“The file didn’t lie,” he replied. “Josephine Cebula had to die.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“I really don’t. The names in the file–the corpses she was meant to have left behind–Tortsen Ulk, Magda Müller, James Richter, Elsbet Horn. I hadn’t heard of them until I read them, and the manner of their death–brutal, sadistic perhaps. Josephine was not that woman. She lacked motive, opportunity and means, and if you’d done your own research you’d know that. She was my skin, nothing more, nothing less.” He wasn’t meeting my eyes. I caught his chin, pulled his head up and round, forcing his gaze to meet mine. “Tell me why.”
“Galileo,” he said. I froze, fingers tight across his jaw. He seemed surprised to have heard himself speak. “For Galileo.”
“What is Galileo?”
“The Santa Rosa,” he replied. “That was Galileo.”
I hesitated, looking for something in his face, something more, and as I did, he struck, his left hand slamming up in a fist, into my face. I cried out and fell to one side, rolling off the edge of the bed. He scrambled up on to his knees, pulling at the handcuffs, ripping with both his hands at the metal chain, even as the bedpost cracked and begin to splinter. I staggered to my feet and he swung one leg into my belly, but I caught his foot, and as he ripped his hand free from the bedpost I flailed against his trouser leg, felt ankle beneath my fingertips
and that was the end of that.
Chapter 23
We have always been hunted.
My first encounter with this truth was in 1838. I was in Rome, and how they found me I will never fully know.
They came in the night, men in thick leather gloves and black masks with long sweet-smelling beaks, plague doctors hunting a most unusual disease. They had tied rope around their sleeves, ankles and waists so that I might not burrow my fingers against their skin. Two of them sat on my chest while a third locked a collar on a three-foot pole around my neck then swung me up by my throat. I wheezed and scrambled and kicked and tried to catch at a hand, a hair, a foot, a finger–any stranger’s skin–but they were careful, so careful, and as they marched me on the end of my collar through the midnight streets, like a naughty dog on his master’s leash, they reminded each other, beware, beware, don’t get too close to the demon-devil, don’t let his fingers so much as brush yours in passing. In the dead dark of the night Roman emperors with broken faces, dead gods with shattered limbs, the weeping eyes of the Holy Mary and the hooded glares of the scuttling thieves as they slipped into the stone alleys between the leaning, stinking homes looked down and showed no comfort.
In a stone cell beneath a stone tower built by a long-dead Roman and renovated by a long-dead Greek, they clamped me down with iron shackles to a wooden chair, so no part of my body could move. Then came the priests and the doctors, the soldiers and the violent men, who beat me with long cudgels, and swung incense in my face and said, begone, evil spirit. In the name of the father, the son, the holy ghost, I banish you, begone.
On the third day of my captivity three masked men entered the room with a woman whose eyes were red from weeping and who tried, at the sight of me, to throw herself at my feet, to kiss my gloved and bound hands, and who was immediately restrained from crossing the line of salt that had been sprinkled around my chair.
And she wept, and cried out, my son, my son, what demon has done this to you?
If they hadn’t broken my ribs, poisoned me with their rem edies and fed me no more than a little water and soggy bread with a very long spoon, I might have said, these men, good mother. These men that you see before you, they have done this to me. Come a little closer until your ear touches my lips, and I will tell you how.
As it was, they had, so I didn’t, but sat limp and broken before her while she wept and wailed and called out for her boy and against all demons, until she was calmed and given a cup of wine with a little something extra to drink, and sat upon a low stool.
Then the leader of my tormentors, a man in a great red cowl and huge crimson gloves that swelled outwards from his wrists, only to be clipped back in and tied to his forearm, knelt down before my mother and said, “Your son is dead, and in heaven. What you see here is a mockery of his flesh, a ghoul in the rotten body of your boy. We could have executed it without telling you, but you are his mother, and to not know the fate of your son is worse than knowing what horrors this creature has performed.”
At this, she wept a little more, and I almost admired the compassion with which my would-be killer bestowed mercy on a mother.
Then he went on: “This demon has fornicated with your son’s flesh. It has lain with both women and men. It has worn your boy’s face as it commits sin upon sin, revelled in its power, delighted in its wickedness. With every act it commits it brings dishonour upon the memory of your boy and it must die. Do you understand this, good mother? Do you forgive us the deed that we must now perform?”
The woman looked up from this angel of death, to me, and I breathed, “Mother…”
At once my killer clamped his hands tight around the woman’s own and hissed, “It is not your son. It is the demon. It will say anything to live.”
And so my mother looked away from me, and with tears running down her face she breathed, “God have mercy,” though upon whom she did not say.
I twisted and screamed, called out for my mother, mother, please, as they led her away, but she didn’t look back, and I didn’t entirely blame her for in truth I didn’t know her name.
The next day, in the half-dawn light, they took me out to a courtyard framed with grey stone and locked shutters. They had a mansion which had once belonged to great men, but in this age of steel and smoke had fallen hard by, a cracked monument of imperial ambition.
A pyre had been built in the middle, and the red-robed masters of my demise stood round it, heads bowed, gloved hands folded across their chests, a single brazier smouldering at the foot of the stake. Ritual makes murder easier; it is something else to concentrate on. Seeing the pyre, I kicked and screamed some more, and they dragged me to the foot of the stake and pushed me to my knees. A priest stood before me, long black robes draping around his black-clad feet. He raised his hands to bless, if not exactly me, then the body he was about to commit to the flame, and it occurred to me that his robe, while extensive, could possibly obscure an excess of hairy leg. The question of what lay beneath a priest’s cassock was not one I had considered too deeply before, but now it seemed of absolute import and so I let myself collapse, falling against my own collar, dragging it down, even as it pulled into my trachea, cutting off breath. The guard who supported me was pulled forward by my weight and as I hit the ground, the priest started back, surprised at his own power to induce such an extreme reaction in the penitent. For the briefest moment I felt the pressure on my throat weaken and so I opened my eyes, pushed up off my belly and with teeth bared shoved my face up and under the priest’s robes and bit as hard as I could against what lay buried there.
I felt hair on my skin, cloth in my eyes, tasted blood on my mouth and even as the priest cried out in shock and distress, I
jumped, and staggered back, yelping, my black robes billowing around my legs. At my feet the shackled body was pulled back, a bludgeon to the head. I hopped away, hands shaking, and exclaimed in perfect Italian, “In the name of God, go in peace!” then scrambled away, gasping for breath.
Blood drifted down the inside of my calf from the fresh bite mark in my flesh, but no one noticed. Meanwhile, the bewildered body opened his eyes, and as they chained him to the stake he cried out, what is this, who are you, help me, help me, what’s happening?