The Fallen (23 page)

“Benigni knows nothing,” replied Georgi.

“Benigni is looking for you. He's tenacious, resolute. Experienced.”

“Surely Düül is the real threat?” asked Georgi, the name seeming to catch in his throat and his fingers tightening around the hilt of his knife.

“His time will come. You know that. For now, deal with Benigni. He will find you, eventually.” The figure turned to go. “Make sure you find him first.”

FORTY

T
HE
V
ATICAN
. V
ATICAN
C
ITY
.

Monsignor Benigni felt a rivulet of sweat run down his spine and allowed himself a moment of pleasure from the sensation. It always pleased him when he perspired from the exertions of the day, or night, as it now was. It was proof he was working hard in his role to stamp out the offensive and the unwelcome within the Church. “Tears of God,” he often described the sensation of feeling sweat on his body. “The Lord is weeping in blessing for me.”

The chubby bear-like figure swept into the old quarters of Inquisitor Cincenzo, knowing it would be his final visit of the evening. Afterwards he would return to his office and, perhaps with a glass of wine to moisten his lips and enliven his mind, he would make the final marks upon the file he had compiled on the dead Inquisitor, before binding it shut with ribbon and retiring to his own quarters to rest.

He stood in the centre of the small chamber, the thin file fixed under his right arm, the fingers of his left hand tapping lightly upon its hazel cover. He scowled and looked about the room, searching for anything, any last clue which might complete his findings on the murdered Inquisitor. Not that he needed anything else for the moment. He understood. The three rituals. The lust of the eyes. The lust of the flesh. The pride of life. He had read about them within the Great Library, the three cardinal sins made real
through rituals which, when committed in the correct manner and order, would summon great powers to a single point. Clearly Inquisitor Cincenzo had discovered that the rituals were being planned, although how exactly they would manifest themselves and how Inquisitor Cincenzo had managed to discover them, Monsignor Benigni did not know – yet.

But he knew he would find out. He always did. He prided himself on his tenacity, his ability to smell out corruption and wrongdoing. To ensure appropriate punishments were brought to bear on the guilty.

He gave the room a sweeping look – a dour and plain residence, just as he expected and appreciated. The home of a man on the road, very little in the way of furnishings, save for a single picture in a frame. Benigni stepped over towards it, surprised to have missed it on his previous visit to the apartment, and picked it up in his pudgy fingers. It was a grainy line drawing of a young woman, perhaps nineteen. On the back was a name, Katerina, a date three years before and a series of numbers written in two lines, one under the other. The bespectacled Priest frowned and looked back at the front of the picture, scrutinising the woman's face carefully. He didn't recognise her, not from the choirs or the nunnery within the Vatican or from Rome. And he suspected, from the way she was dressed and held herself, that the Church might not have been her first calling.

Without further hesitation, he removed the file from under his arm and unlaced the ties, slipping the photo inside, before turning on his heels and striding purposefully out of the room. It was clear Inquisitor Cincenzo had been careless. Had attracted the wrong kind of attention. They had countless witnesses claiming to have seen a group of men fitting the description of Inquisitors chasing him through Rome. The bullet pulled from Cincenzo's head pointed to Inquisitors being involved. The Inquisitors who had chased Cincenzo had obviously killed him, but were they trying to stop Cincenzo committing the three rituals or where they themselves somehow involved with those rituals? That was, for Monsignor Benigni, the most worrying part. He had often heard talk of the Devil among Inquisitors, of the Antichrist lingering on the edges of their society, waiting to entrap the feeble and the unwary. He wondered if that was what had happened here, that these wild young Inquisitors had reached too far out into the Abyss and become ensnared?

He sighed and decided the best thing would be to try to forget the case for the evening. Everything would make much more sense in the morning. It always did. He allowed himself a small smile at the prospect of a glass of good vintage wine and perhaps a little study of Psalm 96:

He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness
.

Unknown to Benigni, a dark figure rose from the shadows of the corridor behind and followed him.

FORTY ONE

T
HE
I
TALIAN
F
RONT
. T
HE
S
OČA
R
IVER
. N
ORTHWEST
S
LOVENIA
.

Close to dawn, the Italian field guns opened up. For hours the artillery flew so close that it seemed to Pablo that he could reach out and touch the shells, running his hands through the grubby slipstreams they left behind as they flew towards the Austro-Hungarian front line. The sun had just begun to rise above the high ridge of the Carso ahead of them, golden tendrils of light feeling hesitantly across the broken blasted terrain, moments before the onslaught began.

Medium-calibre guns opened up all along the rear line of the Italian Third Army, each blast a throaty bark compared to the bellowing roars of the larger calibre cannons and mortars used by the Austro-Hungarians that had savaged the Italian army so badly every night. The two armies had yet to meet upon the same field, but there was already a long stream of bloodied, blackened bodies being carried from the mountainside on stretchers and in carts courtesy of the barrages.

From the shallow trenches of the western face of the Carso, the Italian soldiers could now see the Austro-Hungarian front and wondered what value the blasted smoking ruin of clipped rock and stunted trees could possibly have for Italy to want to possess it so desperately.

Hour after hour rounds were fired by the Italian artillery teams, bristling the vista with smoke and noise, the shattered sounds echoing around the mountainside like fractured rumbles of thunder. Pablo watched the front until his eyes ached, then put down his rifle and rubbed his face with his hand. The initial charge of adrenaline with the first explosion of the field guns had now faded into a lingering feeling of sickness.

He was suddenly aware of the unit Sergeant's barked orders and set his felt hat on his head and listened. From the words he was able to snatch above the incessant roar of the light artillery and the noise of soldiers preparing themselves for battle, he understood that there would be a charge upon the enemy, the target something called ‘Mount San Michele'. The word ‘charge' brought a pain to his stomach and the malign sense of sickness seemed to heighten again. So much walking, so much climbing, and now Pablo knew that this was it. He looked up at where they had to go, a steep climb to a rocky ridge six hundred yards over hard limestone rock, the target heavily engulfed in smoke from the barrage.

Pablo looked to the front and swallowed, trying to harden his resolve. Terror raged within him. He shuddered and felt tears in his eyes. He sniffed at them and heard a Sergeant speak above the roar of the shells, telling them to do great things for their country.

“Don't worry,” said Corporal Abelli. “We'll look after you.” And then Pablo was aware that the shells had fallen silent, that whistles were blowing all along the Italian front line and soldiers were rising up and out of their shallow trenches and forward up the mountainside.

Almost immediately the air was full of noise and fire and smoke and flies, and Pablo's first thought was how quickly the bluebottles had settled in the heat, oblivious to the clamour and torment all around. To him there was nothing but a roaring in his ears, from the soldiers all around him, from the guns behind him, from the enemy ahead.

At first he and the other soldiers of his unit followed the rest of the Third Army into the flames of conflict, running forward over the broken terrain littered with smashed stones and blackened splintered tree trunks. “Savoy! Savoy!” was cried into the air, in respect for the royal family for whom the Third Army fought, while behind the soldiers, Staff Sergeants followed with revolvers pointed at their backs.

When no enemy at first fired back, Pablo thought, like the other soldiers, that the enemy had fled and climbed into the higher ranges of the Carso, perhaps even as far as the Karst Plateau itself, or been obliterated by the initial barrage. But when they reached the barbed wire, great winding walls of the wicked stuff dragged across the wide vista, their progress was checked. It was then, as they began to climb over it, that the enemy appeared, the enemy who they'd been assured by their superiors had been reduced to a few ragtag shocked units left behind.

The heavy clunk of machinegun posts started up and soldiers began to topple like pins. The enemy's front was now just two hundred yards beyond
the wire, but the hail of bullets meant the only way forward was to crawl. If ever a head was lifted too far from the ground, it was turned instantly into a bloody shredded mass.

Pablo crawled, wincing every time his bare skin touched the scorching white rock. He felt his head was about to explode, such was the thundering noise all about him. His eyes were full of dust and dirt, kicked up from the boots of soldiers in front of him and the shells dropping all around him, so much so that he kept blinking the dirt from them and scooping nailfuls of filth from his lids with the edge of a finger.

Despite the roar of war, he was aware of laughing too and looked to his right to see Corporal Abelli crawling beside him, his woollen hat shredded by fire and the shattering of rocks. Pablo stared at him, disbelieving.

“Why are you laughing?” he shouted. “What is so funny?”

“The Devil's flesh!” the Corporal laughed back, tapping the stones. “Can you not feel the fires of hell beneath? We are getting closer! Closer to the end!”

A short way ahead of them a shell landed in a flash of red and yellow, the bare rock stripped from the mountainside, flinging brittle fragments of limestone into the crawling masses. Something bit into Pablo's skull and intense searing pain rippled across his forehead and down his back. His hair dampened almost immediately and he knew it wasn't sweat.

He rolled forward into the hole the shell had created and lay there, his ears ringing, the ground beneath him sinking away as if he was tumbling into it. Perhaps he was tumbling into hell, being drawn down into its fiery depths? Perhaps the Corporal was right? Perhaps this mountainside truly was the flesh of the Devil?

Everything seemed far off, but Pablo felt the ground beneath him and he fell no more. Instead he just lay there, broken, his body shattered. He wondered if he was dying, if this was what death felt like. Calm. Remote. And he was aware that the entire landscape was shaking, rumbling with the weight of shells falling onto it. It was as if the whole earth was moving, trembling in its death throes.

Pablo lay there, not knowing how long. He was aware that men were climbing over him, always going east. He turned with great effort and crawled onwards, up the mountain.

There were more bodies now to clamber over, but ahead there was shouting and more and more soldiers ahead of him were getting up and running the final few yards to the enemy's line, curses and cries in their throats. Pablo staggered to his feet and ran after them, bawling like the rest
of the soldiers, the beast within him let loose. There was dust and smoke and wrestling bodies in the trench ahead of him, which looked like a tunnel to hell. He dropped into it and turned in time to see a Hungarian charge towards him. Instinct kicked in and he thrust out with his rifle, his eyes tightly shut. The rifle went heavy and the figure hung limp on the end of it. Pablo lowered it and the man slid off, dead, pierced clean through the heart. Pablo looked down into the dead man's wide staring eyes.