Elisabetta washed her hands and began sprinkling the meat with sea salt.
‘What will these donkeys say when I crack Goldbach?’ he sneered.
‘You go and work, Papa. I’ll get on with the cooking.’
By the time Zazo and Micaela arrived the kitchen window was steamed up. Zazo sniffed the air like a dog and patted Elisabetta’s back. ‘Keep up the good work,’ he said, peering into a bubbling saucepan. ‘You’re almost at the finish line.’
Zazo and Elisabetta both had the graceful frames of their mother, who had been a woman with the poise and figure of a catwalk model. Zazo kept fit playing soccer after work and lifting weights in the barracks gym, and with his solid jaw and sensitive eyes he remained an eligible bachelor perpetually on the brink of commitment.
‘Good to see you too,’ Elisabetta said happily. ‘Is Arturo here?’
‘Unless he’s hiding, I don’t think so.’ Zazo tasted the red sauce with her stirring spoon. She shooed him away and called out for Micaela.
Elisabetta heard her before seeing her. Micaela’s voice grabbed people’s attention like the persistent bark of a chained dog. She was complaining to her father about Arturo. ‘He didn’t have to swap! He knew he was invited! What a jerk!’
Micaela stomped into the kitchen. She was more like her father – shorter than her siblings, compact, with the heavier facial features of his lineage. When the children were small, people had talked about Elisabetta’s and Zazo’s attractive faces and Micaela’s fiery attitude. Nothing had changed. ‘Arturo’s not coming,’ she announced to her sister.
‘I heard. A pity.’
‘Some shit-head in the casualty ward wanted the day off and unbelievably Arturo agreed to take his shift. He’s soft in the head.’
Elisabetta smiled. Pretty much the only time she heard swearing these days was from her sister. ‘Maybe he’s soft in the heart.’
‘I hate him.’
‘No, you don’t.’ The two girls finally kissed. ‘I like your hair,’ Elisabetta said. It was wavier than usual, similar to the style that Elisabetta herself had worn before hers was shorn.
‘Thanks. It’s hot in here. You must be wilting.’ Compared to Elisabetta, black-clad and draped, Micaela appeared almost naked in her low-cut dancer top.
‘I’m fine. Come and help.’
The dining table sat six and, when there were fewer, Flavia Celestino’s chair stayed empty as if inviting her spirit back into the fold.
‘How was your week?’ Elisabetta asked her brother, passing the serving bowl.
‘You can imagine,’ Zazo said. ‘We’ve got dozens of cardinals and their staffs arriving soon. My boss’s boss is agitated, my boss is agitated and, for the sake of my men, I’m supposed to be agitated.’
‘And you’re not?’ his father asked.
‘When was the last time you saw me upset?’
They all knew the answer but no one spoke of it. It was twelve years ago. They well remembered the wild state he was in when he rushed inside the hospital to find Elisabetta half-dead in one casualty room and Marco’s corpse cooling in another. They remembered how his anger had smoldered during the aftermath when at first he wasn’t allowed to participate in the investigation and later when he was denied access to case files after the official inquiries stalled. He was too close to the matter, a related party, he’d been told. His lack of impartiality would jeopardize a prosecution.
What prosecution, he’d demanded? You haven’t caught anyone? You don’t have a single lead? The investigation’s a joke.
After a year of frustration Zazo and his superiors reached the boiling point at the same time. He wanted out, they wanted him out. His natural cheerfulness had been eclipsed by sarcasm and bursts of hostility toward the upper echelons of his command structure and he’d been called on the carpet for the occasional bout of heavy-handedness during an arrest. They made him see a psychologist who found him fundamentally healthy but in need of a change of assignment to a place that didn’t provide daily reminders of the outrage perpetrated against his best friend and his sister.
Zazo’s commander suggested the Gendarme Corps of Vatican City, the civil police force that patrolled the Vatican, a lower-key job where the most egregious offenders he’d have to contend with were pickpockets and traffic scofflaws. Strings were pulled and it was done. He traded uniforms.
Zazo had done well at the Vatican. He regained his equanimity and rose through the ranks to the level of major. He was able to afford his own apartment. He had a car and a motorbike. There was always a pretty girl on his arm. He couldn’t complain, his life was good except for those moments when Marco’s ghostly bled-out corpse came to him in a flashback.
Carlo commented on the tenderness of the lamb, then grunted, ‘Maybe when there’s a new Pope you can get a promotion to his security detail. The new man always likes to change things around.’
Half the plain-clothes men doing close security for the Pope were from the Gendarmerie, the other half from the Swiss Guards. ‘I can’t work with the Swiss Guards. Most of them are pricks.’
‘Swiss,’ Carlo grunted disagreeably. ‘You’re probably right.’
After Elisabetta cleared the dinner plates, Micaela laid out the tiramisu she’d brought from a bakery. She’d been moody and uncharacteristically silent during the meal and it only took a gentle prod from Elisabetta to get her to uncork.
Micaela was in her last year of training in gastroenterology at the St Andrea Hospital. She wanted to stay put; Arturo was on staff there, she liked her department. She’d been angling for the one open junior-faculty position. ‘They’re giving it to Fanchetti,’ she moaned.
‘Why?’ her father snapped. ‘You’re better than him. I wouldn’t let that joker put a scope up my rear.’
‘He’s a man, I’m a woman, end of story,’ Micaela said.
‘They can’t be that sexist,’ Elisabetta said. ‘In this day and age?’
‘Come on! You work for the single most sexist organization in the world!’ Micaela cried out.
Elisabetta smiled. ‘The hospital is secular. The Church is most decidedly not.’
The apartment buzzer rang.
‘Who the hell is that?’ Carlo growled. ‘On a Sunday?’ He lumbered toward the hall.
‘Maybe it’s Arturo,’ Zazo said, eliciting a snort from Micaela.
Elisabetta quietly put her fork down and got up.
They heard Carlo shouting into the scratchy intercom and when he returned to the dining room he had a puzzled expression.
‘There’s a guy downstairs who says he’s Archbishop Luongo’s driver. He says he’s here to pick up Elisabetta.’
‘He’s early,’ Elisabetta said, adjusting her leather belt. ‘I was going to tell you.’
‘Tell us what?’ Zazo asked.
‘My old professor, Tommaso De Stefano, visited me. He’s still with the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. He wants my help with a project. I said no but he insisted. I’ve got to run. I’m sorry to leave the dishes.’
‘Where are you going?’ Micaela asked, dumbstruck. In fact, they all stared. Elisabetta’s life was so predictable that this deviation from routine seemed to catch them mightily by surprise.
‘The catacombs,’ she said. ‘St Callixtus. But please don’t tell anyone.’
It seemed as though a lifetime had passed since Elisabetta had last entered these grounds. The entrance to St Callixtus was off the Appian Way which, on a late Sunday afternoon, was nearly deserted. She’d forgotten how quickly the land turned rural when one passed through the ancient southern walls of the city.
Off the main road, the avenue leading to the catacombs was lined by stands of tall cypresses, their tops glowing orange in the dwindling sunlight. Beyond was a large tract of wooded and agricultural land owned by the Church and containing an old Trappist monastery, a dormitory for the catacomb guides and the Quo Vadis? church. To the west lay the Catacombs of Domitilla. To the east, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The whole region was sacred.