Fanabarzra: You don’t try to escape?
No. 3643: I don’t have anywhere to go. Mama does it for my own good.
Fanabarzra: And when does she let you leave?
No. 3643: One day. She runs a bath for me. She says she hopes that I have learned my lesson. She says that the closet is hell and that it will be where I go if I am not good, except that then I can’t ever leave. She puts on my clothes. She says that I should have been born a girl and that there’s still time to change that. She touches my little packages. She says it’s all pointless, that I am going to hell in any case, that there is no way out for me.
Fanabarzra: And your father?
No. 3643: Papa is no longer here. He took off.
Dr. Fowler: Conroy, stop this right now. Look at his face. The patient is very ill.
No. 3643: He’s gone, gone, gone . . .
Dr. Fowler: Conroy!
Dr. Conroy: That’s enough. Fanabarzra, stop the recording and take the patient out of the trance.
CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA IN TRASPONTINA
Via della Conciliazione, 14 Wednesday, April 6, 2005, 3:21 P.M.
For the second time that week the Crime Scene Analysis technicians passed through the doors of Santa Maria in Traspontina. They went about their business as unassumingly as possible, dressed in street clothes so as to avoid notice by the pilgrims. Inside, Ispettore Dicanti barked out orders, jumping back and forth between her cell phone and the walkie-talkie. Fowler approached one of the UACV technicians.
“Finished with the murder scene yet?”
“Yes, Padre. We are about to remove the body and start examining the sacristy.”
Fowler looked at Dicanti apprehensively.
“I’ll go down with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want anything to get by me. What is that?”
In his right hand the priest held a small, black case.
“It contains holy oils, which we use to give extreme unction.”
“Is that going to help in some way?”
“Not in the investigation, no. But for Pontiero, yes. He was a devout Catholic, wasn’t he?”
“He was. And little good it did him.”
“With all due respect, that’s not for you to say.”
The two of them started down the steps cautiously, taking pains to step around the inscription at the entrance to the crypt. They quickly moved past the short hallway and found themselves standing at the edge of the chamber. UACV technicians had installed two electric generators, with powerful lights that lighted up the room.
Pontiero’s inert body, nude from the waist up, hung between the two truncated columns that supported him. Karosky had fastened his arms to the stone with duct tape, evidently the same tape he had used on Robayra. The eyes and tongue were torn out, the face horribly disfigured, while strips of bloody flesh hung from his thorax like macabre decorations.
Paola lowered her head while the priest administered the last rites. Fowler’s black shoes, shined to a high polish, stood deep in a pool of slowly congealing blood. Paola swallowed hard and closed her eyes.
“Dicanti.”
Her eyes opened again. Dante had joined them in the underground chamber. Fowler had finished and was tactfully preparing to leave.
“Where are you going, Padre?”
“Upstairs. I don’t want to get in the way.”
“You aren’t. If half of what they say about you is true, you have brains to spare. They sent you to help, right? So help us out here.”
“With pleasure, Ispettore.”
She swallowed hard and started in.
“It looks as if Pontiero entered by the door to the sacristy. It’s obvious that he knocked on the door and our false friar opened it for him. Nothing unusual there. Pontiero spoke to Karosky and was attacked by him.”
“But where?”
“It must have been down here. If it wasn’t, there would be blood upstairs.”
“Why did he do it? Perhaps Pontiero smelled something?”
“I doubt it,” Fowler said. “I feel more confident that Karosky saw the opportunity and seized it. I’m inclined to think he showed Pontiero the way into the crypt and that Pontiero came down here by himself, with the other man behind him.”
“That sounds right. He probably ruled out Brother Francesco immediately. Not only because he looked to be an old man who had trouble moving around—”
“But because he was a religious person. Pontiero would never suspect a friar, right? The poor fool,” Dante said sadly.
“Do me a favor, Dante.”
Fowler glared at Dante but the Vatican cop was staring in another direction.
“I’m sorry. Go on, Dicanti.”
“Once they were down here, Karosky struck him with a blunt object. We think it was a bronze candelabra. The boys at UACV have already taken it away for testing. It was left sitting on the floor close to the body. He then tied him up and . . . as you can see. What Pontiero must have gone through.”
Paola’s voice broke. The two men pretended they didn’t hear it, and then she coughed, to conceal her emotions and try to recover her voice before she went back to work.
“A dark room, extremely dark. He’s repeating the trauma of his earliest childhood, the time he spent locked up in the closet?”
“It could be. Have they found any deliberate clues?”
“We think the only message is the one upstairs: ‘Vexilla regis prodeuntinferni.’ ”
“ ‘The banners of the King of Hell are coming ever closer,’ ” the priest translated a second time.
“What does that mean, Fowler?” Dante asked.
“You ought to know.”
“If you are trying to ridicule me, you aren’t even close.”
Fowler had a wistful look on his face.
“Nothing could be further from my mind. I was referring to a quotation from one of your ancestors, Dante Alighieri.”
“He isn’t my ancestor. It’s my last name, and his first. We have nothing to do with one another.”
“I apologize. I thought every Italian publicly declared himself a descendant of either Dante or Julius Caesar.”
“At least we know who we’re descended from.”
Fowler and Dante stood their ground, glaring at each other. Paola broke in.
“If you two are finished with the xenophobic backstabbing, we can proceed.”
Fowler cleared his throat.
“As I was saying, ‘Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni’ is a citation from The Divine Comedy, from the moment when Dante and Virgil are about to enter into Hell. It’s a paraphrase of a prayer in the Christian liturgy, except that it’s dedicated to Satan instead of God. Many people want to read heresy into the declaration, but in reality the only thing that Dante was trying to do was to scare his audience.”
“That’s what he wants? To scare us?”
“He’s telling us that Hell is close at hand. I don’t believe that Karosky’s interpretation goes any further afield. He isn’t a very cultivated man, although he likes to pretend he is. Are there any other messages?”
“Not on the body,” answered Paola. “He knows that we came here and he became frightened. And it’s my fault he knows it, because I was calling Pontiero’s cell phone nonstop.”
“Any luck pinpointing the phone?”
“We contacted the phone company. The tracking system for cell phones indicates that the telephone is turned off or outside of the area of coverage. The last call recorded in this area was from on top of Hotel Atlante Star, barely a thousand feet from where we stand,” Paola replied.
“Which is exactly where I’m staying,” Fowler pointed out.
“Go on, I was sure you were putting up in a pension especially for priests. You know, something a little more modest.”
Fowler brushed off the comment.
“Dante, my friend, at my age one learns to enjoy the good things in life. Especially when Uncle Sam is paying for it. I’ve already pitched my tent in
plenty of places that reek of death.”
“I am certain of it, Padre. Quite certain.”
“What are you referring to? Whatever you are insinuating, why don’t you just spit it out?”
“I’m not insinuating anything other than that you’ve slept in worse places because of your . . . ministry.”
Dante was even more full of bile than usual, and it was Fowler’s presence that brought it out. Paola didn’t understand what he was up to, but she realized that it was something the two of them had to resolve, face to face.
“Enough already. Let’s get out of here and breathe some fresh air.”
The two men followed Dicanti back through the church. She was giving the nurses instructions on removing Pontiero’s body when one of the UACV technicians approached Dicanti and began to tell her about evidence they had found. Paola nodded her head. She turned to Fowler.
“Could we concentrate a little, Padre?”
“Of course.”
“Dante?”
“Why not?”
“All right, so this is what we have found. In the rectory there was a professional makeup kit and a heap of ashes on a table, which in our opinion are the remains of a passport. He poured a fair amount of alcohol on it after he lit the fire, so not much is left. The UACV team has taken the ashes, to see if there is anything solid there. The only prints found in the rectory aren’t from Karosky, which means we’ll have to find out who they belong to. Dante, you get the job for this afternoon. Find out who Padre Francesco was and how much time he spent here. Search among the church’s regular parishioners.”
“Agreed. I’ll immerse myself in the senior citizen set.”
“Knock off the jokes. Karosky has played with us, but he’s nervous. He is hidden in the shadows, and for a certain period of time we’re not going to hear from him. If in the next few hours we can manage to find out where he’s been, we can perhaps find out where he’s headed.”
Paola secretly crossed her fingers in her coat pocket, trying to believe what she was saying. The two men put on their best stone faces, while they too pretended that the possibility was something more than an unlikely dream.
Dante came back two hours later. With him was a woman in her middle years, who repeated her story to Dicanti. When the previous parish priest, Brother Darío, died, Brother Francesco had shown up. Three years before, give or take. From that day on the lady had been helping him clean the church and the rectory. According to her, Brother Francesco Toma was a model of humility and Christian faith. He had taken thorough care of the parish. No one had a bad word to say about him.
It was, taken all together, a sufficiently frustrating statement, but it at least made one fact clear. The Franciscan Darío Bassano had died in November 2001, which confirmed Karosky’s entrance into the country.
“Dante, do me a favor. Find out what the Carmelites know about Francesco Toma.”
“I’ll make some calls. But I suspect we won’t come up with much.”
Dante went out by the front entrance, in the direction of his office at the Vigilanza. Fowler was also on his way out.
“I’m going to my hotel to change. See you later.”
“I will be at the morgue.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
“Yes, I do.”
They stood there uncomfortably, not saying a word to each other, their silence underscored by a hymn one of the pilgrims was singing. In the vast, turbulent crowd of people, one after another slowly joined in the chorus. The sun slipped behind the hills and Rome was slowly sinking into the long afternoon shadows. And yet the electricity in the streets was incessant.
“A song like that was probably the last thing Pontiero heard.” Paola didn’t respond. Fowler had witnessed what the profiler was going through too many times before, the process that takes place after the death of a close companion. At the outset, it is a kind of intoxication, mixed with the desire for vengeance. Little by little the affected person descends into exhaustion and sadness, as he or she reckons with what happened and the shock takes on the presence of a physical wound. Dicanti would finally be left with a dull grief, a mixture of anger, blame, and resentment, which would only resolve itself when Karosky was behind bars or dead. And perhaps not even then.
The priest was about to put his hand on Dicanti’s shoulder but stopped at the last second. He was standing directly behind her, and even without seeing him, she must have felt something. She turned around and looked at Fowler, a worried expression on her face.
“Careful, Padre. He knows you are here now, and that could change everything. Not only that, but we don’t really know what he looks like. He’s taken pains to be very clever when it comes to his disguise.”
“How much can he have changed in five years?”
“I looked at the photograph that you showed me of Karosky and I saw ‘Brother Francesco’ with my own eyes. They don’t resemble each other in the slightest.”
“The church was exceedingly dark and you hardly paid any attention to that old Carmelite.”
“Trust me. I know how to study people. He could be in disguise, a beard covering half his face, but he would still look like an old man, the real thing. Karosky knows how to conceal himself very skillfully, and by now he could be someone else entirely.”
“All well and good. But I’ve seen him up close. If he crosses my path, I will recognize him. Subterfuge will only get him so far.”
“It is more than just subterfuge. He’s got his hands on a 9mm now, with thirty bullets to spare. Pontiero’s pistol and his bullet clip are missing.”
MUNICIPAL MORGUE
Thursday, April 7, 2005, 1:32 A.M.
She came to the autopsy encased in stone. Every bit of adrenaline on reserve dissolved the instant she walked into the room, and she felt more and more depressed by the second. To watch as the coroner’s scalpel dissected her partner was almost more than she could take, but she made it through. The coroner attested that Pontiero had been struck forty-three times with a blunt object, in all likelihood the candelabra that had been recovered, coated with blood, at the scene of the crime. As to what had caused the cuts on his body, including the slit on his throat, he reserved judgment until laboratory personnel were finished making molds of the incisions.
Paola listened to the report through a sensory fog, which failed in the slightest to attenuate what she was going through. She stood there watching for hours, enduring a self-imposed punishment. Dante stopped into the autopsy room, asked a few questions, and quickly went on his way. Troi stuck his head in too, but it was only a symbolic gesture. He walked out immediately, stunned, in a state of disbelief, muttering in passing that he had been speaking with Pontiero just a few hours before.
When the coroner was finished, he left the body on the metal table. He was lifting the sheet over the dead man’s face when Paola spoke up.
“Don’t.”
The coroner exited the room without saying a word.
The body was clean, but it exuded a faint coppery scent. The harsh, unrelenting light of the six bulbs made her friend, already on the short side, look very small. The bruises covered his body like medals of pain, and his wounds, huge as obscene mouths, still gave off the rusty odor of blood.
Paola looked around for the envelope with the contents of Pontiero’s pockets. A rosary, a few keys, his wallet. A ballpoint pen, a lighter, a newly opened pack of cigarettes. When she saw that last object and realized that no one was ever going to smoke those cigarettes, she felt very sad, and even abandoned. And she began to accept the fact that her partner and friend was dead. As if to deny it, she shook out one of the cigarettes. The lighter’s dancing flame scraped against the heavy silence in the autopsy room.
Paola had given it up after the death of her father. She repressed the urge to cough and took a heavy drag. Imitating Pontiero, she blew the smoke straight at the No Smoking sign. And she began to say good-bye.
Shit, Pontiero. Fuck. Shit, shit, shit. How could you be so
clumsy? This is all your fault. Look at yourself. We haven’t even let your wife see your body. He did a good job on you, fuck he really did you good. She couldn’t have taken it, she couldn’t have taken it seeing you like this. It’s a bit shameful. Does it seem normal to you that I’m probably the last person in the world who will see you naked? I promise you this isn’t the kind of intimacyI wanted to share with you. No, of all the cops in the world you were the worst candidate for a closed coffin and now you’ve earned it. Everything for you. Pontiero, you lummox, you jerk, why didn’t you see it coming? What the hell did you find in that underground passageway? I can’t believe it. You’ve always been running close behind cancer of the lungs, just like my goddamned father. Jesus Christ, you’ve got no idea the things I think of every time I see you smoking one of these pieces of shit. I see my father in the hospital bed again, coughing his lungs out on the sheets. And there I was, studying every afternoon. In the morning at school, and in the afternoon cramming the assignments in my head to the sound of his coughing. I always thought I’d end up at the foot of your bed too, holding your hand while you went to the other part of town, accompanied by Hail Marys and Our Fathers and you with your eye on the nurse’s ass. That’s what was in the cards for you, but you checked out early. Couldn’t you have called me, you jerk? Shit, you look like you’re chuckling at me while I apologize. Or do you think it’s my fault? Your wife and children don’t think so now, but they will when someone tells them the whole story. But no, Pontiero, it’s not my fault. It’s your fault and yours alone, you imbecile. Worse than an imbecile. Why the hell did you go down into that tunnel? And screw your damned faith in anything wearing a robe. That bastard Karosky, he really played us. Well, he played me, and you’ve paid for it. That beard, that nose. He wore those glasses just like he was giving us the finger, just to hold us up to ridicule. A real bastard. He looked straight at me, but I couldn’t see past the two bottle caps perched on his nose. That beard, that nose. Can you believe that I don’t know if I would recognize him if I saw him again? I already know what you’re thinking. Take a look at the scene of Robayra’s murder to see if he turns up somewhere,even in the background. And I’m going to do it, for God’s sake. I’m going to do it. So stop being a little wiseass. And stop smiling, you son of a bitch, stop smiling. It’s just rigor mortis, for the love of God. Even though you are dead you want to keep foisting the blame on me. Don’t trust anyone, you were telling me. Watch your step, you’d say. Is it permissibleto know why you’re giving me all this damn advice if you’re not going to follow it? God, Pontiero, a nice little mess you’ve left me with. Because of your damned clumsiness I have got to face this monster alone. Fuck, if we’re on the trail of a priest, then robes automatically become suspect, Pontiero. Don’t come at me with that. Don’t let yourself off the hook with the argument that Francesco looked like a homeless, crippled old man. Christ, he really did a job on you. Shit, shit. How I hate you, Pontiero.Do you know what your wife said when she was told that you had died? She said, “He can’t die. He likes jazz.” She didn’t say, “He has two kids,” or “He is my husband and I love him.” No, she said that you like jazz. As if Duke Ellington or Diana Krall were a fucking bulletproof jacket. Shit, she senses you, she feels you as if you were still alive, she hears your raspy voice and the music you listen to. She still smells the cigarettes you smoke. That you smoked. How I hate you, you pious piece of shit. . . . What good is everything you prayed for to you now? The people you trusted have turned their backs on you. Now I remember that day we ate pastrami in the middle of Piazza Colonna. You said that priests are simply men with a responsibility and not angels, and that the Church doesn’t realize this. And I swear to you that I will say it to the next one who stands on the balcony of Saint Peter’s, I swear I will write it on a poster so big he’ll see it even if he’s blind. Pontiero, you goddamned idiot. This wasn’t our battle. Oh shit, I’m afraid, very afraid. I don’t want to end up like you. That table looks as cold as ice. And what if Karosky follows me to my house? Pontiero, you idiot, this isn’t our battle. It’s a battle between the priests and their Church. And don’t tell me it’s mine, too. I don’t believe in God anymore. Or I should say, I do. But I don’t believe he’s a good person. My love for Him left me stranded at the feet of a dead man who should have lived thirty years more. He took off faster than a cheap deodorant, Pontiero. And now all that’s left is the stench of the dead, of every dead body we’ve seen the last few years. Bodies that stink to high heaven before their time because God didn’t know how to care for some of his creatures. And your body is the one that will smell the worst of any of them. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t tell me that God believes in me. A decent God doesn’t let things like this happen, he doesn’t let one of his own be transformedinto a wolf among sheep. You heard just like I did what Fowler said. That head case with his lower half in knots was abandoned after all the shit they threw at him and now he’s looking for thrills even more powerful than raping little boys. And what do you have to say for yourself?What kind of God lets them stick a straight arrow like you in a fucking freezer with wounds big enough for your coworker to slip her hand into? Shit, it wasn’t my battle before, way before I got so carried away with Troi, to catch one of these degenerates. But you can see I’m useless. No, shut up. Don’t say anything. Stop protecting me. I’m not a child. Yes, I’ve been useless. Is it so terrible to admit it? I haven’t thought clearly. It’s obvious that things have overwhelmed me, but there it is. It’s over. Fuck, it wasn’t my battle, but it is now. Now it’s personal, Pontiero. Now I couldn’t give a shit about the pressure from the Vatican, from Cirin, from Troi, or from the bitch who gave birth to every single one of them. Now I’m going to go at every one, and it doesn’t matter to me if heads roll along the way. I’m going to catch him, Pontiero. For you and for me. For your wife who’s waiting there outside and for your two brats. But above all for you, because you’re in the deep freeze and already your face isn’t your face anymore. God, he really fucked you over. How fucked over he left you and how alone I feel. I hate you, Pontiero, and I’ll miss you even more.