David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“Don’t look at me like that, Brendan. This is something you can’t understand, because it’s something you’ve never experienced. When we were in each other’s arms there I swear we were in Paradise. I felt closer to God than I’ve ever been in my life and there’s no blasphemy in saying it. I never wanted that to end. Then…”

“Then you followed her to Paris and she got pregnant. You could have left the Church, Michael. You could have been with her. The coward in you always comes out in the end.”

Denney refused to rise to the bait. “I was a coward, but not in the way you think. I wanted to do just that. She couldn’t face the ordeal we both knew that would entail. The wrath of our families. Being cast out as sinners. I was a coward because, when the Church found out, as they were bound to, I acceded to them without a fight. I let them rule us both.”

A picture entered his head, of Annette naked, lying back on the old cushions of a battered sofa, removing the crucifix from her neck, a shaft of light cutting through stained glass into the dusty hot air of the storeroom, her face full of anticipation and joy. “What happened in that room was no sin, Brendan. It was a holy thing. It was what was supposed to happen. If only you could understand it.”

His gray face winced at the remembered pain. “They let her keep one child provided she pretended it belonged to someone else, someone who didn’t care a damn. Imagine having to face that decision and I was nowhere in sight, I was banished. Do you take the girl? Do you take the boy? None of that was my doing. Those were the cruel ways of the Church. Sometimes they make my sins seem like mere transgressions. And then…”

He recalled the last time he visited them both and the way the sickness was dragging the light from her eyes.

“My family had influence. I was saved for greater things. They put my worldliness to other uses.” He took one last look at the apartment. “Sometimes these past few days I’ve wondered. How much are we born to be what we become and how much are we made that way? What would have happened if we’d said to hell with them and got married? Would I have made a loyal husband? A good father? Or would I have become what I am now? A devious old fraud desperate to save his own skin? You see, Brendan. I don’t need you to judge me. I can do that for myself, better than any save one.”

Denney noted the Irishman’s embarrassment with amusement. “And now I’ve made you my confessor. How very awkward for you.”

Hanrahan coughed into his hand. “We’ve twenty minutes to wait, Michael. When the time comes I’ll carry your bag and you can follow me.”

Denney stood his ground. “And the painting?”

“I’ll keep it till I hear.”

Fifty-Three

He waited in front of the Pantheon watching the crowds of tourists struggling in vain to find some shelter from the heat inside its vast, shady belly. It felt as if there were a fire beneath the world. The fierce humid heat was working its way to some catharsis. The sky was darkening, turning the color of lead. From somewhere in the east came a rippling roll of thunder. A speck of rain fell on his cheek with only the slightest touch of gravity, as if it had materialized out of the soaking air.

Gino Fosse had saved these clothes for the last moment. They were his own this time: the long white alb almost touching the ground which he’d worn when he’d said his first mass in Sicily. It was gathered at the waist with a cincture. In one deep pocket was a CD player and headphones. In the other rested the gun.

A tourist, a young girl, pretty, with long fair hair, asked for directions to the Colosseum. “Buy a map,” he snapped, and she wandered away, puzzled, a little frightened perhaps.

He looked at the looming, lowering sky. A storm was on the way, a bad one. The city streets would run deep with rain. The people would race for shelter in the cafés and bars. The short, humid summer would come to a sudden climax and still the city would not be washed clean in the flood that followed. Man was born evil and waited for the events that purified him. There was no other way.

He pulled out the CD player, put on the headphones and listened to the music. It was Cannonball Adderley live playing “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” with Joe Zawinul on piano. It sounded like a spiritual, like a sinner praying for redemption.

Gino Fosse sang the refrain out loud as he walked: Da-da-deedle–deedle-deedle-dee.

By the time he reached the church the sky was black. He walked inside and took a bench in the darkness, watching the way the light was beginning to fail beyond the windows, waiting for a familiar shape to walk through the door.

Fifty-Four

Greta Ricci stood with the rest of the pack outside the main Vatican gate, eyeing the Swiss Guards in their blue uniforms, steadily becoming more and more convinced someone was playing them for fools.

The men on duty looked half bored, half amused. Greta couldn’t believe for one moment that the event they were expecting—an event that would make the news bulletins throughout the world—was about to happen here, in front of two dumb-looking would-be cops. The Vatican surely had other plans. Maybe they were using the helipad at the back, unseen. Maybe they were taking him out of one of the small exits in the wall which led to the Viale Vaticano at the rear, or putting him on a private train at the Vatican Station, behind St. Peter’s.

She was with Toni, the stupid teenage photographer from Naples who had been attached to her side since the story broke. He was never the most fragrant of youths at the best of times. Days and nights of constant stakeouts and itinerant sieges had given him the odor of a street bum. Which Greta Ricci believed she could have handled were it not for his manifest incompetence. Toni was six feet tall and extraordinarily well built. His strategy for getting the best picture consisted of waiting for the moment, then fighting his way to the front of the pack and elbowing himself into position for the shot.

This lent, she was forced to admit, a certain graphic immediacy to his work, which almost always appeared, with some justification, to have been taken from the inside of a brawl. But it made him useless as a journalistic colleague. He looked for nothing except the emergence of an opportunity. He had no flair for creativity beyond the raw muscle of the snatched shot, no talent for seeing that pictures must sometimes be made, not merely captured. He was a chimp with a rapid-fire Nikon, hoping that somewhere among the scores of frames he’d captured a memorable image would emerge.

Her mobile phone rang. She scowled at Toni, eyes fixed straight ahead, straining on the two smirking guards at the gate.

“Don’t,” she ordered, stabbing a finger into his back, “look away for an instant. Understand?”

He nodded. He didn’t have a sense of humor either.

“Ricci,” she snapped into the phone, walking away from the herd to get some peace and a little silence. Then she walked a little faster, a little farther, when she heard who it was.

“Nic? Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Where are you?”

“At the main gate. Where they’re telling us to be to get the best view. Not that I believe a word of it.”

“No.” He kept it short and direct and made sure she agreed, first, to the preconditions. Just her and a photographer. No other press. He couldn’t take the risk.

“You think I’d invite someone else along to my own party?” she asked, then hastily scribbled down the details that he gave her, looking all the while for the nearest cab rank.

When he rang off she walked back into the media pack and physically pulled Toni out from close to the front of it, ignoring his screeching objections.