Steven Savile - Silver

“Good. When you’ve done that, I want you to cross-reference these against any contracts won by companies Miles Devere has a stake in. I want to know exactly how much Little Man Devere has made out of the suffering of others.”

The old man hung up on him.

Noah Larkin had spent the night alive and well and living in hell.

Each one of his personal demons were within arm’s reach. There was a bottle of thirty-year-old McCallan scotch whiskey on the nightstand, a plastic cup beside it. The bottle’s top lay on the nightstand beside the bottle. The cheap hotel room beside the Rome Stazione Termini reeked of alcohol. He had drunk a third of the bottle but felt like he had downed the lot. He sat on the windowsill, watching the girls out in the street. It would have been easy to call down, and one of them would come up to help him take his mind off things. Sometimes that was all he wanted.

He had music playing simply because he couldn’t stand to be alone with his own thoughts. It got like that some nights. The dead started talking to him with the voices of his imagination. The music helped to drown them out, but it didn’t silence them completely. That was what the drink was for.

The girls on this side of the world were the same as the girls back home. They congregated on the street corners and in doorways and walked up and down the street, advertising their wares. Every creed and color was out there to be bought. A car trawled the gutter, driving slowly from woman to woman as they walked up toward the rolled-down window. Watching was uncomfortably voyeuristic and made Noah feel distinctly dirty. He poured himself another slug of whiskey before he went back to the window. He thought about Margot, the middle-aged whore he’d found in Kings Cross.

He’d paid her to stay off the street for a night. She wouldn’t, of course. She was one of these creatures. This was her life. It was all she knew. Like the song said, it was a hard habit to break. But that was what the money was all about. It wasn’t about the sex. He hadn’t enjoyed sex for a long time. Now he used it to punish himself. He’d given up on the dream of beautiful flesh and candles and soft music and all of that nonsense. It was hard to lose yourself in beauty when inside your own head it was so ugly. He knew his own psychology as well as anyone could.

He looked at the clock blinking red beneath the small portable television set, with its little round aerial poking out from the back: 2:47. The night was slipping remorselessly into morning. He had a little under seven hours until he was supposed to meet Dominico Neri’s man from the Vatican. He could sleep. He could drink. He could screw. The truth was he didn’t feel like doing any of that.

He decided to go for a walk and picked his coat up off the bed.

Rome at night was a dangerous creature, but what city wasn’t. The mood Noah was in, if any local boy had decided to push his luck, he would have ended up hospitalized.

He took the stairs down to the lobby. It was another personal quirk. He had no love of elevators. It wasn’t the confined space, he wasn’t claustrophobic; and it wasn’t the height, he didn’t suffer from vertigo. But somehow, with the two put together, all he could think about were the metal cables above sheering away and the elevator car plunging, so he took the stairs.

Noah walked all the way down the hill of Via Cavour to the ruins of the Forum. Even in the dark, Rome was a spectacular place. But like the prostitutes at the top of the hill, there was something worn down and seedy about the place. It had seen better days. Almost two thousand years ago to be precise.

An occasional car cut through the streets, heading down toward the Coliseum and Constantine’s Arch. He walked in a circuit, following the beaten tourist tracks along Via Teatro Marcello and over to the Pantheon and then back around toward the hotel. He heard the revving engines of boy racers, proving that Rome was just like any other city in the Western Hemisphere- full of idiots with fast cars. The entire circuit through the old Rome took him the best part of three hours. The area around the railway station was the one part of the city that didn’t sleep. News vendors were up already, pasting up the day’s headlines.

One of the girls walked toward him, her smile and the sway of her hips inviting.

He didn’t see her.

He only had eyes for the thick black ink of the headline.

One word: Veleno!

Poison.

Rome had fallen silently while he drank his whiskey and watched the whores. He had been looking for fireworks. An explosion on the horizon. Something big. Bright. Bold.

He felt sick to the core.

He turned his back on the woman as she started to ask if he wanted company for the long, hot night.

Despite the drink, Noah was suddenly clear headed.

Noah could see Monsignor Gianni Abandonato was anxious. He shuffled about from foot to foot. He stood at the top of the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. Behind him the white travertine stone of Maderno’s facade gleamed in the morning. The statues of Jo the Baptist, Christ himself and the eleven Apostles looked down on the Monsignor. Noah couldn’t help but look around himself at the Baroque stonework marvels Bernini had fashioned. There was something truly awe-inspiring about the approach to the cathedral. Bernini had somehow managed to balance heaven and earth in his grand design of a split plaza, with its elliptical circus and trapezoid courtyard. It had soul.

In contrast, Maderno’s facade seemed flawed. Instead of inspiring awe and reverence it smacked of mankind’s vanity. While Bernini had reached for the heavens, Maderno’s work lacked line and symmetry-and its cardinal sin… it lacked any form of vertical feature to draw the eye as the pilgrim approached the holiest of holies. That was left to the dome in the distance.

Noah squinted against the rising sun. The attic where the statues stood watch over the great square was too cluttered with detail for its relative lack of height, he realized. It was trying too hard to force grandeur into the white stone. But then Maderno had been frightened by the notion of original thought, almost as though by definition it became original sin, and had clung to the proportions of the rear of the basilica drafted by Michelangelo.

Noah walked slowly toward the Monsignor, who stood across the piazza. He was suddenly at a loss as to how he was supposed to greet the man. Did he call him Father? Eminence? Excellency? Just Monsignor? Gianni? Piazza di San Pietro itself was empty save for a few early morning tourists up with the crows. He counted five crows in the dry basin of the fountain as he walked past it. That made one crow for every early bird. There was no water in either of the fountains. They had been drained at first light, as had every other fountain in the city.

Noah hadn’t been able to reach Neri, which was hardly surprising. The Carabinieri man had been working all night, dealing with the effects of the poisoned water. Rome was a city under siege.

The Witness, the ancient Egyptian obelisk that had supposedly seen the crucifixion of Saint Peter, cast its shadow all the way to the dry fountain. Noah crossed the shadow. It felt as though he had passed some sort of boundary. On the other side, this world of God and Saints and Souls seemed so much more real.

He took the opportunity to study the man on the steps. He was wearing the robes of his office but lacked the serenity of a man at peace with his place in the world. Noah recognized the telltale signs of a man on the verge of breaking. How much was he risking by meeting with Noah? Surely not so much as to be looking over his shoulder every few seconds? Noah wondered who was back there, hiding in the shadows? There was someone back there, he knew. One of the Swiss Guard perhaps? Another holy man? Who would he be more frightened of? The archivist was obviously eager to sweep him away from prying eyes and into the labyrinth of the cathedral itself. Curious then that he would choose such a public place to meet, especially as the doors wouldn’t open for pilims for a few hours yet. He held up a hand and waved in greeting. He reached the stairs a few moments later.