service. Now come and eat before we both get in trouble with mama.’
Later, in her room, Elisabetta sat at her study desk in nightgown and slippers, trying to finish the articles that Micaela had sent her. It was hard going. The subject matter was technical and frankly distasteful – a compendium of medical literature on human tails. Most of the reports were in English and these she tackled first. There were a smattering in French, German, Russian and Japanese which she left for later.
She put down her fourteenth paper of the day on atavistic human tails, a term with which she’d previously been unfamiliar. Atavism: the reappearance of a lost characteristic specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor. Like other atavisms, the scientific literature addressed human tails as one example of our common heritage with non- human mammals.
Elisabetta wasn’t going to let herself be drawn into a debate on evolutionary biology. She was trained as a scientist and preferred to let Church doctrine coexist peacefully with truisms about evolution, at least in her own mind. No one in the Church had ever had occasion to question her about her beliefs on the matter and she’d try to keep it so.
Human tails, she learned, were rare – very rare, with only about a hundred well-documented cases in the past century. Elisabetta forced herself to study the photos, especially those of babies. They stirred something inside her, something deeply disturbing and base: a stomach-churning revulsion. And there was more: an element of fear. An ancient Darwinian fear of prey in the presence of a predator. She took a deep breath and pressed on.
Human tails ranged from short nubbins to longer snake-like appendages. They possessed all the structures of mammalian tails with extra bones – up to half a dozen coccygeal vertebrae – covered by sinew and muscle and pink skin. They could move with the full voluntary control of striated muscle.
Most parents opted for surgical removal lest the child grow up stigmatized and for that reason tails in adults were even more unusual.
Elisabetta’s eyelids grew heavy. She’d gotten through all the English-language papers and she was finding them repetitive. A German paper was at the top of the pile. It was from the
She’d tackle it in the morning, she decided.
It was time to clear her head and restore her balance with a short period of prayer before sleep overtook her.
As she rose from her chair Elisabetta had a sudden impulse to turn one more page. She tried to fight it but her hand moved too fast.
At the sight of the photo, she lost control of her legs and fell back onto the seat hard enough to make her gasp in pain.
A naked old corpse lay prone on an autopsy table, photographed from waist to knees.
Arising above wrinkled male buttocks was a tail, twenty centimeters from its base to its tip by the measuring rule laid beside it. It was thick at its base, its whole length cylindrical and untapered with an abruptly stubby tip like the cut edge of a sausage.
But there was more.
Elisabetta tried to swallow but her mouth was too dry. She squinted hard at the photo and adjusted her reading light but it wasn’t enough.
Breathing hard, she ran from her room, grabbing at her dressing gown and donning it as she flew down the hall. Sister Silvia, a dear lady with a weak bladder on her way to the lavatory, was speechless as Elisabetta rushed past and careened down the stairs to the classrooms.
She switched on the lights and found what she needed in the science room. Then she ran back up the stairs, clutching a magnifying glass.
She sat back down at her desk. The base of the dead man’s spine – that was what had seized her attention like a hard slap to the face.
There they were, visible under the magnifying glass, ringing the tail in concentric semicircles: a flock of small black tattoos. Elisabetta was seized with a paralyzing fear, as if this naked old corpse might rise from the page and strike at her with a knife aimed for her heart.
SEVEN
THE INSTITUTE OF Pathology at the University Hospital of Ulm in southern Germany was set in woodlands at the outskirts of the expansive campus. A journey by air with a car and driver from Munich airport had been arranged at the insistence of Professor De Stefano over Elisabetta’s protestations that the train would do fine.
‘Look,’ he’d said. ‘I’m sticking my neck out by letting you bring your sister into this so indulge me. I want to make sure you’re there and back the same day. Speed …’
To his non-amusement Elisabetta completed his mantra, ‘… is essential.’
She and Micaela had sat beside each other on the flight from Rome talking in hushed voices about tails and tattoos, star signs and ancient Roman burial practices.
Micaela chomped through her bag of mixed nuts and took Elisabetta’s when they were offered, thoroughly enjoying her role as an insider. But Elisabetta, already nervous about including her family in this business, began to worry about her sister’s commitment to secrecy when she said, ‘We should get Papa involved. He’s a genius.’
‘Yes, I know he’s as clever as they come and I guess his analytical powers would be very useful,’ Elisabetta replied, ‘but we simply cannot tell him. We can’t speak of this to anyone else! It was difficult enough to get them to let me bring you inside the tent. I said I needed a medical doctor and De Stefano agreed only because you’re my sister.’
The two women who emerged from the Mercedes car at the entrance to the Institute could not have looked more different – Micaela in a tightly fitting print dress with a sharp leather jacket and high heels and Elisabetta in her black habit and sensible shoes.
While Elisabetta hung back, Micaela told the man at the reception area that she had an appointment. After he had placed a call upstairs he looked up again and asked the nun if he could be of assistance.
‘We’re together,’ Elisabetta replied.
He looked them over and shook his head, seemingly uncertain about this apparent collision of two worlds.
Earlier, Micaela had driven Elisabetta to hysterics about the pomposity of German academic titles. So when Herr Professor Dr Med. Peter-Michael Gunther emerged from the elevator Micaela fired off a wicked wink. He looked every inch the Herr Professor. Tall and imperious, and with a smug goatee, his full title was embroidered above the pocket of his lab coat at the expense of a considerable amount of red thread.
‘Ladies,’ Gunther said in crisp English, seemingly struggling for a proper way to address them, ‘it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Please follow me.’
Micaela chatted his ear off all the way upstairs. She’d been the one to make initial contact and he seemed far more comfortable with her anyway.
‘I’m surprised you were interested in my little paper,’ Gunther said, showing them into his starkly modern office that overlooked the Institute’s reflecting pool.
‘Was no one else interested?’ Elisabetta asked, speaking for the first time.
He poured coffee from a cafetiere. ‘You know, I thought it would generate some wider expressions of interest and comment but that was not the case. Just a few notes from colleagues, a joke or two. Actually, the greatest interest came from the police.’
Elisabetta put her cup down. ‘Why the police? Was his death suspicious?’
‘Not at all. The cause of death was clearly a coronary thrombosis. The man was in his eighties, found unresponsive on the street and taken to the casualty ward where he was pronounced dead. All very routine until someone removed his trousers. The case took a further unusual turn two days after his autopsy when someone broke into the hospital morgue and removed his body. The same night, my hospital office was burglarized and some
