‘Don’t be mad at me. It was Zazo’s idea.’
Zazo jumped up and down like a little kid, giddy at his success, his leather holster slapping against his thigh. Since she was a toddler he’d delighted in scaring his sister and making her howl. Always scheming, always a prankster, always the motormouth, his boyhood nickname, Zazo – ‘Be quiet, shut up’ – had stuck fast.
‘Thank you, Zazo,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I needed that tonight.’
‘It didn’t go well?’ Marco asked.
‘Disaster,’ Elisabetta muttered. ‘A complete disaster.’
‘You can tell me about it over dinner,’ Marco said.
‘You’re off work?’
‘He is,’ Zazo said. ‘I’m pulling overtime. I don’t have a girlfriend to feed me.’
‘I’d pity her if you did,’ Elisabetta said.
Outside, they braced themselves against the cutting wind. Marco buttoned his civilian greatcoat, concealing his starched blue shirt and white pistol belt. When he was off duty he didn’t want to look like a cop, especially on a university campus. Zazo didn’t care. Their sister Micaela liked to say that he loved being in the Polizia so much that he probably wore his uniform to bed.
Outside, everything moved and flapped in the wind except the immense bronze statue of Minerva, virgin goddess of wisdom, who loomed over her moonlit reflecting pool.
Zazo’s squad car was pulled up to the steps. ‘I can give you a ride.’ He got behind the wheel.
‘We’ll walk,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I want the air.’
‘Suit yourself,’ her brother said. ‘See you at Papa’s on Sunday?’
‘After church,’ she said.
‘Say hello to God for me,’ Zazo said lightly. ‘I’ll be in bed. Ciao.’
Elisabetta double-looped her scarf and headed arm in arm with Marco toward her apartment on the Via Lucca. Ordinarily at nine o’clock the university area would be bustling but the precipitously falling thermometer seemed to catch people unawares and pedestrian traffic was sparse.
Elisabetta’s flat was only ten minutes away, a modest walk-up shared with an orthopedic resident who was often on duty. Marco lived with his parents. As did Zazo, who occupied his childhood room like an oversized kid. Neither of them earned enough to rent their own place, though there was always talk of sharing an apartment after their next round of promotions. Ever since Elisabetta and Marco began seeing each other, if they wanted to hang out it had to be at her place.
‘I’m sorry you had a bad day,’ he said.
‘You don’t know how bad.’
‘Whatever it is, you’ll be fine.’
She snorted at that.
‘You couldn’t change the decision?’
‘No.’
‘Want me to shoot the old goat?’
Elisabetta laughed. ‘Maybe if you just wounded him slightly.’
The traffic signal wasn’t with them but they sprinted across the broad Viale Regina Elena anyway. ‘Where’s Cristina tonight?’ Marco asked when they got to the other side.
‘At the hospital. She’s on a twenty-four-hour shift.’
‘Good. Do you want me to stay over?’
She squeezed his hand. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Do we need to buy anything?’
‘There’s enough to whip something together,’ she said. ‘Let’s just go home.’
Ahead was the student district off the Via Ippocrate. On a warm night it would have been thronging with young people smoking at cafés and browsing the small shops but tonight it was nearly deserted.
There was a short stretch of road that sometimes gave Elisabetta pause when she walked alone late at night, a poorly lit zone flanked by a graffiti-daubed concrete wall on one side and angled parking on the other. But with Marco she was fearless. Nothing bad could happen to her while he was at her side.
There was a telephone booth ahead. A tall man was standing inside. The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly with each drag.
Elisabetta heard footsteps coming fast from behind, then an odd, deep groan from Marco. She felt his hand slip from hers.
The tall man in the phone booth was approaching fast.
All of a sudden a heavy arm enveloped Elisabetta’s upper chest from behind and when she tried to turn it slid around her neck and fixed her in place. The telephone-booth man was almost upon her. He had a knife in his hand.
A shot rang out, so loud that it interrupted the dreamlike quality of the attack.
The arm let go and Elisabetta pivoted to see Marco on the sidewalk struggling to lift his service pistol for another shot. The man who had grabbed her twisted toward Marco. She could see blood oozing from the man’s shoulder onto the back of his camel-hair coat.
Wordlessly, the telephone-booth man rushed past, ignoring Elisabetta for the immediate threat. He and the wounded man fell upon Marco, their arms pounding down like pistons.
She screamed ‘No!’ and went for one of the flailing arms, trying to stop the killing, but the telephone-booth man threw her off, using his knife hand. She felt the blade slash her palm.
They resumed their butchery and this time Elisabetta grabbed blindly at the tall man’s legs, trying to pull him away from Marco’s body. Something gave, but it wasn’t him – it was his trousers, which started to slide down his waist.
He rose and swatted Elisabetta violently across the face with a forearm.
She fell to the sidewalk, aware of blood – Marco’s blood – spreading towards her. She saw the man whom Marco had shot squatting on his haunches, breathing hard under his stained coat.
There were shouts in the distance. Someone called out from a high-rise balcony half a block away.
The telephone-booth man approached and knelt deliberately beside Elisabetta. His stony face was blank. He raised his knife hand over his head.
There was another shout, closer by, someone yelling, ‘Hey!’
The man swung round toward the call.
In the seconds before he turned back to Elisabetta and crashed his fist against her chest, just before she lost consciousness, she noticed a strange, disturbing detail.
She couldn’t be sure – she would never be sure – but she thought she saw something protruding from the man’s back just above his loosened trousers.
It was something that didn’t belong there, something thick, fleshy and repulsive, rising out of a swarm of small black tattoos.
TWO
The Vatican, present day
PAIN WAS HIS constant companion, his personal tormentor, and because it had become so intertwined with his mind and body, in a perverse way it had also become his friend.
When it gripped him hard, causing his spine to stiffen in agony, he had to stop himself from involuntarily uttering the oaths of his youth, the street language of Naples. He had a button he could push which would release a pulse of morphine into his veins but beyond occasional lapses of weakness, usually in the middle of the night when sleep seemed so dear, he avoided its use. Would Christ have availed himself of morphine to ease his suffering on the cross?
But when the worst of the present spasm receded, its passing left a pleasurable void. He was grateful for the teaching the pain imparted: that normalcy was a dear thing and a simplicity to be cherished. He wished he’d been more cognizant of this notion during his long life.
There was a gentle rap on his door and he responded in as strong a voice as he could muster.
A Silesian nun shuffled into the high-ceilinged room, her gray habit nearly brushing the floor. ‘Holiness,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Much the same as an hour ago,’ the Pope said, attempting a smile.
Sister Emilia, a woman not much younger than the elderly pontiff, approached and began fussing with the items on his bedside table. ‘You didn’t drink your orange juice,’ she chided. ‘Would you prefer apple?’