The Devil Will Come Read online

  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?’

  ‘I’d prefer to be young and healthy.’

  She shook her head and carried on with her business. ‘Let me raise you a little.’

  His bed had been replaced with a motorized hospital model. Sister Emilia used the controls to elevate his head and when he was safely upright she held the drinking straw to his dry lips and stared sternly until he relented and took a couple of gulps.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Zarilli is waiting to see you.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to see him?’ The Pope knew that the old nun lacked even a rudimentary sense of humor so he let her silence last for only a few seconds and then told her that his visitor was welcome.

  Dr Zarilli, the pontiff’s private physician, was waiting in an anteroom outside the third-floor papal apartment with another doctor from the Gemelli Hospital. Sister Emilia ushered them into the bedroom and parted the long cream curtains over the Piazza St Pietro to let in the waning sunlight of a fine spring day.

  The Pope raised his arm weakly and gave the men a small official wave. He was wearing plain white pajamas. His last therapy had left him bald so for warmth he wore a woolen cap which had been knitted by the aunt of one of his private secretaries.

  ‘Your Holiness,’ Zarilli said. ‘You remember Dr Paciolla.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ the Pope replied wryly. ‘His examination of my person was very thorough. Come closer, gentlemen. Can Sister Emilia get you some coffee?’

  ‘No, no, please,’ Zarilli said. ‘Dr Paciolla has the results of your last scans at the clinic.’

  The two men with their black suits and grim faces resembled undertakers more than doctors and the Pope made light of their appearance. ‘Have you come to advise me or bury me?’

  Paciolla, a tall cultured Roman accustomed to tending to rich and powerful men, didn’t seem fazed by the setting of the house-call or this particular patient. ‘Simply to inform Your Holiness – certainly not to bury you.’

  ‘Well, good,’ the Pope said. ‘The Holy See has more important matters to attend to than calling for a Conclave. Give me the report, then. Is it white smoke or black?’

  Paciolla looked at the floor f
or a moment, then met the Pope’s steady gaze. ‘The cancer has not responded to the chemotherapy. I’m afraid it’s spreading.’

  Cardinal Bishop Aspromonte poked his large balding head into the dining room to make sure that Cardinal Diaz’s favorite sparkling wine was on the table. It was a trifling detail for the Secretary of State and Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church but it was entirely within character. His private secretary, Monsignor Achille, a wiry man who had long ago followed Aspromonte from Genoa to the Vatican, directed his attention to the green bottle on the sideboard.

  Aspromonte mumbled his approval and disappeared for a moment, only to enter again when he heard the telephone ring. ‘That’s probably Diaz and Giaccone.’

  Achille picked up the dining-room phone, nodded, then commanded starchily, ‘Send them up.’

  ‘Five minutes early,’ Aspromonte said. ‘We’ve trained our guests well over the years, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Your Eminence, I believe we have.’

  Monsignor Achille escorted Cardinals Diaz and Giaccone into the book-lined study where Aspromonte waited with his blue-veined hands clasped over his expansive belly. His private rooms were splendid, thanks to recent renovations courtesy of a wealthy Spanish family. He greeted the two men warmly, his jowls wobbling when he grasped their hands, then sent Achille scurrying for aperitifs.

  The three old friends wore red-trimmed black cassocks with wide red sashes but that was the extent of their similarities. Cardinal Diaz, the venerable Dean of the College of Cardinals who had formerly held Aspromonte’s job as Secretary of State, was at seventy-five the oldest but the most imposing. He towered over his colleagues. In his youth in Malaga before joining the priesthood he had been quite the boxer, a heavyweight, and he had carried this athleticism into old age. He had large hands, a squared-off face and ample grey hair but his most remarkable feature was his posture which gave him a strong upright appearance even when he was sitting.

  Cardinal Giaccone was the shortest, with a deeply lined and jowly pug face which could mysteriously change from scowl to grin with only the slightest shift of musculature. The little hair that he had left was confined to a fringe above his beefy neck. Though otherwise nondescript, if all the cardinals were to assemble on a sunny day he could always be picked out of the crowd because of his trademark oversized Prada sunglasses which made him look like a film director. He relaxed now, his worry about being late dissipated. There had been a traffic snarl-up on the way back from the Via Napoleone where, as President, he had held his monthly meeting with the staff of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.

  ‘The lights are burning upstairs,’ Diaz said, pointing at the ceiling.

  The Pope’s apartment was two floors above their heads in the Vatican Palace.

  ‘I suppose that’s a good sign,’ Aspromonte said. ‘Maybe he has made some improvement today.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’ Giaccone asked.

  ‘Two days ago. Tomorrow I’ll visit again.’

  ‘How did he look?’ Diaz asked.

  ‘Weak. Pale. You can see the pain on his face but he’d never complain.’ Aspromonte looked at Diaz. ‘Come with me tomorrow. I don’t have any formal business. I’m sure he’ll want to see you.’

  Diaz nodded crisply, picked up the glass of Prosecco which Achille had placed by his chair and watched the tiny bubbles rise heavenward.

  The pain had been at an ebb for a good hour or more and the Pope was able to take a bowl of thin soup. He had an urge to rise and take advantage of this rare surge of energy. He rang his buzzer and Sister Emilia appeared so quickly that he asked her jokingly if she’d had an ear pressed against his door.

  ‘Get Fathers Diep and Bustamante. Tell them I want to go downstairs to my office and my chapel. And get Giacomo to come and help me get dressed.’

  ‘But, Holiness,’ the nun demurred, ‘shouldn’t we ask Dr Zarilli if this is wise?’

  ‘Leave Zarilli alone,’ the Pope growled. ‘Let the man have dinner with his family.’

  Giacomo Barone was a layman who had been in the Pope’s employ for twenty years. He was unmarried, lived in a small room in the Palace and seemed to have no interests beyond football and the pontiff. He spoke when spoken to and when the Pope was deep in thought and disinclined to chat idly they might spend half an hour in silence as they worked through ablutions and robing.

  Giacomo came in with a heavy stubble on his face. He smelled of the onions that he’d been cooking.

  ‘I want to wash and get dressed,’ the Pope told him.

  Giacomo bowed his head obediently and asked, ‘What do you want to wear, Holiness?’

  ‘Just house dress. Then take me downstairs.’

  Giacomo had powerful arms and shoulders and moved the Pope around his chamber like a manikin, sponging and powdering, layering garments, finishing with a white cassock with fringed white fascia, a pectoral cross, pliable red slippers and a white zuccetto in place of the knitted cap. The act of dressing seemed to tire the pontiff but he insisted on carrying out his wishes. Giacomo lifted him into his wheelchair.

  They took an elevator to the second floor where two Swiss Guards in full blue, orange and red-striped regalia stood at their traditional posts outside the Sala dei Gendarmi. They seemed shocked by the presence of the Pope. As Giacomo rolled the wheelchair past, the pontiff waved and blessed them. They made their way through empty official rooms of state to the Pope’s private study with its large writing desk, his favored place to work and review papers.

  The desk was really a large mahogany table, several meters in length, placed before a bookcase which contained an eclectic mix of official documents, sacred texts, biographies, histories and even a few detective novels.

  His two private secretaries, one of them a Vietnamese priest, the other a Sardinian, were waiting at quiet attention with smiles on their young faces.

  ‘I’ve never seen the two of you so happy to be called to work at night,’ the Pope said lightly.

  ‘It’s been a great while since we’ve been able to serve Your Holiness,’ Father Diep said in his sing-song Italian.

  ‘Our hearts are full of joy,’ Father Bustamante added with touching sincerity.

  The Pope sat in his wheelchair and surveyed the piles of papers littering his once-tidy desk. He shook his head. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s like an unattended garden. The weeds have overtaken the flower beds.’

  ‘Essential business continues,’ Diep said. ‘Cardinals Aspromonte and Diaz are co-signing the day-to-day papers. Much of what we have here are copies for your review.’

  ‘Let me use what small abilities I have tonight to tend to one or two vital ecclesiastical issues. You choose what is suitable. Then I want to pray in my chapel before I’m once again confined to bed by Sister Emilia and Dr Zarilli.’

  The wine was from Aspromonte’s brother who had a vineyard and regularly sent cases to the Vatican. Aspromonte was known for his liberal pouring habits and for giving away bottles as presents.

  ‘The Sangiovese is excellent,’ Diaz said, holding up the glass to the light of the chandelier. ‘Compliments to your brother.’

  ‘Well, 2006 was a marvelous year for him and really for everyone who grows in Tuscany. I’ll send you a case if you like.’

  ‘That would be grand – thank you,’ Diaz said. ‘Let’s pray that conditions are favorable for him this year.’

  ‘The rains have to stop first,’ Giaccone grumbled. ‘Today’s been mostly clear but, dear God, the last three weeks have been biblical. We should be building an ark!’

  ‘Is it affecting your work?’ Aspromonte asked.

  ‘I just came from a meeting of the Pontifical Commission and I can tell you that the archeologists and engineers are worried about the integrity of the catacombs on the Via Antica Appia, particularly St Sebastiano and St Callixtus. The fields above them are so saturated that some trees were uprooted by wind gusts. There’s fear of sinkholes or collapses.’

  Diaz sh
ook his head and put down his fork. ‘If only that was all we had to worry about.’

  ‘The Holy Father,’ Aspromonte said quietly.

  Diaz said soberly, ‘Many are looking for us to be doing the right things, to be making preparations.’

  ‘You mean planning for a Conclave,’ Giaccone said bluntly.

  Diaz nodded. ‘The logistics aren’t trivial. You can’t just snap your fingers and assemble all the Cardinal Electors.’

  ‘Don’t you think we have to tread lightly here?’ Aspromonte asked, chewing the last of a mouthful of beef. ‘The Pope is alive and, God willing, he will remain so. And we must be mindful not to appear to have any personal aspirations.’

  Diaz finished his glass and let Aspromonte fill it again. He looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone. ‘We’re friends. We’ve worked shoulder to shoulder for the better part of three decades. We’ve taken each other’s confessions. If we can’t talk frankly, who can? We all know the chances are good that the next Pope is sitting at this table. And, in my opinion, I’m too old. And not Italian enough!’

  Aspromonte and Giaccone looked down at their plates. ‘Someone had to say it,’ Diaz insisted.

  ‘Some say it’s time for an African or a South American. There are some good men who bear consideration,’ Giaccone said.

  Aspromonte shrugged. ‘I’m told we have some excellent peach gelato for dessert.’

  The Pope was alone in his private chapel. Father Diep had wheeled him in and placed him in front of his usual bronze-clad meditation chair. The ceiling glowed with stained-glass backlit panels, contemporary in style, heavy in primary colors. The floor was white Italian marble with black streaks, also a modernist pattern, but softened by a lovely old brown rug in the center. The altar was simple and elegant: a white lace-covered table holding candles and a Bible. Behind the table a golden crucified Christ floated in the concavity of a floor-to-ceiling installation of red marble.

  The pontiff’s hip started aching and the pain intensified. He had begun to pray and didn’t want to return to his sickbed just now. His infusion pump of morphine was fixed to a pole on the wheelchair but he was especially loath to medicate himself in the presence of this beautiful representation of a suffering Christ.