The Maggot People (19 page)

Brother Paolo was still holding his old enemy firmly by the arm.

“If you'd be kind enough to accompany me this way,” he said, eagerly turning off into an ultra-modern passage, the walls of which were decorated with silver fish moving in highly decorative shoals towards a gilded arch lit by shimmering lights, a sort of imitation of sunlight passing through water: “We commissioned this installation; it was done by a Dane. You know, they really are the best at design—of course she had to be maggotized afterwards to keep her quiet.” Paolo's grip tightened. “Come on, I'll show you the new processing center. We're very proud of it.”

As they entered an expansive, brightly lit complex, O'Hara felt he had entered a world of fiction—an industrialized, genocidal facility of the spirit.

There was a good deal of machinery in there: tracks ran beneath the ceiling, with hooks sliding along, locking onto and picking up tubular aluminum chairs lowered by an automated crane.

A group of naked maggot people on what looked like a train platform were preparing for their imminent retirement. Some were smoking, others embracing or talking emotionally to friends who had come to wave them goodbye from an auditorium to one side. One, probably an Englishman, was calmly leafing through a newspaper while taking long thoughtful swigs from a bottle and puffing on a pipe. Beside him, a woman was undressing and carefully folding her clothes and some other personal effects into a regulation-size case. An orderly behind a counter, having presented her with various documents to sign, attached these to the case and then threw it onto a slow-moving conveyor belt; it passed through a scanning device before exiting through a small gate hung with undulating plastic strips.

“Now watch,” said Paolo, as the Englishman folded up his newspaper and left it on a table, then eased himself into a vacant chair like a traveler getting into his seat.

A young priest adjusted his armrests, fixed his head in a clamp, and unceremoniously sprayed his buttocks with a lubricating unction—then joined him in a quick prayer before sending him on his way.

O'Hara stared with mounting horror.

The chair drew level with an industrial robot, which swung into action, inserting its long snout through an opening at the base of the chair into the rear end of the passenger, then made a whining sound. As the machine sucked, the man collapsed like a balloon—only the head was unaffected, held in place by rubberized prongs at the top.

Once extraction was finished—a procedure that took no more than three or four seconds—the robot withdrew its nuzzle. There was another short interval before a green light flashed and an all-clear signal rang out. The machinery jerked into motion again with much clattering of metal.

At the other end of the production line, the chair slid onto a secondary track. Workers in white overalls unceremoniously unhooked the body-skin and transferred it to what can only be described as wheeled clothes-horse.

There was one final stage in the operation. The head was tagged through its left ear with a bar-code, then scanned using a small handheld device. Once the wheeled units were fully loaded, they were slowly pushed through vats of heavy-duty moisturizer, then left in a drying room, from where O'Hara heard the whirring of giant fans.

“This is monstrous,” he whispered, feeling his legs almost giving way beneath him. “I thought I was beyond forgiveness; I see now that I am nowhere near as wicked as…”

“We can handle up to about two hundred and forty extractions per hour,” said Paolo, a certain pride and professionalism in his voice as he watched the system in action. “We got the top people at Fiat to help us design the process. For now we're focusing more on extraction than refills—we haven't re-modernized that stage yet, but eventually we'll use that cavern over there for it.” He waved his arm towards a large, uneven opening in the rock wall at the far end. “The capital outlay is incredibly costly, so we thought we'd leave it for now. As we won't be doing much refilling for the next hundred years or so, it wouldn't be prudent to shell out all that money now. At this stage it's all about safe storage. We have space for about a million sleepers, and that should do us for now.”

“And you expect me to go through this. To sit on one of those things and…” O'Hara said.

Paolo gave him a little pat on the arm. “Don't worry, you'll go through it all right,” he said. “We all will. It will be done hygienically and safely and we'll be brought back when the time is right. See it as a blessing, if you can. Every person who enters this room is one of the chosen.” He sighed, and threw an envious look at the people waiting on the platform. “I'll have to wait at least a hundred years before I can retire… That's a day I'm looking forward to enormously.” Then, with a glance at his watch: “We must press on.”

They returned to the corridor—O'Hara still feeling his legs rather wobbly—and descended a few levels into far gloomier parts of the catacombs, where dungeons were still dungeons, with all the usual attributes such as cobwebs, Gothic columns, and oak doors. They reached the massive doors leading to Michael and Ariel's cell.

“This area will be preserved for its historical value,” said Paolo. “I expect one day it'll be a museum of sorts…” He hauled up a sturdy chain fastened in the depths of his pocket, then selected a small key from his burgeoning key ring and opened an electrical cupboard. Inside was a monitor, which he turned on. A high definition black-and-white image showed the cavern within. Using a joystick he rotated the camera, but there was no sign of those within—no sign at all.

With a frown Paolo punched in a code and pressed a large green button. The doors swung open soundlessly. He went inside for a closer look, but it was empty. He stood thunderstruck for a moment.

O'Hara inspected the cave, noting the chute coming out of the wall, the rib-shaped cage and the piles of straw. His mood lifted considerably. “There's nothing lovelier than a prison with broken doors,” he called out gleefully. “Makes an old Paddy like me think he's still in with a chance, know what I mean?”

“Shut up, idiot. Let me think.”

But there wasn't a great deal of thinking Paolo needed to do. He went back to the electrical cupboard and picked up a telephone.

Giacomo was sitting at his desk, thoughtfully looking at a custard roly-poly he'd been brought by one of the lay sisters—whose family's bakery was famous in Rome for its pastries. The custard had just enough solidity to prevent it from oozing, yet enough lightness to avoid lumpiness.

Beauty walks the razor's edge, thought Giacomo.

At this exact moment, the telephone, that ugly shrill modern invention, made its presence felt. Telephones were harbingers of bad news, disaster, and annoyance. He glared for a good while, then snatched it up and spluttered into the receiver: “Yes! What is it?”

“Michael and Ariel. They've gone,” Paolo announced breathlessly at the other end of the line. “I've searched their cell more times than I can count, I've turned over the straw, I've…”

“What do you mean they've gone? Where have they gone?”

“Basically they've dematerialized,” said Paolo. “We know he's done it before, Ariel told us. He spontaneously emptied himself and the maggots pulled his skin out of a tiny hole. At the psychiatric ward.”

“What about her?”

“Well, it looks like Houdini found his apprentice.”

“You twat!” cried Giacomo and hung up.

34
.

In spite of all the disasters that day, Giacomo's greatest regret was that he never had time to eat his custard roly-poly when it was ripe and ready. Many hours later he returned to it and recognized that its edges had dried and its custard coagulated like spoilt milk. A thing must always be enjoyed at the perfect moment. Delay imposed a sort of moral inversion on things: what was once considered a general good would become an evil.

Colonization, slavery, industrial development had all at times been considered by various fools and villains to be aspects of progress. Yet, when compared with these monstrous historical facts, Giacomo felt there could never be a compelling argument against a custard roly-poly.

The only argument was that it must be enjoyed.

And that was why he had a strong feeling of regret and sadness as he reached out and pressed the panic button. He knew that his peace was over. Maggot employees all over Rome would spring into immediate action. Intrusive telephones would start ringing everywhere, in the homes of off-duty personnel sitting quietly enjoying a syringe of heroin, or in bedrooms where they lay sleeping, or kitchens, where friends teemed around tables burgeoning with steaming plates. Giacomo licked his lips, filled with the sadness of abstention. What would they be eating? Maybe some grilled St. Peter's fish with olive oil and grated horseradish, or barbecued pig's trotters and bottles of home-distilled grappa? How lovely and what a terrible waste. The feasting would be interrupted everywhere as a great number of irritated individuals pulled on their work clothes again and hurriedly set off.

Within an hour at most, hundreds of security men were swarming all over the depots, warehouses, blast-proof air locks, caverns, catacombs, bone-houses and lift shafts.

Michael and Ariel were gone without a trace.

The presence of two rogue maggots in the high security areas of the catacombs was unprecedented and considered highly dangerous.

Giacomo set up his operational HQ in the da Vinci Chambers—he even had his desk brought down from his office on the surface—complete with newly installed hotlines and TV monitors and CAD drawings of the one hundred and twenty-eight known levels of the Gnostic catacombs.

But, as he observed to Paolo, the place was just too enormous to search efficiently—over a mile and a half deep in places. It was even possible that the catacombs merged with natural cave systems that went deeper still to places that could only be plumbed by professional cavers.

At the end of that first day, Giacomo was debriefed by the head of security who had nothing much to say except that no one had been found and nothing discovered. The fugitives had
disappeared
. That word again.

Paolo had had the foresight to have a cooker installed, and an extractor fan. He was quietly boiling up some pasta in the background, too canny to open his mouth unless spoken to.

Giacomo let slip a long racking sigh and said, quietly. “Oh dear.”

Paolo put down his wooden spoon and turned round. “Have they not found
anything?
A cigarette end? A splash of urine?”

“We're not looking for their DNA! This is not a police investigation!” snapped Giacomo. “No, we have nothing on them. We can't even say how big this place is—for all we know there's an enormous cave at the bottom with a dragon sleeping in it.”

“Of course, all mysteries are bottomless,” Paolo agreed with a sigh. “Consider this, my old friend: all this time we've been taking the living out of circulation and storing the best of them down here. But what if our day never comes? What if we never inherit our bright new world? If we end up as dust instead, buried under millions of tons of rubble?”

“As long as they don't get out of the Catacombs we'll be fine,” said Giacomo. “I've posted guards at all the exits.” He rubbed his face. “I just wish I knew why they've done this. I don't trust them; they're up to something and it's worrying me, I can feel an itch, Paolo, right here.” He punched his chest.

“You don't think they'd talk to journalists, do you?”

“No, no,” cried Giacomo. “Just concentrate on your pasta, Paolo. You don't understand. They don't need us; they don't want us. They can find themselves a farm to live on, grow their damned vegetables, breed their own maggots, and live without us… also without God. It sets a terrible precedent and it damages our plans. Everyone will know they made fools of us; people will laugh at us.”

Paolo nodded soberly, not quite managing to suppress a satisfied grin as he took out his pièce de resistance from the fridge, a tub of Bolognese sauce that in his view rivaled anything available in Rome's best restaurants.

Giacomo was still on the rack of his worst imaginings. “They could also stir up a lot of trouble at the Vatican. They could talk to the Liaison Officer. And he'd have a good excuse to say we were incompetent. They could close us down; Lord knows we have enough enemies.”

Paolo placed a bowl of spaghetti in front of Giacomo with a glass of sumptuous Barolo. Then he watched as Giacomo's expression of anguish slowly melted into a transported smile.

“Bless the bread,” said Giacomo with a grateful nod, then, after a slurp, added, “and the wine.”

The two friends ate in silence, while both thinking to themselves that if all failed, if they were hunted out of Rome like fugitives, then at least they would spend their lives munching their way through all the regions of Italy.

Their bliss was short-lived. Soon there was a commotion outside as a group of guards delivered Cardinal O'Hara—in handcuffs. He'd spent the last few hours being jostled from one cave to another by stressed-out security personnel, unsure in the general pandemonium about what to do with him.

“Leave him there,” said Giacomo, who was now more or less restored. He pointed to an uncomfortable plastic chair in the corner, into which O'Hara was unceremoniously shoved.

For the next few hours, Giacomo and Paolo dealt with a stream of visitors—security personnel, geologists, Vatican officials.

Giacomo stood at his desk like some field marshal—or better still, Winston Churchill—poring over maps, pointing, giving orders, and occasionally downing a shot of Armagnac or hurriedly puffing on his cigar.

O'Hara envied him his power, his freedom to express himself; above all, his utter disregard for notions such as sin.

When all the briefings were over and done with, Giacomo turned to O'Hara and realized that his malingering presence had added a further note of sourness to the night—his constant chuckling from the corner.