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I do my homework. It’s important. You miss some small nothing of a factoid and it turns out to be the crucial piece, and your whole brilliant scheme turns into a flaming shit heap, with you smoldering underneath it. So I do research. I poke around, I find out how things work—and I find out who pulls which strings and why.
I had four good candidates when I went back to Rome. I checked them all out completely, down to knowing their shoe size. And I found one who ticked off every single item on my list. He was absolutely perfect. His name was Rodolfo Berzetti.
By the time I was done looking him over, I knew everything about Rodolfo Berzetti. I probably knew more about him than his mother knew. I knew why he wasn’t married yet at the age of forty-three. I knew what he did on his long vacations to Thailand. And I knew why he was my perfect candidate.
For starters, his job; Rodolfo was an expert at restoring damaged artwork. And he was a full-time employee of the Vatican.
It’s not a job that you would think of all by yourself, not right away. I mean, full-time work in art restoration? Isn’t the Vatican supposed to be all praying and priests and that kind of thing? And it is—but like I said, the Vatican also has a huge collection of some of the greatest artwork in the world. And you can sure as shit argue with how they got some of it—“confiscating,” which means stealing, and blackmailing people with threats of Hell, and terrifying people into “donating” when they die—but you cannot argue with the fact that they take care of it.
Caring for great art is a whole lot more complicated than dusting the frames once a week. So the Vatican has a big staff of very expert people to take care of this collection. Rodolfo Berzetti was one of them. If a painting or a mural—or a fresco—suffers damage from aging, or if it takes a hit of some kind, or if it was in storage so long the paint began to crack, Rodolfo was the guy on staff to fix it. Pretty it up so it was good as new. He was good at what he did, too—not the best in the world, not by a long shot, but he was good.
And why didn’t the Vatican, with its tons of money and incredible collection, have the guy who was the best? Why did they have Rodolfo Berzetti the just okay?
Come on, take a guess. I’ll give you a hint: It rhymes with “honey.” Except it starts with an m.
Rodolfo Berzetti had honey with an m. Lots of it. He came from a family of old money, and in Italy that means really old. His ancestors in the fifteenth century ran a successful bank in Venice, in the days when Venetian banks were the best. Usually the only, and naturally that means bigger profits. The family’s fortune had grown through the
years, jumping up into the stratosphere during World War II. They had a patent on a key piece of tech that had to go into every single round of ammunition any Italian artillery fired during the war. That’s a lot of artillery. That translates to a lot of money, even if it’s only a penny or two per round. And the really funny thing? The government paid them! Can you believe it? They paid! Even toward the end of the war, when people were starving and the soldiers had no food, no shoes, the Berzettis collected their royalty for that little piece of tech.
They got paid. And their really rich turned into stupid rich.
Rodolfo was the only son in the current generation. That meant whatever he wanted, he got. When he wanted this job at the Vatican, discreet inquiries were made, a cardinal got a new and glorious altarpiece for his home cathedral—and Rodolfo got a job.
So Rodolfo Berzetti didn’t need a job. And he didn’t do jack shit to earn it. Unless you think buying gold altarpieces is a legit tough job. He just wanted the job, like it was a shiny new toy. And like every rich kid, he got it. Because Rodolfo was stupid rich. Rich enough to fly in sushi from Edo twice a week on a special chartered flight. So rich he could actually afford to own a bunch of art that should have been in the Louvre—or in the Vatican. Plenty rich enough for those long vacations in Thailand, where he was not, strictly speaking, getting a tan at a beach resort.
And all this stupid rich just fell into his fat lap because it was inherited money. The only thing he did to earn it was get born. That meant he spent his whole life getting everything he ever wanted with no real effort. It meant that whenever he wanted anything—anything—he just naturally assumed he had the right to take it. It meant one thing more, too. Something that was a little more important.
It meant I didn’t like him. And that meant he was just what I was looking for.
That turned out to be a fatal flaw.
I found him in the basement of the museo, in his workshop. He had a large canvas stretched onto an easel and he was bent over it, frowning at something in the lower-right-hand corner. His great big ass stuck out into the room, butt crack showing, and the fat that hung over the collar of his shirt jiggled slightly as he moved a small paintbrush.
He had earbuds in, and he was humming tunelessly along to something, so when I slipped through the door and into a pool of shadow beside the door, he didn’t hear me.
Good for me. Not so good for him.
I watched him for a minute from the shadows by the door. And then I stepped into the room and the shadow came with me.
I was in the Darkness.
It comes over me at these times for most of my life, since that bad day at the old quarry when I turned into Me. It’s like everything gets dark around me until I’m not really driving anymore, just watching, like I’m sitting in a theater with the lights out watching an old movie.
The Darkness came over me now, and it kept me quiet and hidden as I came up behind Berzetti. I reached into my pocket and took out a small syringe. I took the safety guard off the needle and held it up, and—
He must have sensed something at the very last second. He turned his head to one side, saw me, and—
Too late.
I jammed the needle into his fat, stuck-out ass and squeezed the plunger down. Berzetti jerked upright and turned, flailing his arms so wildly that his hand hit his glasses so they flew off his face and went up in the air. As the glasses hit the floor he turned all the way around until he was gaping at me with a look of horror on his fat face.
That’s the expression he died with.
It would take a microscopic autopsy to make anybody guess he died of anything but a natural heart attack. Nobody was going to do that. There was no reason, and there would be no sign of foul play. And an autopsy desecrates the body. Anyway, fat people have heart attacks all the time.