‘What’s wrong? You don’t sound yourself,’ she said.
There was a pause. ‘Stress of the day. Not to mention how badly I feel for dismissing you.’
‘It was tough being on the receiving end.’
‘Will you forgive me?’ Elisabetta was struck by his strange pleading tone.
‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘I’m good at that.’
‘I need you to come over to my apartment straight away,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’re back on the job. I have important new information to discuss. I think I know what the message means – B is the key.’
‘Tonight?’ she asked, looking through the dark windows.
‘Yes, tonight,’ De Stefano said hastily. There was another pause. ‘And bring your copy of the Faustus book.’ He gave her his address and hung up abruptly.
Micaela rang the apartment’s buzzer several times, then used her spare key to let herself in. Inside the apartment the lights were on but no one had been answering her calls. Elisabetta’s bedroom was empty, her father’s door shut.
She poked her head into her father’s room and heard snoring coming from the darkness.
Arturo tapped her on the shoulder and she shut the door behind her quietly.
‘There’s a note from Elisabetta on the dining-room table,’ he said.
It was on a piece of note paper, in Elisabetta’s neat handwriting:
I know Zazo told me not to leave the apartment but I had an urgent call to see Prof. De Stefano at his flat at 14 Via Premuda. I’ll be fine. Will be back before 11. Elisabetta.
‘I’m calling Zazo,’ Micaela said, fishing through her bag for her mobile phone.
Zazo flipped his phone shut and looked at his watch. ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered.
‘What’s up?’ Lorenzo asked. They were walking together through one of the Vatican staff parking lots.
‘Besides my father, my sister Elisabetta’s the smartest Celestino but sometimes she’s so dumb. I’ve got to run over to the Via Premuda. It’ll take me five minutes to get there. I’ll be back in fifteen and we can finish up for the night.’
The taxi driver was held up by some road-repair works that doubled the duration of the ride. Despite carrying a nun as a fare, he insisted on cursing and making lewd gestures out the window most of the way.
He left Elisabetta in front of a smart apartment block clad in pink limestone with freshly painted green window shutters. De Stefano was listed on the first floor. She was quickly buzzed in and walked up one flight to his apartment. She used the small brass knocker and waited.
The door opened too rapidly for politeness.
A man stood there but it wasn’t De Stefano.
She recognized his blank face immediately. It was the telephone-booth man, her attacker from long ago, and, she realized in an instant, the man who’d broken into the convent. He had a gun.
Before Elisabetta could do more than let out a horrified gasp he grabbed a handful of her habit and pulled her inside.
Zazo pressed the buzzer for De Stefano’s apartment and when he didn’t get a reply he pressed all the apartments’ buzzers simultaneously until someone buzzed him through.
When he got to the top of the stairs there was the briefest vision down the hall of black cloth disappearing through a door. Then the door slammed hard.
Zazo drew his SIG from his holster, pulled back the slide to chamber a round and tried to steady his shaking hands.
Elisabetta was on her knees, thrown to the ground by the violent jerk of the man’s arm. The copy of the Faustus book fell from her bag onto the tiles.
She saw through to the sitting room. De Stefano was on the floor, blood oozing from an eye.
She looked up. The man was holding his arm out. He was aiming a pistol at the top of her head.
It was happening too fast – not even enough time to think the name of the Lord.
There was a loud crash.
Zazo’s boot crashed through the lock plate, splintering wood and throwing the door open.
The explosions were so thunderous that Elizabetta wouldn’t be able to hear properly for a week. Zazo fired eight rounds in five seconds. Years of simulator training kicked in automatically: aim for center mass. Keep firing until empty. Expel the spent magazine and slide in the spare.
Elisabetta’s pearly-white vest was stained red with the man’s arterial blood. Her ears rang so loudly that her own screams seemed far away.
The only thing she was able to focus on was an exceedingly small detail.
A glistening drop of blood clung to the cover of the Faustus book, then slowly soaked itself into the porous leather.
THIRTEEN
Surrey, England, 1584
THIS TIME IT was Thomas Lewgar who was pacing and trying to calm his nerves outside the examination hall. Inside, Christopher Marlowe huddled in a corner of the hall with Master Norgate and the two other questioners for Lewgar’s disputation, Robert Cecil and an MA student from another college.
Norgate had a parchment which he waved under the questioners’ noses. ‘To be perfectly frank, Mister Lewgar is a somewhat marginal candidate. He needs to excel in this disputation to succeed in his baccalaureate. I know his father well. He is a prominent man in Norwich. It would not pain me to see Lewgar do well today which is why I was keen for Master Marlowe to join this committee. As his friend I expect you will do your utmost to be helpful in the line of questioning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Marlowe said.
‘Now,’ Norgate said, referring to his parchment, ‘I have three questions we might put to him. The first: In the sight of God sins are then truly venial when they are feared by men to be mortal.’
The committee nodded.
‘The second: The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it.’
Again nods.
‘And the third is less of a theological nature and more of a mathematical and philosophical one. It is: The mathematical order of material things is ingeniously maintained by Pythagoras, but more ingenious is the interaction of ideas maintained by Plato. What say you?’
Something triggered inside him. Marlowe was conscious of the blood coursing through his body; he could almost taste it, metallic in his mouth. ‘I would note, Sir, that Thomas has always said to me how much he enjoys the mathematical arts and the contribution of the Greeks to our state of knowledge.’
Cecil looked up in surprise but said nothing.
‘Very well,’ Norgate said. ‘Pythagoras it shall be.’
By three in the afternoon the spectacle was over. Few could remember a more disastrous final disputation. Norgate called the proceedings to a close when it was apparent that Lewgar could do no more than repeat the same inaccurate and insubstantial points over and over. The young man was reduced to wet eyes and chest heaving and by the end only the hardest men in the audience could take pleasure in the spectacle.
When Norgate pronounced from his chair that the candidate had not attained his BA, Lewgar practically ran from the hall.
‘Most unfortunate,’ Norgate told the committee and was gone himself.
Cecil drew Marlowe aside with a look as much amused as perplexed. ‘I thought Lewgar was your friend.’
‘He is,’ Marlowe said. ‘Perhaps my closest at the college.’
‘Yet you had him orate on a topic he was least prepared to defend.’
‘I suppose I did.’
Cecil leaned in. ‘I’m impressed by the cut of your sails, Master Marlowe. The Marlowes are known to us, you know.’
Marlowe thought, Us? ‘Is that so?’ he said.
‘I wonder if you would accompany me to London tomorrow. There’s someone I would very much like you to meet.’ Then he put his lips an inch from Marlowe’s ear and whispered, ‘I know what you are.’