Animus Facit Nobilem, Chpt 5
Title: Animus Facit Nobilem
Chapter: V. Fear & Suspicion
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: M, for subsequent chapters
Pairing: Lenalee/Lavi
Length: 5 pages
Warnings: No spoilers. Some blasphemy.
Summary: When a series of bizarre events prompts the Black Order to dispatch exorcists, Lenalee and Lavi find that there is more going on in this small village on Malta than anyone could have expected. To make matters worse, the truth is going to hit just a touch too close to home for our Bookman cum Exorcist.
A/N: To hear some really beautiful Maltese, go here and skip to about 1:14. Also, when Lavi says his Arabic is a hodgepodge, he's not kidding. Um, and because the anachronism police have definitely busted me in the past, I'll go ahead and own up to the fact that first lobotomies--if you can actually call them that--were performed in 1888, many years after this story is ostensibly set. They were, however, performed in Switzerland. You'll know what I'm talking about when you get there.
Previous chapters: I, II, III, IV
V. Fear & Suspicion
Giorgio, they learned, was a native of Malta, having gone to work for the Black Order in Rome a few years back. He was assigned to this case for obvious reasons, and when he led Lavi, Lenalee, and Bill to a small corner pub, he ordered drinks for all of them in polite, cheerful Maltese. Bill, on the other hand, had had his name drawn out of a hat like most finders.
They settled around a scrubbed wooden table that was just a touch too low for Bill and Lavi to sit comfortably, exorcists on one side and finders on the other. A server came over to their table before long and laid out four tall glasses of honey-colored water with ice. Ruggata, Giorgio explained, was chilled, diluted almond syrup, a Maltese classic.
"I didn't realize you were on the ferry that wrecked," Bill said after taking a long sip off his drink. "All the ferries yesterday were canceled. I thought you were stuck in Sicily for the night."
"Nope," Lavi said, trying to adjust his legs without banging his knees into the table. "We managed to snag the last room at St. Matthias."
"I'm surprised they let you," Giorgio said, his English as casual as his Maltese. "The Bishop would not understand the two of you traveling alone."
"As a matter of fact," Lavi began, but Lenalee stomped his toe hard.
"We made do," she said, beaming. Lenalee was growing a little weary of the chatting, so she plowed on ahead. "So, from my understanding, we're here to look into the smuggling situation. Is that correct?"
"It is," said Bill. He folded his elbows on the table and hunched forward a little. "The circumstances are really strange. Most of the people coming into Malta are tourists, you know. There certainly have been cases of people emigrating illegally but rarely the reverse."
"Have you had an opportunity to interview anyone in custody?" Lavi asked.
Bill shook his head. "No, almost everyone has been deported back to the mainland, and the few who are still around... well, let's just say you need fancier clearance than a couple of finders have to get in."
Lenalee furrowed her brow. "Are we going to be able to meet with them?"
"That all depends on how well Chief Komui has pulled those strings," Bill answered.
"I'm more concerned," Giorgio pressed, sitting forward in his seat, "About the dwindling interest in the Saints Days celebrations." Lenalee noticed the way the wooden crucifix around Giorgio's neck clapped against his chest when he moved. "I first alerted the Black Order about this long before the smuggling ships were intercepted." He noticed the somewhat unenthusiastic looks of his colleagues. "You see, there are only seven churches across the island that host the Feast of the Ascension. They are called the Seba' Santa Marijiet. Qrendi is one of them. In the past, Qrendi has been flooded with visitors here for the celebration."
"But the lady at the church told us we shouldn't look for hotel rooms last night because they would all be packed," Lavi interjected.
"That may be so," Giorgio went on, "But it does not take very much to book every hotel room in Qrendi."
"Where do people usually stay then?" Lenalee asked.
"Last year the church hosted three hundred pilgrims," Giorgio said.
"Three hundred?" Lavi exclaimed. "Where the hell did they put them all?"
"The nave," Giorgio said. "More pilgrims camped in the courtyard. They covered the fields south of town in tents. They stayed where they could. If you were here on this very day last year, we would not be able to sit in this pub. You would have had to sleep outside last night unless someone volunteered their home to you." His face became stern, frightened even. "I do not think you understand the gravity of this change. This time last year, you would not have been able to walk down the streets of Qrendi, they would be so crowded. The Maltese are a Catholic people. Something is happening here. Something is happening in Qrendi to drive pilgrims into the other parishes. Something is terribly wrong."
Lenalee and Lavi exchanged a look. Clearly, this was a personal matter for Giorgio.
"I think we should start with talking to the people taken off those ships," Lenalee said.
"All right," Lavi said with finality. "Bill and I will go to the police headquarters and talk to the people in custody. Lenalee, you and Giorgio can start asking around here. We'll meet back at the church in, say, two hours?"
~
The hitch that Lavi and Bill immediately ran into was actually getting into the police station. Lavi had decided to question the people in custody himself because he had a working grasp of Arabic, which would certainly be necessary to speak to the people taken off a ship from Tunisia, and while Arabic would get his questions answered, he and Bill could not cobble together enough Maltese to get past the stubborn officer at the front desk.
Lavi and Bill retreated into the foyer of the police station to come up with a plan. Lavi suggested they get themselves thrown into a holding cell by pretending to brawl in a pub somewhere, but Bill looked rather pale at the notion. Just as Lavi was kind of beginning to get into the idea, a voice from behind them called out, "Exorcist? Finder?"
They looked back to see a small, dark-haired woman in uniform approaching them. She came up to just below Lavi's chin and walked in short, clipped steps. "From Black Order?" she asked, her English choppy.
"Yes, we are," Lavi answered.
"I expect you," she said. "Come."
Bill gave a long sigh of relief and fell in line behind Lavi and this woman. She showed them around the front desk, giving the officer there a rapid-fire Maltese explanation, and into a back hallway. The room she took them to was small with whitewashed walls and a long square table in the middle. She gestured for them to sit, and she stood by the door.
"I bring man from ship here," she said, pointing toward the chair opposite Lavi and Bill. She then held up her hand, extending her all her fingers. "Five minutes," she said firmly. "Understand?"
"Yes. Five minutes," Lavi answered, and the woman left. Once she was gone and her footfalls no longer sounded in the hall, Lavi leaned over to Bill and muttered. "That's a little weird, don't you think? I mean, Chief Komui was able to get us in here, but he couldn't finagle more than five minutes?"
"They don't want us poking around," Bill whispered back. "Maybe they don't want word getting out that the Black Order is investigating a problem?"
"I think they don't want to admit that there is a problem at all." This was starting to look more and more like something bigger, something organized. If the police were trying to ignore the issue, perhaps someone more influential than the Black Order was involved. This only seemed to affirm Lavi's opium theory.
The woman officer returned shortly after, leading a tall Tunisian man with a blank, almost glassy expression. He was in cuffs and wore what appeared to have once been an expensive, dark grey suit. Now, however, it looked rather like he had been living in it for some time. She pulled out a chair for him and pushed his shoulder until he sank down. She then turned to Lavi, showed him her five fingers once more. He nodded his understanding.
When the officer was gone and the door was closed behind her, Lavi turned to the Tunisian man. "Good afternoon," Lavi said in Arabic. He was aware that his knowledge of the language had been garnered from living in a series of Arabic-speaking countries and was, therefore, a hodgepodge of dialects. Whether Tunisian Arabic was in there, too, Lavi wasn't entirely sure. He tried his best, however, to be polite.
"Good afternoon," the man replied, his face still a little slack.
"What brings you to Malta?" Lavi asked. He wasn't trying to be ironic, but it must have come off that way because the man began to laugh a loose, almost lazy laugh.
"What brings anyone to Malta? The beach? The sea air?"
Lavi furrowed his brow. "You can't get those things back home?"
The bitter laughter faded from the man's voice, and he dropped his eyes. "What are you? Interpol? Or some Vatican Emissary?"
Lavi wouldn't call himself an emissary per se. He did find it intriguing that the two authorities this man would expect to meet would be those. Lavi laughed, "Do I look like I'm from Interpol?"
The man eyed him. "Then where?"
Lavi hesitated. "Somewhere else," was all he offered.
The man stared at him, the light dimmed behind his heavily lidded, dark eyes. It was possible, Lavi thought, that his stint in jail was really taking its toll on this guy, but something about the Tunisian man, something about his posture, his dull eyes, struck Lavi as more profound. He knew he had seen that look before. It was a look of emptiness, almost soullessness. Lavi sat back and rubbed his chin.
"Is it opium?"
The man laughed again, a derisive laugh, and the longer it went on, the more despondent his face became. Lavi realized then that this man was not laughing at him nor was he laughing at the pale, quaking Bill. "Opium?" the man asked. He bared his straight, white teeth. "I envy the man who has sold his soul to opium."
Lavi recognized it then, where he had seen that look. During a brief stay in Neuchatel, Switzerland with Bookman, quite a few years in the past, Lavi had snuck off one morning and paid a penny to take a stroll down the halls of Prefargier Asylum. Unlike many of the other boys creeping around the corridor that day, Lavi had not brought a stick with which to poke the incurables as they slumped in their seats, oozing lobotomy wounds across their shaven heads.
This look, as though whoever was living behind this man's eyes had simply packed his things and left, was disconcerting on two counts: there is very little more frightening than a living dead man, and Lavi began to question the Tunisian's reliability.
"So who owns your soul, sir?" Lavi asked.
The Tunisian leapt to his feet, wrenching at the handcuffs. Both Lavi and Bill jumped up as well, their chairs clattering to the ground. Lavi instinctively shoved Bill behind him and dropped his right hand to his hammer, strapped to his leg. He winced inwardly; Innocence was not meant to be used on men.
"You're a child!" the Tunisian roared at Lavi. He flung himself forward against the table. "What do you know of anything? Of life? Of what would drive a man to-"
Two officers burst into the room then, the door hitting the wall with an echoing bang. They rushed past Lavi and Bill and restrained the Tunisian man. He began to fight their grip on him, letting his weight sag to the floor then putting out his feet then throwing himself from side to side. They dragged him, though, past Lavi and Bill and out the door into the hall. The Tunisian man's bellow at Lavi must have depleted the vitality he had left because, as the officers forcibly removed him, he let his mouth sag open. He released moan after long, mournful moan. They came from deep in his chest, from the seat of where a normal man's soul would be, and as he was taken down the hall, his moans lingered long after he was gone.
A trembling hand fell on Lavi's arm, and he turned to see Bill, ashen and wide-eyed. "Can we leave? Please?"
~
The sun was high and unashamed when Lenalee found Lavi sitting on the stoop outside St. Matthias. She and Giorgio noticed Lavi from some distance away, but Bill was no where to be seen. Lenalee didn't think much of this until she drew closer and saw the way Lavi was sitting, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped before his mouth. He sat with his right shoulder to them, showing only his eyepatch.
"Is everything all right?" Lenalee called as she and Giorgio approached.
Lavi looked up at her, and for just a moment, she could see the line between his brows, the wide white of his one eye. Then he was grinning and rising to his feet. "Everything's okay here," he replied.
"Where's Bill?" Giorgio asked.
Lavi jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. "He's inside, having girltalk with God. I think he was a little shaken up by the nut job we talked to at the precinct," he said. "Considering I was talking to the guy in a language ol' Bill doesn't speak, it really got to him."
If Giorgio didn't appreciate the girltalk comment, he did not show it. Instead, he shifted his eyes toward the entrance to the church. "I will speak to him," he said and left Lenalee's side. Lavi watched him go, tried to catch a glimpse of the interior of the atrium, although he knew Bill was probably hunkered down in pew, out of sight from the door.
Her partner seemed off. Lenalee watched him a moment, his arms hanging motionlessly at his side. "Lavi," she started, the beginnings of concern in her voice.
He whipped his head around toward her. "So, the guy I talked to said it wasn't opium," Lavi said. "He said he envied the man hooked on opium."
Lenalee resolved then that if Lavi wanted to pretend that he was fine then she could, too. For the time being at least. "Wow," she said, "That's quite a thing to say." She glanced around and took a step closer to Lavi. "I heard something similar from some of the people I spoke to."
"Really?" Lavi asked, "How has this not become big frigging news yet?"
"Well," Lenalee went on, "I was also told that there's no problem at all. And I probably heard everything in between." Lavi gave her a confused look, but she wasn't entirely comfortable elaborating in the street. "Giorgio showed me where our hotel reservations are. I'm going to tell him to meet us there later." She disappeared inside the church for just a moment, emerged with their luggage in hand, and started down the lane.
They walked a few blocks toward the south, entering an area of town where the buildings were taller and more uniform. Their hotel was a long, flat-faced structure with pale stucco and fresh blue paint on the shutters. There were three rows of windows on the front, the ground floor row having wider, taller panes. Lavi held the door open for her, and they walked together toward the reception desk. A bald-headed man smiled up at them from a stool behind the desk and asked them something in Maltese.
Lenalee smiled apologetically and shook her head. She held up two fingers on her right hand and said, "Giorgio Pasquale?"
The man asked another question then another and then seemed to understand what Lenalee meant. "Aaah," he said as he pulled out his ledger. He flipped the tome open, ran his index finger down a list in the far left column. "Hawn, Giorgio Pasquale," the man said. He then opened a drawer in the desk and produced two iron keys. "Sebgha," he said and handed Lenalee a key. It had a tag with the number seven on it. He then passed eight to Lavi and said, "Tmienja." He smiled, nodded, and gestured toward the right of the desk where the room opened into what appeared to be dining room. Beyond that was a flight of stairs leading upward.
"Grazzi hafna," Lenalee replied with a bow and started toward the stairs.
Lavi walked to her right and teased, "Lookit you, Miss I-Speak-Maltese-Now."
Lenalee laughed. "Giorgio thought I should at least know how to say thank you."
They came to the top of the stairs and took a right down a hall with doors on either side. The brass numbers on the door, fortunately, matched the numerals on their keys. Lenalee's room was on the right, and just a few feet down on the left was Lavi's room.
"So," he said, spinning his key around the last knuckle of his index finger. "Your place or mine?"
Lenalee rolled her eyes and unlocked the door to room number seven. Lavi followed her in, looking a little dejected that she couldn't even pretend to giggle. While the room was not too much larger than their room at the church, it certainly was more hospitable. There was a landscape painting on the wall by the door, two pillows on the considerable bed, and the room came with it own imposing wooden crucifix mounted to the right of the bureau.
Lavi tossed his luggage down and went to pull the drapes across the small window before he sank to Lenalee's bed. "So aside from Maltese, what did you learn?"
Lenalee set her suitcase on the bureau, turned, and leaned back against the edge. "Well, either the devil has taken up residence here and is trying to lure us all to perdition or there's nothing wrong and how dare I ask such a rude question." Lavi snorted. "A few people were willing to be rational with me, and I heard something that might be of use to us. Apparently, there's a new doctor in town."
"Doctor?" Lavi asked.
"Yeah," Lenalee replied. "I can't remember what it was in Maltese, but Giorgio told me that it meant Heart Doctor or Spirit Doctor or something like that."
"Where do you s'pose he got his license to practice?" Lavi asked sarcastically.
"And," Lenalee continued, "he's gotten really popular lately. A few people think he can cure just about anything. Somebody told me that he can grant wishes. Most anyone who would talk about him, though, said he's just good at giving people what they want." She shrugged. "I didn't ask anyone pointblank about drugs, though. Giorgio was translating everything for me, and I thought it would make him uncomfortable."
Lavi pictured the terror on Bill's face at the precinct and thought dryly, Oh, we wouldn't want Giorgio to be uncomfortable. "Well, I don't think that's the case anymore," Lavi said. "The guy I talked to may have been bat-shit crazy, but I think he meant it when he said opium wasn't involved."
"What makes you think he was crazy?" Lenalee asked.
"It was his eyes," Lavi said. He suppressed a shudder. "Like a dead man's. Like he'd just sort of switched off the light." He made a flicking gesture near his right temple. "He also tried to attack Bill and me," he added.
Lenalee jumped to her feet. "What?" she demanded.
"Oh," Lavi grinned sheepishly, "I didn't mention that before?"
"No, you didn't mention that! No wonder Bill was so shaken up!" She crossed her arms over her chest. "Why did he attack you? Did you provoke him, Lavi?"
Lavi looked rather hurt. "No, I did not, thank you very much. He said he envied the man who's sold his soul to opium, and I asked, and I quote, so, who owns your soul, sir? I even said sir!"
Lenalee looked thoughtful. "You must have really hit a nerve."
"Yeah," he said, his voice dropping. "He called me a child. Said I didn't know anything about life." Lavi blew out a sigh and cast his gaze to the side. He shook his head. "It was weird. The guy just snapped."
Lenalee watched her partner a moment. His shoulders were slumped forward a degree, his hands hanging between his knees. She remembered then the way he looked when she found him outside the church. And she understood. Lenalee crossed the distance between them quickly and sat to Lavi's left. "Sounds pretty intense," she said, watching his eye, waiting for him to meet her gaze.
"I've seen Akuma with more life in them than that guy," Lavi muttered. He watched his hands a moment longer before straightening his back and looking at Lenalee. "The police were pretty weird, too," he added.
The change of subject certainly seemed to improve his spirits, Lenalee thought. "What about them was weird?"
"They were expecting us," Lavi said. "Which, I s'pose, isn't all that unusual, but even though they let us in to speak with the detainee, they gave us five minutes. The officer was pretty strict about that, too."
Lenalee put a finger on her chin. "That's odd. I wonder what they're hiding." She thought a moment longer but stopped herself before she could get too lost in conjecture. "Well, I think the next step is to find the Doctor. A lady told us that his shop was in the southern part of town, near the ocean." Lenalee reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "It's called Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr," she read from the sheet.
Lavi looked about half confused and half impressed. "Gesundheit?"
Lenalee laughed. "Nawguralek Fejqan ta' Malajr," she repeated. She showed him the piece of paper. "Giorgio wrote down the pronunciation for me right here. He said it means get well soon."