by Diego Marani
‘Leave it to us. He’ll be made mincemeat of along with Benedict XVIII...’
‘No, he might not go up on to the podium and escape the explosion. And anyway, I want to kill him with my own hands. I want to see the terror in that one eye when he sees me pointing a pistol at his head.’
The fair-haired man sat bolt-upright in his chair. He looked out of the window at the passers-by, hoping they didn’t include an imminent customer.
‘Do the others know you’re here?’ he asked, raising his hand and putting it on the coffee-machine.
‘Only you and Marta. The fewer the better.’
‘You do realise that you might be putting a spanner in the entire works?’
‘I shan’t be interfering with your plans. You go ahead. But I need somewhere for tonight. Only tonight. By tomorrow it will all be over.’ The fair-haired man pulled a face.
‘Ivan, it’s very risky…’
‘Mirko, just think about it. It doesn’t affect you; I’m the only one in danger.’ The fair-haired man wiped the sweat off his forehead.
‘All right. Come round whenever you want,’ said Mirko wearily. He switched off his mobile and put it back in his pocket, placed his elbows on the paper and tried to continue reading. But he kept losing the thread and missing lines. So, Ivan was back! Now it could only end in a bloodbath. He leafed through the paper from beginning to end without taking in a word.
The man with the red moustache knocked on the door and went into the study. The Vicar was waiting for him, seated at his desk. He did not get up but waited for the visitor to cross the whole length of the room in silence.
‘I don’t like the news I’m getting, Kowalski!’ he said sharply, putting two little bottles of spray back into a drawer.
‘We’re working on it, Your Eminence. Salazar has vanished from the hospital, we don’t know how. The only people who can have helped him are the angels of death. That’s the proof that he was in cahoots with them all along,’ the man said defensively.
‘I couldn’t care less about any of that! And anyway, I don’t think it’s quite so clear-cut, Kowalski. Salazar is no fool. He is a hound of God. They’ve trained him well. Did you think you could cow him with a death threat? Within just a few days that fiend had managed to flush out a euthanasiast; you were on the job for months without managing anything at all. Now you have caused him to slip through our fingers with your persecution mania; and I don’t think that your men in Holland are doing much better!’ The Vicar got up suddenly and went towards the window; looking out at the changing pattern of the flowers in the garden below sometimes had a soothing effect.
‘Have you at least downloaded that scientist’s computer?’ he asked with unaccustomed courtesy.
‘The hard disks had already been removed by someone, probably by Pertiwi himself. We don’t know where they’re hidden. So we burned the lot, just to be on the safe side.’
‘So even that Darwinist’s archives are beyond our reach!’ remarked the Vicar with an effort at self-control, still contemplating the subtly coloured flower-bed.
‘We’re going through Salazar’s flat in Amsterdam. We think he may have copies of his friend’s research,’ proffered Kowalski nervously.
‘Yes, that friend who slipped through your fingers and who is still alive!’ shot back the Vicar, finally detaching his gaze from the flower-bed and turning it upon the man with the red moustache. He went back to his desk and sat down, drumming his fingers nervously on the table.
‘We set this whole thing up so as to lure Salazar to Rome, and you let him give us the slip. We should have intercepted him, dismantled his network of syncretists and got our hands on Pertiwi’s research. Now the whole thing’s gone up in smoke!’ continued the Vicar, continuing his effort at self-control.
‘Your Eminence, all is not yet lost. We are on Pertiwi’s trail; our agents are on his heels. And Salazar won’t make it out of Rome. He’s done for; he thinks he can outsmart us…’ Kowalski’s attempt at a damage limitation exercise seemed to leave the prelate unconvinced. He opened a drawer in the desk and took out Salazar’s china pipe-cum-holy-water sprinkler.
‘Kowalski, do you know what this is?’ he asked him, dangling the thing in front of the red moustache. Kowalski took the pipe and turned it over in his hands.
‘A holy-water sprinkler!’ he said, narrowing his eyes.
‘Exactly…’ replied the Vicar, stretching out a hand to regain possession of the object. He dropped it back into the drawer and said, almost to himself:
‘This is too much – he must be killed.’
‘And so he shall, Your Eminence!’
‘You may go now, Kowalski! And don’t come back until you’ve got results,’ the Vicar snapped without even bothering to raise his head; eye contact was not for him.
It was late afternoon when Pablo had arrived outside the storeroom. As he passed the door, he glanced inside. Some workmen were stowing things on to the lorry parked in the courtyard. The red-faced one nearest the doorway, his overall unbuttoned to the waist, was drinking water from a bottle; he glanced at Pablo absent-mindedly as he wiped his mouth. Inside, a radio was blaring. Glancing sunlight fell through the skylights, causing the men’s shadows to flicker over the end wall. The first-floor offices were empty, the blinds lowered. On the ground floor, next to the storeroom, was a changing-room with small cupboards and two benches up against the wall. Pablo walked round the building until he came to the courtyard. Wooden duck-boarding and cans of paraffin cluttered the narrow space, which was entered through a gate of stakes and rusty bedsprings, with a chain and padlock hanging from it; but it was open. Weeds were sprouting from the walls and pavement; the place was largely in shadow, but the pile of cans was in partial sunlight. Two workmen were standing on the truck and the others were passing crates up to them. Inside the storeroom, the red-faced man was now singing along to the music on the radio at the top of his voice; another man was begging him to stop. The narrow alleyway led to the back of other sheds. There were few shops in the neighbourhood, just a tobacconist on one corner of the avenue. A few desolate blocks of flats were perched at the crest of a rise, surrounded by tangled undergrowth. Dreary edge-of-town streets; rubbish-strewn ditches; illegal immigrants’ shacks among scrubby bushes. Pablo retraced his steps to the avenue and went to wait for the others under the bus shelter. It was four against four; they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. They pushed the car up against the gate at the back. The truck was now fully loaded, the ropes firmly secured; the radio had been switched off. The workmen were in the changing-room, their voices audible above the noise of the shower. Pablo put on the belt with his toolkit, opened the gate and jumped up on to the truck. This was the trickiest bit: he had only a moment to locate the correct crate. He found it under several others, two smaller crates of oil-lamps and some cans of fuel oil. The others were standing by with the replacement boxes of candles. They passed them up to him hurriedly, almost holding their breath while Mirko, in the driving seat, had his hand on the ignition key. If something went wrong now, that would be that. Pablo didn’t have time to secure one end of the rope; the workmen’s voices were getting louder, they were coming out of the changing-room. He slipped through the gate and ran off with the others; Mirko reversed slowly after them. At the end of the alleyway they all climbed in, closing the doors quietly behind them. They stopped on a track in the countryside around Torre Lupata and threw the candles into a canal.
That night Marta woke up suddenly, drenched with sweat. She had had a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember any details, only a vague sense of dread, and a series of rambling images. She checked the time: four in the morning. Her eyes were still burning with tiredness, but she could not get back to sleep. She tossed and turned; every fold in the sheet felt like a blade. Finally she got up and went to get a drink of water from the kitchen. Or milk, perhaps: she’d read somewhere that milk had a calming effect; she took a gulp straight out of the carton, but it was too cold. She went back i
nto the bedroom and curled up on a chair, pulling a blanket round her shoulders and glancing out at the street through the shutters: one winking traffic-light and four large rubbish bins. Everything was laid out ready on a chair: her clothes, the train tickets, her suitcase, a guide to Venice. She had to look like a tourist. By now the substitute candles would be in place, but she wouldn’t know how it had gone until the next day. All contacts put on hold until Thursday, by which time they would all be well out of Rome. What about Ivan? There was no way out for him. Mirko had told her that he’d come to Rome to kill Novak, but Ivan himself hadn’t said a word about it. Why not? Did he not trust her? Or, yet again, was it so that she wouldn’t get any fancy ideas? Trying to kill Novak was tantamount to suicide. Even if he did manage to fire a shot, he was doomed anyway. Marta sensed that it was late. She saw herself, on the run once again, in yet another house, another town. More safe houses, more shadowing, more attacks, cocaine capsules hidden amongst the omega-3, the dealers’ suspicious faces, weapons slipped into her handbag, the panic that seized her at the sight of a man in uniform. And that enduring sense of loneliness, that fear. The impossibility of even sitting down quietly on a park bench. How would it all end? Sooner or later, they’d get her. Suppose she fell ill? Worse still, she might end up in prison. But might she not also come through unscathed? If only she had managed to persuade Ivan to stay with her. They could have got out of there, they could have gone away together, perhaps even to America. It was still possible.
She remembered a distant September afternoon they’d spent together by the sea; the sand had looked positively black in the setting sun, the bathing attendants were folding up the deckchairs and the hawkers were wheeling carts piled high with unsold clothes up the concrete walkways all along the beach, their long shadows weaving over the white walls of the bathing-huts. An old fisherman up to his waist in water was scrabbling doggedly about in the sand in search of clams; he had the hard, rough skin of a man who has spent the whole summer in the sun. She and Ivan had sat down at the water’s edge.
‘Look! If you go far enough out, you’ll come to America…’ Ivan had said meaningfully, looking towards the setting sun.
‘Rubbish: if you go far enough out, you’ll come to Sardinia,’ she had replied, taking the wind out of his sails. They’d both burst out laughing, hugging one another and rolling round in the sand, two bodies forming one joyful whole. Those were the days when anything could make them laugh until they cried. Everything was still in place, everything was possible.
The sound of a bus driving off from the traffic-lights interrupted Marta’s train of thought. Outside, it was getting light; the room was slowly emerging from the darkness. Marta picked her clothes up from the chair and dressed herself; she was in no hurry. She put on her make-up carefully while the coffee gurgled on the stove. When she went out into the street, the first rays of sun were coming in through the blinds and falling on to the suitcase she had left in the room.
After a supper of lentil soup at a table with a group of beggars, he had slept in a refuge run by Caritas. At first light he had got up from the camp-bed and gone out. Empty buses were arriving in the station forecourt. The bells of the first Easter Day mass could just be heard above the clanging of the overhead railway. On the wall of the ticket-office in the bus station Salazar found a map of the bus routes between there and the sea. He studied the coastline, trying to work out where he might have been held captive. A thick pinewood, low-rise holiday homes, abut half an hour out of town. He located two possibilities: the stretch of coast between Fregene and Focene, or the coast around Castel Fusano. Going towards Ostia it was all too built up. The sudden sharp curves ruled out Castel Fusano; to get to Rome from there it would make more sense to take Via Cristoforo Colombo, which was completely straight. The planes that he had heard suggested Fregene or Focene, which were not far from Fiumicino Airport. Salazar rested his finger on the map and began working out how to board the next bus to Fregene. He had to act fast. He could try begging, but there was hardly anyone around, and it would be slow work. Robbing someone outright would be dangerous. So he went into a self-service restaurant in the station and grabbed a fork from the cutlery section, then continued on to the Chapel of Saint Christopher, to the left of the station. Here his goal was the alms-box beneath the row of candles, one of which he lit, pretending to pray while rummaging around in the lock with his fork; at last it broke, yielding up a pile of coins he slipped quickly into his track-suit pocket. He acknowledged the patron saint of travellers with a sign of the cross and left the chapel almost at a run.
He got out at the first stop in Fregene, in front of the police barracks, and went into a bar on the other side of the road. Now he had to find the baker’s shop. He ordered a coffee and drank it at the counter, taking his time. Choosing his moment, when the place was empty, he went up to the barman and asked:
‘Excuse me, can you tell me where the bakeries are here in Fregene? I’m a baker and I’m looking for temporary work.’
The barman was drying the glasses.
‘A bakery?’ he said, turning towards the cashier for further details. It was she who answered for him:
‘There’s Albanesi’s here on the square, or else De Piscopo, near the church. Otherwise you’ll have to go to Fiumicino.’
‘Which way is the church?’
‘Here in the pinewood. What’s the name of the street?’ she asked, turning to her colleague for assistance. But Salazar had already left the bar.
Some trails of mist still lingered in the pinewood. He found the church by following the people who were going to mass, then wandered the nearby streets until he caught the smell of freshly-baked bread. De Piscopo’s bakery was a low building with metal door and window frames and an ugly garish green shop sign. Salazar walked past it and took a road between the trees which gradually narrowed; parts of the asphalt were covered in sand. The villas were thinning out, their entrance gates becoming higher. It was not long before he recognised the view he had seen from the window of the basement; the house in which he had been held stood in a curve of the road. Although the surrounding villas were luxurious in the extreme, this one had no garden and the area around it was choked with weeds; the blinds were down, the windowsills were covered with moss and the eaves had tufts of grass growing in them. A rusty flagpole hung above the peeling door. Perhaps it had once been a Forestry Commission Station, which had been turned into a holiday home and then abandoned. Salazar walked round the building and found a back window he thought he could force open. He found a piece of wood in the undergrowth and managed to raise the blind, then broke the window, turned the handle and climbed in. Everything inside seemed to be in order: a house shut up for the holidays, with mattresses rolled up on their springs and wardrobes open to let in the air. He found the living room with the long table and the dusty pottery; he also found the basement where he had been held. He inspected each room carefully, but the members of the Free Death Brigade had left no sign of their earlier presence. He paid a cursory visit to the kitchen, and was about to leave when he noticed a lump of something white stuck to the stove; at first he thought it was mould, but when he touched it it felt like plastic, or hardened glue. As he walked around, he noticed that the floor was sticky, and the sink was encrusted with that same resin-like material. He opened the cupboards, inspected plates and glasses, pulled out all the saucepans; the larger ones were still damp, their interiors coated with something white. He looked in the dustbin and found a piece of candle. So, someone had been melting wax. He searched the place for other clues. Bathroom, bedrooms and living room revealed nothing. He went out to the back of the house and poked around in the undergrowth, where he found a series of large white plastic tubes which had been cut lengthways; they were three inches wide and about a metre and a half in length. Inside, his fingers came upon lumps of wax similar to those he had found in the kitchen. Now he was beginning to see the light and, as he did so, he felt a sudden shudder of horror creep down his spine
. Clearly, the members of the Free Death Brigade had been making candles, and big ones at that. Not to light in front of altars, but more probably to serve as explosive devices. They were to replace the ones on the papal podium in Saint Peter’s Square and send everything sky-high! Now Salazar saw why the man who had questioned him had been so interested in the police patrols on the podium! He clenched his fists and cursed himself. Yet in fact he had nothing to reproach himself for. It was only by answering those questions that he had had any chance of getting out of their clutches. Anyway, there might still be time. He looked down at himself, covered in scratches from the brambles, dressed like a beggar, his pockets weighed down with small change. It was not an encouraging sight.
The De Piscopo bread van was parked outside the bakery with the engine running and the door open. Between blaring adverts, the radio was giving out the traffic news. The driver had gone into the shop to take the orders and was chatting with the baker; two shop boys were lazily piling the bread into the baskets, cackling as they did so and occasionally gesturing towards the window. They loaded up a couple of trays of pastries and went into the back of the shop. Salazar observed the scene from behind a rubbish-bin. He walked around the bread van, jumped into the driving-seat and drove off, skidding over the gravel. The driver came out of the shop, put his hands on his hips, shook his head with a smile and went back into the shop, thinking the shop boys were playing a joke on him.
Salazar turned into the road which led to the Aurelia, the curves reminding him of the route he had been taken on, blindfold, by the members of the Free Death Brigade. He had to act fast; the ceremony would be starting in an hour. It was a glorious day; the air was crystal-clear, fields and houses crisply outlined, barely blurred by the thinning mist on the windscreen. The rows of cluster pines were giving off a fresh scent of resin, casting sharp shadows on the tender green of the fields. The roads around the city were strangely empty, but by the time he got to Via Cipro the pilgrims’ buses were already double-parked, and columns of visitors snaked like gigantic caterpillars from one pavement to the other. Salazar abandoned De Piscopo’s van and carried on on foot. People were pouring into the square; but before going to the colonnade, they had to be searched. Policemen were going through bags and running metal detectors over their owners. A large stand had been put up on the side overlooking Via della Conciliazione, with numbered paying places, and special areas for official visitors. The crowd was buzzing with impatience; children were climbing on to their parents’ shoulders and craning their necks in the direction of the basilica. Many people had brought along plastic stools and were standing on them to get a better view. Although it was barely ten o’clock, the sun was already hot. Water sellers with red caps were weaving their way along the screened-off corridors, while policemen directed people towards the less crowded parts of the square. Salazar had decided to make a discreet approach to a Swiss Guard and give the alarm, so as to avoid creating sudden panic. The Swiss Guards were the only ones he trusted. But the nearest ones were just in front of the papal podium. He was trying to worm his way through the throng to reach them when he heard someone calling him.
