The Fifth Gospel (3 page)

I'm about to shout Simon's name into the wind, when something comes into view. From up here, on the highest terrace, I make out a fence. The eastern border of the pope's property. Just before the gate, the beam of my flashlight tangles with something dark. A silhouette dressed entirely in black.

The wind snaps at the hem of my cassock as I run toward it. The earth is choppy. Clods of mud are turned up, grass roots sticking out like spider legs.

“Simon!” I call toward him. “Are you okay?”

He doesn't answer. He doesn't even move.

I'm lurching toward him now, trying to keep upright in the slicks of mud. The distance between us shrinks. Yet he doesn't speak.

I arrive in front of him. My brother. I lay hands on him, saying, “Are you okay? Tell me you're okay.”

He's soaked and pale. His wet hair is painted to his forehead like a doll's. A black cassock clings to his ropy muscles the way a pelt clings to a racehorse. Cassocks are the old-fashioned robes that all Roman priests once wore, before black pants and black jackets came into style. In this darkness, on my brother's looming figure, it creates an almost ghoulish impression.

“What's wrong?” I say, because he still hasn't answered me.

There's a thin, distant look in his eyes. He's staring at something on the ground.

A long black coat lies in the mud. The overcoat of a Roman priest. A greca, named for its resemblance to a Greek priest's cassock. Underneath it is a hump.

Not in any imagining of this moment have I conceived of something like this. At the end of the hump is a pair of shoes.

“My God,” I whisper. “Who is that?”

Simon's voice is so dry that it cracks.

“I could've saved him,” he says.

“Sy, I don't understand. Tell me what's going on.”

My eyes are drawn to those loafers. There's a hole in one of the soles. A feeling nags at me, like a fingernail scraping against my thoughts.
Stray papers have blown against the high fence that separates the pope's property from the border road. Rain has pasted them to the metal links like papier-mâché.

“He called me,” Simon murmurs. “I knew he was in trouble. I came as soon as I could.”

“
Who
called you?”

But the meaning of the words slowly registers. Now I know the source of that nagging feeling. The hole in those loafers is familiar.

I step back. My stomach tightens. My hands curl up.

“H-how . . . ?” I stammer.

There are suddenly lights moving down the garden road toward us. Pairs of them, no bigger than BBs. When they come closer, they resolve into police cruisers.

Vatican gendarmes.

I kneel down, hands trembling. On the ground beside the body is an open briefcase. The wind continues to tug at the papers inside it.

The gendarmes begin jogging toward us, barking orders to step away from the body. But I reach over and do what every instinct in my body requires. I need to see.

When I pull back Simon's greca, the dead man's eyes are wide. The mouth is cocked. The tongue is stuffed in its cheek. On my friend's face is a dull grimace. In his temple is a black hole leaking a pink nubbin of flesh.

The clouds are pressing in. Simon's hand is on me, pulling me back.
Step away
, he says.

But I can't take my eyes off it. I see suit pockets turned out. A bare patch of white skin where a wristwatch has been removed.

“Come away, Father,” says a gendarme.

Finally I turn. The gendarme has a face like a leather knuckle. From his needlepoint eyes, from his frost of white hair, I recognize him as Inspector Falcone, chief of Vatican police. The man who runs beside John Paul's car.

“Which one of you is Father Andreou?” he says.

Simon steps forward and says, “We both are. I'm the one who called you.”

I stare at my brother, trying to make sense of this.

Falcone points to one of his officers. “Go with Special Agent Bracco. Tell him everything you saw.”

Simon obeys. He reaches into the pocket of the greca for his wallet and phone and passport but leaves his coat draped over the body. Before following the officer, he says, “This man has no next of kin. I need to make sure he receives a proper funeral.”

Falcone squints. It's a queer statement. But coming from a priest, he allows it.

“Father,” he says, “you knew this man?”

Simon answers in a faint voice. “
He was my friend. His name was Ugolino Nogara.”

C
HAPTER
3

T
HE POLICEMAN LEADS
Simon out of earshot to answer questions, and I watch the other gendarmes rope up the clearing. One studies the eight-foot fence beside the public road, trying to understand how an outsider penetrated these gardens. Another stares at a security camera mounted overhead. Most gendarmes were city cops in another life. Rome PD. They can see that Ugo's watch has been stolen, that his wallet is gone, that his briefcase is pried open. Yet they keep working over the details as if something doesn't square.

In these hills, people's love for the Holy Father is fierce. Locals tell stories about popes knocking at their doors, making sure every family in town had a chicken in its pot. Old-timers are named in honor of Pope Pius, who shielded their families from harm in wartime. It's not the walls that protect this place, but the villagers. A robbery here seems impossible.

“Weapon!” I hear one of the officers call.

He's standing at the mouth of a tunnel, a giant thoroughfare built for a Roman emperor as a covered path for after-meal walks. Two more gendarmes jog to the opening, guided by a pair of gardeners. There is grunting. Something large topples over. Whatever the police find, though, isn't the gun they were hoping for.

“False alarm,” one of them barks.

My chest shudders. I close my eyes. A wave of emotion rolls through
me. I've watched men die before. At the hospital where Mona was a nurse, I used to anoint the sick. Say prayers for the dying. And yet I have trouble swallowing back this feeling.

A gendarme comes by, taking pictures of footprints in the mud. There are police everywhere in these gardens now. But my eyes return to Ugo.

What is his special claim on my heart? His exhibit will make him, now posthumously, one of the most talked-about men in Rome, and I'll be able to say I had a hand in that. But what won me over were his battle scars. The eyeglasses he never found time to repair. The holes in his shoes. The awkwardness that evaporated once he began talking about his great project. Even his neurotic, incurable drinking. Nothing on earth mattered to him except his exhibit, and on it he lavished every waking thought. He existed for its future. That, I realize, is the source of my feelings. To this exhibit, Ugo was a father.

Simon returns now, followed by the gendarme who questioned him. My brother's eyes are blank and wet. I wait for him to say something. Instead it's the officer who speaks.

“You may go now,” he says. “Fathers.”

But the body bag has just arrived. Neither of us moves. Two gendarmes lift Ugo on top of it and stretch the sides around him. The zipper makes a sound like velvet ripping. They begin to carry him off when Simon says, “Stop.”

The policemen turn.

Simon lifts a hand in the air and says:

“O Lord, incline Your ear.”

Both gendarmes lower the body bag. Everyone within earshot—every cop, every gardener, every man of every caste—reaches up to remove his hat.

“Humbly I ask,” Simon says, “that You show mercy on the soul of Your servant Ugolino Nogara, whom You commanded to pass out of this world into the region of peace and light. Let him be partaker with Your saints. Through Christ the Lord, amen.”

In my heart, I add those two essential Greek words, the most succinct and powerful of all Christian prayers.

Kyrie, eleison
.

Lord, have mercy.

Hats return to heads. The bag rises once more. Wherever it is going, it goes.

There is an aching stillness between my ribs.

Ugo Nogara is gone.

WHEN WE REACH THE
Fiat, Simon pops open the glove box and feels it out with his fingers. In a faint voice he says, “Where's my pack of cigarettes?”

“I threw it away.”

The screen of my mobile phone says Sister Helena has called twice. Peter must be frantic with worry. But there isn't enough service here to get a connection.

Simon scratches his neck needfully.

“We'll get you some when we get back,” I tell him. “What happened back there?”

He breathes out the corner of his mouth, a plume of invisible smoke. I notice his right hand squeezing the top of his right thigh.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

He shakes his head but readjusts himself to make that leg more comfortable. His left hand reaches into the other sleeve of his cassock, dipping into the French cuffs that priests use like pockets. He's looking for cigarettes again.

I turn the key. When the Fiat comes to life, I lean forward and kiss the rosary Mona hung from the rearview mirror long ago. “We'll be home soon,” I say. “When you're ready to talk, let me know.”

He nods but doesn't speak. Drumming his fingers against his lips, he stares toward the clearing where Ugo lost his life.

WE COULD GET TO
Rome faster driving elephants over the Alps. My father's old Fiat is on its last cylinder, down from the original two. There are lawn mowers with more horsepower these days. The dial of the car stereo has rusted in place at 105 FM, Vatican Radio, which is broadcasting the rosary. Simon takes the string of beads off the mirror and begins to finger it. The voice on the radio says:
Pontius Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified
. Those
words cue the usual prayers—an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, a Glory Be—and the prayers plunge Simon into faraway contemplation.

“Why would anyone rob him?” I ask, unable to bear the silence.

Ugo had almost nothing worth taking. He wore a cheap wristwatch. Carried a wallet whose contents would barely have covered the train fare back to Rome.

“I don't know,” Simon says.

The only time I ever saw Ugo with a wad of cash was after he'd traded money at the airport following a business trip.

“Were you on the same plane home?” I ask.

They've both been working in Turkey.

“No,” Simon says distantly. “He got in two nights ago.”

“What was he doing here?”

My brother glances at me, as if trying to sift meaning from gibberish.

“Preparing his exhibit,” Simon says.

“Why would he have gone walking in the gardens?”

“I don't know.”

There are a handful of museums and archaeological sites among these hills, in the Italian territory surrounding the pope's property. Ugo could've been doing research there, or meeting with another curator. But the outdoor sites would've closed when the storm came through, and Ugo would've been forced to find shelter.

“The villa in the gardens,” I say. “Maybe that's where he was headed.”

Simon nods. The voice on the radio says,
Weaving a crown out of thorns, they placed it on Jesus' head, and a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!”
The next round of prayers starts, and Simon follows it, leaving chips of dirt on the beads as they move under his thumb. He's never been a fastidious priest, but he's always been trim and tidy. As the mud dries on his skin, he stares at the spiderwebs of cracks forming in it, and at the flakes of dust stripped off by the rosary.

I remember the two of us sitting just like this, shortly after Peter's birth, on the night I drove Simon to the airport for his first posting overseas. We listened to the radio, watching planes swim into the air overhead, leaving contrails like angels. My brother believed that diplomacy was God's work, that negotiating tables were where religious hatreds went to die. When he accepted a post in lowly Bulgaria, where
fewer than one in a hundred people is Catholic, Uncle Lucio wrung his hands and said Simon might as well work for the pork lobby in Israel. But three out of four Bulgarians are Orthodox Christians, and ever since my brother's trip to Athens, it had been his project to promote the reunion of the earth's two biggest Churches. That kind of idealism had always been Simon's besetting sin. Priests in our Secretariat of State are promoted on a timetable—bishop in ten years, archbishop in twenty—which explains why so many of the world's hundred fifty cardinals are Secretariat men. But the ones who fall short tend to be the ones waylaid by good intentions. As Lucio warned him, a maharaja has to choose between leading his people and cleaning up after his elephant. In that metaphor, Mona, Peter, and I were the elephant. Simon needed to extricate himself from us before his sense of obligation slowed him down.

But then Simon posted to Turkey, and God tossed him a new charity case: Ugo Nogara. A lost sheep. A fragile soul struggling with the masterpiece of his career. So I can imagine what my brother must feel at this moment. An agony not entirely different from what I would feel if something had happened to Peter.

“Ugo's in a good place,” I remind him.

This is the conviction that helped two boys survive the deaths of their parents. Beyond death is life; beyond suffering, peace. But Simon is still too raw to absorb Ugo's death. Instead of thumbing the rosary, he grips it in his hand.

“What did the gendarme ask you?” I say.

There are wrinkles under his eyes. I can't tell whether he's squinting into the distance or whether a handful of years in the Secretariat has done this to a man only in his early thirties.

“About my phone,” he says.

“Why?”

“To see what time Ugo called me.”

“What else?”

He stares at the phone in his hand. “Whether I saw anyone else in the gardens.”

“Did you?”

He must be swimming in darkness. His only dim answer is, “Nobody.”

Loose thoughts tangle in my mind. Castel Gandolfo goes quiet in the fall. The pope leaves his summer residence and returns to the Vatican,
so the Swiss Guards and gendarmes no longer keep detachments on the grounds. Tourist spots are deserted by evening because the last daily train to Rome leaves before five, and if the pickpockets here are anything like the ones in Rome, they become more aggressive once the easy prey is gone. For a second I'm haunted by the image of Ugo in the rain, in the empty town square, hunted down by one of them.

“There was a carabinieri station right across the road,” I say. “Why didn't Ugo call them?”

“I don't know.”

Maybe he
did
call them, but they refused to cross the Vatican border. And if Ugo called our Vatican emergency number, 112, I doubt it would've worked out here.

“What did he say to you on the phone?” I ask.

Simon lifts a hand. “Please, Alex. I need some time.”

He retreats into himself, as if his memory of the phone call is especially painful. Simon must've been en route from the airport when it came. Maybe he told his driver to take an immediate detour, but it still wasn't enough.

I remember how he flew home right away when I called him with the news that Mona had left me. He vowed to stay as long as it took for me to feel human again. It took six weeks. Lucio begged him to return to the embassy. Instead, Simon helped me canvass Rome with flyers, helped me phone relatives and friends, helped take care of Peter while I meandered self-indulgently through the city, visiting the places where I had fallen in love with my wife. Later, when he returned to Bulgaria, our mailbox was flooded with envelopes addressed to Peter, each containing photos Simon had shot around the capital: a man losing his toupee in a city breeze; an accordion player with a monkey; a squirrel in a mountain of chestnuts. They became the wallpaper of Peter's room. The ritual of reading the letters became my new beginning with my son. That was how I learned what Lucio had meant. While Simon snapped photos, lesser priests were climbing the ladder. Finally I told him that Peter and I had turned the corner. No more letters. Please.

The city lights have begun to rain color on us. Simon's eyes are moving, sizing up the vista beyond the windshield. It's been more than a month since he saw this skyline, more than a month since he breathed Roman air. Tonight was supposed to be a homecoming.

Quietly I say, “Did you see any of the garden gates left unlocked?”

But he doesn't seem to hear me.