The Lucifer Gospel

20

Finn Ryan, still fully dressed, lay on the bed in her hotel room and listened to the sounds of the sleeping city. She and Hilts had driven straight through from Venosa, stopping only once for a quick bite to eat at a roadside restaurant. The made the journey in a little less than eight hours. They spent another hour and a half getting thoroughly lost in the two-thousand-year-old metropolis, finally dumping the rental car in what seemed to be Milan’s last available parking spot, then walked until they found a relatively inexpensive hotel willing to rent them rooms without reservations and almost no luggage.

The rooms turned out to be tiny, perched under the eaves on the top floor with a view out over the dusty street instead of the hotel courtyard, with its newly renovated open-air garden and restaurant. Both of them were too tired for food, so they’d simply said good night and gone to their separate rooms. But sleep had not come. She was worried, and even the warm night air seemed charged with apprehension. She longed for a bath, but to strip and slip into the welcoming heat would somehow make her too vulnerable. Visions from old Alfred Hitchcock movies swarmed through her mind like buzzing bees.

Through her open window Finn could hear the distant sound of traffic, and closer, the echoing of tapping, high-heeled footsteps on the hard cobbles of the street and the sound of shrill female laughter. Someone made a comment and the woman laughed again, while a male companion made a mocking, hooting sound. Suddenly she started as she heard the muted shriek of a train whistle cutting through the dark night air; Milan’s gigantic and brutal Stazione Centrale hunched like one of Mussolini’s stone nightmares only a few blocks away, the huge white granite hulk proof of the clichй that if nothing else Il Duce had made the Italian trains run on time.

Milan, Finn knew, was a smaller and considerably more decrepit version of Paris, and like Paris it was almost completely empty of skyscrapers. Scaffolding seemed to grow from buildings constantly being refurbished like permanent exoskeletons. It was the place where thirties fascism had been born, where Leonardo’s and Dan Brown’s Last Supper was doled out to ticket holders for roughly a buck and a half per minute, and it was the place where thirties fascism had finally died at an Esso station in the Piazzale Loreto with Benito Mussolini hanging from his heels while half a dozen GIs looked on. It was home to the finest Italian fashion, the most extreme Italian politics, and the best-equipped riot police in the world. It’s duomo, or cathedral, was the third largest church in all of Christendom, but the city’s true religion was soccer, second only to the pursuit of money. It was a city far too brash and industrious to be charming, and certainly its vast slums and sometimes choking smog were not what the average reader of the New York Times thought about as he dreamed of a holiday in Tuscany.

Finn jumped as her door burst open and Hilts appeared, shirt unbuttoned to the waist. His hair was all over the place and his eyes were wide and hot.

“Turn on the TV!”

“What’s the matter!?”

“Just turn the damn thing on!”

Finn picked up the remote from the bedside table and pushed the ON button. The screen on the big console TV on the bureau at the end of the bed blipped on to CNN, which was the last channel she’d had on before trying to sleep. They were showing a weather map of Eastern Europe. It was raining in Prague.

“Not that! Switch it!” barked Hilts. He came into the room and closed the door. Finn did as she was told, flipping through the channels.

“There!” he said. “Hold it!”

It was channel six, Telelombardia, a local news show. A well-dressed dark-haired woman with a serious look on her face was reading a report as she stood in the middle of a futuristic set constructed of something that looked like chrome-plated scaffolding. There were keyed-in inserts showing an old black-and-white photograph of two smiling middle-aged men, one of whom looked vaguely familiar.

“Turn it up! What are they saying?”

“Calm down and I’ll tell you,” said Finn, using the remote to adjust the volume. She listened. The news anchor kept on with her story. Finn translated for Hilts as the story continued, thrusting her feet into her running shoes as they watched.

– Here seen with his friend Adriano Olivetti, Vergadora was a well-known and well-liked member of the academic community and a noted historian. His sudden, violent death at the hands of what are reported to be members of the terrorist group Third Position came as a shock to the people of Venosa, the farming community where he made his home.-

The scene on the television changed to an idyllic shot of rolling hills and vineyards from the station’s stock footage library, then more footage of the town itself, and finally a floodlit shot of the villa among the poplars, surrounded by efficient-looking police unreeling tape while the bubble lights on their patrol cars skipped frantically over the scene. This was then shockingly overlaid by two grainy black-and-white pictures that clearly showed Hilts and Finn shot from a high angle standing outside the door of the villa.

– These pictures, taken from Rabbi Vergadora’s security system, show his attackers shortly before the elderly professor was slaughtered in his library…-

“I didn’t see a camera,” said Finn, shocked and horrified by what she was seeing.

“They murdered him,” muttered Hilts, staring at the screen. “And they’re putting it on us.”

“They?”

“This is Adamson and his pals.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“You think it’s a coincidence?”

“The camera got us on tape. There’s been a misunderstanding, that’s all,” said Finn. “We’ll just go to the police and explain.”

“Where do they get this stuff about us being members of Third Position?”

“Who are they?”

“The Italian version of al-Qaeda. We’re being set up.”

“It’s a mistake.”

“It’s no mistake. Vergadora is dead. If the news is saying it’s Third Position, that probably means Vergadora was killed violently. Their weapon of choice is a cut-down shotgun, a Mafia lupara. This is not Boy Scouts, Finn. This is hardball. These people are out to kill us.”

“But why kill Vergadora?”

“Because he obviously needed killing as far as they were concerned, and because blaming it on us turns you and me into lepers-untouchables. With this hanging over us there’s nobody we can go to for help.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“That we get the hell out of here. Fast. We’ve got to regroup.”

“If they’ve got our faces on tape they probably have a description of the car. Maybe even a plate number.”

“The train station then.”

On cue there was the sound of two-tone sirens wailing and the screeching of tires. Finn jumped off the bed and raced to the window. She looked out and saw the dark street below littered with blue-and-white polizia Alfas. A black-and-white van thundered up behind them and half a dozen special police poured out dressed in camo blouses, black helmets, and loose fatigue pants. All of them were carrying compact Beretta machine guns or short-barreled Benelli shotguns.

“SISDE,” muttered Hilts, looking over her shoulder. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her away from the window.

“Who are they?”

He started dragging her toward the door. “Italian Secret Police, come on!”

“My clothes! My things!”

“No time!”

She barely had time to grab her wallet and watch off the nightstand before Hilts pushed her out into the narrow hall. There were two rooms to the left, three to the right, the same across the hall, and the single old-fashioned cage elevator in the middle. Even as they stood there the mechanism began to grind.

“Here they come!”

To the left Finn saw a backlit sign, white on red: ESITO. Exit.

“This way!” She pulled him left. Three seconds later and they were there. They barged through the pneumatic door. Six floors below booted footsteps hammered and shouts echoed up.

“Su! Su!” Hard voices yelling. Up. They were trapped. The elevator and the stairs were blocked.

“Maybe we should surrender ourselves.”

“These guys are the shoot-first breed and they’ve got machine guns.”

“There,” said Finn, pointing up. “The roof!” There was a pull-down fire ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling of the stairwell. Below them the pounding boots were getting closer.

Hilts jumped up, grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder, and pulled hard. It came creaking down, showering them with flecks of dried-out rustproofing paint. Hilts went up first, banging the palm of his hand into the underside of the trapdoor. It slammed open and he continued through the exit. In an instant he reappeared, holding his hand down to Finn as she climbed upward.

A few seconds later she was standing on the roof of the hotel as Hilts hauled up the ladder and dropped the trapdoor closed. The summer air was hot and heavy. There were neither stars nor moon. The night was dark except for the wash of light from the street below.

“They’ll figure out where we went quickly enough when they find our rooms empty.”

“Where to now?” asked Finn.

“Anywhere but here.”

Milan, like many of the older European cities, began its existence behind walls, where space was always at a premium. Lawns, backyards, drive-ways, and garages simply never existed. Rome was the first city to have tenements, in the first century, and Milan wasn’t far behind. By the Renaissance things were much less confined, but old habits died hard. Even beyond the walls of the Old City humanity was densely packed, building built against building so that entire blocks and neighborhoods consisted of a solid wall of terraced structures presenting a single face to the street, the rear of the buildings creating common courtyards or airshafts, sometimes connected and sometimes not.

The Hotel Caravaggio occupied a corner of such a block in the Brera district of the city, once known as the Montmartre of Milan but long since abandoned by the avante-garde artists, designers, and musicians who had once made it famous. The Caravaggio’s particular block was bounded by the via Marangoni to the north, the via Locatelli to the south, and was backed by the via Vittor Pisani.

The core of this irregularly shaped block was mostly made up of inaccessible airshafts, with the exception of a restaurant in an office building on the via Vittor Pisani, which used what had once been an old stable for outdoor seating in the summer months, and the Caravaggio, with its newly renovated courtyard cafй and private garden. Almost without exception the buildings making up the single square of masonry along the street shared a common wall, separated by nothing more than a two-foot-high course of bricks or stone to divide one roof from another.

Finn and Hilts moved across the flat, tar-papered roof, heading to the right. Reaching the end of the hotel they boosted themselves over the low barrier and stepped onto the roof of the next building. This one had a cinder-block extension for an elevator mechanical room and a few simple pipe vents, but the only trapdoor was firmly locked from the inside.

“We’re going to be sitting ducks in a minute,” said Hilts. “We have to find a way down. He grabbed Finn’s hand and together they raced across the second roof, hopped the retaining wall to the third, and ran across it as well. Hilts guided them to an interior airshaft, but it was useless. This was Europe, and fire escapes were the exception, not the rule.

The airshaft was a black hole, picked out with squares of light from windows looking into it. Finn could just make out the litter-filled base of the shaft. Even if there had been a way down, there didn’t appear to be any way out. They turned away and pelted across to the next building. This one was a full story lower than the roof they were standing on. “We’ll have to jump,” said Hilts. Finn just nodded.

Without pausing she dropped down to the edge of the wall, let herself over, and then let go, dropping six or seven feet to the roof of the next building. Hilts followed her, and they moved quickly across to the next low wall between the buildings. They drew up short. There was a three-foot space between the buildings. Finn looked down. For some reason the space between the buildings had been left open, and she thought she knew why. In days gone by the building’s wastewater had probably run from the back of the building to the street, finally joining with whatever passed for a storm sewer in those days. The need for an open trough had gone, and the building’s owners who had come after now used the space to run all manner of wiring and pipes up and down the walls, some of it modern, like the thick rubber electrical wires and the narrow phone and cable TV lines, some of it old and worn, like the lead eaves, troughs, and old-fashioned downspouts.

“We can make it,” said Hilts, looking across the gap.

“Why not go down?” Finn suggested. “They’re going to spot us any second.”

“Maybe we can find an open hatch on the next roof,” Hilts answered, looking down the narrow breach between the buildings. “And what exactly are you suggesting? It’s not like there’s a ladder.”

“Chimney descent,” said Finn. “No problem.”

“What’s a chimney descent?”

“Back against one wall, feet on the opposite wall, about knee-high. Put your palms on the opposite wall, thumbs down for support. Drop alternating feet, one, two, then shift your back to follow. You sort of walk down the walls, bracing yourself to keep from falling.”

“You sound like you’ve done this kind of thing once or twice.”

“Lots of times. Rock climbing was one of my hobbies at school. Climbed indoors at Lifetime and Vertical Adventure in Columbus during the winter and the real thing during the summer. It’s fun.”

“Sure it is,” said Hilts skeptically, staring down into the cut between the buildings.

“I don’t think we’ve got a lot of choice.”

“Tell me again.”

“I’ll show you.”

Finn sat on the edge of the gap, then slid her back slowly down, her feet braced tight against the other wall. When she was completely down she reached forward and laid her palms flat on the other wall. There was nothing holding her up now except the tension in her back and knees. She shifted her back slightly and went down a foot or two.

“This is crazy,” Hilts muttered, sitting down on the wall. He dropped into the same position as Finn, holding his breath. He inched down below the level of the roofline just as the arc of a searching flashlight beam swept over the roof. “Oh godohgodohgod,” he whispered, slipping down into the yawning chasm, his body held tight as a spring, sweat popping out on his forehead. He arched his back into the wall behind him and pressed his feet against the wall in front, suspended over nothingness, held up only by the strength of his desperation. Then, inch by frightening inch and foot by frightening foot, he moved himself slowly down.