To the City
40
Waking from terrible dreams, Giacomo got out of his bed and put on his morning gown, went to the window and parted the curtains. He stared out at the bleak morning, the light drizzling rain.
For the first time in many, many days, he tried to say a prayer.
“Oh Lord…” he began, then stopped. Summoning whatever calm he had left, he opened the bedroom door and shuffled down the long, slightly dirty corridor that ended in a swing-door leading into the kitchen, where he found Günter already sitting on a chair with his ears pricked.
Paolo was at the gas cooker, portioning out a greasy fry-up on large dinner plates.
Giacomo’s eye fell on three buckets of writhing white maggots, lined up against the wall. “What in the world is that?” he said weakly. “Shouldn’t they be kept covered?” He went to the sink, wet a couple of tea towels and threw them over the buckets.
“First have your breakfast,” Paolo muttered. “Then we’ll fill you in on all the details.”
“I had awful dreams,” Giacomo mumbled. “All this trouble is getting the better of me. I think I’m losing my reason. I was back in Bloomsbury all night.”
“Never mind about that. The maggot liaison officer called first thing this morning,” said Paolo. “He’s given us until midday to leave Rome or we’ll be killed.”
Giacomo listened as he devoured his crispy bacon rashers. After he’d stilled his worst hunger pangs, he asked Paolo whether he’d been to St. Peter’s that morning.
“Of course, I went first thing,” said Paolo. “I met Günter on the way. We popped into a favorite bar of mine, had a few artichoke fritters and a couple of espressos, and were slightly delayed as a result. We realized something was wrong as soon as we got there. There were lorries on the west side unloading construction materials. Must have been thirty or forty workers there. They’d screened off the whole area so the tourists couldn’t see what was happening. There was an absolute profusion of security guards everywhere. We went through the cordon and ran into a crowd of maggots who hadn’t been allowed into the crypts. The doors were barred. I demanded to know what was going on. I spoke to the foreman and he took me inside. Paolo stopped. “You won’t believe it.”
“Tell me.”
“They’d chalked a line across the main reception. Anyone on the inside of the line wasn’t allowed to leave.”
Günter gave a little bark of excitement: “There were two men lying dead on the floor. Martyrs. Shot through the head. Very accurately done.”
“The construction workers were drilling holes in the floor and inserting reinforcement rods across the whole vestibule. They put up a sturdy wood partition. Outside I heard the cement mixers churning and grinding.”
“The guards moved us out; a few of them had their guns ready to stop anyone on the other side of the line from leaving.” “Before we knew it there was liquid cement being pumped in.”
“They plugged the entrance, basically. Block by block. Hundreds of tons of cement. We stood there listening to the shouting from the other side of the concrete wall. It grew increasingly faint.”
Günter took over: “When the shouting stopped we heard…”
“Singing,” said Paolo. “They started singing.” He blew his nose and looked at Giacomo. “If I hadn’t been slightly late because of the artichoke fritters, I would have been on the other side of that chalked line. I would have been buried alive like the rest of them. I owe my life to some artichoke fritters; isn’t that ridiculous?”
“Yes,” said Giacomo, who felt curiously unaffected. “It is.”
Günter picked up the thread. “While the wall was being built, we noticed a few brothers waving at us from the other side of the line. They’d brought up fresh maggot from the vaults.” He nodded at the buckets lined up against the wall. “They passed them across when the guards weren’t looking.”
“Their courage was exemplary,” said Paolo. “One of them tripped and fell. He went into the cement, just sank into it like quicksand.”
There was a long silence. Giacomo wondered at his lack of empathy until he reminded himself that empathy was not one of his strengths. “So,” he said. “There must have been a decision from the top to close us down.” He stood up, went to the kitchen cupboard, and started stuffing his specialties — Ligurian pine nuts, Sardinian anchovy fillets, salted capers, dried chilies — into a cotton sack. “We’ve caused too much trouble. They’ll take control and assert proper centralized authority. It’s this whole business of the runaway Christ that’s got the wind up them.”
Only when he sat down did the enormity of it overwhelm him. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means O’Hara, the shit, actually put an end to us when he planted Michael in our midst.”
“Oh, that little innocent had nothing to do with it.”
Paolo nodded. “I have to say I agree. But I’d give my eye-teeth to know how he managed to get out of that cell. And find Jesus…”
“And rouse him,” said Günter. “Who would have thought it?”
Giacomo looked at his watch again. “So we have to be out of Rome in just under three hours. Does that give us enough time to pack?”
“Pack what, in the name of God?” said Paolo. “I shall just bring my Bible and my walking boots.”
“The only thing I own is my collar,” said Günter.
“We have to find a suitable container for the maggots,” Giacomo said. “From now on we’ll take one or two every morning.”
Günter yawned. “I’m ready for a little peregrination. The gardens of Bonus Pastor are starting to look a little dull.”
Paolo looked at Giacomo: “And where should we go?”
“I own a nice little monastery in La Spezia,” said Giacomo. “We’ll wait there until Jesus surfaces. His presence won’t go unnoticed. At some point we’ll have to go and see… Him… and persuade… Him… to turn Himself in.”
“Sounds funny, when you put it like that,” said Günter.
“It may sound funny,” Giacomo growled. “But it isn’t.”
He swallowed two maggots as if they were vitamin pills and bid the others do the same. They poured the maggots into large plastic containers, after perforating the lids and placing rotten bananas inside.
At exactly twelve o’clock they boarded a train. Giacomo and Paolo were carrying hefty rucksacks, loaded with food, maggots, and a change of clothes.
A group of unsmiling men at the barrier, obviously Vatican agents, spoke into their walkie-talkies as the train pulled away. Giacomo saluted them, as if making light of their presence. But he quickly brought his arm down. When he looked at his wrist it seemed as if there was a leash clipped to it, a leash effortlessly fed out from an infinite, many-geared spool in Rome.
I’ll never get away from them, he thought.
41
A few weeks after their departure in the camper bus, Michael and Ariel took stock of their experiences so far. While it could not be denied that Jesus had some sort of power, the Master remained deeply enigmatic to them.
At his bidding, they had driven all over Europe: along valleys, up hills, and through tunnels, across bridges and over plains. No matter how far they drove it was never quite enough for Jesus, who mostly sat at the back of the camper bus drinking goat’s milk (which he was terrifically fond of) and methodically working his way through Michael’s newly acquired CD collection. “Keep going, keep going,” he’d call out, waving his arm. “Farther, farther…”