On the Fifth Day (23 page)

Maybe he shouldn't have come. But a part of him did want to see the volcano. As Roberta had suggested, it was the heart of the story of Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns that would otherwise have evolved normally, their first-century glories forgotten.

The rock and cinder path was straight, fenced on one side with wooden beams, cut away from the slope up to the summit on the other. Up here there were no trees, and the mountaintop rose smooth and featureless save where stray boulders of the same porous rock jutted out of the cone. He had expected the stone to be gray, but the base colors were browns, pinks, and violets, the rock grainy like pellets and pitted with air pockets. Here and there were straggling grasses and lichens, but for all the fertility of the lower slopes, there wasn't much growing up here. The summit was a dead landscape, barren, but with a savage beauty of its own.

Everyone was going home. A party of Italian teenagers jogged jauntily past, but a lot of the others--many of them in their fifties and sixties, none of them locals--looked ex

hausted. As Thomas trudged wearily up, letting Roberta get ahead, he checked behind him a couple of times. They might have been the last people admitted.

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It took them twenty minutes to reach the top, and when they did the little stall selling drinks and postcards was clos

ing for the day and the summit was all but deserted. On the in

side of the path the jagged crags that marked the crater's rim were broken by stretches where only a single looping chain separated the visitor from the hollow below. Thomas peered down, not certain what to expect, and found a vast conical de

pression of tiny stones. The sides showed blasted and splin

tered rock, scorched black and white, stone that looked as hard as flint but had been shattered by the force from below. Smoke drifted up in lazy gusts from spots all around the crater walls, but the center of the depression looked still and tran

quil. There was no heat, and only the merest tang of sulfur in the air.

"This way," said Roberta, leading away from the edge to

ward a narrower path than the one they had ascended. The trail slotted down the outer slope of the cone and out of sight.

"Where does that go?" Thomas asked, with a sour look.

"Around the crater," she said, cheerily. "Got to go around the top. Got to do the thing properly. Come on, Thomas."

He trudged in her dusty wake as the sun began to set and the last of the tourists began their descent.

"On the other side," she shouted over her shoulder, "we'll be able to look across the crater to the bay."

"I can hardly wait," muttered Thomas.

"And we can say a prayer."

Better and better.

Thomas's feet hurt.

"Slow down," he called. "I think I'm getting the Stigmata."

"The what?" she said, turning, looking quizzical.

"The Stigmata," Thomas replied. "You know, when your hands and feet bleed. Feet, in this case."

"Oh, the Stigmata," she said. "I misheard."

She still looked a little confused, maybe even offended.

"Sorry," he said. "Bad joke."

"That's okay," she replied. "I'm used to people not under

standing miracles."

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"And you believe in things like that?" he said. It was a sin

cere question and there was no mockery in his voice. "Mani

festing the wounds of Christ?"

"Of course," she said. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform," she intoned, seriously.

"But Stigmata," Thomas pressed. "I mean, what's the point? Why would God inflict open wounds on people? I don't get it."

"Well, I've never actually encountered it," she said.

"Though I'm sure it happens. The world is full of sin, and sometimes the Lord sees fit to punish sin miraculously."

Thomas stared at her, but she kept walking and did not meet his eyes.

"Look," she said. "We're almost at the other side."

"Yes," said Thomas.

"I think we should pray for the repose of the soul of that man who was killed. This place is full of the grandeur of God."

She climbed the shifting shingle to the rim and looked out across the volcano's great mouth to the sea. The sun was low and amber now, so that the inside of the crater was slashed in half, part in deep shade, part seeming to burn with an orange light vibrant as flame. There was no one else around.

"Kneel with me," she said, dropping, her face lit by the same glow so that she seemed passionate, radiant in her con

viction.

Thomas climbed up beside her, but he did not kneel, and his brain was racing.

"What did you say his name was? The dead man?" said Roberta, her eyes closed, her hands joined in front of her, fin

gers pointed skyward like a statue of the Virgin.

"Satoh," said Thomas, absently.

"We thank the Lord for this bountiful day, and pray for the souls of Mister Satoh and for Father Edward Knight,"

she began. "May they rest in peace. Our Father, who art in Heaven . . ."

She intoned the words slowly, so that Thomas could join in. He did, but awkwardly, his cracked voice barely more than 168

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a whisper. He had expected something more appropriate:
Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord . . .
Something like that. But she had chosen the Lord's Prayer.

". . . give us this day our daily bread . . . ," she continued. Thomas was staring out over the great smoking hollow. The climb weighed heavily on him, and there was something surreal about this place, about praying--for the first time in years--for his dead brother, with this woman he didn't know.

". . . as we forgive those who trespass against us . . ."

The whole thing felt dreamlike, as if all his doubts and sad

ness had drifted unexpectedly to the surface, but other things were nagging at him. Pietro had given a sermon on the Im

maculate Conception, he recalled, as if hearing the account of it through an echoing tunnel . . .

"I didn't understand most of it, of course--my Italian is
not good enough--but it was a beautiful sermon, full of devo

tion and piety. At the end he was close to tears at the thought
of Our Lord being conceived without sin, then entering this
dreadful world . . ."

He had been irritated at the time, but it had been turning over at the back of his mind ever since. Surely the Immaculate Conception wasn't about the birth of Christ at all? He barely remembered such things anymore, but he was almost sure it was about the birth of the Virgin Mary, the only person since Adam and Eve to enter the world without the stain of original sin. Frowning, Thomas stopped mouthing the old familiar words, and Roberta's voice went on alone.

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory . . ."

Thomas's drowsiness, his drifting toward grief, left him instantly.

"Forever and ever. Amen."

Another phrase came back to him.

"Sometimes the Lord sees fit to punish sin miraculously."

Punish? With Stigmata?

Stigmata was a sign of piety, a manifestation of a saintly devotion to the crucified body of Christ.

"For thine is the kingdom . . ."

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And while many Catholics wouldn't give much thought to it these days, surely you would expect a Franciscan to know . . .

"Forever and ever . . ."

Particularly since the most famous of all Stigmatics was . . .

"St. Francis," he whispered aloud.

As he did so, he became aware that Roberta was no longer kneeling beside him. She was behind him.

CHAPTER 43

Pestilence was moving before she finished the prayer. Knight was looking distracted, tired, and a little weepy, which had been the idea from the start. She rose silently, drawing the lit

tle Walther automatic from the pouch over her stomach, level

ing it at the back of his head in the same motion in which she thumbed off the safety with casual expertise. Just two shots, and then the shallow grave she would scoop out of the ash and pumice on the unvisited slope of the vol

cano. It might be years before anyone found him.
Catholics,
Thomas thought,
don't say those last lines as part
of the Lord's Prayer. In the mass they are part of the congre

gation's answer to the priest.

"
Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,
" said the priest in his memory, as Thomas flung himself over the edge, and the gun went off behind him.
"And grant us peace in our day . . ."

Pestilence cursed as the shot went high over the man's diving form.

What the hell had just happened?

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He had just dropped into the crater, as if he'd known she was about to spray his brains over the Goddamned mountain. She scrambled forward, cursing the clumsy, jangling san

dals, raising the gun and peering down its barrel as she neared the edge. There was nowhere for him to hide in there. It was inconvenient, and getting his body out to where she could bury it would be harder, but she'd still have the pathetic bas

tard, and maybe she'd make him pay for his dramatics. Thomas fell into the crater and rolled, trying to stabilize him

self so that he could at least look around. It was dark, but not dark enough to stop her from picking him off. He clawed at a promising outcrop, missed it, and tumbled another ten feet. For a split second he saw her standing on the rim, her habit lit by the last of the sun, face livid, gun raised and flashing. The report came a moment later, and the volcanic dust inches from his head kicked up as the bullet slammed in. Then he hit a spike of rock that reared out of the sandy funnel like a breaching whale, and he swiped at it, grabbing and holding on to stop his fall, only then wincing at the pain in his fingers. The stone was hot.

Pestilence had fired two hasty shots and hit nothing. Now she forced herself to breathe and aim, but in that moment Knight's flailing descent shuddered to a halt, and he was clawing onto a jagged hunk of rock. Her shot, which had been trained to his momentum, missed, pinging off stone a foot or so beneath him, and in that second, he squirmed around the rock and out of sight.

Her anger flared again. She checked the clip in her pistol and began walking carefully down into the crater. The lower side of the rock was a fissure, or series of fissures, and though it wasn't clearly visible in the dusk and shadow, 171

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there was a steam vent belching thin wisps of hot vapor. As soon as he felt secure, Thomas took his hands off the rock and opened them to the air. They wouldn't blister, and apart from some tenderness, there was no serious harm. He fished for a loose rock and braced himself for Roberta's arrival. There was no sound for perhaps a minute, but it was im

possible to move on this surface without sending little streams of tiny stones trickling down into the cone, and he heard her when she got a foot or two above the crag.

If you were her, what would you do?

Pestilence paused, bare feet splayed. She had left the clumsy, noisy sandals on the crater's rim. She had the gun in both hands, swiveling carefully, sighting down the barrel as she had been trained. He could be still sheltering beneath the rock or trying to creep up one side or the other. Her best approach was over the top. She put one foot on the rock and stepped up. It took a second for the burning sensation in the soles of her feet to reach her, then she was scrambling, leaping, and there was Knight, waiting for her, lunging into close quarters as she fired, off balance, missing.

Just don't lose the gun.

Thomas hit her with his full body weight, pushing the pistol wide, but she didn't let go, even as she fell back against the rock, and without so much as a beat, it was swinging back to

ward him. He fell on her then, pinning her arms, trying to make her drop the gun clutched in her right hand. But she was strong. He was so used to her religious disguise that a part of him still couldn't believe what she really was, but the pressure on his wrist as she began to turn the pistol in to

ward his ribs dispelled any lingering sense of "Sister Roberta."

She's going to kill you. Now.

With his left hand still trying to control her gun hand, he released his right, grabbed at her face, and twisted her head as 172

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hard and fast as he could. If she had expected it, he would never have had the strength, but as it was she didn't see it coming, and he was able to turn and hold for just a second. She had been lying right beside the smoking vent. The vol

canic steam hit her face and she cried out, writhing in a pain that opened her other hand. The gun fell out. Thomas pounced on it.

He turned to find her up and coming for him, the left side of her face red from the scalding gas. Her eyes were full of fury, hatred, and something else, something smug and selfsatisfied.
She knows you won't shoot.

Thomas hesitated, and then, just as she was almost upon him, switched his grip on the gun and slashed hard with it across her forehead.

She fell heavily on top of him, unconscious, and for a long bizarre moment, he lay in the crater and looked up at the sky, the coolness and tranquillity of the evening settling all about him.

CHAPTER 44

Thomas left her where she had fallen. She would probably be out for a while yet, and when she woke she'd be without trans

port. He took her gun and her phone, then made the long walk back to the parking lot, climbed over the gate, and took the rental car.

The fact that Roberta had been ready to kill him had stripped away all he thought he could rely on. Now he knew only three things: first, powerful people were prepared to kill to keep Ed's death unexamined. Second, he had to get what

ever he could out of the old monsignor. Third, he had to get out of Italy as quickly and cleanly as possible. He didn't know 173