Valentina understands the ‘baggage’ to be back-up police. ‘Okay. We’ll see you at eleven.’
The line goes dead.
Valentina glances at her watch. She has two hours to get a plan together.
92
Father Alfredo Giordano is in an unusual and awkward position when his cell phone rings.
He’s bare-chested, in only his pyjama bottoms and has just come out of a Downward Facing Dog.
Right now, he’s balanced on his hands counting a five breath in The Crow.
Alfie has never held The Crow pose for a full five before. He usually crashes sideways at the start, slips backwards on reaching two or bangs his forehead on a very shaky-handed three count.
Right now, his palms are well spread and he’s rock solid on a four, so no way is he going to answer that phone until he’s made the full five.
‘ Cinque! Yee-haaaw!’ He rolls out of the yoga pose and pads across the polished wooden floor of his tiny room. He pulls his cell phone from the charger cable stuck in a wall socket and answers with gusto: ‘ Pronto, Giordano – il padrone di yoga fantastico!’
His old friend daren’t ask what he’s up to. ‘Alfie, it’s Tom. I need your help.’
‘You have it, my friend.’ He takes a deep yogic breath. ‘ Il padrone can fold you into a Bird of Paradise or twist you into a One-Legged King Pigeon. Which would you prefer?’
‘Alfie, this is serious. What do you know about St Cecilia’s?’
He drops the comedy routine. ‘St Cecilia’s in Trastevere?’
Tom switches on the speakerphone function so Valentina can hear, then glances at notes on a pad. ‘The one in Piazza di Santa Cecilia; that’s Trastevere, right?’
‘Yes, yes, it is. What’s wrong, Tom?’
‘I’ll fill you in later. Please, Alfie, just tell me what you know.’
‘Okay. The church is very famous. Let me think… it was built in something like the third century. It has an amazing Romanesque campanile… lots of rebuilds over the ages, notably the ninth and I think eighteenth centuries.’
Tom scribbles furiously. Valentina watches over his shoulder.
Alfie continues with his list. ‘Oh, one of the weirdest things, there’s a convent adjacent to the church, and the sisters there shear the lambs from Sant’Agnese fueri le Mura and use the wool to make sacred vestments. Inside the church there are paintings depicting the beheading of St Cecilia. You remember the story of her?’
Tom has to jog his memory. ‘Lived her life wearing sack-cloth, married but stayed a virgin out of devotion to the Lord?’
‘Haven’t we all,’ interrupts Alfie with a tang of irony.
Tom continues to download the rest of what he knows about St Cecilia. ‘Patron saint of musicians, feast day in October – no, sorry, November. And her killers had great trouble putting her to death.’
‘Seven out of ten, or B plus, whichever you prefer.’
Valentina flaps her hands in frustration. Fascinating as this is, it isn’t helping rescue Louisa.
Tom ignores her. ‘I’m not finished. Didn’t she suffer some Rasputin-like death? Her persecutors tried to kill her two or three times and failed?’
‘I’ll up you to an A minus. They attempted to suffocate her in the bath at her house. When that failed, they decided to behead her. That didn’t go well either. The executioner tried three times to decapitate her, and then, seeing that she was still alive, fled in fear.’
‘And she didn’t die until three days later, after she’d received Holy Communion.’
‘Another thing,’ adds Alfie. ‘The original church is widely believed to have been built on the place of her home and martyrdom.’
Tom writes down ruins of old home beneath church and underlines it as Valentina reads over his shoulder. ‘So are there a lot of tunnels and open areas beneath the ground at Santa Cecilia?’
‘A lot?’ Alfie sounds almost incredulous. ‘Tom, there’s a whole city beneath Rome. The place is built over this soft volcanic rock and there are miles and miles of catacombs. Have a look at the crypt at Santa Cecilia and you’ll understand what I mean.’
93
The blindfold is a big improvement on the hood.
Louisa is hugely relieved not to have her head covered and a rope tied around her neck.
It’s the kind of observation she never dreamt she’d make, but it’s true.
‘Relax. It’s okay,’ says a man holding her right elbow and helping her walk.
But it’s not okay.
Louisa still feels claustrophobic. Hidden claws are scratching at her lungs. She knows it’s only a matter of time before she has another fit if they don’t get this damned thing off her.
They make her climb several steps.
Steps that are steep and turn sharply in on themselves.
It’s a spiral staircase.
A never-ending one.
Her heart rate is alarmingly elevated, and it’s increasing all the stress she’s feeling.
‘You’re doing fine, it’s nearly over,’ says the voice at her side.
Louisa steps up, but there’s no step there. She stumbles. Unseen hands catch her. ‘You’re at the top. It’s okay.’
A door opens and she feels a rush of cold, wintry air.
Paradise.
The sensation of being outside stops her feeling panicky.
They make her walk for about ten seconds.
A car door clunks open.
‘Watch your head,’ says her new minder. ‘We’re putting you in a vehicle; you’re going to have to slide in.’
He grabs her by the back of her hair and manhandles her into the rear of the car.
Louisa can smell leather.
Leather and sweat.
She puts one down to the car’s upholstery and the other to the bulky body pressed against her.
Even without seeing him she knows he’s huge.
She knows it because her back-seat buddy has biceps like boulders and one keeps cracking the side of her head every time he shifts in his seat.
After several minutes of driving, a voice booms out from the front of the car. ‘You can take the blindfold off her now.’
The guy in the back seat squashes her as he fumbles around her head and unfastens it.
‘ Grazie.’ Louisa keeps her eyes closed to begin with. Even through her lids, the daylight is bright, and the tight binding has made her pupils and skin sore.
The first thing she sees is the back of the front passenger seat, then the windows on her side of the vehicle. They’re heavily tinted, the kind that are so dark that from the outside you can’t see in. She’s in some expensive four-by-four, but she can’t see any badging and can’t work out the model or make.
She turns to the man alongside her and tries to give him a friendly look. Year One psychology taught her that if kidnappers see their captives as human, they have more difficulty hurting them.
She’s not so sure it has any effect.
The guy’s every bit as big as she imagined, but surprisingly he’s rake thin and has arms like the hind legs of a bull. She realises that her inner prejudices equated the unwashed smell with someone fat.
‘Thanks for taking that off,’ she says, gradually widening her eyes to get them used to the light. ‘I thought I was going to pass out.’
‘Shut up!’ shouts the driver, without turning round. ‘Just sit there and shut the fuck up!’
Louisa takes the hint.
In the silence that follows, she works out that the short-tempered driver is Purple Cloak and the other two men in the car with her are the two Scarlet Cloaks she saw when they were holding her underground.
As they crawl over the cobbled and congested back streets, she takes strange comfort in the familiarity of seeing traffic jammed up all around her.
Are the doors centrally locked?
She thinks they probably are. It would be stupid if they weren’t.
And even if they weren’t, could she flip the handle and make a run for it without being grabbed by the half-bull, half-man creature sitting next to her?