The Assassini (12 page)

D’Ambrizzi had greeted her with an avuncular hug and insistence that she hang on for the distance. He needed a quiet moment with her once Higgins had been sent on his way. Sandanato had been formal, proper, undemonstrative, such a contrast to the vibrant cardinal
who had been standing beside the black limo, face to the sunshine, already giving Higgins an earful, when the monsignor had brought her out to the street.

The drive through the hot, dusty, traffic-clogged city had been punctuated by stops for walks through various sites. Cardinal D’Ambrizzi had inevitably linked his arm through hers, as if he were substituting her for the absent Val, who so often accompanied him, and meandered slowly with Higgins trailing behind in Sandanato’s care, the monsignor a dark shadow, ready to open a door or brush off a bench or light one of the cardinal’s black Egyptian cigarettes.

The cardinal’s commentary never flagged. At one point Sandanato reminded him to take some medication which he washed down with a
granita
from a street-corner vendor. And now they were driving along the Tiber, the cardinal finally quiet, smiling at her and the Boston banker, letting the newcomer soak up the sights and reflect on where they had been and what they had seen.

“It isn’t simply that I love this city,” D’Ambrizzi had said as they set off, his English excellent though colored by a rich accent. “I
am
this city. Sometimes I think I was here when Romulus and Remus were suckled by the wolf and have been here ever since—not a very Catholic notion but it is true, I feel it in my soul. I was here with Caligula and with Constantine, I was here with Peter and the Medicis and Michelangelo, I feel them, I knew them.” He had looked out from the folds of his hooded eyes: there was something timeless and unknowable in the visage, then he smiled suddenly as if enjoying a secret joke or a magician’s trick he couldn’t explain to the children. Elizabeth saw in him at such moments all the things Val had described, how he’d played with Val and her brother during those months in Princeton after the war. “Like Montaigne,” he was saying, “I can say I know the pagan temples of old Rome better than I know the palaces of today’s Church. I can see them, I can hear the voices of the consuls and senators on the Capitoline Hill when all was grandeur and grace … and I can see the same hill more than a thousand years later when the
monuments were done to dust and the great men replaced by goats nibbling at the scrub brush. Ah, here we are—let’s get out and go for a walk.” He was larger than life, stumping along in his plain black cassock. He was George C. Scott playing Patton.

They had traversed the Capitoline, or Campidoglio as it is known now, the center of Roman municipality, and everywhere they had seen the immortal cipher which far predated Christianity, S.P.Q.R.,
Senatus Populusque Romanus
. Like the cardinal’s own view of himself, the solemn inscription, now visible on everything from buses to manhole covers, linked the pagan and Christian eras across the centuries. It was the central fascination Val had always felt with the city, both as a historian and as a nun: that this one remarkable point on the planet had been the center of the pagan world, that all roads of the world before Christ had led to Rome, and that subsequently it had become the fountainhead of the Christian world.

Life was pulsing everywhere, all around them, in the noise and the color and the sense of time coursing backward and forward, past and present all one, pagan and Christian so inextricably bound together that what divided them was irrelevant. Sister Elizabeth felt a certain light-headedness, bred of wonderment at the sensuality and humanity of the city coexisting so easily with the Church’s orders and denials, and when she turned she saw the cardinal watching her, suddenly solemn.

The roar from the Piazza Venezia faded away in the quiet of the Capitoline. They passed through the gentle little garden separating the Via San Marco from the Piazza d’Aracoeli. With a sweep of his arm D’Ambrizzi encompassed the palaces and the piazza and the cordonata of the Capitoline, spoke one word: “Michelangelo.” He shrugged happily, drew her on toward the Piazza del Campidoglio.

There, burnished in the bright sunshine, was the elegant statue of Marcus Aurelius surging forward on his horse, hand outstretched, with the brightly glowing gold Palazzo del Senatore behind him. When Michelangelo first saw this survivor of the ancient world, he had been
so moved by its sense of life that he had ordered it to walk. They paused now, looking at it, and D’Ambrizzi said, “It’s a mistake, you know, that we can see it at all. In the Middle Ages, at a time of religious zealotry which produced a good deal of vandalism, it was thought to be a statue of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and as such it escaped the melting pot. Had they known it was Marcus Aurelius, it would have been gone, along with all the others.”

He waited while Monsignor Sandanato lit another cigarette for him. “Like your Chicago, Kevin, Rome is built on a foundation of legend. This one has it that when this statue appears once again covered with gold, the end of the world will be at hand and from the horse’s forelock will come the voice of the Last Judgment.” He took a deep, rasping breath, moved on. “The statue had many curious uses. It was once used for a banquet with wine flowing from one nostril, water from the other. Much like one of your bankers’ conventions, Kevin.… One angry pope hanged a city prefect from the statue by his hair.” He laughed deep in his chest. “You tell me that you are interested in the violent side of Roman history.” The moneyman shrugged self-consciously. “This was once a place of medieval executions. They executed people everywhere, wherever the mood took them.”

She smelled the cypresses and the oleander blossoms baking in the sun, releasing their scent. She turned, saw Sandanato’s large, dark eyes staring at her. She smiled but he merely turned his gaze back to the glorious garden.

D’Ambrizzi seemed most interested in showing Higgins traces of the world that predated Christianity, perhaps assuming that his awareness of Church-related history was more complete. They were entering the Passagio del Muro Romano when he pointed at some massive, weathered gray stone blocks which seemed hardly worthy of comment.

“All that remains of the Temple of Jupiter, you see before you. The sixth century before Christ. In those days the soldiers of Rome were nothing more than shepherds, and there was no concept in their minds of gods
like people. And certainly no temples in their honor. The Romans worshipped in the open, at altars made of turf. But the immortal Livy tells us that the soldiers brought their plunder to this place and put it under an oak tree. Where the kings of Rome chose to begin building the Temple of Jupiter.” He looked leisurely around, as if he saw or heard something familiar. “It was here that the great triumphs were held, the celebrations of the endless victories. The triumphant general’s body was painted bloodred and they dressed him in a purple-flowered tunic, a purple toga embroidered with gold. He wore a laurel wreath and carried an ivory scepter and a laurel branch.” The hooded eyes were wide now, as if he could see the spectacle before him: Elizabeth felt his enthusiasm sparking within her, the effect of a magus.

“There he stood, clad as a god, offering a sacrifice to Jupiter—and his enemies, held in the Mamertine prison down there, below us, were put to the sword … my dear Sister Elizabeth,” he whispered hoarsely, “these triumphant pagan rituals exceed my powers of description. Surrounded by gold and marble and statuary we now consider a standard of grace and beauty, wearing their purple robes, they presided over the sacrifices of pigs and goats and bulls, the smell of blood was everywhere, people fainted from it, their togas were stiff with it, the squeals of the dying animals filled the air that was thick with the smoke of the roasting flesh, the piazza was slippery with blood … our ancestors … where we stand, they stood, they believed in their gods as we believe in ours, we are one with them … we are the same.” His voice had fallen almost to nothing and the images gripped her. Higgins leaned forward, straining to hear. She was almost embarrassed by the fervor of the description.

Later they stood in the cool shade of a small garden from which they could see the stark ruins of the Forum through the haze of heat and dust. Higgins was speaking softly to D’Ambrizzi and she caught a fragment. “It’s always been something that fascinated me, the paradox … the evil, the good, coexisting. Not unlike your own interest in the pagan forerunners of Christianity.”

Sandanato was ahead of them, smelling flowers in the bright sunshine. “Paradoxes,” D’Ambrizzi repeated. “They are, of course, what lie at the heart of the Church. Two sides, two conflicting approaches to life, always interacting in order to survive … I have tried to bring the diverse elements into harmony. After all, we are not an organization of ascetics, are we? Oh, we have those fellows off in monasteries praying, we have the good sisters who remain in the cloister—they do enough praying for us all, don’t you agree? I’ve never spent more time praying than was required of me.” Smoke curled away from the cigarette clamped between stubby, nicotine-stained fingers. “Sister Elizabeth, you are not given to great prodigies of prayer, are you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Not prodigies.” She smiled.

“I knew it,” he said, satisfied. “You and I, wine from the same hillside, Sister. Take Monsignor Sandanato there, he’s a great expert on the monasteries, loves them, monasteries in ruins, monasteries deserted and burned to the ground by infidels or following infestations of plague. He doesn’t always approve of the emphasis I put on the secular world, the money and power games.” He smiled, beaming from one face to another.

They had left the comfort of the shade and the sunshine flowed across them, blinding them momentarily. Sandanato was waiting patiently, a lean figure in black, a kind of Roman Calvinist.

“Games someone has to play,” she said, inhaling the sweetness of the garden, “or the world devours us. Evil might triumph and wear the red paint and the purple toga—”

He nodded vigorously. “There are those who might say the world has devoured us already. In any case, it is a battle fought on the world’s terms, not ours. So I play my games and let others, like my faithful Pietro, attend to the spirituality. The Church is big enough for us all.” His eyes flickered behind the folds of flesh.

Later still she was out of breath in the steepness of another ancient Roman street, the Clivus Argentarius, on past the Basilica Argentaria which had once been the center of the Roman world’s commerce. The sun was
dipping low enough so that they were much of the time in shadows. As they entered the Via del Tulliano she wondered if the cardinal’s tour had simply been an elaborate jest, a teasing effort to send a shiver along the banker’s spine, and hers as well, or did he intend it as some kind of object lesson about the connections that forever tie the pagan and Christian worlds together? Perhaps it was, as he had said, simply a reflection of his own identification with the timeless, ambiguous city. Whatever his intention, her mind was reeling with the images and insights he had produced as if from a top hat, in a spotlight.

“There,” he said, stopping to catch his breath, “on the corner, the Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami. Nothing out of the ordinary, but beneath the church is a fascinating chamber, the chapel of San Pietro in Carcere … consecrated as the prison where Nero had St. Peter himself held. Come, let me show you this place.” He crossed the street flanked by Higgins, who was beginning to look a trifle bedraggled, and Elizabeth, with Sandanato trailing behind. “Tell them the history, Pietro.” The cardinal was tired. The huge nose drooped over the full mouth which seemed always drawn back in a grin, exposing the yellowed teeth. The black cigarette with the gold banding was stuck on the heavy ridge of his lower lip, the eyes almost hidden as he squinted through the wavering pillar of smoke.

“His Eminence has a peculiar affection for some of Rome’s grislier sights,” Monsignor Sandanato said, “but never give up hope, we draw near the end. The Tullianum was nothing more ominous than a water cistern, probably constructed shortly after the Gauls sacked Rome. However, it was later converted to use as a prison, serving as the lower vault of the Mamertine which, you will recall from your Roman history, was the final home of such defeated enemies as Simon Bar Giora and Jugurtha and Vercingetorix, who were often as not starved to death, and such enemies of the state as the Catiline conspirators who were perhaps strangled. Dead is dead, in any case, and a great deal of dying went on here.”

They descended the modern double stairway to the
entrance of the chapel, then entered the upper chamber. She suddenly felt a fluttering in her chest, felt her breathing shorten, and perspiration break out across her forehead and on her upper lip. A moving screen of black dots appeared before her. She was on the verge of falling, stopped to lean on a railing. She was hot, then icy cold, and her stomach churned rebelliously. The warm day and the onset of her period, the long walk, the talk, the intensity of the cardinal’s vision of Rome, the horrors and oddities he had described—they all seemed to be overtaking her at once. All she wanted was a moment to rest and somehow not disgrace herself. The three men swam before her, she felt herself nodding in a mockery of attention, faking it, grasping for handholds as inconspicuously as possible. It was dim in the chapel. She prayed, hating her own weakness, get me through this and I’ll never be bad again.…

Sister Elizabeth closed her eyes, tried to force herself to be calm, wondering with a distant corner of her mind if she was about to pass out.

“There was only one exit from the Tullianum, which is where we are at this moment, and that was a drain leading to the Cloaca Maxima. It was sometimes said to be clogged with rotting corpses. Now, of course, we see above the altar a relief depicting St. Peter baptising his jailer …”

It seemed hours before they’d gotten back to the Mercedes. Now, with the breeze off the Tiber cooling her face, and the cardinal staring moodily out the window, and the banker disgorged at his hotel, the tour was over. She was worn out and they were headed back toward the Via Veneto, and she felt the semblance of equilibrium returning.