The Devil Will Come Read online

  Though Christianity’s early history was troubled, fortune eventually favored the new religion when, in the fourth century AD, the Emperor Constantine himself converted to it, banned the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated Church properties. Gradually, the remains of the Popes and important martyrs were removed from catacombs and buried in consecrated ground within the grounds of churches. The sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 put an end to the use of the catacombs for fresh burials, though for centuries pilgrims continued to visit them and Popes did their best to preserve and even embellish the important vaults.

  Yet their preservation would last only so long and by the ninth century relics were transferred with increased frequency to churches within the city walls. The catacombs were doomed to a form of extinction. Their entrances became overgrown by vegetation and they were lost in time, completely forgotten until the sixteenth century when Antonio Bosio, the Christopher Columbus of subterranean Rome, rediscovered one, then another, then thirty of them, and systematically began their study.

  But tomb robbers followed and over the next two centuries most marble and precious artifacts disappeared until, in 1852, the Church put all Christian catacombs under the protection of the newly created Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.

  Elisabetta had always felt a sense of peace inside these rough-cut narrow passageways, the color of deep sunset. How the walls and low ceilings must have come alive with a sense of motion as pilgrims passed through, clutching their flickering oil lamps! How excited they must have felt, plunging through the darkness, glimpsing the corpses in their loculi, the colorful inscriptions and paintings in the cubicula – the chambers reserved for families – until, bursting with anticipation, they reached their destination, the crypts of the Popes and of the great martyrs like St Callixtus!

  Now the loculi were empty. There were no longer any bones, lamps or offerings, just bare rectangular recesses cut into the rock. Elisabetta lightly touched a remembered fragment of plaster on one of the walls. It had the fragile outline of a dove holding an olive branch. It made her sigh.

  De Stefano walked quickly and confidently for a man of his age. From time to time he turned to make sure that Elisabetta was keeping up. For the first ten minutes of their journey the tunnels were those open to the public. They passed through the crypts of Cecilia and the Popes, skirted the tombs of St Gaius and Eusebius until they came to an unlatched iron gate, its key in the lock. The Liberian Area was off the tourist path. Completed in the fourth century, it was the last sector to have been dug out, a twisting three-level network of passages.

  The cave-in was at the outermost reaches of the Liberian Area. When De Stefano paused at a poorly lit intersection of two galleries and momentarily seemed at a loss, Elisabetta gently advised him to take a left.

  ‘Your memory is excellent,’ he said appreciatively.

  A faint sound of metal against rubble grew louder as they approached their destination. The plastered wall which had sparked Elisabetta’s interest years ago was gone, turned into dust by the collapse. Now there was a gaping opening, irregular like the mouth of a cave.

  ‘Here we are,’ De Stefano said. ‘The heavy work’s been done. There’s good timber erected. If I didn’t think it was safe I wouldn’t have brought you.’

  ‘God will protect,’ Elisabetta said, peering into the harshly lit space.

  Inside the chamber there were three men who were shoveling a mixture of tuff, dirt and bricks. Some kind of manual hoist system was in place to lift their buckets out of the cave-in. The men stopped working and stared at Elisabetta through the entrance.

  ‘These are my most trusted assistants,’ De Stefano said. ‘Gentlemen, this is Sister Elisabetta.’ The men were young. Despite the cool subterranean temperature they were soaked through with sweat. ‘Gian Paolo Trapani is directly responsible for all the catacombs of the Via Antica and he’s acting as foreman for the operation.’

  The pleasant-looking young man who came forward had longish hair, reddened by tufo dust. He didn’t seem to know if he should extend a grimy hand so he made do with, ‘Hello, Sister. I heard you studied here once. It’s a pity that it took a quake to make an excavation. It’s such a mess now.’

  Elisabetta followed De Stefano through the opening. The chamber was irregularly shaped, generally rectangular. But the margins were ill-defined because of the piles of rubble. Wooden supports, thick as railway ties, had been laid in to support the sides and the earth overhead. The space was at least fifteen meters by ten, she thought, but the cave-in made it hard to be precise. There was a shaft of light coming in from a good ten meters above. A head appeared and another fellow yelled down. ‘Why are you stopping?’ He was manning the block and pulleys of the bucket rig.

  ‘Go take a break!’ Trapani shouted and the head disappeared.

  Elisabetta’s first impression was that their work was favoring speed over science. There were no excavation grids, no signs of measurement and documentation, no camera tripods or drawing tables. The ground seemed to have been cleared in one frantic effort rather than deliberately, meter by meter. Blue tarps covered much of the floor. Only one of the walls was reasonably vertical. It was covered by a suspended tarp.

  ‘Sorry it’s so untidy,’ Trapani said, looking at her shoes and hemline, which were covered in tuff dust. ‘We’ve been moving faster than we’d like.’

  ‘So I see,’ Elisabetta said.

  She was surprised at how seamlessly she made the shift into the observational mode of an archeologist. For twelve years she’d focused on an interior space, the realm of emotion and belief, faith and prayer. But at this moment, her mind won out over her heart. She stepped gingerly through the chamber, avoiding the ubiquitous tarps, taking in details and sorting them.

  ‘The bricks,’ Elisabetta said, stooping to pick one up. ‘Typical first-century Roman – long and narrow. And this.’ She dropped the brick and selected a grey friable chunk the size of a small cat. ‘Opus caementicium, Roman foundation cement.’ Then she picked up one of the many pieces of blackened, charred wood and thought, There was a fire. ‘This chamber predates the earliest part of the catacombs by at least a century. It’s just as I proposed. The fourth-century extension of the catacombs stopped right before it encroached on it.’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ De Stefano said. ‘The diggers of the Liberian Area catacombs were only a few swipes of the pickax away from the surprise of their lives.’

  ‘It is a columbarium, isn’t it?’ Elisabetta said.

  ‘Just as you suggested during your student days,’ De Stefano agreed, ‘it does appear to be an underground funeral chamber for pre-Christians. The above-ground monument was probably razed and likely disappeared before the catacombs were built.’

  He took a clear plastic specimen bag from his pocket. ‘If the first-century dating was ever going to be in doubt, this settled it. We’ve found several so far.’

  Elisabetta took the bag. It contained a large silver coin. The bust on the obverse showed a flat-nosed man with curly hair who was wearing a laurel wreath. The inscription read ‘NERO CLAVDIVS CAESAR’. She flipped the bag over. The reverse was an elaborate arch flanked by the letters S and C – Senatus Consulto, the Senatorial mint mark. ‘The lost arch of Nero,’ she said. ‘AD 54.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Trapani said, visibly impressed by the nun’s acumen.

  ‘But this isn’t a typical columbarium, is it?’ she said, glancing at the tarps.

  ‘Hardly.’ De Stefano waved his hand at the hanging wall tarp. ‘Please take it down, Gian Paolo.’

  The men pulled the tarp free of its pins and gathered it up. Underneath were rows of small dome-shaped niches carved into the cement, many containing stone funerary urns. The array of niches was interrupted by one smooth panel of creamy plaster. Gian Paolo trained a floodlight on it.

  The plaster was covered with a wheel of painted symbols.

  Elisabetta approached it and smiled. ‘The same as my wall.’

&n
bsp; The horns of Aries, the Ram.

  The twin pillars of Gemini, the Twins.

  The piercing arrow of Sagittarius.

  The complementary scrolls of Cancer, the Crab.

  The crescent of the Moon.

  The male symbol, Mars. The female symbol, Venus.

  All of the zodiac. The planets. A circle of images.

  De Stefano drew close, almost rubbing against Elisabetta’s shoulders. ‘The plaster you studied must have come from the interior wall of a smaller room. It took this cave-in to expose the main chamber.’

  One symbol particularly drew her attention. She stood beneath it and raised herself on her toes for a better look.

  It appeared to be a stick-figure, the trunk a vertical line, the arms C-shaped upwards as if raised, the legs C-shaped downwards. The vertical line extended above the arms to create a head or neck but it also extended below the legs.

  ‘It’s surely the symbol for Pisces, but it’s traditionally portrayed on its side. Vertically, it looks more like a man, doesn’t it? My original wall had the same variant. And if it’s meant to be a man, what do you suppose that is?’ Elisabetta asked, pointing at the segment between the legs. ‘A phallus?’

  The archeologists seemed embarrassed at hearing a nun utter the word and De Stefano quickly rejoindered, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What, then?’ she asked.

  The old professor paused a moment and told Trapani, ‘All right, pull back the ground tarps.’

  The men worked quickly, almost theatrically to accomplish their version of a dramatic reveal, exposing the length and breadth of the debris-strewn floor.

  Elisabetta put her hand to her mouth to stifle an oath. ‘My God!’ she whispered. ‘How many?’

  De Stefano sighed. ‘As you can see, our excavations have been hasty and there’s undoubtedly jumble and stackage from the cave-in, but there are approximately eighty-five adults and twelve children.’

  The bodies were mostly skeletal, but because of the sealed atmosphere some were partially mummified, retaining tan patches of adherent skin, bits of hair and fragments of clothing. Elisabetta made out a few faces with their mouths agape – fixed, it almost seemed, in mid-gasp.

  The remains were only incompletely exposed; hundreds of man-hours would be required to extricate them thoroughly and carefully from the rubble. There were so many that she found it hard to focus on one at a time.

  Then, out of the tangle of arms, legs, ribs, skulls and spines one singular feature emerged, crashing into Elisabetta’s consciousness like a huge wave pounding against a rock. Her eyes darted from one to another until she felt her vision blur and her knees go liquid.

  Holy father, give me strength.

  It was undeniable.

  Every body, every man, woman and child stretched out before her possessed a bony tail.

  FIVE

  JANKO MULEJ HABITUALLY cracked his knuckles when he became impatient. The gesture wasn’t lost on Krek.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Krek demanded.

  Mulej was in his forties, a decade younger than his host, ugly as the back of a bus, as Krek liked to say, even to Mulej’s face. He was almost twice Krek’s size, a giant of a man who would have had to go around in tracksuits were it not for his excellent tailor in Ljubljana. ‘Perhaps we should pack it in for the night.’

  The great room at Castle Krek never got warm even in the height of summer and on this spring night Krek had deemed a fire to be in order. He liked his flames to leap high and throughout the evening he liberally piled on fresh logs to keep the massive fireplace roaring hotly.

  The medieval manor had been in his family for four hundred years though it was nominally out of Krek hands during the unpleasant decades of Communist rule. Nestled in several hundred hectares of Slovenian woodlands, a few kilometers from Lake Bled, its original squared-off keep dated from the thirteenth century. The deep moat was stocked with carp and from outward appearances the ragged stonework of the castle suggested a certain shabbiness and disrepair.

  That impression was obliterated upon entry. Krek’s father had been a reclusive man who had rarely left the grounds. Throughout his life he lavished greater attention on his basement-to-parapet renovation of the castle than on his son. Ivo Krek had concentrated on the guts of the house, the masonry, the plumbing, furnace, wiring. His son shared his father’s devotion to the castle but turned his keen eye toward furnishings and trappings of modernity. The reception rooms with their Romanesque arches were lavishly appointed with period antiques but Krek blended in contemporary overstuffed pieces to make the rooms inhabitable. Flat-panel televisions coexisted with medieval walnut carvings. A sixteenth-century cabinet with painted hunting scenes contained a €400,000 Danish audio system. The state-of-the-art chef’s kitchen could have sprung from the pages of a decorating magazine.

  He chose to receive Mulej and others in the great room. Its magnificent scale dwarfed men, even one of Mulej’s size, and Krek liked his people to feel small in his presence.

  Krek glanced at the grandfather clock. It was ten o’clock. ‘I’ve been up since four and you’re the one who’s tired?’ he asked Mulej, his voice rising. ‘Don’t you know what’s at stake here? Don’t you realize how little time we have?’

  Mulej shifted his considerable weight on the armless leather sofa. He was seated uncomfortably close to the fire and was sweating profusely but he would never move from the spot because this was where Krek had placed him. The table between them was piled high with corporate folios, financial reports and a selection of newspapers.

  ‘Of course I do, K,’ Mulej said, wiping his damp forehead with his soaked handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll go on as long as you like.’

  Krek threw a log down hard onto the pile, making the fire spark wildly. An ember landed on his trousers. He swore and when he flicked it off he continued swearing at Mulej. The man’s apology was having little effect. ‘The Conclave is in less than a week, there’s going to be a new Pope and now we’ve got this problem at St Callixtus! We have an enormous amount of work to do! You’ll sleep when I tell you to sleep, you’ll eat when I tell you to eat! Do you understand?’

  To the outside world Mulej was Krek’s Cerberus, the menacing beast guarding the gates of hell, the managing director of his conglomerate. But when his boss raged at him the hellhound became a small, frightened mutt.

  Krek looked upwards as if he could see through the ceilings to the constellations of the night sky. ‘Why the hell did Bruno Ottinger have to die? I miss the old goat. I trusted him.’

  ‘You can trust me too,’ Mulej said meekly.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I can trust you,’ Krek said, calming down. ‘But you’re rather stupid. Ottinger was a genius, almost my equal.’

  Mulej quickly picked up the copy of the daily newspaper, Delo, and dropped it back on the stack, as if anxious to change the subject. ‘So what do you want me to do about this?’

  The editorial-and-opinions page sported a good-sized photo of Krek, a flattering if somewhat brooding treatment, emerging dramatically from blackness with the headline: DAMJAN KREK – WHY WON’T HE RUN FOR PRESIDENT? A political commentator they knew well, a gadfly of the right, was stirring the pot again.

  ‘We should ignore it,’ Krek sighed. ‘Why won’t this guy leave me alone?’

  Mulej answered his question with another. ‘How many billionaires are there in Slovenia?’

  ‘The disadvantage of being a large fish in a small lake,’ Krek said. ‘We do best when we work in the shadows. Politicians!’ He spat the word out.

  ‘We’ve had our share,’ Mulej said.

  Krek’s voice was full of contempt. ‘Moths to the flame.’

  The phone on the internal line from the gatehouse rang. Krek answered it. ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Send her up.’

  ‘Do you want me to stay?’ Mulej asked.

  ‘I’ll be no more than an hour,’ Krek said. ‘Yes, stay! Don’t you dare leave. When I get back I want to see a p
roposal of the trades we’re going to set up between now and next week.’

  ‘I know what to do, K,’ Mulej said wearily.

  ‘And I want you to make sure the statement is checked by one of our Arabic speakers. It has to appear authentic.’

  ‘It’s being done.’

  ‘And draw up a press release expressing the company’s outrage on behalf of myself and, of course, our Catholic employees. Got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘And, most importantly, I want a plan for dealing with the catacombs. I can’t believe this happened at the worst possible moment. I want our people in Italy to know this is my highest priority. I want the best information, the best plan and the best execution.’ He had been gradually creeping closer to Mulej and now he stood over him. He stabbed a finger into his shoulder. ‘Got it?’

  The big man nodded obediently. ‘Yes, K.’

  The doorbell chimed and Krek responded personally.

  One of his security men was escorting a young woman. Krek welcomed her into the hall with a smile. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name is Aleida, Mister Krek.’ She had a Dutch accent.

  ‘My friends call me K,’ he said. ‘I was told you were lovely. I’m not disappointed.’

  ‘It’s an honor to meet you. Surely one of the great events of my life.’ Aleida was a brunette with a film-star face. Her cheeks were flushed with the excitement of the moment.

  ‘Come with me,’ Krek said. ‘My time is limited.’

  ‘Of course, Mister Krek – K – a man like you has many responsibilities, I’m sure.’

  He led her up an ornately carved staircase past a succession of bygone Kreks frozen in portraiture. ‘You have no idea.’

  Both sides of the hallway were lined with stag antlers, a dangerous gauntlet to run if one stumbled through in a drunken stupor. The residential areas of the castle were also uncontaminated by any traces of femininity. Krek’s wife had died of a swiftly moving neurological condition years earlier and what frills of hers he had tolerated were purged when she was gone. His estate was feral, populated with wild boar and roe deer. It was a hunting castle. A man’s house.