‘And now I do?’
‘I need your help.’
‘I don’t see what I can do. I was dismissed.’
‘Yes, I heard.’
‘And I’m being sent to Africa.’
Tremblay appeared surprised at that. ‘When?’
‘A week from now.’
‘I can try to get that reversed.’
‘No, don’t! I want to go.’
‘Then we haven’t much time. Lemures,’ he said again, putting his cup down.
Lemures. The ghosts of the ancient Romans, the shades of the dead. Malevolent, restless, unwanted souls. Invaders of the home, they were said to come at night to do fearsome things.
Tremblay said there had been a public festival every May during which the Romans performed rites to exorcise these horrible entities from their homes. At midnight in every Roman household the head of the family, the paterfamilias, would throw black beans over his shoulder and say nine times: ‘These I cast. With these I redeem me and mine.’ The Lemures were supposed to become distracted as they gathered up the beans. Suddenly the worshipper would spin around, throw clean spring water in their direction, then clang bronze plates together, demanding that the demons depart. And for a year they would, with luck, be obliged to do so.
The origin of the name Lemures was obscure. But the modern association was clear enough. Lemurs, the African primates with nocturnal habits, haunting stares, ghostly calls and long, thick tails. The Roman ghosts had been the inspiration for the name given to the animals by the eighteenth-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus.
Tremblay uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. ‘At St Callixtus we have a first-century group of men, women and children who possessed tails and died together, perhaps violently by fire. The early Romans feared them, thought they were ghosts. But, Elisabetta, they were real. They were there in ancient Rome. They were there throughout history. They’re still here. Your man from Ulm was one of them. Aldo Vani was one of them. They stole the skeletons from St Callixtus, for what purpose I don’t know. They killed Professor De Stefano. They tried to kill you. They are among us.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘It’s my job. The Vatican – or rather, a very small number of people within the Vatican – has known of the Lemures for centuries. The Church has quietly done what they can to counteract them, to defeat their evil at every possible turn. There have been successes but also many failures. They are difficult adversaries. I’m a tracker – more detective, unfortunately, than priest. I look for their signs, I follow their trails which are sometimes as vaporous as rumors. I travel, I read, I monitor the internet, intelligence reports, and even, like you, the medical journals.’
Elisabetta looked shocked.
‘I confess I looked at your email box.’
‘You went to my desk?’
‘I’m sorry. In this day and age you should log off an email account when you leave the office.’
‘Did you also call the newspaper from my desk phone?’
‘No! Someone did, but it wasn’t me.’
‘I imagined it was.’
‘Why?’
‘You made me nervous.’
Tremblay laughed. ‘I have that effect on people.’
‘Who are they? What do they want?’
‘That’s like asking why is there evil in the world? I’m not the best theologian, Sister. My skills lie more towards organization and administration. I’m content to simply acknowledge that evil exists in many forms and the role of a compassionate God is to give us the strength to fight it and learn from it. The Lemures are quite amoral. They revel in attaining power, wealth, domination. Those seem to be their gods. And we, the Church, are their great enemy. Why this is so, I don’t know – but it is most assuredly a fact. It reaches back for centuries, perhaps millennia to the Church’s very beginnings. I like to think that we represent the good in the world and they represent evil. That we represent light and they represent darkness. Naturally opposing forces.’
‘One of the corpses at St Callixtus had a chi-rho pendant in his hand,’ Elisabetta said.
Tremblay arched an eyebrow, making his face appear even more elongated. ‘Really? The Church was young at that time. Very young. So the battle is quite old, then. They enjoy killing us, harming our interests, setting others against us. Throughout the ages, at every anti-Catholic turn of history, it now seems that we may suspect unseen Lemures hands.’
‘And what of their tails?’
‘Ah, the tails. They are a phenotype.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A scientific term. The long-held view of the Vatican is that the tails are a physical embodiment of evil. From the decidedly modern field of genetics we know the genotype is said to control the phenotype.’
‘Are you saying they have evil genes?’
‘What I’m saying is that they are extreme psychopaths, an almost alien subset of humans, completely lacking the ability to feel guilt or remorse. They have shallow emotions. They engage in antisocial behaviour, often involving violence. They understand the difference between right and wrong – they just don’t act like they do. There’s an evolving field in neuroscience linking specific genetic abnormalities of brain neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine with antisocial or psychopathic states. But the most visible phenotype of the Lemures’ genetic constitution is unquestionably their tails. The anomalous tail has always been associated with evil. You don’t need to look any further than representations of the Devil since early times.’
‘If what you’re telling me is true, how could they have stayed hidden for so long?’
‘Because they are exceedingly careful and probably because there aren’t so many of them. They associate with their own kind. They couple and marry with their own kind. If they have to go into the army or some situation where others will see them, then we believe they’re sent to one of their own surgeons to have their tails amputated. They get sick, they go to one of their own doctors. They die, they go to one of their own funeral homes. Dropping dead on the street before their own kind can get to the body, as happened to Bruno Ottinger – that is a very rare occurrence. And getting shot like Aldo Vani by your brother – that’s even rarer.’
‘What about the tattoos?’
‘These have never been understood. I’ve personally scoured the Vatican to see if any of my predecessors had any credible theories, but there’s nothing. I was hoping you might have come up with something.’
‘No, I don’t have an answer.’
‘But you have clues. This message you found on the envelope in Germany – it’s a living document. We’ve never seen this kind of intimate communication among them.’
‘You know about it.’
‘Professor De Stefano showed me a copy of the note. And I couldn’t help but notice the Monad you drew on your whiteboard.’
‘Monad?’
‘You hadn’t identified it?’
Elisabetta felt her chest fluttering. ‘No, what is it?’
Tremblay pulled out his leather file, unzipped it and took out a page. ‘Look at this.’
It sent a chill over Elisabetta’s breastbone. ‘The symbol,’ she said quietly.
Tremblay nodded. ‘It’s from the frontispiece of a book published in London in 1564 by John Dee. He was an alchemist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a philosopher and the court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. We believe he was also a Lemures. The book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, the Hieroglyphic Monad, was an exhaustive text purporting to explain this glyph, this symbol of his own making which he claimed represented a mystical unity of all creation, a singular entity from which all material things on Earth derive. The glyph is constructed from four distinct symbols: the astrological signs for the moon, the sun, the cross, and the zodiac symbol for Aries, the ram, one of the fire signs. The text is hugely convoluted and technical but the gist, according to Dee, was that the sun and the moon of the Monad desire that the elements be separated by the application of fire.’