A Season for the Dead

Twenty-Six

Alicia Vaccarini spent the night tethered to the chair against the upright wooden beam in the curious octagonal chamber where Gino Fosse had left her. There had been a sound outside only once; the noise of a drunk going home, singing. She was gagged. She was tied. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could hope to achieve. He would return soon, she knew, and then there would be no more delays. This madman believed, in some demented way, that he was doing her a favor.

The manner of his “apology” left her full of dread. There was no avenue for persuasion, no prospect of clemency. He was set upon this path, and was distraught that something—something on the television—had disturbed his well-planned sequence of events.

She had slept, for how long she could only guess, and woke when daylight began to filter into the room through the narrow, slitted windows. There had to be people nearby. There had to be someone who would come, she believed. Even in August, when the heat had depleted the streets, this was still Rome. The city was alive beyond these crumbling medieval walls. The guards would soon be opening up offices in the Parliament building. Secretaries would be delivering mail.

Staff at the small neighborhood café where she drank her morning macchiato would be wondering why she was absent. Alicia Vaccarini was a woman of habit. There would be those who noticed her absence. By lunchtime, she believed, someone would question it. She had been scheduled to attend a reception for a visiting party of Brussels bureaucrats at ten. It was unknown for her to miss such events. She was diligent. She had nothing else to do.

So by two, three at the latest, there would be someone checking her apartment, discovering she had never returned home the previous day. The police would be called in. Questions would be asked, with no ready answers.

She tried to convince herself there was hope in this slow, muddled series of small discoveries. It was impossible. He would be back and when he did he would achieve what he wished. He would be anxious to be done with her and move on to whatever came next.

The book was still open on the floor. She refused to look at it. The patron saint of musicians deserved to be a brighter, happier figure, she decided. Not a white marble corpse lying in a shroud with three visible wounds on her neck. Alicia Vaccarini had only one, and it was shallow and ceased to bleed soon after Fosse had raced from the room. One wound was enough, she thought, and closed her eyes, wondering if there was somewhere, within her, the ability to pray. It was a time for desperate measures.

Then there was a sound from downstairs. Her heart leapt in hope. She heard footsteps rising. Familiar ones: determined and heavy. She closed her eyes and wept.

When she opened them, Gino Fosse was standing in front of her looking confused. He was wearing a checked shirt smeared with dirt and torn at the front. His mouth hung open as he gasped for breath. She was unable to decide whether his odd appearance was good or bad. Then he started to speak, a rapid-fire babble of insane nonsense about the Church and the perfidy of women. The phone rang. It was on a sideboard next to the window opposite her. He walked over and picked it up. She listened intently. There was a shade of subservience in his voice. It was the first time she had ever heard it. He had seemed so confident, so capable of acting individually.

He went quiet, his head bent. This was bad news. Alicia closed her eyes for a moment and prayed someone would come, that soon there would be the sound of the police beating down the doors to this odd monastic prison.

“No,” he said insistently into the phone. “It’s impossible. You can’t ask that. Where will I go?”

He fell silent then, listening. His shoulders hunched over and his face contorted with grief and fury. But he would do as he was told, Alicia realized, and there, perhaps, lay salvation.

“Shit!” he yelled.

He threw the phone to the floor. He kicked it across the carpet. She watched as he dashed around the tiny, airless room, snatching at curtains, ornaments, anything he could lay his hands on, smashing these objects to the ground, screaming obscene nonsense.

They’ll hear, she thought. Someone knows. Someone is coming. And they will hear.

He went behind her. She shuddered. Two clammy hands came around her neck and clasped her cheeks. He turned her head to look up at the disgusting, frightening photographs arrayed on the ceiling, photographs she had avoided up to that point. All were black and white. The women in them looked back, their faces impassive, as if they didn’t care or wanted to wish themselves out of the camera’s eye.

“See what happens,” he murmured into her ear, half crying. “See what’s done and can’t be undone.”

Her bladder failed and a warm stinging stream ran down her legs. The hands moved again. The gag relaxed. He untied the knot at the back of her head and let the gag fall from her. Alicia Vaccarini moaned, pleased she could breathe easily again.

Then he came back around her once more and she looked into his eyes. He’d altered again. This was a different person, one full of conviction and cruel determination. His hand came up abruptly, slapping her across the face. She yelped. The hand swept backward, his knuckles slammed against her lips. She tasted blood. She sensed something new now: an intense, personal hatred for her.

“Whore,” he yelled. “You’re all the same. The doorway of the Devil. You know that?”

“Please…”

“Shut up!” His fist came up again, hesitated. She got the message.

She said nothing.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, thinking. She watched him, silent. It was beyond protest, beyond pleading. The decision now was his, and he was insane, violent one moment, repentant, or at least uncertain, the next.

“They’re coming,” he told her. “Here! To my home. My home.”

She spoke very quietly, very calmly. “Don’t make it any worse than it is.”

He stared at her, wondering. “It could be worse? How?”

There was some light in his eyes. Some kind of doubt. There was room for her to work. “I can help you,” Alicia said. “I have friends. I can tell the police you’ve been kind. That you didn’t mean it. We all make mistakes.”

“We all burn in Hell.”

“No,” she said. “That’s an old story. Even the Church doesn’t believe that anymore.”

“Then they’re stupid.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. Truly, I’m sorry.”

She breathed deeply for the first time in hours, finding a flicker of hope in his apology.

“It’s all right,” Alicia Vaccarini promised. “Everything will be all right.”

His face was so odd. In some light he would be handsome. In another, not hideous but exaggerated somehow, like a character painted by Caravaggio.

“You don’t understand, Alicia. I’m sorry because I can’t do you justice. The church in Trastevere. The means of your death, a holy means. Something that could help wash away your sins. Save you perhaps. All of this is impossible now. They’re coming to take away my home. They think they can trap me. They’re very, very stupid.”

“It can work out. I can help.”

“Perhaps.” He was thinking. He was as rational now as he had appeared in the restaurant. Something occupied him. He went over to the pile of jazz CDs strewn on the floor, sifted quickly through them until he found what he wanted, then put it on the hi-fi. The wail of a high, sweeping electric violin filled the room. Then he came back to her.

“Have you ever watched a man smash a brick with his hand, Alicia? The martial arts place I go to, they show you how to do that. They teach you the secret.”

“No,” she answered quietly, not wishing to excite him.

“The secret is you don’t try to hit the brick. What you aim at is something imaginary a little way behind it. That is what you’re trying to destroy. You get the result you want by focusing on that hidden place, by making that your target. And in doing so you smash the brick. Do you understand?”

“I think so. Could you untie me, please? I’m very stiff. I need to go to the bathroom.”

He shook his head, annoyed she appeared to miss his point. “This is important, Alicia. Our true goal’s beyond. It’s not something that we see. What we do along the way—what we touch, what we destroy—is irrelevant. It’s the end point that matters. Being able to see the end with your inner eye. To know you’ll get there.”

She looked up at him, not liking what she saw. “They’ll be here soon. It would look best if they didn’t find me like this. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Of course,” he said, and walked behind her. The earth began to shift. The chair moved through ninety degrees as Fosse tilted it forward until Alicia Vaccarini was on her knees, head hanging down, eyes fixed on the worn, stained carpet.

She waited for his touch, waited to feel him working on the rope. It never happened. Gino Fosse returned to stand in front of her again. This time he was holding the sword, the bright, glittering sword that had cut her once already.

“Jesus Christ.” She looked at the blade and felt the breath squeezing from her lungs. “Don’t,” she whispered.

But Fosse didn’t seem to hear. His eyes were on the chair to which she was tied and the curve of her neck.

He walked to one side of her. Only his ankles were visible: white socks in black trainers. She heard the hiss of the sword cutting through the hot, dank air of the octagonal room and a strange memory came to her from a history course long ago: Anne Boleyn going to her death at the hands of the French swordsman, a bitter kindness on Henry VIII’s part, to save her from the conventional executioner’s axe. The man had been brought in for the occasion because of his reputation. The sword had a clean, deadly efficiency impossible with the axe. He’d hidden the blade beneath the straw, stood behind the condemned woman, listened to her last words then decapitated the disgraced queen with a single blow.

Alicia could hear it: unseen, the silver blade dashing at her back as her executioner made his practice strokes. Then there was silence. She could picture him drawing the sword to his shoulders, turning in a lethal, powerful arc.

Without thinking, she lifted her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t wish to see this. She didn’t want to think of the blade missing her neck, smashing into the back of her skull.

In the curious practicality of the moment she recalled something further of the history lesson: Anne’s last words, “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.” It was impossible to say them. It would be an insult, Alicia thought.

The music ended, then looped back on itself. The wailing violin began to dance again.