Blood of the Lamb (29 page)

“That’s not a flashlight,” he said uselessly.

“On the iPhone. It’s an app.” She zipped the bag. “You can’t really be as disgusted as you look. That a Noantri would have the newest technology?”

With a pang of guilt Thomas realized what he’d been doing. Ruefully grateful she hadn’t taken his bait, he said, almost by way of apology, “Some people think it all comes from the devil anyway. There’s nothing here. What are we going to do?”

Pietro looked around, as though hoping for inspiration from the columns, the ceiling, the swirling patterned Cosmatesque floors. Doing that, she reminded Thomas of someone, and then he realized: himself.

“Is it possible Damiani didn’t mean this church?” she asked.

“No.” Thomas shook his head. “‘Fragrant, flowing oil.’ This is the place.”

“But the oil . . . If he was leading us to the oil . . .”

Thomas stared at the bronze letters, and then spun to look at her. “There’s no oil here. There was. There once was. But if he was leading us to the oil, he didn’t mean here.”

“But we just agreed, he had to mean here. This church.”

“
Basilica
. This basilica. But not here.” Rapidly, he turned and started up the aisle, pausing at each side chapel, glancing inside. Pietro didn’t ask what he was looking for, just trotted beside him. He reached the narthex and gazed at the front wall, then turned to cross to the left-side aisle. He stopped before he’d taken a step. There it was. Across the narthex, in the side wall, maybe ten feet above the floor, a small golden door in a carved stone frame. Pietro followed his gaze.

“What is it?” she asked.

“An aumbry. A lot of older churches have them but they’re not used anymore. This one might not have been opened for years.” He barked a humorless laugh. “I’d have said, ‘not within living memory,’ but—”

“What’s in it?”

Right. Serious. This was all serious. “Chalices and other requisites for administering the sacraments. Sacraments like the anointing of the sick.” He turned to her. “Requisites like holy oil.”

47

Livia stared in wonder at Thomas Kelly. An aumbry. She’d never even heard of an aumbry.

Thomas Kelly turned away from her look to focus, with a frown, on the golden door set high above their heads. He clearly saw the location as an obstacle.

She didn’t.

“Father,” she said, “it’ll take me two minutes if it’s locked, one if it’s not. Can you give me that?”

“What are you—” The priest’s face darkened. He glanced at the offering box at shoulder height directly under the golden door. “You can’t be serious.”

“If it will hold me.”

“No. No, that’s—” He stopped himself. “What am I worried about? Such a minor desecration.” His sarcastic tone made it clear the words weren’t intended for her. After a moment’s pause, Thomas Kelly, looking as though his stomach hurt, turned and walked across the narthex and back up the right-side aisle.

He fell. The priest tripped and plowed into a group of tourists, nearly knocking one man over, clumsily recovering, tripping again in his attempt to aid the man and his flummoxed friends. Voices were raised in apology and forgiveness, Thomas Kelly was straightening the man’s coat, and then a small exclamation, more apology, and three people in the group fell to their knees. They weren’t, Livia realized, praying. They were attempting to recover the contents of a purse knocked away in the confusion.

She looked around. The raised voices and flailing arms had claimed the attention of most people in the church. Good, but it wouldn’t last. This leap was higher than the last one she’d made, and the landing area was a nine-inch box. A stretch even for a Noantri, but what choice did she have? She lightly vaulted up, prepared for the box to give, but it didn’t. Balancing herself, she reached to test the golden door. She was ready with her pick and shim but the door wasn’t locked. Well, really, ten feet above the floor in a basilica, why would it be? She eased it open.

Inside: a pearly marble niche, a shallow gold shelf, a graceful Murano glass flask of pale yellow oil.

And nothing else.

How could this be? Were they wrong?
No,
she heard Spencer’s voice in her head.
This is just too Mario to be wrong.

Then what?

The glass flask, the gold shelf, the marble niche. The glass was clear, the oil was pure, the shelf sat firmly on the pearl gray marble.

Except behind the flask the marble wasn’t gray.

There, it was black. And it didn’t look like marble.

She reached in and removed the stoppered flask with her left hand, taking care not to spill the holy oil. With her other hand she felt the niche’s rear wall. No, not stone. Leather. Wedged into the niche, almost the exact dimensions of the rear wall. An unobservant priest replenishing the holy oil would never notice it. She ran a finger around the edge, found a raised corner, peeled it gently toward her. It came away easily.

It was a book cover. Matching exactly the front cover of Damiani’s poetry notebook.

Fluttering out from behind it came a single sheet of now-familiar paper.

48

Thomas heard a shout. He whipped around in time to see Livia Pietro, paper and something else in hand, leap down from the offering box, shove a ten-Euro note in it, and dash out the basilica’s door. The aumbry was open, the holy oil sitting untroubled within. Three men, clearly more troubled, gave chase, tearing after Pietro while voices echoed around the church in confusion and in umbrage. Thomas’s little commotion was suddenly so sixty seconds ago.

Now, if someone steals something from a basilica, shouldn’t a priest chase after her? The same as if she steals from, oh, say, the Vatican Library? With a final shamefaced smile to the people he’d been bouncing off of, Thomas ran out the door.

The three chasing men were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Pietro. There was no way they would catch her, Thomas was sure. She could probably fly, or something. No, of course she couldn’t. She could run very fast, was all.

What, Thomas? You’re starting to buy the nothing-supernatural-about-it line? Careful there.

Well, whether or not she was supernatural, he wasn’t. He had complete confidence that her pursuers wouldn’t find her. But could he? A cold fear struck him: What if they’d been wrong about how many missing poems they needed to lead them to the Concordat? What if the paper she’d just found was the final one? If she’d realized it would take her to the document and she didn’t need him anymore? If so, she’d find it on her own and deliver it to her Conclave. To
her
people. And Lorenzo?

Lorenzo would be condemned.

Thomas stood in the piazza, staring around helplessly. Resolute tourists headed into the basilica while indolent locals strolled toward cafés. Pigeons swooped in to perch on the fountain. A little white dog barked at a big black one, which looked down with amused disdain. Nothing offered a clue to Pietro’s course.

Thomas’s heart sank.

Against it, in his breast pocket, his phone began to vibrate.

He almost dropped it fumbling it out. A local number that he didn’t recognize. Lorenzo’s abductors? He thumbed it on and practically shouted, “Thomas Kelly!”

“I know that, Father. Are you coming?”

For a moment Thomas couldn’t speak. “I—
Professoressa
?”

“Try to call me ‘Livia.’ I’m on Via dei Fienaroli, just past where it intersects with Via della Cisterna. Can you find that?”

“I’m— I will. Stay there. Don’t leave!”

“If I were going to leave,” he heard her sigh, “why would I have called you?”

49

At the sound of the door latch Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa turned from the open window. Jonah Richter stood on the threshold, golden hair tousled, hands in his trouser pockets, wearing that confident grin Lorenzo despised. Truth be told, there was nothing about the man Lorenzo didn’t despise. Starting with the fact that he wasn’t a man.

Richter took a few steps into the room, but, as though he were humoring Lorenzo, did not closely approach. “Don’t you find it chilly with all the windows open?”

“This room reeks of your kind.”

“So strange—before you knew I was Noantri, you didn’t complain that I smelled. My stench seems to have arisen simultaneously with your knowledge. What do you make of that?”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve come to report the hunt is going well.”

Lorenzo didn’t answer.

“It seems,” Richter went on, “that Mario Damiani was a complicated fellow. The trail’s longer than it appeared. My historian and your priest have been to two churches and they’re on their way to a third.”

“What are they finding?” Lorenzo asked in spite of himself.

“I’m not sure. My people can’t get that close without being detected by Livia.”

Lorenzo turned his back on Richter to gaze out the window again. The room was on the top floor of a building on the Janiculum Hill, and the view was grand. “There. As I said: you stink.”

Richter actually laughed. “We can, in fact, detect one another by scent, but we don’t feel about it the way you seem to. In any case—” He stopped as his cell phone rang. Lorenzo turned again to face him as Richter answered it and listened. His cheeriness faded into a thoughtful frown. “Thank you,” he said, and clicked off. “I have to go,” he told Lorenzo.

“Why, is this brilliant scheme malfunctioning?”

“Probably not. But a Noantri who isn’t one of my people has been spotted twice in the vicinity of Livia and Kelly. I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“You can’t even trust one another, is that it?”

Richter laughed again. “And you princes and priests of the Church—you can?”

He shut the door behind himself, the latch clicking loudly into place. Lorenzo stood looking where Richter had gone; then he turned once more to the open window and lit a cigar.

50

It took longer than it probably should have for Thomas to arrive at Via dei Fienaroli. That was the fault of the first man he’d asked, who helpfully gave detailed, incorrect directions. Via dei Fienaroli, in fact, was right around the corner from the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and it intersected Via della Cisterna another fifty yards along. Via dei Fienaroli was a street so narrow it had no sidewalks. The doors of the shadowed, ancient houses opened directly to the road.