Blood of the Lamb

by Sam Cabot

  Near midnight—as on so many horrific nights before—the jangle of keys heralded a visit by a man intent on having his way with the once-virginal daughter of the dead king. By now long past numb, and intent on the longed-for dawn, Anna just stared at the wall as the man settled in the dirty straw beside her and said he was a friend, a former courtier of her father’s, and was here to help. He was lying, she was sure: all her father’s intimates had surely been put to death, or had fled. Why he said it, she didn’t know. Some of them did, the men who came into her cell. Some of them spoke to her as though to persuade her there was, somewhere, a reason she should not hate them for what they were about to do. She despised those men even more than the ones who silently and roughly threw her on the straw and took her as they wanted.

  So she didn’t speak to this man, didn’t look at him, and when he came close she didn’t move. She’d learned to respond as little as she could; in the beginning she’d fought them, but they had always conquered her and her ineffectual struggles only inflamed their lust. Her sole power was in impassiveness and scorn.

  The man took her chin gently in his hand, turned her head to face him. He looked into her eyes. She found herself strangely captivated, and was not sure if she could have moved in any case when finally he took her by her shoulders, laid her softly in the straw, and leaned over her. She felt his mouth on her throat, his soft lips, and then a searing, fiery pain engulfed her. It blazed through her as though she were plunging into boiling oil. She lost sight and hearing, could feel nothing but this agonizing Fire. She tried to scream but no sound came. Just when she thought she’d go mad from the pain it started to fade, and when she could see again, she found the man’s eyes still on hers. She found also that she could hear the newborn squeak of a baby mouse in its nest inside the walls, and she could smell the aroma of roast meat from the guard’s quarters across the courtyard.

  He sat her up, this courtier, took her hands, and told her what he was. What she now was. Stunned and unbelieving, she took him for mad. He told her not to fear the dawn. He stroked her hair and, leaning forward again, kissed her. His mouth on hers awoke in her such a clamor of yearning, such vast, unknown pleasure, that it was almost pain again. She still hadn’t spoken when he stood and left, locking her cell behind him.

  She sat immobile, staring where he’d gone, until they came for her at dawn. Her hands were bound behind her, her eyes blindfolded, and she was hanged, not with a sharp, merciful snap of the neck, but a slow, terrifying strangulation. She fought, kicking, writhing, but darkness flowed gradually in and she was gone. Her last thought was, At least it’s over.

  Until she awoke on silk sheets in a room filled with daylight glowing softly through lace curtains. The courtier sat beside her in a velvet chair. He smiled and she reached her hand to his.

  • • •

  Anna shook herself to bring her thoughts back to this world. Enough memories, enough time-wasting! Each phone call from Jorge brought worse news than the last. She could see no help for it now: she had to involve herself directly, or this golden chance might be lost. If the Church, or the Conclave, recovered the Concordat, another such opportunity could be centuries away. But Jorge was no longer a useful tool. He was a liability, calling attention to himself, and so potentially to her and their movement.

  Jorge, the stupid fool, had killed a monk.

  41

  “Esposito? Come in here a minute.”

  The soprintendente’s command came without urgency, as though it were a request; but the man never raised his voice. Some of Luigi Esposito’s fellow Gendarmes had the idea from his manner that their boss was fundamentally unconcerned, with his work, theirs, or anything else, that he was just marking time until he was pensioned off. As so many of them were. But Luigi had learned to read the soprintendente’s inflections and the look in his eyes. That’s why, though he was just a Naples street kid, he’d become a vice assistente when his fellows were still—and would always be—uniformed Gendarmes.

  Luigi rose from his desk, where three windows open on his computer linked him to the websites of various law enforcement agencies specializing in art and antiquities theft. Educating himself about the ins and outs of this crime specialty seemed an obvious next step. Especially since he had no suspects to process, no interviews to conduct, and no actual physical evidence to examine.

  Well, not entirely no evidence. He’d made a search of the Library passage both the clerk and the black-haired woman had used—and a man claiming to be a priest, one Father Thomas Kelly, a researcher from Boston—and come up with the clerk’s Library smock. That he’d thrown it off, obviously the better to blend in, plus the fact that he and the other two had used the same escape route, made it even more glaringly obvious to Luigi that this was a ring of highly professional thieves. Though it was also clear, from the reported fight in the Manoscritti Reading Room, that something had gone wrong with this particular attempt at larceny. Maybe the priest really was a priest, and had been trying to prevent the theft? And had chased after the woman to get the stolen book back? But if so, where was he? Why hadn’t he come forward? No, to Luigi it seemed more likely that the priest, real or bogus, was a member of the ring, involved up to his clerical collar.

  Luigi followed his boss into his office, where the soprintendente dropped his round, rumpled body into his desk chair and said, “Close the door. Take a look at this.”

  Luigi pushed the door shut and took the sheet of paper the soprintendente handed him. It was a printout of an incident report, one from a steady stream that flowed through the soprintendente’s computer all day. The Rome Polizia, the Italian Carabinieri, and the Vatican Gendarmerie kept one another informed of goings-on in their jurisdictions throughout the day. (And into the endlessly silent Vatican night, when, during Luigi’s stints as watch officer, reading the reports of the other police agencies was sometimes the only thing that kept him awake.) It was a professional courtesy, though Luigi couldn’t imagine a cop or a Carabiniere scanning the Holy See’s crime news with any serious interest.

  Glancing over the other agencies’ reports was part of the soprintendente’s duties, though, and he performed this office faithfully. Luigi knew, from his boss’s sharp blue eyes combined with the weary set of his shoulders, that the soprintendente had once seen himself sailing the wild seas of true law enforcement, before he’d gotten becalmed in the backwater of the Vatican. It made Luigi wonder how he, Luigi, would survive once he got promoted to a supervisory position and spent all day doing Vatican paperwork, his nose pressed to the glass of actual policing.

  Then he read the printout, and his heart skipped a beat.

  “That description,” the soprintendente said. As usual, his manner was casual, but now his eyes were narrowed. “Of their person of interest. Reminiscent of the man you had in here earlier, wouldn’t you say?”

  Luigi swallowed. “Very much so, sir.”

  The soprintendente stared wordlessly at Luigi for long enough that Luigi found he had to force himself to meet the pale gaze and not squirm. Finally the man spoke. “You don’t have the seniority and unless I’m wrong, you haven’t worked with the Carabinieri before.” He wasn’t wrong and he knew he wasn’t, so Luigi said nothing. “But if it’s the same man, you might be of use. I’ve spoken to the detective in charge, a man named Giulio Aventino. He’s on his way to the church. Santa Maria della Scala.” The soprintendente gestured to the printout. “His sergeant’s already there. He was nearby on some kind of surveillance, I don’t know what, when the incident occurred. They’ll meet you at the scene.”

  Trying to appear cool and professional though he’d already nearly crushed the printout in his grip, Luigi said, “Yes, sir!” and headed for the door.

  “Esposito?” The soprintendente waited for Luigi to stop and turn. “It’s their case. They’re willing to have us send someone because it’s a homicide of a churchman in a church. You’re the obvious choice b
ecause of the suspect.” Whom, on the instructions of the Cardinal Librarian, I ordered you to release, and I’m now making it up to you. Luigi wasn’t sure he saw that in the soprintendente’s eyes, but he hoped so. “But Santa Maria della Scala’s not the Vatican,” his boss went on. “It’s Italy. You’re there to help. To help them, Esposito.”

  Luigi nodded. Anything for a fellow cop. Though, he thought as he loped through the station to the door, if Vice Assistente Luigi Esposito of the Gendarmerie were to be any help to a homicide detective of the Carabinieri, it was just possible he might find he was helping himself.

  42

  Thomas read Mario Damiani’s cryptic words with, a tiny corner of his mind was pleased to note, less befuddlement than he’d felt in the Vatican Library when first faced with the poet’s works. He was beginning to get inside Damiani’s head, he thought. These lines, he was sure, would soon yield to serious and methodical consideration and offer up their meaning.

  If he could bring serious and methodical consideration to bear.

  The truth was, leaning here on the worn wooden counter beside Livia Pietro, under the scrutiny of a painted angel peeking over a painted curtain, Thomas was having trouble concentrating. Part of it was the distraction created by the aromas swirling through the room. How many weeks, months perhaps, had it been since anyone had opened that door, before he and Pietro had, well, broken in? In all that time the sunlight of summer, now fading to autumn, had continued to fall through the ancient windows. In the quiet warmth, spices, medicinal herbs, flowers, and oils had released their intoxicating scents into the air.

  The aromas were part of it; but the other part was that Thomas was noticing them.

  Father Thomas Kelly was famous for his scholarly focus, which was another way of saying he was an absentminded professor. Though fond of flowers and sunshine, he generally took as little notice of them while working as he did of howling winter storms and broken water pipes—each of which had landed him in trouble in the past, to the great amusement of his colleagues. (“Until your feet got wet? Seriously?”) Faced with a task as monumentally important as the one he was involved in now, it seemed inexplicable to Thomas that he was thinking about scent.

  And even more ridiculous, he realized, that he was thinking about thinking about scent. He was distracted by his own distraction. While Lorenzo’s life, and death, and afterlife, hung in the balance.

  Thomas shifted position, leaning closer to the unfolded paper. Pietro raised her eyebrows as he crowded her, but said nothing. Together they read:

  Sarve Reggina, madre de la sorgente

  de nasscita e de morte, fragrante ojjo ner core

  de le lanterne, tutto d’oro, potente

  drento. Ave all’anima, ar piede, a la tera

  ch’aregge sordati e ssuore, peregrini ner gnente.

  Ave, Maria, mother of the source

  of birth and death, and fragrant, flowing oil

  that fuels the lanterns, golden, and the force

  within. Ave, the soul, the foot, the soil

  ’neath nuns and soldiers, pilgrims on their course.

  Just below the last line of the poem: the letters T I V A C, in heavy lead pencil, all uppercase.

  At first neither of them spoke. The soft air of the apothecary enfolded them in scent and silence. Finally, Pietro tentatively offered, “Maria. Foot, again. Soil. Pilgrimage. Well, they’re pilgrimage poems. And these.” She pointed, not touching the paper. “What do you suppose this means?”

  “T-I-V-A-C?” With equal uncertainty, Thomas said, “Nothing I can see. Maybe it’s initials? Something Spencer George would understand?”

  “I suppose. Though we can’t very well ask him right now.”

  “And,” Thomas realized, “we can’t be sure Damiani wrote them. Uppercase letters, lead, not ink—someone else might have done it.”

  “In Damiani’s notebook? I got the feeling from Spencer that Damiani never showed his notebooks to anyone. But all right, let’s let that go for now and focus on the poem.”

  If only I could focus, Thomas thought. But he redoubled his efforts and stared at the words. And slowly found himself drawn in, absorbed in the old, familiar way, until he all but felt the connections being made in his brain between what he was learning now, and what he already knew. “Something else,” he said slowly, as his synapses sizzled and clicked. “Soil, foot, you’re right, pilgrimage, but something else . . . Maria, yes, so another church dedicated to Mary. But: Source. Oil. Soldiers, the soldiers are important . . . Lanterns . . . golden lanterns . . . No! Not the lanterns are golden! The oil is golden. The oil. Where the oil bubbled up.” He saw the light go on in Pietro’s eyes and wondered if it was mirrored in his own.

  43

  Livia refolded Damiani’s poem, slipped it into the pages of her own notebook, and zipped notebook and poem into her bag. The Conclave had been right: having the priest with her was paying off. She was a little surprised at herself for, well, being surprised. The Conclave carried a collective wisdom of thousands of years. Behind them were centuries of debate and study. It was their responsibility to be right. And—with the single, glaring exception of her defying of the Law to make Jonah Noantri—Livia had, since her own Change, always taken it as an article of personal faith that they were. Livia wanted nothing more than a quiet, assimilated life, lived undiscovered among the Unchanged and openly among her own kind; she’d never wanted anything else, except Jonah, and allowing herself to want him was her great error and still her greatest regret.

  In silence she led the priest back out of the apothecary—though she caught him casting a look of disappointment on the shelves and bottles, the jars and the drawers he’d had no chance to explore—and across the vestibule to a hallway on the right. She made quick work of the lock on the first door, to, she noticed, no reaction at all from Thomas Kelly. The room held old equipment for crushing and distilling herbs; fascinating devices, and the priest appeared even more pained here, to have to pass them all by. But he made no comment as she crossed to the dusty window, unlatched it, and peered out. Ten feet below lay a courtyard that was even now planted in a formal pattern, though no longer with herbs the monks were cultivating for future use, just with ornamental flowers and shrubs. She pulled the window wide.

  “Wait.” Thomas Kelly finally spoke, the edginess back in his voice. She’d expected it would return, but still she sighed; his disapproval and objections were wearying. “You can’t be planning to go out that way?”

  “It’s not a far drop. There’s a fig tree here.” She smiled. “Even a priest in a jacket and collar should be able to make it.”

  “That’s not the point! We can’t go through there. It’s the monastery garden. They’ll see us.”

  “The monks? They’re all in the church. The bells called them. Look around: there’s no one anywhere.”

  Kelly’s face changed. “I should—I should go, too. To see if—”

  “No.” She turned to look at him full-on. “Father, whatever it was, there’s nothing you can do. You and I have a task, as important to you as it is to me. Let’s concentrate on it.” With that she sat on the windowsill, swung her legs over it, and leapt to the ground. She hadn’t needed the help of the fig tree but turned expecting to find Thomas Kelly clambering clumsily down its branches—if he decided to come along at all. She was surprised to see the priest, after hesitating, ignore the tree and grasp the sill, lowering himself on outstretched arms until he let go his handhold and dropped lightly beside her.

  As he stood dusting his hands, Livia said, “Nicely done.”

  “We humans aren’t completely without our physical abilities.”

  She sighed. “Can’t we have a truce?” When he didn’t answer, she turned away from him. “All right.” She surveyed the walled garden. “Now we need to find a way out to the street.”

  Kelly gave her a pitying look and spun br
iskly, heading to his left. Livia caught up with him. “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “How do you know it’s this way?”

  “It’s a monastery. I’m a priest.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. She followed, and it turned out he was right. He marched confidently through a small door into a cool, dim corridor, then led her along a smooth-worn stone floor past walls hung with crucifixes and a dark, not very good but clearly deeply felt painting of Santa Teresa. After a brief moment of decision at the intersection with a wider corridor he turned right. A few yards later they reached another door and, through it, a small vestibule. Livia’s heart pounded when she saw the sliding scrollwork screen and the desk in the tiny room beyond it, but the vestibule and room were as empty as the corridors. Thomas Kelly crossed to the outer door, eased it open, took a cautious look out, and gestured impatiently as though she were dragging her feet. They issued onto Via del Mattonato, behind the church. No one was about as they hurried away.

  “That was impressive,” Livia said.

  “Tradesman’s entrance,” was Kelly’s short answer. But after a moment he relented, adding, “The Discalced Carmelites are a semi-cloistered order. Their contact with the outside world is carefully controlled.”

  “They have a big gate right smack through the rear wall into the monastery.”

  “That would have been added recently. For trucks. Originally a tradesman would have brought his wares on his back or by handcart as far as the vestibule we just came out of. He’d have been paid by the monk behind the screen and gone off. Then other friars would have been summoned to collect the delivery. Which, you can be sure, is a similar system to the one they use now for the trucks. It’s only when the monks are performing their pastoral duties that they have contact with outsiders.”

  Kelly had assumed the pedantic tones of the university lecturer again, but Livia took care to keep her amusement to herself. To her surprise, though, the corners of the priest’s mouth lifted into a small smile.