Blood of the Lamb

by Sam Cabot

  “The historian,” Luigi said. “I want to go back and talk to him.”

  Aventino squinted through the smoke from his cigarette. “The Englishman? Spencer George? We grilled him pretty thoroughly. You just caught the end.”

  “So you’re satisfied he has nothing to do with this?”

  “I’m never satisfied. We’ve got people watching him. I just don’t have anything new to ask him yet.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  Orsini grinned. “A hunch?”

  Luigi felt his face grow hot. “Not really, I—”

  The ispettore shrugged. “Good cops play their hunches. Let us know what you find out.”

  “Yes, sir!” Luigi, thrilled to be just another cop on a case, playing a hunch, entrusted with the interrogation of a suspect under surveillance, loped to his car. Five minutes later he was back in Piazza della Scala, parking opposite Spencer George’s door. He banged the bronze lion knocker and saw the curtain move aside in the upstairs window. For a moment he wondered what he’d do if the historian didn’t let him in. He had no authority outside the Holy See, and even if he’d had, a citizen was under no obligation to speak to anyone in law enforcement unless he was under arrest. Or then, either, come to think of it: that’s what lawyers were for.

  But the door opened and Spencer George stood there, his expression as haughtily bored as it had been when he’d sat on the church pew a few hours ago. Did his face ever change, Luigi wondered, or was this sneer permanent? He was about to introduce himself when the historian spoke.

  “Well. The gentleman from the Gendarmerie. Presumably you’re here to ask yet more tiresome questions. I’d hope your position would create in you greater reserves of humility and courtesy than that of your secular peers, but I doubt it does. At least let’s be comfortable. Please, come in.”

  66

  Anna’s blood started to boil.

  Jorge had left the theater. She could tell by sniffing the air when she dropped in the open window: his scent was faded, dissipating in the musty room. She stared around her, picking out, in the dark, all the details Mortal eyes would have needed assistance to see. What was it about this place, Il Pasquino? Why had Jorge chosen to hide here? Dust, mold, and spiderwebs; torn curtains and bubbling plaster. Another object once valuable, now discarded, discounted, by myopic Mortals, who found no worth in what they couldn’t use right that instant. This had been a beautiful place once, she could tell, before it was chopped up, then closed and allowed to rot. Sleek, art deco lines, comfortable, wooden-armed seats, even a retractable roof. A place to relax and be transported to someone else’s fantasy, where you’d be safe for an hour or two.

  Maybe, after she and her followers were successful and Noantri rule was established over a peaceful—a pacified—world, she’d reopen this theater. She’d name it after Jorge, she thought, smiling. L’Ocampo. He’d like that.

  Too bad he wouldn’t be around to see it.

  67

  “Ignatius Loyola revered Saint Francis. Ignatius was the son of a noble family whose crest was two gray wolves, rampant, and a cauldron. And of course the wolf is associated with Francis, also.” Thomas spoke rapidly, and had fallen back into university lecturer mode, Livia noted, as he led the way up the stone staircase to the left of the altar. To reach these stairs they’d had to cut through the sacristy. Livia had regretted Thomas’s lack of ecclesiastical dress at that point, as she had when they left the confessional. She wasn’t sure the priests and monks at San Francesco a Ripa would be pleased to see some guy in a sweatshirt climbing out of the box; but speaking through the screen, Thomas had brushed off her worry. “It’s not an issue. There’s no law about what I wear when. Anyway, my passport photo shows the full regalia. If anyone asks I’ll tell them I’m on vacation, we were out sightseeing, and you were overcome with an urge to confess as soon as we walked in here. Believe me, they’ll be thrilled.” He paused. “I’ll be lying, but they’ll be thrilled.”

  “Lying? What about all the things I just told you?”

  “We had to keep talking. You had to say something.”

  “I could have said lots of other things.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I don’t . . . I didn’t . . . even if you were—”

  “Oh, never mind. Father. We have work to do. Let’s go.”

  As it happened, they weren’t challenged leaving the confessional, or in the sacristy, or on their way up the stone stairway. A number of priests and monks could be seen in the aisles of the church itself, trying to restore tranquillity after the recent excitement. No one noticed Thomas and Livia making their calm way toward the altar. Of course, the two of them did—calmly—stick to as many shadows as they could find.

  “Before he founded the Jesuit order—my order—Ignatius made a number of pilgrimages to sites associated with Francis. Including here.” Thomas sounded odd to Livia. A peculiar note had found its way into his voice in the confessional, and she could still hear it now. And why was he going on about Ignatius Loyola and Francis? Was he offering what he had to offer—knowledge—as some sort of apology for accusing her of tendering meaningless words just so there would be something for the Carabinieri to hear? Although, to be honest, the raw truth of what she’d said had surprised her, too. Or was Thomas trying to convince her his deciphering of the poem had been correct? Why work so hard? She believed him, or at least, believed him enough to follow where that deciphering led and see if he was right. Still, he kept talking. “This was a Benedictine monastery church when Francis came here, on his visits to Rome to petition the Pope—Innocent the Third—to authorize his new order. He lodged in a tiny cell up these stairs. Nearly three centuries later Ignatius Loyola made a pilgrimage here, asking and receiving permission to sleep in the same room.”

  He stopped as they reached a small landing at the top. Before them stood a wrought-iron gate, its lines and curlicues allowing a clear view, but no access, to the room beyond. Thomas stepped aside, motioning to the lock. He folded his hands and waited.

  He’d certainly gotten used to this process fast, Livia thought, taking out her pick and shim. She didn’t call him on it, though, saying instead, “How do you know this is where we’re supposed to be? If Ignatius made all those pilgrimages to all those sites?”

  “I made this particular one myself, my first time in Rome.”

  That wasn’t actually enlightening, but Livia said nothing, concentrating on the lock. It was at least a century old, which meant her tools were almost too delicate for it, but after thirty seconds of careful work—the faint resistance of tumblers against her fingertips was her guide—she heard it click open. Swinging the gate aside, she stepped into the room. She almost brushed against Thomas on the narrow landing, but he drew back, pressing himself into the stone wall.

  “I thought we were past that,” she said.

  “Past what?”

  “You being afraid to touch me.”

  “I . . . I’m not . . .”

  The oddness of his voice made her turn to face him. She saw his flushed cheeks, his wide pupils, and finally she understood.

  “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “It’s natural, in a way you don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about? What is?” he croaked.

  She stepped back, put more space between them. “Your desire.”

  “My what?”

  “Father. You’re a priest, but you’re a man. I’m Noantri and I’m a woman. What you’re feeling right now—” She stopped, looking for the right words. “Our bodies—Noantri bodies—exert a pull on the Unchanged. When I saw Jonah just now, everything I felt for him . . . You couldn’t help but sense it, and it made you—” The dismay on his face was so total Livia understood three things: she was right; as funny as he looked, she mustn’t laugh; and they’d better get back to work before he ran away again.

  68

&n
bsp; In stunned disbelief, Thomas watched Livia step into Saint Francis’s cell, into the room where that most pious and self-denying of saints had prayed and slept. The horror he felt was not because such an unnatural creature as she was defiling these hallowed stones. Exactly the opposite: it was partly because he realized he’d led her here with no hesitation, no disquiet whatsoever. Worse: with a sense of pride and pleasure. Showing off his cleverness, his erudition. To a Noantri? When had he become so cavalier about who she was, what she was?

  And the other cause of his horror was the knowledge that she was right.

  The rapid heartbeat, the tingling. The inability to stop talking, to be too near her, to look at her. How many ways, he wondered, could he deceive himself?

  He’d felt desire before, of course he had. If ordination meant the end of human frailty there would be no need for vows. He’d felt it, not acted upon it, confessed, and been absolved. Was what was happening now so different?

  Yes.

  It was stronger, richer, deeper. More immediate, more propulsive. Though he stood two yards from her, his fingertips could feel the silk of her skin, his palms the wildness her hair would offer if, as his hands longed to do, they reached to unfasten her braid. Her scent, that night-blooming jungle, permeated his senses, and every movement she made, every swing of hip or sweep of arm, arrested his gaze. He longed for her. He’d hidden this truth from himself behind a meandering excursus about Saint Ignatius Loyola; but now she’d said it, and he couldn’t deny it. And to whom could he confess it? What would he even say? That he, who had vowed to yield to no such wordly hunger, now ached for the touch of a creature not even of this world, a being with no soul and no place in the afterlife?

  And how could he confess it, until he really, truly, felt it was wrong?

  Ignatius Loyola, who had stood in this very room, had founded an order based on intellectual rigor and natural law. Thomas had joined that order with joy. His life thus far had been spent fearlessly pursuing the truth, confident that the light of reason would chase away the shadows of superstition and ignorance. His Church had agreed, maintaining that belief in the supernatural was error and, even when, in former times of ignorance, indulged in by the Church itself, had ever been so. God’s mystical nature and his miracles were one thing, not to be rationally understood; but demons, succubae, and other such creatures were mere metaphors, images useful to reveal the evil in all of us.

  But here he was, Father Thomas Kelly, standing in Saint Francis’s cell with one of those creatures, yearning for her touch.

  Her claim, of course, was that her people were not supernatural, just humans with a virus in the blood. Maybe so, but that didn’t change another fundamental point. The Church had always known about the Noantri. For centuries it had hunted them. That path, brutal as it was, made sense in the days of irrational belief. Then—still in those days—Martin the Fifth suddenly signed a document that began six hundred years of simultaneously trafficking with the Noantri, and denying their existence. Six hundred years during which the Church had maintained a position it knew to be false.

  What else, then, was false?

  The efficacy of confession?

  The sanctity of the Host?

  The need for priestly celibacy?

  An old familiar voice, one he’d thought he’d never hear again, came whispering back to him now.

  Thomas—really?

  69

  Her back to Thomas, Livia stood facing the polished wood and painted saints of the tall altarpiece in Saint Francis’s otherwise stark cell. She bit her lip to keep from speaking, planted her feet so she’d stay still, so she wouldn’t spin around and demand that Thomas tell her why they were here and how to find the next poem. The priest was teetering on a narrow ledge, she sensed. And so was she.

  She’d hidden it from herself behind the immediacy of effort: slipping from the confessional, working their way through the shadows to the sacristy, picking the lock. Listening to Thomas’s discourse on saints and holy orders. Worrying about the oddness she sensed in him. Now, in the silence of the stone cell, she could no longer deny it.

  Seeing Jonah, his grin and his broad shoulders, smelling his sweat, hearing his laugh, had thrown her into a cyclone of confusion.

  She’d thought, for so long, that all that was behind her. Jonah had left her long ago. On a gray autumn afternoon, the entire world outside the windows dispirited, he’d gazed into her eyes across a gulf of disappointment, saying sadly that he could see she wouldn’t change. That she’d always be content to follow the rules, to live in the past, to hide her Blessings and mimic the mediocrity of the Unchanged around her. The necessity of that, he said, had ended long ago, and he’d tried every way he could think of to show her he was right; but he realized now that she’d never understand. She was afraid, or she was comfortable, or she was uninterested in a longer, broader view of the world; whatever the chains that were holding her back, he couldn’t let them bind him, too. The future was calling him forward, he said, and he kissed her and turned away.

  She’d thought then that she’d understood who and what he was. She’d mourned their love, staggered under a weight of loss and guilt, but she’d come back to Italy, to Rome, and started life anew. Through the years since, she hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t heard from him, or even about him. She’d lived each day still believing she was right and he was wrong. Believing that over the years, as he deepened in understanding of the life he now had, the life of her people, he’d come to realize that.

  It would be too late for them then, was too late for them from the moment he strode out the door without looking back, leaving her in the chill of a dusk that came too early. Her victory would be hollow, so personally meaningless that she never thought of it as a victory at all. But she did feel comfort imagining Jonah settling into a rich, fruitful Noantri life. Picturing him somewhere back at his work, studying, exploring, endlessly immersed in beauty: it was their love of art that had brought them together, had given rise to their love of each other. She’d hoped he’d think of her now and then, and that the memory would be a warm one.

  But now, suddenly, frighteningly, she wondered.

  It was the confessional that had opened the floodgate of her questions, not what she’d said to Thomas as much as the small dark booth itself. Hiding behind a heavy door, concealing herself in fear—this was the Noantri life. This was the life the Concordat had brought about. Yes, and Community; yes, and assimilation, which brought with it the gift of normal days, of street corner cafés and neighbors who knew her, students to teach and a house to maintain. And friendship, people she loved among both Noantri and Unchanged.

  But would all this not still be possible if the Noantri Unveiled?

  Maybe Jonah was right. Maybe science was ready to lead the way to Unchanged acceptance of her people, once they were understood to be no threat; and maybe the fear she and every Noantri now felt, not of discovery by the Unchanged as in the days Before, but of the wrath of the Conclave, could be banished forever.

  Facing the altarpiece, Livia could not shake off this new idea: that she could find Jonah and tell him she understood now and was ready to join him. That she could disobey the Conclave. Jonah—she knew this from the look she’d just seen in his eyes—would embrace her. He would publish the contents of the Concordat. The Noantri would Unveil, and a new day would begin.

  The outlines of that new day, just starting to emerge from the swirl of sensations she was feeling, were shattered by a loud pop.

  Before her, the saints on the tall painted panels began to move. She stepped back in instinctive alarm as, with piercing creaks, the panels slowly rotated, vanishing into the altarpiece. The low light in the cell bounced off a moving forest of gold, silver, and glass, which slowed and came to a stop facing her: reliquaries, dozens of them, hidden behind what she hadn’t even known were doors.

  70

  “What . . .
,” Livia sputtered. “How did you . . . ?”

  “I told you,” Thomas said. “I’ve made this pilgrimage before.” He stepped back to the middle of the room, leaving open the small door on the altarpiece where the switch was hidden.

  “‘He lays the sweet machine upon the stone.’ There.” Thomas pointed to a recess in the wall, where an unimposing rock was locked away behind a grate, to be viewed and venerated like the precious object it was. “Francis’s pillow. Ignatius used it, too. The sweet machine, la dorce machina, that would be his body. But there’s another machine here, too. This one. That’s what it’s called, Il Macchina. Thomas of Spoleto built it in 1704 to house relics Lorenzo di Medici donated to this church.”

  “But—it still works?”

  “It’s spring-loaded. As long as the friars replace the springs every few decades, it’s fine. I think they need to oil the hinges, though. It shouldn’t creak like that.”

  “And Lorenzo di Medici? He was a fan of Saint Francis? That’s a stretch.”

  “Desperation to get into heaven makes strange bedfellows.”

  “Desperation of any kind does that, I suppose. Like you and me.”

  He looked at her. He had to be able, he’d decided, to look at her, if they were to continue. And they had to continue. Lorenzo may have lied to Thomas, the Church may have lied to everyone, but Lorenzo was still a man and even if it were remotely possible that the Noantri were actually people, just a different kind of people, still, becoming one was the sort of choice a man should be able to make for himself. Not have made for him, by someone who considered him an enemy.

  “Yes.” Steadily, he returned her gaze. “Like you and me.” He kept his eyes on hers, found he could, in fact, look at her, and was relieved (though he already regretted the choice of the word “bedfellows”). It might not be wise, though, to stand too near her. He took a step forward, toward the newly revealed shelves of caskets, boxes, stands, and tiny treasure chests in which rested particles of bone and hair that had once been living, breathing saints.