Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“We need a drugstore!”

Finn spotted the neon green cross that marked a farmacia on the ground floor of a building on the right. She pulled over between two parked cars and ran the Vespa up over the low curb. She put the engine in neutral but kept it running.

“What are you getting?”

“Stuff,” said Hilts. “Back in a minute or two.”

She waited, looking over her shoulder while Hilts ran into the brightly lit drugstore. She watched for the telltale flicker of lights and the up-and-down wail of approaching sirens, but there was nothing. It was late, but there was still a lot of traffic and the sidewalks were crowded with locals and tourists. Directly ahead was the massive, gleaming bulk of the train station. She tried to stop the terrible hammering of her heart but it was impossible. Vergadora was dead and they were looking for her and Hilts. The smart thing to do would be to put the Vespa in gear and find the nearest U.S. consulate, but she knew that the security of being on home ground was an illusion. There was physical evidence that they’d been at the old man’s villa, and it was more than enough to have them turned over to the Italian authorities. They’d be trapped in the system for an eternity. Worse, if Hilts was right, Adamson’s powerful friends would be able to find them wherever they were. Hilts reappeared with a plastic shopping bag. He climbed onto the back of the scooter.

“Now what?” said Finn urgently.

“We need somewhere to hide out for an hour or so.”

“Movie theater?” There was a cinema two doors down from the drugstore. According to the marquee they were showing an ongoing Franco Zeffirelli retrospective. Tonight it was Endless Love. Somehow Finn had a hard time thinking of Brooke Shields as being part of anyone’s retrospective.

“No, we need somewhere private.”

“Another hotel?”

“No. Not with our faces plastered all over the news.” He looked around. “You think they have such a thing as a parking garage in this town?”

“Here and there,” Finn said and nodded. She spotted one of the telltale blue-and-white P signs on the far side of the boulevard. One of the city’s bright orange trams clattered by, blocking her view for a moment, but then it was gone and she spotted the sign again. “There,” she pointed.

“Get us into it,” said Hilts.

In proper Italian fashion Finn ignored the traffic sign banning U-turns, bumped the scooter over the concrete lip separating the tram lane, and then swung across the far side of the boulevard between red lights and roared into the parking garage entrance. The booth attendant was gone, so Finn simply drove around the barrier arm and through the short carriageway in the base of the building fronting onto via Vittor Pisani. With parking at such a premium in the ancient city, the people who’d originally developed the office building had bought up the entire interior courtyard and built the five-story garage within it.

“We’re looking for a van,” Hilts instructed as they went up the ramps. Finn nodded and kept on driving. They found what they were looking for on the roof of the garage: a bright yellow Fiat Ducato light commercial van with the name Mar-cello Di Milano in red on the side. Hilts tapped Finn on the shoulder and pointed. She pulled the Vespa in beside the van and killed the engine. There were three other vehicles on the roof and they all looked like delivery vans. There were also stenciled Riservato notations on all the spots. Long-term reserved parking, probably for stores in the area.

“How are we supposed to get into it?”

Hilts climbed off the scooter and looked around. He found a broken, fist-sized chunk of concrete beside the waist-high retaining wall on the roof. He carried it back to the driver’s-side window and slammed it through the glass.

“Like that,” Hilts answered, reaching in through the broken window and opening the door.

“Very subtle.” Finn got off the Vespa, put down the kickstand and climbed into the van after her companion.

“Couldn’t be better,” said Hilts, clicking on the dome light. The interior of the truck was filled with clothes. Racks of pants and shorts took up one side, ties and plastic-wrapped shirts were stacked on the other. Hilts knelt on the floor and spilled out his own bag of goodies: a dozen small bottles filled with some kind of muddy substance, scissors, several pairs of reading glasses, a guidebook to Milan, various small toiletries, including toothpaste, toothbrushes, and a razor, two small cheap backpacks, and a bottle of Neutrogena Instant Bronze.

“What’s all this?” said Finn.

“We can’t hide your freckles and your pale skin, but we can cover it,” he answered, holding up the Neutrogena bronzer. “And we can both color our hair.” He checked through the pile of small plastic bottles. “You darker, me lighter.” He read the labels. “Which would you like, Chocaholic or Cinnamon Stick?”

In the end she settled on Hazelnut Crunch.

Forty-five minutes later, hair towel-dried with a few of Marcello’s lightweight sweaters, Finn and Hilts climbed into the front seats of the van. Finn’s hair had been chopped into a boyish shag and was now a deep auburn color. The Neutrogena bronzer had darkened her face considerably, hiding the telltale redhead complexion. Hilts’s hair had been trimmed as well and had gone from dirty to sun-streaked blond. Both were wearing fashionably rumpled cargo pants and brightly colored shirts, Finn’s green and Hilts’s bright red. A couple of clothing changes and toiletries for both of them were stuffed into the cheap backpacks. Finn and Hilts were both wearing reading glasses, Finn’s large and round, Hilts’s aviator style.

“This is how it’s going to go,” said Hilts. “Everything they expect, we won’t do. They’ll expect a couple, we go single. They’re looking for Americans, we give them something else. What languages do you speak other than English?”

“Quite a bit of Italian, Mexican Spanish. High school French.”

“How good is the French?”

“As good as high school French usually is.”

“Canadian.”

“What?”

“That’s who you are now, a Canadian student. French, from Montreal. Your name is… What’s a French-Canadian girl’s name?”

“Celine Dion. Alanis Morrisette.”

“Perfect. Your name is Celine Morrisette and you don’t speak any Italian at all. If it gets bad, start crying and screaming in French.”

“If what gets bad?”

“If they catch you.”

“What about you?”

“Du er sе grim at du gшr blinde bшrn bange.”

“What the hell is that?!”

“Danish for ‘you’re so ugly you scare blind children.’ ”

“I didn’t know you spoke Danish.”

Hilts smiled, leaned over, and kissed Finn’s newly bronzed cheek.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. And I didn’t mean the bit about the blind kids.”

Finn walked through the hundred-foot-high entrance to Milan’s Stazione Centrale trying to think in French, an old trick from her days writing high school exams. The trouble was, it didn’t work. Instead she kept on hearing the nasal voice of her history professor at NYU telling her that the English word “crap” came from the British infantry during the Napoleonic Wars, when they couldn’t pronounce the French word for “frog”-grenouille-so they used the Gallic word for “toad” instead, which was crapaud, zoologically close enough for the average English foot soldier. For some reason the story had stuck in her mind, and at that particular moment Finn couldn’t think of any other word in the French language with the possible exceptions of oui and non. Trying not to panic, she made her way down the main concourse, which was roughly the size of a football field.