A Season for the Dead

Nineteen

Gino Fosse lived in a three-story tower which belonged, he felt, in the pages of a Gothic fairy tale. The structure was built of honeycolored bricks and situated on the Caelian Hill midway along the imperial thoroughfare of the Clivus Scauri. Opposite stood the sprawling hulk of the basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, to which Fosse was now loosely attached as one of the parish priests, although almost all his professional time was spent at the hospital of San Giovanni, a ten-minute walk away. It was not the same as working in the Vatican but the Church knew best.

Fosse felt obliged to know some history of his surroundings. The tower which had been his home this past month was embedded in the Aurelian Wall, built in the third century A.D. and still, for the most part, an intact circle around the center of the city. A pleasant run, one he sometimes made in a tracksuit which disguised his calling, was to follow the wall’s line unimpeded straight to the great gate of San Sebastian and on to the Appian Way.

Initially the structure had been a small Roman sentry point along the brick expanse of the defenses. In the Middle Ages it had been enlarged to provide accommodation for the expanding ecclesiastical entourage of the large and powerful basilica across the square.

Giovanni e Paolo, though little known to the average tourist, was, for Fosse, one of the most interesting churches in Rome. The visible shell was unremarkable, save for the Romanesque campanile which cast an afternoon shadow across his second-floor window. Beneath the church lay centuries of rich history, however, and a story which had bemused him from the moment he first encountered it.

The tale of the martyrs John and Paul was, for centuries, thought to be apocryphal by those who dared say as much. It concerned two Christian officers at the court of Constantine who, after the accession of Julian the Apostate in 360 A.D., refused to sacrifice to pagan gods. The two were, as a consequence, beheaded, along with a woman who came to comfort them, in their own house on the Caelian Hill which later became the site of the basilica.

Myth begat myth, church begat church. Centuries of building and rebuilding ensued, resulting in the formidable pile which now dominated the view from Fosse’s tower. Yet, when the archaeologists—doubtless atheists to a man—came to explore the foundations of the present church they found, deep beneath it, the well-preserved remains of an ancient Roman house. And three Christian graves, with clear signs that they were the scene of much reverence from as early as the end of the fourth century A.D.

Sometimes Fosse would take privileged visitors into the subterranean houses and show them the paintings on the wall. It was always a humbling experience, an unspoken sermon on the mystery that underpinned all human life, and the relentless unreliability of what the clever people in universities like to call “facts.”

The former guard post had, since the fifteenth century, been given over to the more humble employees of the parish. The modest living quarters afforded Fosse a sitting room, a bedroom and a tiny bathroom, all built into the second floor of the circular tower, with the ground floor used for storage. At the top was the small, octagonal room which Fosse regarded as his private place.

The composer di Cambio, who wrote a choral work described by the “bad pope” Alexander VI as “the sound that angels now make in Heaven,” had lived and died in these quarters in the late fifteenth century. This obscure historical connection—which Fosse found baffling on the occasion he listened to the boring drone of the work when it was performed, on the anniversary of di Cambio’s death, in Santi Giovanni e Paolo—meant the tower was on the list of ancient monuments for which permission to view could be gained by applying to the relevant office in the Vatican. Accordingly, every few weeks since his arrival he had been forced to allow some curious gaggle of sightseers, usually American, into his home, where they would bill and coo at the “cuteness” of the place. They would then stare out of the four slitted medieval windows that gave onto the Clivus Scauri and begin, surreptitiously, to peek at their watches.

None had the wit to ask what was in the tiny space at the summit. Nor would they have gained admittance in any case; Fosse had established that this tower room had no public right of view. This was part of the price of what he saw as his exile. The resulting privacy made it perfect for the purpose required when his new and urgent calling had become apparent.

It was now seven on a blazing Sunday morning. His collection of more than three hundred jazz CDs was scattered on the floor in the small, octagonal tower. It was difficult sometimes to know what to play.

Soon he would go to the hospital, to talk to the sick and the dying, to sit in on operations, gowned and gloved, and offer his support to the surgeons and nurses. Soon too he would be forced to think of other matters, of the names he had gathered, and how these lives might be taken.

While Gino Fosse sat, listening to John Coltrane racing through “Giant Steps,” he felt a sense of wonder. On the walls were the photographs, the constant, nagging reminder of his duty. Here too were the tools of his new trade: the ropes; the drugs he had carefully smuggled out of the hospital for when his own considerable strength was insufficient; the nine-millimeter M9 Beretta automatic pistol he had stolen on a visit to the army hospital next to San Giovanni—he enjoyed the idea it should have virtually the same name as the cardinal’s three-pointed hat; and the knives—large and small, slender and broad, all sharpened so delicately that he was able to believe there existed but a single atom at the edge of the blade, one that would slice through anything it encountered.

The hospital had need of him for the rest of the morning. But from lunchtime onward he was free, and there was much to do.