redRobe

Chapter Forty-Nine Hollow Rooms

Villa Carlotta looked as it had the last time Axl had seen it. Purple bougainvillea still smothered the walls of the gatehouse, softening the hard lines of the reinforced titanium gate now shutting behind him. Squat palms like over-large pineapples edged the gravelled drive, fat trunks curved under the weight of waxed leaves as sharp as blades and as big as surfboards. And lush curling ferns buried the crested, baroque gates to the courtyard beneath an explosion of nature’s pubic hair.

Arpeggios ran down his spine. The notes fuzzy, like a harpsichord sampled note for note and then damped. Perhaps that was because he couldn’t see the Villa properly. Maybe, if he hadn’t been squinting through the smoked glass windows of a vast Nexus stretch, the notes would have been clear as crystal.

Right back in Dey Effé, after the Nexus had asked him where he wanted to be taken, Axl told the stretch to wind down the window and it had suggested he use manual. So he’d hit the window’s button himself and the window had suggested he ask the car. They’d been going round in the same circle ever since, with increasing bad temper.

So instead of watching open countryside, Axl had been forced to spend the trip looking at himself, since the inside of every car window was mirrored. And everywhere Axl had looked he’d seen his own haggard reflection staring back.

‘We’re here,’ announced the Nexus, opening the door nearest Axl.

‘Really?’ Axl said, harpsichord and heartbeat syncopating.

It’s my own choice, Axl told himself. No one could take that away from him. Everything else maybe, including his life, but not that. He slammed the car door, without giving the Nexus time to shut itself. Guaranteed to irritate the car, but Axl didn’t care. Though no doubt it would whine to the Nuncio when it got back.

Grit crunching under his feet, Axl walked slowly across the huge courtyard towards the main doorway of the Villa Carlotta, watched silently by four guards. If they planned to arrest him now would be a good time.

No one moved.

‘Fuck it.’ The words weren’t loud or directed at anyone except himself but that didn’t mean Axl didn’t mean them. He’d screwed up big time. God alone knew how Rinpoche was doing, or Kate, or Mai. And what upset Axl was the certainty at the base of his gut that he’d never get the chance to find out.

Straightening his back and pushing his chin in the air the way Kate did, Axl stamped over to door.

‘Axl Borja,’ he announced firmly. ‘To see the Cardinal.’

‘Is he expecting you?’

Axl looked at the door and shrugged. ‘Who knows what His Excellency expects. I wouldn’t presume. . .’Actually, he would and had, frequently. Now just didn’t seem the time to mention it. Axl stepped through into the waiting hall.

It was empty. So was the long corridor.

The last time Axl had stood there, the corridor alone had been filled with a thousand petitioners, so full that bored ushers stood on plinths watching out for those who’d fainted in the crush. Now there was nobody at all in the echoing corridor but Axl, and the unexpected emptiness was at least as overpowering as the crowd had been.

It must have been the Villa’s AI that opened the door at the end of the corridor for Axl because no human was there to do it, the doorkeeper’s gilded stool was as empty as the plinths that once housed the ushers. Right then, Axl couldn’t tell what was backing track and what was his own heartbeat. He had a feeling that was intentional.

Axl stepped in through the door and found himself again in the Cardinal’s vast ante-room. Silence echoed off silk-covered walls and the only person reflected in the vast glass slabs of neo Venetian mirrors was him. Even the silver carts that dispensed hot chocolate were deserted and cold.

‘Borja.’ On the other side of the room, the Cardinal’s major-domo stood proudly by the door to His Excellency’s tiny octagonal study, but the man’s face was grim and his smile troubled. Something was so wrong Axl couldn’t even begin to imagine.

‘Well,’ growled a voice from behind the door. ‘Who is it?’

‘Axl Borja, Your Excellency.’

‘Borja?’ The voice was tired, gravel and glass. Older than Axl remembered and quietly angry. Yet still unmistakable enough to make Axl shiver.

‘Borja, Your Excellency.’

‘Well, send him in…’

And Axl walked past the empty benches and across the impasto di gesso floor, his steps echoing in the silence. Heartbeat filling his emptiness.

‘Come to gloat?’ The Cardinal pulled his top lip back into a sneer, revealing canines that were yellow with age. Yellow and cracked like old ivory. There was an edge to his voice, a cold disappointment that bordered on fury.

His in-tray was bare of paper and the only sign that he’d been working was a small screen angled up from the desk. Axl wanted to ask what disaster had happened but didn’t know how. No matter what he achieved, how old he got he never had the right words when stood in front of this man.

‘No,’ said Axl simply. ‘I’ve here to tell you I’m back from Samsara.’

‘And you’ve brought me the soulcatcher?’

‘No.’ Axl shook his head. ‘I brought only myself.’

From the look on the vampyre’s face it didn’t seen as if that was anything like enough. ‘I’m not so powerless that I can’t still have you shot,’ the Cardinal said shortly.

Axl shrugged. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t imagine you were.’ They both knew that was true.

‘So why didn’t you bring me what I asked?’

‘It was needed.’

The Cardinal took off his dark glasses at that, and rested them neatly on his black glass desk. ‘And who needed my soulcatcher?’ The Cardinal’s voice was low, his golden eyes fixed like sighting lasers on Axl’s face.

Mai and Kate, Axl didn’t know which one had needed it most. Mai for her sanity, Kate for her dead lover.

‘Joan did,’ said Axl.

When Axl had finished crying, the Cardinal ordered coffee, though there was only his major-domo to operate the coffee-maker and Axl ended up going to fetch the water himself. With the coffee they ate truffles dusted with pure cocoa powder. Or rather Axl ate the truffles while the Cardinal smoked a Partegas corona down to a damp stub.

‘Joan was shot,’ the Cardinal said suddenly, stubbing out his cigar. ‘Her body was ripped apart by children. Do you deny that?’

Axl shook his head.

‘So the Pope is dead?’

Axl shook his head.

‘Surely,’ said the Cardinal, ‘Her Holiness is either alive or dead? All I require from you is that you tell me which it is…’

‘I’m not qualified to answer.’

‘No indeed,’ the Cardinal gave a vulpine smile and lit another cigar, ‘I’m not sure anybody is. We’ll just have to see what the courts say.’ He reached for the pop-up screen on his desk and swivelled it, so Axl could watch the frozen, tear-stained face of an ex-child star, ex-hitman, ex-burger flipper at McDonalds.

The date on the CySat copyright line was that day’s, the time just gone. The blipvert moral expanding across the screen explained for the cognitively-challenged that Rome, WorldBank and the IMF had just been tied into a court case that would last decades, maybe longer.

The imminent, expected return to prominence of Cardinal Santo Ducque made first story on most newsfeeds that evening.