“Of course I can,” he said, his finger hovering over the phone, not wanting to break the seal or the sacrament of the confessional but wondering if it wasn’t time to call 911. “Of course I can.” The air in the booth had become cloying. He felt a sheen of sweat forming under his clerical collar, and he hastily undid the top button on his shirt. How he wished he had that Maalox with him now.
“Non era ancor di là Nesso arrivato,” she suddenly recited, “quando noi ci mettemmo per un bosco, che da neun sentiero era segnato.”
Father DiGennaro, who had spent several years in Rome, knew a perfect accent when he heard one.
“Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco; no rami schietti, ma nadosi e ’nvolti; non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tosco.”
And he also knew his Dante. She was reciting from the Inferno, the lines describing the wood of the self-murderers, where the damned souls were tortured forever, bound into gnarled tree limbs studded with poisonous thorns. A chill ran down his spine. “Non han si aspri sterpi né si folti quelle fiere selvagge che ’n odio hanno, tra Cecina e Corneto i luoghi cólti.”
There was no better indication of her intentions, or her state of mind, than this—she was contemplating suicide. But when he tried to punch the tiny buttons on his phone, his thick fingers, damp with perspiration, misdialed. His left arm tingled.
And the booth, it seemed, had become darker.
He had to get out, and rising from his chair, he was almost overcome by dizziness. He swept the curtain of the confessional aside, and stumbled out into the dimly lighted cathedral. A sudden draft extinguished a bank of candles, and glancing up, he saw a plastic tarp drifting down from the gloom of the apse … trailed by the cardinal’s red hats, like so many dead leaves.
A rivulet of sweat ran down his back, and he felt himself in the grip of something strange. His left arm was aching, and his breath was coming in short, shallow bursts.
He took hold of the curtain on the penitent’s side of the booth, and yanked it open. He had never done such a thing in his life.
Nor had he seen what he saw then.
Her veil thrown back, her fur coat open, the woman stared up at him with a face that was at once as beautiful as any he had ever known—her eyes were wide, and even in the shadows, looked violet—and as terrible, too. Beneath the taut white skin, and for just a split second, he caught a glimpse of a gleaming white skull, and the very air seemed diffused with the scent of corruption. His heart seized up in his chest—it felt like a fist clenching—and his legs crumpled. But even as he fell to the floor, the cell phone skittering across the flagstones, he was unable to tear his eyes away from her awful and implacable gaze.
The cell phone glowed at her feet as Kathryn watched the priest collapse. Snatching it up, she dialed 911, reported the incident, and before the operator could ask her anything more, flicked it closed and gently replaced it in the priest’s hand.
But she could tell that he was already as dead as dead could be. She envied him.
Then she descended the steps of the cathedral as fast as her sharp heels and the blowing snow would allow her. Cyril saw her coming and held open the rear door of the limousine.
“Quickly,” was all she said.
The moment the door was closed, she raised the interior partition, and the car swerved away from the curb.
Eyes closed, she rested her head against the back of the leather seat. A blast of cold Chicago air buffeted the car as the tires swooshed through the salt and slush. In the far distance, she thought she could already detect the wailing siren of an ambulance.
Take your time, she thought. Let the man rest in peace.
The limo was warm and dark and comfortable inside, like a cocoon, and as she reclined there, listening to the siren race past in the opposite direction, she wondered if there was any reason for her to stay in this city any longer. With Randolph dead—and how many husbands, pray tell, had preceded him?—perhaps it was time for her to reinvent herself yet again, to decamp for another country, another continent, under another name … as she had done countless times before. There was only one thing she kept constant in her peregrinations, and that was her first name. She always employed some variation on Caterina; it was the only way she could hold on to any identity at all.
But she had grown so weary of life … and death. She felt as if she had been marching in this solemn parade forever, with no end in sight. Had she known what that strongbox contained, so many centuries ago in Florence, she would never have opened it, never have risked Benvenuto’s wrath, or subjected herself to this … nightmare from which there was no awakening. If there was any hope for finishing the dreadful course she was on—for starting life again in its natural course, or ending it fairly, here and now—then that hope lay in La Medusa.
And in David Franco’s being able to find it.