redRobe
Page 34
‘You brought the girl?’ The booming voice echoed from the cruiser’s doorway, where an obese Namibian dressed entirely in purple stood staring down at Axl.
Axl was already shaking his head before he wondered, which girl, the kid or Kate? And what had happened to wanting Father Sylvester? Synth-loops looped, feeding on themselves. Didn’t matter either way. He was into the signature tune.
‘No,’ Axl said, ‘No girl, just me.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
PoV Free
The first thing Axl noticed about the Nuncio’s cabin was the mahogany panelling. Second he spotted Bronzino’s painting ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time’, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence in 1545, though Axl just saw a naked boy with wings cupping the breast of an older woman. Finally, he realised the sound track was gone. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset.
The Nuncio fed him while the engines finished firing up. Not nutrients, chelated vitamins or worse still, luke-warm plates of Tsampa and buttered tea, but a vast platter of beef, carved from the side of a huge joint that already sat steaming on a silver salver.
Maybe the Church really had streamlined itself into austerity but, if so, no one appeared to have told the Nuncio. Blood-dark Barolo came from a tall wine jug, hammered from silver and embossed with vine leaves that curled from its elegant base up through its round belly to a narrow fluted top which was closed by a single silver leaf that hinged at the stalk.
‘The Two Sicilies, nineteenth-century, pre-Risorgimento,’ the Nuncio told Axl, dropping crumbs from his mouth to his expansive lap. After the beef they ate syllabub and washed down slivers of basalt-like parmesan with a wine so sweet and thick it stuck to Axl’s teeth.
Outside they were preparing for the Boeing to take off, but that was still ten minutes away. Time enough, the Nuncio said, to eat parmesan properly. And as Axl sipped the wine while sucking the slivers of hard cheese to soften them, he could feel spiders crawling over his leg. At least he assumed the medicare box at his feet had got around to converting ants into spiders. The ants had gone in first, tiny metallic pincers stripping away dead flesh from the edge of the gash, then they’d excreted some kind of mite so small as to be invisible and so dedicated all it could do was repair cell walls and die. The spiders did the macro work, like stitching or spinning strips of new skin.
It was battlefield stuff, crude but reusable. Not what Axl would have expected the Nuncio to carry and undoubtedly not what he kept for his own use, assuming he paid as much attention to the Church’s dislike of nanetics as he did to its exhortations to poverty.
Food, wine and the smallest of talk about who was doing what at the Vatican filled the time, the gossip as unreal to Axl as any newsfeed half seen on a feed across a crowded bar. But the Nuncio said nothing about Joan, soulcatchers or any coming conclave. Nothing about the Cardinal, either. And the only thing the Nuncio didn’t offer Axl was new clothes or a shower.
Axl had a nasty feeling that lack of soundtrack and no shower fed back to a cryptic comment of the Nuncio’s when Axl first clambered on board. The Nuncio’s arm had gone round his shoulder, avuncular maybe, but still steering him away from the open doorway.
‘This is dead space,’ the Nuncio announced waving one arm at the ornate interior of his cruiser. ‘Looped out/PoV-free.’ Then he stopped, looked carefully at Axl.
‘You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
Axl didn’t, so he said he didn’t and the Nuncio nodded, black eyes glittering in a face round and black as a total eclipse.
‘Good.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
Hollow Rooms
Villa Carlotta looked as it had the last time Axl had seen it. Purple bougainvillea still smothered the walls of the gatehouse, softening the hard lines of the reinforced titanium gate now shutting behind him. Squat palms like over-large pineapples edged the gravelled drive, fat trunks curved under the weight of waxed leaves as sharp as blades and as big as surfboards. And lush curling ferns buried the crested, baroque gates to the courtyard beneath an explosion of nature’s pubic hair.
Arpeggios ran down his spine. The notes fuzzy, like a harpsichord sampled note for note and then damped. Perhaps that was because he couldn’t see the Villa properly. Maybe, if he hadn’t been squinting through the smoked glass windows of a vast Nexus stretch, the notes would have been clear as crystal.
Right back in Dey Effé, after the Nexus had asked him where he wanted to be taken, Axl told the stretch to wind down the window and it had suggested he use manual. So he’d hit the window’s button himself and the window had suggested he ask the car. They’d been going round in the same circle ever since, with increasing bad temper.
So instead of watching open countryside, Axl had been forced to spend the trip looking at himself, since the inside of every car window was mirrored. And everywhere Axl had looked he’d seen his own haggard reflection staring back.
‘We’re here,’ announced the Nexus, opening the door nearest Axl.
‘Really?’ Axl said, harpsichord and heartbeat syncopating.
It’s my own choice, Axl told himself. No one could take that away from him. Everything else maybe, including his life, but not that. He slammed the car door, without giving the Nexus time to shut itself. Guaranteed to irritate the car, but Axl didn’t care. Though no doubt it would whine to the Nuncio when it got back.
Grit crunching under his feet, Axl walked slowly across the huge courtyard towards the main doorway of the Villa Carlotta, watched silently by four guards. If they planned to arrest him now would be a good time.
No one moved.
‘Fuck it.’ The words weren’t loud or directed at anyone except himself but that didn’t mean Axl didn’t mean them. He’d screwed up big time. God alone knew how Rinpoche was doing, or Kate, or Mai. And what upset Axl was the certainty at the base of his gut that he’d never get the chance to find out.
Straightening his back and pushing his chin in the air the way Kate did, Axl stamped over to door.
‘Axl Borja,’ he announced firmly. ‘To see the Cardinal.’
‘Is he expecting you?’
Axl looked at the door and shrugged. ‘Who knows what His Excellency expects. I wouldn’t presume. . .’Actually, he would and had, frequently. Now just didn’t seem the time to mention it. Axl stepped through into the waiting hall.
It was empty. So was the long corridor.
The last time Axl had stood there, the corridor alone had been filled with a thousand petitioners, so full that bored ushers stood on plinths watching out for those who’d fainted in the crush. Now there was nobody at all in the echoing corridor but Axl, and the unexpected emptiness was at least as overpowering as the crowd had been.
It must have been the Villa’s AI that opened the door at the end of the corridor for Axl because no human was there to do it, the doorkeeper’s gilded stool was as empty as the plinths that once housed the ushers. Right then, Axl couldn’t tell what was backing track and what was his own heartbeat. He had a feeling that was intentional.
Axl stepped in through the door and found himself again in the Cardinal’s vast ante-room. Silence echoed off silk-covered walls and the only person reflected in the vast glass slabs of neo Venetian mirrors was him. Even the silver carts that dispensed hot chocolate were deserted and cold.
‘Borja.’ On the other side of the room, the Cardinal’s major-domo stood proudly by the door to His Excellency’s tiny octagonal study, but the man’s face was grim and his smile troubled. Something was so wrong Axl couldn’t even begin to imagine.
‘Well,’ growled a voice from behind the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Axl Borja, Your Excellency.’
‘Borja?’ The voice was tired, gravel and glass. Older than Axl remembered and quietly angry. Yet still unmistakable enough to make Axl shiver.
‘Borja, Your Excellency.’
‘Well, send him in…’
And Axl walked past the em
pty benches and across the impasto di gesso floor, his steps echoing in the silence. Heartbeat filling his emptiness.
‘Come to gloat?’ The Cardinal pulled his top lip back into a sneer, revealing canines that were yellow with age. Yellow and cracked like old ivory. There was an edge to his voice, a cold disappointment that bordered on fury.
His in-tray was bare of paper and the only sign that he’d been working was a small screen angled up from the desk. Axl wanted to ask what disaster had happened but didn’t know how. No matter what he achieved, how old he got he never had the right words when stood in front of this man.
‘No,’ said Axl simply. ‘I’ve here to tell you I’m back from Samsara.’
‘And you’ve brought me the soulcatcher?’
‘No.’ Axl shook his head. ‘I brought only myself.’
From the look on the vampyre’s face it didn’t seen as if that was anything like enough. ‘I’m not so powerless that I can’t still have you shot,’ the Cardinal said shortly.
Axl shrugged. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t imagine you were.’ They both knew that was true.
‘So why didn’t you bring me what I asked?’
‘It was needed.’
The Cardinal took off his dark glasses at that, and rested them neatly on his black glass desk. ‘And who needed my soulcatcher?’ The Cardinal’s voice was low, his golden eyes fixed like sighting lasers on Axl’s face.
Mai and Kate, Axl didn’t know which one had needed it most. Mai for her sanity, Kate for her dead lover.
‘Joan did,’ said Axl.
* * * *
When Axl had finished crying, the Cardinal ordered coffee, though there was only his major-domo to operate the coffee-maker and Axl ended up going to fetch the water himself. With the coffee they ate truffles dusted with pure cocoa powder. Or rather Axl ate the truffles while the Cardinal smoked a Partegas corona down to a damp stub.
‘Joan was shot,’ the Cardinal said suddenly, stubbing out his cigar. ‘Her body was ripped apart by children. Do you deny that?’
Axl shook his head.
‘So the Pope is dead?’
Axl shook his head.
‘Surely,’ said the Cardinal, ‘Her Holiness is either alive or dead? All I require from you is that you tell me which it is…’
‘I’m not qualified to answer.’
‘No indeed,’ the Cardinal gave a vulpine smile and lit another cigar, ‘I’m not sure anybody is. We’ll just have to see what the courts say.’ He reached for the pop-up screen on his desk and swivelled it, so Axl could watch the frozen, tear-stained face of an ex-child star, ex-hitman, ex-burger flipper at McDonalds.
The date on the CySat copyright line was that day’s, the time just gone. The blipvert moral expanding across the screen explained for the cognitively-challenged that Rome, WorldBank and the IMF had just been tied into a court case that would last decades, maybe longer.
The imminent, expected return to prominence of Cardinal Santo Ducque made first story on most newsfeeds that evening.
Epilogue
Points of Vision
On screen Axl swore on the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud and the works of Immanuel Kant. Then waited while the IMF, WorldBank and Rome read off his blood pressure, heartbeat and limbic pattern, took and matched MRI scans to already-prepared templates to confirm that Axl regarded Joan’s being both alive and dead as a statement of fact not of faith, hope or belief. That statement would go on file until it was needed, several years from then.
Mostly, what happened after Axl’s return to the Villa Carlotta were negatives. The Vatican didn’t go into conclave to elect a new pope. Under a statute previously agreed by the UN, the Cardinal currently holding voting rights (which happened to be Cardinal Santo Ducque) kept both his proxy vote in the UN and control of the Vatican Bank. Interim audits were not issued. Nor would they be while the court case was running. Which could be forever, or at least as long as it took the Cardinal to replenish the accounts emptied by Joan shipping ‘fugees to Samsara.
No matter how often Axl watched reruns, he was faced with the fact that he limped in through the door of Villa Carlotta, head jerking to some unheard soundtrack and looking so dirty you could practically smell him through the screen.
And the stuff shot though his own eyes shook so badly by the end that Axl was surprised CySat had been able to use it. But what Axl really remembered about that night were the calls which flooded in between the rolling of the credits and the breaking news of Cardinal Santo Ducque’s comeback.
A thin man, utterly unmemorable except for the large pectoral cross hung round the neck of his black silk Armani jacket called from New York. He wanted to be the first to tell the Cardinal how audacious, how brilliant a move it had been to stream Axl’s quest for Pope Joan live on CySat.
But others followed within seconds. Rome, Rio, even Beijing. Everyone thought the Cardinal was brilliant, none had ever doubted him… And sitting at his desk taking the calls, Cardinal Santo Ducque had looked up and seen Axl staring at him, with something between outrage and admiration in his eyes.
‘Look,’ said the Cardinal, ‘I just wanted to run a dummy past WorldBank. The idea to run it live and reactivate your soundtrack came from that bloody gun of yours…’
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