Daughter of Ashes, page 5
Parri pointed at the evidence bag containing the old man’s clothes.
“The killer took the trouble to remove the victim’s trousers, yet there are no signs of sexual violence. Perhaps he ran out of time, or perhaps what he did was enough to satisfy him. In any event, I haven’t found any traces of ejaculation.”
“No, that’s not why he took the victim’s trousers off. At least I don’t think so; I can’t see any sexual motive behind any of this. There must be some other message for us to decipher.”
Parri was looking at her as if she had gone mad.
Teresa’s determination wavered. She must have seemed crazy—or worse, naive. The nausea returned. Would she ever be capable of sounding authoritative, of being and feeling like a true professional? Sometimes she felt like she was trying to sense her way around in the dark, with her ability to improvise her only trump card. And that was far too little to secure the respect of her more established colleagues.
Parri returned to the cuts with greater conviction.
“So what you’re saying is that he tried to commit a controlled murder, but something still got out of hand?”
He sounded genuinely interested. That was new.
“Yes . . . yes. He tried his best, but he was unable to complete his work as he had originally conceived it. He succumbed to his animal instincts. He bit the victim and tried to hide the tooth marks with these cuts. He knew that a dental impression could get him into trouble, while carving crosses into the victim’s skin could easily put us on the wrong track.”
“Is that what they teach you lot these days?”
“I’ve taught myself.”
“It’s fascinating stuff. The other leg, please. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll look for your bite mark. If he really did bite, it must have been after the victim was already dead. I can’t see any bruising beneath the incisions.”
Teresa let her gaze roam over the body. She was ready to heed its siren call, and let herself be dragged into the vortex of its last living moments.
She was nearly tempted to caress him. He seemed like a kind man. The gap between his eyebrows did not bear the furrowed marks of a mean spirit.
“The killer panicked.” Teresa spoke in a whisper now, as if to avoid rousing death. “He couldn’t keep his excitement in check. He moved the body more than once, as indicated by the scratches on the victim’s face. May I?” she said, pointing at the mouth.
Parri seemed enraptured.
“Of course.”
Teresa lowered the leg back onto the table.
“The phalanges have not been removed in a professional manner. It’s almost like a butcher’s work. He must have used an ordinary knife, maybe even a box cutter,” Parri warned her. “Same with the gash on the chest—though there isn’t anything missing in there.”
But that wasn’t what Teresa was looking at; the cavity that had caught her attention was a different one. She took a flashlight from the tool tray and shone it onto the mucus membrane inside the mouth.
“Gravel.”
“Yes . . . I was just about to point that out to you. We haven’t washed him yet.”
“He moved the body. Several times.” She mimicked the action. “Dragged it by the arms. This contact with the body stimulated him. And in the end he just left it lying there in plain sight. He took a pretty big risk. He’s only just getting started. He’ll get braver, and more confident, but more careful, too.”
“He did it all in an hour.”
Teresa had thought about that, too.
“He didn’t kill him too far from where he left him to be found. And he didn’t have much difficulty getting the victim to follow him—perhaps even into his car. They must have known each other. Let’s not forget about the dog: he was covered in blood. He’s a boisterous little creature, yet he doesn’t seem to have given the killer any trouble. There was no duress.”
Parri was watching her.
“I saw how you wiped that cloth over its fur. I must admit I was impressed.”
“Oh, right!”
Teresa went to retrieve the two bags she had put in the pocket of her parka and handed them to the coroner: wet wipes covered in blood and mud.
“You should run some tests on these, if you don’t mind. There might be something in the chemical composition that can lead us to a more precise location. If the blood matches the victim’s, then we can confirm the dog was with them when it happened. One way or another, the three of them must have gone off together. That’s not exactly a minor detail; it suggests a completely different kind of behavior than what you might see during a kidnapping.”
“Of course. I’ll get those analyzed right away.”
“I’ve been reading about these new laboratory tests; they say it’s possible now to extract DNA code from blood samples and use that to identify whose blood it is.”
“Yes, but don’t get too carried away, Inspector. It’s still an experimental technique, and I wouldn’t bet on it coming to our little lab anytime soon.”
Teresa hid her disappointment. She looked at the victim’s pale hands.
“The widow said that there was something missing from his personal possessions, a golden ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand and never took off. It was his mother’s wedding ring.”
“Indeed. You can see the mark here.”
Teresa held the mutilated hand in her own and peered at the thin strip of lighter skin where the ring used to be.
“The bones he removes are a trophy and may even become his signature for future murders. The modus operandi might change, it might be perfected, but the signature will remain the same. It’s like a trademark. The ring is a sort of talisman that will help him relive the different phases of the murder and feel that sense of power and fulfillment all over again. A simple object taken from the victim and which the killer may one day even find a way to return to the victim’s relatives—or gift to someone he feels close to.”
“Really? That’s horrifying.”
Teresa smiled at him.
“That’s the killer’s story, Doctor. You told me yourself: this man’s death is telling us all about it.”
“A munificent death, indeed. I might have found something of interest. Here, look, just on the outer edge of the calf.” The doctor pointed a pair of tweezers at a patch of loose skin. “There’s something there.”
“What is it?”
“The faintest of shadows, really, but I would go so far as to say it is the beginnings of a premortem bruise in a familiar shape.” He took his glasses off. He looked incredulous, or perhaps just approving. “Death rewards you, Inspector.”
Teresa took note of the designation. Parri was the only one who’d ever called her that. He put the tweezers down.
“The heart had already stopped, but it must have managed with its last beat to direct a final stream of blood into this bit of flesh right as it was being attacked. There it is: the bite mark you were looking for.”
7
Today
“AQUILEIA. OF COURSE. WHERE else?”
Marini was inspecting the columns of the forum. Teresa noticed how the initial hint of disbelief in his voice had been quickly replaced with the understanding that there was no setting on earth more fitting for the tale of death that Giacomo’s own story told.
The sky was tinged with red, as if the wrath of a surviving god had set the millennial ruins on fire. This place had been desecrated. By Giacomo.
Aquileia: that was the word the killer had written in his note to Teresa. Aquileia submerged, and forever lost. The ancient Roman city surfaced now in the long shadows of the evening. Teresa was reminded of the translucent skin of a sacred serpent. No scales to cover it, but blocks of marble springing out of the black earth.
The city had welcomed them with the vestiges of an ancient realm, with the mineral scent of Istrian stone, with the ruins of the circus and the thermae, and the inland port that had once connected it to the Adriatic Sea—before the river had deserted its bed and poured itself elsewhere with even greater vigor.
We are walking over countless layers of life, thought Teresa, a thousand souls to every step, retracing the paths of the greats. Julius Caesar, the first Christians to arrive from Alexandria of Egypt, Attila and his wrath. Legend had it that even Saint Mark had once passed through here.
Today the town consisted of a handful of houses clustered in the flat countryside, almost within sight of the coastal lagoon. That first furrow that the triumvirate had dug to mark the perimeter of the city as an eagle floated above their heads had been turned over again and again across the centuries until it had finally faded away. The names and feats of its Patriarchs were chiseled into Aquileia, but when you looked at the city now, there was little sign of that mighty past.
Teresa’s eyes scanned the horizon. It was like looking at a peasant girl for signs of an empress. And yet the ground beneath those crops and fields was teeming with fallen capitals, amphorae, and golden treasures, all yet to be discovered. The city’s ornaments kept pushing up against the surface of the earth, bearing witness to what it had once been.
Aquileia the forgotten, Aquileia the unknown. Not by all, perhaps, but certainly by most.
Behind the columns of the forum, the thousand-year-old belfry built with marble blocks taken from the amphitheater soared above the lancing silhouettes of a row of fragrant cypress trees. Right beside it, lit up in the encroaching evening, and on a scale incongruous with the settlement itself, stood the church, a cathedral constructed by means of identical blocks of stone that made clear its ancient origins. The layers of plaster and the various adornments that had been added in subsequent periods had all since been removed, returning the building to its original beauty. The basilica of Aquileia was the grand and primordial house of God that Theodore I had envisaged, erected over the domus ecclesiae that had welcomed martyrs and the persecuted, nearly two thousand years’ worth of sanctity and blood mixed into its foundations.
Teresa and Marini began heading in its direction, Teresa leaning on him as they walked. They had been waiting for hours for the forensics team to finish gathering evidence. Hanging in the air was the fragrance of night-time blooms, of salty sea spray carried in the wind blowing from the south, and—as hidden as it was portentous—the sepulchral smell of the dust that all men were destined to become. Aquileia was an open tomb, exposed anew.
Teresa had already gulped down a couple of painkillers. But her aches kept gnawing at her, and wouldn’t let go.
As they walked toward the basilica, following the path of ancient furrows, stepping over countless other relics that lay forgotten beneath the surface of the earth, she became aware once more that there was nothing novel about her suffering, nothing especially valuable about it that might make it somehow more worthy of note. It was simply one of many tremors of pain crossing the fabric of space and time, yet lacking the force to curve it. She caught herself wondering if it was human misery that held the universe together, a kind of gravity keeping the stars bound to its axis.
Nothing was being asked of her that others had not already endured.
The silence in this place seemed unreal. The security tape around the cathedral had kept most curious onlookers away. Even the boldest bystanders had tired of waiting, leaving with the early shadows of the evening and the first enticing smells from freshly laid dinner tables.
Teresa stopped before the stretch of burnished bricks that led to the entrance of the basilica.
“Leaving something behind is a little like dying.”
She was gazing at a statue of the Capitoline She-Wolf suckling a pair of infants. Perched atop an ancient column, on a carved capital that had come straight from the Roman past, her teats provided nourishment for a dream of long-faded grandeur.
Teresa sat at the base of the column. She could have sworn that her comment had made Marini’s blood pump faster; his wrist felt warm under her fingers. Or perhaps it was her own blood that was rushing to her ears in protest. A cacophony of emotions, of leaps and falls—densely packed into a single moment, and all while she stood completely still. She was like a black hole now.
“Don’t say that, Superintendent. Sometimes leaving something behind just means making a new beginning.”
He was in agony, too. It was as if the night were summoning darker nights inside them.
Teresa stopped him with the tough love she’d accustomed him to.
“Don’t you say another word, Marini.”
By the basilica door, a team of experts was rolling up cables and packing tools away. The police vans were turning their engines back on. There was no time to rest. She had to get back on her feet.
She let go of Marini’s arm.
“Give me a push.”
He helped her up, then put his hands back in his pockets and stood watching as the other officers prepared to leave the scene.
“So I guess we’re done for the day, and with nothing much to show for it.”
“They’re done. We haven’t even started.”
“You don’t mean . . . ?”
“Of course I do. I’ve not been waiting here for hours, twiddling my thumbs, only to go home now.”
“I thought we were only supposed to intervene if any traces were found.”
“I’ve already made other arrangements.”
“With whom? When?”
“When you went to the toilet.”
He threw up his hands.
“You’re not ill at all, are you? I can’t have been gone for longer than five minutes. How did you even manage to . . . ?”
Teresa turned to look at the car that was coming to a stop just behind the tape marking the search zone. The headlights blinded her for a moment. Shortly thereafter, de Carli and Parisi got out of the car. Then the back door opened, and out came a mutt with black and gray fur, followed by a skinny young woman with long blue hair and ripped jeans. The woman opened a folding cane with one hand and twisted the other until the dog’s leash was wrapped tight around her wrist.
Teresa smiled. Her search team was here.
“Great. We have the full squad now.”
The Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption had been built along the axis of the sun, its altar aligning with the east to symbolize the light of Christianity, which was supposed to illuminate the darkness of the human soul. Its consecrated heart held the oldest and largest paleo-Christian mosaic pavement in the Western world. Millions of tiles to be examined one by one, in search of the scent of death.
When she stepped across its threshold not long thereafter, Teresa was overwhelmed by a tangible weight, the air inside steeped in the humors of centuries of history. It seemed to be breathing over her. It was the past in all its solemnity, a past with a soul and a skeleton made of stone, its joints set around the cardinal points of humanity. And some kind of ineffable force.
Now that they had confirmed there was no whole body in there, what was left to look for was the thing Teresa had most feared. Hidden somewhere among the millions of mosaic tiles inside the cathedral were seven fragments of human bone.
8
IV Century
CERES’S HOUR WAS NIGH. Thus spoke the alignment of celestial bodies.
It was the night the goddess breathed life into the stars and the oracles. The clipei of the soldiers of the ancient regio X drummed against the bowels of the earth, all for her.
The torches in the military encampment outside the urbe aquileiensis were already alight. Fires crackled and burned in the twilight, their flames mirrored in the calm waters of the Natiso. Boats hung as if suspended over the gleaming surface of the river port. A breeze carried the scent of seashells and salt-washed timber over the fields. A few leagues to the south swirled the Mare Superum, the upper sea, while the bountiful shores of Histria and Illyricum unfurled in a black ribbon reaching for the horizon. Spread out at regular intervals, the vast braziers of the castra and of the trading ports across the sea started to light up one after the other.
Aquileia had shrugged off the bustle of the day and donned in its place the peaceful cloak of night. Only in the tabernae, tucked away among narrow streets, could the sound of animated chatter still be heard. Many were the languages spoken, and in the reviving light of the flickering lanterns, every face was a different color.
The legionnaire was a shadow among shadows. He passed the forum, the circus, the amphitheater with its limestone dolphins, and the baths, until he reached the muggy gloom of the former palatium. Its foundations now supported the basilica commissioned by Bishop Theodore.
The era of the Christians had begun. Some had begun to whisper that the age of the great legions had come to an end. The world would no longer be ruled by sharpened blades, but by the cross. Like an eclipse, the banner of Christ would soon obscure the emperor’s eagle and the face of Jove.
The voices of women and men could be heard singing from the Christian temple. They were not hiding, though perhaps they should be. For even within their own faith, the cracks were beginning to turn into ruptures. Christians were turning against Christians.
Wrapped in his cape the color of the night sky, the legionnaire paused.
The wind had changed direction, bringing a different scent from that of fields and soft rush. He had learned to recognize it by now. It was the sacred essence of the temple of Edfu, resin of terebinth and olibanum, myrrh and balm of Gilead.
Two Ethiopian servants with shaven heads emerged from the darkness, their necks and wrists girdled in copper and bronze. It was hard to distinguish where the ornaments ended and the slave chains began.
The legionnaire recognized their faces.
“Tell your mistress that I am unarmed.”
Calida Lupa did not wait a moment longer. She revealed herself like the moon from behind the clouds, her robe of white gauze embroidered with the two hundred and three resting scarabs of the priestess of Isis, and her shoes adorned with golden sprigs of ivy. Her skin was gleaming and fragrant with ointments.
“Why do you follow me, daughter of Isis?”
The vestal swept the palm of her hand in front of the legionnaire’s face. Her eyes, made up with powdered lapis, showed signs of disquiet.
“The killer took the trouble to remove the victim’s trousers, yet there are no signs of sexual violence. Perhaps he ran out of time, or perhaps what he did was enough to satisfy him. In any event, I haven’t found any traces of ejaculation.”
“No, that’s not why he took the victim’s trousers off. At least I don’t think so; I can’t see any sexual motive behind any of this. There must be some other message for us to decipher.”
Parri was looking at her as if she had gone mad.
Teresa’s determination wavered. She must have seemed crazy—or worse, naive. The nausea returned. Would she ever be capable of sounding authoritative, of being and feeling like a true professional? Sometimes she felt like she was trying to sense her way around in the dark, with her ability to improvise her only trump card. And that was far too little to secure the respect of her more established colleagues.
Parri returned to the cuts with greater conviction.
“So what you’re saying is that he tried to commit a controlled murder, but something still got out of hand?”
He sounded genuinely interested. That was new.
“Yes . . . yes. He tried his best, but he was unable to complete his work as he had originally conceived it. He succumbed to his animal instincts. He bit the victim and tried to hide the tooth marks with these cuts. He knew that a dental impression could get him into trouble, while carving crosses into the victim’s skin could easily put us on the wrong track.”
“Is that what they teach you lot these days?”
“I’ve taught myself.”
“It’s fascinating stuff. The other leg, please. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll look for your bite mark. If he really did bite, it must have been after the victim was already dead. I can’t see any bruising beneath the incisions.”
Teresa let her gaze roam over the body. She was ready to heed its siren call, and let herself be dragged into the vortex of its last living moments.
She was nearly tempted to caress him. He seemed like a kind man. The gap between his eyebrows did not bear the furrowed marks of a mean spirit.
“The killer panicked.” Teresa spoke in a whisper now, as if to avoid rousing death. “He couldn’t keep his excitement in check. He moved the body more than once, as indicated by the scratches on the victim’s face. May I?” she said, pointing at the mouth.
Parri seemed enraptured.
“Of course.”
Teresa lowered the leg back onto the table.
“The phalanges have not been removed in a professional manner. It’s almost like a butcher’s work. He must have used an ordinary knife, maybe even a box cutter,” Parri warned her. “Same with the gash on the chest—though there isn’t anything missing in there.”
But that wasn’t what Teresa was looking at; the cavity that had caught her attention was a different one. She took a flashlight from the tool tray and shone it onto the mucus membrane inside the mouth.
“Gravel.”
“Yes . . . I was just about to point that out to you. We haven’t washed him yet.”
“He moved the body. Several times.” She mimicked the action. “Dragged it by the arms. This contact with the body stimulated him. And in the end he just left it lying there in plain sight. He took a pretty big risk. He’s only just getting started. He’ll get braver, and more confident, but more careful, too.”
“He did it all in an hour.”
Teresa had thought about that, too.
“He didn’t kill him too far from where he left him to be found. And he didn’t have much difficulty getting the victim to follow him—perhaps even into his car. They must have known each other. Let’s not forget about the dog: he was covered in blood. He’s a boisterous little creature, yet he doesn’t seem to have given the killer any trouble. There was no duress.”
Parri was watching her.
“I saw how you wiped that cloth over its fur. I must admit I was impressed.”
“Oh, right!”
Teresa went to retrieve the two bags she had put in the pocket of her parka and handed them to the coroner: wet wipes covered in blood and mud.
“You should run some tests on these, if you don’t mind. There might be something in the chemical composition that can lead us to a more precise location. If the blood matches the victim’s, then we can confirm the dog was with them when it happened. One way or another, the three of them must have gone off together. That’s not exactly a minor detail; it suggests a completely different kind of behavior than what you might see during a kidnapping.”
“Of course. I’ll get those analyzed right away.”
“I’ve been reading about these new laboratory tests; they say it’s possible now to extract DNA code from blood samples and use that to identify whose blood it is.”
“Yes, but don’t get too carried away, Inspector. It’s still an experimental technique, and I wouldn’t bet on it coming to our little lab anytime soon.”
Teresa hid her disappointment. She looked at the victim’s pale hands.
“The widow said that there was something missing from his personal possessions, a golden ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand and never took off. It was his mother’s wedding ring.”
“Indeed. You can see the mark here.”
Teresa held the mutilated hand in her own and peered at the thin strip of lighter skin where the ring used to be.
“The bones he removes are a trophy and may even become his signature for future murders. The modus operandi might change, it might be perfected, but the signature will remain the same. It’s like a trademark. The ring is a sort of talisman that will help him relive the different phases of the murder and feel that sense of power and fulfillment all over again. A simple object taken from the victim and which the killer may one day even find a way to return to the victim’s relatives—or gift to someone he feels close to.”
“Really? That’s horrifying.”
Teresa smiled at him.
“That’s the killer’s story, Doctor. You told me yourself: this man’s death is telling us all about it.”
“A munificent death, indeed. I might have found something of interest. Here, look, just on the outer edge of the calf.” The doctor pointed a pair of tweezers at a patch of loose skin. “There’s something there.”
“What is it?”
“The faintest of shadows, really, but I would go so far as to say it is the beginnings of a premortem bruise in a familiar shape.” He took his glasses off. He looked incredulous, or perhaps just approving. “Death rewards you, Inspector.”
Teresa took note of the designation. Parri was the only one who’d ever called her that. He put the tweezers down.
“The heart had already stopped, but it must have managed with its last beat to direct a final stream of blood into this bit of flesh right as it was being attacked. There it is: the bite mark you were looking for.”
7
Today
“AQUILEIA. OF COURSE. WHERE else?”
Marini was inspecting the columns of the forum. Teresa noticed how the initial hint of disbelief in his voice had been quickly replaced with the understanding that there was no setting on earth more fitting for the tale of death that Giacomo’s own story told.
The sky was tinged with red, as if the wrath of a surviving god had set the millennial ruins on fire. This place had been desecrated. By Giacomo.
Aquileia: that was the word the killer had written in his note to Teresa. Aquileia submerged, and forever lost. The ancient Roman city surfaced now in the long shadows of the evening. Teresa was reminded of the translucent skin of a sacred serpent. No scales to cover it, but blocks of marble springing out of the black earth.
The city had welcomed them with the vestiges of an ancient realm, with the mineral scent of Istrian stone, with the ruins of the circus and the thermae, and the inland port that had once connected it to the Adriatic Sea—before the river had deserted its bed and poured itself elsewhere with even greater vigor.
We are walking over countless layers of life, thought Teresa, a thousand souls to every step, retracing the paths of the greats. Julius Caesar, the first Christians to arrive from Alexandria of Egypt, Attila and his wrath. Legend had it that even Saint Mark had once passed through here.
Today the town consisted of a handful of houses clustered in the flat countryside, almost within sight of the coastal lagoon. That first furrow that the triumvirate had dug to mark the perimeter of the city as an eagle floated above their heads had been turned over again and again across the centuries until it had finally faded away. The names and feats of its Patriarchs were chiseled into Aquileia, but when you looked at the city now, there was little sign of that mighty past.
Teresa’s eyes scanned the horizon. It was like looking at a peasant girl for signs of an empress. And yet the ground beneath those crops and fields was teeming with fallen capitals, amphorae, and golden treasures, all yet to be discovered. The city’s ornaments kept pushing up against the surface of the earth, bearing witness to what it had once been.
Aquileia the forgotten, Aquileia the unknown. Not by all, perhaps, but certainly by most.
Behind the columns of the forum, the thousand-year-old belfry built with marble blocks taken from the amphitheater soared above the lancing silhouettes of a row of fragrant cypress trees. Right beside it, lit up in the encroaching evening, and on a scale incongruous with the settlement itself, stood the church, a cathedral constructed by means of identical blocks of stone that made clear its ancient origins. The layers of plaster and the various adornments that had been added in subsequent periods had all since been removed, returning the building to its original beauty. The basilica of Aquileia was the grand and primordial house of God that Theodore I had envisaged, erected over the domus ecclesiae that had welcomed martyrs and the persecuted, nearly two thousand years’ worth of sanctity and blood mixed into its foundations.
Teresa and Marini began heading in its direction, Teresa leaning on him as they walked. They had been waiting for hours for the forensics team to finish gathering evidence. Hanging in the air was the fragrance of night-time blooms, of salty sea spray carried in the wind blowing from the south, and—as hidden as it was portentous—the sepulchral smell of the dust that all men were destined to become. Aquileia was an open tomb, exposed anew.
Teresa had already gulped down a couple of painkillers. But her aches kept gnawing at her, and wouldn’t let go.
As they walked toward the basilica, following the path of ancient furrows, stepping over countless other relics that lay forgotten beneath the surface of the earth, she became aware once more that there was nothing novel about her suffering, nothing especially valuable about it that might make it somehow more worthy of note. It was simply one of many tremors of pain crossing the fabric of space and time, yet lacking the force to curve it. She caught herself wondering if it was human misery that held the universe together, a kind of gravity keeping the stars bound to its axis.
Nothing was being asked of her that others had not already endured.
The silence in this place seemed unreal. The security tape around the cathedral had kept most curious onlookers away. Even the boldest bystanders had tired of waiting, leaving with the early shadows of the evening and the first enticing smells from freshly laid dinner tables.
Teresa stopped before the stretch of burnished bricks that led to the entrance of the basilica.
“Leaving something behind is a little like dying.”
She was gazing at a statue of the Capitoline She-Wolf suckling a pair of infants. Perched atop an ancient column, on a carved capital that had come straight from the Roman past, her teats provided nourishment for a dream of long-faded grandeur.
Teresa sat at the base of the column. She could have sworn that her comment had made Marini’s blood pump faster; his wrist felt warm under her fingers. Or perhaps it was her own blood that was rushing to her ears in protest. A cacophony of emotions, of leaps and falls—densely packed into a single moment, and all while she stood completely still. She was like a black hole now.
“Don’t say that, Superintendent. Sometimes leaving something behind just means making a new beginning.”
He was in agony, too. It was as if the night were summoning darker nights inside them.
Teresa stopped him with the tough love she’d accustomed him to.
“Don’t you say another word, Marini.”
By the basilica door, a team of experts was rolling up cables and packing tools away. The police vans were turning their engines back on. There was no time to rest. She had to get back on her feet.
She let go of Marini’s arm.
“Give me a push.”
He helped her up, then put his hands back in his pockets and stood watching as the other officers prepared to leave the scene.
“So I guess we’re done for the day, and with nothing much to show for it.”
“They’re done. We haven’t even started.”
“You don’t mean . . . ?”
“Of course I do. I’ve not been waiting here for hours, twiddling my thumbs, only to go home now.”
“I thought we were only supposed to intervene if any traces were found.”
“I’ve already made other arrangements.”
“With whom? When?”
“When you went to the toilet.”
He threw up his hands.
“You’re not ill at all, are you? I can’t have been gone for longer than five minutes. How did you even manage to . . . ?”
Teresa turned to look at the car that was coming to a stop just behind the tape marking the search zone. The headlights blinded her for a moment. Shortly thereafter, de Carli and Parisi got out of the car. Then the back door opened, and out came a mutt with black and gray fur, followed by a skinny young woman with long blue hair and ripped jeans. The woman opened a folding cane with one hand and twisted the other until the dog’s leash was wrapped tight around her wrist.
Teresa smiled. Her search team was here.
“Great. We have the full squad now.”
The Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption had been built along the axis of the sun, its altar aligning with the east to symbolize the light of Christianity, which was supposed to illuminate the darkness of the human soul. Its consecrated heart held the oldest and largest paleo-Christian mosaic pavement in the Western world. Millions of tiles to be examined one by one, in search of the scent of death.
When she stepped across its threshold not long thereafter, Teresa was overwhelmed by a tangible weight, the air inside steeped in the humors of centuries of history. It seemed to be breathing over her. It was the past in all its solemnity, a past with a soul and a skeleton made of stone, its joints set around the cardinal points of humanity. And some kind of ineffable force.
Now that they had confirmed there was no whole body in there, what was left to look for was the thing Teresa had most feared. Hidden somewhere among the millions of mosaic tiles inside the cathedral were seven fragments of human bone.
8
IV Century
CERES’S HOUR WAS NIGH. Thus spoke the alignment of celestial bodies.
It was the night the goddess breathed life into the stars and the oracles. The clipei of the soldiers of the ancient regio X drummed against the bowels of the earth, all for her.
The torches in the military encampment outside the urbe aquileiensis were already alight. Fires crackled and burned in the twilight, their flames mirrored in the calm waters of the Natiso. Boats hung as if suspended over the gleaming surface of the river port. A breeze carried the scent of seashells and salt-washed timber over the fields. A few leagues to the south swirled the Mare Superum, the upper sea, while the bountiful shores of Histria and Illyricum unfurled in a black ribbon reaching for the horizon. Spread out at regular intervals, the vast braziers of the castra and of the trading ports across the sea started to light up one after the other.
Aquileia had shrugged off the bustle of the day and donned in its place the peaceful cloak of night. Only in the tabernae, tucked away among narrow streets, could the sound of animated chatter still be heard. Many were the languages spoken, and in the reviving light of the flickering lanterns, every face was a different color.
The legionnaire was a shadow among shadows. He passed the forum, the circus, the amphitheater with its limestone dolphins, and the baths, until he reached the muggy gloom of the former palatium. Its foundations now supported the basilica commissioned by Bishop Theodore.
The era of the Christians had begun. Some had begun to whisper that the age of the great legions had come to an end. The world would no longer be ruled by sharpened blades, but by the cross. Like an eclipse, the banner of Christ would soon obscure the emperor’s eagle and the face of Jove.
The voices of women and men could be heard singing from the Christian temple. They were not hiding, though perhaps they should be. For even within their own faith, the cracks were beginning to turn into ruptures. Christians were turning against Christians.
Wrapped in his cape the color of the night sky, the legionnaire paused.
The wind had changed direction, bringing a different scent from that of fields and soft rush. He had learned to recognize it by now. It was the sacred essence of the temple of Edfu, resin of terebinth and olibanum, myrrh and balm of Gilead.
Two Ethiopian servants with shaven heads emerged from the darkness, their necks and wrists girdled in copper and bronze. It was hard to distinguish where the ornaments ended and the slave chains began.
The legionnaire recognized their faces.
“Tell your mistress that I am unarmed.”
Calida Lupa did not wait a moment longer. She revealed herself like the moon from behind the clouds, her robe of white gauze embroidered with the two hundred and three resting scarabs of the priestess of Isis, and her shoes adorned with golden sprigs of ivy. Her skin was gleaming and fragrant with ointments.
“Why do you follow me, daughter of Isis?”
The vestal swept the palm of her hand in front of the legionnaire’s face. Her eyes, made up with powdered lapis, showed signs of disquiet.
