A Season for the Dead

Forty-Nine

"You made a sound. When…" He was reluctant to finish the sentence. She laughed at his embarrassment. It was midmorning. The traffic outside made a low roar. Gino Fosse had returned at eight, showered, slept a little, not disturbing her. Then she had woken him slowly, gently, touching his strong, naked body with keen fingers, arching over him, letting her breasts fall into his face until his teeth fastened on a nipple and she felt his growing interest stir against her legs.

“When you what?” she asked him. They were still locked lazily together, she above him, rolling gently, feeling his physical presence subside.

“You know.” His eyes went dark for a moment. There was so much inside him she didn’t understand. Where he went to all night. What he did. Robbing, she guessed. It wasn’t such a bad thing. Needs must.

But if all he did was steal, why would they want her to watch him like this? Why would they demand, so insistently, with threats only barely concealed, that she had to call them every time he left and tell them everything they had discussed?

“Say it,” she ordered.

The pinkness in his cheeks, the result of their mutual exertions, flushed a little brighter. “When I come. You felt it.”

“Of course.” She laughed. “What do you think?” There was a sheen of sweat on her soft, young skin. “Those others. I make them wear something. But you’re special, Gino. You’re safe. With you I want to feel when it happens. Not that I wouldn’t know anyway. I’m good. Aren’t I?”

“You’re good,” he agreed. “Why? Why me?”

She frankly peered straight into his eyes. “Because you didn’t expect anything. Because you were gentle.”

There were so many mysteries for him here. He’d never wanted Irena, not in the beginning. Then something had changed, in him, not her.

“What do you feel when it happens?” he asked.

She thought for a moment. No one had asked before. He saw this in her face and felt some small, warm surge of pride to think he was the first. “That there’s something of you just blooming inside me. Something that could stay if I wanted it to. Stay and grow. Become a child maybe.”

His face went white. Abruptly he withdrew from her, shrinking back under the damp sheet. She hated to see him like this, the sudden shock, the strange, internal grief that seemed to be masquerading as fury.

“I told you,” she said, stroking his matted hair. “With the others I make them wear something.”

He refused to look at her. She wondered once again what he did, thought about the curious smell on him when he came back that morning. A stink that suggested he’d been near cooked meat.

“But it won’t happen, Gino. It can’t.”

He looked into her pale, young face, struggling to make sure she told the truth.

“I got pregnant once back home. You can go places. You can get rid of the problem before it arrives. They made a mess of it. I can’t have kids, not ever. I just make them wear these things so I don’t get their diseases. But I can dream. We can both dream if we want.”

He let her fingers run down his cheek, play with his lips. She bent down and kissed him, hard.

“Families kill you,” Gino Fosse said. “Families tear your life to shreds.”

“Sometimes,” she agreed. “What else is there?”

He was unable to think of an answer.

She leaned into his ear, her breath hot. “When you come inside me I feel something warm and alive, where it’s supposed to be, as if you were bleeding out your life for me, Gino. I take your gift and it sits there, wondering, making me grateful.”

Not once, not in any of the brief, aggressive encounters he recalled from the past, had he considered the idea that this was a mutual event. The act had always been about his own efforts to achieve some brief, cathartic satisfaction. It had never occurred to him that there could be pleasure on the other side too. You’re the doorway of the Devil. That was what Tertullian had said and he’d always interpreted this literally, that a woman was the receptacle, an unfeeling, unresponsive place into which he could cast his lust.

He looked around the room. It was grubby. Their clothes lay on the floor. His bag, now depleted of most of his tricks, sagged on the stained carpet. All that was left was the gun and some ammunition. It had to be enough.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”

He looked at her with those cold, dead eyes and she wished she could keep her mouth shut sometimes.

“Why? What do you want with them?”

“Nothing.” His anger annoyed her. It had been a reasonable request, not the kind he ought to resent. “I want to know about you. I want to hear what they did to make you this way.”

“I was this way without them,” Gino Fosse said. It was foolish, dishonest, to pretend anything else was to blame. No family, no colliding set of events, had made him what he was. He recalled the fat TV man roasting on the grill, thought of the look of terror in his eyes. This was no one’s doing but his. It was a conscious, deliberate act with a specific purpose in mind. Just like skinning a live cat had been twenty years or so before. The dark seed had been growing inside him all along. It just needed someone to nurture it.

Before the work began he’d stared for hours at those haunting, grisly depictions of martyrdoms in the churches, watching the saints meet their fate, wishing he could hear the words on their lips. But they were different. In his agonies, Arturo Valena screamed nothing but curses. Alicia Vaccarini went weeping, unenlightened. He tried to remember the Englishman, losing his skin, tied to the beam in the church on Tiber Island, tried to decode the noises that issued from his gagged throat. And the Rinaldi woman, so stupid, so baffled by what was going on. These were now distant memories. What happened that day was not his doing alone. Hanrahan had made the arrangements.

The Irishman had spread his net wide, culling so much information, from tapped phone calls, Fosse’s own illicit photographs, stolen items perhaps. Hanrahan knew names and dates. He was a constant voice in Fosse’s ear. Even so, there was no blood on Hanrahan’s hands. He may have suggested the means but it was Gino Fosse who used them.

Then there were the two cops. Hanrahan would never have sanctioned that. He had his limits.

“What do you do?” she asked. “When you go out of here? Who are you, Gino?”

He scowled at her. She should know better. She was in enough danger as it was. “Don’t ask.”

“I want to know!” she pleaded.

He closed his eyes, wishing she weren’t there. The end was so close. This distraction was the last thing he needed. And this revelation too: that she felt him inside her, that two people could touch one another in such a strange and intimate fashion. This was, in its way, a momentary, mystical epiphany just as shocking as the glittering rodent eyes behind the altar in San Lorenzo. This threatened his resolve. This made the world seem a different place.

He stood up, went to the bag and took out the gun, brought the weapon back to the bed and placed it in her hand. “I bring deliverance,” he answered. “To people who deserve it.”

Her pretty face cracked at that. She wouldn’t touch the weapon. She seemed terribly young again, and scared. It occurred to him that she knew what a gun could do. He thought of where she came from. Maybe she had personal experience.

“Why?” she asked, handing him back the weapon.

“I told you. Because they deserve it. Because their sins cry out for vengeance.”

Not the cops, though. They got theirs for free. She wiped her damp eyes with her forearm, like a child.

“Come with me,” she said. “We could run away.”

“Where?”

“The coast somewhere. Rimini. They say Rimini’s nice.”

He thought of the sea, the endless sea, and the way the blue tide washed away everything.

“I’d like that,” he said.

He walked over to the bag and took out an envelope. It was full of notes. He counted out all but a handful and gave her the money. She stared at it. There was so much, more than she could ever have imagined.

“I’m not finished. I’ve one more piece of work to do. Irena…” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead, surprised by his own tenderness. “You must leave, right now. In two days’ time. Rimini. Be on the beach. I’ll see you there.”

She was silent. He wanted to feel she lied too, lied about feeling his warm, sparking presence inside her. You’re the doorway of the Devil. Tertullian was right. He had to believe that. If he didn’t, he could never be the Gino Fosse he knew, the one he understood, the one with a goal, a mission. This Gino had heard the rats chattering in San Lorenzo, had dared the anonymous, shriveled heads in the Lateran to speak their true names.

There was no choice. He clasped her hand, forcing her fingers tightly around the money. “Go,” he ordered, and handed her the cheap champagne. “Take this and we’ll drink it together.”

Her eyes were wet. She didn’t dare call him a liar.

He watched her pack her few things, waited as she walked out of the door, not looking back. Soon now, he knew, the phone would ring. Soon there would be a new deliverance.