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CHAPTER 1

Book One

Waiting for Rita

1

A ROUGH WIND lifted the decaying leaves that lay in front of the burial chamber and sent them swirling through the iron gates that separate the living from the dead. Two figures occupied the chamber's narrow inner space. The first, a woman, lay face up, her head resting on a stone altar step. One of the leaves had lodged in her hair. The second figure, enveloped in the cloak and hood of a pilgrim, bent and reverently removed the leaf. The woman gazed upward at the intruder, as though pleading for mercy or forgiveness, and the figure knelt and applied a firm pressure to the woman's open lids, sealing her eyes in the first ritual of death. A sudden noise disturbed the stillness of the night, causing the cloaked figure to look up, but it was only the cooing of a pigeon. The figure then made the sign of the cross over the woman and whispered a benediction in Latin before proceeding to raise her skirt. The woman was dressed for enticement and her stockings, of black lace, had etched a deep red welt in her firm white thighs. The cloaked figure unhooked the garters and gently eased the stockings down the stillwarm legs, exposing the woman's dead flesh to the frigid night air. The pigeon, nesting for the night, cooed again, but the intruder was too intent to hear.

2

IT WAS LATE March, crisp and cold, with the smell of snow in the night air. Those who stood on the steps of the Bar Sensi waiting for the procession of the cross to pass were shivering with cold. Some had ordered red wine or grappa to warm them. But the Casatis were traditionalists. They would wait to have their wine — a good French Chardonnay — and mandatory fish dinner later in the evening.

Viewing the Good Friday procession together as a family was a Casati ritual. For the first few hundred years, they had viewed it from the portico of their home on via San Francisco. (The family had been resident in Assisi since the Fourth Crusade.) For the past thirty years, they had viewed it in the Piazza del Comune and from there gone to dine with family and friends at a local restaurant. Five of them were gathered together that evening: Count Umberto Casati, Amelia Casati, his Englishborn wife, their daughter Artemisia, their son's daughter Paola, and John Williams, a Canadian cartographer. They were waiting for a sixth. Rita Minelli, the count's niece, was missing.

"Perhaps we should go back to the house to see if she's all right? You know how devout she is," the countess whispered to her husband. "She won't want to miss this."

"Leave well enough alone," the count replied sharply. "Let's have at least one evening free of her simpering platitudes."

He spoke louder than he'd intended and Amelia quickly glanced around, hoping that John Williams hadn't overheard. "He's right behind us. He may have heard you," she murmured.

"Good," the count responded. "Perhaps he'll get the hint and leave. Who gave her permission to invite him, anyway?" He looked at his wife accusingly.

"I couldn't refuse when she asked. If I had, she would have come alone and made it evident to everyone that she's the despised relative. I did my best in a difficult situation."

The count was only half-listening to his wife's excuse. He'd just heard the distant drumroll from below, an indication that the procession was fast approaching the Piazza. Two men moved quickly through the Piazza, filling and lighting the cressets that adorned every public building in Assisi. Soon the electric lights in the Piazza would be extinguished. The evening stars and the flicker of flames from the cressets would serve as the only guides to those carrying the crosses symbolizing the passion and death of Christ.

Umberto had carried one of those crosses when he was only twelve. The Franciscans had wanted to cancel the procession that year. "The war has caused enough suffering," they'd told his father. "The people don't need further reminders. And where will we find the young men to carry the crosses?"

His father, who was head of the Fascist party in Assisi, viewed the procession as emblematic of Italy's great strength, its ability to observe its rituals despite the hardships of war. He volunteered his son. Although still too young to wear the black shirt, Umberto could don the white robe of a crossbearer.

Most of the other processionists that year were elderly, former cross-bearers who had volunteered to replace the young men who'd been sent to war. One of them, a pensioner of his father's, had offered Umberto a folded towel as padding for his shoulder while they were dressing. "The cross bites into your skin," he said. Umberto had rejected the offering.

When they'd first exited the Basilica, the drumroll, one long beat and two short, had invigorated young Umberto. He had fasted all day and his dinner was waiting; he was impatient to get to the bottom of via San Francisco to begin the ascent to via Portica and the Cathedral of San Rufino. He soon realized how foolish he'd been to reject Pietro's towel and the reason for the other processionists' deliberate pace. The cross, a minor burden when he had first assumed it in the Basilica, grew in size and weight with each step. He could feel the rough wood biting through the cheap cotton of his robe; he was sure he had a splinter in his shoulder. He had tripped twice on the long robe, the hood obscured his vision, and his feet were raw from the cobblestones that bruised his tender unshod flesh. The unvarying drumroll was maddening.

He never again participated in the Good Friday procession. The memory of that night in 1943 would suffice him for eternity.

His wife could tell by the frozen look on Umberto's face that he was not listening to her. He rarely did. Good Friday was always difficult. She couldn't understand why he insisted on punishing himself by watching the procession each year. She knew he had dropped out once when he was only a boy, before the procession had reached the cathedral. For most people this would have been a minor failure; for Umberto it had assumed the proportions of a tragedy.

Looking at her husband by the light of the cressets, she could see how little he had changed in the years since they'd married. He was still strikingly handsome. His black hair, once worn long in the fashion popular at the University of Perugia, was now gray and cut close to his head, but it was still ample for a man of seventy-one. He stooped a little now, but other women still looked at her with envy when they appeared together in public.

I still love him, she thought with some surprise. He's demanding, arrogant, and most of the time not very likeable, but when has love been rational? She'd blamed her husband for alienating Camillo, their only son, and when Camillo died, she'd blamed him for his death. But despite his own loss, and Amelia knew it was great — the title would now die with him and family name and honor were paramount to Umberto — he had held her in his arms every night for five months, some times through the night, when she was in despair and spoke of killing herself. I love him, Amelia acknowledged to herself. And now more than ever, he needs me.

Artemisia Casati watched her mother watching her father. I'm still outside their circle, she thought, and blamed her mother for excluding her. She couldn't remember ever having loved her mother, not even when she was a young child. Marie, their maid, had fed, washed, dressed, and loved her, had supplied all her physical and emotional needs for the first ten years of her life. She supposed that she had loved Marie in return. She had certainly cried when Marie left, the day after her tenth birthday, to return to Sicily. Her father's response to Artemisia's tears was that she was too old for pampering, but Artemisia knew it was her mother's decision that had sent Marie to Sicily and her to boarding school in England.

She leaned against one of the portico's pillars, the darkness creating a wall of privacy between herself and the others. The muffled drum acted as a prompt to her memory. She remembered exactly the day and hour when her father had first really noticed her. It had been the Good Friday after her brother's death. Artemisia had volunteered that year to carry the cross that Camillo had carried in previous processions — begged, in fact, since no woman had yet carried one of the crosses. It wasn't until Good Friday morning that Artemisia told her parents that she would be one of the processionists that year. When she took the cross in her grasp, the look of pride on her father's face provided her first moment's assurance that she was loved, perhaps had been loved all along.

Artemisia did not repeat her father's failure. Tall, athletic, and a Jesuit in temperament, she'd planned with care to ensure her success. She had practiced carrying the cross in the cloisters during those long winter twilight hours when only the Franciscans had access to the Basilica. The robe, made especially for her, had shoulder and torso padding built in.

She had grown close to her father since that day seventeen years ago. He had helped with her career, discussed art with her, and introduced her to the right people in the Italian art world. Her first job, as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Umbria, had come through his influence. Last week, the count had called her into his library to tell her the news: She was front-runner to become the new director of the Umbrian National Gallery.

Her recently published book, A Woman's Art, had received international acclaim. Without this achievement, she wouldn't even be a candidate. But Artemisia also knew the Italian art world and acknowledged to herself that her father's influence had made the difference. She smiled with some satisfaction at the thought that not only would she be the Gallery's first woman director but, at thirty- seven, the youngest director of a regional art museum in Italy.

Her mother's overloud whisper directed at Artemisia, but probably overheard by everyone on the steps, brought her out of her reverie.

"Do you have any idea where Rita is?" Amelia asked. "When we left the house, I thought she was in her room dressing and was going to come later with you and Paola."

Artemisia shrugged her shoulders. "No idea. I walked here by myself. Ask Paola," she responded, showing no particular concern. She hadn't told anyone about Rita's visit to her room earlier that day, certainly not her mother.

It was too late, however, for further questions. The lone drummer had reached the crescent of via Portica and could be seen entering the Piazza. A drumbeat reverberated through the Piazza and through history. The drummer passed the Piazza del Populo, where noblemen from the upper town had fed pork stuffed with human remains to their enemies in the lower town. He passed the Torre del Populo, where an Assisi barber was rumored to have murdered his cuckolding wife by throwing her from the tower. He passed the Temple of Minerva, whose steps had been consecrated first by Roman and then by Christian zealots with the blood of their enemies.

The mournful beat of the drum moving ever closer had also reminded Paola of previous Good Fridays. She hated the ritual of the Good Friday procession, and for most of her teen years she had managed to avoid it by sneaking out of the house to meet her friends. But no matter where they went in Assisi, they could still hear the lamentations of the drum. Her high school boyfriend had devised a contest: See who can inhale and hold it for the full drumroll. They were smoking pot, and it was no small feat to keep the smoke down for the full ten seconds. She usually arrived home and was in bed, feigning sleep, before her grandparents returned from their precious dinner and their pretentious friends.

This year Paola was in Assisi on sufferance and had decided that accommodation might be the wiser course of action. Orlando, the bar's manager and an old friend, had found her a spot in the corner of the portico, immediately outside and to the left of the bar door. He'd even found her a chair so that she — a slight five-foot-two-inches tall — was well hidden seated among a standing crowd of German and English tourists. In the twenty minutes that they had been waiting for the procession to reach the Piazza, she had smoked a half package of cigarettes, nervously lighting each new cigarette from the previous one before stamping it out on the cement floor.

She'd always found it hard to concentrate when she had an important decision to make. In the past, she had let the decisions make themselves, generally following whatever person or idea seemed strongest at the moment. It was different this time. She knew that whatever decision she reached, its consequences would affect her for the rest of her life. She had desperately needed someone to turn to. God help me, she thought, why did I choose Rita?

It was John Williams's first Good Friday in Assisi, yet perhaps more than other onlookers, he understood the need of the cross-bearers to lessen their future purgatorial torment through an imaginative recreation of the torment of Jesus. Rita had repeatedly urged him to join the processionists this year and had even asked permission on his behalf, but in that, at least, he had resisted. He and Paola were both suffering from the effects of too much Rita.

He had arrived in Assisi in early December and had met Rita as their fingers touched in the holy water font after mass at San Stefano's, on the Sunday before Christmas. She had approached him outside, smiling, hand extended. "You're new here," she said in English. "I saw you a few days ago buying meat at the butcher; you left your guidebook on the counter. I called after you, but I don't think you heard me! How is your Italian coming? Please don't think I'm meddling, but I'd noticed that you had trouble ordering your groceries. I teach at a language school here in Assisi. Most of our students leave after three months speaking basic Italian. I teach English there. It's obvious you don't need my course. You're Canadian, aren't you? I could tell by your accent."

She was right about his need to learn Italian. He had always been a loner and had believed himself to be self-sufficient. He hadn't realized until he arrived in Assisi how much comfort and human interaction there is in the simple act of buying groceries or of ordering a meal in a restaurant. In Assisi, he was cut off from the comfort of shared language. The tradespeople smiled politely when he tried talking to them. At least Rita talked back.

They met the next day for coffee and every day after that. She became his guide and interpreter. She told him where to buy groceries, which restaurants offered good value, which coffee bars to frequent. She had even helped him to find an inexpensive apartment. He had complained of the cold, and for Christmas she had given him a cashmere scarf. She had hinted that they should spend New Year's Eve together. When he didn't respond, she had asked directly. "I won't take no for an answer," she had said.

His headaches had grown more frequent since the New Year. The nightmare that had haunted him since adolescence had assumed a different, more menacing shape. The hooded figure that lurked in every dark corner of his sleep had turned into a woman. She loomed over him, her breasts foul with the smell of fetid milk, urging him to drink. The nightmare had become even more persistent in the last week, the hour after waking more terrifying. He thought often of Addison's dying words, "See in what peace a Christian can die." If he could choose death he would, but without redemption, dying would bring no peace. He knew better than most that for those who shed innocent blood, there is no redemption.

They were still waiting for Rita, but the procession moved inexorably on, pausing for no one, through the Piazza del Comune and up via San Rufino, each drumroll a call to those seeking salvation to remember the passion of Christ, to seek forgiveness in his death. In their demonstration of faith, the processionists were indistinguishable from one another. They had shed the outward signs of age, wealth, and gender when they donned their robes in the Basilica and took up their crosses. Some of the onlookers would later claim that Rita had been among them, that she was the one who had stumbled as they climbed toward San Rufino.

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Excerpted from "The Last Enemy"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Grace Brophy.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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