The Devil Will Come Read Online Free PDF Page A

guardsman looked the man in the eye, then glanced at his shoulder bag.
    ‘Korporal,’ the man said quickly.
    The guardsman saluted crisply and stepped aside. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant. Sad day.’
    ‘Indeed it is.’
    Oberstleutnant Matthias Hackel moved through the drab deserted hall, his leather-soled shoes tapping the tiles. Ahead was a locked doorway leading directly to the Sistine Chapel. He had the keys, of course, but everything on this level was covered by security cameras. While the second in command of the Swiss Guards could go virtually anywhere in Vatican City with impunity, it was better to pass through basement corridors where surveillance cameras were few.
    He climbed a set of stone stairs to the first basement level and followed a corridor until he was directly under the Sistine Chapel within a rabbit warren of small and medium-sized rooms packed with uninteresting and low-value items. The Vatican had intensely secure spaces for documents, books and art treasures but the contents of these rooms were rather more prosaic: furniture, cleaning supplies, outdoor security barriers.
    The room which he now entered had no cameras and was visited so infrequently that he was certain he’d be able to work without any surprise interruptions. He switched on the lights and the chamber sputtered into sickly yellow-green fluorescence. There were stacks of simple, inexpensive wooden tables, each a meter and a half long, less than a meter wide, high enough for use by a seated man. They’d been purchased in bulk in the 1950s from a Milanese factory but still seemed relatively new owing to their light use. They had been taken out of storage and carried upstairs into the Sistine Chapel only five times in nearly six decades, each on the occasion of selecting a new Pope.
    They didn’t look like much. But when covered in floor-length red velvet and crowned with gold-brocaded brown velvet they would take on a certain splendor, especially when laid out in precise rows underneath Michelangelo’s ceiling.
    The nearest table would serve a more immediate purpose. The man placed his bag on it and smiled.

THREE
    TOMMASO DE STEFANO LINGERED OVER his cigarette, seemingly fretful about his appointment. Above him, water cascaded from the fountain of entwined sculpted dolphins which had stood at the center of the Piazza Mastai since 1863. His wife had been trying to get him to stop smoking and even he wheezily acknowledged the necessity. Yet this entire Roman square was a monument to tobacco and it was, perhaps, historically appropriate to pay homage with a smoke.
    Besides, he was nervous and even a bit timid. His awkwardness bore a similarity to the trepidation he felt a few years earlier when a cousin emerged from a six-year jail term for larceny. At the time he’d asked his wife helplessly, ‘What do you say to a man who’s life’s been interrupted like this? How are you doing? Haven’t seen you for a while? You’re looking good?’
    Behind him was the rather grand nineteenth-century Pontifical Tobacco Manufacturing factory erected by the entrepreneurial family of Pope Pius IX, now a state facility concerned with monopolies. Facing him was a more pedestrian four-story structure of red sandstone built by the same Pope in 1877 to house and educate the girls employed by his tobacco factory. It probably hadn’t been an act of pure papal charity, more likely a calculated maneuver to keep a cheap workforce off the streets and free of venereal disease.
    De Stefano stamped out his cigarette and crossed the square.
    Though the tobacco factory was long gone the red building had endured as a school. A bevy of well-behaved teenage girls in blue and white tracksuits milled around under a sign: SCUOLA TERESA SPINELLI, MATERNA-ELEMENTARE-MEDIA .
    De Stefano took a sharp breath and pushed the iron gate open. In the marble forecourt a young nun was conversing with the harried mother of a little girl who was running in circles, working off pent-up