The Julian secret

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Rome

Santa Maria della Concezione, Via Veneto 27

The next afternoon

Lang had intentionally waited until the church was about to close for the midday siesta..The narthex was empty, and the nave and single aisle were empty except for an older woman in a nun's habit whose lips moved in what Lang supposed was prayer as she ticked off the beads of her rosary. Voices from the apse and transept behind the altar told him that a smattering of tourists had paid to see the macabre crypt displays of bones for which the church was noted. Arranged in rosette patterns, bones of equal or different sizes were displayed in varying designs featuring femurs, ribs, vertebrae, and other skeletal parts Lang could not identify.

Art is truly in the eye of the beholder. Some beholders' anyway.

The chapel of St. Michael was little more than a small room to his right just inside the nave. There was room for only three rows of five uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs each. The side chapel was empty of worshipers, but a brown paper shopping bag occupied a corner seat on the right front. If someone was watching, they were either invisible or the Agency had exempted the nun from its already liberal retirement age.

He picked up the bag and left.

It was when he was about to descend the twin staircase to the street that he saw her: a young Gypsy woman squatting just at the foot of the steps. When Lang had entered less than two or three minutes earlier, there had been a wrinkled crone crying out in the most pitiful tones imaginable. Entrances to churches were prime real estate in the begging business, spots not to be given up without a fight. Yet the old woman was gone, replaced. Stranger still, the bowl in front of the newcomer had a number of coins already in it. She had either seeded the dish or was one of the city's more accomplished beggars, a mendicant whose attention was fixed on the front of the church, not passersby. Her clothes, though far from fashionable, were neat and clean, not the soiled and torn attire he was used to seeing. Unless he was seriously mistaken, her fingernails were evenly trimmed and polished.

He dug into a pocket and dropped a handful of change into her bowl. She was watching him, not the money. A dead giveaway.

"Grazie, signor, " she said.

Bending over so he could not be heard by other pedestrians, Lang replied in English. "Spend it on nail polish remover."