Blood Makes Noise (26 page)

The superintendent looked aghast. “Of course not. I only meant that with this sort of ridiculous accusation hanging over our office just now, someone in my position must be extra vigilant in making sure our records are correct regarding those resting with us.”

He smoothed his blotter again.

“Is there some problem with the paperwork?”

“No. Everything was in order. But for one matter.”

“What is that?”

“We forwarded your request, as family, for her removal to the Carmelite order. Just a formality. We, however, received an unusual reply.”

“Yes?”

“María Maggi died.”

Michael let the words sink in. “Well, yes. Naturally she’s dead.”

“María Maggi died in Argentina
three weeks ago
.”

At that moment Michael understood conclusively both that God existed and that He hated Michael’s guts.

“There’s obviously been a mistake.”

“Of course. I don’t doubt that some clerical error has occurred with the Carmelites. It won’t be the first time. Still, as I said, we must, particularly at this moment, be absolutely certain of our registration records. Therefore, regrettably, we cannot release any remains till this paperwork issue is resolved.”

“Signore, I have a hired hearse waiting at great expense to transport my aunt. Any delay would be a great burden to my family.”

“I understand and apologize. But we must verify the paperwork before we can release your aunt.”

“How long is this investigation likely to take?”

“Oh, no more than two or three weeks.”

“No matter the cost to my family?”

“Again, I apologize.”

There was another ten minutes back and forth like this, with Michael trying various tactics, including a thinly veiled offer of a personal donation to the Carmelite order or the superintendent himself, in cash, but the man just kept glancing nervously at the magazine article and shrugging his helpless apologies.

Giancarlo was waiting at the bottom of the stairs smoking a cigarette. “And?”

“Walk with me.”

They cut through the cemetery quadrants, Michael’s bloodshot eyes eventually finding the numbers he knew by heart: Garden 41, Lot 86.

They marked a simple plot across the path from the daisies of the cemetery’s potter’s field. Michael stood before the slab, searched for a feeling separate from the general confusion in his body. He glanced up and down the gravel and sighed in disappointment. He’d forgotten how exposed She was. First row. With the openness of potter’s field next door, you could see Her grave a dozen yards in three directions.

“A nun,” Giancarlo said, reading the marker.

“It’ll be harder here. In the more crowded areas you wouldn’t be seen as quickly doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Digging her up.”

“You are, obviously, insane.”

“We’ll dig at night. With the airport goons watching me, with Montoneros maybe on the way right now…I don’t have two or three weeks to get through this paperwork. We’ll do it ourselves tonight and get the casket out a service portal in the wall.”

They were sitting outside the cemetery gates now, against the curving gallery of columns. Giancarlo was studying the gelato in his hand intensely, trying to make Michael disappear. The air was so heavy the city seemed to catch its breath.

“We’ll need a truck.”

Giancarlo finished his gelato and stood. “Get it yourself. I have a train waiting for me.”

“Just like that.”

“Fuck yes, like that. I do favors for Uncle Frankenstein, understand? But I’m not on his payroll, and this is way, way out of any universe I live in—or anyone but you, I’m getting to think.”

Michael climbed slowly to his feet like a man pulled from the wreckage of his own body. The shakes and sweat were getting worse and he wondered a beat if he’d faint. Giancarlo seemed to wonder the same. Michael let him roll with the thought a moment
before grabbing the nephew’s shoulder pads and slapping him against the column. The kid tensed, and Michael decided,
If I’m going to faint, I’m taking someone with me.

“Listen.” Michael kept his voice close and calm. “You know, I know you’re a worthless, pointless piece of shit that only has that third-rate embassy job because you’re Hector’s last name. And you know, I know that one phone call to said uncle and you’re gone, history, back to Buenos Aires, where you’re also a pointless piece of shit, only you’ll be a pointless piece of shit without diplomatic portfolio, sitting drunk in cheap cafés waiting to be blown up by a terrorist bomb, because, after all, the one thing you’ll still have is your uncle’s last name.”

Giancarlo’s eyes narrowed. “Christ, what are you, a spook?”

“Worse.”

“You look it.”

Michael let him go. “Just buy a truck, get some wino to help dig, and be at the corner service gate at one thirty tonight.”

He had his own problems to take care of in the meantime. There was a pharmacy near the hotel on a quiet shopping alley. It was closed now, the block dark, and Michael broke a rear window to get in. He didn’t waste time, and he only took the little white ones.

The corner service gate consisted of a locked steel door mounted into the high masonry wall that surrounded the cemetery. Taller than the one dividing east and west in Berlin, it reminded Michael of necropoli favored by the ancients. For them, the dead were unclean and vengeful, their bodies stashed behind secure frontiers.

Christianity supposedly changed that. From howling uncertainty to the gentle metaphysics of a peaceful soul that slept patiently, awaiting not revenge but resurrection. This leached the
dead of some of their terror, and the corrupted bodies of family were brought into the churchyards. Villagers visited, picnicked on, walked by their graves to market. For it was only slumber, and the spirit was the soul, and the soul was not a ghost that could wander.

Yet there was something in the northern Italian mind that had never completely accepted this. Their dead, it seemed, still strolled, and taking no chances, these sons of Sibyl continued to hide their deceased behind high walls, just in case the ancients had been right all along.

Giancarlo was at the gate, smoking to look calm, the tight, jerky arm movements accenting his nervousness. Michael, energy in his step, walked quickly across the dirt median. “You got the truck?”

“I got a truck.”

“Big enough?”

“For a nun it’s big enough.”

A three-quarter moon played peek-a-boo behind brewing clouds.

“Did you get someone to help dig?”

“He’s got two legs and he’s breathing. After that all guarantees end.” Giancarlo studied Michael. “What have
you
been doing?”

“Get the truck. Bring it and the guy up to the curb.”

A streetlight caught Michael’s eyes, and Giancarlo shook his head when he glimpsed the pupils. “I knew it. Uncle Frankenstein sent me a drug addict. A fucking drug addict.” He turned to the truck. “Well, at least you’ll have something in common with our Igor for the evening.”

Michael went to work on the service door with his TSD skeleton keys. The lock was old and burst apart as he picked free chunks of rust. Giancarlo brought the truck to the curb. It wheezed, and
a death rattle banged on thirty seconds after Giancarlo shut the ignition.

“It runs,” Hector’s nephew said sourly.

“And runs and runs, clearly.” The whole truck lurched and fell silent. It was a ’59 Bedford with a short plank carrying area, corroded but sturdy looking. Tufts of sheep wool were caught in the rear side-slats and drifted like talismans in the breeze.

“Where’s the digger?”

Giancarlo looked around him as if noticing for the first time that he wasn’t accompanied, sighed, and walked back to the truck. From it, half dragged, appeared the evening’s hired help. “Meet Igor.”

The man didn’t smile, didn’t register Michael’s presence. He swayed, his hair black and unwashed, bits of dead skin sticking up through greasy clumps. His clothes smelled of low tide. The face was the flat romantic features of a Central European, but the eyes were all Gypsy.

“Igor, this is Mr. Suslov. Your boss for the evening.” Igor carried a couple of shovels. Giancarlo looked anxiously up and down the avenue. “Now can we please get off the street?”

They went inside. Threading past dark tombs, scuffling gravel, feeling their hearts jimmy every time the moon broke and shot searchlights around them. A sea of red oil lamps winked tiny patches of hot blood over dead yearbook photos. Thunder rolled without enthusiasm out of town as they crossed the potter’s field like thieves, cicadas singing languidly at their feet.

Michael tried Italian on the Gypsy and got in return what might have been Albanian, might have been the man’s own secret language. Michael wondered exactly how Giancarlo had negotiated his services.

They hadn’t seen anyone moving about, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, walking the dead beat. Michael felt exposed,
every escaping bolt of moonlight like fire on his cheek. His pulse raced threadily, and he resolved to just get on with it.

They surrounded Her, judged the thin, flecked stone tablet that sat over the grave. Michael crouched, felt for an edge, took the shovel, and pried underneath, using it as a fulcrum. “C’mon. Give me a hand.”

The Gypsy seemed to get the idea and knelt beside Michael to lend his effort. Giancarlo lit a cigarette.

“Do you really think a cigarette’s a good idea right now?”

“Fuck you.”

Giancarlo lit another, stuck it in the Gypsy’s mouth, and braced a third shovel underneath the tablet. Together they pushed, and there was a tearing sound as fifteen years’ worth of grass roots ripped aside. The marble tablet rose slowly. When it was high enough Michael dropped his shovel and added his shoulder to the Gypsy’s, pivoting it up and over with a deep thump onto the grass.

The underside was caked earth swarming with confused pill bugs. They boiled over the grave, considering a sky for the first time.

“Charming,” Giancarlo said.

Michael turned to the Gypsy. “Dig.” Whether the word was universal, or just that he was following Michael’s example, the Gypsy complied.

After a shallow surface of roots, then fine urban grit, the grave gave up soft Lombardy soil. The shovels sank easily and pulled free hillocks of black loam. Giancarlo leaned against the headstone. “You could help us out some, y’know,” Michael said. Giancarlo glanced at his own impeccable disco threads.

“Yeah. Right.”

It started to rain. Giancarlo hissed something. A sweat had risen on Michael’s shoulders and he didn’t feel the droplets at first. They began to strike harder, joining across the back of his neck
and rolling into his eyes. The droplets plunged into the spongy grave, releasing the sweet remains of previous tenants. The sleepy scent melded with the Gypsy’s own personal rot, and the hole came alive in Michael’s throat.

Lightning whacked suddenly overhead, close enough to drape them in ozone. Giancarlo reflexively scrunched down closer to the headstone, turning his collar as the sky cracked and dumped. Instantly the grave went to soup, and now they were shoveling as much water as earth. More lightning exploded, strobing faces and turning rain to frozen silver.

Michael’s hair plastered to his skull. Giancarlo’s blow-dry fell like a soggy hamster. The Gypsy begun humming a dirge but kept digging. The rain was a solid white curtain now, flattening grass, rushing the grave in torrents. Rolling shotgun blasts of thunder bounced off cathedral towers miles away, the succession so fast lightning and sound lost sync with each other. Michael was flash blind, deaf, and couldn’t even see the grave anymore…

When his shovel hit it.

The wood was soggy and peeled away like bark. Beneath the humble wood of a nun lay the hardened steel of a First Lady. Beneath the steel, waxed and bottled for eternity, would be the woman herself.

“Oh
shit
…”

Michael barely heard it over the sky’s caterwauling, but the fact that Giancarlo had said it reflexively in Spanish spiked his blood. He stuck his head out of the grave and there, across the no-man’s-land of potter’s field, bobbed two flashlights slowly in their direction.

“Friends of yours?” Giancarlo asked.

“They’re guards.”

No more than a hundred yards away but the rain made them seem farther.

“Well, you or Igor have an idea?” Giancarlo said.

“Stay low.”

“And if they come closer?”

The Gypsy was still humming his dirge in Michael’s ear. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to do something stupid like shoot them, are you?”

“I don’t have a gun.”

They were definitely going to pass by. Michael couldn’t tell if they were zeroing in on something in particular or following a regular route. He looked at the piles of sludge heaped around the grave. They’d never miss that.

He heard voices. Gruff working-class ones. They weren’t laughing but they didn’t seem tense either. A flashlight suddenly swung past them, and Michael dropped flat on his back atop the rotten outer casket, softly mildewed as a pillow. The Gypsy fell in line beside him, the rain clattering off their faces and arms. It was warm and he felt mud shifting and reforming around him.

A flashlight beam hit the top of the grave and froze. It was a strange angle, low to the ground, and it held absolutely still, like the untrembling hand of God.

Someone screamed.

A rising, strangled moan, the sound of people clawing up from nightmares. He heard a scuffling, feet darting serpentine through wet gravel.

Michael climbed to his knees. Kept his face out of the light beam and looked over the lip. The flashlight was straight and unmoving because it was lying on the ground. The guards, who had been closing lazily on them, were now dashing wildly in a crazed retreat across potter’s field. Through the solid curtain of pounding water, Michael saw a ghoul, dressed in red, baying and loping like a werewolf after them. The guards had dropped everything and bolted in terrorized panic.

When the guards had disappeared, the ghoul paused, straightened, and walked unhurriedly back toward him and the Gypsy, two drowned puppies with their heads above the edge of a grave. The ghoul had lost its lupine gait now, taken on a pelvic swagger, and ten yards from the grave tried to light a cigarette in the rain. The lighter’s flare illuminated a horror face of black streaks—cheap hair dye, Michael realized—running in the rain.