This personal connection changed things, so much that, in the end, Gabrielli stayed away from the last exhibit as much as possible. It was unhealthy to become obsessed by the cast-off garment of Alessio Bramante, a dead schoolchild, victim of a tragedy no one could begin to comprehend. There were times he regretted his own personal involvement in having it placed in the Piccolo Museo in the first place.
And there was another cause for concern too, one that bothered him much more when he cared to think about it.
There was the blood.
Everything else on the wall of the small room in Sacro Cuore was static, frozen in time. Burns or fingerprints or mere accidental stains that only faded with the years, with nothing left to hint that living, breathing human beings had once touched them. Only one other object, the sleeve of the chemise of the Venerable Mother Isabella Fornari, abbess of the Poor Clares in Todi, possessed a bloodstain, now a pale, indistinct dun brown, and that supposedly belonged to the shade of a former Abbot who died in 1731.
Alessio’s T-shirt was of more recent origin. Beatrice Bramante said she had discovered it while searching her son’s room just after his disappearance. Over the lowermost star she found something inexplicable: a red mark, fresh and ragged at the edges, as if it had occurred only minutes before. Nothing could explain the stain’s presence. The garment had been newly washed shortly before the tragedy and left in a cupboard, untouched during the days of torment that had preceded its discovery.
The mother had approached Gabielli and asked if it would be appropriate for the item to be added to the collection of the Little Museum, contemporary proof that those departed in tragedy could still send a message to the living.
There had been doubts. Gabrielli believed the shirt should have been sent to the police. Others deemed that the plight of the boy’s father now made that inappropriate. The priest at the time had little affection for the odd assortment of curios he had inherited. Yet even the priest relented when faced with Beatrice Bramante, a woman who was both distraught and utterly determined. Then there was the unavoidable truth: a bloodstain had appeared on a seven-year-old’s white T-shirt while it was folded, clean and neat, in a cupboard in his home. All at a time when the child was gone from sight, presumed, by everyone, to be dead.
So they had relented, and before long come to regret it. Three years after the T-shirt had gone on the wall of the Little Museum, it had acquired another bloodstain. Then, in subsequent years, two more. Each was sufficiently modest to prevent it attracting those unfamiliar with the object. The fact was acknowledged quietly by those more observant among the church hierarchy, the case withdrawn from view until the newest stain faded, losing its freshness, then returned to the wall. Its metamorphosis was never mentioned again, for fear of unwanted publicity.
Gabrielli, who had been a party to this subterfuge, always knew a reckoning would come. If one accepted the premise of Purgatory, it was clear what was happening. The stains were a message. They would continue until someone listened, someone saw fit to act. The rational part of his mind told him this was impossible, ludicrous. Wherever the ghost of the hapless Alessio — just repeating the name to himself brought back a memory of the boy, stiff and upright in his office, asking intelligent questions about Bernini and his legacy in Rome — had gone, it could not be capable of making its mark on a simple object in a glass case on the wall of a curious church by the side of the noisy and traffic-choked Lungotevere Prati. The mundane and the unworldly were not supposed to meet like this.
For some reason these thoughts haunted Gabrielli more than usual as the warden sipped his coffee and picked at the pastry. He knew why, too. It was the man next door, wrapped up tight in his coat and hat and scarf, yet — and Gabrielli knew this was ridiculous — familiar somehow. There was also his eagerness to be in that confounded room. The visitor hadn’t even asked a single question, it now occurred to him, except: Is it still there?
It was almost as if he’d been here before, and that was another thought that Gabrielli found disturbing.
Reluctantly — a part of him was coming to hate that little room — he got up and, with all the speed a sixty-seven-year-old man could muster, crossed the passage and stood by the door to the familiar place. The too-bright lights of the passageway dazzled him. At first he fooled himself that the visitor was gone, without a word of thanks or so much as a departing footstep. There wasn’t a human sound from anywhere, save for his own laboured breathing, the gift of a lifetime’s addiction to strong cigarettes. All Pino Gabrielli could hear was the repetitive, mechanical roar of the traffic, a constant tide of sound so familiar and predictable he rarely noticed it, though today it seemed louder than ever, seemed to enter his head and rebound inside his rising imagination.
Then he stepped into the narrow, claustrophobic room, knowing as he did so that he entered a place that was wrong, out of kilter with the world he liked to inhabit.
He didn’t believe in Purgatory. Not really. But at that moment, with his heart beating a compound rhythm deep beneath his tight waistcoat, his throat dry with fear, Pino Gabrielli was aware that even a man like him, a former professor of architecture, well read, well travelled, with an open, inquisitive mind, sometimes knew very little at all.
The figure in black was busy in the pool of hard shadow at the far wall where Alessio Bramante’s T-shirt was kept. The item was no longer in its case but pinned to the old pale plaster by the intruder’s left hand. His right fist held some kind of grubby cloth, dripping with a dark viscous liquid. Gabrielli watched, unable to move, as the man stabbed at the boy’s shirt four times, enlarging each old stain with a new one that was bright and shiny with fresh blood. Finally he added an extra mark, a thick, sanguineous blotch on a previously unblemished star to the upper left.
One more message, the petrified warden thought, to add to four that had already gone unheard.
Perhaps Gabrielli uttered some noise. Perhaps it was simply his labored breathing. He became aware that his presence was known. The man placed the shirt back in its case with slow, ponderous care, and pushed the glass back into position, leaving gory, sticky marks on the surface. Then he dragged off his heavy woollen hat and turned round.
“You…” Gabrielli murmured, astonished by what he saw.
Pino Gabrielli closed his eyes, felt his bladder go weak, his mind go blank, ashamed that, in extremis, he found it impossible to pray.
When he recovered the courage to look around him again, he was alone. Gabrielli stumbled to the nave and fell into a hard wooden pew there, trembling.
Sacro Cuore was dear to him. He knew the rules, the protocols that bound its governance, and that of any church in Rome. By rights he should have called the priest and members of the parochial council before anyone. Just as he had done before.
And still the messages kept coming, this time with the messenger.
Enough was enough. With a shaking hand, Pino Gabrielli withdrew his phone from his pocket, waited for his fingers to stop shaking, wondering whom to dial in such circumstances — 112 for the Carabinieri? Or 113 for the police? There was no easy number for God. That was why men built churches in the first place.