The Devil Will Come (23 page)

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.

Rome,
AD
64

IT WAS MID-JULY
and many of the noble families of Rome had retreated from the scorching heat to the breezier climes of their villas on the western coast or their estates high in the piney hills. A million of the less fortunate were left behind. The shimmering air above the metropolis reeked of smoke from tens of thousands of cooking fires and a thin layer of black ash settled on roofs and cobbles like a sinister summer snow.

Everything was parched: men’s throats, the sandy soil, the fissured timbers and rafters of the ancient tenements. Water, always important to Rome, was never more vital than during the rainless drought of that hot summer.

A thousand freedmen and slaves worked perpetually in the city’s water gangs, keeping the aqueducts, reservoirs and kilometers of pipes in order. A hundred public buildings, five hundred public basins and bathhouses and dozens of ornamental fountains received running water around the clock but for weeks the loudest sound that the system produced had been grumbling.

Water wasn’t flowing as it should; it was trickling. The basins were dangerously low, the bathhouses were raising their prices, the brewers were charging more for beer. The vigiles, the night-owls of the city, knew the hazard. Organized into seven cohorts of a thousand men each, they slept by day and by night they patrolled the impossibly narrow dark lanes of the vast capital, prowling for incipient house fires. Their only effective weapons were bronze and leather buckets which they passed from hand to hand in human chains from the nearest basin or, if close enough, the Tiber. But this season the water levels were too meager to do much good and the vigiles knew why. It was more than drought.

The puncturers were relentless and the water commissioner, a close relative of Prefect Tigellinus, was getting rich.

Before decamping for Antium a fortnight earlier, Nero had told Tigellinus, ‘Have your brother-in-law bleed it dry,’ and virtually overnight corrupt water bosses had their gangs of puncturers tap into the system with illegal pipes. Torrents of tax-free water rushed to Lemures privateers and the vigiles could do little more than bite their nails to the quick as they watched Rome turn to kindling. It had been twenty-eight years since the last major fire.

July was a festival month and the chariot-race season was in full swing. Nothing distracted the masses from the misery of the heat and humidity like a day of sport at the Circus Maximus. Up to 200,000 Romans
crammed
into the stands to root for one of their teams, the Blues, Reds, Greens or Whites, each controlled by a corporation. Quadrias – four-horse chariots – raced around the long narrow U-shaped track and if the drivers and animals survived the hairpin turns the prizes were great. Below the stands were several bustling floors of wine bars, hot-food shops, bakeries and plenty of prostitution dens.

The day was propitious in other ways, too. Balbilus had told Nero that it would be so after poring over his astrological charts. Sirius, the Dog Star, rose in the heavens that night, signaling the hottest days of the summer. But furthermore its path took it through the House of Death. That had sealed it. The time of destiny had come.