The city coroner’s office was housed in the cellars of a stone building which had, at various periods in its history, been a gunpowder store, an ice house, a fish locker, a meat store and briefly, for a short time in the sixteenth century, a prison. Its robust security and subterranean coolness were perfect for the new department of pathology the city council decided to create at the tail end of the 1950s. Here in these retro-fitted, vaulted cellars, on the middle of three old-style ceramic post-mortem tables, the broken body of Brother Samuel now lay, starkly illuminated and under the scrutiny of two men.
The first was Dr Bartholomew Reis, the attendant pathologist, the white lab coat of his profession worn loose over the black clothes of his social tribe. He had arrived from England four years previously on an international police exchange programme, his Turkish father and dual nationality easing the paperwork. He was supposed to stay for six months, but had never quite managed to leave. His long hair was also black, thanks more to chemistry than nature, and hung on either side of his thin, pale face like a pair of partly opened curtains. Despite his sombre appearance, however, Reis was renowned throughout every division of the Ruin police force as being the most cheerful pathologist anyone had ever met. As he often said, he was thirty-two, earning good money, and while most Goths only dreamed of making a living amongst the dead, he was actually doing it.
The second man appeared much less at ease. He stood slightly behind Reis, chewing on a fruit-and-nut breakfast bar he’d found in his pocket. He was taller than Reis but looked crumpled somehow, his summer-weight grey suit hanging loosely from shoulders that drooped under the weight of nearly twenty years’ service. His thick, dark hair, shot through with silver, was pushed back from an intelligent face that managed to appear both amused and sad, a pair of half-moon tortoiseshell glasses halfway down his long, hawkish nose, completing the image of a man who looked more like a tired history professor than a Homicide detective.
Inspector Davud Arkadian was something of an oddity within the Ruin police force. His undoubted abilities should easily have raised him at this advanced stage of his career to the rank of chief inspector or beyond. Instead he’d spent the larger part of his life as a police officer watching a steady procession of lesser men get promoted above him, while he remained lumped in with the general raft of anonymous career detectives marking the days until their pensions kicked in. Arkadian was much better than that, but he’d made a choice early in his career that had cast a very long shadow over the rest of it.
What he’d done was meet a woman, fall in love and then marry her.
Being a happily married detective was rare enough, but Arkadian had met his wife while working vice as a sub-inspector. When he met his bride-to-be she was a prostitute preparing to testify against the men who had trafficked her from what was then the Eastern Bloc, then enslaved her. The first time he saw her he thought she was the bravest, the most beautiful and most scared person he’d ever met. He was detailed to look after her until the case came to trial. He often joked that he should bill for all the overtime because, twelve years later, he was still doing it. In that time he’d helped her kick the drugs they’d hooked her on, paid for her to go back to school to gain her teacher’s diploma, and restored her to the life she should have been leading in the first place. In his heart he knew it was the best thing he’d ever done, but his head also knew the price that came with it. High-ranking police officers couldn’t be married to ex-prostitutes, no matter how reformed they were. So he remained a mid-level inspector, where the public scrutiny was less, occasionally picking up a case worthy of his abilities, but often catching the tricky ones no one more senior wanted to touch.
He looked down now at the monk’s crumpled form, the lenses in his glasses magnifying his warm brown eyes as he assessed the details of the corpse. The forensics team had swept the body for trace evidence but had left it clothed. The rough green habit was dark with cold coagulated blood. The arms that had stretched out for so long making the sign of the cross were now arranged by his sides, the double loop of rope around his right wrist coiled into a neat pile by his ravaged hand. Arkadian took in the grisly scene and frowned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like autopsies – he’d certainly been to enough of them; he just wasn’t sure why he had been specifically asked to attend this one.
Reis tucked his lank black hair into a surgical cap, logged on to the computer on the mobile stand by his side and opened a new case file. ‘What do you make of the noose?’ he said.
Arkadian shrugged. ‘Maybe he was going to hang himself but decided it was too mundane.’ He launched the balled-up wrapper of his fruit bar across the room, where it bounced off the rim of the bin and skittered underneath a workbench. It was clearly going to be one of those days. His gaze flicked to a TV monitor on the far wall, tuned to a news channel and showing footage of the monk on the summit.
‘This is a new one on me.’ Arkadian retrieved his wrapper. ‘First watch the TV show. Now dissect the corpse …’
Reis smiled and angled the flat computer screen towards him. He unhooked a wireless headset from the back of the monitor, slipped it over his head and twisted a thin microphone in front of his mouth before pressing a red square in the corner of the screen. It started to flash; an MP3 file had begun to record directly into the case file.
19
Oscar de la Cruz sat near the back of the private chapel, his habitual white turtleneck sweater worn under a dark brown linen suit. His head was slightly lowered as he offered up a silent prayer for the monk, not knowing he was already dead. Then he opened his eyes and looked around at the place he had helped build over seventy years before.
There were no adornments in the chapel, not even windows; the soft light emanated from a network of concealed lamps that gradually brightened the higher you looked – a piece of architectural sleight of hand intended to draw the eye upwards. It was an idea he had stolen from the great gothic churches of Europe. He figured they’d taken much more from him and his people.
Oscar could see another twenty or so people holding their own private vigils; other night owls like himself, people of the secret congregation who had caught the news and been drawn here to pray and reflect on what the sign could mean to them and their kind. He recognized most of them, knew some of them pretty well, but then the church wasn’t for everyone. Few people even knew of its existence.
Mariella sat nearby, wrapped in her own private contemplation, uttering a prayer in a language older than Latin. When she finished she caught Oscar’s eye.
‘What were you praying for?’ he asked.
She smiled quietly and looked towards the front of the chapel where a large Tau was suspended above the altar. In all the years they’d been coming here, she had never once told him.
He remembered the first time he’d met the shy eight-year-old girl who’d blushed when he spoke to her. The chapel had been young then and the statue it was built inside had carried the hopes of their tribe. Now a man halfway round the world held them in his outstretched arms.
‘When you built this place,’ Mariella whispered, dragging his attention back to the silent room, ‘did you really believe it would change things?’
Oscar considered the question. The statue of Christ the Redeemer had been built at his suggestion, and with the help of money he had been instrumental in raising. It had been sold to the people of Brazil as a great symbol for their Catholic nation but was in fact an attempt to bring the ancient prophecy of a much older religion to pass.
The one true cross will appear on earth
All will see it in a single moment – all will wonder
When it was finally revealed to the assembled world media, after nine years of construction, images of it appeared on newsreels and in papers around the world. It wasn’t quite a single moment, but all did see it and the gushing encomia testified to their wonder.
But nothing happened.
In the years that followed, its fame had grown. But still nothing had happened; at least not what Oscar had hoped.