Ten.
Fifty.
Eighty.
One hundred.
One hundred twelve!
He bore down mentally and repeated the exercise.
Yes, one hundred twelve.
The eclipse began to reverse and the penumbra collapsed.
Malachy carefully scuttled back down to the hatch, descended the stairs and made his way to his room, anxious not to lose a moment.
There he lit a fat candle and dipped a quill into a pot of ink. He began to write as fast as he could. He would write all night until the dawn came. He saw it clearly, as clearly as the stars brightly imprinted on his mind’s eye.
Here in the Lateran Palace, here in Rome, here in the bosom of Christendom, the home of his great enemy and the enemy of his kind, Malachy had a lucid and certain vision of what would come to pass.
There would be 112 more Popes: 112 Popes until the end of the Church. And the end of the world as they knew it.
ONE
Rome, 2000
‘WHAT DOES K want?’ the man asked. He was seated, nervously drumming thick fingers against the wooden arms of a chair.
Although the line had gone dead, the other man still had the phone in his hand. He set it back into its cradle and waited for a city bus to pass under their open window and for its annoying rumble to fade. ‘He wants us to kill her.’
‘So we’ll kill her. We know where she lives. We know where she works.’
‘He wants us to do it tonight.’
The seated man lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. It was inscribed TO ALDO, FROM K. ‘I prefer more planning.’
‘Of course. So do I.’
‘I didn’t hear you objecting.’
‘That wasn’t one of his people. It was K!’
The seated man leaned forward in surprise and exhaled a plume of smoke which floated off and merged with the wafting diesel fumes. ‘He called you himself?’
‘Couldn’t you tell by the way I was speaking?’
The seated man drew on his cigarette so deeply that the smoke penetrated the deepest reaches of his lungs. When he breathed out he said, ‘Then tonight she dies.’
Elisabetta Celestino was shocked at her own tears. When was the last time she’d cried?
The answer came to her in a vinegary rush of memory.
Her mother’s death. At the hospital, at the wake, at the funeral and for days afterwards until she prayed for the tears to stop and they did. Even though she was a young girl at the time, she hated the wet eyes and the streaked cheeks, the awful heaving of the chest, the lack of control over her body and she vowed to banish henceforth this kind of eruption.
But now Elisabetta felt the sting of salty tears in her eyes. She was angry at herself. There was no equivalence between these long-separated events – her mother’s passing and this email she’d received from Professor De Stefano.
Still, she was determined to confront him, change his mind, turn the situation around. In the pantheon of the Universita Degli Studi di Roma, De Stefano was a god and she, a lowly graduate student, was a supplicant. But since childhood she’d possessed a gritty determination, often getting her way by peppering her adversary with a fusillade of reason and then launching a few piercing missiles of intellect to win the day. Over the years many had succumbed – friends, teachers, even her genius father once or twice.
As she waited outside De Stefano’s office at the Department of Archeology and Antiquity within the heartless Fascist-style Humanities Building Elisabetta composed herself. It was already dark and unseasonably cold. The boilers weren’t putting out any perceptible heat and she kept her coat on her lap draped over her bare legs. The book-lined corridor of the department was empty, the volumes secure in locked glass-fronted cabinets. The overhead fluorescent lights cast a white stripe on the gray-tiled floor. There was only one open door. It led to the cramped office she shared with three other grad students but she didn’t want to wait there. She wanted De Stefano to see her as soon as he rounded the corner so she sat on one of the hard benches where the students waited for their professors.
He kept her waiting. He was almost never on time. Whether it was his way of demonstrating his position on the totem pole or just scatterbrained time management, she was uncertain. He was nonetheless always appropriately apologetic and when he finally did come rushing in he spouted
‘Sit, sit,’ he said. ‘I was delayed. My meeting ran over, and the traffic was dreadful.’
‘I understand,’ Elisabetta said smoothly. ‘It was good of you to come back tonight to see me.’
‘Yes, of course. I know you’re upset. It’s difficult, but I think there are important lessons that in the long term will only help your career.’
De Stefano hung up his overcoat and sank into his desk chair.
She had rehearsed the speech in her mind and now the stage was hers. ‘But, Professor, here’s what I’m having great trouble with. You supported my work from the moment I showed you the first photographs of St Callixtus. You came with me to see the subsidence damage, the fallen wall, the first-century brickwork, the symbols on the plaster. You agreed with me that they were unique to the catacombs. You agreed the astrological symbology was unprecedented. You supported my research. You supported publication. You supported further excavation. What happened?’
De Stefano rubbed his bristly crew-cut. ‘Look, Elisabetta, you’ve always known the protocol. The catacombs are under the control of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. I’m a member of the Commission. All publication drafts have to be cleared by them. Unfortunately, your paper was rejected and your request for funding to mount an excavation was also rejected. But here’s the good news. You’re broadly known now. No one criticized your scholarship. This can only work toward your benefit. All you need is patience.’
She leaned back in her chair and felt her cheeks flushing with anger. ‘Why was it rejected? You haven’t told me why.’
‘I talked to Archbishop Luongo just this afternoon and asked him the same question. He told me the view was that the paper was too speculative and preliminary, that any public disclosure of the findings should await further study and contextual analysis.’
‘Isn’t that an argument for extending the gallery further to the west? I’m convinced, as you are, that the cave-in exposed an early Imperial columbarium. The symbology is singular and indicates a previously unknown sect. I can make tremendous progress with a modest grant.’
‘To the Commission, it’s out of the question. They won’t support a trench beyond the known limits of the catacomb. They’re concerned about larger issues of architectural stability. An excavation could trigger further cave- ins and have a domino effect that could lead back into the heart of St Callixtus. The decision went all the way up to Cardinal Giaccone.’
‘I can do it safely! I’ve consulted with engineers. And besides, it’s pre-Christian! It shouldn’t even be the Vatican’s call.’
‘You’re the last person to be naive about this,’ De Stefano clucked. ‘You know that the entire complex is under the Commission’s jurisdiction.’
