consistent with his filthy, matted white beard. Without a word being spoken, the Sibyl climbed into the fragile craft and I followed, leaving the priest on the shore.
Thus was I truly committed.
NOTES.
1. More likely to produce a credible likeness. By skillfully interrogating the pilgrim, the priests would learn something not only of the deceased's appearance, but his personality.
2. See note 8, previous chapter.
3. Mistletoe had spiritual connotations throughout the ancient world. Since it bore berries in winter, when other plants were awaiting spring, it symbolized life amid death.
4. The origins of the Christian concept of hell as fire and brimstone?
5. Dictamuus albus, also known as dictamus fraxinella, native to Asia Minor and parts of southern Europe. The plant exudes a flammable vapor that is subject to spontaneous combustion of the gas without its own leaves being consumed. Likely this is the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses. Other flashing or sparking plants include henbane, white hellebore, and belladonna, all of which had their uses in oracular mysticism. It is odd that no one seems to have undertaken a study of self-combustible plants in modern times.
6. A craft used in nontidal waters made of skins stretched around a basketlike frame.
PART V
Chapter Thirty
Via Delia Dataria
Rome
Inspectore Santi Guiellmo, capo, le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica, chief of Italy's security force, removed his glasses and glanced down from his third-story corner office at the Piazza del Quirinale and its obelisk and fountain flanked by equestrian statues of the twins Castor and Pollux. Crossing to the other side, he noted the dress-uniformed carabinieri standing at attention outside the Palazzo del Quiriale, the old papal palace that now housed Italy's president, the man whose security, along with the rest of the country, Guilellmo was sworn to protect.
The Chief, as he liked to be called, returned his attention to the hand-tooled, gilt-edged leather top of the boulle desk that rumor attributed to Victor Emmanuel I, the first king of a united Italy. Royalist sentiment had become unfashionable after the last Victor Emmanuel's abrupt departure from Rome in 1944 in the face of determined German defenders and the equally resolute Allied advance. The desk had been relegated to oblivion until the
Chief had restored it, if not to its former glory, then at least enhanced status above that of the petty bureaucrat in whose office he had found it.
Guiellmo replaced his rimless glasses and scowled at the papers that blemished the usually immaculate desktop. He picked up the top of the stack as he plopped into a leather swivel chair.
As chief of national security, he had the job of keeping the country… well, secure. Secure from invasion, subversion, or infiltration, though it was hard to imagine by whom. After all, Italy had had sixty-plus governments in the last sixty years. Fascists, Communists, socialists, and everything in between, including a female porn star elected to parliament.
In this country, everyone's allotted fifteen minutes of fame was their term as president.
Now this.
A week or so ago, the police in Taormina had found a man, apparently not Italian, shot to death in a rental house. Scorched paint hinted at some sort of explosion. A Chinese version of the Russian AK-47 automatic rifle had been nearby. Not the usual baggage for a tourist, a visitor to Sicily with no driver's permit, no passport, no identification whatsoever. Nearby bloodstains suggested at least one other person had been wounded.
At the time, Guiellmo had paid scant attention. This was, after all, Sicily, home of the Mafia, which tended to settle quarrels on a permanent basis.
But the dead man in Taormina wasn't Mafia. At least, not in the traditional sense. The cut of the clothes, the facial structure made it almost certain the man was from Eastern Europe. The poor quality of dental work-iron fillings, one steel false tooth-made Russia likely. The ideology of Marx and Lenin had produced dentists more qualified to repair Oz's Tin Man than teeth.
Okay, so there was the possibility the Cosa Nostra boys had had a falling-out with one or more of the organization's heroin suppliers from the poppy fields of Turkey,
Afghanistan, or Pakistan, trade the Russians crime cartels largely controlled. It was a guess, but a reasonable one.
One less narco trafficker, a slightly better world.
Then, two nights ago, the local polizia in the wilds of Sardinia had come upon a multifatality wreck. Nothing unusual about that in itself, either. After all, every Italian male fancied himself a Formula One driver.
But in Sardinia, all fatalities, all four, had been foreigners. Again, no identification but bullet holes and empty shell casings in abundance, as well as the AK-47s common to third-world militia, terrorists, and anyone else seeking the most inexpensive and easily obtained automatic the international arms market had to offer.
Again, dentistry that few who could find better would choose, dentistry peculiar to the USSR before its collapse.
Coincidence that there would be a double instance of Russians armed with automatic weapons? Mere chance that they had been shot?
Unlikely.
Then there were the reports of some sort of explosions earlier that same evening. Investigation had been cut short the next day when the American Embassy announced apologetically that somehow one or two of its special aircraft drones carrying little more than training fireworks had broken their electronic tethers and crashed in Sardinia somewhere in the neighborhood of the auto accident. Brief as it had been, the probe of the scene had revealed harmless amounts of pyrotechnics but no trace of aircraft, drone or otherwise.
A fluke?
Why was it every time the Americans apologized for some sort of incursion across Italian boundaries, Guiellmo's imagination could see Uncle Sam, his index finger just below his eye, tugging the lower lid down ever so slightly, the Italian equivalent of a knowing wink?
One was an isolated incident; the second part of a pattern.
A pattern of what?
The Chief hated mysteries and puzzles, he they involving words, like the English crosswords; numbers, like the current rage for Sudoku; or multiple homicides, like the reports in front of him. Mysteries and puzzles represented a form of disorder. Unlike his countrymen, he found confusion and turmoil to be anathema. He hated the snarled traffic, comic corruption of government at all levels, social disarray. He suspected somewhere in his ancestry lurked a non-Italian.
Perhaps a German.
He straightened the papers back into a perfect stack. He hated disarray. That was why he had never married. Sharing a dwelling with another human being, let alone one with lace underwear, hose, cosmetics, and other unimaginable accessories, was to invite bedlam into his well-ordered life.
As was letting these killings go unsolved.
The answer, of course, was to look at the problem logically.
First, although Italy had sent a small contingent to fight with the coalition in Iraq, there was no national enemy as far as the inspector knew. The killings, then, had to be either based on something else or committed by a non- Italian. For that matter, the shell casings and slugs in Sicily and Sardinia were definitely not all from Czech, Chinese, or Russian versions of the AK-47.
