by Sam Cabot
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“You might be the only woman ever to have walked that hallway.”
“Don’t tell the monks, they’ll be scandalized.”
Still smiling, Kelly nodded. Then, as if he’d caught himself in an error, his face flushed and he said, “Much more than scandalized if they knew what you really were. What I’d brought to their consecrated halls.”
Livia sighed once again. “Give it a rest, Father.” She strode past him and then, without looking back, turned down a vicolo so narrow it was always in shadow. She kept a few paces ahead of Thomas Kelly as they covered the short distance to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.
44
Giulio Aventino had to admit that, notwithstanding the Armani jacket, the elegant two-day scruff, and the cardinal uncle, Raffaele Orsini had done an excellent job at the Santa Maria della Scala crime scene. Once you got past the fact that he’d sat drinking coffee in the café across the piazza while it became a crime scene, of course. Raffaele had called in the coroner and the forensics team, used some of the responding officers to secure the church and some to fan out and hunt for the alleged perpetrator; and he’d held on to all the witnesses. That last must not have been easy in the case of the sour historian who was sitting in cold impatience, his arms folded, in a rear pew. He, according to the sergeant, had to have it explained to him that the forces of law and good represented by the Carabinieri would be most grateful for his continuing cooperation. As would the substantial paperwork-generating bureaucratic machine of the civil state, which sadly the Carabinieri could not control once it was unleashed. Giulio nodded. Raffaele was very good at that sort of thing. Giulio himself would just have arrested the man if he’d tried to leave, and sorted it out later.
Not for the first time, Giulio considered the possibility that the maresciallo had created their partnership not only because of the things the junior detective could learn from the senior.
The other two witnesses, by contrast, were only too glad to stay. Black-clad vecchie, of a type Giulio’s twenty-three years on the force had taught him to know well, they had not only been in the church when the homicide had occurred, they’d nearly seen it happen. They’d turned at the yell and the thud, seen the thin young man flee back up the aisle. It was their solemn duty, they assured him, to help the Carabinieri solve this horrible crime, this desecration, this tragedy that offered further proof, if any were needed, that today’s young people were lost to God and running completely amok. No, they’d needed no persuasion to stay; in fact, Giulio suspected he’d need a pry bar to get these ladies out of the church in the end.
He’d listened patiently to each as she objected, disingenuously but huffily, to being made to go through her story again, having already told it to Raffaele. Then, being reassured of her value to the investigation, each launched into a blow-by-blow (“. . . lighting candles for my late husband, such a good man, God rest his soul, he was Francesca’s brother, we come every day . . .”) that eventually wound round to the raised voices, the scuffle, the fall. By the time each of the ladies had told it twice, the story included bellowed blasphemous curses, an unprovoked vicious attack on a man of God by a wild-eyed degenerate, and a morbidly delighted grin lighting up the face of the killer (“I can never forget it, Madonna help me!”); but Giulio thought not. What he heard, between the self-importantly hysterical lines, played out like this: a young man rose from his knees at the rear of the church and sought access to an area in which he was not permitted; the old monk sought to prevent him; in an attempt to shove his way past, the young man had knocked the old monk down. The monk had hit his head on the ancient marble floor—on a gravestone marking a tomb below, but Giulio was long over the ironies that churches could offer—and died, either of the impact or of a heart attack caused by fright or agitation, the specific cause being for the coroner to determine.
Giulio, again from long experience of such matters, suspected the death had been an absurd accident. An overreaction, you might say, on the part of Fate. A satanic disciple, a specimen of today’s amok youth with eyes like burning coals, would be unlikely to have been found on his knees at the back of the church to begin with. Had the young man stayed, and assuming he had no record of previous criminal violence, it was likely he’d have gotten a slap on the wrist: at worst, a six-month suspended sentence for assault. As it was, because he’d fled the scene, he was now a suspect in a homicide. The longer and harder the authorities looked for him and the more resources they expended, the angrier the judge they brought him before would be when he was finally caught.
It was that he had, in fact, fled that interested Giulio. That, and the fact that he’d been on his knees in prayer in the first place.
The coroner’s men were ready to go, so Giulio dismissed the second vecchia, instructing one of the uniformed officers to escort the important lady out. As he’d expected, she balked at leaving, but her sanctimonious respect for authority overcame her desire to be at the center of any tragedy; and finally she went. As was his custom, Giulio went back to the body, lifting the linen over the face for one final look. Raffaele Orsini, standing beside him, crossed himself. That made, since Giulio had arrived, four times. Of course he’d counted; it was one of the little delights of working with Raffaele, the private side bets Giulio made daily about how the sergeant’s piety would express itself. Since this case involved the death of a monk in a church, Giulio was looking forward to some inspired devotion.
Giulio nodded to the coroner’s team, who started the process of packing the body up for transport. From Giulio’s point of view there was nothing of note about the body except the look of peace, even joy, on the old monk’s face. Giulio could tell the man had been bent crooked with arthritis, which probably caused him constant pain; and at his age no doubt he had other health problems as well. As you will soon enough, Aventino, he told himself, and at least this one died happy, expecting to meet his Maker. As Giulio often did, he considered the cheerless irony of how he and his fellow realists (a word he vastly preferred to “nonbelievers,” which implied something actually existed in which they refused to believe) had outsmarted themselves. Men like this monk—and Raffaele Orsini—might be deluded about their own purpose, about God existing and having a plan, and most of all, about the afterlife; but they generally died happy.
With a stifled sigh Giulio walked over to the pew where the historian sat. The lemon face turned to look at him.
“Well. The majesty of the law is finally prepared to catechize me, is that it?”
Giulio enjoyed the deliberate misuse of the theological verb, partly because he heard, from the pew behind, Raffaele sucking disapproving air between his teeth. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir,” he said. “Professor Spencer George, is that correct?” Giulio pronounced the English badly but with obvious care, and then returned to Italian with equally obvious relief. “I’m Senior Investigator Giulio Aventino. It’s an honor, sir. May I?” Without pausing for an answer Giulio dropped wearily into the pew. “It was those women. They were witnesses to the incident—which I take it you yourself were not, Professore?”
He waited, though they both knew he knew the answer. The historian forced out an exasperated “That’s correct.”
“As I thought. In any case, I needed personally to hear those women’s accounts of the situation—as senior investigator on this case I can’t rely on secondhand testimony, even from someone as reliable as my sergeant”—his nod to Raffaele, now leaning forward, caused the historian to swivel around to look—“but frankly, sir, it was also that until they were gone I knew I wouldn’t be able to think straight. Very pious, of course, and no doubt women of great virtue, but exhausting, don’t you find?”
None of this did the professore grace with an answer; and all of it was only barely true. Giulio had no special love for the doom-and-gloom sin-sniffing old ladies who came early to Mass and made a point of occupying
the pews nearest the confessional, the better to eavesdrop on other people’s transgressions. But they didn’t make his head spin. Belying his carefully cultivated appearance, very little, in reality, made Giulio Aventino’s head spin.
He peered at Spencer George and could tell the historian was seeing right through his rumpled-and-befuddled act. Excellent. George would conclude that Giulio, after having kept him cooling his heels for no good reason, was now making an inept attempt to cozy up to him for the purpose of manipulating him into lowering his guard. Being manipulated tended to irritate people. And, having so easily discovered Giulio’s strategy, the professore—in any case no doubt accustomed to thinking of himself as smarter than everyone around him; Giulio could see that in the impatient thin lips and the arrogant set of the shoulders—would allow his own condescension free rein.
Irritated, impatient, and condescending. If any constellation of mind-sets was more likely to cause a suspect to make mistakes, Giulio hadn’t yet come across it.
Not that Spencer George was a suspect, at least, not in the death of the monk, at least, not directly. But when Giulio had first arrived, after he’d seen the body and gotten the lay of the land, and before he’d questioned any of the witnesses, he’d taken his sergeant outside and had a hushed conversation with him on the church steps. Raffaele had filled him in, with exactly the mixture of apology and pride that Giulio had expected, on his surveillance mission for his cardinal uncle. Giulio, over the half-glasses perennially slipping down his nose as though they wanted to bury themselves in his mustache, had interrupted Raffaele’s narrative to ask whether he was absolutely sure he hadn’t noticed anything at all amiss about the visitors going in and out of the church. That was by way of reminding the sergeant that all of this had happened while he’d been lounging in the piazza outside on secondment to the Vatican, so perhaps a bit more apology and a touch less pride would have been appropriate. Then, because they were, at the end of the day, partners, and because Raffaele, at bottom, had the makings of a good, solid cop—and because one of Raffaele’s better points was that he never made excuses for his mistakes—Giulio had filled the sergeant in on what might turn out to be the intriguing next piece of what might turn out to be a larger puzzle: the anticipated arrival of a member of the Gendarmerie. (“Stop smirking, Raffaele, they’re brothers in arms. If anyone should show respect to an officer from the Vatican I’d think it would be a cardinal’s nephew.”) The Gendarme, so Giulio had heard, had an interesting tale to tell about the homicide suspect who, after causing what Giulio was still sure was an accident, had so rapidly disappeared.
45
Raffaele Orsini was watching his partner work.
He himself had gotten Giulio Aventino’s trademark soft-voiced, phrased-as-a-question, piercing-gaze-over-the-eyeglasses reprimand earlier, but he was the first to admit he’d deserved it. Not so much because of what had happened inside Santa Maria della Scala while he sat in the café outside—hadn’t the maresciallo told him not to enter the church?—but because, though Giulio hadn’t mentioned this, the thin young man they now thought of as their suspect must have exploded out of one of the church’s main doors just as, through another, Raffaele had been charging in.
Raffaele had been forgiven, though, or at least considered properly chastised, and welcomed back into the fold. In fact, he’d proved his use already. Not only by his rapid, efficient, and book-proper handling of the crime scene. While the historian smoldered in the pew, Giulio Aventino patiently listened to the lamentations of the old ladies. Raffaele would have liked to stay and pick up some pointers on dealing with hysterical witnesses, but he’d been dispatched to run interference with the dyspeptic emissary launched in their direction by the Bishop. This vinegary Monsignore had arrived with a flurry and a frown, sent to ensure, in equal measure, that the search for the friar’s killer was made a high Carabinieri priority, and that untoward behavior at the monastery of Santa Maria della Scala, should any come to light, not find its way into the official report. Raffaele had done a good job, he was pleased to say, of placating the priest while upholding the honor and independence of the Carabinieri. At the moment the Monsignore, in the company of the monastery’s prior, was exploring the possibility that some valuable item might have gone missing (a suggestion that made the Monsignore’s eyes flash, as though Raffaele, by speaking the words, was in danger of bringing about the fact). After they’d gone off Raffaele had herded the rest of the monks—there were fourteen—into two pews not far from where the body lay. As a detective, he’d have been happier if they’d left the premises altogether, so as not to endanger the evidence; and his partner, as a nonbeliever, would probably be happier if they just vaporized. But Raffaele felt strongly that they had a right to sit in prayer and meditation near the corporeal remains of their brother, to keep vigil and ease his joyous trip into the presence of God.
Until the coroner’s men took the body away, of course. Now the monks, on the orders of their prior, had returned to their cloister. The prior and the acidic Monsignore were inspecting the side chapels one by one. Uniformed officers, armed with a dialed-back version of the old ladies’ descriptions, prowled the streets hunting down the thin young man. And Raffaele was in a rear pew taking lessons in interview technique.
He always enjoyed this process. In some ways observing Giulio with a witness was like watching a soccer game between unmatched teams. Each play unfolded uniquely, and so held individual interest; but the overall organization of the game was familiar and the outcome never in doubt.
“Now, Professore, please.” Seeming both distracted and ready to be grateful, Giulio addressed the historian. “Tell me what you can about this incident. Where were you when it took place?” The answer, of course, Giulio already knew, as he could also, no doubt, predict the objection of Spencer George.
“What I told your sergeant—”
“Is what you told my sergeant. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s my responsibility to hear all witness statements personally. As I did with those of the vecchie,” he confided in a tone of shared misery.
“Yes, of course.” Spencer George, his eye-roll making it clear he was yielding, unwillingly, to the inevitable, began his tale. It was essentially the same story he’d told Raffaele: he and two friends had entered the Reliquary Chapel at the end of the side aisle “to admire Santa Teresa’s chopped-off foot,” a phrase near enough to blasphemy that it caused Raffaele to suppress a shudder. George had remained after his friends had gone. He’d heard a scream, come into the main church, and seen the monk lying on the floor with an apparition in black hovering over him. Giulio lifted his eyebrows at this suggestion of the supernatural, until George went on to add, “I believe it was her sister-in-law who’d run howling outside.”
“Ah.” Giulio nodded and continued. “And the friends you were with, your fellow historians? Livia Pietro and Thomas Kelly? Where are they now?”
From the pause and the widening of the historian’s eyes, Raffaele could tell the question had hit home. The professore had never been asked, or volunteered, the names or occupations of his companions.
And this was the point and had been all along: the point of keeping Spencer George waiting, of Giulio’s pedantic civil servant act, to make him feel superior and therefore get careless.
In their brief conference when Giulio arrived, Raffaele had explained he’d been sent by the Cardinal to keep an eye on Livia Pietro; Giulio in turn told Raffaele about the theft at the Vatican Library and the red-haired American priest easily identified as one Thomas Kelly, who’d been with Pietro then. The third party involved in that fracas, it seemed, was a thin young man of suspiciously similar description to the suspect they were seeking now. The Gendarme detective on that case was on his way; but even without him, Raffaele and his senior partner could see something was going on here that required a more thorough explanation. And that this historian, now that he’d been thrown off-balance, might well be the one to give
it.
46
Thomas Kelly realized he’d lost control of the situation once again. He’d boldly led their escape from the monastery, as he’d been the discoverer of the hiding place of the new poem. True, Pietro had chosen for them a serene and splendid retreat in which to decipher the verse, and also true, and more rankling, it had been Spencer George who’d prompted Thomas to check for the folded paper in the reliquary’s roof. But as Thomas brought Livia Pietro through the hushed monastery corridors and out onto the street, and then along it, he’d felt less at sea than any time that day.
However, now she was ahead of him in a dark lane he wouldn’t have thought to turn down. She knew the way to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and he didn’t. He was sure she had no idea what to do when they got there, but neither had he, so they were even on that score.
And she was an unnatural creature with a nimble intellect, a great depth of learning, and an indelible physical presence. A creature who, to hear her tell it, felt a warm, benign joy in the company of others physiologically like herself. Whereas he was a man who’d given his merely human mind, body, and soul to a spiritual community he’d chosen: a Church he’d always understood, even in the days of his darkest doubts, to exist as a place of honest refuge from the evils of the world. About which characterization he was now, at best, unsure.
Where did that put the two of them on the relative-advantage scale?
He pondered that question as he followed Pietro, turning left and then right along narrow streets, then left again onto a busier one, until she suddenly stopped. She thrust out her arm so she could halt Thomas’s progress, also. Shades of the Vatican Library. She peered from the mouth of the alley, and then, adjusting her hat and sunglasses, strode confidently into a wide piazza. Thomas followed—what else was he going to do?—as she strolled nonchalantly toward the fountain and then turned to survey the basilica’s façade. Wide and imposing, it well suited the first church in Rome, in fact the first in the world, dedicated to Christ’s mother. On the pediment the Madonna and Child were flanked by—if he remembered his art history (and he certainly wasn’t going to ask Pietro)—a mosaic of ten female saints no one had ever been able to name. He craned up to see them as he trotted by the fountain and through the piazza. Pietro, he noticed, also looked up, with an air of familiarity and happiness, as though seeing old friends. Well, there you go. Maybe they weren’t saints. Maybe they were all female Noantri. And maybe that wasn’t the Infant Jesus and the Blessed Virgin at their center, it was Baby Damian and the Queen of the Night.
