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Authors: David Hewson
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desiccated pallor of a corpse.
The Carabinieri were more Gabrielli’s kind. Middle-class. Well dressed. Polite. More sophisticated.
Only half understanding why, he wandered back into the little room as he struggled with his phone, smelling the blood, dimly aware there was something else, something he should have seen. His shuddering finger fought for the buttons, fell all over the place and got the wrong ones anyway. Perhaps, he thought, it was just fate. Most things were.
Too late, he heard a hard female voice on the line, demanding an answer.
Pino Gabrielli looked at the Little Museum of Purgatory, properly this time, not fearful for his life because of some dark familiar stranger who stank of blood.
His intuition had been right. There was something new. A direct message, written in a way he’d never forget.
It was a moment before Gabrielli could speak. And when he did, only a single word escaped his lips.
“Bramante…” he murmured, unable to take his eyes off the line of bloody writing on the wall, a crooked, continuous script, with deliberate lettering, the handiwork of someone or something determined to make a point, in just a few words.
Ca’ d’Ossi.
The House of Bones.
P INO GABRIELLI WASN’T THE ONLY CHURCH WARDEN IN Rome to receive a surprise that morning. Half an hour after Pino opened the doors of the small white church in Prati, Ornella Di Benedetto found herself facing the padlocked chains on the shuttered, abandoned wreck that was once Santa Maria dell’Assunta, wondering what looked different. The logical answer—that someone had gone inside—seemed too absurd for words.
Rome had many churches. Too many to cater to a population that grew more secular by the year. Santa Maria dell’Assunta, set on the southeastern side of the Aventino hill, not far from the Piazza Albania, had little to keep it in business. The historians said it stood on the site of one of the oldest churches in Rome, dating back to the earliest times, when Christianity was one religion among many, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, occasionally encouraged. Not a trace remained of the original church. Over the centuries, it had been rebuilt on at least five occasions, burned to the ground more than once, then, in the sixteenth century, handed over to an order of Capuchin monks. The tiny, unremarkable building that survived lasted a further three centuries as a consecrated property, then, under Napoleon’s anti-clerical hand, fell into disuse, and was later converted into municipal offices. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it became, briefly, a private residence occupied by an elderly British writer of arcane and macabre tastes. After his death it slid steadily into ruin, maintained only by a small grant from the city and a local diocese still somewhat guilty over its abandonment. The mishmash of architectural styles and the absence of a single important painting or sculpture meant that the middle-aged woman who kept an eye on the place was, for months on end, the only person to set foot beyond its dusty, rotting oak doors, in the narrow cul-de-sac just a few metres from the bustle of the Viale Aventino.
Even so, Santa Maria dell’Assunta had one esoteric feature, hidden away in a crypt reachable only through a narrow, damp, and winding corridor cut into the hill’s soft rock. The same Capuchin monks who had maintained the church for a while continued to own a greater property in Rome, Santa Maria della Concezione in the Via Veneto, just a little way up from the American Embassy. Here they had created a curiosity too: a crypt much larger than that of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, decorated—there was no other way to put it—with the bones of some four thousand of their fellows, deposited there until the late nineteenth century, when the practice was deemed a little too grisly for modern tastes.
Ornella Di Benedetto knew that place well and had compared it in detail with the one
The Carabinieri were more Gabrielli’s kind. Middle-class. Well dressed. Polite. More sophisticated.
Only half understanding why, he wandered back into the little room as he struggled with his phone, smelling the blood, dimly aware there was something else, something he should have seen. His shuddering finger fought for the buttons, fell all over the place and got the wrong ones anyway. Perhaps, he thought, it was just fate. Most things were.
Too late, he heard a hard female voice on the line, demanding an answer.
Pino Gabrielli looked at the Little Museum of Purgatory, properly this time, not fearful for his life because of some dark familiar stranger who stank of blood.
His intuition had been right. There was something new. A direct message, written in a way he’d never forget.
It was a moment before Gabrielli could speak. And when he did, only a single word escaped his lips.
“Bramante…” he murmured, unable to take his eyes off the line of bloody writing on the wall, a crooked, continuous script, with deliberate lettering, the handiwork of someone or something determined to make a point, in just a few words.
Ca’ d’Ossi.
The House of Bones.
P INO GABRIELLI WASN’T THE ONLY CHURCH WARDEN IN Rome to receive a surprise that morning. Half an hour after Pino opened the doors of the small white church in Prati, Ornella Di Benedetto found herself facing the padlocked chains on the shuttered, abandoned wreck that was once Santa Maria dell’Assunta, wondering what looked different. The logical answer—that someone had gone inside—seemed too absurd for words.
Rome had many churches. Too many to cater to a population that grew more secular by the year. Santa Maria dell’Assunta, set on the southeastern side of the Aventino hill, not far from the Piazza Albania, had little to keep it in business. The historians said it stood on the site of one of the oldest churches in Rome, dating back to the earliest times, when Christianity was one religion among many, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, occasionally encouraged. Not a trace remained of the original church. Over the centuries, it had been rebuilt on at least five occasions, burned to the ground more than once, then, in the sixteenth century, handed over to an order of Capuchin monks. The tiny, unremarkable building that survived lasted a further three centuries as a consecrated property, then, under Napoleon’s anti-clerical hand, fell into disuse, and was later converted into municipal offices. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it became, briefly, a private residence occupied by an elderly British writer of arcane and macabre tastes. After his death it slid steadily into ruin, maintained only by a small grant from the city and a local diocese still somewhat guilty over its abandonment. The mishmash of architectural styles and the absence of a single important painting or sculpture meant that the middle-aged woman who kept an eye on the place was, for months on end, the only person to set foot beyond its dusty, rotting oak doors, in the narrow cul-de-sac just a few metres from the bustle of the Viale Aventino.
Even so, Santa Maria dell’Assunta had one esoteric feature, hidden away in a crypt reachable only through a narrow, damp, and winding corridor cut into the hill’s soft rock. The same Capuchin monks who had maintained the church for a while continued to own a greater property in Rome, Santa Maria della Concezione in the Via Veneto, just a little way up from the American Embassy. Here they had created a curiosity too: a crypt much larger than that of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, decorated—there was no other way to put it—with the bones of some four thousand of their fellows, deposited there until the late nineteenth century, when the practice was deemed a little too grisly for modern tastes.
Ornella Di Benedetto knew that place well and had compared it in detail with the one
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