A Season for the Dead

Fifty-Three

He waited in front of the Pantheon watching the crowds of tourists struggling in vain to find some shelter from the heat inside its vast, shady belly. It felt as if there were a fire beneath the world. The fierce humid heat was working its way to some catharsis. The sky was darkening, turning the color of lead. From somewhere in the east came a rippling roll of thunder. A speck of rain fell on his cheek with only the slightest touch of gravity, as if it had materialized out of the soaking air.

Gino Fosse had saved these clothes for the last moment. They were his own this time: the long white alb almost touching the ground which he’d worn when he’d said his first mass in Sicily. It was gathered at the waist with a cincture. In one deep pocket was a CD player and headphones. In the other rested the gun.

A tourist, a young girl, pretty, with long fair hair, asked for directions to the Colosseum. “Buy a map,” he snapped, and she wandered away, puzzled, a little frightened perhaps.

He looked at the looming, lowering sky. A storm was on the way, a bad one. The city streets would run deep with rain. The people would race for shelter in the cafés and bars. The short, humid summer would come to a sudden climax and still the city would not be washed clean in the flood that followed. Man was born evil and waited for the events that purified him. There was no other way.

He pulled out the CD player, put on the headphones and listened to the music. It was Cannonball Adderley live playing “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” with Joe Zawinul on piano. It sounded like a spiritual, like a sinner praying for redemption.

Gino Fosse sang the refrain out loud as he walked: Da-da-deedle–deedle-deedle-dee.

By the time he reached the church the sky was black. He walked inside and took a bench in the darkness, watching the way the light was beginning to fail beyond the windows, waiting for a familiar shape to walk through the door.