Rome: 8:14 p.m.
Alexander left Marcus Crossler’s house a little over two hours after he’d first discovered the professor’s body, stepping into the dusk of an early Roman evening as the first street lamps started to flicker into life. He’d debated staying longer, but there was little he could contribute to the officers’ labors, and the subtle clues that they’d rather be without him had been growing less and less refined as the evening wore on. When he’d finally notified them that he’d be leaving, he was shown the front door with more energy than he would have liked.
An hour later, he was at his kitchen table, cigarette in hand and a reheated plate of two-day-old pasta steaming on the Formica top, waiting for him to finish his low-brow aperitif. The small apartment block on Via Varese, his home since he had left the priesthood four years ago, was situated conveniently close to the paper’s offices in a pleasant enough quarter of Rome. The redbrick structure was modern, going back no further than the 1960s, which for Rome was essentially yesterday. It wasn’t as quaint as a parish vicarage or as grandiose as a curial apartment, but when faith dies, certain perks go with it.
Alexander swallowed hard. He’d been through enough trauma today. He didn’t need to reminisce about the most difficult choice of his life.
The pasta steamed beneath a blanket of melted cheese. Alexander was not a man without a healthy appetite, and as far as he was concerned, the more cholesterol there was dripping over a dish, the better. But this evening he realized as he stared at the plate of food, its vapors swirling into interlocking folds with the plumes from his cigarette, that he had no appetite. The lifeless expression on Professor Crossler’s face stared back at him from every surface. It was there on the countertops, on the table, in the bubbling lumps of browned cheese.
He stubbed out his cigarette and walked to the refrigerator, pulled open the door and retrieved a beer. Whether a drink was any more suitable a post-trauma option he didn’t know, but it was worth a try.
He moved back to the table, uncapped bottle in hand. As he took a long first sip, the icy draft bubbled its way down his throat, soothing more than just his tongue. He closed his eyes, praying that Crossler’s face wouldn’t be there behind his eyelids, looking back at him. But even the thought evoked the memory, the scents, the bile . . .
He forced open his eyes before the sensations could grow stronger. He needed distraction—to put his mind to work. He leaned forward and set down the bottle, plotting a way to begin. Facts. Data. The skeleton of a story yet to be written. These were the things to battle his preoccupation.
He reached into his leather satchel and withdrew his laptop. Cracking it open, he shoved his dinner plate out of the way as it powered up. Front and center of the screen was his Twitter timeline, the means by which he’d discovered Crossler, hovering where he’d left it as he’d departed the office before heading to the man’s home. He’d been monitoring the main hashtags for gossip over the stranger’s appearance in the Vatican, and as the wireless connection in his flat now came online anew, the status bar at the top of the refreshing window switched from “15 unread messages” to “2,340 unread messages.”
So it hasn’t been a slow evening for the hype.
The messages on display were the last he’d read before powering down: a series of exchanges between hundreds of concerned citizens, faithful believers and honest skeptics. In the midst, @DrMCrossler292 had interjected his thoughts at routine intervals—always sounding authoritative and keen to insist that any hype about a divine origin to the visitor was “a traditional religious response to the unknown.” The responses he’d received had varied from those who believed him to those who had reacted with anger and vitriol. But it was Crossler’s calm insistence that he could prove his claims, despite the heated responses of others, that had made him stand out.
Suddenly Alexander leaned forward, an idea ticking to life in his mind. Twitter called its display a timeline, and there might be something useful in that fact.
He clicked the bar to reveal the thousands of newer messages above, and started to read forward in the chronology. He was less interested in what was being said and more interested in the time stamps that headed each comment. He scrolled speedily upward until he reached the times that mattered, slowing as he reached the messages—hundreds of them—stamped with 2:40 p.m., about the time he’d phoned Crossler. He took note of their flow more closely. @DrMCrossler292’s contributions became less frequent, then stopped for a span of nearly fifteen minutes. That’s it, a definitive connection to our exchange. The lapse in contributions indicated, so far as he could tell, that the professor had kept on tweeting, a little less fervently, as their phone conversation had begun, but then had stopped altogether as that conversation deepened. Alexander remembered the energy the other man had exuded over the line, suddenly feeling the grotesquery of his death in his stomach again.
He slid his fingers over the computer’s trackpad and advanced through the timeline yet further. Precisely seventeen minutes after Crossler’s account had gone silent, about the time their call would have concluded, he re-emerged online with a new vigor, tweeting at almost five-minute intervals for the next forty-five. Have made contact with the press; will show you all what I mean! at 3:22 p.m., followed by a long string of exchanges with individuals who alternately believed he was full of hot air, or a voice of reason about to enter into a fraudulent and overly hyped debate.
Then, at 4:06 p.m., Marcus Crossler had posted his last tweet: Someone at the door. A bit early. Hold tight, my friends. The truth will come out. Back soon.
He’d never come back. That was the last activity on the Twitter account of Dr. Marcus Crossler of the Sapienza University of Rome.
It had been posted precisely sixty-five minutes before Alexander had arrived at his house.
Over the next half-hour, Alexander continued to scrutinize his timeline. There was something here, he knew it. Evidence mixed into the time stamps of Crossler’s messages—evidence of a connection between the man’s agreeing to talk to him and his death a few hours later.
But he knew he needed much more than vague 140-character implications. “Circumstantial” was the title given to this kind of evidence, for a reason. There could, in theory, be any number of reasons for Crossler’s silence.
He scrolled backward through the screen. He’d already found the terminus of Crosser’s online activity, but it suddenly struck him that he hadn’t yet looked in the other direction. He now scrolled toward earlier time stamps, seeking the moment that Crossler had begun his activity. The chronology went back for hours, to midday and then late morning, the professor active throughout. It was becoming clear that Crossler had gone to the internet almost as soon as he’d heard of the event at the basilica, which couldn’t have been much after it had taken place.
Finally Alexander located the man’s first post of the morning, at 8:49 a.m.: Have just heard about something going on at St. Peter’s. Any news?
A series of responses passed along links to newly emerging video clips, and Alexander watched the phrase-burst history of the beginning of the hype.
In the midst of it, something caught his eye. Dr. Crossler had entered into the public debate with a flare, but he’d not in fact been the lone credentialed voice Alexander had previously thought him to be. He’d had a counterpart. Alexander grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down the second man’s name from his Twitter profile: Professor Salvatore Tosi. It wasn’t a name he’d heard before, but that hardly surprised him. Rome was full of universities, each full of professors. Academics were like snow from heaven: they came in droves and required a hell of a lot of shoveling to get them out of your way.
But this interlocutor spoke with the same kind of conviction as Crossler, and he’d started in just as fast. What the public was seeing, he announced, was a fraud. And not a peaceful, innocent scam. People would be hurt by this, there would be ramifications, and so on. Tosi posted fervently and quickly, though, like Crossler, he never said specifically what it was that stood behind his claims that he could prove all that he was saying. I need to speak to the relevant officials, he tweeted at 9:18 a.m., while the stranger would still have been seated in St. Peter’s.
Alexander advanced forward through the timeline, straining to see what Tosi’s next contribution had been. Perhaps the man had noted whom he’d spoken to, or what response he’d received.
But there was no follow-up to the comment. In fact there were no further posts at all by Salvatore Tosi. At 9:18 a.m., the first man claiming to have proof that the morning’s happenings in the Vatican were a fraud had gone silent.
Later, at 4:06 p.m., the second, Marcus Crossler, had fallen just as silent.
Suddenly Alexander’s stomach tightened into a knot. He was willing to stake his journalistic nose on the disturbing suspicion that spun its way out of these facts. Salvatore Tosi, whoever he was and wherever he lived, was just as dead as Marcus Crossler.
He stood up abruptly and walked to the wireless phone that sat on his kitchen counter. The temptation to dial the police station was almost overwhelming—it was the normal, obvious thing to do. But the shove-off he’d been given earlier in the evening was firm: no theories, no help, thank you very much. The man in charge had dismissed Alexander’s immediate observations outright, and those had the benefit of being based on a direct, physical connection. How much more spitefully was he likely to reject a theory built off social media references on the internet?
But Alexander had discovered something that his gut felt was concrete. Real.
The story had managed to attract his attention when it had just been about a man appearing at the Vatican and the strange effect he’d had on the pontiff. But if his only contact was dead, another quite possibly just as coldly murdered and the police persistent in calling it ‘routine,’ he wasn’t going to be put off that easily.
He would simply have to go about things another way.
As uncomfortable as it was going to be, he had to make a different call.
He clutched the phone in his hands, took another swill of his beer and swallowed hard. By the time the bottle was back on the table, he was already dialing. He lit a new cigarette as the line began to ring. He was going to need it.