The Devil Will Come

EIGHTEEN

MICHELANGELO’S SISTINE CHAPEL WAS not created for hordes of tourists craning their necks and strobing the chamber with their digital flashes.

It was created for this.

Sealed and empty, it was grandly silent and expectant, evenly and naturally lit from the high windows which lined the chapel from their position just below the painted ceiling.

Rows of brown-velvet-topped tables were carefully laid out on either side of the chapel, facing each other, each table with a simple white card bearing a cardinal’s name.

There was a sound of an ancient key in an ancient lock and a heavy door groaned open. Then a sound of sniffing and claws scratching on the mosaic floor.

The Alsatian dog strained at its leash, its ears erect and eager, its tail wagging with purpose. Its handler from the security contractor Gruppo BRM let it do its job. It went straight for the nearest table, sniffed at the floor-length velvet drape and poked its large black and brown head underneath.

The dog resurfaced, its tail in the same state of readiness. It strained for the next table down the line.

Hackel motioned to his man, Glauser, who seemed overjoyed that he’d been given a plain-clothes assignment for the Conclave, a black suit cut with enough room to conceal a modified Heckler & Koch submachine gun. ‘Bring in the electronics team to start sweeping behind the dog.’

Glauser nodded and went to fetch the bug sweepers.

When they were done with the chapel, the security detail proceeded en masse to the small adjoining rooms including the Room of Tears – where the new Pope would briefly contemplate his fate alone – the Vestments Room and on down to the basement rooms where they completed the sweep.

In the courtyard behind the chapel, Hackel watched the Gruppo BRM people packing up their gear and loading the dog into a van. Glauser approached him and said, ‘From this point on, I’ll double the guard and maintain the highest level of sterility.’

Hackel pointed a finger at him and growled, ‘You make sure of that.’

Elisabetta had the apartment to herself. She’d returned there after mass at Santa Maria in Trastevere and the day stretched out oddly in front of her. She wasn’t at all used to unstructured time but she wasn’t going to turn on the television, was she?

First she spent an hour on her father’s computer researching Lumbubashi and the Republic of Congo. Such a poor country, she thought. So many needs. But despite the poverty, the children on the Order’s website seemed so cheerful and fresh-faced. That, at least, buoyed her spirits.

She sighed and rose. The light streaming through the windows accentuated the dust on the furniture. Unlike her father’s cleaning lady, she could move his books and papers with impunity and dust and polish under surfaces that hadn’t been tended for years.

Elisabetta went to her bedroom, slipped off her shoes and then her robes. The drawers of her old dresser were swollen with humidity and it took several determined tugs to open them. She hadn’t looked at her clothes in years and the sight of her old jeans and sweaters brought back a torrent of memories. She reached for a faded pair of Levis she’d bought on a school trip to New York and her fingertips brushed something underneath them.

It was a velvet box.

She sat back on her bed, her chest shuddering, trying to suppress tears. The box was on her bare knees. She opened the lid. The sunlight caught Marco’s pendant and bounced wildly off its faceted surface. It was as pretty and sparkly as the day she’d first put it on.

It was a hot night. Elisabetta’s window was wide open but the air was hardly moving.

Marco put his forefinger onto the heart-shaped pendant, pressing it lightly against the top of her breast. Her skin was glistening and she was breathing heavily. They were bathed in candlelight.

‘Do you still like it?’ he asked.

‘Of course I do. Don’t you notice I never take it off?’

‘I have noticed. Even when you make love.’

‘With the other boys, I take it off,’ she said, poking him in the ribs.

He pouted. ‘Ah, very nice.’

Elisabetta kissed his cheek, then ran her tongue playfully over Marco’s stubble. He tasted salty. ‘Don’t worry. You’re the only one.’

He sat up beside her in the bed, pulled his knees against his chest and suddenly said. ‘We’re going to get married, aren’t we?’

She sat up too and looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s not a proposal, is it?’

Marco shrugged. ‘It’s just a question. I mean, I think I know the answer, I just want to make sure you know it too.’

He was like a man-child that night. So big and potent, but at the same time so vulnerable and insecure. ‘Who else would I marry?’ Elisabetta placed her palm on his naked back and moved it slowly down over his spine until she got to the hollow at the small of his back. It was smooth and strong and, for a reason she didn’t understand, was her favorite spot on his body.

Elisabetta put the velvet box back into the drawer, as carefully as if she were handling a saint’s relic. She pulled on the old Levis – which still fit – and then a musty sweatshirt.

As she cleaned the apartment, she tried not to think about Marco. She had always been good at blotting out thoughts of him but today the only thing with any chance of accomplishing that was Africa.

The news from Sister Marilena had shaken her deeply. She’d spent the night in denial, suppressing a sense of indignation, even anger. Who was playing with her life, pulling strings as if she were a marionette? Why was she being ripped from her convent and her students, indeed from the very membrane of her life?

But as she’d prayed at Mass that morning her attitude had begun to shift and her mood had lightened. How arrogant and self-important of her to question her fate! Not only was she in God’s hands but it dawned on her that the Congo was His gift. It was a chance, Elisabetta realized, to shed the heavy load she’d been forced to carry. She could leave behind the skeletons and the men with tails and their dark little tattoos and get back to her true calling, the service of God and the education of His children. The convent school in Lumbubashi was far away and pure and good and she would be restored there. Of course she would miss her family and her community of Sisters but her sacrifice was nothing compared to the sacrifice that Christ had made. Christ’s love would sustain her in a foreign land and the happy faces of the little children called to her from the pages of Lumbubashi’s website.

The sitting room, kitchen, dining room, hall and guest lavatory were gleaming and smelled of fresh cleaning products. She’d do the bedrooms next, starting with her own and doing her father’s last. Elisabetta pushed the vacuum cleaner into her bedroom, plugged it in and began to run it over the carpet when the Faustus book and Bruno Ottinger’s envelope caught her eye. She turned off the machine and sat at her desk, rereading the inscription from this mysterious K to Ottinger.

She sighed at her weakness. She couldn’t let go.

I’m not leaving for six days, she thought. What would it matter if I spent some of my time before I got on the plane doing more than cleaning?

Armed with a cup of coffee and a phone number from the University of Ulm web page, Elisabetta sat in her father’s kitchen cradling a telephone under her chin. She talked her way past an imperious secretary and was soon on the line with the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Daniel Friedrich.

Dean Friedrich listened quietly to Elisabetta’s request for information about Bruno Ottinger but as soon as she spoke she knew he couldn’t be helpful. He was relatively new at the University and although he had a vague knowledge that Ottinger had been in the department years earlier, he had no personal knowledge of the man. He also sounded as if he had more important things to attend to.

‘Are there any older faculty members who might remember him?’ she asked.

‘Maybe Hermann Straub,’ the Dean said irritably. ‘He’s been here forever.’

‘Might I speak with him?’

‘Tell you what,’ Friedrich snapped. ‘Call back and leave your number with my secretary. She’ll see if Straub wants to contact you. That’s the best I can do.’

Elisabetta had already pulled Straub’s office number from the website and she rang it the instant the line went dead. An older-sounding man answered formally in German but switched to serviceable English when she asked if he spoke English or Italian.

Straub was instantly charming and, she imagined from his syrupy tone, something of an aging ladies’ man. She didn’t risk putting him off by mentioning she was a nun.

‘Yes,’ he answered with surprise. ‘I knew Ottinger quite well. We were colleagues for many years. He died some years ago, you know.’

‘Yes, I know. Perhaps you can help me, then. I came into possession of one of his treasured possessions – an old book – through a mutual acquaintance. It made me curious. I wanted to try to find out something about him.’

‘Well, I have to say that Ottinger wasn’t the easiest man in the world. I got along with him fairly well, but I was in the minority. He was quite hard, quite tough. Most students didn’t like him and his relations with other faculty members were strained. Some of my colleagues refused to speak with him for years. But he was a very brilliant man and an excellent mechanical engineer and I appreciated his work. And he appreciated my work, so that was the basis, I think, for an acceptable departmental relationship.’

‘What did you know of his life outside the University?’

‘Very little, really. He was a private man and I respected that. To my knowledge he lived alone and had no family. He acted like an old bachelor. His collars were frayed, his sweaters had holes – that sort of thing.’

‘You knew nothing about his non-academic interests?’

‘I only know that his politics were a little on the extreme side. We didn’t have big political conversations or anything like that, but he often made small comments that showed which direction he tilted.’

‘And that was?’

‘To the right. To the far right, I’d say. Our University is quite liberal and he was always muttering about socialist this and communist that. I think he also had some biases against immigrants. The students we had from Turkey and such places, well, they knew Ottinger’s reputation and they stayed away from his courses.’

‘Did he belong to any political party?’ Elisabetta asked.

‘That, I wouldn’t know.’

‘Did he ever mention an interest in literature?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘Did he ever talk of Christopher Marlowe or the Faustus play?’

‘To me? I’m certain he didn’t.’

‘Did he ever bring up someone he called “K”?’

‘Again, not that I recall. These are very odd questions, young lady.’

Elisabetta laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose they are. But I’m saving the oddest for last. Are you aware of any anatomical abnormalities that he might have had?’

‘I don’t know what you could possibly mean.’

She took a breath. Why hide it? ‘Bruno Ottinger had a tail. Was that something you knew?’

There was a longish pause. ‘A tail, you say! How marvelous! Of all the characters I’ve known in my life, Ottinger, that old devil, would certainly be the one man to have a tail!’

Once Elisabetta had pulled back the heavy curtains and let the light pour in she discovered that her father’s bedroom wasn’t the disaster she had expected. True, his bed was unmade and books and clothes were strewn everywhere but there wasn’t much dust and the en suite bathroom was acceptable. The cleaner, it appeared, had periodic access to his inner sanctum.

She stripped the bed, gathered the towels and dirty clothes and began to assemble a load of laundry.

She left the second bed untouched. The bedspread was perfectly draped, the decorative pillows in precise rows of descending size. It seemed as though it was protected by some force field – the only surface unencumbered by her father’s things.

Her mother’s bed.

Returning to the bedroom, hands on hips, Elisabetta surveyed the untidiness. She reckoned there’d be hell to pay for organizing his books and papers but she was determined to take a stab at it. Besides, she could do it with more care than anyone else: Goldbach monographs in one place, Goldbach notebooks and scraps of paper in another. Lecture notes here. Detective novels there.

One bookcase was neat as a pin, the one next to her mother’s bed. Flavia Celestino’s books, most of them on medieval history, remained in the same exact order as on the day she died. Elisabetta reached for one, Elizabeth and Pius V – The Excommunication of a Queen, and sat on the bed. The dust jacket was bright and clean, a pristine copy of a 26-year-old book. She opened it to the inside back flap and gazed at the author’s photo.

It was like looking into a mirror.

Elisabetta had forgotten how much she looked like her mother; the photo had been taken when Flavia was about her own age. The same high forehead, the same cheekbones, the same lips. Even though she’d been a young girl when the book came out, she remembered the soirée her parents threw and how proud and radiant her mother had been over its publication. Her academic career at the History Department at La Sapienza was launched. Who could have known she’d be dead within a year?

Elisabetta had never read the book. She had avoided doing so in the same way that one avoids dwelling on the memory of a painful love affair. But at that moment she resolved to take a copy to Africa. She’d start reading on the flight. It would be a long-neglected conversation. Absently, she thumbed through the pages and dipped into a paragraph or two. There was a light turn of phrase evident in the style. Flavia, it seemed, was a good writer and that pleased her.

An envelope dropped onto her lap – a bookmark, she supposed. She turned it over and was surprised to see the Vatican seal. The envelope was unaddressed, unused, never sealed. There was a card inside. With a curious anticipation she pulled it out and instantly froze.

There it was!

She had seen it before. She remembered.

The bedroom door loomed large and scary.

‘Go in,’ her father said. ‘It’s okay. She wants to see you.’

Elisabetta’s feet seemed to be stuck.

‘Go on!’

The doorknob was at a child’s eye level. She turned it and was assaulted with the unfamiliar smells of a sickroom. She crept toward her mother’s bed.

A thin voice called to her. ‘Elisabetta, come.’

Her mother was propped up on big pillows, covered by bedclothes. Her face was hollow, her skin dull. Every so often she seemed to be fighting off a wince so as not to scare her daughter with facial contortions.

‘Are you sick, momma?’

‘Yes, sweetheart. Momma’s sick.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why. The doctors don’t know either. I’m trying my hardest to get better.’

‘Should I pray for you?’

‘Yes, why not? Praying is always good. When in doubt, pray. Are you eating all your food?’

Elisabetta nodded.

‘Your brother and sister too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Papa?’

‘He’s just picking.’

‘Oh, dear. That won’t do. Elisabetta, you’re only young but you’re the oldest. I want you to promise me something. I want you always to take care of Micaela and little Zazo. And if you’re able, try to take some care of Papa too. He gets distracted by his work and sometimes needs to be reminded of things.’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘And don’t forget to take care of yourself too. You’re going to have your own life to lead. I want you to try always to be the happy little girl I love so much.’

Her mother had a spasm, strong enough that it couldn’t be denied. She clutched involuntarily at her stomach and when she did a small pile of papers slid off her belly. A card slipped off the bed onto the floor. Elisabetta picked it up and looked at it.

‘What’s that?’ Elisabetta asked.

Her mother snatched it from her fingers and tucked it in back among her papers. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a picture. Come closer. I want to kiss you.’

Elisabetta felt dry lips against her forehead.

‘You’re a good girl, sweetheart. You’ve got the best heart I know. But remember: not everyone in the world is good. You must never let your guard down against evil.’

Elisabetta held the card in her hand and sobbed. At that moment her mother’s death felt as raw and fresh as the day it had happened. She desperately wanted to reach back and speak to her one more time, ask for an explanation, ask for help.

There was a sharp rapping coming from the front door, the sound of a single insistent knuckle against heavy wood. She tucked the card back in the book, dried her face with her palms and began to wonder how someone had got past the entrance without being buzzed through. Was it a neighbor?

She put her tearful eye against the peephole and pulled back with a start.

The pale, elongated face of Father Pascal Tremblay filled the fisheye lens and Elisabetta’s first confused instinct was to run and hide underneath her mother’s bed.