The two friends ate in silence, while both thinking to themselves that if all failed, if they were hunted out of Rome like fugitives, then at least they would spend their lives munching their way through all the regions of Italy.
Their bliss was short-lived. Soon there was a commotion outside as a group of guards delivered Cardinal O’Hara — in handcuffs. He’d spent the last few hours being jostled from one cave to another by stressed-out security personnel, unsure in the general pandemonium about what to do with him.
“Leave him there,” said Giacomo, who was now more or less restored. He pointed to an uncomfortable plastic chair in the corner, into which O’Hara was unceremoniously shoved.
For the next few hours, Giacomo and Paolo dealt with a stream of visitors — security personnel, geologists, Vatican officials.
Giacomo stood at his desk like some field marshal — or better still, Winston Churchill — poring over maps, pointing, giving orders, and occasionally downing a shot of Armagnac or hurriedly puffing on his cigar.
O’Hara envied him his power, his freedom to express himself; above all, his utter disregard for notions such as sin.
When all the briefings were over and done with, Giacomo turned to O’Hara and realized that his malingering presence had added a further note of sourness to the night — his constant chuckling from the corner.
Giacomo turned to a guard. “Would you be kind enough to remove this sack of shit, take him downstairs, and keep him under arrest? He’s not to go anywhere until further notice.” He looked at O’Hara. “I’m seriously considering letting you expire… keeping you out of our vaults so you can enjoy your precious mortality.”
As O’Hara was brusquely removed from the room, he threw Giacomo a final lingering gaze, and thought to himself, “If there’s any way I can give this man a painful death, I will.”
This venal thought was a great comfort to him.
35
When Michael and Ariel reached the ancient catacombs deep under the north transept of St. Peter’s, they found no modern technology or forklift trucks, only dank, dripping passages and compacted silence, in a world where nothing ever moved. The catacombs were so vast that at times one wondered if they had even been made by humans. Yet it seemed safe to assume they had, for there were carvings everywhere, on every lintel and passage, with names and dates in Romanic numerals and occasionally birds, trees, or fish.
The windings of the various chambers were mostly by a sort of design, not intestinal in their shape but logical.
The first day they just wandered without purpose, descending another level whenever they chanced on cramped stairs winding down like a screw thread.
“Lucky we’re not claustrophobic,” said Ariel. “We’d scream the place down.”
“I am claustrophobic,” said Michael. “Every step I take I’m fighting panic.”
Occasionally they were disturbed by search parties with powerful torches. Whenever they saw or heard anything, they stepped into the nearest side passage, of which there were hundreds, each immediately bifurcating, and then bifurcating again.
If by any chance their pursuers got too close, it was easy to clamber behind a stone sarcophagus and lie very still until they had passed. There were sepulchral niches cut into the rock on either side up to ceiling, and nicely proportioned spaces between the wall and the sarcophagi for hiding or getting a bit of sleep.
“There’s nothing to bloody do down here, is there?” Ariel said after a few days of traipsing about. “Do we actually know why we’re here? Otherwise we could end up walking around for years. And if we ever have the crazy notion of trying to get out of here, we’ll meet plenty of helpful people at the top who’d like nothing more than to stuff our throats with embalming cloth.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted? To sleep?”
She looked at him. He’d grown so sharp and grim; his comments often hit their mark with an edge of cruelty. She swallowed her guilt, knowing that she had made him what he was.
“You know, if we really want to leave this place we can’t head down, can we?” she said. “Are you sure you’re trying to escape, Michael? Are you sure you’re not just playing games with your friends, the graybeards?”
Michael trudged on, considering her question, and then answered: “I’m running because they’re puffed-up frauds; I’m sick of their pomposity. They mystify the maggot and keep it secret; they use its power to make themselves stronger. They tell themselves they’re the custodians of our future, Ariel, but they’re only saving their own skins.”
“You sound a bit like them. Maybe you should also grow a beard? I’m sure it’ll turn gray if you wait long enough.”
“I might have to. I don’t have a razor.”
Their conversation drifted like this, sometimes argumentative, often consoling, but always aimless. They kept moving for the sake of moving, never knowing where they were heading.
On the third day the passages broadened and they reached an ultramodern silo where the Sacred Tomb of Jesus was housed in a lead-lined cavern beyond yet another pair of blastproof steel doors.
The place was absolutely deserted.
They stood, a little awed, looking up at the doors, which were as tall as a three-story building.
“I’ve got news for you,” said Ariel. “Hanging round caves for no particular reason… isn’t my thing.”
“We should go inside at least and have a look.”
Ariel stared dubiously at the steel doors. “I’m not sure I want to. Something tells me once you go in there you’re there for keeps.” Despising herself even as she spoke, she went on: “I’m lost. I don’t know what I want anymore. I don’t even know if I should stand or sit. I miss fruit and sunlight and water.”
Michael nodded at a familiar contraption fixed into the wall, an adjustable double-prong at the top and a retractable hose below. “At least we can top ourselves up when we need to.” He wandered over to the machine, and stood there fingering the controls, while he thought back on the bullshit Mama Maggot had fed him when she emptied him in Sardinia. All that stuff about… what was it she’d called it? — the passpartout—and then the oath of loyalty she had made him swear.
Why did people with power always have to abuse it?
He tested the hose by touching the trigger. A high-pressure burst of wriggling maggots sprayed across the floor.
“Michael, leave that thing and come here.”
She put her arms round him, kissed him and said, “When I am close to you I almost feel human. At least that’s something I can be happy about.”
“I’d say everything is going a bit too well,” said Michael. “Maybe they actually emptied us and we’re hanging up to dry and this is all a coffin dream? If it is, then I’m quite happy being dead.”
36
Giacomo woke up at six-thirty and made sure he was well tanked up on coffee, raisin rolls, Manchego cheese, and a half-bottle of Armagnac by the time his team of advisers turned up, showered and rosy-cheeked in their pressed suits.
One of the first things Giacomo did when he assumed his position as Grand Master of the Maggot Church was to have a group of top bankers and scientists maggotized and co-opted. He never bothered to learn their names; he didn’t want excessive contact with seculars. They bored him, for one thing, and then of course they didn’t qualify for storage and eternal life — which inevitably meant any friendship would have limited duration.
His chief statistician was a ferocious creature; he knew her simply as Chase, because that was the institution for which she had once worked. His financial analyst, a bit of a pompous dullard from South Kensington, went by the name of Barings. Then there was a smiling, voluptuous biologist, Smithsonian, who in another life would probably have had many happy children. Lastly, an acne-scarred information technology expert from New York — Warburg.