Papal decree

21

Francesco couldn’t imagine making the trip to Ascoli without Sarah. To make the scene more troubling, he didn’t know what had happened to her. They were supposed to be going the next day to meet his mother. It was important.

‘Not even a phone call to let me know you’re okay?’ he sighed to himself, annoyed. Had something happened to her?

He pressed his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder while holding the hotel phone in his other hand. Someone must know something.

‘Sarah, let me know if you get this message. I’m getting really worried.’

He shouldn’t have let her leave without finding out where she was going. He’d looked out the window and seen her get into an imposing Mercedes. They went up Via Cavour and were lost to sight. From there they could have gone anywhere. She wasn’t coerced. She got in willingly. Still, he’d tried to read the license plate, but he was too high up to make it out.

This had happened five hours earlier. Five hours was a long time. Enough to cross the entire continent. He hung up his cell and took the earpiece from his ear. He laid his hand on the other phone to give his shoulder a rest and continued to wait.

Think, Francesco, think. But he didn’t know what to do, except what he was doing.

The operator left him on hold too long, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of hanging up. He couldn’t stop. Finally someone answered on the other end of the line. No news. They couldn’t help him. Fury mixed with apprehension overcame Francesco.

‘Listen up. I know she was called by someone in the Vatican,’ he lied. ‘I saw the priest who came to get her. You have an hour,’ he emphasized, raising a finger, ‘one hour to give me news. If not, her face is going to be on all the lead stories of the international news media, and I’m going to accuse you of kidnapping a British citizen. Do you understand? I’ll turn the eyes of the world on you. One hour.’ Francesco was fed up.

The operator maintained the same serene, routine voice and said she’d communicate the message to the proper party, wished him good night, and hung up.

Tears filled his eyes, but didn’t fall. He covered his face in his hands and took a deep breath. He was exhausted. He looked at his wristwatch. It was two thirty in the morning. He got up and went to the window, drew the curtain back, and looked down. There was no sign of the Mercedes or Sarah. The pavement was wet, parked cars covered with drops, but it was not raining. On the other side of the street he saw the steps leading to the engineering school and the Church of Saint Peter in Chains, where the chains that had bound Saint Peter on his fateful journey to Rome could be found, as well as a monumental statue of Moses by Michelangelo. The steps passed below the palace of the Borgias — Rodrigo, Cesare, and the beautiful Lucrezia — who in other times wandered through these streets, masters of Rome, but Francesco didn’t think about this. He ignored the history of the building on the other side of the street.

Where are you, Sarah? he asked himself.

He felt like waking up the whole place with a huge outcry, but Sarah might just saunter into the room at any time without a mark, calm, with her usual composure, calling him an idiot for entertaining these fantasies. He remembered her nausea and dry heaves, and felt tightness in his chest.

Outside there was little movement. A car or two passing in the direction of the Piazza dell’Esquilino, a car coming down Via dei Fori Imperiali. Rome slept the eternal sleep of night, disordered layers of time flowing together. The streets, plazas, alleys, avenues, and all the roads came together in Rome, this millennial city, and no street ended in a dead end. There was no better city to disappear in than this, where everything was connected, like arteries in the human body.

The phone ringing on the bed startled Francesco so much that he jumped. He immediately grabbed it and looked at the screen. An unknown number. Tonight was not going to be easy. He took a deep breath and answered the call.