Contract With God Read online

  ‘Hi, LB. They’ve fired Mummy. What do you think about that?’

  Andrea had given him the name LB, short for Little Bastard, after the monster had got into the bathroom and managed to hunt down and rip apart an expensive tube of shampoo. LB did not appear to be impressed with the news that his mistress had been fired.

  ‘You don’t care, do you? You should, though,’ Andrea said, pulling a can of Whiskas out of the refrigerator and spooning its contents on to a dish in front of LB. ‘When there’s nothing left for you to eat I’ll sell you to Mr Wong’s Chinese restaurant on the corner. Then I’ll go and order chicken with almonds.’

  The idea that he would become part of the menu at a Chinese restaurant didn’t curb LB’s appetite. The cat had no respect for anything or anybody. He lived in his own world, ill-tempered, apathetic, undisciplined and proud. Andrea hated him.

  Because he reminds me so much of myself, she thought.

  She looked around, annoyed at what she saw. The bookcases were covered in dust. There were leftovers on the floor, the sink was buried under a mountain of dirty dishes, and the manuscript of a half-finished novel that she had started three years ago was scattered over the bathroom floor.

  Fuck. If only I could pay for a cleaning lady by credit card . . .

  The only place in the apartment that was neat and orderly was the huge - thank god - wardrobe in her bedroom. Andrea was very careful with her clothes. The rest of the apartment looked like a war zone. She believed her messiness had been one of the main reasons for the breakup with Eva. They had been together for two years. The young engineer was a cleaning machine and Andrea had affectionately dubbed her The Romantic Vacuum Cleaner because she loved tidying the apartment to the accompaniment of Barry White.

  At this point, as she surveyed the disaster that was her apartment, Andrea had a revelation. She’d clean up the pigsty, sell her clothes on eBay, find a well-paid job, pay off her debts, and make up with Eva. She now had a goal, a mission. Everything would turn out perfectly.

  She felt a rush of energy through her body. This lasted precisely four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the exact time it took her to open a rubbish bag, fling in a quarter of the leftovers on the table along with a few dirty dishes that were beyond salvaging, move haphazardly from one spot to another, then knock over the book she’d been reading the night before so that the photo inside fell to the floor.

  The two of them together. The last one they’d taken.

  It’s useless.

  She dropped onto the sofa, sobbing, as the rubbish bag disgorged part of its contents onto the living-room rug. LB came over and nibbled on a slice of pizza. The cheese had started to turn green.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it, LB? I can’t escape the person I am, at least not with a mop and broom.’

  The cat didn’t pay the least attention but ran over to the apartment entrance and began rubbing itself against the door frame. Andrea stood up mechanically, realising that somebody was about to ring the bell.

  What kind of lunatic would come over at this time of night?

  She threw the door open, surprising her visitor before he could ring.

  ‘Hey there, beautiful.’

  ‘I guess news travels fast.’

  ‘Bad news does. If you start crying, I’m out of here.’

  Andrea stepped aside without rubbing the expression of disgust from her face, but secretly she was relieved. She should have guessed. Enrique Pascual had been her best friend and shoulder to cry on for many years. He worked for one of the big radio stations in Madrid, and every time Andrea stumbled Enrique showed up at her door with a bottle of whisky and a smile. This time he must have thought that she was especially needy because the whisky was twelve years old and to the right of his smile was a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘You had to do it, didn’t you? The super-reporter had to fuck with one of the paper’s major advertisers,’ Enrique said, going down the hall and into the living room without tripping over LB. ‘Is there a clean vase in this dump?’

  ‘Let them die and give me the bottle. Who cares! Nothing lasts for ever.’

  ‘Now you’ve lost me,’ Enrique said, ignoring the problem of the flowers for the moment. ‘Are we talking about Eva or getting fired?’

  ‘I don’t think I know,’ Andrea muttered, appearing from the kitchen with a glass in each hand.

  ‘If you’d hooked up with me, maybe things would have been clearer.’

  Andrea tried not to laugh. Enrique Pascual was tall, attractive, and ideal for any woman for the first ten days of the relationship, then a nightmare for the next three months.

  ‘If I liked men you’d be in my top twenty. Probably.’

  It was now Enrique’s turn to laugh. He poured two fingers of whisky neat. He had hardly taken a sip before Andrea had emptied her glass and was reaching for the bottle.

  ‘Take it easy, Andrea. It’s not a good idea to end up in Casualty. Again.’

  ‘I think it would be a fucking great idea. At least I’d have somebody to look after me.’

  ‘Thank you for not appreciating my efforts. And don’t be so dramatic.’

  ‘You think it’s not dramatic losing your lover and your job in the space of two months? My life is shit.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you there. At least you’re surrounded by what’s left of her,’ Enrique said, waving disgustedly at the mess in the room.

  ‘Maybe you could become my cleaning lady. I’m sure it would be more useful than that bullshit sports programme you pretend to work on.’

  Enrique’s expression didn’t change. He knew what was coming next and so did Andrea. She buried her head in a cushion and screamed with all her might. After a few seconds her scream turned into sobs.

  ‘I should’ve brought two bottles.’

  Just then a mobile phone rang.

  ‘I think it’s yours,’ Enrique said.

  ‘Tell whoever it is to go fuck themselves,’ Andrea said, her face still buried in the cushion.

  Enrique snapped open the phone with an elegant gesture.

  ‘A Torrent of Tears. Hello . . .? Hold on a moment . . .’

  He handed Andrea the telephone.

  ‘I think you’d better handle this. I don’t speak foreign languages.’

  Andrea took the telephone, wiped away her tears with the back of her hand and tried to sound normal.

  ‘Do you know what time it is, you idiot?’ Andrea said through gritted teeth.

  ‘I’m sorry. Andrea Otero, please?’ said a voice in English.

  ‘Who is it?’ she answered in the same language.

  ‘My name is Jacob Russell, Ms Otero. I’m calling from New York on behalf of my boss, Raymond Kayn.’

  ‘Raymond Kayn? Of Kayn Industries?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And you’re the same Andrea Otero who pulled off that controversial interview with President Bush last year?’

  Of course, the interview. That interview had had a big impact in Spain and even in the rest of Europe. She had been the first Spanish reporter to get inside the Oval Office. Some of her more direct questions - the few that had not been agreed beforehand and she had managed to sneak in - had made the Texan more than a little nervous. That exclusive interview had relaunched her career at El Globo. At least briefly. And it seemed to have rattled some cages on the other side of the Atlantic.

  ‘One and the same, sir,’ Andrea replied. ‘So tell me, why does Raymond Kayn need an excellent reporter?’ she added, sniffing quietly, pleased that the person on the phone couldn’t see the state she was in.

  Russell cleared his throat. ‘Can I count on you not to tell anyone at your paper about this, Ms Otero?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Andrea said, amused at the irony.

  ‘Mr Kayn would like to give you the greatest exclusive of your life.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’ Andrea said, making a writing motion to Enrique.

  Her friend extracted a notebook and pen from his pocket and handed them to he
r with a questioning look. Andrea ignored him.

  ‘Let’s just say he likes your style,’ Russell said.

  ‘Mr Russell, at this point in my life it’s hard for me to credit that someone I’ve never met is calling me up with such a vague and probably unbelievable offer.’

  ‘Well, let me convince you.’

  Russell spoke for quarter of an hour, during which the astonished Andrea continuously scribbled down notes. Enrique tried reading over her shoulder, but with Andrea’s spidery writing it was no use.

  ‘. . . that’s why we’re counting on you to be at the site of the excavation, Ms Otero.’

  ‘Will there be an exclusive interview with Mr Kayn?’

  ‘As a general rule, Mr Kayn doesn’t give interviews. Never.’

  ‘Maybe Mr Kayn should find a reporter for whom rules matter.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Andrea crossed her fingers, praying that her shot in the dark would hit its target.

  ‘I suppose there could always be a first time. Do we have a deal?’

  Andrea thought about it for a few seconds. If what Russell was promising was really true, she’d be able to get a contract with any media company in the world. And she would send that son of a bitch editor at El Globo a copy of the cheque.

  Even if Russell’s not telling the truth, there’s nothing to lose.

  She didn’t give it another thought.

  ‘You can make a reservation for me on the next flight to Djibouti. First class.’

  Andrea hung up.

  ‘I didn’t understand a single word except “first class”,’ Enrique said. ‘Can you tell me where you’re going?’ He was surprised by the obvious change in Andrea’s mood.

  ‘If I said the Bahamas, you wouldn’t believe me, right?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Enrique, said, half annoyed and half jealous. ‘I bring you flowers, whisky, I scrape you off the floor and this is how you treat me . . .’

  Pretending she wasn’t listening, Andrea went into the bedroom to pack.

  9

  RELICS CRYPT

  VATICAN CITY

  Friday, 7 July 2006. 8:29 p.m.

  The knock at the door startled Brother Cesáreo. Nobody came down to the crypt, not only because access was restricted to a very few people, but also because it was damp and unhealthy, despite the four dehumidifiers that hummed constantly in each corner of the enormous space. Pleased to have company, the old Dominican friar smiled as he opened the security door, standing on tiptoe to embrace his visitor.

  ‘Anthony!’

  The priest smiled and embraced the smaller man.

  ‘I was in the neighbourhood . . .’

  ‘I swear by God, Anthony, how did you manage to get this far? This place has been monitored by cameras and security alarms for some time now.’

  ‘There’s always more than one entrance if you take your time and know the way. You taught me, remember?’

  The old Dominican massaged his goatee with one hand and patted his large belly with the other, laughing heartily. Under the streets of Rome was a system of more than three hundred miles of tunnels and catacombs, some of them over two hundred feet beneath the city. It was a veritable museum, a maze of winding, unexplored passages that linked almost every part of the city, including the Vatican. Twenty years earlier, Fowler and Brother Cesáreo had dedicated their spare time to exploring those dangerous and intricate tunnels.

  ‘It looks like Cirin will have to revisit his flawless security system. If an old dog like you can slip in here . . . But why not use the front door, Anthony? I hear that you’re no longer persona non grata with the Holy Office. And I’d love to know why.’

  ‘Actually, now I may be a little too grata for some people’s taste.’

  ‘Cirin wants you back in, doesn’t he? Once that low-rent Machiavelli gets his teeth into you, he doesn’t let go easily.’

  ‘And old guardians of relics can be stubborn too. Especially when speaking of things they’re not supposed to know about.’

  ‘Anthony, Anthony. This crypt is the best kept secret in our tiny country, but its walls echo with rumours.’ Cesáreo waved his arms at the surroundings.

  Fowler looked up. The ceiling of the crypt, supported by stone arches, was black from the smoke of the millions of candles that had illuminated the space for almost two thousand years. In recent times, however, a modern electrical system had replaced the candles. The rectangular space was roughly two hundred and fifty feet square, part of which had been hewn from the living rock by pickaxe. On the walls, from ceiling to floor, were doors that concealed niches containing the remains of various saints.

  ‘You’ve spent too much time breathing in this horrible air, and it certainly doesn’t help your clients either,’ said Fowler. ‘Why are you still down here?’

  It was a little known fact that for the past seventeen hundred years in every Catholic church, no matter how humble, a relic from a saint had been hidden in the altar. And this site housed the largest collection of such relics in the world. Some of the niches were almost empty, containing only small fragments of bone, while in others the whole skeleton was intact. Each time a church was built anywhere in the world, a young priest would pick up a steel suitcase from Brother Cesáreo and travel to the new church to deposit the relic inside the altar.

  The old historian took off his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his white habit.

  ‘Security. Tradition. Stubbornness,’ said Cesáreo in answer to Fowler’s question. ‘The words that define our Holy Mother the Church.’

  ‘Excellent. Besides the damp, this place reeks of cynicism.’

  Brother Cesáreo tapped the screen of his powerful Mac book Pro on which he had been writing when his friend arrived.

  ‘Locked in here are my truths, Anthony. Forty years of work cataloguing bone fragments. Have you ever sucked on an ancient bone, my friend? It’s an excellent method for determining if a bone is fake, but it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. After four decades I’m no closer to the truth than when I started.’ He sighed.

  ‘Well, maybe you can go into that hard disk and give me a hand, old man,’ Fowler said as he handed Cesáreo a photo.

  ‘Always the business at hand, always—’

  The Dominican stopped in mid-sentence. For a moment he stared myopically at the photograph, and then went over to the desk where he worked. From a pile of books he pulled out an old volume in classical Hebrew that was covered in pencil marks. He leafed through it, checking various symbols against the book. Startled, he looked up.

  ‘Where did you get this, Anthony?’

  ‘From an ancient candle. A retired Nazi had it.’

  ‘Camilo Cirin sent you to recover it, didn’t he? You have to tell me everything. Don’t leave out a single detail. I need to know!’

  ‘Let’s say I owed Camilo a favour and I agreed to carry out one last mission for the Holy Alliance. He asked me to find an Austrian war criminal who had stolen the candle from a Jewish family in 1943. The candle was covered with layers of gold and the man had had it since the war. A few months ago I caught up with him and retrieved the candle. After melting the wax, I discovered the copper sheet that you see in the photo.’

  ‘Don’t you have a better one with a higher resolution? I can barely make out the script on the exterior.’

  ‘It was rolled up too tightly. If I had completely unrolled it, I could have damaged it.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you didn’t. What you would have ruined is priceless. Where is it now?’

  ‘I turned it over to Cirin and didn’t really give it much thought. I figured someone at the Curia wanted it. Then I went back to Boston, convinced that I had repaid my debt—’

  ‘That’s not quite true, Anthony,’ a calm, unemotional voice interjected. The owner of the voice had managed to slip into the crypt like a master spy, which was exactly what the squat, plain-faced man dressed in grey was. Sparing of word and gesture, he concealed himself behind a wall of chameleon-l
ike insignificance.

  ‘It’s bad manners to enter a room without knocking, Cirin,’ said Cesáreo.

  ‘It’s also bad manners not to respond when summoned,’ said the Chief of the Holy Alliance, staring at Fowler.

  ‘I thought we were done. We agreed on a mission - only one.’

  ‘And you’ve carried out the first part: recovering the candle. Now you have to make sure that what it contains is used correctly.’

  Annoyed, Fowler didn’t answer.

  ‘Maybe Anthony would appreciate his assignment more if he understood its importance,’ Cirin continued. ‘As you now know what we’re dealing with, Brother Cesáreo, would you be so kind as to tell Anthony what that photo you’ve never seen depicts?’

  The Dominican cleared his throat.

  ‘Before I do so, I need to know if it’s authentic, Cirin.’

  ‘It is.’

  The friar’s eyes lit up. He turned to Fowler.

  ‘This, my friend, is a treasure map. Or to be precise, half of one. That is, if my memory doesn’t fail me, because it has been many years since I held the other half in my hands. This is the piece that was missing from the Copper Scroll of Qumran.’

  The priest’s expression darkened considerably.

  ‘You’re telling me—’

  ‘Yes, my friend. The most powerful object in History can be found through the meaning of these symbols. And all the problems that come with it.’

  ‘Good Lord. And it has to show up at this precise moment.’

  ‘I’m glad you finally understand, Anthony,’ Cirin broke in. ‘Compared with this, all the relics that our good friend keeps in this room are nothing more than dust.’

  ‘Who put you on the trail, Camilo? Why now, after all this time, did you try to find Dr Graus?’ asked Brother Cesáreo.

  ‘The information came from one of the Church’s benefactors, a Mr Kayn. A benefactor from another faith and a great philanthropist. He needed us to find Graus, and personally offered to finance an archaeological expedition should we could recover the candle.’