She slid the pipe tool from her pocket and punched it into Krek’s chest with all the strength she had in her arm.
He said nothing. She didn’t know she’d accomplished anything at all until she let her hand go and saw the tool sticking through his sweater, the aerator spike fully buried. There was no blood.
Krek looked down, rolled off Elisabetta and rose to his feet. He looked amused. ‘What is this? What did you do?’
He pulled out the pipe tool and laughed. ‘No, thank you! I smoke cigars!’
To Elisabetta’s horror, he seemed perfectly fine. As she lay on the rug he casually lowered his trousers, enough to reveal his lower back. ‘Have you ever seen one of these?’
He made a half-turn to show her his spine. His tail was thick, twitching like an angry snake. His tattoos were black and crisp, menacing but, to Elisabetta, no longer mysterious.
She started to crawl away.
But as Krek turned back to her something was happening inside his chest.
Blood was leaking from a small wound in his heart into the pericardial sac and when the sac was full it squeezed his heart like an orange in a juicer.
He inhaled sharply and began to wheeze.
Krek clutched at his chest and lifted up his sweater as if that might help give him more air.
He began to teeter, then slowly pitched forward like a felled tree.
He tried to speak but nothing came out.
And just before he crashed down pure rage possessed his face.
Elisabetta had never before seen a look of such hatred.
THIRTY-ONE
IT HAD BEEN a false alarm.
The man apprehended by the Vatican Gendarmes at the metal detector was an off-duty Rome policeman with an unloaded service weapon in his backpack. He’d come to St Peter’s Square to join in the Conclave vigil and had forgotten he’d brought his gun. He was chagrined and apologetic. His identity checked out. The man with him was his cousin.
Hackel waited outside the incident van where the men were being held. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and finally said to Oberst Sonnenberg, ‘I should be getting back to my post at the Chapel.’
‘Yes, go ahead, Oberstleutnant,’ Sonnenberg said. ‘I’ll check in with you soon. I don’t think we’ll be lucky enough to have white smoke tonight, but you never know.’
Hackel saluted and peeled away. When he was out of Sonnenberg’s sight he reversed direction and made for his flat.
*
Micaela briefly considered digging at the rubble to see if the fat corpse had a mobile phone but the task seemed too formidable. She put her ear to the door and listened. The falling crate had made a terribly loud sound. If someone were nearby they would surely have noticed it.
Hearing nothing at the door she opened it a crack, then wide enough to poke her head through. The cellar hall was mostly dark; there was a naked bulb ten meters away. There was no one about. She began to walk toward the light.
Elisabetta stood over Krek’s prone, lifeless body. The tail which only moments ago had seemed so terrifyingly menacing now struck her as nothing but an anomalous piece of meat.
She felt her heart thumping wildly and tried to think. She had to sound the alarm. Krek’s telephone beckoned. She reached for it, then froze. What if the line was monitored? Would placing a call alert Krek’s people that she was running free and put Micaela’s life in danger? She had to save her sister first.
The great room had four doors and all of them, she found, were locked from the inside. Krek seemed to have liked his privacy.
Two of the doors along one wall led to different sides of the entrance hall. This was the way she had entered. Elisabetta visualized the route from the basement: up a set of stairs, into a hall off a small study, through a paneled library to the entrance hall and then into the great room. She was about to go into the hall when she heard heavy footsteps approaching. She retreated, closed the door and examined the other two.
The third door led directly to a stairway that went upstairs. The fourth one led to a dim, undecorated hallway – a servant’s passageway, perhaps. The coast seemed clear and she took the passageway.
Micaela shucked off her shoes to enable her to tread more silently and kicked them against the wall. The basement hall stretched a considerable distance without any sign of stairs and she wondered if she should have gone in the other direction. She tried several door latches along the way. Some were locked, others led to dark storage rooms.
Finally a poorly lit flight of stone stairs beckoned. Micaela climbed them gingerly, praying that she didn’t meet anyone along the way.
Elisabetta crept into a dining room with a banqueting table long enough to seat thirty comfortably. Through its leaded windows she could see a young man with a slung rifle patrolling the grounds. She ducked and frog-walked below the window line. At the opposite end of the dining room she stopped to put her ear to a set of double doors. Through the wood she heard the noise of a clattering of pots.
*
Micaela’s stairs took her to a rabbit warren of pantry rooms stocked with canned and dried goods. She found herself looking hungrily at labels and briefly searching in vain for a can opener to get at a tin of peaches.
She heard a gasp behind her and turned to see a huge woman wearing a chef’s apron looking as shocked as she herself must have looked. The woman let out a short shriek and began to flee but Micaela pursued her with the peach tin, laying her low with a single heavy blow to the back of her head. The woman went smashing into a shelf, taking a month’s worth of provisions to the floor with her.
Elisabetta heard a sharp cry and loud noises coming from the kitchen area. She crouched behind a large oriental vase in case someone came flying into the dining room but after several minutes all remained quiet. Cautiously, she entered the kitchen. Seeing nothing, she went through to the pantry where she found a hefty female chef lying unconscious, her chest heaving with grunts and snores. To one side was a flight of stairs to the basement. Elisabetta uttered a quick prayer and made a dash for them, wondering what had befallen the woman.
Micaela left the kitchen and found herself in the entrance hall, a vast expanse of marble and oversized ornamental furnishings. She stole across the hall, trying first one door, which was locked, then another. The second door was unlocked. She eased it open a centimeter at a time, trying to avoid any creaking.
Through the gap she took in a great room with an enormous fireplace before she spotted a half-naked body on the floor.
Micaela slinked inside and quietly locked the door behind her. The body lay still, with a cashmere sweater bunched up around its chest and slacks rolled down around its ankles. She approached it slowly and swore at what she saw.
A long, lifeless tail.
Elisabetta scurried down the basement hall, her habit sweeping the concrete floor. Suddenly something made her stop short. Micaela’s shoes! She cringed in fear but carried on to the room with the crates where she leapt inside, calling for her sister.
The room was in a shambles with planks from a burst crate, tufo earth and ancient bones scattered everywhere.
The sight under the mess of a hand that still had flesh on it almost made her scream but she gasped with relief when she saw a chunky man’s ring on one finger.
