A Season for the Dead

Thirty

The address he’d been given was a couple of hundred yards from Termini Station, above a Chinese restaurant. It was the worst place Gino Fosse had ever occupied, worse even than the farm he dimly remembered from his childhood, before the church school in Palermo.

They’d fixed it for him. They’d told him where to run and he did, so quickly he only just remembered to snatch a few CDs and the player along with some belongings. They’d told him to keep quiet, stay inside for a few hours, until the police got less jumpy, less observant.

There was money waiting for him. There was someone to act as gobetween: a red-haired foreign girl who could have been no more than nineteen. She told him she worked tricks around the station back alleys, took her clients into the adjoining bedroom, where he imagined her performing her work with a brutal, brief efficiency, and then sent them back out onto the street. She’d fetch food for him.

She’d act as a liaison with the people outside. At one on that stifling Rome afternoon she sat down on the spare chair in his bedroom and looked fetchingly at him. She was pretty after a fashion, Fosse thought: big brown eyes, an alert, alluring face, a ready, open smile. But her skin was flawed by blemishes and her teeth were crooked and discolored, like two rows of pebbles from a grimy beach.

She wore a skimpy red halter top and a glossy plastic miniskirt in fluorescent lavender. When she perched on the seat she opened her legs to show him there was nothing underneath. He thought of Tertullian and what might happen next. Then, when his head hurt too much to think of anything else, he nodded at her, sat on the bed and let her come down on him, daring only to touch the back of her head as she went about her work, trying to force from his mind the picture of another scalp beneath his fingers that morning.

Fosse wondered if he’d seen her before. When he was doing the Cardinal’s business, when he was ferrying women to and fro across Rome, using his camera at every possible opportunity, he met all sorts. She could have been one. Most of them were hookers. Most of them were classy. A few straddled the borderline. It depended, he guessed, on the taste of those that Denney was trying to please. And one fitted no such category. One was just beautiful, so beautiful that, on occasion, Denney would see her alone himself, leaving Gino Fosse to wait downstairs in the apartment block, like some miserable cabdriver, imagining—there was no preventing it—what was going on in the bedroom above.

She never spoke when she was in the car. She never said anything after a visit, whether it was to Denney or someone on the Cardinal’s list. She simply sat there, as lovely and serene as a portrait in a church.

Then things got bad with Denney, and Gino Fosse was driving only occasionally, when there was no one else for the job or the destination was too delicate.

A month ago, in disgrace for nothing more than a rough encounter with a hooker, he’d been exiled to the place in the Clivus Scauri. They had given him the ridiculous and mind-numbing task of comforting the dying and the bereaved in the hospital at the top of the road. And he’d begun to change, begun to understand that he was becoming something else.

It started two weeks before, in the dark echoing belly of San Giovanni in Laterano, taking a break in the church from the weary round of hospital visits. In front of him was the papal altar with its ornate Gothic baldachino. Behind a curtain, the history books insisted, were the heads of Peter and Paul, preserved in silver reliquaries. Gino Fosse had stared at this hidden space, wishing he could see into it.

From his childhood in Sicily to his present unhappy state in Rome, the Church had enfolded him constantly, warming his nights with its comforting promises, easing his mind when the demons—and demons there were, real ones with horns and gleaming teeth—came to him and forced his hand, made him mad and bold and violent. One needed imperfect people in the world. Without them the Church would lose its meaning. Everyone would go straight to God and learn nothing, feel nothing, along the way. Peter and Paul were no strangers to anger and deceit. One had denied the Lord not once but three times, the other was a persecutor of Christians, a supreme, cruel servant of the Roman state. And now they were saints. Now their mummified heads rested in silver caskets in a hidden partition of the canopy that stood before him.

Gino Fosse would recall this moment for the rest of his life. It was here, in the black maw of San Giovanni, that something wormed its way into his soul, wound itself around his neck and whispered in his ear what he already half suspected: He was a fool and worse. It spoke of what he had done on the sweaty bed in the medieval tower on the Clivus Scauri. It taunted him with the bright, vivid memories. It reminded him of the sinful ecstasies: the warmth of a woman panting on his neck, the feel of her flesh against his as he writhed and moaned above her. And it asked: Where, in all this delight, is the sin? Where, in all this feverish, mindless conjoining of bodies, was there room for the old, dead myths passed down by generations of men whose primary purpose was to serve themselves?

There were no heads in the canopy’s reliquaries. Or if there were, they belonged to some hapless corpses which had been appropriated for the sake of the Church. Peter and Paul were distant shadows. If they lived, they may never have come to Rome. If they were martyred, their remains were now dust on the wind, particles inhaled and exhaled by black and white, young and old, Christian, Muslim and atheist. These early martyrs weren’t hiding inside an ornate metal container in some vast, overweening basilica in Rome.

He was deceived. And if they tricked him about this, what else was true?

He found himself sweating. His head ached. His eyes burned. When he looked down at the marble floor to make sure it was still there, it seemed to shift beneath his feet like water moving in a slow and relentless swell.

They lied. Every one of them.

He was amazed it had taken so long for him to see through their deceit. At that moment, Gino Fosse burned with anger and shame and there was scarcely a waking second afterward when these bitter, acrid sensations abated. Then, later, there was the ultimate revelation, in a smaller, darker place, with the Irishman’s dank, tobacco-stained breath in his ear, bringing with it a new and terrible kind of sense and order.

It was in the basilica of San Giovanni that he began to lose the faith of his childhood and that was worse than anything he could imagine, worse than going blind or becoming a cripple. In a few terrifying moments, he was transformed. He became an outsider, a man beyond the Church that had been a kind of parent to him for as long as he could recall. From this point on, he would live outside the normal bounds of humanity.

Yet a faith remained, hidden, silent, waiting for him to recognize it.

Later, when that occurred, Gino Fosse would know he was not alone. In his soul there was a profound, inexplicable certainty. Beneath all the trickery there was a God, one Peter and Paul knew and the modern world had forgotten. Not the God of bureaucrats and basilicas. Not the God of love and reconciliation, the comforting face of Jesus hanging over a child’s bed. The true God still lived on from the Old Testament, a supernatural deity, angry, vengeful and hungry, ready to punish those who betrayed Him. This God would become a constant presence inside Gino Fosse’s head, his one bulwark against a cruel and shallow world. From time to time He spoke, offering the promise of eventual redemption. He accompanied Gino when the work began, wakeful and watching in the church on Tiber Island, on the shore of the dead river, in the upstairs room where the sinning bitch Alicia Vaccarini would take her first step on the road to deliverance.

And He took them all to His bosom, even the vilest. The bloody harvest served its purpose. All were, against their own instincts, snatched from the darkness to His side.

Fosse thought about this as the red hair of the prostitute bobbed beneath his hand. One day it would be his turn and he would go willingly, knowing his sins would be washed clean. This was a world of shadows, an unreal, transitory place of stinking bodies and vile physical couplings. He was a part of it, and a part of Him too. The reconciliation of these two was under way.

She moved more rapidly. He felt the heat rise and pushed her away.

She went to the sink. He listened to the sound of her there. It seemed an act as commonplace as brushing one’s teeth. This woman’s body had been subverted for a purpose. He was stunned by the realization that she was not to blame.

“What are you called?” he asked across the room.

She turned and looked at him, puzzled. “You want to know my name?”

“Is that so odd?”

“You bet.” Her voice had an odd, tinny quality, as if she struggled with the soft vowels of Italian.

“Well?” he insisted.

“Irena.”

“Where are you from?”

“Kosovo,” she answered a little nervously.

“Orthodox? Or the other?”

“Neither,” she said sharply. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just asking.”

“Where I come from you don’t ask that. Good people don’t. Just the ones looking for someone to kill.”

“I’m sorry.” There was a lifetime of fear and grief inside her. He could see it behind her pretty, blemished face. “My name’s Gino,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you, Irena. I just want you to do something for me. Here…” He pulled out a sheaf of notes from his jacket pocket. She stared at them. It was big money for her, he guessed. They had been generous and he’d robbed from Alicia Vaccarini’s purse too. “What do you make in a day?”

“A hundred and fifty. Two hundred sometimes. Maybe more.” She toyed with her hair. “Don’t get to keep it. I’m not what you’d call top-shelf goods.”

There was something else inside this damaged half-child. Something still young, still unspoiled, in spite of everything. “Looks don’t matter. It’s what’s in here”—he patted his heart—“that counts. And you don’t look bad either.”

“Thanks.” The pebble teeth shone wanly in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window.

“Here’s three hundred. You get this every day you’re with me. In exchange, you don’t turn any tricks. You just do what I say.”

She came over and took the money. There was a stupid, puzzled smile on her face. “If I do some tricks, we get more money,” she said.

He took her arm gently. “No tricks.”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s fine by me.”

“Now. Go get me a phone book. I want some wine too. Red. Sicilian. Some bread, cheese. Whatever food you like. I don’t care.”

“Sure,” she said, grinning. “And when I come back we’ll have fun. I’ll show you things. Things you don’t get in Italy.” A black, angry look rose on his face. She took a step back. “But only if you want…”

“If I want,” he repeated.

She scuttled out of the room hastily. It was almost two hours before she returned with what he asked for. Surreptitiously he stood next to her, letting the smell enter his nostrils. He expected a stink to her, of sweat and something else he recognized, and a guilty look in her lost eyes. There was nothing. She looked up at him, smiling, then, for no reason at all, kissed him on the cheek.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“For being kind,” she told him.

She lived in a lost world too, one in which an absence of cruelty counted as gentleness. She was a part of a greater mechanism, small, unimportant. She was, in a sense, very like him.