Cecilian Vespers (25 page)

“Com’ è bello, eh Lina?”
she called out to a friend.

“È carino, si. Come un angelo!”
Lina agreed. If I heard one more person in my life say I looked angelic, I was going to grow a Mephistophelean goatee. But I’d do that later. In the meantime, if Isabella liked the look of me, who was I to complain?

The party went on till the small hours of the morning. My last sighting of Burke was him reclining on a sofa with Susanna kneeling beside him, taking sips of a golden liquid and transfusing it directly from her mouth into his. When I blearily asked him whether we had
any duties scheduled in the city in the morning, all he said, in a languid voice I barely recognized, was “Let Rome in Tiber melt.”

I woke up alone in Isabella’s room when the sun rose, and went out to find her. She was in the kitchen making coffee. There was nobody else in the apartment, and I didn’t ask where my travelling companion had gone. If Mark Antony had melted into the arms of Cleopatra, it was none of my affair.

He did not turn up that afternoon for our planned excursion to the Vatican’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum, so I made the short walk alone from our hotel in the Via Tunisi across the Viale Vaticano to the museums. I went inside and admired the gleaming treasures within. It wasn’t long before I spotted a piece of jewellery that was exotic and yet familiar. Familiar from Zamira Lule Halili’s description. It was a bright gold necklace with a round medallion and what looked like gold vessels — Zamira had suggested vials of poison — one on either side of the medallion. They hung from tubes of gold that were arranged in a semicircle as if they were tied around a woman’s neck on a piece of string.

The information card told me this piece was from the Etruscan period, anywhere from three to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. The Etruscans were described as brilliant goldsmiths, admired particularly for their elaborate technique of granulation: the side-by-side application of tiny beads of gold. This piece was acquired somehow by a Roman noblewoman. She gave it to her bishop along with all her other earthly wealth when she converted to Christianity. The woman was martyred for her faith; her jewels and other possessions were handed down through the centuries until they became part of the Vatican treasure trove. No one could say how much something like this was worth because its history rendered it priceless. I had no idea whether I was looking at the genuine article or a brilliant fake. But the write-up said the Etruscans’ work had never been equalled; close examination by an expert would quickly tell the tale.

Isabella had invited me to spend New Year’s Eve at the trattoria and promised to save me a table on a night when many Romans partake of gargantuan servings of food and drink. There was still no sign of Burke, so I got scrubbed and spiffed up and went by myself. Lo and behold, Isa’s sister, Susanna, was nowhere to be seen; it seemed she had taken a couple of days off. I ate too much, drank too much, played my blues harp, sang till my voice was gone, and joined in with the Roman revellers at the other tables. Isabella and I celebrated the arrival of 1992 together in a small, cramped room upstairs, to the sound of fireworks going off all over the city. We returned to the festivities and partied till it was time for me to roll back to the hotel.

Burke did not make an appearance on New Year’s Day. There was no answer when I knocked on his hotel room door in the afternoon, but I noticed that the
Non Disturbare
sign never left the doorknob. Room service trays were stacked outside the door, piled with dinner plates and wine bottles. I did a bit more sightseeing in the city. I stood where Antony had stood when he cut such a
bella figura
at the Forum before losing himself in the sensuous East. I visited the Mausoleum of Augustus and his Altar of Peace, with its bas reliefs of Augustus, Agrippa, Tiberius, and the wives and children of the famous and infamous of ancient Rome.

I tracked down Kitty Curran and took her out for a ravishing, and ravishingly expensive, three-hour New Year’s dinner at Les Etoiles, the rooftop restaurant of the Atlante Star Hotel. She didn’t ask where Brennan was, which must have made her the most discreet person in Vatican City. The view of St. Peter’s dome at night was magnificent, though Kitty made a crack about never getting away from the office. Like so many Irish, she was a born storyteller, and she kept me mesmerized with her tales of the Vatican and the wider world.

I asked her if she had ever met Reinhold Schellenberg. “I met him years ago, on more than one occasion, but we never had a conversation. I can’t say I knew him. I wish to God I could help you solve this.”

“Me, too. If the Vatican control freak you mentioned, Savo, isn’t satisfied with the progress of the investigation he may swoop down on us yet. And Brennan won’t be fit company if his reaction the other day is any indication!”

“Oh, Brennan will be crabbed indeed if he has Gino Savo breathing
down his neck! The funny part is that, in some ways, they are two of a kind. Both very intelligent, good at what they do, men of the world. Brennan didn’t come to Holy Orders a blushing virgin. Neither did Gino. He was married. His wife and daughter died. I don’t know what happened. But Gino entered the seminary after that.”

“And he’s an ill-tempered, domineering despot who —”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Monty! I don’t think Gino ever intends to throw a tantrum; he just can’t help himself at times. He had a bit of a nervous breakdown at one point, so people make allowances for him. He really is very highly regarded here. I mean, to be considered for the job of archbishop of Genoa, somebody has to like you!”

“Still and all, we’d be better off without Father Savo’s intervention.”

“Oh, my dear, yes!”

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

As we were finishing our espresso, she said: “I may not see you again before you go. Take care of him for me.”

“Take care …”

“Of my dear friend Brennan.”

“He doesn’t seem to need much in the way of care; he’s a pretty self-sufficient kind of guy.”

“Do you think? Don’t be fooled, Monty. Look around you.” She nodded in the direction of the Vatican. “Observe the priests when you’re over there. Some of them look twenty years younger than they really are. This is the life for some. The priestly life does not sit as easily on the shoulders of others. Like Brennan.”

“All the more reason for you to come to Halifax and spend some time with him.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Our days in Italy were numbered, and I was anxious to get on with our investigation in other parts of the country. It was the morning after my dinner with Kitty and it was time I intruded on Burke. I knocked on his door. No answer. I went down for breakfast, took a walk around the block, went to the desk, told them I had forgotten my key, and went back upstairs with the key to Burke’s room. I
ignored the
Non Disturbare
sign, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. The room of the normally fastidious priest reeked of booze, smoke, and sex. There were empty bottles on the tables, and an overflowing ashtray. The bed looked as if a cyclone had hit it, and clothing was strewn over chairs and lampshades. He obviously wasn’t here, or he’d have cleaned — Jesus! My heart took a leap in my chest. He was on the floor; he wasn’t moving. Was he … I started towards his body, towards him, then I hesitated. He was face down on the carpet, with his arms flung out wide on either side. He was wearing some kind of stole, part of his vestments. I looked up then and saw on an otherwise empty table a small monstrance, a gold receptacle shaped like a blazing sun, used for the consecrated host. He must have been saying Mass. Was he now prostrate before the sacrament in an act of adoration, humility, penitence? I watched him for a moment longer, saw his rib cage move, so I knew he was breathing. I backed out of the room.

I was concerned but I am also discreet, so I left him alone. He finally surfaced that evening, showered, shaved, and dressed in fresh civilian clothes. But he was half-blitzed when he came to my room to pick me up for dinner. We walked a few blocks to a tiny, quiet restaurant and bar, and sat by the window. We watched the parade of Romans go by, men in camel or black cashmere topcoats, women in party dresses and shoes that cost a month’s rent. Dinner consisted of
antipasti, insalata caprese, linguini marinara alla pesce
with scallops, salmon, shrimps, and all kinds of other delicacies that, in Burke’s case, went to waste. The meal, at least for us, also included copious amounts of alcohol. His face was drawn, and he had dark circles under his black eyes; he looked as if he hadn’t slept in a year.

“Is guilt eating away at you, Brennan? Are you in fear of the fires of hell?” I asked lightly. “Kind of a
Portrait of the Artist
damnation scene?”

“Guilt? Of course I feel guilt, as I do any time I break my vows. And use someone else for my own ends.”

“Well, it’s not as if it wasn’t mutual.”

“And when you suspect you’re using the person as a substitute for —” he paused for a mouthful of wine “— for someone else, then it’s all the worse.”

“You mean if you can’t have Zamira Lule Halili!”

He looked at me as if he had no idea who I was talking about. Then he seemed to snap back into focus. “Zamira. Right,” he said.

If it wasn’t Zamira he really wanted, who was it?
I didn’t have time to speculate before he spoke again: “Anyway, all this is beside the point.”

“Which is what?”

He waved my question away and lit up a cigarette. He blew the smoke out angrily, looked at the cigarette in his hand, and stubbed it out. “It’s not guilt, fear of damnation, any of that. It’s something worse.”

“What could possibly be worse than burning in eternal hellfire?” His exhausted eyes looked away from me into the darkness of the Roman night. I thought he had forgotten my presence but then he spoke again. “Oldest story in the book, a recurring nightmare.”

“About what?”

“I dream of the Mass. But I’m cut off from it. I can’t say it. I’m in the congregation, in the first row. I try to get up to the altar but I can’t move. Ever. And I know it will be like that for me
per omnia saecula saeculorum
. For all eternity. The Mass goes on and doesn’t reach me. I don’t think it’s a dream at all; it’s too literal. It’s more like I’m lying there thinking it when I’m awake. That I’ll fuck up and lose my priest-hood. If that happened I couldn’t —”

“No one’s going to — what do they do? — fire you, or take away your privileges, over a couple of nights in the crib with a woman.”

“Nobody would have to. I’d lose it on my own. I’d no longer be able to celebrate the Eucharist. The loss — it’s beyond me to explain it to you, Monty. Only if you were a priest would you understand. Not even every priest would understand. When I say Mass — not every time but most times — it’s as if — it’s not
as if
, it
is
— the veil between this world and the unseen world drops away. The eternal, the ineffable, the heavenly, comes down to earth, is present on the altar, like beams of pure light, or unearthly harmonies, only more intense. Sometimes I can barely come back from it and finish the Mass. This is incomprehensible to you; it’s not your fault. But your daughter knows. Normie sees it, she feels it. On those occasions when you or … or Maura bring her to Mass and I look at her, I know she’s having a direct, an unmediated experience, even if just for an instant. Oh, Christ.” He patted his pockets. “Am I out of smokes now?”

He muttered and cursed about that, got up and bought a pack of cigarettes, returned to the table, and said no more about the subject that was consuming him. We drank silently and excessively, then staggered to our hotel.

Chapter 9

Der Gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand und keine Qual rühret sie an
.
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them.
— Johannes Brahms,
Ein Deutsches Requiem
, Opus 45

When I awoke in the morning, there was a note shoved under my door. “Mass 10:30 a.m., San Gregorio dei Muratori, Via Leccosa, 75. Taxi. Bring camera.”

I got ready and shoved my little camera in my pocket. Fighting down the nausea induced by a night of drinking way beyond my considerable capacity, I went downstairs for breakfast, then walked out of the hotel and up the stairs facing the wall of Vatican City. A taxi approached, and I sleep-walked towards it. I passed the driver the paper Burke had left with the address of the church. The cabbie stared at the address, jabbed it with his finger a couple of times, and looked back at me:
“Dov’è?”

I shrugged, leaned back, and closed my eyes. I felt the car surge forward and reel around several turns. My stomach followed suit. Then we stopped, and I prepared to get out, but I saw that the driver had pulled up beside a bar and was consulting a well-thumbed street directory. Leave it to Burke to come up with an address unknown even to a Roman cab driver. I closed my eyes again and felt myself drifting off to sleep, until the cab took off like a rocket. “Via Leccosa,
settantacinque
,”

I heard before we squealed to a halt. I paid the driver, got out, and only then noticed that there was no church in sight. The cabbie had left me at the entrance to a short, narrow alleyway lined with high tenements. I walked down the alley, hoping to ask someone for directions, but there was nobody in sight. One of the apartment buildings was number 75, so I pushed open the door and did a double take. There before me was a magnificent altar carved out of stone. Above the altar, light blazed in from an oval stained-glass window depicting the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. There were only a few benches in the fore-shortened space of the chapel. I heard Gregorian chant and turned to see three priests in the choir loft, singing from large leather-bound books. Then Burke emerged from the sacristy, wearing his vestments, a biretta on his head. Two younger priests and two altar boys served at the traditional Latin Mass. I was handed a
Kyriale
and I chanted the responses along with the others in the small congregation. I was a bit late falling to my knees at the “incarnatus est” during the “Credo” but, other than that, my old altar-boy training came back, and it felt as if a quarter century of English Masses had never been.