The Lost Girls of Rome (52 page)

On the other occasions she has been here, Sandra has wondered for what sins they have been lit. Now she has her answer. For everyone’s sins.

She takes the last of the Leica photographs from her bag, and looks at it. The darkness of the image conceals a test of her faith. David’s last clue is the most mysterious but also the most eloquent.

She should not look for the answer outside, but inside herself.

Over the past few months she has asked herself where David is now, what is the meaning of his death. Unable to answer this question, she has felt lost. She is a forensic photographer, she looks for death in the details, convinced that only through them can everything be explained.

I see things through my camera. I trust in details, because they tell me what happened. But for the penitenzieri there exists something
beyond what we have in front of us. Something equally real, but that a camera cannot perceive. So I have to learn that sometimes it is necessary to give oneself up to the mystery. And accept that it is not granted to us to understand everything.

Faced with the great questions of human existence, the man of science frets, the man of faith stops. And right now, in this church, Sandra feels she has reached a borderline. It is not by chance that the penitenziere’s words come back to her: ‘There is a place where the world of light meets the world of darkness. It is there that everything happens: in the land of shadows, where everything is vague, confused, undefined.’

Marcus said it clearly. But Sandra has never understood it until now. The true danger lies not in the darkness, but in that intermediate state, where the light becomes deceptive. Where good and bad are confused, and you can’t tell one from the other.

Evil does not hide in the darkness.
It is in the shadows.

It is there that it distorts things. There are no monsters, she reminds herself, only normal people who commit terrible crimes. So the secret, she thinks, is not to be afraid of the dark. Because deep inside it lie all the answers.

Holding the dark photograph in her hands, she bends over the votive candles and starts blowing them out, one by one. There are dozens of them and it takes a while. As she proceeds, the darkness rises like a tide. Around her, everything vanishes.

When she has finished, she takes a step back. She cannot see anything, she is afraid, but she tells herself again that all she needs to do is wait and, at last, she will know. Just like when she was a little girl, lying in bed before falling asleep, and the darkness seemed threatening to her, but as soon as her eyes got accustomed to it, everything magically reappeared – the small room with her games, her dolls – and she could sleep peacefully. Slowly Sandra’s gaze adapts to the new conditions. The memory of light fades and suddenly she realises that she can again see something.

The figures around her begin to re-emerge. On the altarpiece, St Raymond reappears, radiant. Christ the judge and the two angels are clothed in a different, brilliant luminosity. On the rough plaster
of the walls, made grey by soot, forms begin to reveal themselves: frescoes depicting scenes of devotion, repentance and forgiveness.

The miracle is happening in front of her eyes and Sandra is incredulous. The poorest of the chapels, the one devoid of marbles and friezes, has become the most beautiful.

A new light appears on the bare walls, forming turquoise inlays. Filaments climb over columns that seemed bare. The total effect is a blue glow, like the tranquil depths of the ocean. It is still dark, but a blinding dark.

Sandra smiles.
Phosphorescent paint.

Yes, there is a rational explanation, but there is nothing rational about the step she has taken inside herself to discover all this. It is pure abandonment, an acceptance of her own limitations, a wonderful surrender to the unfathomable, the incomprehensible. It is faith.

This was David’s last gift. His loving message to her. Accept my death, without asking yourself why this happened to us. That is the only way you will be able to be happy again.

Sandra looks up and thanks him. There is no archive here. The secret is all this beauty.

She hears footsteps behind her and turns.

‘The discovery of phosphorescence dates from the seventeenth century,’ Marcus says. ‘We owe it to a shoemaker in Bologna who collected some stones, roasted them over coal and observed a strange phenomenon: after being exposed to daylight, they continued to emit light for several hours, even in the dark.’ He indicates the chapel. ‘What you see here was executed a few decades later, thanks to an anonymous artist who used the shoemaker’s substance to paint this chapel. Think how astonished people must have been at the time. They’d never seen anything like it before. It’s not as surprising today as it was then, because we know the reasons for the phenomenon. Anyway, each person can choose whether to see this as yet another of the oddities of Rome, or as a miracle of some kind.’

‘I’d prefer to see it as a miracle, I really would,’ Sandra admits, her voice tinged with sadness. ‘But reason tells me it isn’t. Just as it tells
me that there’s no God and that David isn’t in a paradise where life goes on forever and is always happy. But I really wish I was wrong.’

Marcus was not fazed by this. ‘I understand. The first time someone brought me here, he told me I could find the answer to the question I asked myself when, after my amnesia, it was revealed to me that I was a priest. That question was: if it’s true that I’m a priest, then where is my faith?’

‘And what was the answer?’

‘That faith isn’t simply a gift. You always have to look for it.’ He lowers his eyes. ‘I look for it in evil.’

‘What a strange destiny unites us. You must deal with the gap in your memory, and I must deal with all too many memories of David. I’m forced to try and forget, while you try desperately to remember.’ She pauses and looks at him. ‘What now? Will you carry on?’

‘I don’t know yet. But if you’re asking me if I’m afraid something will corrupt me one day, I can only say yes. At first I thought it was a curse, this ability to look at the world through the eyes of evil. But finding Lara has given my talent a meaning. Even though I don’t remember who I was in the past, thanks to what I’m doing I finally know who I am.’

Sandra nods, but feels as if she is at fault. ‘I have to tell you something.’ She pauses for a long time. ‘There’s a man looking for you. I thought he wanted to find the archive, but after what I’ve seen here, I’ve realised he has a different aim.’

Marcus is surprised. ‘Who is he?’

‘I don’t know. He lied to me. He passed himself off as an Interpol agent, but it wasn’t true. I don’t know who he really is, but I suspect he’s very dangerous.’

‘He won’t find me.’

‘Yes, he will. He has a photograph of you.’

Marcus reflects. ‘Even if he finds me, what can he do to me?’

‘He’ll kill you.’

Sandra’s certainty does not affect him. ‘How can you say that?’

‘Because, if he isn’t a policeman and he doesn’t want to arrest you, then that’s his one aim.’

Marcus smiles. ‘I’ve already died once. It doesn’t frighten me any more.’

Sandra lets herself be persuaded by the priest’s composure, it inspires trust in her. She still remembers the way he stroked her arm at the hospital, and how good it made her feel. ‘I’ve committed a sin and I can’t forgive myself.’

‘There is forgiveness for everything, even for mortal sins. It’s not enough to ask for it, though. You have to share the guilt with someone: letting it out is the first step to being free of it.’

Sandra bows her head, closes her eyes and starts to open her heart. She tells him about the abortion, the love she lost and has found again, the way she has been punishing herself. Everything emerges naturally, the words gush out from somewhere deep inside her. She imagined the feeling would be the same you feel when unburdening yourself of a weight. Instead, it is the opposite. The emptiness left inside her by that unborn child fills again. The anguish she has been feeling in those months heals. Something in her is changing, she is becoming a new person.

‘I also have a grave sin on my conscience,’ Marcus says when she has finished. ‘Like you, I have taken lives. But is that enough to make us killers? Sometimes we kill because we have to, to protect someone or else out of fear. There should be a different measure by which to judge such cases.’

Sandra feels relieved by his words.

‘In 1314, in the Ardèche, in the South of France, the plague was ravaging the population. Taking advantage of this, a band of brigands sowed terror in the area, sacking, raping and killing. People were scared, barely able to survive. So some priests from the mountains, with little experience of the world, joined together to confront the criminals. They took up arms and fought. In the end, they prevailed. Men of God who had spilled blood: who would ever forgive them? But when they returned to their churches, the population acclaimed them as saviours. Thanks to their protection, there were no more crimes in the Ardèche. People started calling those priests
the hunters of the dark
.’ Marcus takes a candle, lights it with a match and hands it to
Sandra. ‘So the judgement on our actions is not up to us. All we can do is ask for forgiveness.’

In her turn, Sandra takes a candle and lights it from his. Then together they start to light all the candles at the feet of Christ the judge. As the collective flame comes back to life, she feels liberated, just as the penitenziere predicted. The wax again starts dripping on the opaque marble floor. Sandra is calm, contented, ready to return home. The phosphorescent glow starts to fade. The luminous frescoes and brilliant friezes disappear. Slowly, the chapel becomes bare and nondescript again. As she lights the last candles, Sandra happens to looks down and notices that some of the drops on the floor are red.

They form a small ring of brown stains. But it isn’t wax. It’s blood.

She looks up at Marcus and sees that he has a nose bleed.

‘Careful,’ she says, because he hasn’t noticed.

He lifts his hand to his face and then looks at his fingers. ‘It happens every now and again. But then it passes. It always passes.’

Digging into her bag, Sandra takes out some paper handkerchiefs, to help him staunch the flow of blood. He accepts them.

‘There are things about me I don’t know,’ he says, throwing his head back. ‘Before, every time I discovered another one, I felt scared. Now I’m just surprised. Even these nose bleeds. I don’t know where they come from, but they’re part of me. And so I tell myself that maybe one day they, too, will help me remember who I was before.’

Sandra goes to Marcus and hugs him. ‘Good luck,’ she says.

‘Goodbye,’ he replies.

He had stayed in Prypiat another few months, to make sure nobody else came looking for him. The work he had carried out on his latest victim had been long and demanding. This one hadn’t been like the others. They had told him everything after a few hours of torture. But it had taken several days to force this one to tell him everything about himself, so that he could learn to become him. Strangely, the most difficult thing had been to get him to reveal his own name.

The transformist looked at himself in the mirror. ‘Marcus,’ he said. He liked it.

He had arrived in Prague three days ago, and had taken a room in a hotel. The building was an old one, with a view of the black roofs of the city.

He had a lot of money with him, taken over the years from the men who had yielded their lives to him. He also had a Vatican City diplomatic passport, stolen from his latest victim, whose photograph he had replaced. The identity on the document was already false, because it didn’t coincide with the one he had extorted. The explanation was simple.

The hunter didn’t exist.

It was the ideal condition for the transformist. Becoming a man nobody knew made it virtually impossible for him to be tracked down. But he couldn’t yet be sure. He had to wait, that was why he was here.

He was going over the notes he had taken in Prypiat – a potted biography of his new identity: only the essential information, because he had learned the rest by heart – when all at once the door opened.

In the doorway there stood a weary-looking, hollow-faced old man, dressed in dark clothes. He was holding a gun. But he didn’t immediately open fire. He entered and closed the door behind him. He seemed calm and resolute.

‘I’ve found you,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake and I’ve come to remedy it.’

The transformist said nothing. He wasn’t fazed. Calmly he put down the sheets of paper he had been reading on a little table and assumed an impassive expression. He was not afraid – he didn’t know what fear was, he’d never been taught – he was merely curious. Why did this old man have tears in his eyes?

‘I asked my most able pupil to hunt you down. But if you’re here, that means Marcus is dead. And it’s my fault.’

The old man was aiming the gun directly at him. The transformist had never found himself so close to death. He had always struggled to survive his own nature. Now he had no desire to be killed. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that. It isn’t right, Devok.’

The old man froze, a look of astonishment on his face. It wasn’t the words that had stopped him dead, or the fact that he knew his name, it was the sound with which the words had been uttered.

The transformist had spoken in Marcus’s voice.

Now the old man was disorientated. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, fear in his eyes now.

‘What do you mean, who am I? Don’t you recognise me?’ He said it almost imploringly. Because the transformist’s weapon – the only one he needed, the most effective – was illusion.

Something incomprehensible was happening, right here in front of the old man’s eyes. He was witnessing a kind of transformation. ‘It isn’t true. You aren’t him.’ Although he knew with certainty that he was right, he hesitated for some reason. It was the affection he felt for his pupil that made him pause. That was why he no longer had the strength he needed to pull the trigger.

‘You were my teacher, my mentor. Everything I know, I owe to you. And now you want to kill me?’ As he spoke, he was getting ever closer to the old man, step by step.