Blood of the Lamb (10 page)

Thomas blinked, taking in the sight: a woman in a flowing, flowered skirt, a blouse, and a complicated jacket (how did women know how to wear things like that?) was removing large sunglasses and smiling in surprise. She took off a straw hat and smoothed her dark hair. She’d spoken in English, and, extending her hand, in English went on. “Livia Pietro. I’m an art historian.”

Thomas took her hand automatically. Her grip was strong and cool, and her eyes were an extraordinary green: silver-flecked, deep and dark. Moonlight on the ocean. Thomas realized he was staring. “Thomas Kelly,” he said. He started to stand, but she slid out the chair next to him and sat. He dropped back into his own chair and added, “A historian, too, but of the Church. From Boston.”

“I know.” Livia Pietro dropped her voice to a whisper as two scholars by the window frowned over at them. She laid her hat on the table and gave Thomas a mischievous smile.

“That I’m an American?” Thomas matched her whisper. “Is it that obvious?”

“Well, you Americans do sit, walk, and hold yourselves in your own way. You’re not hard to spot. But no: I meant, that you’re a historian. The collar might suggest theologian, but you’re reading Damiani, a fellow not known for his religious subtlety.”

“Brava.” Thomas smiled. “Some fine deduction.”

“Why, thank you, Father. I’ve studied Damiani myself, here and there. He was an excellent poet. Complicated, elliptical, but well worth the effort. May I?”

Livia Pietro unzipped her shoulder bag and removed white cotton gloves, pulled them on, and lifted a volume off the pile.
Prepared and making herself at home,
Thomas thought. Academic protocol demanded that he object, stake his claim now, or risk losing his proprietary rights to Damiani’s volumes. But Pietro’s good humor was appealing, and it occurred to Thomas that if she knew Damiani’s work well, perhaps she could help him get inside the poet’s head.

She looked up and asked, “Do you read Romanesco? Few non-Italians do. Few Italians these days, actually.”

“My main subject is the Church in the nineteenth century, on the Italian peninsula and elsewhere around Europe, as affected by the political movements of the time. Many primary sources have never been translated. I found it easier—” At Livia Pietro’s smile, Thomas stopped short, hearing with something like horror his own pedantic tones. “I’m sorry. I think I spend too much time with undergraduates. Yes, I read Romanesco.”

“So do I. What’s this?” With a quick, conspiratorial movement, Livia Pietro slid the battered notebook along the tabletop. One finger keeping Thomas’s place, she leafed through the pages. Her green eyes seemed to sparkle. “Is this Damiani’s? I don’t know these.”

Thomas, who until that moment had not known eyes sparkled except in novels, said, “Yes, I think so. It was cataloged with the miscellanea. I doubt if anyone’s looked at it since it was accessioned. If they had, the handwriting would’ve—”

“Yes,” she said. “I agree. How exciting! You’ve made a discovery. Added to the store of human knowledge.” Her brows knit. “But look—missing pages. I wonder why?”

“I assume, poems that didn’t go well.”

“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “But look at some of these. Cross-outs, rewrites, arrows, more cross-outs, lines up the margins. He didn’t seem to mind poems that needed work.”

“Maybe he thought these couldn’t be saved.”

“Ummm.” Livia Pietro came dangerously close to humming to herself, Thomas thought, as she turned the pages of the small notebook. “Interesting.” She nodded, said, “Ummm,” again, and settled over the volume. After a moment, Thomas pulled his own chair closer and read along with her.

10

Under the glorious blue Rome sky the buildings of La Sapienza positively glowed with learning. Anna Jagiellon flopped down against the trunk of a golden-leafed
platano.
The morning was fresh and clear and she had an hour before her next class: twentieth-century Russian poetry, a miraculous trifecta of a fascinating subject, presented in a creatively organized curriculum, taught by, for once, a professor who, though Mortal, wasn’t an idiot. Not only not an idiot, the man was hot: a grinning swarthy Serb. She’d caught the way he looked at her as she studiously took her notes, seen the corners of his mouth tug up when she swept her long blond hair back from her forehead. She’d have taken a run at him already, but her current life was a comfortable one that she wasn’t prepared to complicate for a few rolls in the hay. Especially now, with her goal suddenly, after so long, within sight. If she was able to accomplish her objective, she and the Serb could take it up then. At that point they’d be fair game for each other.

Not that there was anything fair going on when a Noantri made a play for one of the Unchanged. The Noantri body was so intensely and elusively irresistible to Mortal senses that Noantri custom declared seducing the Unchanged unacceptable. Amazing, Anna thought, how her people had the same wide streak of pious hypocrisy as Mortals, who outlawed double-dealing, drunkenness, and debauchery and then feverishly committed every sin they had time for. In her Community, it was the same. If every Noantri who took a Mortal lover were punished, the Conclave would have time for little else. And, Anna suspected, would be missing a few of its own members.

Now that she was settled in the shade she pulled off her hat, a red straw Jason Wu, fizzy with random bits of crimson netting that would have done her no good if she’d actually needed to veil her features, if she’d had to go about with that air of elegant mystery women had affected a hundred years ago. Aha, progress! A century and now she could uncover her face.

Honestly, how could these Mortals stand it?

Of all the identities, professions, and trades Anna Jagiellon had had through a long, long life, being a university student was the one she returned to most often. True, her considerable intellect was rarely challenged except by Noantri professors, who, recognizing their own, quietly tailored assignments to take into account, and take advantage of, not only her intelligence but also the years of learning already behind her. Still, even without that, she’d found enough new knowledge at universities to keep her interested, and her own impatience and restlessness found an echo in the yeasty fervor of young Mortals. Mortals, damn it. She used the politically correct “Unchanged,” or “Gli Altri”—“the others,” as opposed to her own peoples’ “Noantri,” which meant “we others”—when she had to, but she hated those terms. It wasn’t, as she pointed out to nods and mumbled agreement in the Circolo degli Artisti café, in that back room where you’d always find a compatible few, that they were
other
or
not changed
that made the vast majority of humans different from, and yes, lesser than, Noantri. It was that they were
mortal
. It was that they would die.

That kind of talk, naturally, was dangerous. It had gotten her exiled nearly a century and a half ago, sent to Buenos Aires. Far from Europe, but not any kind of hardship, not for her. The beautiful, wealthy, and wild port city had adored the beautiful, wealthy, and wild young Hungarian. She’d loved it back, its burning sun and broad, sparkling river, its
confiterías
where she sipped
café con leche
all day, and its sultry clubs where she danced all night. She’d considered turning her back on the Old World and making the New her home. But though the Noantri Community in Argentina was large, Rome was the center of the oppressor’s power and also of her people’s. Her people, her hidden, optimistic, absurdly contented people, who had every right to the entire pie and were grateful for the crumbs. The Conclave had eventually lifted her sentence, not called her back but allowed her to return if she chose. She did.

She was braiding her long pale hair over her shoulder, looking forward to an hour of reading Akhmatova, when her cell phone rang. “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” which meant that fool, Jorge. Maybe she shouldn’t have given him his own ring tone. Then whenever he called she’d have a few more exasperation-free seconds between the time the phone rang and the time she knew who it was.

“
Pronto
, Jorge.” He’d speak in Spanish, she knew; his Italian, though earnest, was clumsy, and his laughable attempts to master even a few words of her native Hungarian were pathetic. If she’d wanted to make him comfortable she’d have picked up with, “
Bueno.
” But Jorge was more useful if he wasn’t comfortable. He tried harder to please.

“Anna.” She could tell from that one word that he was excited. “I’m in the Vatican Library,” he said. Yes, in Spanish and just a notch above a whisper.

She blew out a sigh, answered in Spanish to move this conversation along. “That’s where you’re supposed to be, Jorge. Did you call to tell me that?”

“No! No, of course not. I’ve been watching that priest the way you said to—”

“Good boy,” Anna said, knowing he’d beam and completely miss her acid sarcasm.

“Thank you.” God, it sounded like he was blushing! “For the last two days he’s been asking for books by nineteenth-century Republican poets.”

“And . . . ?” He might miss sarcasm but he’d hear impatience, at this high level anyway.

“And someone came to join him today,” Jorge hurried on. “One of us.”

Anna sat straighter. All right, the boy might be on to something. “Who? What do you mean, ‘to join him’?”

“She introduced herself but I didn’t hear. A woman, with long black hair. Some gray streaks,” he added, with clear pride in his powers of observation.

“When you get a chance”—she suggested the obvious—“you might check the registry. Wouldn’t she have had to sign in?”

“Yes, she would’ve.” Again, sarcasm flew over his head. She wondered if that was a hearing defect, or a mental one. “I’ll go look. But here’s why I called.”

“Oh, you mean there’s a point?”

“Anna!” Finally, he was wounded. “The priest asked for a book, and when she saw it she got excited. They’re leaning over it and reading it together.”

He stopped again. Sometimes Anna doubted herself: Were the Noantri really the right choice to rule the world, if the Community included morons like Jorge? And like herself, whose fault Jorge was in the first place?

“Jorge,” she said carefully, “what is the book?”

“Poetry,” he answered promptly. “Nineteenth century, but unattributed until now. The priest thinks it’s Mario Damiani’s. Anna, wasn’t he one of—”

“Yes. Does she agree? The black-haired woman?”

“Yes, and she—”

“Get it.”

“What?”

“The book, Jorge! I want that book! Do you understand me?”

“I—yes, but—”

“Call me when you have it.” Anna added,
“Ciao,”
then thumbed the phone off with perhaps more force than necessary. She settled back against the tree trunk and took out a cigarette. Few of the Noantri smoked. A real pity, she’d always thought; it was a great pleasure, and the health dangers of this habit meant nothing to them. Of course, the problem was the fire. You needed a flame to get your cigarette going and it burned at its tip the whole time. Well, what of it? These miniature embers, so easily smashed out on the bottom of your shoe? Her people had been afraid of fire, and so much else, for far too long.

She drew in smoke and streamed it out contentedly. The Conclave had sources in the Vatican; well, good for them. So did Anna and her friends. She’d been told about Father Thomas Kelly, called to the Vatican to root through the Archives in clear—and clearly desperate—search of something. Now he’d been joined by a Noantri with Vatican Library credentials, thus obviously a scholar. And there they were, getting excited together over a book of Noantri poetry.

Of course, it could mean nothing. Just some academics getting their bookish thrills.

Though if it meant nothing, why was Anna’s skin tingling like this?

11

“Interesting,” Livia Pietro said again, still studying the pages of the poetry notebook.

Thomas, who’d been contentedly reading the poems alongside her, looked up. “What’s interesting?”

Now she turned to him, considering. “Do you know Trastevere well?”