Blood of the Lamb by Cabot Sam

Author:Cabot, Sam [Cabot, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction Suspense
ISBN: 9780399162954
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2013-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

41

“Esposito? Come in here a minute.”

The soprintendente’s command came without urgency, as though it were a request; but the man never raised his voice. Some of Luigi Esposito’s fellow Gendarmes had the idea from his manner that their boss was fundamentally unconcerned, with his work, theirs, or anything else, that he was just marking time until he was pensioned off. As so many of them were. But Luigi had learned to read the soprintendente’s inflections and the look in his eyes. That’s why, though he was just a Naples street kid, he’d become a vice assistente when his fellows were still—and would always be—uniformed Gendarmes.

Luigi rose from his desk, where three windows open on his computer linked him to the websites of various law enforcement agencies specializing in art and antiquities theft. Educating himself about the ins and outs of this crime specialty seemed an obvious next step. Especially since he had no suspects to process, no interviews to conduct, and no actual physical evidence to examine.

Well, not entirely no evidence. He’d made a search of the Library passage both the clerk and the black-haired woman had used—and a man claiming to be a priest, one Father Thomas Kelly, a researcher from Boston—and come up with the clerk’s Library smock. That he’d thrown it off, obviously the better to blend in, plus the fact that he and the other two had used the same escape route, made it even more glaringly obvious to Luigi that this was a ring of highly professional thieves. Though it was also clear, from the reported fight in the Manoscritti Reading Room, that something had gone wrong with this particular attempt at larceny. Maybe the priest really was a priest, and had been trying to prevent the theft? And had chased after the woman to get the stolen book back? But if so, where was he? Why hadn’t he come forward? No, to Luigi it seemed more likely that the priest, real or bogus, was a member of the ring, involved up to his clerical collar.

Luigi followed his boss into his office, where the soprintendente dropped his round, rumpled body into his desk chair and said, “Close the door. Take a look at this.”

Luigi pushed the door shut and took the sheet of paper the soprintendente handed him. It was a printout of an incident report, one from a steady stream that flowed through the soprintendente’s computer all day. The Rome Polizia, the Italian Carabinieri, and the Vatican Gendarmerie kept one another informed of goings-on in their jurisdictions throughout the day. (And into the endlessly silent Vatican night, when, during Luigi’s stints as watch officer, reading the reports of the other police agencies was sometimes the only thing that kept him awake.) It was a professional courtesy, though Luigi couldn’t imagine a cop or a Carabiniere scanning the Holy See’s crime news with any serious interest.

Glancing over the other agencies’ reports was part of the soprintendente’s duties, though, and he performed this office faithfully. Luigi

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