The Nuncio fed him while the engines finished firing up. Not nutrients, chelated vitamins or worse still, luke-warm plates of Tsampa and buttered tea, but a vast platter of beef, carved from the side of a huge joint that already sat steaming on a silver salver.
Maybe the Church really had streamlined itself into austerity but, if so, no one appeared to have told the Nuncio. Blood-dark Barolo came from a tall wine jug, hammered from silver and embossed with vine leaves that curled from its elegant base up through its round belly to a narrow fluted top which was closed by a single silver leaf that hinged at the stalk.
‘The Two Sicilies, nineteenth-century, pre-Risorgimento,’ the Nuncio told Axl, dropping crumbs from his mouth to his expansive lap. After the beef they ate syllabub and washed down slivers of basalt-like parmesan with a wine so sweet and thick it stuck to Axl’s teeth.
Outside they were preparing for the Boeing to take off, but that was still ten minutes away. Time enough, the Nuncio said, to eat parmesan properly. And as Axl sipped the wine while sucking the slivers of hard cheese to soften them, he could feel spiders crawling over his leg. At least he assumed the medicare box at his feet had got around to converting ants into spiders. The ants had gone in first, tiny metallic pincers stripping away dead flesh from the edge of the gash, then they’d excreted some kind of mite so small as to be invisible and so dedicated all it could do was repair cell walls and die. The spiders did the macro work, like stitching or spinning strips of new skin.
It was battlefield stuff, crude but reusable. Not what Axl would have expected the Nuncio to carry and undoubtedly not what he kept for his own use, assuming he paid as much attention to the Church’s dislike of nanetics as he did to its exhortations to poverty.
Food, wine and the smallest of talk about who was doing what at the Vatican filled the time, the gossip as unreal to Axl as any newsfeed half seen on a feed across a crowded bar. But the Nuncio said nothing about Joan, soulcatchers or any coming conclave. Nothing about the Cardinal, either. And the only thing the Nuncio didn’t offer Axl was new clothes or a shower.
Axl had a nasty feeling that lack of soundtrack and no shower fed back to a cryptic comment of the Nuncio’s when Axl first clambered on board. The Nuncio’s arm had gone round his shoulder, avuncular maybe, but still steering him away from the open doorway.
‘This is dead space,’ the Nuncio announced waving one arm at the ornate interior of his cruiser. ‘Looped out/PoV-free.’ Then he stopped, looked carefully at Axl.
‘You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
Axl didn’t, so he said he didn’t and the Nuncio nodded, black eyes glittering in a face round and black as a total eclipse.
‘Good.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
Hollow Rooms
Villa Carlotta looked as it had the last time Axl had seen it. Purple bougainvillea still smothered the walls of the gatehouse, softening the hard lines of the reinforced titanium gate now shutting behind him. Squat palms like over-large pineapples edged the gravelled drive, fat trunks curved under the weight of waxed leaves as sharp as blades and as big as surfboards. And lush curling ferns buried the crested, baroque gates to the courtyard beneath an explosion of nature’s pubic hair.
Arpeggios ran down his spine. The notes fuzzy, like a harpsichord sampled note for note and then damped. Perhaps that was because he couldn’t see the Villa properly. Maybe, if he hadn’t been squinting through the smoked glass windows of a vast Nexus stretch, the notes would have been clear as crystal.
Right back in Dey Effé, after the Nexus had asked him where he wanted to be taken, Axl told the stretch to wind down the window and it had suggested he use manual. So he’d hit the window’s button himself and the window had suggested he ask the car. They’d been going round in the same circle ever since, with increasing bad temper.
So instead of watching open countryside, Axl had been forced to spend the trip looking at himself, since the inside of every car window was mirrored. And everywhere Axl had looked he’d seen his own haggard reflection staring back.
‘We’re here,’ announced the Nexus, opening the door nearest Axl.
‘Really?’ Axl said, harpsichord and heartbeat syncopating.
It’s my own choice, Axl told himself. No one could take that away from him. Everything else maybe, including his life, but not that. He slammed the car door, without giving the Nexus time to shut itself. Guaranteed to irritate the car, but Axl didn’t care. Though no doubt it would whine to the Nuncio when it got back.
Grit crunching under his feet, Axl walked slowly across the huge courtyard towards the main doorway of the Villa Carlotta, watched silently by four guards. If they planned to arrest him now would be a good time.
No one moved.
‘Fuck it.’ The words weren’t loud or directed at anyone except himself but that didn’t mean Axl didn’t mean them. He’d screwed up big time. God alone knew how Rinpoche was doing, or Kate, or Mai. And what upset Axl was the certainty at the base of his gut that he’d never get the chance to find out.
Straightening his back and pushing his chin in the air the way Kate did, Axl stamped over to door.
‘Axl Borja,’ he announced firmly. ‘To see the Cardinal.’
‘Is he expecting you?’
Axl looked at the door and shrugged. ‘Who knows what His Excellency expects. I wouldn’t presume. . .’Actually, he would and had, frequently. Now just didn’t seem the time to mention it. Axl stepped through into the waiting hall.
It was empty. So was the long corridor.
The last time Axl had stood there, the corridor alone had been filled with a thousand petitioners, so full that bored ushers stood on plinths watching out for those who’d fainted in the crush. Now there was nobody at all in the echoing corridor but Axl, and the unexpected emptiness was at least as overpowering as the crowd had been.
It must have been the Villa’s AI that opened the door at the end of the corridor for Axl because no human was there to do it, the doorkeeper’s gilded stool was as empty as the plinths that once housed the ushers. Right then, Axl couldn’t tell what was backing track and what was his own heartbeat. He had a feeling that was intentional.
Axl stepped in through the door and found himself again in the Cardinal’s vast ante-room. Silence echoed off silk-covered walls and the only person reflected in the vast glass slabs of neo Venetian mirrors was him. Even the silver carts that dispensed hot chocolate were deserted and cold.
‘Borja.’ On the other side of the room, the Cardinal’s major-domo stood proudly by the door to His Excellency’s tiny octagonal study, but the man’s face was grim and his smile troubled. Something was so wrong Axl couldn’t even begin to imagine.
‘Well,’ growled a voice from behind the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Axl Borja, Your Excellency.’
‘Borja?’ The voice was tired, gravel and glass. Older than Axl remembered and quietly angry. Yet still unmistakable enough to make Axl shiver.
‘Borja, Your Excellency.’
‘Well, send him in…’
And Axl walked past the empty benches and across the impasto di gesso floor, his steps echoing in the silence. Heartbeat filling his emptiness.
‘Come to gloat?’ The Cardinal pulled his top lip back into a sneer, revealing canines that were yellow with age. Yellow and cracked like old ivory. There was an edge to his voice, a cold disappointment that bordered on fury.
His in-tray was bare of paper and the only sign that he’d been working was a small screen angled up from the desk. Axl wanted to ask what disaster had happened but didn’t know how. No matter what he achieved, how old he got he never had the right words when stood in front of this man.