David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“Where are you?”

Gino Fosse looked at the door and caught his breath. She was walking through the entrance, leading the young cop, the one he’d nearly killed a couple of days before. They were striding into the nave with no fear, no caution on their faces. It was impossible. He blinked to make certain this could be true. They were heading for the paintings now, over to where the small crowds had gathered. Were they looking for him? Or were they looking for Michael Denney? He racked his mind to try to find answers.

One small certainty made sense. He rose from the bench, the gun tight in his hand. “Sara!” His voice rose to a roar. Her eyes met his across the nave. The cop watched him intently. He didn’t even move a hand to his jacket. They shouldn’t have been there, either of them.

Then the lights failed altogether. The electric bulbs died. He’d been staring straight at them, into the pool of light around the painting: the image of the naked madman murdering the prone Matthew on the ground, sword raised, ready to deliver the final blow.

“Run!” he bellowed, and raised the gun, firing a single shot into the black air.

There was still some light. A few bulbs remained lit in an adjoining alcove. People huddled there, whimpering, terrified, waiting. He staggered toward them but before he could get there even that was snatched from him. The wan lights failed with a clatter as the meter swung the switch. The image of Matthew, in his medieval costume, staring at the biblical Christ, asking “Who, me?,” faded to black.

Fosse loosed off two more shots into the air. A woman began screaming hysterically. As his eyes adjusted to the velvet gloom and the random sea of tiny candle flames that now shed the last illumination on the scene, something brushed past him, something black and fast-moving, a man who never spoke a word.

He swore and lunged to catch the fleeing figure. There was nothing there. Everything eluded his grasp. Everything was denied him. He stumbled forward, colliding with terrified bodies in the darkness, yelling every obscenity he could think of, screaming his father’s name, begging the black maw of the nave to give up his body for vengeance.

He stumbled against a pillar, slammed his face hard against the stone. A warm, sticky stream began to flow from his nose. He tasted blood on his tongue.

“Bastard!” he screamed, and let off another shot.

Something else collided with him, taking away his breath, almost bringing him to his knees. He recognized what it was: the iron railing that ran in front of the altar, the same kind of worked metal on which Arturo Valena had died screaming. He groped his way along it, toward the tiny sea of candles. The dark, glittering eyes, human this time, looked back at him in their reflection, scared, scattering as he approached.

“Bastard!”

A hand gripped his shoulder, turning him. Gino Fosse lashed out with the butt of the gun, missing, and found his arm thrust briskly aside.

The pool of light from a few guttering candles revealed the man’s face. It was the little cop. He held Fosse’s gun hand high above them. It wouldn’t be hard to overcome him, Gino thought. He didn’t look right for the part he was trying to play. But then perhaps none of them did.

“I didn’t come for you,” Gino murmured. “Get away. Take her with you.”

A face came out of the darkness. She looked at him, serene, controlled, unafraid, which was, he thought, stupid.

“You have to run,” he said. “They’ll kill you too.”

“Gino,” she answered, and a slim hand touched his face. He shrank back, unable to comprehend what was happening. “Come with us,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

He needed her gone. He didn’t want to face her. Her fingers moved against his skin.

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know who I was. I should have told you.”

“Too late for that.” Gino shook his head, wishing he could get the pictures out of his mind. “Too late!”

“I forgive you,” she said. She seemed so calm. He wanted to believe her.

The little cop’s grip was relaxing. There were people moving nearby. He wanted to see their faces. He needed to see that silver head running away in the darkness.

“It’s what they want,” the cop said. “They’ve been using you, Gino. Who gave you the names? Who told you where to go and when?”

He thought of Hanrahan, smiling in the darkness of San Lorenzo in Lucina. “What does it matter?”

“Because they’re just playing with you, Gino,” the cop insisted.

He laughed. “You think I don’t know that?”

Sara’s face, compassionate, loving, stared at him. “Then why do it?”

He waved the gun in front of her. “Because this is what he deserves.”

“He’s our father,” she said. “He deserves our pity. Not our hate. If I can forgive you…”

The little cop seemed puzzled. Gino watched her face in the halflight.

It could have been an image from a painting. She seemed so placid, so sure of herself. “Please,” she said. “We can belong to each other. We can heal ourselves if we want. Don’t let them use your fury for their own ends. Don’t give them that pleasure. Or they win.”

He listened hard in the dark space beyond them. They had to be there. The rats chattering away in the darkness, shredding what little was left of his soul. But all he could hear, deep inside his head, was the refrain of the music: Cannonball Adderley’s alto chanting Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy with an insistent lilting sadness, like a gospel singer praying for absolution.

“If you talk to people I know, Gino,” the little cop said, “there can be justice for them all. Your father. For these people who led you to do these things.” The cop hesitated. “Isn’t that what you want?”

Fosse thought again of the Irishman, his hot breath in his ear, saying those hated words in his ear in San Lorenzo in Lucina. How it would be so easy to make things right if only Michael Denney could be persuaded to flee from behind the Vatican’s high walls. He would like to see Hanrahan face justice, he thought. There was, when he considered it, so much he could tell them.

The cop’s hand went up and grasped the gun. Fosse let go, let him take it.

Nic Costa’s eyes flashed at Sara. “Try to find your father. He must be hiding somewhere. Keep him safe until I say so. I don’t know if the right people are here or not.”

In another situation, Costa knew, she would have kissed him quickly on the cheek. But her brother was still on a knife edge. Neither of them wanted to push their luck. Her hand reached out and squeezed his, then she was gone, a fleeting figure vanishing into the maw of the church.

Fosse stared after her, a wild animal look in his eyes, part fear, part rage. Nic Costa felt, for a moment, afraid. “Where is she?”

Fosse asked. “Will she come back?”

“Sure, she’ll come back,” Nic said, trying to sound confident.

“I didn’t know,” Fosse said. “I did it to the others because they were whores. That’s what they were for. I didn’t know…”

Fosse’s black eyes stared into his. “It haunts me. I don’t want it in my head any longer.”

A part of him wasn’t mad at all, Costa realized, and then he let his mind go blank, unable to countenance the possibilities that lay within what he’d just heard. There was no time. People were moving through the shadows, big, dark bodies, men in jackets, men with a purpose. Costa wondered who would get there first, who might be in the church already. He’d tried to cover as many options as possible.

Someone brushed past him. An arm reached down toward the altar rail, some coins fell in the box there and, in a sudden, aching flash, the lights of the canvas burst into life.