The Devil Will Come

SEVEN

THE INSTITUTE OF Pathology at the University Hospital of Ulm in southern Germany was set in woodlands at the outskirts of the expansive campus. A journey by air with a car and driver from Munich airport had been arranged at the insistence of Professor De Stefano over Elisabetta’s protestations that the train would do fine.

‘Look,’ he’d said. ‘I’m sticking my neck out by letting you bring your sister into this so indulge me. I want to make sure you’re there and back the same day. Speed …’

To his non-amusement Elisabetta completed his mantra, ‘… is essential.’

She and Micaela had sat beside each other on the flight from Rome talking in hushed voices about tails and tattoos, star signs and ancient Roman burial practices.

Micaela chomped through her bag of mixed nuts and took Elisabetta’s when they were offered, thoroughly enjoying her role as an insider. But Elisabetta, already nervous about including her family in this business, began to worry about her sister’s commitment to secrecy when she said, ‘We should get Papa involved. He’s a genius.’

‘Yes, I know he’s as clever as they come and I guess his analytical powers would be very useful,’ Elisabetta replied, ‘but we simply cannot tell him. We can’t speak of this to anyone else! It was difficult enough to get them to let me bring you inside the tent. I said I needed a medical doctor and De Stefano agreed only because you’re my sister.’

The two women who emerged from the Mercedes car at the entrance to the Institute could not have looked more different – Micaela in a tightly fitting print dress with a sharp leather jacket and high heels and Elisabetta in her black habit and sensible shoes.

While Elisabetta hung back, Micaela told the man at the reception area that she had an appointment. After he had placed a call upstairs he looked up again and asked the nun if he could be of assistance.

‘We’re together,’ Elisabetta replied.

He looked them over and shook his head, seemingly uncertain about this apparent collision of two worlds.

Earlier, Micaela had driven Elisabetta to hysterics about the pomposity of German academic titles. So when Herr Professor Dr Med. Peter-Michael Gunther emerged from the elevator Micaela fired off a wicked wink. He looked every inch the Herr Professor. Tall and imperious, and with a smug goatee, his full title was embroidered above the pocket of his lab coat at the expense of a considerable amount of red thread.

‘Ladies,’ Gunther said in crisp English, seemingly struggling for a proper way to address them, ‘it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Please follow me.’

Micaela chatted his ear off all the way upstairs. She’d been the one to make initial contact and he seemed far more comfortable with her anyway.

‘I’m surprised you were interested in my little paper,’ Gunther said, showing them into his starkly modern office that overlooked the Institute’s reflecting pool.

‘Was no one else interested?’ Elisabetta asked, speaking for the first time.

He poured coffee from a cafetière. ‘You know, I thought it would generate some wider expressions of interest and comment but that was not the case. Just a few notes from colleagues, a joke or two. Actually, the greatest interest came from the police.’

Elisabetta put her cup down. ‘Why the police? Was his death suspicious?’

‘Not at all. The cause of death was clearly a coronary thrombosis. The man was in his eighties, found unresponsive on the street and taken to the casualty ward where he was pronounced dead. All very routine until someone removed his trousers. The case took a further unusual turn two days after his autopsy when someone broke into the hospital morgue and removed his body. The same night, my hospital office was burglarized and some of my files were taken, including the notes and photographs of our gentleman. Even my digital camera was stolen, complete with the relevant memory card. The police were quite useless, in my opinion. There was never any solution.’

Elisabetta’s heart sank at the news. Had their journey been a waste of time? All she could ask was, ‘What did his loved ones do?’

‘There were none. The man had no living relatives that we could find. He was a long-retired university professor who lived in a rented flat near the city center. It seems that he was quite alone. The police concluded that someone in the hospital might have talked about his unusual anatomy and some oddball group stole his remains for ritualistic purposes or as a sick joke. Who knows?’

‘How did you write the paper if everything was stolen?’ Micaela asked.

‘Ah, so!’ Gunther said slyly. ‘Because the case was unique, I printed a duplicate set of photos and a copy of the autopsy report and brought them back to this office the evening of his post-mortem. I wanted to study them at my leisure. It was fortunate that I had two offices.’

‘So you have photos?’ Micaela asked.

‘Yes, several.’

‘More than the ones you published?’ Elisabetta asked.

‘Yes, of course. Now perhaps it’s your turn to tell me why a nun and a gastroenterologist are so interested in my case.’

The sisters looked at each other. They’d rehearsed their reply. ‘It’s the tattoos,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I’m doing research on a project concerning early Roman symbology. I have reason to believe this man’s tattoos bear a relationship to them but the published photos are too indistinct for me to make them out.’

‘What kind of symbols?’ Gunther asked, clearly fascinated.

‘Astrological,’ Elisabetta replied.

‘Then you are going to be disappointed,’ he said, picking a folder off his orderly desk. He laid out a series of color photographs, one by one, like a dealer at a casino, snapping their edges. They were all of the man’s wizened back. The first few were wide-angles and included the two that had been published in the paper. The tail was long, extending below the corpse’s buttocks. Its shriveled skin exposed the extra vertebrae underneath.

In other shots the field tightened and the magnification increased as the photographer worked his way up to the conical tip stretched over a tiny coccygeal bone. The tail swelled in diameter at its midsection; fine white hairs covered the skin. Had they been black in the man’s youth, Elisabetta wondered?

Then Gunther laid out the critical shots, those from the base of the spine.

It might have been impolite to grab but Elisabetta couldn’t help herself. She snatched one of the close-ups and devoured it with her stare.

The tattoos were numbers.

Three concentric semicircles of numbers surrounded the base of the tail.

63 128 99 128 51 132 162 56 70

32 56 52 103 132 128 56 99

99 39 63 38 120 39 70

Micaela, not to be outdone, had gotten her hands on a similar photo. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

‘We had absolutely no idea,’ Gunther said. ‘We still don’t.’

They both looked to Elisabetta.

She shook her head hopelessly. ‘I have no idea, either.’ She put the photo down. ‘May we have a copy?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Do you know anything else about the man?’

‘We have his name and his last address, that’s all.’

‘May we know these?’ Elisabetta asked gently.

Gunther shrugged. ‘Ordinarily, patient confidentiality would prohibit this, but when the affair went to the police it became a matter of public record.’ He produced a data sheet from the folder. ‘One day, ladies, you must repay me by telling me the results of your inquiries. I have a feeling you’ve got something up your sleeves.’

Micaela smiled and said, ‘My sister’s sleeves are bigger than mine.’

The address on Fischergasse was a short distance from Ulm Münster and if the two women hadn’t been rushing to make their return flight, Elisabetta would have tried to pay a flying visit. The cathedral had begun its existence as a relatively modest Catholic building but thanks to the region’s conversion to Protestantism and a grand nineteenth-century spire added by its Church Elders, it was now the tallest cathedral in the world.

Their driver parked outside a row of pretty half-timbered houses in the Old Town, close enough to the Danube for the wind to carry a faintly riverine smell. Number 29 was an ample four-story house with a bakery on the ground floor.

When they arrived, Micaela was on her mobile, engaged in an overheated conversation with her boyfriend Arturo, so Elisabetta got out alone.

‘If you don’t get anywhere, at least bring me back some cakes,’ Micaela called after her.

The pleasant street called out to Elisabetta. How marvelous it would be to find a bench and spend some time alone. Except for a few brief moments in the convent chapel at dawn she’d spent an entire day without prayer. She felt unhealthy and unfulfilled and she wondered darkly if her faith was being tested. And if it was, would she pass the test and emerge clean?

A spring-loaded bell chimed her entry into the bakery. The rotund woman at the till seemed surprised to see a nun in her shop and ignored another customer in a rush to serve Elisabetta.

‘How can I help you today, Sister?’ she asked in German.

‘Ah, do you speak Italian or English?’ Elisabetta asked in English.

‘English, a little. Would you like some bread? Some pastries, Sister?’

‘Just some assistance. A man used to live at this address. I wonder if you knew him?’

‘Who?’

‘Bruno Ottinger.’

It was as if Elisabetta had conjured a ghost. The shopkeeper braced herself against the counter and almost rested her hand on a fresh pie. ‘The professor! My God! Funnily enough, Hans and I were talking about him just last night. We were his landlords.’

‘I see you’re busy. I was just stopping by on the way to the airport and wanted a word with someone who knew him.’

‘Let me get rid of her,’ the shopkeeper said, pointing her chin at the elderly customer who Elisabetta hoped spoke no English. ‘She always buys the same thing so it won’t take a minute.’

When the customer was gone, the baker’s wife, who introduced herself as Frau Lang, hung a back-in-10-minutes sign in the shop window and locked the door. She touched Elisabetta’s wrist and said guiltily, ‘Hans is Protestant but I’m Catholic. I should do more with my religion but you get out of the habit, what with our crazy hours and all the family commitments.’

‘There are many ways to live a good life,’ Elisabetta said, trying to be helpful. ‘I wonder if I might get my sister from the car.’

‘Is she a nun too?’ Frau Lang asked in bewilderment.

‘No, she’s a doctor.’

‘Well, tell her to come inside. Does she like cakes?’

‘In fact, she likes them a great deal.’

Krek sat behind his large desk with his mobile phone pressed against one ear. Double-glazed windows cut the street noises of Ljubljana’s Prešeren Square to a minimum but he could see that Čopova Street was thick with lunchtime traffic.

‘Yes, I know that communication is a perennial issue.’

He listened to the response and said, ‘I don’t trust the internet. We’ll use the old ways. The day before the Conclave our people will see it and they’ll know it was us.’

He rang off brusquely and looked up. Mulej was there, filling the door frame with his bulk and wearing a constipated expression.

‘What is it?’ Krek asked

‘I just took a call. There’s a new problem, probably not a major one but one that we should monitor closely.’

‘Spit it out, damn it!’

‘Do you remember that girl, the one from years ago who was snooping around St Callixtus?’

Krek frowned more severely, his look becoming ugly. ‘Elisabetta Celestino. Aldo Vani botched the job. She survived. She became a nun, of all things. She became harmless. We let her go. Yes, Mulej, it seems that I remember her.’

‘Someone at the Vatican pressed her into service. She left her convent and has begun working at the St Callixtus collapse. I can’t confirm it but she may have gone to Ulm today.’

‘Ulm?’ Krek roared. ‘What the hell is she doing in Ulm?’

Mulej looked out the tinted windows rather than face his boss’s fearsome stare. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’

‘Get Aldo on the phone right now.’ Krek’s voice was strained, his throat constricted by venom. ‘This time he’s going to do the job correctly. I want this woman, this nun, stopped bang in her tracks, Mulej. Tell Aldo to bring her here so I can deal with her personally. If that proves inconvenient, then have him eliminate her. Do you understand?’

The Tribunal Palace was only a few paces from the Basilica, yet it was just one of the anonymous buildings dotting the Vatican complex which tourists barely noticed. A bland administrative building, it housed, among other departments, the Gendarmerie Office.

The Inspector-General of the Gendarmerie Corps, Luca Loreti, was a competent leader, generally liked and respected by his men though the youngest recruits sometimes rolled their eyes at his twisted locutions. The officers who’d been around for a while, like Zazo, always came back to the fact that Loreti consistently stood up to his Swiss Guard counterpart, Oberst Hans Sonnenberg, and defended his men to the hilt against that prick. Not that the officers were completely reverential. Loreti, a lusty eater, had been steadily expanding in girth over time and there was a book running every year on the closest date for his annual uniform refitting.

Most of the Corps’s 130 gendarmes were now assembled in the auditorium for Loreti’s briefing. The officers sat in the front, the junior ranks behind, all very orderly and hierarchical. Loreti possessed tremendous kinetic energy for a man his size and he strode rapidly back and forth on the stage, making the audience move their heads as if they were at a tennis match.

‘First, let me compliment you on the job you did at the Pope’s funeral. Our cardinals, our bishops, our Vatican officials, over two hundred world leaders and their security details – all of them came to Vatican City, paid their respects and left in good health,’ Loreti boomed into his hand-held microphone. ‘But we cannot rest on our laurels, can we? We have five days until the Conclave begins. Many of the Cardinal Electors have already checked into the Domus Sanctae Marthae. As of today, the guest house will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Sistine Chapel will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Basilica and the Museums will be closed to the public. Our tasks will be precisely defined by protocols. I have been working with Oberst Sonnenberg to ensure that we will not be tripping over the Swiss Guards, they will not be tripping over us and there will be no gaps in our security blanket. We will control the guest house, they will control the Sistine Chapel. We will utilize our dogs and our experts to sweep the guest house for explosives and listening devices. The Guards will do the same with their experts inside the Sistine Chapel. I want you to play nice with the Guards but if there’s any trouble, let your superiors know immediately and they will let me know. All disputes will necessarily be answered at my level.’

Zazo knew the drill. This would be his second Conclave. At the first one he’d been a wide-eyed corporal, dazzled by pomp, grandeur and the heavy sense of occasion. Now he was immune to that. He had squads of men to command and his accountability went far beyond guarding a doorway.

He nudged Lorenzo Rosa in the ribs. Lorenzo, also a major, had entered the Corps the same year as Zazo and the two of them were now good friends. Initially, Zazo had resisted the urge to befriend Lorenzo because the man bore enough of a physical resemblance to Marco – tall and athletic, crisp facial lines, black hair – that on some level Zazo felt that to make a friend of him would be a betrayal. But Zazo was so naturally gregarious and eager for comradeship that he broke through the psychological block the day both men went through a poison-gas drill together and wound up puking alongside each other in a ditch.

‘This isn’t going to be as smooth as he says,’ Zazo whispered. ‘We’ll be at war with the Guards by Friday.’

Lorenzo leaned over to whisper into Zazo’s ear. ‘The Swiss can kiss my Italian ass.’

That was why Zazo liked the guy.

*

Martin Lang, the Ulm baker, was roused furiously from the sofa by his wife and sent to the bedroom to change his shirt. Over Elisabetta’s protestations, Frau Lang quickly picked up after him, then left the two women in the sitting room while she put the kettle on and began rattling porcelain and silverware.

Hans Lang came back tucking in a fresh shirt and haplessly combing wisps of hair over a balding pate with his hand. He looked every inch a man who’d been up at the ovens since the middle of the night. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said in halting English. ‘I wasn’t expecting. I’m always the last to know of such things.’

Elisabetta and Micaela apologized for the intrusion and sat stiffly by, waiting for Frau Lang to reappear. Elisabetta tried some small talk about how nice his shop was but the baker’s English was not up to the task.

When Frau Lang brought in a tray with tea and cakes, Micaela hungrily tucked into the pastries while Elisabetta nibbled demurely. ‘What can you tell us about Herr Ottinger?’ she asked.

Frau Lang did the talking. Her husband sat blearily on the sofa looking like he wanted his privacy back. ‘He was a proper old gentleman,’ she said. ‘He lived on our third floor for fifteen years. He kept to himself. I wouldn’t say we knew him well. He’d often buy a meat pie for his dinner, maybe something sweet on a Saturday. He paid his rent on time. He didn’t have many visitors. I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

‘You said he was a professor. Do you know anything about his work?’ Elisabetta asked.

‘He was retired from the university. I have no idea what kind of professor he was but there were so many books in his flat when he died.’ Frau Lang spoke in German to her husband. ‘Hans says they were mostly science and engineering books so maybe that was his field.’

‘And there were no relatives?’

‘None. The authorities checked, of course. We had to go through a formal process before we were entitled to sell his belongings to satisfy the unpaid portion of the rental agreement. We didn’t do so well out of the process. The man had no significant possessions. More cake?’

Micaela nodded happily and accepted another slice before asking, ‘Did you ever notice anything odd about him? Physically?’

Frau Lang shook her head. ‘No. Whatever do you mean? He was just an ordinary-looking older gentleman.’

‘So, there’s nothing left in the flat?’ Elisabetta asked, leaving her sister hanging.

‘No. Of course we’ve had new people, a nice couple living there since 2008.’

Elisabetta shook her head slightly. She’d call the university, see if she could track down any former colleagues. There was nothing left to be done here.

The baker said something gruffly in German.

‘Hans reminded me,’ his wife said. ‘We kept a small box of personal belongings, things like his passport, the items in his bedside table in case a relative ever appeared.’

The sisters looked up hopefully. ‘Can we see it?’ Elisabetta asked quickly.

Frau Lang spoke to her husband in German again and Elisabetta made out curse words as he pushed himself off the sofa and headed out the door.

‘He’ll get it. It’s in the basement,’ Frau Lang said, frowning after him and pouring more tea.

In five minutes the baker came back with a cardboard box the size of a briefcase. It was clean and dry, and had obviously been stored with some care. He handed it to Elisabetta, mumbled something to his wife and appeared to be excusing himself with a small bow.

Frau Lang looked embarrassed. ‘Hans is going to take his nap now. He wishes you a good trip home.’

Elisabetta and Micaela started to rise but the baker shooed them down with a wave of his hands and disappeared into another room.

The box was light; its contents shifted in Elisabetta’s hands when she transferred it to her lap. She pulled apart the tucked-in corners and looked in. A stale mustiness escaped, an old-man smell.

Reading glasses. Fountain pens. A passport. A bronzed medal on a ribbon from, as far as she could tell, a German engineering society. Checkbooks and bank statements from 2006 and 2007. Pill bottles which Micaela inspected and whose contents she declared to be for high blood pressure. A box of dentures. A fading Kodachrome of a young man, Ottinger himself perhaps, in hiking gear on a steep green slope. At the very bottom was an unsealed Manila envelope with a handwritten note on the outside, written finely in black ink.

Elisabetta lifted out the envelope, prompting Frau Lang to remark that it contained a book, the only one they hadn’t sold because of the personal note. Elisabetta, who had a passable grasp of written German, read the note to herself slowly, translating as best she could.

To my teacher, my mentor, my friend. I found this in the hands of a dealer and I enticed him to part with it. You, more than anyone, will appreciate it. It is the B Text, of course. As you always taught – B holds the key. 11 September is surely a sign, don’t you think? I hope you will be with us when M’s day finally comes. K. October 2001.

Beneath the date was a small hand-drawn symbol.

This sight of it made Elisabetta’s head swim.

There was something strangely familiar about it, real and unreal at the same time, as if she’d seen it before in a long-forgotten dream.

She tried to shrug off the feeling as she opened the envelope. Inside was a slim bound book. Its cover was plain, worn leather, ever so slightly warped. The pages were a bit foxed. It was an old book in fairly good condition.

When she opened the cover her head cleared as effectively as if she’d taken a strong whiff of smelling salts.

Elisabetta didn’t think she’d ever seen the engraving before, but part of it was as recognizable as her own reflection in the mirror.

It was a 1620 edition of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, and there on the frontispiece was the old conjuror wearing his academic robes, standing inside his magic circle with his staff and his book, summoning the devil through the floor. The devil was a winged creature with horns, a pointy beard and a long curled tail.

None of that made Elisabetta’s heart race or her skin crawl. None of it made her feel like she was suffocating under her tight veil and gown.

The source of her alarm lay around and within the rim of the magic circle.

Constellation signs.

Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer.

Star signs.

The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, presented in the same peculiar order as on the fresco at St Callixtus.

And peeking out to the right of Faustus’s robes was Pisces, tilted upright, looking for all the world like a man with a tail.