David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

“Why Tiber Island?” he asked.

“I told you. We have to go to the church.”

Rossi, who was driving, cast him a chilly glance.

Costa wondered if his new partner was starting to get bad feelings about this whole thing. It was an odd decision. They should have waited for instructions, maybe. But he had no evidence a crime had been committed on city territory. Besides, the woman was adamant: She wanted to get there quickly. Costa thought he could make out a good case in front of Falcone. He usually did. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

She sighed, as if she were talking to a schoolchild. “Bartholomew. The saint was flayed alive. Skinned. Stefano did some work on that period. He would have known. The church on Tiber Island is Bartholomew’s. I can’t think of anything else.”

“That’s it?” Costa replied, fast revising his hopes of keeping Falcone sweet.

“That’s it,” she agreed testily. “Unless you have a better idea.”

The two men looked at each other.

The August traffic was light. They made their way along the Trastevere waterfront, then took a left turn onto the tiny island that sat in the middle of the river.

“This Stefano,” Rossi asked as they pulled into the piazza in front of the church, “he was a friend of yours?” She said nothing, and was stepping out the door before they had come to a halt. “One scary woman,” Rossi grunted just out of earshot, shaking his head.

The two policemen followed her and looked at the church. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong here. This was an old, unspoiled corner of the city, with a cobbled piazza where you could sit in the shade away from the murmur of traffic that ran along both banks of the river. “You think we should call in?” Rossi asked.

Costa shrugged. “What’s the point? Let them hang us in their time, not ours.”

“Yeah,” the older man agreed.

“Let me see if I can find someone. Get some keys.” The woman was already at the door of the church.

“Hey,” Costa yelled. “Wait.” But she was gone. Costa swore and raced after her, shouting for Rossi to follow.

The place was empty. They stood in the nave, framed by the polished columns on either side, Costa feeling the way he always did in churches: uncomfortable. It was a matter of upbringing, he guessed. The places just spooked him sometimes. They looked in the dimly lit side chapels. They tried a couple of doors that opened onto tiny storage rooms full of dust.

“There’s nothing here,” she said. They stood in the nave, Costa trying to think of other options. She was disappointed, anxious, as if this were some intellectual puzzle demanding a solution.

“It was worth a try,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“I blame myself already,” she said softly. “There has to be more to it than this. We did some work here once. There was a temple here, to Aesculapius, before the church was built. Maybe something underground.”

“Aescoo—who?”

“Aesculapius. He was the god of medicine.” She looked at him. “That makes it appropriate too, don’t you think?”

“Maybe.” Costa was out of his depth and knew it. There was more going on in the woman’s head than he understood. He wondered how much she realized that herself.

Rossi returned waving a set of large, old keys. Costa felt suddenly awkward. Somehow he seemed to have taken the initiative, which was surely Rossi’s prerogative. Rossi was older, more senior. He knew more.

“We’ve been everywhere,” Costa said. “It’s all open anyway. Nothing.”

“Best we call in then,” Rossi said, and seemed relieved at the idea someone else might have to pick up the pieces. She was staring intently at a small door on the left, before the altar. “Over there.”

“We tried it,” Costa said.

“No. There’s a campanile here too. We didn’t find the way into the tower.”

Costa led the way and threw open the door. The room was small and dark. He pulled out the little flashlight from his pocket and saw instantly why they had missed the exit earlier. The stairs were hidden in the dark far corner, behind an iron screen that was secured with a huge padlock. Rossi grunted, then went to it, fumbled with the keys, found the right one and pushed through into the darkness, scrabbling up the stairs.

“Jesus! What was that?” The big man’s screech echoed up the stone staircase.

Costa’s fingers finally found a light switch. It illuminated the ground floor of the tower and the stone spiral leading upward through a second floor of old, dry planking.

Rossi staggered down the stairs, still squealing. His bald head was now stained with blood. It ran down his temple, into his eyes. He squirmed, trying to wipe it off, scrubbing at his head with a handkerchief, yelling all the time. For the first time in his police career Nic Costa felt bile rising in his throat.

Now that they stood at the staircase, there was a smell inside the hot enclosed oven that was the tower’s interior. It stank of fresh meat starting to go sour. He flashed his light upward. From the wooden ceiling above the stairs there was a slow, steady drip of coagulating blood—Rossi had walked beneath it the moment he’d put a foot on the first step.

“We need help,” Costa said grimly, reaching for the radio in his pocket.

But Sara Farnese was already on the stairs, squeezing past Rossi.

“Hey!” Costa yelled, seeing her slim form disappear completely from view. “Don’t do that. Don’t touch anything. Jesus—” His partner was losing it.

Rossi was scratching at his face as if the blood there were poison, acid, ready to eat into his skin. Costa took the radio and made a short, urgent call. Then he told Rossi to stay downstairs and wait for him. He didn’t like the look on the older man’s face. There was something crazy there, something that said this was all traveling a little too far from home.

Nic Costa felt the same way but she was gone, she was upstairs with whatever else lived there, and he couldn’t accept the idea that she might be there alone. He heard the sound of a switch overhead. A dim, yellow light cast shadows down the stairs. Then Sara Farnese made a noise, something halfway between a gasp and a scream, the first real sign of emotion she had uttered since the carnage in the Vatican Library half an hour before.

“Shit!” Costa cursed, and took the stairs two at a time.

She was slumped with her back to the wall. Her hands were over her mouth, her green eyes open wide in shock and amazement. Costa followed the direction of her gaze. He saw the corpses in the full beam of the single bulb and fought to keep the contents of his stomach down.

There were two bodies in the room. The woman’s was fully dressed in a dark skirt and red blouse. It was suspended from a beam by a makeshift noose. Close to the dangling legs was an old wooden chair which might have been kicked from beneath her—or, perhaps, had fallen away as she struggled to keep herself upright. Costa did not look too closely at her face but she appeared to be in her midthirties, with streaky fair hair and thin, leathery skin.

About two yards away was a second figure, strapped upright to a supporting timber beam: a man with a striking shock of golden hair and a face contorted by the agonies of a terrible death, with a gag tied tightly across his mouth, raising the bloodless lips and perfect white teeth into an ironic smile. He hung by his arms, which were tethered above his head to a blackened beam. His legs dangled free to the wooden floor. There was skin only on his face, hands, feet and groin.

A buzzing cloud of flies hovered over the fleshy torso. Their noise filled the tiny circular room. Around the walls, painted time and time again in the dead man’s blood, was the message Sara Farnese had first heard in the Vatican Library, written in scrawled capital letters: THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH. And, once only, a couplet in English, one Nic Costa could understand enough to realize it was even crazier. It was painted on the wall behind the body so the writing was behind its head. The words read like the first two lines of a poem… As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.