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“DOMINIC. WAIT. WHAT are you doing?” Tonita was breathless, sweating; her hair clung to her forehead. “Dom, stop!” She pulled away from him and leaned her exhausted body against a wall of peeling yellow paint. She wiped the hair from her eyes and screamed, “What is this? Why are we running? Why did you push that priest down the stairs? Dominic? What’s wrong with you?” She concluded the rant of questions in tears.
Dominic leaned in close to her. He was breathing heavily and his words came out in short strains. “That priest, brother, or whatever he said he was,” he took a deep breath, “believe me, Tonita. He wasn’t.” He took in another breath and blew it out slowly. “That man was going to kill us.”
“Dom? He was there watching over the place.”
“I know that’s what he said. But, he wasn’t. There was something about him. Evil.”
“Dom. He was just standing there.”
“Tonita. He wasn’t just standing there watching out for the Cardinal’s possessions or his apartment. I don’t even think the Vatican knows that he was there. They certainly did not send him.” Dominic spoke breathlessly.
“And how, Dom? How do you know this?”
He stepped back from the wall, pulled off a thick piece of the paint, and examined it. There was layer upon layer of paints in that little piece. Red first, then brown, with a deeper brown, over tan and then the yellows. Different layers of yellows, one under the other, from bright to faded, to the last layer of pollution covered and stained yellow. “I don’t know it.” Dominic let the paint chip drop from his hand. “All right, let me ask you a question. How did he know to speak to us in English and not Italian?”
“Maybe he heard us coming up the stairs? And we were speaking in English, so he spoke to us in English.”
“Possible.” Dominic went silent. His eyes wandered over the faded yellow layer of paint, stained with years of pollution. “He knew that we were with the Cardinal. He didn’t even ask us if the Cardinal was all right.”
“Dom, he’s with the Vatican. Of course he knew that the Cardinal had died. And he must have known that we were with him when the window blew out. I’m sure everyone knows, thanks to Inspector Carrola.” Tonita sighed, extending her hand to him. “So, now what? What do we do now?” Tonita stared into his eyes.
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know, Dom. You can’t continue not knowing.”
“Unfair.” Dominic stepped away from her. “I didn’t ask for any of this. It just happened.”
“Unfair is what you’re doing to me.”
“I didn’t ask you to come along, Tonita.”
“No, you just yanked me along.” She took a step toward him, reached out, placed her hand under his chin, and turned his face to her. “Dominic, that man could be dead back there. We’ve got to call someone. Send him help. We just can’t leave him lying at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Tonita, trust me. We don’t want to help him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s part of this. He’s part of whatever ‘this’ is...” He turned away from her. “Nothing is right anymore.”
“Thanks. I’ll assume that present company is included.”
Dominic looked backed at her, shook his head and walked away.
“Now what? Where are you going?” Tonita called after Dominic. “What? Are you just going to leave me like you did that priest and the church?”
Dominic stopped mid-stride. “Nice Tonita. Thanks,” he said without turning around.
A long silence covered the distance between them.
Finally, Tonita broke the silence and the distance. “All right.” She took several steps to close the gap between them. “Dominic? Meet me half way.”
Dominic turned around, breathed out a heavy sigh, and moved to her.
“That wasn’t too hard was it?”
Dominic leaned into her and kissed her. His arms wrapped around her body and drew her close to him. He held her there tightly, not letting his mouth and hers part.
Tonita responded in kind and her arms became twisted in his. After a moment, she pulled back. “Well, big boy, is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” she said in her best Mae West accent.
Dominic smiled at her. “Neither.” He lifted up his shirt revealing half of a book tucked into the waistband of his pants.
Tonita grabbed the book and pulled it out of Dominic’s pants. “You went back into the Cardinal’s apartment to get this.”
“Hey.” Dominic flinched instinctively.
“Let me get this straight. You push a priest down a flight of stairs, maybe killing him because he’s going to hurt us, although he never made a move to do so. Then, you grab me, push me out of the apartment, all because of this unseen danger, and...”
“It’s not...” Dominic tried to interject.
Tonita held up her hand, placing it in front of Dominic’s face. “Oh, I’m not finished. You grab me. Rush me out. But then, in spite of this murdering priest who may be waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs playing dead with blood splattered everywhere, you rush back into the apartment to get this.” She presented the book to Dominic’s face. “A travel book?”
“Well...yeah!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me?” Tonita shook her head.
“Was that a question or a statement?”
“A book?” Tonita asked. Then added, “That was a question.”
“Can I?” Dominic reached for the book.
Tonita rolled her eyes and handed him the book.
Dominic took it, letting his fingers touch hers.
She shook her head, turning away.
Dominic turned the cover back inspecting the first few pages, then using his thumb flipped through the remaining pages, fanning the book. He paused, held the book by the spine, and turned it upside down. He shook it. Then, turning the book face up, flipped the pages again. And then once more.
“Are you hot?” Tonita could not conceal the sarcasm in her voice
Dominic didn’t respond. Instead, he flipped through the pages again. This time he stopped at a page. Watching. Studying. He bent the spine back and held the book open on the page. Then he looked up at Tonita and smiled.
“What’s that grin for?” Tonita’s eyebrow raised and her head cocked to the side.
“This.” Dominic let the book fall open to page seventeen, chapter three. Getting to Roswell.
Tonita glanced down at the opened book; she mouthed the words of the chapter title and then looked up at Dominic. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of going there?”
“I’m not.”
“Thank God.”
“But we are.” Dominic nearly broke the spine on the book by folding the pages back as far as he could. Then, methodically, he began to tear page seventeen from the old binding glue. The page came away easily. “Here.” He handed the book to Tonita, keeping only the page he had just removed. He read the words printed onto the first side of the page. Considering them. Then he turned the paper over to page eighteen and read each of the words printed there.
“You found something?” Tonita asked.
“Not sure.” He took the page and held it at arms’ length to the sky, letting the cloud filtered sunlight pass through it.
“Well what are you looking for?”
“Not sure of that either.”
“Okay. Let me try this another way.
“Shoot.” Dominic continued to turn, twist, and flip the torn page seventeen.
“You tore the page from the book for a reason, right?”
“Yes,” Dominic answered without looking at Tonita. His eyes swept the page as he turned it over and upside down and up to the sun again.
“What was that reason?”
“This page is different.”
“How so?”
“I noticed it before,” he said.
Tonita’s expression begged for further explanation.
“When Cardinal Celent handed me the book back in his apartment. I noticed that a page or two seemed different...thicker maybe. I dismissed it then as just a fluke.”
“And now you think that page has some information hidden on it?”
“Yes, my dear Doctor Watson. You are correct.”
“That’s weird.”
“Maybe. But I’m sure that Cardinal Celent was trying to tell us something.”
“Why didn’t he just say it?”
“I don’t know. But then that fits in with the way my life,” he paused and looked directly into Tonita’s eyes, “our lives have been going. I don’t know what to expect next.”
“Can I take a look?”
Dominic eyed the page again. “Sure,” he said and handed to Tonita.
She turned the page around.
“I did that already,” Dominic said, as she performed her inspection.
“Yes, I know. But you may have missed something.
Then concentrating, she read every word.
“I did that, too,” Dominic said.
“You’re not helping,” Tonita chastised, then held the page up to the sun.
“And I did that.”
“But you didn’t do this,” Tonita said, then spat onto the page.
“Tonita!” Dominic shouted, then added, “That was gross.”
Tonita rubbed the saliva into the fabric of the page. She glanced up at Dominic with a big smile and showed him the page. Where the saliva had dampened the page, a new image of crisscrossing lines had partially appeared.
“You’re brilliant.”
“Hey, all those days of candy-striping at the hospital were not lost.”
“Oh? They teach Candy stripers to spit on things?”
“Didn’t you ever do a litmus test, where the paper reacts to something that’s alkaline or acidic and turns it different colors? When I was a kid I got this really cool, well, I thought it was really cool at the time, science kit.”
Dominic didn’t let her finish. “Come on. We’ve got to find some water.”
Tonita glared at him. “Dom, we’re in Rome. There’s a freakin’ fountain on every corner.”