The Fifth Gospel (2 page)

C
HAPTER
2

I
DRIVE TO CASTEL
Gandolfo in the teeth of a north-riding storm. The rain is angry, hopping off the cobblestones like fleas. By the time I reach the highway, the windshield is just a drum the sky is beating. On all sides, cars slow up and pull onto shoulders. As the constellation of red lights vanishes, my thoughts turn to my brother.

When he was young, Simon was the boy who would climb a tree in a lightning storm to fetch a stray cat. One night, on the beach in Campania, I watched him swim into a school of glowing jellyfish to bring back a girl who got caught in a riptide. That winter, when he was fifteen and I was eleven, I went to meet him at the sacristy of Saint Peter's, where he was an altar boy. He was supposed to take me for a haircut in town, but on our way out of the basilica, a bird flew through a window in the dome, two hundred feet up, and we heard the thump of it landing on the balcony. Something inside Simon needed to see it, so we ran up those six million stairs, and at the top we reached a fingernail ledge of marble. It looped in a circle over the high altar, with nothing but a guardrail between us and thin air. On the ledge was the dove, flopping in circles, coughing little ink-spots of blood. Simon walked over and picked it up. That was when someone shouted,
Stop! Don't come any closer!

Across the dome, leaning on the rail, was a man. He was staring at us with red eyes. Suddenly, Simon went running at him.

No, signore!
he shouted.
Don't!

Then the man lifted his leg over the rail.

Signore!

Not even if God had given Simon wings could he have gotten there in time. The man leaned forward and let go. We watched him drop through Saint Peter's like a pin. I heard a tour guide down there saying
bronze stolen from the Pantheon
, and still the man was falling, smaller than an eyelash now. Finally there was a scream, and a little starburst of blood. I sat down. The joints in my legs had buckled. I can't remember moving again until Simon came to pick me up.

All my life, I've never understood why God sent a bird through that window. Maybe it was to teach Simon the feeling of something slipping through his fingers. Our father died the following year, so maybe it was a lesson that couldn't wait. But the last image I have in my memory of that day, before the workmen hustled everyone out of the church, is of Simon on that ledge, arms outstretched, frozen, as if trying to put the bird back into the air. As if it were just a matter of getting a vase back on a shelf.

That afternoon, the priests reconsecrated Saint Peter's, the way they always do when a pilgrim jumps. But no one can reconsecrate a child. Two weeks later, our choirmaster slapped a boy for being out of tune, and Simon jumped out of line and slapped him back. For three days they canceled choir practice while my parents tried to knuckle Simon into an apology. The soul of obedience he had been, all his life. Now he said he would rather quit than apologize. In the blueprint of how we became the men we are, that is where I locate the foundation. Everything I know about my brother rises unwavering from that point.

The decade of Simon's life between the beginning of college and the beginning of his diplomatic training were hard ones in Italy. The bombings and assassinations of our childhood had mostly ended, but there were volcanic protests in Rome against a bankrupt government that was collapsing under its own corruption. During college, Simon marched with the university students. During seminary, he marched in solidarity with the workers. By the time he was invited to enter the diplomatic ranks, I thought those days were behind us. Then, three years ago, in May of 2001, John Paul decided to travel to Greece.

It was the first trip by any pope to our homeland in thirteen centuries, and our countrymen weren't happy to see him. Nearly all Greeks are Orthodox, and John Paul wanted to end the schism between our
Churches. Simon went there to see it happen. But hatreds are something my brother has never understood. From our father he inherited an almost Protestant immunity to the verdict of history. Orthodox blame Catholics for mistreating them in every war from the Crusades to World War Two. They blame Catholics for luring Orthodox away from their ancestral Church for a new hybrid form of Catholicism. The mere existence of Eastern Catholics is a provocation to some Orthodox, yet Simon couldn't fathom why his own brother, a Greek Catholic priest, wouldn't join him in Athens for the trip.

The trouble arrived even before Simon did. When news spread that John Paul was going to touch down on Hellenic soil, Greek Orthodox monasteries rang funeral bells. Hundreds of Orthodox took to the streets in protest, carrying banners that read
ARCH-HERETIC
and
TWO-HORNED MONSTER OF ROME
. Newspapers carried stories about holy icons that had begun bleeding. A national day of mourning was declared. Simon, who had made arrangements to sleep in the rectory of my father's old Greek Catholic church, arrived to find that Orthodox reactionaries had vandalized the doors with spray paint. He said the police wouldn't help. My brother had finally found the underdog he was born to defend.

That night, a small group of Orthodox hard-liners broke into the church and disrupted the liturgy. They made the great mistake of stripping the parish priest of his cassock and stomping on the antimension, the sacred cloth that makes a table an altar.

My brother is almost six and a half feet tall. His sense of obligation toward the weak and helpless is intensified by the knowledge that he is larger and stronger than anyone he meets. Simon vaguely remembers pushing an Orthodox man out of the sanctuary in an attempt to save the Greek Catholic priest. The Orthodox man says Simon threw him. Greek police say he broke the man's arm. Simon was arrested. His new employer—the Holy See Secretariat of State—had to negotiate his immediate return to Rome. That was why Simon never saw firsthand how John Paul dealt with the same hostilities, with much better success.

The Greek Orthodox bishops made a point of snubbing John Paul. He didn't complain. They insulted him. He didn't defend himself. They demanded he apologize for Catholic sins from centuries ago. And John Paul, speaking on behalf of one billion living souls and the untold Catholic dead, apologized. The Orthodox were so amazed that they agreed to
do something they had refused to do until that moment: to stand beside him in prayer.

I've always hoped that John Paul's performance in Athens was a corrective to Simon's behavior. Another lesson sent down from heaven. Since then, Simon has been a changed man. That is what I tell myself, again and again, as I drive south from Rome into the heart of the storm.

IN THE DISTANCE, CASTEL
Gandolfo comes into view: a long hilltop breaching over the weird prairie of golf courses and used-car lots that yawn south from the outskirts of Rome. Two thousand years ago, this was the playground of emperors. The popes have been summering here for only a few centuries, but it's enough to qualify the land as an official extension of our country.

As I round the hill, I see a carabinieri squad car at the bottom of the cliff—Italian policemen from the station across the border line, sharing a cigarette while the storm rages. But Italy's laws have no force where I'm going. There's no sign of Vatican police in this slashing rain, and their absence allows the pinch in my chest to begin to loosen.

I park my Fiat where the hillside sinks into Lake Albano, and before stepping out in the rain I dial a number on my phone. On the fifth ring, a gruff voice picks up.

“Pronto.”

“Little Guido?” I say.

He snorts. “Who's this?”

“Alex Andreou.”

Guido Canali is an old childhood acquaintance, the son of a Vatican turbine mechanic. In a country where the only qualification for most jobs is blood relation to someone else with a job, Guido has been unable to find better work than shoveling manure at the pontifical dairy on this hilltop. He's always looking for a handout. And though it's no accident our paths don't cross anymore, I'm looking for some help of my own.

“It's not Little Guido anymore,” he says. “My old man died last year.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“That makes one of us. To what do I owe the call?”

“I'm in town and need a favor. Could you open the gate for me?”

From his surprised tone, he has no inkling about Simon. More good news. We negotiate a deal: two tickets to the upcoming exhibit, which Guido knows I can get from Uncle Lucio. Even the proudest sloth in our country wants to see what my friend Ugo has done. When I hang up, I follow the dark trail up the hill to our meeting place, where the wind sharpens to the high hissing sound I heard behind Simon's phone call.

I'm surprised—and at first, relieved—to see no signs of trouble here. Every time I've collected my brother from the police in the past, he's been part of some agitation. But there are no villagers picketing in the square here, no Vatican employees marching for better wages. At the north end of the village, the pope's summer palace looks abandoned. The two domes of the Vatican Observatory rise from its roof like lumps on the head of the cartoon characters Peter watches on television. Nothing is amiss here. Nothing even seems alive.

A private walkway leads from the palace to the papal gardens, and at the garden gate I see a pixie of cigarette light hovering in a black fist.

“Guido?”

“Hell of a time for a visit,” the cigarette says, then drops in a puddle to die. “Follow me.”

As my eyes adjust, I see that he looks exactly like the late Big Guido: pug-faced, with a broad beetlelike back. Manual labor has made him a man. The Vatican directory is littered with staff Simon and I knew as children, but my brother and I are almost the only priests. Ours is a caste system in which men proudly replace the fathers and grandfathers who shined floors or fixed furniture before them. It can be hard, though, to watch old playmates rise to a higher station, and there's a familiar tone in Guido's voice when he opens the metal lock, points to his truck, and says, “Get in,
Father
.”

The gates here are to keep out the riffraff, and the hedges are to keep out their eyes. An Italian village sits on either side of our land, but you'd never know it. The spine of this hill, half a mile long, is a private wonderland for the pope. His property at Castel Gandolfo is bigger than the entire Vatican, but nobody lives here, only some gardeners and workmen and the old Jesuit astronomer who sleeps during the day. The real inhabitants are potted fruit trees and avenues of stone pines, flower beds measured in acres, and marble statues left behind by pagan emperors, now mounted in the gardens to give John Paul a smile on his
summer walks. From up here, the view is from lake to sea. As we drive down the unpaved garden path, there isn't another living thing in sight.

“Where were you looking to go?” Guido says.

“Just drop me in the gardens.”

He raises an eyebrow. “In the middle of
this
?”

The storm rages. His interest piqued by the strangeness of my request, Guido turns on the CB radio to see if there is any chatter. Yet it, too, is silent.

“My girl works down there,” he says, lifting a finger off the wheel to point. “In the olive groves.”

I say nothing. I give tours of this place to new recruits at my old seminary, so in daylight I would know the landscape better. But in the darkness, in this driving rain, all I can make out is the strip of road before the headlights. As we approach the gardens, there are no trucks, no police cars, no gardeners with flashlights sloping through the rain.

“She drives me up a wall,” Guido says, shaking his head. “But Alex, the ass on this girl.” He whistles.

The deeper we drive into these shadows, the more it blooms in me that something is deeply wrong. Simon must be alone in the rain. For the first time, I consider the possibility that he's hurt. That he's been in some kind of accident. Yet on the phone he mentioned the police, not an ambulance. I replay our conversation in my mind, searching for something I misunderstood.

Guido's truck jackknifes up a road through the gardens and comes to the edge of a clearing.

“Far enough,” I say. “I'll get out here.”

Guido looks around. “Here?”

I'm already descending.

“Don't forget our deal, Alex,” he calls out. “Two tickets to opening night.”

But I'm too preoccupied to respond. When Guido is gone, I take out my phone and call Simon. The coverage up here is so spotty that there's no reliable connection. Just for an instant, though, I hear another mobile phone ring.

I move toward the sound, fanning my flashlight into the distance. The hillside has been carved into a vast staircase, three monolithic terraces that descend one after another in the direction of the far-off sea.
Every inch is planted with flowers arranged in circles within octagons within squares, not a petal out of place. The space up here is infinite. It creates a wild anxiety in me.