On the Fifth Day (24 page)

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

where to go or how he was going to get there, but he had no doubt that Roberta--or whatever her real name was--was not working alone. If he spent another night at the Executive, he was sure, it would be his last.

He drove to the Ercolano station, abandoned the car, resis

ted the urge to grab a beer from a neighboring bar, and took the train to Garibaldi and a cab to the hotel. On the train he searched Roberta's phone for any dialed or received numbers, but all the directories had been wiped clean.

"Cops were looking for you, bro," remarked Brad with a broad grin. He was lounging at the Executive's bar with a glass of orange juice in his hand and flagged Thomas down before he even collected his key. "What you been up to?"

Thomas stiffened.

Roberta?

Not yet, surely. And she wouldn't go to the police. This had to be about Satoh.

Thomas smiled weakly and turned to the level gray eyes of the concierge.

"They want you to call them as soon as you return," the Italian said. "And if you don't, they want me to call them for you."

It was almost a question and Thomas thought fast.

"How about I step out," he began carefully, "to talk to the priest round the corner and
then
come back and
then
we have this conversation, you and I?"

The concierge looked at him for a long moment.

"Be quick," he said, at last.

It was nine o'clock. Giovanni answered the retreat house door and immediately shook his head.

"Pietro is not here," he said. "He's at his church. Santa Maria del Carmine."

"Do you have a phone number for him there?"

"Yes," said Giovanni, fishing in his pocket and producing the retreat house's business card. "The second number."

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"Okay," said Thomas, walking away.

"He will not talk to you," said Giovanni.

"He has no choice," said Thomas, still walking. "And nei

ther do I."

He walked quickly away from the hotel, dialing on Roberta's phone, scanning the dark but busy street for a cab. Pietro answered on the third ring, giving the name of the church in a brusque mumble.

"This is Thomas Knight. Eduardo's brother. Don't hang up."

He had no idea how good Pietro's English was. He paused and, for a moment, there was silence.

"Yes," said the voice at the other end, sounding far away.

"I'm coming to see you," said Thomas with force. "Now. Someone just tried to kill me."

He didn't know how much of this the old priest was get

ting, and part of him didn't care.

"Okay," said the priest.

Thomas stopped in his tracks. No shouting? No threats?

Then the voice came back, slow, careful.

"Tanaka is dead?" it said.

"Tanaka?" asked Thomas.

"The Japanese," said Pietro.

"He told me his name was Satoh."

"He is dead?"

"Yes."

Another long pause, and what might have been a sigh.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay what?" said Thomas.

"I will show you Eduardo's papers."

"You didn't burn them?"

"No."

Thomas's surging triumph was tempered by anger.

"But you deliberately made it look like you had, so that I wouldn't ask to see them again. Where are they? I want them now."

"I say
messa.
"

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"Mass?"

"Yes," said the priest. "You come?"

"Come to mass?" said Thomas, incredulous.

"Yes. Come. Pray for me."

"No," said Thomas, brushing away the invitation irritably. He was in no mood for an olive branch, particularly after

"Roberta's" use of the same ruse on Vesuvius.

"Half hour only," said the priest.

Either the priest was using a short form of the liturgy, or he motored through it. But there would be nobody there and there would be no singing. That would keep it short. This was no scheduled mass he was being invited to. This would be just the two of them.

You could go. Sit at the back, listen, like you used to.
No.

"You go ahead," said Thomas. "I'll be there by the time you're done."

"Okay," said the priest, giving in, and then the phone went dead.

Thomas took a cab up past the museum and through a labyrinth of increasingly chaotic streets. Here as elsewhere in the city the churches were joined to the neighboring build

ings, and since they lacked spires, they were identifiable only by their ornate doors and the invariably sooty inscrip

tions above them. Thomas peered out of the window looking for Santa Maria del Carmine as the streets got narrower and poorer, though the buildings themselves had clearly once been opulent. The traffic got heavier, more dominated by tiny cars and scooters, often overburdened with multiple children, all laughing and shouting to each other. The cobbled roads of the Sanita thronged with foot traffic too, and there were the ends of makeshift markets at intersec

tions where people were clearing away trays of submerged clams, crabs, and mussels. Twice the driver stopped and 176

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leaned out the window to ask directions. A young woman in a pink T-shirt and designer sunglasses pointed up the street without speaking and then eased off between the honking cars as if she couldn't see them or--more likely--as if they were beneath her consideration. They parted before her like the Red Sea and she strode down a street where washing hung like a triumphal arch.

Thomas paid the driver ten euros and he pulled away, ap

parently glad to head back to more familiar neighborhoods. Thomas couldn't blame him. He hadn't felt so out of place since arriving in Italy, maybe for many years before.
Since Japan.

There were no tourists here. He had stepped into the heart of a community where he was a curiosity. He had seen noth

ing of Naples's much-touted street crime, but at night in a place like this he felt as if he were wearing a sign around his neck. He felt the frank, interested, and mildly amused eyes of people on him as he strolled through the place where they worked and played and lived, and he felt like apologizing. All he needed was for Pietro to kick him out into the street and he might need more than apologies to get out of the place in one piece.

It was completely dark here now, the streets unlit.
Perfect.

He felt the weight of the gun in his jacket pocket.

"Hi," said a shirtless kid on a bike. "Hi, American."

He was perhaps eight. His buddies roared with laughter and echoed his greeting. Someone shouted "Coca-Cola," and they laughed some more before running off into the night. Santa Maria del Carmine was pale yellow, trimmed with gray stone, well maintained, but old without being monumen

tal. The road, he noticed with a little chill, was Via Fontanelle alla Sanita. He approached the church door, grasped the ring, and twisted it. The door swung softly open.

CHAPTER 45

The church was cool and dim, its pale, uncluttered nave bright

ened only by the lights of a few votive candles in front of a statue and the gleam of brass on the altar. The ranked wooden pews were empty. There was no sound, no sign of anyone there.

Thomas inched forward, aware of the way his footsteps echoed. He felt the old mixture of awe and anxiety that churches had always produced in him, heightened this time by anticipation. He couldn't begin to guess what the strange old priest would tell him. He inhaled, tasting the trace of incense and candle wax, and then began to walk down the side aisle toward the front. At the altar rail he paused, re

pressed an impulse to genuflect, and went through a door in the wall.

The door gave onto a passage leading to a tiny sacristy that was as empty as the church.

"Hello?" he called. "Monsignor Pietro?"

Nothing.

In the corner he saw and climbed a cramped staircase up to the priest's equally cramped living quarters: a single room with a hot plate and a sink. The toilet was off the sacristy pas

sageway. The bedroom had no central light and the desk lamp was meager indeed, so that the room was bathed in a dull cop

per glow.

He looked around the bare room.

"Father McKenzie, darning his socks in the night when
there's nobody there . . ."

His eye fell on a book.
Hymn of the Universe
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The name was familiar and the book was in English. One of Ed's.

He flipped it open at random, found a passage marked by a vertical pencil line, and read.

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Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock:
you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if
we would eat.

Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable
passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evo

lution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shat

tering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and
further in pursuit of truth.

Thomas turned to the frontispiece and read about the au

thor: an early-twentieth-century French Jesuit.
Weird,
he thought.
And unsettling, that conviction, that
strange, intense mysticism, particularly in service of so con

crete a subject. Matter? What brand of Catholicism sung
hymns to matter?

Thomas brooded, listening to the silence, his mind wan

dering back to what Pietro had said. He had known Satoh, ap

parently, though he had called him Tanaka, and his death seemed to have changed things. Why?

The cry that tore the silence--a long, trailing wail that snaked up the stairs from somewhere far away--snapped Thomas to his feet, carried him toward the stairs on a wave of horror and despair.

CHAPTER 46

Thomas descended without hope, driven only by a mad need to know. He ran, his heart thumping, stumbling down the stairs, into the sacristy, back through the lightless passage. He burst into the church.

It was quite empty. The rear doors were still closed. The pews were deserted. Thomas stepped up onto the elevated part 179

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of the sanctuary, his back to the altar, and gazed down the length of the nave: nothing.

And then he heard a slight pattering like rain behind him. He turned slowly, the trepidation he had felt cooling, hard

ening like stone in his gut. Behind the altar the stone floor was half covered by a gleaming irregular pool, and though the light was low it was clear that the liquid was a dark, terrible scarlet. Another drop fell into the pool, then another. Thomas forced himself to look up.

Against the rear wall of the apse was a high altar with a golden tabernacle, six tall candles, and, above it all, a framed icon of the Madonna and Child with a triangular pediment. Suspended in front of this from the gallery of the dome above, hanging by a length of heavy chain, was the monsignor.
No. Not this. Not now.

His torn cassock was black and glistening with blood so that it was hard to see what had been done to him, but it seemed that the chain that bore his weight had been laced through his chest, so that he hung by his breastbone in the air of the chancel.

For a long moment Thomas could not move, and then he caught the merest whisper of sound and looked up. The priest's eyes had opened. He was still alive.

Thomas looked wildly around, the spell broken. He couldn't climb up the altar to him. He had to get up to the gallery in the dome.

Where are the damned stairs?

He leaped down the steps of the sanctuary and threw open the door to the sacristy. There in the wall was a doorway, be

hind it a flight of stone steps. He ran up them two at a time and cannoned out into the emptiness of the dome so fast that he al

most went right over the rail.

The gallery was narrow, the rail a single wrought-iron rod circling the dome at waist height. He forced himself to slow down, inching to where the chain had been lashed to the slender fence, leaving twenty or thirty feet coiled untidily. It would take an age to untangle the knotted chain that kept him suspended 180

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there, so there was nothing to do but drag the old priest up. Thomas grasped the chain, slick in places with blood, and be

gan to pull.

Pietro was a big man. Thomas strained, but he just couldn't move him. He tried to gather the chain over his shoulder, but the dome gave him nowhere to go and the more he pulled, the more it felt like the weight would drag him over the rail. He relaxed and took a breath. Below him, the old priest groaned. He wouldn't last much longer.

Thomas braced his feet against the iron bases of the rail, leaned back as far as he could, and began to haul using only his arms and chest. He worked hand over hand, six inches of chain at a time, head back, teeth clenched, his shoulder blades squared, and sweat breaking out all over his torso. He pulled with one hand till his fist reached his shoulder, then did the same with the other. Each pull was harder than the one before it, each one strained his muscle and sinew till he thought something would pop, and twice he felt his grip slide a link or two down the chain, so that he had to just hold it tight until the energy to pull farther came back to him. At last, with a cry of determined fury, he hauled the priest to the top. Thomas seized Pietro under the arms, dragging, shunting, levering him up and over the rail. As he did so, the pistol slipped from his pocket, hit the gallery floor, and bounced through the railings and down, clattering hollowly in the church below.

He's dead already,
Thomas thought, panting, and for a long moment the priest made no sound or movement, and his blood-spattered face was still as earth.

Then the eyes flickered and opened halfway, and the mouth parted.

"Thomas," he said, slowly, struggling to get the words out.