Pendergast reached into his suit coat and removed a thin cloth, which he quickly spread on the stone floor in front of the crypt. Next, he produced a narrow crowbar and a long metal blade with a curved end. He shimmed the blade behind the marble plaque, moved it slowly along all four edges, then stuck the crowbar into the newly created joint and gave a sharp tug. The plaque popped loose with a faint cloud of dust. Pendergast caught it deftly and laid it on the cloth.
The dark hole exhaled a nasty, burned smell.
Pendergast shone his flashlight into the niche. “Give me a hand, please.”
D’Agosta knelt beside him. He avoided looking in the hole; it didn’t seem decent somehow.
“You grab the left foot, I’ll grab the right, and we’ll slide him out. It’s our good fortune that Vanni’s niche is at floor level.”
Now D’Agosta forced himself to look. In the dimness, all he could see were the soles of two shoes, each with a hole in it.
“Ready?”
D’Agosta nodded. He reached in, grabbed the shoe.
“On second thought, grasp it above the ankle. We wouldn’t want the foot coming off at the anklebone.”
“Right.” D’Agosta moved his hand up, around the pant leg. It felt like grabbing a knotty bone, except there was a crackle of something else under there, like parchment, that almost turned his stomach. The smell was appalling.
“At the count of three, pull slowly and easily. One, two, three . . .”
D’Agosta pulled, and after a moment of sticky resistance, the body came free and began sliding out, surprisingly light.
“Keep going.”
D’Agosta backed up, pulling as he went, until the corpse was entirely out of the niche. A nest of earwigs was exposed, the panicked insects racing off in all directions. D’Agosta jumped back, slapping at several that had dashed up his leg.
Carlo Vanni lay before them, arms crossed, hands folded around a crucifix, eyes wide open but black and wrinkled. The lips had drawn back from the teeth, which were no more than rotten stumps. The man’s white hair had been slicked down with some formidable substance, because not a strand was out of place. The suit had holes in it from insect activity but was otherwise intact, if a bit dusty. The only obvious sign of burning was on the hands themselves, which were black and twisted, the fingernails curled up in little scrolls.
“Hold the light, please, Vincent.”
Pendergast bent over the body, placed a knife at the corpse’s throat, and in one motion slit the clothes from neck to navel. He pulled them aside. Paper wadding, used to bulk up the suit, filled the sunken abdomen. Pendergast pulled this away to reveal a blackened torso, skin peeling away in dusty burned sheets. Burned ribs sprang from the rib cage, charred ends exposed.
D’Agosta made an effort to keep the light steady.
Pendergast removed a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it beside the body. D’Agosta saw it was the copy of the M.E.’s report, a photocopy of an X-ray showing the location of the drops of metal. Next, he fitted a jeweler’s loupe to his eye, bending close to the body as he adjusted the objective. With the knife in one hand and a pair of surgical tweezers in the other, he began to poke into the abdomen. Faint crackling sounds rose up.
“Ah!” He held up a frozen droplet of metal, suspended between the tweezers, then dropped it into a test tube and reapplied himself to the corpse.
From the darkness behind them came a sound.
D’Agosta straightened immediately, turning the light back down the crypt. “You hear that?”
“A rat. The light, if you please?”
D’Agosta returned the light to Vanni, heart pounding. There was a lot to be said for waiting for the paperwork to come through. A year? Make that two.
There was another sound and D’Agosta swept the light back. A rat the size of a small cat crouched and blinked, showing its teeth with a little hiss.
“Shoo!” D’Agosta kicked some dirt at it and it slunk away.
“The light?”
D’Agosta swung the light back. “Nasty buggers.”
“Here’s another.” Pendergast put a long dribble of frozen metal into the test tube. “Interesting. This metal penetrated more than six inches of flesh. These droplets weren’t merely splattered on the corpse: they entered the body at high velocity. The result, I would guess, of a small explosion.”
Pendergast extracted a third and fourth droplet, stoppered the tube, removed the loupe. Everything disappeared back into his suit. “I think we’re done here,” he said, glancing up at D’Agosta. “Let’s return Mr. Vanni to his resting place.”
D’Agosta bent and, once again taking hold of the corpse, helped shove him back into the niche.