The Lucifer Gospel

by Paul Christopher

  “Then we’d better run for it,” said Finn.

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Hilts pointed toward a battered old Vespa Sprint parked a few feet away, a chain looped around the steering column and a lead pipe that ran up the side of the building beside it. He looked left and right. The narrow street was empty. More shouting came from the roof above them. He walked over to the scooter, gripped the pipe, and pulled hard. It tore away from the wall and snapped in two. He unwrapped the chain and tossed it into the alley. He checked out the scooter. “Where’s the ignition?” he asked, irritated.

  Finn pushed him aside and climbed onto the motorbike. There isn’t one, they only have ignition keys on the export models. I drove one of these around Florence for a whole year. Hop on.”

  Hilts frowned but climbed onto the rear of the narrow pommel seat. Finn took a couple of swipes at the kick-starter and the engine coughed into squeaky life. She adjusted the choke pull-down at knee level, hit the kickstand with her heel, twisted the right hand throttle and they were off.

  She turned left, away from the via Fabio Filzi and all the police cars, then left again onto via Vittor Pisani, ignoring the lights. They swept across three lanes of traffic and the central tram lane, finally turning left up the boulevard. They swung back and forth between enraged drivers, heading north toward the white grimy bulk of the Stazione Centrale, lit up like a Christmas tree half a mile ahead.

  Finn turned her head slightly.

  “What do I do now?” she asked.

  “Head for the station.”

  “And then?”

  “It’ll take them a while to figure out we’ve given them the slip.”

  “Won’t they be watching the station?”

  “Probably. We’ll just have to give them the slip.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll think of something, just drive.”

  Finn guided the Vespa north along the wide, modern boulevard, office buildings rising on either side. Hilts leaned forward in his seat and raised his voice over the racket of the old rattle-trap engine.

  “We need a drugstore!”

  Finn spotted the neon green cross that marked a farmacia on the ground floor of a building on the right. She pulled over between two parked cars and ran the Vespa up over the low curb. She put the engine in neutral but kept it running.

  “What are you getting?”

  “Stuff,” said Hilts. “Back in a minute or two.”

  She waited, looking over her shoulder while Hilts ran into the brightly lit drugstore. She watched for the telltale flicker of lights and the up-and-down wail of approaching sirens, but there was nothing. It was late, but there was still a lot of traffic and the sidewalks were crowded with locals and tourists. Directly ahead was the massive, gleaming bulk of the train station. She tried to stop the terrible hammering of her heart but it was impossible. Vergadora was dead and they were looking for her and Hilts. The smart thing to do would be to put the Vespa in gear and find the nearest U.S. consulate, but she knew that the security of being on home ground was an illusion. There was physical evidence that they’d been at the old man’s villa, and it was more than enough to have them turned over to the Italian authorities. They’d be trapped in the system for an eternity. Worse, if Hilts was right, Adamson’s powerful friends would be able to find them wherever they were. Hilts reappeared with a plastic shopping bag. He climbed onto the back of the scooter.

  “Now what?” said Finn urgently.

  “We need somewhere to hide out for an hour or so.”

  “Movie theater?” There was a cinema two doors down from the drugstore. According to the marquee they were showing an ongoing Franco Zeffirelli retrospective. Tonight it was Endless Love. Somehow Finn had a hard time thinking of Brooke Shields as being part of anyone’s retrospective.

  “No, we need somewhere private.”

  “Another hotel?”

  “No. Not with our faces plastered all over the news.” He looked around. “You think they have such a thing as a parking garage in this town?”

  “Here and there,” Finn said and nodded. She spotted one of the telltale blue-and-white P signs on the far side of the boulevard. One of the city’s bright orange trams clattered by, blocking her view for a moment, but then it was gone and she spotted the sign again. “There,” she pointed.

  “Get us into it,” said Hilts.

  In proper Italian fashion Finn ignored the traffic sign banning U-turns, bumped the scooter over the concrete lip separating the tram lane, and then swung across the far side of the boulevard between red lights and roared into the parking garage entrance. The booth attendant was gone, so Finn simply drove around the barrier arm and through the short carriageway in the base of the building fronting onto via Vittor Pisani. With parking at such a premium in the ancient city, the people who’d originally developed the office building had bought up the entire interior courtyard and built the five-story garage within it.

  “We’re looking for a van,” Hilts instructed as they went up the ramps. Finn nodded and kept on driving. They found what they were looking for on the roof of the garage: a bright yellow Fiat Ducato light commercial van with the name Mar-cello Di Milano in red on the side. Hilts tapped Finn on the shoulder and pointed. She pulled the Vespa in beside the van and killed the engine. There were three other vehicles on the roof and they all looked like delivery vans. There were also stenciled Riservato notations on all the spots. Long-term reserved parking, probably for stores in the area.

  “How are we supposed to get into it?”

  Hilts climbed off the scooter and looked around. He found a broken, fist-sized chunk of concrete beside the waist-high retaining wall on the roof. He carried it back to the driver’s-side window and slammed it through the glass.

  “Like that,” Hilts answered, reaching in through the broken window and opening the door.

  “Very subtle.” Finn got off the Vespa, put down the kickstand and climbed into the van after her companion.

  “Couldn’t be better,” said Hilts, clicking on the dome light. The interior of the truck was filled with clothes. Racks of pants and shorts took up one side, ties and plastic-wrapped shirts were stacked on the other. Hilts knelt on the floor and spilled out his own bag of goodies: a dozen small bottles filled with some kind of muddy substance, scissors, several pairs of reading glasses, a guidebook to Milan, various small toiletries, including toothpaste, toothbrushes, and a razor, two small cheap backpacks, and a bottle of Neutrogena Instant Bronze.

  “What’s all this?” said Finn.

  “We can’t hide your freckles and your pale skin, but we can cover it,” he answered, holding up the Neutrogena bronzer. “And we can both color our hair.” He checked through the pile of small plastic bottles. “You darker, me lighter.” He read the labels. “Which would you like, Chocaholic or Cinnamon Stick?”

  In the end she settled on Hazelnut Crunch.

  Forty-five minutes later, hair towel-dried with a few of Marcello’s lightweight sweaters, Finn and Hilts climbed into the front seats of the van. Finn’s hair had been chopped into a boyish shag and was now a deep auburn color. The Neutrogena bronzer had darkened her face considerably, hiding the telltale redhead complexion. Hilts’s hair had been trimmed as well and had gone from dirty to sun-streaked blond. Both were wearing fashionably rumpled cargo pants and brightly colored shirts, Finn’s green and Hilts’s bright red. A couple of clothing changes and toiletries for both of them were stuffed into the cheap backpacks. Finn and Hilts were both wearing reading glasses, Finn’s large and round, Hilts’s aviator style.

  “This is how it’s going to go,” said Hilts. “Everything they expect, we won’t do. They’ll expect a couple, we go single. They’re looking for Americans, we give them something else. What languages do you speak other than English?”

  “Quite a bit of Italian, Mexican Spanish. High school French.”

  “How good is the French?”

  “As good as high school French usually is.”

>   “Canadian.”

  “What?”

  “That’s who you are now, a Canadian student. French, from Montreal. Your name is . . . What’s a French-Canadian girl’s name?”

  “Celine Dion. Alanis Morrisette.”

  “Perfect. Your name is Celine Morrisette and you don’t speak any Italian at all. If it gets bad, start crying and screaming in French.”

  “If what gets bad?”

  “If they catch you.”

  “What about you?”

  “Du er så grim at du gør blinde børn bange.”

  “What the hell is that?!”

  “Danish for ‘you’re so ugly you scare blind children.’ ”

  “I didn’t know you spoke Danish.”

  Hilts smiled, leaned over, and kissed Finn’s newly bronzed cheek.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. And I didn’t mean the bit about the blind kids.”

  22

  Finn walked through the hundred-foot-high entrance to Milan’s Stazione Centrale trying to think in French, an old trick from her days writing high school exams. The trouble was, it didn’t work. Instead she kept on hearing the nasal voice of her history professor at NYU telling her that the English word “crap” came from the British infantry during the Napoleonic Wars, when they couldn’t pronounce the French word for “frog”—grenouille—so they used the Gallic word for “toad” instead, which was crapaud, zoologically close enough for the average English foot soldier. For some reason the story had stuck in her mind, and at that particular moment Finn couldn’t think of any other word in the French language with the possible exceptions of oui and non. Trying not to panic, she made her way down the main concourse, which was roughly the size of a football field.

  The interior of the station was irrationally, and wastefully, large, especially when one considered its fascist origins, a regime priding itself on ruthless efficiency. The cornerstone of the gigantic building had been laid in 1906, when Italy was still a monarchy. By 1912, the architect, a man named Stacchini, had stolen the plans for Burnham’s Union Station in Washington, D.C., and had simply doubled the scale. Twenty years after that the station was finally opened, complete with a parade of goose-stepping Blackshirts marching through the same enormous archway that Finn had just walked through. The whole station, including the twenty-five platforms and the barrel-vaulted iron and glass canopies, was 1,118 feet long and covered an area of a little over 700,000 square feet. Seventy-five years after its opening the station was now home to everything from packs of meandering gypsies to several hundred professional pickpockets, twice that many homeless people, 320,000 passengers coming and going each and every day, a Gucci outlet, two McDonald’s, and a Budget Rent-a-Car. It also sold railway tickets, even at midnight. Between the first McDonald’s arches and the ticket counter Finn was approached by four single men of varying ages, each one attesting to his virility and his desire to buy her a drink, coffee, or a hotel room. The word “crapaud” turned out to be more useful than she’d thought. On her way to the ticket counter she also noticed at least a dozen blue-uniformed cops checking the relatively thin late-night crowds, each one carrying some kind of handbill. Hilts had been right: they were on the lookout for her and the photographer. She was suddenly grateful for the bad cut and dye job and the new clothes. She was also acutely aware of the fact that their passports were back at the hotel and that she didn’t have a single piece of identification to corroborate her sudden incarnation as Celine Morrisette, crossover Canadian singing sensation.

  “Crapaud is right,” she whispered to herself, standing in the short line at the counter. Checking the big boards showing the next departures, she’d seen that there wasn’t much to choose from. She reached the head of the line, tried to put on what passed for a French Canadian accent in English, and bought her ticket. Turning away from the counter she brushed past Hilts, as they’d previously arranged.

  “Lyon, car eleven, compartment D, platform nine,” she said under her breath, looking away from him as she passed. Hilts joined the ticket line and Finn went on ahead. The train was due to leave in ten minutes. She moved slowly, watching the entrance to the track area. There were four uniformed policemen at the gate and two plainclothes cops speaking into walkie-talkies. They weren’t asking people for papers, but the plainclothesmen were eyeing the passengers as they headed through the small opening in the looming iron grille. Once again it looked as though Hilts was right, because they were paying particular attention to younger couples.

  With her ticket visible in one hand Finn moved between the two policemen with their walkie-talkies, keeping her eyes forward and holding her breath. Once she was between the two men flanking the opening there would be no way to escape. She thought about how long she would last as Celine Morrisette under questioning by the police. Not long, she knew, and after all, what would be the point? If they had her, then that was that. She thought about how her mother would react back in Columbus. A simple summer job turned to crapaud. Strangely she also found herself thinking of Hilts. He was the kind of man her mother always referred to as a scoundrel, but every time she said the word it was wistful and she was smiling. Her dad, according to her mom, had been one.

  “Scusi, signorina, parla Italiano?”

  “Pardon?” She froze. She was a French Canadian named Dion. No, Celine. Crapaud.

  “Parla Italiano, signorina?”

  “Je ne comprends pas.” That was it, the absolute bottom of the barrel. There wasn’t a syllable of French left in her and her mouth had dried up like being at the dentist.

  The bigger of the two men stepped forward, half blocking her path. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the sign for platform nine and the train’s destination in white on black.

  “Signorina, per quanto tempo sei stato in viaggio?”

  The cop was asking her how long she’d been traveling. She understood every word, even in his thick, Milanese accent. But she wasn’t supposed to understand him. She didn’t speak any Italian because she wasn’t Fiona Katherine Ryan, young art-historian-fugitive-killer-on-the-run, she was Celine Morrisette, carefree French-Canadian girl on her own, seeing Italy for twenty bucks a day and taking night trains to save on hotels.

  “Signorina, per favore . . .”

  And then, suddenly, miraculously, she had it, complete with that strange twang like a Cajun on steroids that always lurked in the back of Celine Dion’s voice when she talked to Larry King. Finn let out a torrent of words, most of them to do with Raymond and his student-exchange visit and how exciting it was and all of it somehow remembered chapter, verse, and word perfect from her junior-year textbook, Premières Années de Française. She buried the Milanese plainclothes cop in it up to his eyeballs, all at blinding speed, along with the atrocious accent. It seemed to work. Finally Finn ran out of Raymond and his new friend Elaine’s exploits, so she just shut up and smiled. The big man turned to his partner.

  “Esse un po’ di fuori,” he said, which meant that Finn was a nutcase. She smiled even more. She waved her ticket.

  “Canadian?” said the first cop.

  She gave the cop her best revolutionary student glare. “Non, je suis Quebecois!” She laughed, waved the ticket, and said, “S’il vous plait, messieurs! Mon train est on depart à ce moment!” It was true, the Lyon train gave a shrieking blast on its whistle. Last call.

  They let her go. She made it to the train, showed her ticket to the official on the platform, and climbed aboard. The night train was one of the slower and older Corail TRNs that were being slowly replaced by the high-speed bullet-nosed TGVs, the Trains a Grande Vitesse. She found her compartment, empty at the moment, and sighed with relief. Half a minute later the whistle shrieked again, and true to Mussolini’s promise, the train began to move, right on time.

  Trains in Europe are almost all electric, so there was none of the North American diesel pull-and-tug as they started; the train simply began to move in a gentle, gradually accelerating motion that swept them o
ut of the massive station and into the dark of Milan’s industrial suburbs. The small compartment remained empty and Finn began to relax. It looked as though they had made it—if Hilts had managed to make it onto the train.

  “This seat taken?” Hilts stepped into the compartment and slid the door closed behind him. He sat down across from her.

  “You made it.” She smiled.

  He didn’t look as happy.

  “So did Badir,” he answered.

  “Who?”

  “Badir. One of the stewards at the Adamson site. He was shadowing those two cops at the gate. He followed me onto the train.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good memory for faces. He’s no steward, and he probably never was. He’s muscle.”

  “You think he’s after us?”