CHAPTER 37

“What was that thing?” said Thomas.

He hadn’t asked the question aloud in the three hours they had been talking to the police, but now that the interview was over he finally voiced it.

“That thing?” said Deborah. “It was a man, Thomas.”

“It didn’t look like a man,” he said. “It didn’t move like a man.”

“There are no alternatives,” she said with finality. “And it did look like a man. A strange one, perhaps, but we could have guessed that from what he had just done.”

He wasn’t sure if she was as convinced as she was making out, but he knew she was right.

They had reached the restaurant-store on the corner without any sign of the killer, who—it seemed—had been content to scare them off. They had summoned the skeptical, middle-aged widow who lived there and she had called the police, Thomas grateful that Deborah’s Italian was considerably better than his.

“Homicidal lunatic” and “vampire” don’t exactly make the Berlitz guide.

He didn’t know why the word vampire had popped into his head. He didn’t believe in such things, of course, and didn’t for a moment think that that was what had killed Satoh. It was just the paleness of the killer, the crablike way he had scuttled over the rocks like Nosferatu . . .

By the time their interview was over, the police had erected some kind of protective tent over part of the Temple of Ceres, and the entire site was bathed in the blue-white light of a dozen halogen work lamps. The entire environment seemed surreal, dreamlike. The police had not, thank God, asked him to look again at the body or, indeed, to venture back into the site.

They had been interviewed separately, but once they’d been released, he and Deborah had compared notes. Thomas was particularly relieved to find that neither of them had held anything back, so their stories agreed. Even their answers to the key question, casually floated by the chain-smoking translator in the museum where the police had set up their temporary operations base, had been frank: “Did you know the deceased?”

Thomas had known that any discrepancies between his story and Deborah’s would get them into deep water fast. So he had told them: about Satoh searching his room at the Executive; about the struggle in the site earlier in the day; about the supposed link to Ed, whose death had first led him to Italy. The translator had gone over each point several times, clarifying, responding to rapid questions from the investigating officer, the three men regarding each other cautiously, circling, almost, as if spoiling for a fight.

Camoranesi was a heavyset man with a thick black mustache and sad, heavy-lidded eyes. Like the translator, the policeman smoked constantly and spoke in a low, gravelly voice like someone who knew so much of the world’s nastier side that he was numb to it, almost bored. By contrast the translator, a young man barely more than college age, seemed as rattled as Thomas, and though the greenish tinge left his face in the course of their long conversation, the jitteriness never went away.

They didn’t like what he had to say. It complicated a messy situation further, and he knew it. They would have to liaise with the Americans, maybe with Interpol, and if Thomas was reading Camoranesi correctly, they thought it was irrelevant. They were dealing with some psycho, they thought. It had nothing to do with Thomas’s rambling and arbitrary crusade.

Thomas couldn’t blame them. By the end of the interview, he too felt that Satoh’s death was most likely a coincidence. He had, perhaps, been spying on Thomas, maybe on Deborah too, but that had not been connected to his death. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had fallen afoul of a maniac. It could happen, he supposed uneasily, anywhere.

The police didn’t say any of this directly. They copied his passport—which he had been carrying with him since the break-in at the hotel—and asked for names and contact numbers here and in the United States. He gave them Jim in the States, and Father Giovanni at the retreat house in Naples. The policeman raised his eyebrows at the fact that both were priests, and the strangeness of it struck Thomas too. They asked for his fingerprints, and Thomas gave them without complaint. He had nothing to hide.

He’d had no more than ten minutes to speak to Deborah, and he didn’t really know what to say anyway. After rehashing what she had told the police, she offered her number and he took it, doubtful they would ever speak to each other again, wondering how they could possibly chat about history and culture when all that held them together was soaked with the evening’s horrors.

After their halfhearted farewell, he was invited to a police car and driven to the local station. He waited there for twenty-two minutes alone in a dingy room whose window was so high it may have served as a cell, before being put into another police car and taken back to the Executive in Naples.

It was two in the morning. He got the desk clerk to open the bar long enough for him to take a couple of beers to his room, drinking them in a series of long gulps the moment he got inside. He undressed quickly and got into bed, hoping against hope that he was too tired to dream.