The Devil Will Come

SIX

ELISABETTA’S SMALL OFFICE was on the third floor of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Archeology on the Via Napoleone, a bustling Roman street on a gentle hill. Outside, everything was moving at speed – cars, motorbikes and pedestrians – and the cacophony of engines and people made the city seem vibrant. Inside, the pace was languid. The staff shuffled through the halls at a crawl. The catacombs and monuments had been there for centuries, they reckoned, so what was the rush?

Elisabetta didn’t share this sense of torpor. Over at Piazza Mastai her classes were being taught without her! Sister Marilena had taken them over so the children were being well-served – that wasn’t the biggest problem. This assignment was a schism, a rip through the fabric of her soul, for all the sinister fascination it held for her now. The patterns of her day had a purpose, all to serve God. For the first time in a dozen years she’d been tipped from her gently rocking lifeboat and cast into an unfamiliar sea.

The books and papers on her desk were from a different time, a different Elisabetta. She recognized her own handwriting, remembered the marginalia she’d made but they seemed alien to her. She resented them, resented Professor De Stefano and resented the staff at the Institute. To her mind, they were players in a conspiracy to pluck her away from the things she loved. Even the clergy at the Institute seemed like inhabitants of a parallel universe with missions different from her own. The nuns were more like clock-watching secretaries, the priests smelled of cigarettes and talked about TV shows in the lunch room. She had to finish this job of hers, whatever it was, and return to precious normalcy.

Elisabetta was thumbing through her old copy of Manilius’s Astronomica when she felt a sudden need to shut everything out and pray silently.

She closed her eyes and clutched the cross hanging from her neck, hard enough to hurt her hand which already ached frequently from her old palm laceration. ‘Dear Lord, I lost all thoughts of myself and that of my old life when I abandoned myself to your divine spirit. I yielded my heart to the power of your love. That heart which was almost pierced by an assassin’s knife, that heart now belongs to you. I offer up my actions, my trials, my sufferings that my entire being may be employed in loving, honoring and glorifying you. It is my irrevocable will to belong entirely to you, to live and die as one of your devoted servants. Please let nothing disturb my deep peace. Heal my heart from impurity. Amen.’

Before Elisabetta could reopen her eyes, disturbing images began to invade her thoughts like unwelcome visitors. Pictures of partially mummified bodies with bony tails wafted through her mind.

Then she was seized by a flash, a painful memory she’d all but blocked from consciousness: the half-naked backside of the man who’d stabbed her, that thing protruding from his spine, ringed by small black tattoos looking for all the world like a swarm of angry insects.

That thing. It was a tail, wasn’t it?

Suddenly woozy, she exhaled, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

It was as if she’d always known.

Elisabetta felt small and vulnerable, a sparrow in a hurricane. God was inside her; He was all around her. But for the first time in a very long while she craved the warm sanctuary of a physical embrace.

‘Are you coming?’

Elisabetta heard Marco’s impatient baritone through the bathroom door. ‘Yes!’ she shouted back.

‘You said “yes” ten minutes ago. We’re going to be late.’

‘This time I mean it.’

She put the finishing touches on her eye make-up and stood as far back as she could in an attempt to turn her reflection in the mirror over the sink into something more full-length. She liked her new dress. It was red and summery and it made her look especially shapely. She only needed to pick out a necklace, something nice and long, to show off her cleavage.

She opened the door and watched the impatience melt from Marco’s face. ‘That was worth waiting for,’ he said. ‘Look at you!’

She asked if he liked the dress and he responded by running his big hands over the silky fabric and up her stockings.

Elisabetta laughed and pulled away. ‘I thought you said we were going to be late.’

‘It’s only my cousin’s wedding. I don’t even like him.’

‘Well, I’m not going to let you mess up my dress and make-up. Not to mention your new suit – which looks really good, by the way.’

Marco checked himself out in the hallway mirror. ‘You think so?’

‘Yes, I think so. You’re going to make the girls go crazy.’

‘They can’t have me,’ he said, lightly. ‘I’m spoken for.’

‘For that, I’ll kiss you, but later. I’ll be right back. I need to get a necklace.’

At that moment he stopped looking like a hulking man and took on the demeanor of a small, excited boy. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and removed a slim velvet box. ‘Maybe this will work.’

‘Marco, what have you done?’

She opened it and loved it immediately. It was a heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain, half the design done in pavé diamonds, half in rubies.

‘You like it?’

‘Oh my God! I love it!’

She ran back into the bathroom to put it on and came out glowing.

‘It looks beautiful,’ he said. ‘Like you.’

‘Half is me, half is you,’ Elisabetta said. ‘Which am I, the diamonds or the rubies?’

‘Whichever you like.’

She took a couple of steps forward and turned her face upwards to his. He encircled her in his strong arms and tenderly squeezed her ribs. She closed her eyes, put her arms around his waist, and her ear against his heart, feeling as happy and secure as she’d ever been.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

Startled, Elisabetta opened her eyes. Professor De Stefano was at her door. ‘No, please come in.’

The old man looked apologetic. ‘I just wanted to make sure you had everything you needed.’

‘Yes, it’s all here,’ she said, composing herself. ‘My box of papers arrived this morning from my father’s flat. The computer seems to work.’

‘Do you need someone to help you with it?’

‘We have computers at the school, Professor. I’m quite proficient.’

‘Good, good. I’ll have my secretary give you access to my files of photographs from the site.’

‘That would be useful,’ Elisabetta said.

De Stefano lingered. ‘Do you have a plan?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I know it’s only your first full day and I wouldn’t press you, but I’ve already had calls this morning from the Vatican. They’re anxious for a report.’

She tapped on her copy of Astronomica. ‘I’m thinking about the symbols. I want to try to understand their meaning, the significance they may have had to these … beings. And I need to understand the phenomenon better – the tails.’

De Stefano nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, this is critical. We need to solve this mystery quickly. Who were these people? How did they come to be in this place? How did they die? By fire? Were they murdered? If so, who was responsible? Was it mass suicide? If so, why did they do it? What do their tails and their symbology tell us about who they were? Were they Romans? Were they pagans? Is there even the remotest possibility that they could have been Christians? It’s going to be impossible to prevent the public from finding out about this forever. These things always leak. I only hope that we have some credible explanations to offer if it comes out before the Conclave starts or while it’s in session. I’ll leave you to it. But let me know as soon as you’ve made progress.’ His voice had a pleading tone.

She opened the small volume to a bookmark. Marcus Manilius was a Roman astrologer whose life straddled the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, a figure who would have been lost to the sands of time were it not for his epic poem Astronomica, intended to teach the art of the zodiac to his contemporaries.

Nor did man’s reason set bound or limit to its activities until it scaled the skies, grasped the innermost secrets of the world by its understanding of their causes, and beheld all that anywhere exists. It perceived why clouds were shaken and shattered by so loud a crash; why winter’s snowflakes were softer than summer’s hail; why volcanoes blazed with fire and the solid earth quaked; why rain poured down and what cause set the winds in motion. After reason had referred these several happenings to their true causes, it ventured beyond the atmosphere to seek knowledge of the neighboring vastness of heaven and comprehend the sky as a whole; it determined the shapes and names of the signs, and discovered what cycles they experienced according to fixed law, and that all things moved to the will and disposition of heaven, as the constellations by their varied array assign different destinies.

This much Elisabetta recalled: the ancient Romans had been astrology mad, passionately convinced that the heavens ruled their fate. Some Emperors, those who were cocksure like Tiberius, encouraged the practice. Others, like Augustus, convinced that the populace was actively trying to predict his demise, banned astrological consultation outright.

But despite the pervasiveness of the zodiac in everyday Roman life she knew that astrological symbols were rarely found on the frescoes of homes or tombs. The symbology splashed across this columbarium was unique and given its context, disturbing.

Elisabetta compared her old notes on the original, now disintegrated wall with her new jottings. The pattern of symbols was identical, the twelve astrological signs simply but beautifully rendered in a large circle in their traditional longitudinal order from Aries to Pisces, followed by seven planetary signs in a peculiar order: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And in each circle Pisces was always upright, like a standing man.

And what of the mummified and skeletal remains? She’d need to study De Stefano’s photos carefully but, more importantly, she needed to get back into the catacombs with a trowel and brush and spend some time with the remains. She started to write a reminder to ask the professor about arranging another visit but she became distracted by a sticky note with an exclamation mark on it that she’d left protruding from a page of Astronomica years ago. She opened the book to the mark.

A superior power often intermingles the bodies of wild beasts with the limbs of human beings: that is no natural birth … the stars create these unprecedented forms, heaven introduces their features.

Monstrous births.

Elisabetta shuddered, trying to recall why she had flagged the passage.

Her computer chimed the arrival of her first email. She wheeled her chair around and clicked to the inbox, expecting the photos from De Stefano. But it was a message from Micaela – the subject line simply read CIAO.

Here’s a bunch of articles for you. Hope they’re what you’re looking for. It’s driving me crazy that you won’t tell me what’s going on. Mic.

Elisabetta sent the documents to the shared printer in the copier/file room and hurried to pick them up before anyone could see them.

She was relieved to be alone, away from prying eyes as the articles dropped into the printing tray. She stapled each one and waited for the next. Then she realized that she wasn’t alone. A young priest had emerged from the rows of filing cabinets and was looking at her.

She turned and stared too long.

He was very tall, certainly two meters, with an oblong face and fine blond hair that made him resemble the screaming man in Munch’s painting. He was wearing black plastic glasses with lenses so thick that they magnified and distorted his eyes. But it was his long torso and absurdly long arms that struck Elisabetta most. The arms were too much even for a body as stretched-out as his, and his thin, bony wrists protruded from the too-short sleeves of his black clergy shirt.

She was embarrassed at her involuntary gawking and was about to say something when he scooted out the door and disappeared without a word.

At her desk Elisabetta slipped the journal articles into her bag. Night reading. She would spend the rest of the afternoon poring over De Stefano’s computer file of excavation photos.

Gian Paolo Trapani had taken hundreds of shots. The excavation work was rudimentary and the skeletons were only partially separated from one another and the surrounding matrix of rubble. She studied each photo carefully. Her first impressions were that these people were well-off. They had gold and silver bracelets and jeweled pendants on their persons. There were clumps of silver coins here and there suggesting long-ago-decomposed purses. The bodies were pressed together rather uniformly, indicating, Elisabetta supposed, crowding in a small space. But one feature jumped out after she had seen enough shots. The skeletons of children and even infants seemed to be randomly scattered among the adults. She couldn’t find one example of an infant sheltered in the arms of one of the adults. Where was the evidence the maternal instinct?

Then a photo of one skeleton stopped her in her tracks.

It was a male, she thought, judging from its overall length and the bulkiness of its skull. As to mummification, it was among the better-preserved, with a good portion of tight brown skin sticking to the facial bones. She knew that post-mortem changes made these kinds of judgment difficult, if not absurd, but there was a frozen look of tortured rage on that rudimentary face.

The skeleton was dripping with gold. Heavy gold bracelets on the wrist bones. A beaten-gold pendant lying among the ribs. Elisabetta searched for a close-up of the pendant but there was none. She magnified the area with a photo-tool but it was no use. If there were markings she couldn’t make them out. She made a mental note to seek it out the next time she went to St Callixtus.

But it was the final photo of this skeleton that really seized her imagination. There was something in one of his bony hands: a broken silver chain with a silver medallion. A shiver of expectation ran through Elisabetta. She zoomed in. The resulting image was blurry but she was almost certain what it was: the chi-rho cross, one of the earliest Christian symbols, made by combining the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ.

What was this symbol of the early Church doing in the decidedly un-Christian context of a Roman columbarium decorated with pagan astrological symbols? Elisabetta clicked the folder of photos closed and rubbed her dry eyes.

Yet another mystery.

Elisabetta arrived at Piazza Mastai too late for evening chapel and was obliged to pray on her own while the other sisters took their evening meal together. Because the chapel was at the opposite end of the hall from the kitchen it was peaceful and quiet. When she was done, she crossed herself and rose. Sister Marilena was seated in the last row.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Elisabetta told her.

‘Good,’ the old nun said. ‘Mama put aside a plate for you. She doesn’t like it when someone skips a meal.’

Mama was Sister Marilena’s 92-year-old mother. Marilena had years ago sought and received dispensation from the Mother General of their order to allow her mother to live with them rather than going into an old-age home. They had plenty of space. The third and fourth floors of the convent were home to only eight sisters – four Italian, four Maltese – and ten novices, all African. It was hard going these days, recruiting young novices into the fold, particularly from Italy and the rest of Europe, so the women rattled around the facility and had the luxury of their own rooms.

‘Making an extra prayer?’ Elisabetta asked.

It was their private joke. Marilena was always sneaking into the chapel for extra prayers. The order was under-funded. They needed more books and computers. With the dearth of novices entering the order they had to rely on lay contract teachers who were expensive. Most parents could ill afford a hike in fees. So Marilena was always praying for more resources.

‘I believe God heard me this time,’ Marilena said, her stock answer.

Elisabetta smiled and asked, ‘How did Michele do on her geometry test?’

‘Not well. Does that surprise you?’

‘No. She’ll need extra help.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marilena said, ‘I have vivid memories of Pythagoras and Euclid. How did you get on?’

‘I don’t like it. I hardly had a moment to pray.’

‘You hardly have a moment during school.’

‘It’s different. Here, I’m with you. Their office is alien to me and so are the people.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘I hope not,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I want to finish the assignment and come back.’

Marilena nodded. ‘You’ll do what the Church asks of you and I’m quite sure that God will bless you for your service. Now come and eat before we both get in trouble with mama.’

Later, in her room, Elisabetta sat at her study desk in nightgown and slippers, trying to finish the articles that Micaela had sent her. It was hard going. The subject matter was technical and frankly distasteful – a compendium of medical literature on human tails. Most of the reports were in English and these she tackled first. There were a smattering in French, German, Russian and Japanese which she left for later.

She put down her fourteenth paper of the day on atavistic human tails, a term with which she’d previously been unfamiliar. Atavism: the reappearance of a lost characteristic specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor. Like other atavisms, the scientific literature addressed human tails as one example of our common heritage with non-human mammals.

Elisabetta wasn’t going to let herself be drawn into a debate on evolutionary biology. She was trained as a scientist and preferred to let Church doctrine coexist peacefully with truisms about evolution, at least in her own mind. No one in the Church had ever had occasion to question her about her beliefs on the matter and she’d try to keep it so.

Human tails, she learned, were rare – very rare, with only about a hundred well-documented cases in the past century. Elisabetta forced herself to study the photos, especially those of babies. They stirred something inside her, something deeply disturbing and base: a stomach-churning revulsion. And there was more: an element of fear. An ancient Darwinian fear of prey in the presence of a predator. She took a deep breath and pressed on.

Human tails ranged from short nubbins to longer snake-like appendages. They possessed all the structures of mammalian tails with extra bones – up to half a dozen coccygeal vertebrae – covered by sinew and muscle and pink skin. They could move with the full voluntary control of striated muscle.

Most parents opted for surgical removal lest the child grow up stigmatized and for that reason tails in adults were even more unusual.

Elisabetta’s eyelids grew heavy. She’d gotten through all the English-language papers and she was finding them repetitive. A German paper was at the top of the pile. It was from the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, a short piece from 2007. Her knowledge of German wasn’t good but she thought the title referred to a case study of an adult human tail. The text was dense and impenetrable.

She’d tackle it in the morning, she decided.

It was time to clear her head and restore her balance with a short period of prayer before sleep overtook her.

As she rose from her chair Elisabetta had a sudden impulse to turn one more page. She tried to fight it but her hand moved too fast.

At the sight of the photo, she lost control of her legs and fell back onto the seat hard enough to make her gasp in pain.

Dear God.

A naked old corpse lay prone on an autopsy table, photographed from waist to knees.

Arising above wrinkled male buttocks was a tail, twenty centimeters from its base to its tip by the measuring rule laid beside it. It was thick at its base, its whole length cylindrical and untapered with an abruptly stubby tip like the cut edge of a sausage.

But there was more.

Elisabetta tried to swallow but her mouth was too dry. She squinted hard at the photo and adjusted her reading light but it wasn’t enough.

Breathing hard, she ran from her room, grabbing at her dressing gown and donning it as she flew down the hall. Sister Silvia, a dear lady with a weak bladder on her way to the lavatory, was speechless as Elisabetta rushed past and careened down the stairs to the classrooms.

She switched on the lights and found what she needed in the science room. Then she ran back up the stairs, clutching a magnifying glass.

She sat back down at her desk. The base of the dead man’s spine – that was what had seized her attention like a hard slap to the face.

There they were, visible under the magnifying glass, ringing the tail in concentric semicircles: a flock of small black tattoos. Elisabetta was seized with a paralyzing fear, as if this naked old corpse might rise from the page and strike at her with a knife aimed for her heart.