The Eighth Day (12 page)

EIGHT

They walked to the Vatican from the restaurant, with Danny following Inzaghi through a maze of ancient streets so narrow that even on a summer afternoon twilight reigned. Occasionally they’d turn a corner and find themselves in a piazza drenched in sunshine. A moment later, they’d round another corner, and the light would fade from gold to silver.

They crossed the Tiber on a pedestrian bridge just west of the hulking Castel Sant’ Angelo. The bridge was an open-air marketplace of sorts, where olive-skinned Arabs and listless Africans were selling everything from hashish, umbrellas, and caricatures to battery-driven tin soldiers that crawled on their bellies with rifles cradled in their arms.

It was hot on the Via della Conciliazione, a broad boulevard that funneled tourists and tour buses directly into St. Peter’s Square, where a sea of folding chairs was set out in anticipation of a papal appearance. Inzaghi escorted Danny past a gatepost manned by Swiss Guards, then down an ancient byway that opened onto a vast courtyard—the Cortile della Pigne. Surrounded and defined by an arcade of umber buildings, the courtyard was divided into quadrants by cobbled walks and greens with a roaring fountain at their center. At the far end of the yard, to Danny’s delight, was a gigantic pinecone—it looked to be about eight feet tall and made of marble—resting on a magnificently carved capital.

“Where did
that
come from?” Danny asked.

Inzaghi shrugged. “A gift,” he said. “Or looted.”

Passing through the arcades, they entered a building that was almost as modern on the inside as it was ancient without. Inzaghi signed in for the both of them at a small reception desk, then led Danny to an escalator. Descending one flight and then another, they soon found themselves in a sort of mezzanine, a brightly lit glassed-in waiting room. Behind the glass was a subterranean warehouse of books and manuscripts, standing, leaning, and piled on miles of shelves. Nearby a small sign identified the place as the
ARCHIVIO SEGRETO
.

“There was a huge renovation—a rebuilding, really—about ten years ago,” Inzaghi told him. “There wasn’t enough space for the manuscripts. So now we have this! Forty-three kilometers of cheap metal shelves. You could run a marathon on them.” The priest smiled. “If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll get the paperwork.”

Danny was left in the company of an elderly nun who sat behind an antique desk, paying him no mind. She was speaking quietly into a telephone headset, her eyes locked on a Silicon Graphics monitor as her right hand clicked away at a mouse.

Eventually Inzaghi returned with a thick envelope. “Sorry to be so long,” he said, “but I’ve given you a copy of the manifest,as well as a letter authorizing you to collect the computer for me. I don’t know that a letter is actually necessary, but—” A laugh. “—we
are
in Italy, and more paper is always better.”

“Thanks.”

“And you’ll let me know what you learn?”

“Absolutely,” Danny promised. It was all going great, he thought. The hardest part of the job, the part that he’d dreaded—lying to a priest about being a cop—was more or less over. And it hadn’t been all that bad. On the contrary, it had gone so well that this generous man had actually written him
a letter
.

“I wonder, how long do you think you’ll need it?” Inzaghi asked.

The American hesitated. He couldn’t imagine Belzer keeping the computer for long. Then again, what did
he
know? If the files were encrypted, it could take a while. On the other hand, once they’d copied the files the computer would be superfluous. “Not too long,” Danny promised, “unless we get lucky. If we find something, if there’s
evidence
. . .” He let the sentence fade and made a gesture with his hands. “It could be a while,” he confessed.

Inzaghi nodded. “I understand. Well, you have my number—and I have yours.”

“Right.”

“But I think—maybe you shouldn’t try today.”

“Try what?” Danny asked.

“The airport,” Inzaghi replied. Then he tapped the watch on his wrist. “It’s three now, and with the traffic . . . you’ll never make it.”

“Customs is open till five,” Danny told him. “I checked.”

Inzaghi nodded. “Of course. But that means they’ll be gone by four.” With a chuckle, the priest guided him to the escalator, where he waved good-bye with a smile so genuine that Danny, rising slowly from the library’s depths, was haunted by it all the way back to the Inghilterra. The man’s kindness was depressing.

But the afternoon was not. The sun was shining, and Rome was
happening
. Taking the elevator to his room, Danny retrieved
The Radiant Tomb
from his suitcase. The book had arrived from Alibris a couple of days before, and he hadn’t even opened it. Now, he saw that it was a thin volume, with a photo of Terio on the dust jacket—the same photo the
Washington Post
had published above his obituary. Tucking the book under his arm, Danny took the elevator downstairs, went out, and hailed a cab.

“Villa Borghese,” he directed, and, feeling adventurous, added, “
per favore
.”

The ride was a short one and, as he suspected, the park turned out to be the perfect place to read on a summer afternoon. Huge plane trees shaded the lawns and benches. Lovers strolled. Children played. Gelato vendors wheeled their carts along the paths. Danny bought a small cup of pistachio ice cream, sat down, and began to read.

The first half of
The Radiant Tomb
was devoted to the early anchorites. In telling their stories, Terio argued that Saint Anthony of Egypt and those who came after him were largely responsible for the emergence of monasticism in the West. This was so, Terio argued, because religious hermits invariably attracted a following. Ironically, the more profound their retreat—the farther they got into the desert—the more likely they were to come out the other side with a retinue. And a good thing, too: it was the monastic orders that preserved the written word during the Dark Ages—and, in so doing, saved Western civilization from ignorance and obscurity.

This was all interesting, but what really got Danny’s attention was a chapter near the end of the book. Addressing the subject of “reluctant anchorites,” Terio wrote about a ballad or folk song that was said to be more than a thousand years old. Titled “The Walled-Up Wife,” the song was well known from Bombay to Bucharest. There were, Terio wrote, more than seven hundred versions of the ditty in various languages and dialects.

In the Yugoslavian variant, a woman is immured in the walls of a fortress. In Turkey, it’s a caravansary. In Persia, a bridge. And always for “good luck” or, in the case of bridges, to placate the river gods who were angered by such crossings.

The most poignant of the songs, to Danny’s reckoning, was Transylvanian. In that variation, a group of masons labor mightily, far from home, to build a monastery—only to have their work undone by night. “Spirits” are said to be at fault, and the men are distraught: will they never return home? Thinking about the problem, the head mason hears a voice, which tells him that the river’s spirits can be placated only by the sacrifice of a woman. Specifically, the first woman who comes to the site must be immured in the foundation of the bridge. Relieved that a solution has been found, the mason recounts the tale to his colleagues, and it’s agreed: the first woman to come to the site will be buried alive. The next morning, they anxiously watch the road, and soon a woman can be seen approaching from a great distance. As she draws closer, the mason’s excitement turns to horror as he realizes that the woman is his young wife, come from far away, carrying flowers, food, and wine. The mason begs God to make her turn around, to go back the way she came, but she doesn’t. And so she’s cemented into the wall, even as the mason dies of grief.

In discussing the song, Terio acknowledged that there were as many interpretations of its meaning as there were variations in its lyrics. To some postmodern analysts, the song was “a deadly metaphor for married life” (in which a woman was said to be “figuratively immured in marriage to protect her virtue”). Another commentary claimed that the song represented “the symbolic immurement of the Serbs” by Muslim invaders.

For Terio, however, the song was meant to be taken literally. In his view, “The Walled-Up Wife” was neither more nor less than oral history—the popular account of a historical custom by which women and children were burned alive to ensure the success of major construction projects. As evidence of the practice, Terio cited the immurement of a woman, said to be a virgin, in a wall of Germany’s Nieder Manderscheid castle. A second example was the Bridge Gate in Bremen: when demolished in the Nineteenth Century, the structure was found to have concealed a child’s skeleton in its foundation. Further evidence had been uncovered in the course of renovations to English churches and French cathedrals. Terio noted in passing that some scholars thought the nursery rhyme “London Bridge” referred to the practice. Unbidden, the song popped into Danny’s mind:

London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Take the keys and lock her up,
lock her up, lock her up.
Take the keys and lock her up,
My fair lady

The jingle didn’t make sense, when you thought of it. What keys? Lock who up? Was that the sense of it—lock up some fair lady to keep the bridge from falling down? Jesus. It gave him the creeps.

All in all, it was chilling stuff, dryly told but fascinating. So much so, in fact, that when Danny finally closed the book, he was surprised to find that it was now evening. Unnoticed, the lights in the park had flickered on and the afternoon’s long shadows had dissolved into a more generalized darkness.

Getting to his feet, he set out in the direction of a distant glow, a haze of light that he hoped was the Piazza del Popolo. Not that it mattered. He was lost in thought and might just as well be lost in fact. At some point or other, he’d find a cab and the cab would take him to his hotel, where he’d have a quiet dinner and turn in. Meanwhile, he trudged through the park past statues of Third World poets and revolutionaries,
The Radiant Tomb
clasped in his hands behind his back. For the first time Danny won-dered if Chris Terio
had
committed suicide.
What if he was a “reluctant” anchorite? Who would do something like that? Bury someone alive?

He shook off that train of thought, but the one that followed was no improvement. If it was suicide and Terio actually sealed himself in there,
what was he thinking?
Danny wondered.
What was he thinking when he put the last block in place?

It was hot in the morning, the air gritty against his skin, as Danny stood at the reception desk in the Customs office at Leonardo da Vinci Airport, waiting for a stamp. Behind the counter, an elegant young man pecked away at an antique typewriter, a cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth. A Customs agent, the man was amazingly intent, as if the keyboard was a mystery of huge proportions. Occasionally he took a slow-motion slap at the carriage return, squinted through the smoke, and resumed pecking. Finally, he paused and, ever so slowly, reread what he’d typed.

“Va bene,”
he proclaimed, and, twirling the platen, ejected the page. Getting to his feet, he pushed the paper across the counter at Danny. “You sign.”

Danny complied again, and the Customs agent stamped and countersigned the paper. Then he pointed to a number (it was 1,483,000) and said, “Now, you pay.” Danny complied, counting out the bills from a wad that he’d gotten from the bank that same morning. The agent sorted the bills and put them away in a drawer beneath the counter. Then he locked the drawer, muttered something that Danny didn’t quite get, and disappeared into a back room. A minute later, he returned with a package in his arms, presenting it as if it were a crown resting on a cushion.

“Grazie!”

“Prego!”

On his way back to the Inghilterra, Danny sat in the rear of the cab with the computer beside him in its box. His intention was to FedEx it to Belzer within the hour, but it occurred to him that shipping the computer without copying its contents would be a mistake. FedEx didn’t lose much—but shit happened, and if it happened this time, it could cost Danny a whole lot of money. Better to copy the files onto a floppy, so that he’d have a backup just in case.

At Danny’s direction, the cabbie stopped at a chic little office-supply store on the Via del Corso. Leaving the car parked on the sidewalk and the driver reading a soccer tabloid, Danny went inside and bought a box of floppies and some mailing labels. Then it was back to the hotel and up to his room, where he sat down on the bed and, using a letter opener, carefully slit the seals on the package.

Just as he’d hoped, the Thinkpad was in a black cordura case, with all of its accessories, including an external floppy drive and the adapters needed to accommodate Italian plugs. It only took a minute to get everything up and running. He went immediately into the root directory.

He found a dozen directories containing text files. The rest were system files and applications that he absolutely didn’t need. So he re-created the same directories on a floppy and copied the text files to it. Finally, he slid the floppy into one of the Inghilterra’s envelopes, wrote
Terio
on the front, and shoved it into his duffle bag. Then he repacked the Thinkpad in its case and put it back in the cardboard box.

It was time to call Belzer. Time to get paid.

The lawyer’s telephone number was on his business card, and Danny dialed it, using the cell phone that Belzer had given him. The connection was pristine, a dead silence interrupted by a distant electronic warble. Then:
“Prego.”

“Uhh . . . I’m trying to reach Mr. Belzer?”

The voice warmed up. “Daniel! My friend! How are you enjoying the Eternal City?”

“It’s a knockout. I’m blown away.”

“Wonderful! And you have news for me?”

“I have good news for you,” Danny replied.