The Devil Will Come (38 page)

Micaela climbed down and tried to find an arm or a leg that belonged to Mulej under the debris. She dug around and found a wrist.

‘Good,’ she said out loud when she couldn’t detect a pulse.

Elisabetta regained consciousness quickly but it took several moments to get her bearings.

She was lying on her side in the center of the great room. The fire was crackling and popping fiercely. The
big
television was still showing the crowds at St Peter’s. Her jaw hurt terribly.

Where was Krek?

There was a weight on top of her.

Then she felt herself being turned onto her back.

A hand slipped up under her robes and she smelled the whiskey on her assailant’s breath.

‘I’ve always been curious,’ Krek said, breathing hard, his cheek touching hers. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what nuns wear under these habits.’

Elisabetta didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of weeping or pleading. Instead she squirmed and thrashed like a bucking horse and tried to throw him off.

‘Good, good!’ he shouted. ‘I like this. Fight harder!’

He had her robes up around her waist and as they bunched she felt something sharp against her stomach.

She remembered.

Elisabetta kept fighting Krek off with her left hand while she thrust her right one into the pocket of her tunic. She felt for the object and when she had it in her grasp she eased it open.

Her father’s pipe tool. This simple, comforting little implement.

Krek let up for just a couple of seconds to arch his back and undo his belt and that was all the time Elisabetta needed.

She slid the pipe tool from her pocket and punched
it
into Krek’s chest with all the strength she had in her arm.

He said nothing. She didn’t know she’d accomplished anything at all until she let her hand go and saw the tool sticking through his sweater, the aerator spike fully buried. There was no blood.

Krek looked down, rolled off Elisabetta and rose to his feet. He looked amused. ‘What is this? What did you do?’

He pulled out the pipe tool and laughed. ‘No, thank you! I smoke cigars!’

To Elisabetta’s horror, he seemed perfectly fine. As she lay on the rug he casually lowered his trousers, enough to reveal his lower back. ‘Have you ever seen one of these?’

He made a half-turn to show her his spine. His tail was thick, twitching like an angry snake. His tattoos were black and crisp, menacing but, to Elisabetta, no longer mysterious.

She started to crawl away.

But as Krek turned back to her something was happening inside his chest.

Blood was leaking from a small wound in his heart into the pericardial sac and when the sac was full it squeezed his heart like an orange in a juicer.

He inhaled sharply and began to wheeze.

Krek clutched at his chest and lifted up his sweater as if that might help give him more air.

He began to teeter, then slowly pitched forward like a felled tree.

He tried to speak but nothing came out.

And just before he crashed down pure rage possessed his face.

Elisabetta had never before seen a look of such hatred.

IT HAD BEEN
a false alarm.

The man apprehended by the Vatican Gendarmes at the metal detector was an off-duty Rome policeman with an unloaded service weapon in his backpack. He’d come to St Peter’s Square to join in the Conclave vigil and had forgotten he’d brought his gun. He was chagrined and apologetic. His identity checked out. The man with him was his cousin.

Hackel waited outside the incident van where the men were being held. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and finally said to Oberst Sonnenberg, ‘I should be getting back to my post at the Chapel.’

‘Yes, go ahead, Oberstleutnant,’ Sonnenberg said. ‘I’ll check in with you soon. I don’t think we’ll be lucky enough to have white smoke tonight, but you never know.’

Hackel saluted and peeled away. When he was out of Sonnenberg’s sight he reversed direction and made for his flat.

Micaela briefly considered digging at the rubble to see if the fat corpse had a mobile phone but the task seemed too formidable. She put her ear to the door and listened. The falling crate had made a terribly loud sound. If someone were nearby they would surely have noticed it.

Hearing nothing at the door she opened it a crack, then wide enough to poke her head through. The cellar hall was mostly dark; there was a naked bulb ten meters away. There was no one about. She began to walk toward the light.

Elisabetta stood over Krek’s prone, lifeless body. The tail which only moments ago had seemed so terrifyingly menacing now struck her as nothing but an anomalous piece of meat.

She felt her heart thumping wildly and tried to think. She had to sound the alarm. Krek’s telephone beckoned. She reached for it, then froze. What if the line was monitored? Would placing a call alert Krek’s people that she was running free and put Micaela’s life in danger? She had to save her sister first.

The great room had four doors and all of them, she found, were locked from the inside. Krek seemed to have liked his privacy.

Two of the doors along one wall led to different sides of the entrance hall. This was the way she had entered. Elisabetta visualized the route from the basement: up a set of stairs, into a hall off a small study,
through
a paneled library to the entrance hall and then into the great room. She was about to go into the hall when she heard heavy footsteps approaching. She retreated, closed the door and examined the other two.

The third door led directly to a stairway that went upstairs. The fourth one led to a dim, undecorated hallway – a servant’s passageway, perhaps. The coast seemed clear and she took the passageway.

Micaela shucked off her shoes to enable her to tread more silently and kicked them against the wall. The basement hall stretched a considerable distance without any sign of stairs and she wondered if she should have gone in the other direction. She tried several door latches along the way. Some were locked, others led to dark storage rooms.

Finally a poorly lit flight of stone stairs beckoned. Micaela climbed them gingerly, praying that she didn’t meet anyone along the way.

Elisabetta crept into a dining room with a banqueting table long enough to seat thirty comfortably. Through its leaded windows she could see a young man with a slung rifle patrolling the grounds. She ducked and frog-walked below the window line. At the opposite end of the dining room she stopped to put her ear to a set of double doors. Through the wood she heard the noise of a clattering of pots.

Micaela’s stairs took her to a rabbit warren of pantry rooms stocked with canned and dried goods. She found herself looking hungrily at labels and briefly searching in vain for a can opener to get at a tin of peaches.

She heard a gasp behind her and turned to see a huge woman wearing a chef’s apron looking as shocked as she herself must have looked. The woman let out a short shriek and began to flee but Micaela pursued her with the peach tin, laying her low with a single heavy blow to the back of her head. The woman went smashing into a shelf, taking a month’s worth of provisions to the floor with her.

Elisabetta heard a sharp cry and loud noises coming from the kitchen area. She crouched behind a large oriental vase in case someone came flying into the dining room but after several minutes all remained quiet. Cautiously, she entered the kitchen. Seeing nothing, she went through to the pantry where she found a hefty female chef lying unconscious, her chest heaving with grunts and snores. To one side was a flight of stairs to the basement. Elisabetta uttered a quick prayer and made a dash for them, wondering what had befallen the woman.

Micaela left the kitchen and found herself in the entrance hall, a vast expanse of marble and oversized ornamental furnishings. She stole across the hall, trying first one door, which was locked, then another. The
second
door was unlocked. She eased it open a centimeter at a time, trying to avoid any creaking.

Through the gap she took in a great room with an enormous fireplace before she spotted a half-naked body on the floor.

Micaela slinked inside and quietly locked the door behind her. The body lay still, with a cashmere sweater bunched up around its chest and slacks rolled down around its ankles. She approached it slowly and swore at what she saw.

A long, lifeless tail.

Elisabetta scurried down the basement hall, her habit sweeping the concrete floor. Suddenly something made her stop short. Micaela’s shoes! She cringed in fear but carried on to the room with the crates where she leapt inside, calling for her sister.

The room was in a shambles with planks from a burst crate, tufo earth and ancient bones scattered everywhere.

The sight under the mess of a hand that still had flesh on it almost made her scream but she gasped with relief when she saw a chunky man’s ring on one finger.

Micaela
, she thought,
where are you and what have you done?

Micaela armed herself with a fireplace poker and made doubly sure that all the doors were locked.

She stared at the phone, wishing that she knew the
Slovene
number for emergency services. Just then the phone rang and she backed away from it as if it were a coiled viper.

One of the doorknobs squeaked.

She inhaled deeply, unlocked the door, gripped the poker like an ax and raised it high above her head.

The knob turned and the door opened.

At that instant Micaela began her downward swing but at the last second was just able to check it when she glimpsed a nun’s black sleeve.

Zazo started to jog. The traffic was bad at this time of day and he thought he’d do better on foot than taking the bus. He started to form a plan. He’d get his car, head north and drive like hell to Slovenia. With luck he’d get to Bled before midnight. He’d demand to speak with Krek. They’d probably call the authorities and have him arrested but what else could he do? He was a policeman and this was his only lead.

His mobile phone chirped.

He plucked it from his pocket as he ran but came to a dead halt at the sight of the number.

929295.

Krek’s number!

‘Yes?’ he answered cautiously, panting from his running.

The whispering voice he heard was distraught and frantic. ‘Zazo! It’s me!’

His mind disconnected from his body at the sound
of
Elisabetta’s voice. It seemed to take him an eternity to answer.

‘My God! You’re in Slovenia! You’re with Krek!’

‘How did you know?’

‘Forget about that. Are you okay?’

‘Yes! No! He’s dead. I killed him, Zazo!’

‘Jesus! Is Micaela okay?’

‘Yes, we’re together. I’m sorry I’ve got to whisper but we’re hiding. Krek’s men are everywhere but they don’t know he’s dead.’

‘Okay, listen. If you’re safe where you are, stay put. I’ll call the Slovenian State Police.’

‘No, Zazo. I’ll call them. You’ve got to go to the Vatican.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a bomb in the Sistine Chapel, I’m sure of it. You’ve got to go there! You’ve got to stop the Conclave!’

Zazo was on Via Garibaldi. Cars and motorbikes were whizzing past. He stared at his phone for a moment to gather his wits and then speed-dialed Lorenzo. He got his voicemail.

He tried Inspector Loreti.

Voicemail there, too.

He was three or four kilometers away from the Vatican – too far to run.

On impulse Zazo stepped into the street, stretched his arms wide and blocked an approaching red Honda 1000. The rider almost lost control and stopped a
half-meter
before hitting him. The young man ripped off his helmet and began swearing.

Zazo pulled his badge from his back pocket. ‘Police! This is an emergency! I’m taking your bike!’

‘The hell you are!’ the man shouted.

Zazo instinctively reached for his gun but it was back at his flat. Instead he pointed a finger and menaced the Honda’s rider: ‘Do you want to go to jail for obstructing a police operation?’ When the fellow didn’t respond, Zazo pushed him hard with both hands. The bike tipped over and the young man fell to the ground. Zazo righted the Honda, mounted it and put it in gear. All the rider could do was scream at him and toss his helmet uselessly at his back.

Hackel locked the door of his flat and opened one of his west-facing windows to let in some fresh air. His building was too low for him to see the Sistine Chapel but the spire atop St Peter’s was visible against a hazy late-afternoon sky.

He turned on his television. The crowd in the Square was placid, expectant.

He went into the bedroom and slid open the top drawer of his dresser. Behind the folded stacks of black socks was a black and green box, the size of three packs of playing cards.

Hackel sat on his bed and tested the on-off switch of the Combifire detonator. He knew the batteries were fresh but just in case he was wrong he had spares.

A small bulb glowed green.

He put the detonator down and sighed.

He was troubled by the call that had been made to Krek’s residence by someone claiming to be him. The number texted to him was from a Rome exchange. Someone was onto him. Who? How? The notion of riding out the investigation was now absurd. He’d have to disappear immediately.

Hackel went to his closet and retrieved an empty suitcase.

Zazo gunned the Honda like a madman, weaving in and out of traffic, passing through gaps between cars so tight that he scraped their doors with the handlebars. The combination of rush-hour traffic and the extraordinary congestion around Vatican City made for total gridlock.

On the Via Domenico Silveri the traffic came to a complete stop. He looked up at the Dome of the Basilica, turned the handlebars and jumped the motorbike over the curb and onto the sidewalk.

Pedestrians yelled at him and he yelled back, making it clear that he wasn’t going to stop. Dodging and zigzagging, he made it to the Via della Stazione Vaticana where the sidewalks too became impassable.