He tried not to think about the face of the man he’d seen. Someone he had once known, almost to the point of friendship. Someone who now had cold black eyes and skin that had the dry, desiccated pallor of a corpse.
The Carabinieri were more Gabrielli’s kind. Middle-class. Well dressed. Polite. More sophisticated.
Only half understanding why, he wandered back into the little room as he struggled with his phone, smelling the blood, dimly aware there was something else, something he should have seen. His shuddering finger fought for the buttons, fell all over the place and got the wrong ones anyway. Perhaps, he thought, it was just fate. Most things were.
Too late, he heard a hard female voice on the line, demanding an answer.
Pino Gabrielli looked at the Little Museum of Purgatory, properly this time, not fearful for his life because of some dark familiar stranger who stank of blood.
His intuition had been right. There was something new. A direct message, written in a way he’d never forget.
It was a moment before Gabrielli could speak. And when he did, only a single word escaped his lips.
“Bramante…” he murmured, unable to take his eyes off the line of bloody writing on the wall, a crooked, continuous script, with deliberate lettering, the handiwork of someone or something determined to make a point, in just a few words.
Ca’ d’Ossi.
The House of Bones.
Pino Gabrielli wasn’t the only church warden in Rome to receive a surprise that morning. Half an hour after Pino opened the doors of the small white church in Prati, Ornella Di Benedetto found herself facing the padlocked chains on the shuttered, abandoned wreck that was once Santa Maria dell’Assunta, wondering what looked different. The logical answer — that someone had gone inside — seemed too absurd for words.
Rome had many churches. Too many to cater to a population that grew more secular by the year. Santa Maria dell’Assunta, set on the southeastern side of the Aventino hill, not far from the Piazza Albania, had little to keep it in business. The historians said it stood on the site of one of the oldest churches in Rome, dating back to the earliest times, when Christianity was one religion among many, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, occasionally encouraged. Not a trace remained of the original church. Over the centuries, it had been rebuilt on at least five occasions, burned to the ground more than once, then, in the sixteenth century, handed over to an order of Capuchin monks. The tiny, unremarkable building that survived lasted a further three centuries as a consecrated property, then, under Napoleon’s anti-clerical hand, fell into disuse, and was later converted into municipal offices. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it became, briefly, a private residence occupied by an elderly British writer of arcane and macabre tastes. After his death it slid steadily into ruin, maintained only by a small grant from the city and a local diocese still somewhat guilty over its abandonment. The mishmash of architectural styles and the absence of a single important painting or sculpture meant that the middle-aged woman who kept an eye on the place was, for months on end, the only person to set foot beyond its dusty, rotting oak doors, in the narrow cul-de-sac just a few metres from the bustle of the Viale Aventino.
Even so, Santa Maria dell’Assunta had one esoteric feature, hidden away in a crypt reachable only through a narrow, damp, and winding corridor cut into the hill’s soft rock. The same Capuchin monks who had maintained the church for a while continued to own a greater property in Rome, Santa Maria della Concezione in the Via Veneto, just a little way up from the American Embassy. Here they had created a curiosity too: a crypt much larger than that of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, decorated — there was no other way to put it — with the bones of some four thousand of their fellows, deposited there until the late nineteenth century, when the practice was deemed a little too grisly for modern tastes.
Ornella Di Benedetto knew that place well and had compared it in detail with the one in her own charge, hoping one day to be able to impress visitors with her erudition. The charnel house in the Via Veneto was undoubtedly impressive. She wished her own dead monks had provided a similar quotable motto for the inscription over their tomb on the Aventino.
Quello che voi siete noi eravamo, quello che noi siamo voi sarete, read the famous epitaph.
What you are we were, what we are you will be.
But her smaller version was, Ornella felt, more tasteful, more in keeping with the original purpose. It had none of the theatrical touches of Concezione: skeletons still in their monastic robes, cowls drawn around their skulls, patterns of vertebrae and jawbones arranged like some ghastly frieze, mocking the spectator, seeming, to her, to deny that anything of value existed in their worldly lives.
Santa Maria dell’Assunta was, simply, an underground public tomb, a place where a hundred monks — no more, no less — decided that their remains should stay visible for anyone who wished to see them. After a suitable time in the Capuchin cemetery in San Giovanni — she had researched this thoroughly for her imaginary visitors — they would be exhumed and taken to the crypt. There each corpse was arrayed tidily on the bare earth, five rows, twenty in each, skeletal arms neatly folded over skeletal chests, patiently awaiting resurrection.
The late English writer had installed some weak electrical lighting so that his visitors could enjoy the spectacle. Rumour had it that his will had demanded he be laid among them, too, an idea the city authorities quashed on health grounds, though only when he was in no condition to object. The man had lived in Venice for several years, in a small palazzo adjoining the Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal, before moving to Rome. That had, apparently, been his inspiration for giving the place the nickname by which it continued to be known in the neighbourhood: Ca’ d’Ossi. Not that “the House of Bones” was a sobriquet Ornella would ever use.
The Capuchins of Santa Maria dell’Assunta had, she firmly believed, bequeathed to future generations a humane and instructive exhibition, with none of the tourist-seeking histrionics of the larger place on the Via Veneto. It deserved to be better known, and perhaps receive a little restoration money, some of which would, naturally, find its way into the pocket of its lone custodian over the years.
Nor — and she’d had to explain this point repeatedly to friends and relatives — had Santa Maria dell’Assunta ever scared her. Death, for Ornella Di Benedetto, was an ordinary, unremarkable figure who walked through the world like everyone else, trying to get on with the job Fate had given him. Some days, she imagined, he would hop onto the Number 3 tram that ran through Testaccio across the river to Trastevere, and back into the city in the opposite direction, studying the faces of his fellow travellers, trying to decide which among them was deserving of another journey altogether. Then, when his work was done, he would sit by the Tiber for a while, letting the traffic roar drown out his thoughts.
Ornella Di Benedetto was never in fear of the corpses in her care, which made it all the more inexplicable that she was reluctant to enter the church that morning. The padlock and chain had been broken. It had happened before, a long time ago. Some youngsters had entered the building, looking for somewhere to sleep, something to steal. They would be disappointed on both counts. The place was cold and fusty, populated by rats, for which she left poison. Not an item of value remained, not even decent furniture. In the small nave, which the Englishman had used as a general hall and dining room, only a few worthless pews and a shattered pulpit still stood.