresaw an unbroken chain of 112 popes lasting until the end of the papacy – or, as some believed, until the end of the world.

  Each pope was assigned a mystical title, pithy and evocative: From a castle of the Tiber. Dragon pressed down. Out of the leonine rose. Angel of the grove. Religion destroyed. From a solar eclipse. Over the centuries, those who tried to interpret and explain these symbol
ical prophecies always succeeded in finding something about each pope embedded in Malachy’s titles, perhaps related to their country of origin, their name, their coat of arms, their birthplace, their talents.

  Elisabetta skipped through the list with rapt fascination. The prophecy concerning Urban VIII was Lilium et Rosa, the Lily and the Rose. He was a native of Florence and a fleur-de-lis figured on the arms of Florence; he had three bees emblazoned on his escutcheon, and bees, of course, gather honey from the lilies and roses.

  Marcellus II was Frumentum Flacidum, trifling grain. He was trifling, perhaps, because he was pope for only a very short time, and his coat of arms featured a stag and ears of wheat.

  Innocent XII was Raftrum in Porta, rake in the door. His given name, Rastrello, meant lake in Italian.

  Benedict XV was Religio Depopulata, religions laid waste. During his reign, World War I killed twenty million people in Europe, the 1918 flu pandemic killed one hundred million, and the October Revolution in Russia cast aside Christianity in favor of atheism.

  In 1958, following the death of Pius XII, Cardinal Spellman from Boston had a little fun with Malachy’s prediction that the next Pope would be Pastor et Nauta, shepherd and sailor. During the Conclave that would elect John XXIII, Spellman rented a boat, filled it with sheep and sailed up and down the Tiber. As it happened, Angelo Roncalli, the Cardinal named as the new Pope, had been patriarch of Venice, a maritime city famous for its waterways.

  Pope John Paul II was De Labore Solis, which literally means ‘the labor of the sun’, though labor solis was also a common Latin expression for solar eclipse. Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born on 18 May 1920, the day of a partial solar eclipse over the Indian Ocean, and was buried on 8 April 2005, a day which saw a solar eclipse over the southwestern Pacific and South America.

  And Malachy’s prophetic chain led all the way to the 267th and penultimate pope who was now freshly interred within three nested coffins in a crypt beneath the Basilica of St Pietro.

  The 268th pope, to be chosen at the Conclave which would begin tomorrow, would be the last. Malachy called him Petrus Romanus and gave him the longest title:

  In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, et Iudex tremendus iudicabit populum suum. Finis.

  During the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, the seat will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will feed his sheep in many tribulations; and when these things are finished, the seven-hilled city will be destroyed, and the formidable Judge will judge his people. The End.

  To Elisabetta, the vague nature of these prophecies reminded her of the quatrains of Nostradamus, notions concocted by a charlatan so that people might find one or two snippets from a pope’s life to connect the man to his title. In fact, diverse scholars claimed Malachy’s Prophecy was no more than an elaborate sixteenth-century hoax intended – unsuccessfully – to help Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli reach the papacy.

  Yet here, embedded within Marlowe’s Faustus, was the coded message: MALACHY IS KING HAIL LEMURES – a message important enough for these Lemures to tattoo over their sacrums.

  Elisabetta’s training in anthropology kicked in. The documented use of tattoos reached all the way to the Neolithic period, and probably even further than that. Tattoos were evidence of rites of passage, marks of status and rank, cultural affiliation, symbols of religious and spiritual devotion. The symbolism and importance of tattoos varied from culture to culture, but she was certain of one thing: these sacral tattoos were important to the Lemures.

  So it stood to reason that Malachy was important to them too, perhaps forming the basis of some kind of belief system. And Marlowe must have either known of them or been one himself!

  HAIL LEMURES. Elisabetta fingered her crucifix.

  She wanted to reach out to Father Tremblay but realized she didn’t have a contact number for him.

  There was a sound at the front door, someone fumbling at the lock.

  She approached cautiously. The door swung open and Micaela burst in. ‘Sorry I’m late. I had a patient to see.’

  They kissed and Elisabetta put the kettle on.

  ‘Where’s Papa?’

  ‘A retirement dinner for someone in his department.’

  Micaela frowned. ‘I’m sure he was thrilled about that. Arturo’s coming later – do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Micaela stripped off her jacket. She was looking stylishly professional in a blue skirt and silk top and seemed compelled to comment on the sartorial gulf between herself and her sister. ‘For heaven’s sake, Elisabetta, why are you wearing your habit around the house? Aren’t you off duty?’

  Elisabetta held up her left hand, showing off her gold wedding band. ‘Still married, remember?’

  ‘So how’s Christ been treating you in His role as a husband?’ Micaela asked dryly.

  Elisabetta remembered her recent daydream about Marco. ‘Better, I think, than I’ve been treating Him in my role as a wife.’ She changed the subject abruptly. ‘Did you hear about Zazo?’

  Micaela knew; he’d called her. She went into a rant, heaping invectives upon the Vatican, stupid bosses and assholes in general. Elisabetta halted her diatribe. ‘If you calm down, I’ll tell you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Papa solved the tattoo code.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  They were interrupted by the sound of the buzzer. Micaela said it was probably Arturo and scrambled to answer it but she came back shaking her head. ‘It wasn’t him. It’s a Father Tremblay. He said you’re expecting him. Is it okay?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Please don’t comment on the way he looks, all right?’

  Elisabetta greeted Father Tremblay at the door and showed him into the kitchen where, upon seeing Micaela, he immediately apologized for intruding. Elisabetta assured him that it wasn’t a problem and hastened to add that she wanted to speak with him anyway. She introduced him. Micaela looked him up and down and promptly asked, ignoring Elisabetta’s request, ‘You have Marfan’s, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be so rude!’ Elisabetta scolded.

  ‘I’m not rude, I’m a doctor.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Tremblay said, his ears glowing with visible embarrassment. ‘Yes, I do – you’re a good diagnostician.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Micaela said, satisfied.

  At the kitchen table it was left to Elisabetta to explain to Micaela Father Tremblay’s involvement in the affair and to inform the priest what her sister knew about it.

  ‘So it seems we all have some knowledge, albeit incomplete,’ Tremblay said. ‘But I have some important new information.’

  ‘So do I,’ Elisabetta said.

  ‘Should I flip a coin to see who goes first?’ Micaela asked.

  ‘No, please, Sister Elisabetta,’ Tremblay said politely. ‘Tell me what you’ve found.’

  ‘My father’s a clever man, a mathematician. He broke the code. We know what the tattoos mean. I was about to tell my sister. The answer came from differences between the A and B texts of Marlowe’s Faustus. The tattoos say: “Malachy is King. Hail Lemures.”’

  Tremblay’s face fell. ‘My God …’

  ‘What are Lemures?’ Micaela asked.

  While Tremblay sipped nervously at his tea, Elisabetta reminded him that Micaela was subject to a Vatican confidentiality agreement and asked if she, Elisabetta, could speak freely. He nodded uncomfortably and Elisabetta passed on what he had told her about Lemures and what they had learned at the Secret Archives.

  When she was done, Micaela asked, ‘You expect me to believe this? And you’re telling me that our mother was involved with these people. That they might have poisoned her?’

  ‘I’m afraid everything Sister Elisabetta says is the absolute truth,’ Tremblay murmured. ‘They are difficult foes. It would be better if they didn’t exist but they do.’<
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  ‘And Malachy?’ Micaela asked, shaking her head. ‘Who’s he?’

  Tremblay said, ‘I can answer that.’

  To Elisabetta’s surprise, the priest was fluent in his knowledge of the prophecy and presented a brisk summary. When he finished, he curled his long index finger through the handle of the cup and raised it to drain the last of his tea, then added, ‘I can tell you, Elisabetta, we had no idea that the Lemures were involved with the Malachy business. No one in the Vatican took it seriously. That was a mistake and now we’ve arrived at the moment of Malachy’s last pope. And maybe our world’s last hope.’

  Micaela displayed her characteristic blend of scepticism and exasperation. ‘Am I the only one who feels like they’re in a carnival hall of mirrors? It’s too much! None of this makes any sense to me.’

  ‘You saw Aldo Vani in the flesh,’ Elisabetta said. ‘You saw the photos of Bruno Ottinger. These men were Lemures. The Prophecy of Malachy was important enough for them to tattoo it onto their spines! I’m scared, Micaela. Your carnival analogy – this isn’t a hall of mirrors, it’s the terror ride. I think these men mean to do the Church great harm.’

  Tremblay reached for the leather portfolio he’d deposited at his feet. He unzipped it and took out a sheaf of copier pages. ‘Your sister is right, Micaela. Sister Elisabetta, when you left this morning I went back to my office and began working to find out who this “R.A.” was who signed the Dee letter out of the Secret Archives in 1985. It involved a lot of work, looking through old Vatican personnel files. I think I have the likely man: a certain Riccardo Agnelli. He was the private secretary to a bishop, a man who is now a cardinal.’