The Devil Will Come (9 page)

It was their private joke. Marilena was always sneaking into the chapel for extra prayers. The order was under-funded. They needed more books and computers. With the dearth of novices entering the order they had to rely on lay contract teachers who were
expensive
. Most parents could ill afford a hike in fees. So Marilena was always praying for more resources.

‘I believe God heard me this time,’ Marilena said, her stock answer.

Elisabetta smiled and asked, ‘How did Michele do on her geometry test?’

‘Not well. Does that surprise you?’

‘No. She’ll need extra help.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marilena said, ‘I have vivid memories of Pythagoras and Euclid. How did
you
get on?’

‘I don’t like it. I hardly had a moment to pray.’

‘You hardly have a moment during school.’

‘It’s different. Here, I’m with you. Their office is alien to me and so are the people.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘I hope not,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I want to finish the assignment and come back.’

Marilena nodded. ‘You’ll do what the Church asks of you and I’m quite sure that God will bless you for your service. Now come and eat before we both get in trouble with mama.’

Later, in her room, Elisabetta sat at her study desk in nightgown and slippers, trying to finish the articles that Micaela had sent her. It was hard going. The subject matter was technical and frankly distasteful – a compendium of medical literature on human tails. Most of the reports were in English and these she tackled first. There were a smattering in French, German, Russian and Japanese which she left for later.

She put down her fourteenth paper of the day on
atavistic
human tails, a term with which she’d previously been unfamiliar. Atavism: the reappearance of a lost characteristic specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor. Like other atavisms, the scientific literature addressed human tails as one example of our common heritage with non-human mammals.

Elisabetta wasn’t going to let herself be drawn into a debate on evolutionary biology. She was trained as a scientist and preferred to let Church doctrine coexist peacefully with truisms about evolution, at least in her own mind. No one in the Church had ever had occasion to question her about her beliefs on the matter and she’d try to keep it so.

Human tails, she learned, were rare – very rare, with only about a hundred well-documented cases in the past century. Elisabetta forced herself to study the photos, especially those of babies. They stirred something inside her, something deeply disturbing and base: a stomach-churning revulsion. And there was more: an element of fear. An ancient Darwinian fear of prey in the presence of a predator. She took a deep breath and pressed on.

Human tails ranged from short nubbins to longer snake-like appendages. They possessed all the structures of mammalian tails with extra bones – up to half a dozen coccygeal vertebrae – covered by sinew and muscle and pink skin. They could move with the full voluntary control of striated muscle.

Most parents opted for surgical removal lest the
child
grow up stigmatized and for that reason tails in adults were even more unusual.

Elisabetta’s eyelids grew heavy. She’d gotten through all the English-language papers and she was finding them repetitive. A German paper was at the top of the pile. It was from the
Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift
, a short piece from 2007. Her knowledge of German wasn’t good but she thought the title referred to a case study of an adult human tail. The text was dense and impenetrable.

She’d tackle it in the morning, she decided.

It was time to clear her head and restore her balance with a short period of prayer before sleep overtook her.

As she rose from her chair Elisabetta had a sudden impulse to turn one more page. She tried to fight it but her hand moved too fast.

At the sight of the photo, she lost control of her legs and fell back onto the seat hard enough to make her gasp in pain.

Dear God
.

A naked old corpse lay prone on an autopsy table, photographed from waist to knees.

Arising above wrinkled male buttocks was a tail, twenty centimeters from its base to its tip by the measuring rule laid beside it. It was thick at its base, its whole length cylindrical and untapered with an abruptly stubby tip like the cut edge of a sausage.

But there was more.

Elisabetta tried to swallow but her mouth was too
dry
. She squinted hard at the photo and adjusted her reading light but it wasn’t enough.

Breathing hard, she ran from her room, grabbing at her dressing gown and donning it as she flew down the hall. Sister Silvia, a dear lady with a weak bladder on her way to the lavatory, was speechless as Elisabetta rushed past and careened down the stairs to the classrooms.

She switched on the lights and found what she needed in the science room. Then she ran back up the stairs, clutching a magnifying glass.

She sat back down at her desk. The base of the dead man’s spine – that was what had seized her attention like a hard slap to the face.

There they were, visible under the magnifying glass, ringing the tail in concentric semicircles: a flock of small black tattoos. Elisabetta was seized with a paralyzing fear, as if this naked old corpse might rise from the page and strike at her with a knife aimed for her heart.

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?