The Lucifer Gospel fr-2

by Paul Christopher

  “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 sе grim at du gшr blinde bшrn 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 Engl
ish, 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, Premiиres Annйes de Franзaise. 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 а 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 out 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?”

  “I don’t think he’s on the train to do any damage, and I’m pretty sure he’s alone. I think they put him into the station on the off chance we’d show up, and we did. He’s tailing us.”

  “With a cell phone.”

  “No doubt.”

  “We’re screwed.”

  “No doubt.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Get off the train before they can bring in reinforcements.”

  “Where?”

  “Where the hell are we going again?”

  “Lyon.”

  “Main line or local?”

  “It’s not a bullet train, it’s one of the old ones, so it’s probably local.” She shrugged. “I’m not really sure. Does it make a difference?”

  “Some. That’s why I didn’t want to go straight into Switzerland. They’re not EU, they’re neutral, so they still check your passports. Sometimes they spot-check them on the fast trains too, but if we’re on a local there’s less chance.”

  “We’re going to need passports sometime.”

  “Let’s both be Scarlett O’Hara and think about that tomorrow,” Hilts suggested. “For now we have to ditch our Libyan friend Badir.”

  23

  Finn and Hilts sat in the bar car of the humming train as it threaded itself through the alpine darkness. Finn was drinking black coffee as Hilts nursed a bottle of grape Fanta. Marco the bar-tender was fast asleep on his stool behind the U-shaped counter, arms crossed, head back and snoring. Badir, smoking endlessly and sipping from a foam cup of cold tea with lemon, was seated at the other end of the car, pretending to read an old copy of Jours de France. It was almost two in the morning and they were the only people in the bar car except for an old woman fast asleep over her knitting, a plastic aperitif glass vibrating gently on the round table in front of her.

  “Where are we?” Hilts asked, taking a sip of Fanta and puckering at the unbelievable sweetness of the concoction. Finn had taken a sip just for fun. It tasted like liquid bubble gum.

  “According to the porter putting down our bunks, we’re right on the border,” Finn answered quietly. “A place called Bardonecchia. We’ll be going into the Frejus Tunnel in about three minutes. The tunnel is the border. We come out in France. A ski town named Modane.”

  “Do we stop?”

  “Five minutes to switch crews.”

  “That’s when we dump him, then.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll see.”

  A moment later the train slid into the tunnel and the lights flickered and died. In the darkness Hilts stood up, grabbed Finn’s hand and headed back toward their sleeping car. Almost immediately they heard the sound of Badir as he clambered to his feet. Hilts pulled open the door leading into the next car and there was a sudden explosion of sound from the tracks below. Instead of moving into the adjoining car, Hilts pushed Finn into the small bathroom cubicle and eased the door shut behind them. Finn’s nostrils suddenly filled with the smell of antiseptic and li
quid soap. She couldn’t see a thing. They heard the heavy door being pulled open a second time as Badir headed into the next sleeping car and then there was silence.

  “Come on,” Hilts whispered. He led Finn out of the bathroom cubicle and they stepped back into the bar car. Hilts headed back the way they’d come with Finn trailing behind. It was still almost pitch dark but there was a warning flicker from the lights overhead. “Hurry!”

  They made their way into the sleeping car ahead of the bar. A passage curved to the left. Moving around the corner Finn saw that the carriage was the same as their own: passageway to the right with a line of windows, a dozen or so compartments on the left, each compartment with a varying number of bunks, from the private two-bunk room like theirs to the Cabine 8, where the narrow beds were crammed in four to each side with no more than a foot between your nose and the bottom of the bed above. They moved along the passage as the blue night-lights overhead began to flicker on again. The doors to the compartments were all closed. At the very far end of the carriage they found a Cabine 8 with the door open, which meant presumably that it was unoccupied.

  “In here!” whispered the photographer.

  Finn stepped into the compartment and pulled back the curtain over the lower bunk on the right. Before she could slip into it, the curtains on the bunk above slid open and a pajamaed hand clutching a very realistic-looking rabbit appeared and then spoke in English, with a dreadfully theatrical French accent.

  “Bonjour, mon ami, my name is Henri. Would you like to come fishing with me?” Henri then rolled his eyes and gave a fiendishly evil laugh, like a furry Hannibal Lecter.

  “What the hell is that?” said Hilts from behind her.

  A face appeared behind the rabbit-a young boy with dark tousled hair, big intelligent eyes, and his other thumb stuck securely in his mouth. He took the thumb out of his mouth and poked it hard into the pale fur of the rabbit’s chest. There was a brief pause and then the French accent again: “Bonjour, mon ami, my name is Henri. Would you like to come fishing with me?”