Saying, What Wilt Thou Do? (2)
Rome, Italy. The hotel stood roughly thirty to forty kilometers by car from Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino.
The drive itself had not taken long. The journey, though, had begun on the far side of the planet, and by the time they checked in, lunch hour was already well behind them.
"Shall we go get something to eat?"
So there was nothing strange at all about Seoyeon offering the suggestion as she unpacked. Both of them had bodies that could go days without food, but Hitomi still preferred to eat the way an ordinary person did. A body that could live without meals, she felt, was no reason to actually live that way — and she was the one who saw to it that Seoyeon ate three simple meals a day.
"Yes. I'd like that."
Hitomi, of course, had no reason to refuse.
"I've really been wanting to try the cooking of Italy itself."
Ask someone to name the country in Europe most famous for its cuisine, and most answers would fall within a short list of candidates. France, widely known as the nation of gastronomy. Britain, which the universal Church had long ago recognized, in name and in fact, as having one foot planted in the realm of the uncanny.
And if one more had to be named... at least seven or eight out of ten would give the nod to Italy. Pizza, pasta — of the dishes East Asia takes for the face of Western food, half of them at the least were probably this country's cooking. Even setting that aside, the notion that one ought to eat foreign food upon going abroad was an exceedingly ordinary one.
"Is there anything in particular you'd like?"
"Hmm... pizza, maybe...?"
That said, Hitomi was hardly steeped in Italian cuisine. Put bluntly, how many Japanese people could rattle off five Italian dishes inside of ten seconds? No — forget five. Three would have done it. Everyone would have gone under after pizza and pasta. At any rate, she had rallied her meager knowledge of Italy and chosen the first of the two candidates it yielded.
"Pizza? That's fine. Shall I ask whether the hotel knows a good place?"
"Oh — you can ask about things like that?"
"I imagine a concierge at a hotel of this standing would grant it even if you asked them to fetch a specialty from the country next door. Pizza would be nothing."
The hotel where they were staying had not been chosen as some staggering palace of luxury; Hitomi's stomach had been taken into account. Even so, there was no world in which Han Seoyeon would have reserved anything below average as a place for Hitomi to sleep.
"Anyway, once we're unpacked, let's get moving. We came all this way abroad — even with no plan, wandering around still beats shutting ourselves in the room, doesn't it? Let's step out first and think from there."
Hitomi smiled, soft and bright. Han Seoyeon met her eyes and smiled faintly in return.
"Please don't come out. Just stay shut in the room until tomorrow. Please... drop the Rome sightseeing and every other piece of worthless nonsense..."
The curtains were drawn, and the lights were off besides. It was still midday, though, and sunlight leaking through the curtains kept the room from going truly dark. In that room, a man was muttering on and on as if possessed.
What spilled from his mouth was Italian that still carried a Sicilian accent. He was a handsome man of strong features, wearing a splendid blond beard. But this man — Pietro — had a face packed tight with tension and dread.
His shoulders were broad enough to seat a person on each of them, and the muscle on his frame was thick and solid, and yet the figure he cut now was no different from a child scared out of his wits. He gnawed at his thumbnail, and his gaze was locked on a piece of equipment. From the device a coiled cord, like that of a landline, ran out and connected all the way to Pietro's head — more precisely, to a pair of headphones whose size felt far too dainty for that large head.
A moment later a thin, tearing beep sounded in the headphones. It was the sort of unpleasant noise that would have had most people clutching their ears and grimacing, but Pietro paid it no mind and only listened harder.
"—Fuck!"
Pietro shouted. The words that followed — Repeating. Bartholomew and Bartholomew-Alpha have left the hotel room! — never even reached his ears. It had been a report too plain to mistake in any case.
Bartholomew? This was no identification code, nor anything of the sort. It meant exactly what it said. The Korean apostle had gone out after all — together with Bartholomew-Alpha, her companion, Ninomae Hitomi. To Pietro, the report felt like a death sentence. ...No. Strictly speaking, it was not. He had already felt something like this more times than he could remember.
At once he powered on the tablet he had set nearby. The screen flickered for a moment, then showed a cityscape — footage that seemed to look down, from on high, upon some street in Rome. Pietro let out a long sigh and picked up the handset he had left resting on his knee.
"You heard? Bartholomew is moving now, too. Be ready. No mistakes."
No answer came. None came — and instead, the colleague filming the feed on the tablet signaled assent with a finger. He waited a short while, and with another brief report the image magnified further. Not enough to read an expression, but enough to make a person out for certain. At the center of it was a black-haired woman... Apostle Bartholomew. Beside her, a woman he took for Ninomae Hitomi came along at a light, quick step.
"Good. Nothing's wrong yet, at lea—"
He had meant to mutter it in relief. Hardly any time passed before his brow twitched. A man was closing in on the pair. Even from a distance, the movement alone made the intent plain: he was hitting on them.
"...You know what to do. Handle it. Now."
Right after that, noise came through the tablet — a sound Pietro knew well, the sound of a special-situation anesthetic round leaving the muzzle. Presently the man in the feed lurched hard. A figure approached him, took him under the arm, and moved him off. At a glance it was the very image of someone helping a friend who had gotten roaring drunk before noon. In truth, of course, the two had never so much as met. The one walking him out would be one of Pietro's subordinates... which was to say, a trooper of Tombstone. Only once he had confirmed the matter was finished did Pietro sigh again.
He knew, for a start, the report that Bartholomew was of a markedly moderate temperament, and he knew as well that her close friend — there was analysis suggesting the two had lately become lovers — was an exceedingly kind person. That did not mean he had the slightest intention of leaving in place anything that might sour an apostle's mood. Those two would, ninety-nine percent of the time, let it pass with a thought that people like that existed. But if there was a one percent chance, or less, that Rome would become a sea of fire, he had to act.
What in the world possesses a man to try hitting on them?
Had it been Ninomae Hitomi alone, he might have understood. With Han Seoyeon standing right there, he was honestly baffled that the thought had occurred to anyone. He had once had the chance to see Han Seoyeon from up close, and what he had felt then was a fear sharp enough to shorten the breath. It was not a human matter of liking or disliking. It was something like a beast's instinct to survive. As a mouse shrinks before the cat that kills mice, she gave off a scent that any person would have no choice but to fear.
To think of making a move while a being like that stood at her side... he went so far as to lament whether the man's brain was kept in his lower half. It was because lunatics like this existed, wasn't it, that foreigners went around with their stories about Italian men.
"...Fuck."
He sighed, looked at the tablet once more, and the curse escaped him before he knew it. Their eyes had met. She was looking this way.
Does that woman think this counts as close range? Ten meters, twenty?
It had been a single shot. Not even live ammunition — an anesthetic round, fired with the noise suppressed as far as it would go. And at the moment of the shot, Han Seoyeon had had her back turned completely. Finding a sniper atop a building in a single instant, in that state — how was that supposed to be the same species as him?
And there are ten of these people...
The fist he had clenched tight trembled. That Gravekeepers were simply not to be dealt with was Pietro's creed, and apostles — the summit of that order — he did not even want to understand. Ten such beings, not counting the honorary seats, were scheduled to visit this cramped little Rome. It was no wonder Italy had gone to emergency alert at word of an apostolic council.
Strictly speaking, the Church had never announced a precise date. But with word already out that an apostolic council would be held, the schedule of the Patriarch of Constantinople's visit to the Vatican had been made public — and there would not be an idiot alive who failed to grasp what that meant.
"...What?"
But Pietro's heart did not loosen in the slightest. Not because he was wound so tight that comfort of this sort could never reach him. The reason was far simpler. There was not a single woman among his troops.
"The channel's been jacked...? No — hold on. Who are you?"
The voice on the other end of the radio was thoroughly unhurried, and that ease, somehow, struck Pietro as an omen he could not name.
"...Shit."
Alejandra Monica Lopez Sanchez Muerte... Apostle Matthias of this generation. What her miracle of overwhelming degree — one of the conditions for recognition as an apostle — actually was, was information not released even to a man of Pietro's standing. Among the apostles, she was one of the dangerous elements held to warrant particular caution.
"Wh-what is this regarding?"
His manner had turned polite of its own accord. If he weighed the worst case, this was absolutely not the moment to stand on his pride.
Like hell I'd relax if I were you. The words rose as far as his throat, and he barely swallowed them back. She had bored through a military radio without a single sign of warning, and yet she spoke as if she had simply phoned a close friend at home.
"Wait. A warning?"
"...Pardon?"
At those words Pietro swallowed, hard. The little one. She must have meant James the Less. And the holy relic passed down through the generations of Apostle James the Less was...
He had no answer. Cold sweat ran down the nape of his neck as he looked around.
Since when has there been a chair here?
Not a meter from where Pietro sat, a wooden chair had been set down. Slowly, his gaze traveled up over it. Only when he forced his attention a little did he make out the Black man with the bushy beard sitting in it. A face he had seen in a photograph. Apostle James the Less — Guénaël Duvert.
He had heard that when a person is shocked badly enough, even a scream will not come. Pietro proved it true for himself.
"About the footage on the screen — it seems the camera taking it has been seized by someone. You had better check that end, don't you think?"
"Uh, uhh, uhhhh..."
"Oh, so it was Moritz. The council isn't until tomorrow, and he's here already — there's a surprise. Ah, is this a video call, by any chance? If I wave, will they see me over there?"
This one and that one — he wished every last one of them would just drop dead. And with that, Pietro lost consciousness.