“Forse oggi,” Antonella had smiled at him through tears and biscuits, “you will arrive in Rome and there will be a new pope. You will see the white smoke up the spout of the Sistine Chapel. They say he was poisoned,” she’d whispered to Malory, biting her soggy bottom lip to stop the flow of tears. “I have a cousin who works at the Banco Ambrosiano in the Vaticano. Nobody talks very loud there, but these days, he says, they are talking faster and softer. They say John Paul I was the wrong pope. A mistake was made. The way Aldo Moro was the wrong politician. Malory,”—Antonella had grabbed his corduroy arm in a fistful of painted nails—“you are a scientist. Tell me, if the pope is chosen by God, how can there be a mistake?”
Kit Bag across his shoulder, Malory followed the outline of Fra Mario’s muscular brush cut through the sacristy into the church. A vague glow from the windows high in the apse and at the piazza end of the long nave met at a Christ the Savior that stood to the left of the altar, carved by Michelangelo but dressed much later by some nineteenth-century critic frightened by naked marble. Next to Jesus and below the altar, illuminated by her own electricity, a sarcophagus held the complete remains of Santa Caterina of Siena — minus head and right thumb, which had found their ways to Siena, and a foot, which wandered occasionally around Venice. Off to the side in the chapel of the Torquemada family, a colossal cousin of the more famous Spanish Inquisitor sat on his cardinal throne judging these abused ancients. High above them all, golden stars filled the blue firmament of the ceiling of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but failed to give off any light of their own.
Fra Mario turned a key. A door opened across from Michelangelo’s Savior. A staircase appeared, next to it a pegboard holding the business end of the bell ropes. Malory followed Fra Mario — one flight of steps, two flights, back and forth up the shaft of the campanile. The tower smelled of damp and the droppings of small things that scurried just out of sight through the cracks and holes and nests in the walls at their approach. The corkscrewed spire of San Ivo appeared through one slit of the tower, the saucepan lid of the Pantheon through another. The more Malory climbed, the more he began to wake up, and both were torture. He wondered what he was doing following Fra Mario, who kept murmuring forse oggi and climbing like William Tell. He wondered, as he turned a corner up the narrowing staircase, whether some Inquisitor, or perhaps the ghost of Galileo himself, was waiting to push him and Fra Mario off the top of the campanile in a scientific auto-da-fé, and which one of them would hit the gypsies first.
But as he turned the corner, the sun shot a ray through the window and fractioned the morning into the seven colors of the rainbow. The full spectrum spread across the wall of the staircase in front of Malory, a sign as powerful as the vision of St. Michael with his sword that converted the Roman Constantine to Christianity.
Light, Malory thought. Prism. Newton.
The pot of gold at the end of Malory’s rainbow, however, was merely a door into the dusty choir room. The hall was broad and high-ceilinged, lit through a rank of dusty and leaded windows, furnished with a pair of upright pianos and an opened trunk of water-stained surplices, a room that had clearly not been used in some time or, if used, set aside as storage for rancid hymnals guarded by poorly painted and forgotten bishops. At the far end, Fra Mario held open a tiny Wonderland door. Malory stepped through the opening.
“Forse oggi,” Fra Mario said, “ma adesso l’organo.” With the finality of real hope, he retreated into the choir room, pulling the door shut.
The case was a fluffy bit of baroque panna cotta, a gift from a Borghese prince who was more aesthete than musician. The organ itself, like the one Malory had advised Trinity College to purchase, was a Metzler, built by a Swiss burgher who believed organs were created to play Bach and not Iron Butterfly. Swiss organs, like Swiss watches, trains, knives, and, for all Malory knew, fondue burners, ran fine as long as they were tended by fastidious Swiss organ tuners or confused British organ scholars. Leave them for a few years in the variable humidity and smog and waxy perfume of a Roman church and, well, they would need work.
Still, without playing the organ, without backing it out of the garage, driving it around the corner, and listening to its particular purr as it ran the preludes and fugues, it was impossible to know the soul of the organ and prescribe the appropriate therapy. A faded cinquecento case with its birthmarks long dissolved by years of damp and pigeon shit might disguise an instrument of genius, as well-tuned now as it was the century it was installed. A sparkling canary and forest-green façade, on the other hand, could mask a scrapyard of rusted pipe and moldy wood fit more for a Duchamp fountain than a Dominican church. Malory had a fondness for these mismatches, the puzzles, the illegitimate offspring of budget and architecture. It was time to tune his attention and speak to this particular bastard.
He emptied his Kit Bag one weight at a time onto the music stand. First the Book of Organs, next the Universal Tuner. Finally, Malory pulled out a 35-millimeter reliquary that had no mass, but which still contained the weight of Malory’s hope. Malory flipped one switch, and the light over his keyboard warmed the neglected ivory. He flipped another, and the electric motor twenty feet away behind the pipes began to wheeze air into the lungs of the instrument. The hum of power vibrated confidence through the organ bench up Malory’s body and into his fingers. The organ of Santa Maria sopra Minerva might be broken, but chances were it was playable. There was no point in gentling up to the keyboard, testing it with a tentative finger, one note at a time. Not when the stops, the manuals, the pedals, the pipes, the very bellows themselves were crying out for release. It was time for music. It was time for improvisation. i = u. Malory = Louiza. Malory raised his left hand six inches above the keyboard and brought it firmly down on the first letter of Louiza’s name.
“Fututi pizda matii!”
Malory pulled his hand off the keyboard. The note faded to silence. He raised his left hand and brought it down on the B-flat once again.
“Fututi pizda matii!” The noise came from the organ case. The bottom rank of pipes, the sixteen-footers. Right register, wrong language.
“Scusi?” One of about twelve words Malory knew in Italian. But there was no response. He looked over the parapet of the organ loft. The church was empty. Malory turned back to the bottom manual and pressed the B-flat again.
“Cazzo!” No doubt about it. A human voice. Not a voice or vocabulary he associated with Fra Mario or the aged Dominicans.
“Chi è?” Malory slid down the bench, his eye on the door to the choir room and the spiral stairs. “Hello?” No answer, just the muffled sound of movements behind the pipes.
And then Malory saw the handle on the door to the pipe case turn, the door open. A figure stepped out of the pipe case and around the corner of the 16-footers. There was such a stoop to the man’s appearance that Malory at first imagined he was one of those Victorian creatures from Dante’s Inferno, damned for some sin Malory could hardly remember, swinging his head by the hair like a lantern at waist height. The man’s hair itself was medievally long, bog dark, and streaked with darker still, matted, nicotined, uncombed, and tangled past the shoulders, circling like a wet dog into a beard that seeped into the vague middle of his chest. He was dressed entirely in black — black t-shirt, black jeans, black jean jacket, black boots, all as wrinkled as the hair and as menacing as the hobnails of the bovver boys who hung around the clove-scented exit of the Taboo Disco Club on St. Andrew’s Road back in Cambridge and threw uncomprehending foreign students into oncoming traffic. Exhausted by Galileo’s bed, confused by Fra Mario’s Italian, Malory’s brain was without the oxygen to register fear, surprise or much of anything.