Blood of the Lamb

by Sam Cabot

  Thomas put in an immediate request for the notebook, and it was delivered soon after Damiani’s other works on a silent-wheeled cart by a thin, solemn clerk who whispered, “Prego, Padre,” and slipped away. Thomas’s white-gloved fingers put down the volume he’d been holding and took up the notebook. He leafed through it with a delicacy that belied the pounding of his heart. Could it be this easy? The stolen document, slipped into a notebook, then lost all these years because of a lack of attribution? Thomas imagined the Concordat rustling out of the pages, saw himself racing through the echoing hallways, bearing it triumphantly to Lorenzo; and he laughed out loud—provoking frowns from other researchers, which seemed to be his lot—when he turned the final pages. Of course it wasn’t there. Nothing fell out, though the book was in sorry shape: back cover gone, some pages torn and some missing, looking as though it had been stepped on more than once. Oh, Thomas. Still a hopeless romantic.

  He glanced at some of the poems. Just as the cover promised, they were love poems, or at least, poems of praise, to the buildings and streets, the statues and fountains of Trastevere. None of the poems was titled; it was left to the reader to work out the subject of each. A few seemed obvious to Thomas:

  Du’ angioloni de quell’angiolo stanno de guardia

  ar martiro, buttato ggiù in ner pozzo

  two angels of that angel keep their watch

  over the martyr, thrown into the well

  That had to be San Callisto, where two of Bernini’s angels gazed perpetually across the church to the pit where the martyred Pope had died. Or

  Cosmologgje de colore, rosso-sangue, bianche,

  e le curve llustre de li pini in ombre de verde

  cosmologies of color, blood-red, white,

  and shining curves of pines in shades of green

  What came to mind was the floor—Cosmatesque, the style was called—at San Crisogono. Many churches had similar floors, but these colors were associated, in Thomas’s mind at least, with that one. And Cosmologgje/Cosmatesco, was it wordplay? Maybe. But maybe not . . .

  Well, it had been his plan to spend the morning studying Damiani’s work. He might as well start here. He settled over the notebook, forearms on the table. He read a poem, turned a page, read another. So absorbed was he in the words he was reading that he actually jumped when a soft voice spoke beside him.

  “Mario Damiani! I thought no one read him anymore but me!”

  Thomas blinked, taking in the sight: a woman in a flowing, flowered skirt, a blouse, and a complicated jacket (how did women know how to wear things like that?) was removing large sunglasses and smiling in surprise. She took off a straw hat and smoothed her dark hair. She’d spoken in English, and, extending her hand, in English went on. “Livia Pietro. I’m an art historian.”

  Thomas took her hand automatically. Her grip was strong and cool, and her eyes were an extraordinary green: silver-flecked, deep and dark. Moonlight on the ocean. Thomas realized he was staring. “Thomas Kelly,” he said. He started to stand, but she slid out the chair next to him and sat. He dropped back into his own chair and added, “A historian, too, but of the Church. From Boston.”

  “I know.” Livia Pietro dropped her voice to a whisper as two scholars by the window frowned over at them. She laid her hat on the table and gave Thomas a mischievous smile.

  “That I’m an American?” Thomas matched her whisper. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Well, you Americans do sit, walk, and hold yourselves in your own way. You’re not hard to spot. But no: I meant, that you’re a historian. The collar might suggest theologian, but you’re reading Damiani, a fellow not known for his religious subtlety.”

  “Brava.” Thomas smiled. “Some fine deduction.”

  “Why, thank you, Father. I’ve studied Damiani myself, here and there. He was an excellent poet. Complicated, elliptical, but well worth the effort. May I?”

  Livia Pietro unzipped her shoulder bag and removed white cotton gloves, pulled them on, and lifted a volume off the pile. Prepared and making herself at home, Thomas thought. Academic protocol demanded that he object, stake his claim now, or risk losing his proprietary rights to Damiani’s volumes. But Pietro’s good humor was appealing, and it occurred to Thomas that if she knew Damiani’s work well, perhaps she could help him get inside the poet’s head.

  She looked up and asked, “Do you read Romanesco? Few non-Italians do. Few Italians these days, actually.”

  “My main subject is the Church in the nineteenth century, on the Italian peninsula and elsewhere around Europe, as affected by the political movements of the time. Many primary sources have never been translated. I found it easier—” At Livia Pietro’s smile, Thomas stopped short, hearing with something like horror his own pedantic tones. “I’m sorry. I think I spend too much time with undergraduates. Yes, I read Romanesco.”

  “So do I. What’s this?” With a quick, conspiratorial movement, Livia Pietro slid the battered notebook along the tabletop. One finger keeping Thomas’s place, she leafed through the pages. Her green eyes seemed to sparkle. “Is this Damiani’s? I don’t know these.”

  Thomas, who until that moment had not known eyes sparkled except in novels, said, “Yes, I think so. It was cataloged with the miscellanea. I doubt if anyone’s looked at it since it was accessioned. If they had, the handwriting would’ve—”

  “Yes,” she said. “I agree. How exciting! You’ve made a discovery. Added to the store of human knowledge.” Her brows knit. “But look—missing pages. I wonder why?”

  “I assume, poems that didn’t go well.”

  “Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “But look at some of these. Cross-outs, rewrites, arrows, more cross-outs, lines up the margins. He didn’t seem to mind poems that needed work.”

  “Maybe he thought these couldn’t be saved.”

  “Ummm.” Livia Pietro came dangerously close to humming to herself, Thomas thought, as she turned the pages of the small notebook. “Interesting.” She nodded, said, “Ummm,” again, and settled over the volume. After a moment, Thomas pulled his own chair closer and read along with her.

  10

  Under the glorious blue Rome sky the buildings of La Sapienza positively glowed with learning. Anna Jagiellon flopped down against the trunk of a golden-leafed platano. The morning was fresh and clear and she had an hour before her next class: twentieth-century Russian poetry, a miraculous trifecta of a fascinating subject, presented in a creatively organized curriculum, taught by, for once, a professor who, though Mortal, wasn’t an idiot. Not only not an idiot, the man was hot: a grinning swarthy Serb. She’d caught the way he looked at her as she studiously took her notes, seen the corners of his mouth tug up when she swept her long blond hair back from her forehead. She’d have taken a run at him already, but her current life was a comfortable one that she wasn’t prepared to complicate for a few rolls in the hay. Especially now, with her goal suddenly, after so long, within sight. If she was able to accomplish her objective, she and the Serb could take it up then. At that point they’d be fair game for each other.

  Not that there was anything fair going on when a Noantri made a play for one of the Unchanged. The Noantri body was so intensely and elusively irresistible to Mortal senses that Noantri custom declared seducing the Unchanged unacceptable. Amazing, Anna thought, how her people had the same wide streak of pious hypocrisy as Mortals, who outlawed double-dealing, drunkenness, and debauchery and then feverishly committed every sin they had time for. In her Community, it was the same. If every Noantri who took a Mortal lover were punished, the Conclave would have time for little else. And, Anna suspected, would be missing a few of its own members.

  Now that she was settled in the shade she pulled off her hat, a red straw Jason Wu, fizzy with random bits of crimson netting that would have done her no good if she’d actually needed to veil her features, if she’d had to go about with that air of elegant m
ystery women had affected a hundred years ago. Aha, progress! A century and now she could uncover her face.

  Honestly, how could these Mortals stand it?

  Of all the identities, professions, and trades Anna Jagiellon had had through a long, long life, being a university student was the one she returned to most often. True, her considerable intellect was rarely challenged except by Noantri professors, who, recognizing their own, quietly tailored assignments to take into account, and take advantage of, not only her intelligence but also the years of learning already behind her. Still, even without that, she’d found enough new knowledge at universities to keep her interested, and her own impatience and restlessness found an echo in the yeasty fervor of young Mortals. Mortals, damn it. She used the politically correct “Unchanged,” or “Gli Altri”—“the others,” as opposed to her own peoples’ “Noantri,” which meant “we others”—when she had to, but she hated those terms. It wasn’t, as she pointed out to nods and mumbled agreement in the Circolo degli Artisti café, in that back room where you’d always find a compatible few, that they were other or not changed that made the vast majority of humans different from, and yes, lesser than, Noantri. It was that they were mortal. It was that they would die.

  That kind of talk, naturally, was dangerous. It had gotten her exiled nearly a century and a half ago, sent to Buenos Aires. Far from Europe, but not any kind of hardship, not for her. The beautiful, wealthy, and wild port city had adored the beautiful, wealthy, and wild young Hungarian. She’d loved it back, its burning sun and broad, sparkling river, its confiterías where she sipped café con leche all day, and its sultry clubs where she danced all night. She’d considered turning her back on the Old World and making the New her home. But though the Noantri Community in Argentina was large, Rome was the center of the oppressor’s power and also of her people’s. Her people, her hidden, optimistic, absurdly contented people, who had every right to the entire pie and were grateful for the crumbs. The Conclave had eventually lifted her sentence, not called her back but allowed her to return if she chose. She did.

  She was braiding her long pale hair over her shoulder, looking forward to an hour of reading Akhmatova, when her cell phone rang. “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” which meant that fool, Jorge. Maybe she shouldn’t have given him his own ring tone. Then whenever he called she’d have a few more exasperation-free seconds between the time the phone rang and the time she knew who it was.

  “Pronto, Jorge.” He’d speak in Spanish, she knew; his Italian, though earnest, was clumsy, and his laughable attempts to master even a few words of her native Hungarian were pathetic. If she’d wanted to make him comfortable she’d have picked up with, “Bueno.” But Jorge was more useful if he wasn’t comfortable. He tried harder to please.

  “Anna.” She could tell from that one word that he was excited. “I’m in the Vatican Library,” he said. Yes, in Spanish and just a notch above a whisper.

  She blew out a sigh, answered in Spanish to move this conversation along. “That’s where you’re supposed to be, Jorge. Did you call to tell me that?”

  “No! No, of course not. I’ve been watching that priest the way you said to—”

  “Good boy,” Anna said, knowing he’d beam and completely miss her acid sarcasm.

  “Thank you.” God, it sounded like he was blushing! “For the last two days he’s been asking for books by nineteenth-century Republican poets.”

  “And . . . ?” He might miss sarcasm but he’d hear impatience, at this high level anyway.

  “And someone came to join him today,” Jorge hurried on. “One of us.”

  Anna sat straighter. All right, the boy might be on to something. “Who? What do you mean, ‘to join him’?”

  “She introduced herself but I didn’t hear. A woman, with long black hair. Some gray streaks,” he added, with clear pride in his powers of observation.

  “When you get a chance”—she suggested the obvious—“you might check the registry. Wouldn’t she have had to sign in?”

  “Yes, she would’ve.” Again, sarcasm flew over his head. She wondered if that was a hearing defect, or a mental one. “I’ll go look. But here’s why I called.”

  “Oh, you mean there’s a point?”

  “Anna!” Finally, he was wounded. “The priest asked for a book, and when she saw it she got excited. They’re leaning over it and reading it together.”

  He stopped again. Sometimes Anna doubted herself: Were the Noantri really the right choice to rule the world, if the Community included morons like Jorge? And like herself, whose fault Jorge was in the first place?

  “Jorge,” she said carefully, “what is the book?”

  “Poetry,” he answered promptly. “Nineteenth century, but unattributed until now. The priest thinks it’s Mario Damiani’s. Anna, wasn’t he one of—”

  “Yes. Does she agree? The black-haired woman?”

  “Yes, and she—”

  “Get it.”

  “What?”

  “The book, Jorge! I want that book! Do you understand me?”

  “I—yes, but—”

  “Call me when you have it.” Anna added, “Ciao,” then thumbed the phone off with perhaps more force than necessary. She settled back against the tree trunk and took out a cigarette. Few of the Noantri smoked. A real pity, she’d always thought; it was a great pleasure, and the health dangers of this habit meant nothing to them. Of course, the problem was the fire. You needed a flame to get your cigarette going and it burned at its tip the whole time. Well, what of it? These miniature embers, so easily smashed out on the bottom of your shoe? Her people had been afraid of fire, and so much else, for far too long.

  She drew in smoke and streamed it out contentedly. The Conclave had sources in the Vatican; well, good for them. So did Anna and her friends. She’d been told about Father Thomas Kelly, called to the Vatican to root through the Archives in clear—and clearly desperate—search of something. Now he’d been joined by a Noantri with Vatican Library credentials, thus obviously a scholar. And there they were, getting excited together over a book of Noantri poetry.

  Of course, it could mean nothing. Just some academics getting their bookish thrills.

  Though if it meant nothing, why was Anna’s skin tingling like this?

  11

  “Interesting,” Livia Pietro said again, still studying the pages of the poetry notebook.

  Thomas, who’d been contentedly reading the poems alongside her, looked up. “What’s interesting?”

  Now she turned to him, considering. “Do you know Trastevere well?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. It’s across the Tiber from Rome proper and therefore through the centuries a neighborhood of noncitizens when only citizens were allowed to live within the city walls. It housed the Jewish ghetto until the ghetto was dissolved and has always been a magnet for people of many nationalities because of its proximity to the docks. It has a Bohemian reputation but has gentrified lately, with writers, galleries, cafés—you’re smiling again. I’ve gone beyond pedantic into pompous, haven’t I?”

  “Just a little, around the edges. But you’re spot-on. Damiani lived there, and as it happens, so do I. It’s an extraordinary place. Though I suppose,” she added, “most people feel that way about their hometowns. You probably find Boston extraordinary.”

  “Yes, I do.” Thomas thought it sweetly polite of her to be at pains not to rank her hometown above his own. Though he had yet to meet a Roman who didn’t consider everywhere else inferior to Rome. “It does seem a fascinating place. Trastevere,” he said. “Damiani obviously thought so, writing love poems to it. Is that what you meant by ‘interesting’—that he wrote love poems to buildings?”

  “No.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “We actually have a tradition of that here. But look. You wouldn’t know this, but . . . These pages, there are forty or so poems here. Some are clear
ly in praise of what could be called major sites—important churches, statues, piazzas.”

  “You can tell which they are?”

  “A few. They’re unmistakable. Here—the martyr in the well has to be San Callisto.”

  “Yes, I thought so, too.”

  She glanced sideways with a smile. “Did you?” Then back to the book. “And here’s Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, and I think I see Porta Settimiana. But there are so many poems. Some seem to be about places that are relatively insignificant. And I think some major places are missing.”

  “Well,” Thomas said, “a lover writing love poems—he might find praiseworthy what others consider insignificant.”

  “Undeniably true.” She inclined her head. “Still, there are one or two churches, for example, that no lover of Trastevere would ignore. What I’m wondering is whether the missing pages were about those places.”

  “They might have been. There’s no way to know, though.”

  “I’m not so sure. I—” Livia Pietro snapped her head around. The solemn clerk who’d brought Thomas’s materials wheeled his cart past their table. Livia Pietro’s green eyes seemed for a moment to flash, another thing Thomas had thought eyes didn’t actually do. The clerk, paying no attention to them, crossed the room to collect books left by a researcher finished for the day. Livia Pietro watched him wordlessly, then turned back to Thomas. “If you look at how the—”

  Stopping, she leapt to her feet. Before Thomas had quite registered that she was standing in front of him, he felt himself gripped from behind and flung onto the cold stone floor. The echoes of clattering chairs pinged around the room, mixing with shouts from affronted scholars and from Livia Pietro, who, in a flurry of complicated jacket and skirt, seemed to be struggling with the silent clerk over Damiani’s notebook. Thomas was briefly immobile in confusion—What was going on? Why had the clerk thrown him out of his chair? How had he come back across the room so fast?—but when a falling book thunked onto his forehead he unfroze and grabbed for the clerk’s ankle. All he got was trouser leg, so he yanked on that. Thrown off balance, the clerk tottered and fell but rolled to his feet again. He ignored Thomas, who was clumsily trying to free himself from books and furniture. The clerk and Livia Pietro faced each other. For a half second both stood as still as the marble statues that stared disapprovingly from niches along the walls.