The Devil Will Come

Reading glasses. Fountain pens. A passport. A bronzed medal on a ribbon from, as far as she could tell, a German engineering society. Checkbooks and bank statements from 2006 and 2007. Pill bottles which Micaela inspected and whose contents she declared to be for high blood pressure. A box of dentures. A fading Kodachrome of a young man, Ottinger himself perhaps, in hiking gear on a steep green slope. At the very bottom was an unsealed Manila envelope with a handwritten note on the outside, written finely in black ink.

Elisabetta lifted out the envelope, prompting Frau Lang to remark that it contained a book, the only one they hadn’t sold because of the personal note. Elisabetta, who had a passable grasp of written German, read the note to herself slowly, translating as best she could.

To my teacher, my mentor, my friend. I found this in the hands of a dealer and I enticed him to part with it. You, more than anyone, will appreciate it. It is the B Text, of course. As you always taught – B holds the key. 11 September is surely a sign, don’t you think? I hope you will be with us when M’s day finally comes. K. October 2001.

Beneath the date was a small hand-drawn symbol.

This sight of it made Elisabetta’s head swim.

There was something strangely familiar about it, real and unreal at the same time, as if she’d seen it before in a long-forgotten dream.

She tried to shrug off the feeling as she opened the envelope. Inside was a slim bound book. Its cover was plain, worn leather, ever so slightly warped. The pages were a bit foxed. It was an old book in fairly good condition.

When she opened the cover her head cleared as effectively as if she’d taken a strong whiff of smelling salts.

Elisabetta didn’t think she’d ever seen the engraving before, but part of it was as recognizable as her own reflection in the mirror.

It was a 1620 edition of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, and there on the frontispiece was the old conjuror wearing his academic robes, standing inside his magic circle with his staff and his book, summoning the devil through the floor. The devil was a winged creature with horns, a pointy beard and a long curled tail.

None of that made Elisabetta’s heart race or her skin crawl. None of it made her feel like she was suffocating under her tight veil and gown.

The source of her alarm lay around and within the rim of the magic circle.

Constellation signs.

Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer.

Star signs.

The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, presented in the same peculiar order as on the fresco at St Callixtus.

And peeking out to the right of Faustus’s robes was Pisces, tilted upright, looking for all the world like a man with a tail.

EIGHT

Rome, AD 37

DUSK WAS TURNING to night as two weary boys trudged up the road toward the city centre. An insipid quarter-moon hung limply in the black sky, dimly lighting the way. In silence they kept close to the stinking central gutter to avoid worse piles of refuse that littered their way.

‘Where will we sleep?’ the youngest asked fearfully as they passed a gloomy alley.

‘I’ve no idea,’ snapped his older brother. Sensing the seven-year-old’s abject misery he relented. ‘The father of my friend, Lucius, says he sleeps in the cattle market whenever he stays in Rome. We’ll find a place there.’

Clasping his brother’s hand, the younger child shivered. His loose tunic barely warded off the chill.

‘Are we nearly there? At the cattle market?’ he enquired hopefully.

Quintus groaned, having heard a variant of the same question at least a hundred times that day.

‘Yes, Sextus, soon we’ll have somewhere warm to rest, after we’ve had a bite to eat.’

They were travelling to their uncle’s brick manufactory in the north of Rome, on the Pincian Hill, and they were hungry and exhausted following a dawn departure from their village. At least they’d made it through the walls, into the city. The two huge Praetorians with scorpion emblems affixed to their breastplates at the Porta Capena had given them a world of trouble and tried to shake them down for a bribe. But they had no coins, nothing at all and they had to prove it by stripping themselves bare and enduring the taunts of the fearsome soldiers.

Quintus, the older by three years, had wondered if his father had looked like these men. Only the vaguest of memories lingered. He was a toddler when the centurion left for active service in Germania. Their mother had to fend for herself with only the help of two older girls to tend their smallholding and look after Quintus and his baby brother.

Only a fortnight ago, their mother had gotten notice of her husband’s death in battle against the Cheruscii. On further learning that the bastard had frittered away his accumulated pay on wine and whores all she could do was shed futile tears.

Faced with crippling debts, she quickly sold her land for a pittance to a rich patrician. She and her daughters would have to survive by hiring themselves out as labourers and cloth weavers, but she could ill afford to feed two useless mouths. Rather than sell them into slavery she made the somewhat more humane decision to send the boys to their uncle to earn their keep there.

Judging by the smells, they were getting close to the cattle market in an industrial sector where tenements clung to islands of land in a sea of twisting and claustrophobic alleyways.

At street level, the retaining walls of the tenements were built of stone and reasonably robust. Higher stories listed at precarious angles and looked a good bit flimsier and indeed they passed a block which had suffered a collapse. The dwellings doubled as shops by day, selling bare necessities and cheap, rough wine. The boys dragged themselves along the fetid street towards the ghostly white glow of the stone-flagged marketplace, keeping to the centre, avoiding the glowering shadows.

The open windows at street level leered at them like black sockets in a cadaver’s skull. Sextus squeaked in fright as he tripped over a pile of offal festering in front of a butcher shop and set a loathsome carpet of rats in motion. With the last of his fading strength, Quintus managed to jerk him upright before the little boy fell into the mess.

An empty cattle byre beckoned. An emaciated dog emerged from it, interested in seizing the rotting meat before the rats reclaimed their prize. The mongrel succeeded and scuttled off down an alleyway dragging a coil of intestines.

Inside the animal pen, Quintus looked around and declared, ‘We’ll sleep here.’ They busied themselves raking up stray hanks of unfouled straw and dry grass with their hands, laying out a bed of sorts against the plank walls at the far corner of the unroofed shed.

‘We won’t have far to travel tomorrow, will we, Quintus?’ asked the younger boy hopefully.

Quintus wasn’t at all sure but he said with feigned confidence, ‘If we start early, we’ll be at Uncle’s before noon.’

He untied the knotted corners of the travelling blanket he’d been carrying over his shoulder and removed the last of their meagre provisions. Handing Sextus half the bread and an apple, the two boys collapsed on the straw bed and ate.

Balbilus heard a dull pounding overhead, an iron rod smashing against stone, a signal that he was wanted.

The underground chamber was well lit by sooty lamps. It was a large space – fifty men could assemble there comfortably, a hundred in a pinch. Live men. There was space for thousands of dead ones if most were cremated