The Fifth Gospel (46 page)

I don't know. If the reason is good enough, it could be anything.

“Father Andreou, tell me.”

But at that moment, my phone rings. And I recognize the number.

“Michael?” I say, answering immediately.

“Alex, I was on an airplane. That's why I couldn't pick up.”

“What?”

“I'm at the airport now.”

“Which airport?”

“Timbuktu. What do you think? I'll be downtown in an hour. If Simon's lawyer wants to talk, he'd better be ready to talk.”

Is that him?
Mignatto mouths.

I nod.

“Let me speak to him.”

I hand over the phone.

“Father Black?” Mignatto asks.

He pulls a pen from the French cuff of his cassock and flips back the evidence folder to write inside the cover. Behind him, trucks come and go from the museums. I think again of what Archbishop Nowak said. Opening night. Just twenty-four hours away.

“Will you testify?” Mignatto is saying. “How soon can you be ready?”

I stare at the folder in his hand. At the photos he was asking the clerk
about. In one of them is Ugo's phone charger. In another, the scrap of stationery scrawled with my phone number.

“We need to discuss what happened to you. Can we meet at my office tonight?”

Beside them are the evidence bags I couldn't examine before Gianni hurried me out of the impound garage. A pack of cigarettes. The sun-faded Vatican ID Ugo probably flashed to the Swiss Guards every time he drove into the country. A key chain. Nothing big enough to match the impression under the driver's seat of Ugo's car.

“He can't be present when we meet. That's not part of the procurator's job.”

My jaw goes slack. The fob of the key chain: it's oval, engraved with three letters and three numbers. DSM 328.

I pull the folder out of Mignatto's hand. He bobbles the phone and glowers at me.

DSM. Domus Sanctae Marthae. The Latin name of the Casa. The three digits are the room number. A sliver is missing from the metal fob.

This can't be Ugo's key. He didn't need a hotel room. So this must belong to whoever broke into the Alfa.

“I didn't hear that. You're breaking up. Say again?”

I close my eyes. I'm deceiving myself. The killer wouldn't have left behind his own key. So whose is it?

Mignatto takes back the folder to write more information on its cover. I wonder why Michael is being so forthcoming. It's unlike him.

The answer comes a moment later, when Mignatto hands back the phone and says, “Father Black wants to speak to you again.”

“Listen up,” Michael says. “The lawyer tells me you can't be at our little meeting tonight, so there's something you and I need to talk about in private. Meet me at Saint Peter's afterward.”

“In the square?”

“No, in the right transept. I'll leave the north door open. You know the one I mean?”

Mignatto is trying to overhear. I step away.

“What time?” I say.

“Let's make it eight. And if I'm not there, you need to find yourself a new witness tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Eight o'clock. Got it?”

When I hang up, Mignatto says, “You're not to meet with him. Understood? Not outside my presence.”

I ignore the question. “Good night, Monsignor,” I say. “I'll see you in the morning.”

I CALL BROTHER SAMUEL'S
apartment and ask him to babysit Peter a while longer. Then I call Mona.

“I can't make it tonight after all,” I say.

She must hear something in my voice. “Is everything all right? Do you want to talk about it?”

I don't. But the words trickle out.

“I'm angry. Simon lied to me.”

Now the silence. The silence that reveals how, in her heart, she still doubts him.

“Lied about what?” she says finally.

“Never mind.”

More silence.

At last she says, “I'm at my parents' place. I can meet you anywhere you want, just tell me where.”

“I can't. Just . . . talk to me.”

“How's Peter?” she asks.

I close my eyes. “I've been at the courthouse all day. Brother Samuel says he's fine.”

“Alex, you don't sound good. Let me help you.”

I'm sitting on the bench in the tribunal courtyard. The last commuters are queued at the gas station. Over the roofs of their cars I stare at the Casa.

“I just need some time to think,” I say. “I'll call you tomorrow.” I hesitate. “I'm sorry about tonight.”

Before she can answer, I hang up. The ache that has been building for hours is now painful. When Simon and I used to feel this way after Mamma died, we would run cross-country and back. The hills. The steps. The shadows of the walls. We would run until we were buckled over, heaving on the ground, cooling ourselves in the overspray of
the fountains. I close my eyes.
Give him back to me, Lord. I need my brother.

I count the Casa windows. I know which room is 328. It's only a floor beneath where Peter and I were staying, but along the far side of the building. By my count, a corner room. I'm staring at its west-facing windows right now.

Maybe tomorrow will be the day. Maybe that's Boia's plan. To keep Simon until the exhibit is over.

The west-facing windows have their shutters closed. Other rooms have their drapes opened, but the occupant in that one room wants no air at all. Wants no view of the Roman afternoon. I open my phone and dial the front desk.

“Sister, please connect me to three twenty-eight.”

“Just a moment.”

The phone rings without stop. Whoever's up there doesn't want to talk, either.

I hang up. The last car drives off from the gas station. The air becomes quiet again. A breeze snaps the Vatican flag on the pole above the Casa entrance.

I stand. With a feathery feeling in my chest I begin walking toward those doors.

AT THE DESK, THE
nun surprises me.

“Welcome, Father. How are you?”

She says the words in Greek.

Instinct tells me to respond in the same tongue. “Very well, Sister. Thank you.”

“Are you enjoying your stay in our country?”

“Very much.”

“How may I help you?”

“Just returning to my room.” I flash my old room key and walk on.

But the security has been heightened since I left. A notice in the lobby says that each elevator will now serve only a specific floor of the building. I overhear the elevator operators asking passengers to show their keys before boarding the car.

I take the stairs instead. But just as I'm about to open the door to the third floor, a voice comes from overhead.

“Father, you've got the wrong floor. Up here.”

A Swiss Guard comes double-stepping down from the fourth-floor landing. Fortunately, we don't know each other.

“May I see your key?” he says.

He seems to have been posted just outside the fire door.

When I show him, he nods. The key to the room Peter and I shared says 435.

“Follow me, Father,” he says in slow Italian. And with an exaggerated wave of the hand, he leads me upstairs.

THE FOURTH FLOOR BRIMS
with activity. There are priests everywhere. I'm astonished. Every single one is dressed in Eastern attire. These must be Simon's Orthodox. I count eleven of them standing in the hall. A twelfth priest opens his door, says something to a colleague outside, then turns back. His language is unfamiliar to me.
Serbian?
I wonder.
Bulgarian?

Then it hits me: at least a few of these other priests must be Greek. The nun at the front desk, without knowing which country I came from, welcomed me in Greek. So Simon must've traveled there, too. He must've spread his invitations in the fatherland.

I wonder how many countries he visited in all. How many priests, from how many nations, are staying on this hall. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before.

I glance back at the Swiss Guard outside the fire door. Another thought settles over me. Only the pope controls the Swiss. Only John Paul and Nowak could've sent these soldiers here. They must know the scope of what Simon has done.

For a moment, all I can do is watch. The groups of priests form and re-form. Orthodox have no central power, no pope as Catholics do. The patriarch of Constantinople is their honorary leader, but really the Orthodox Church is a federation of national churches, many with patriarchs of their own. The mere idea of this kind of clerical democracy, with no bishop taking orders from any other, is a Catholic's nightmare, a recipe for chaos. Yet for two thousand years, the bonds of tradition and communion have made Orthodox priests from every corner of Chris
tendom into brothers. Even in the nervous atmosphere of this hallway, with its air of expectation, men cross boundaries and greet each other. They speak, sometimes fluently, sometimes haltingly, in one another's languages. There are almost as many smiles as beards. I feel as if I'm witnessing the ancient Church, the world the apostles left behind. I feel strangely, deeply at home.

Some of them come toward me en masse. I realize I'm standing in front of the elevator. The doors open, and I step aside. Three of them filter in, speaking a language I don't recognize. I think I overhear the word for evening prayer, which must be why they're going downstairs. But one of them, in Italian, instructs the operator to hold the door. More are coming.

Now a room opens down the hall. A young priest comes out. His beard is thin. He idles by the doorway, staring back into it. And in my gut I feel a thrill. I know what this means. He's waiting for his boss.

I try not to stare as the bishop—fifty or sixty years old, with an impressive belly and a handsome loose cassock—comes striding out. Just as Gianni said, he wears the Orthodox stovepipe hat. The remaining priests in the hallway make room for him as he walks toward the elevator. The operator reaches for his key—but the bishop shakes his head. Another priest in the car says, “Wait, please. More coming.”

I peer down the corridor. From the same open door, another bishop has appeared, this one wearing a gold chain with a painted portrait of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary. Even at a distance I can see the glitter of something on his stovepipe hat: the tiny cross that signifies a high-­ranking bishop or metropolitan. This bishop is more senior, surely at least seventy years old. He walks with a stoop. His aides travel on either side of him, minding that his cassock doesn't catch under his feet.

Yet even now, the door behind him doesn't shut. And suddenly, there's a commotion. For some reason, the priests in the hallway begin murmuring. Some of them gather outside the open door, stealing looks inside. The rest of them separate to the far walls of the corridor. They are parting like the sea, because someone else is beginning to emerge.

A man in white.

C
HAPTER
30

A
SHIVER GOES THROUGH
me. All through the hallway, priests bow. My eyes must be playing tricks.

As the man approaches, he comes into focus. It isn't John Paul. It's someone even more ancient. His eyes are black smudges. And he has a beard.

The beard encircles his long, drawn face like a wreath of white fog. It extends down to the middle of his chest, where he carries something in his hand: a white stovepipe hat with a small jeweled cross. As he passes the other priests, he lifts a hand in blessing.

I'm frozen. I know who this is.

In poor, accented Italian, the man says to me, “God bless you.”

“And you,” I fumble as two priests exit the elevator to make sure he has room to enter it.

Simon has done the impossible. The tradition of Romanian Orthodoxy is that its highest leader may wear white. Before my eyes is one of the nine patriarchs of the Orthodox Church.

I begin hurrying down the stairs. The elevator must be going to the ground floor, to the private chapel attached to the Casa.

And then I realize: I can't follow them there. I would barely be able to communicate with these men. They might mistake me for a brother since my cassock and beard look Orthodox, but because of our schism, the Orthodox Church forbids me—a Catholic—from receiving the
Eucharist with them. Even joining them for evening prayer without revealing who I am would be an act of bad faith.

Instead, I take the stairs no farther than the third-floor landing and slip inside. My nerves are ringing. I lean against the wall, wondering how this could've gone so wrong. How something so beautiful, so historic, could've cost Ugo his life. How Simon could lose his priesthood over it.

Here on the third floor, a door opens. A Roman Catholic priest steps out of his room. He walks toward the elevator. As he presses the button, he takes a second look at me.

I know this look too well. Though I have more in common with him than I have with any Orthodox upstairs—I'm a Catholic; I follow the pope; this priest and I can receive the Eucharist in each other's churches—he seems to think I'm out of place.

“Good evening, Father,” I say in Italian to assuage his concern. Or maybe, in some dark way, to assuage mine. Then I continue on toward room 328.

At the door, I calm myself by repeating the Jesus Prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner
.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner
.

Nothing can happen to me here. This hall, this building, is full of men who would come running at the first shout for help. Whoever's inside, I'll invite him out to talk. Out; not back into his room.

I knock.

No answer.

I stare at the peephole, wondering if I'm being watched. Stepping forward, I knock again.

Still no answer.

I pull out my phone and call the front desk. “Sister, could you connect me to three twenty-eight?”

I hear the phone ring on the other side of the door. Standing in front of the peephole, I hold my phone in the air and point to it. We can talk this way, too. It makes no difference to me.

But no one responds.

Outside, through the large window at the end of the hall, the sun is setting. Something occurs to me. I glance down.

There's no light beneath the door. That's why the shutters are closed. Nobody's home.

I call the lobby again and say, “Sister, I'm coming down to meet a visitor in the dining hall. Could someone tidy my room while I'm gone? It's three twenty-eight.”

“Father, I believe your visitor just rang up. I'll send the housekeeper right away. I'd say the tidying is a bit overdue.”

I thank her, then wait near the elevator until the nun with the cleaning cart arrives. When she unlocks the room, I follow her inside.

“What in heavens?” says the nun in alarm.

For an instant, it's dark. From the outer courtyard comes a pale miasma of electric light, glowing through the shutter slats. Then the nun turns on the lights.

No one else is here.

“Sister,” I murmur absently, surveying the room, “don't mind me. I left something behind.”

It's almost identical to the room Peter and I shared. A narrow bed with a simple camelback headboard. A nightstand. A crucifix.

I sit at the desk and pretend to make notations, waiting for her to leave. She closes the closet and gathers up a pair of sheets lying on the ground beside the bed. The priest in this room might be a floor-sleeper like Simon. But the bed looks slept-in, too.

There must be two of them staying here. And there must be a reason the room is overdue for cleaning.

As the housekeeper makes the bed and empties the trash cans, I scan the floor. By the lamp is an old piece of luggage with no name tag visible. On the nightstand are a bag of toiletries, a camera, a softcover book. The nun stares at a pile of papers under the toiletry bag, then glances back at the closet.

“Father,” she says, “who's staying in this room with you?”

“Just a colleague,” I improvise.

Something catches my attention. The softcover book on the nightstand. It's about the Shroud.

I feel a nervous pinch in my chest. I've read that book. I own that same edition. It was stolen from my apartment during the break-in.

My eyes shift across the room anxiously. There's a glass bottle in the wastebasket the nun is emptying. Grappa Julia. Ugo's favorite drink. But there are no glass tumblers in sight, no sign that this was drunk here. Bottles like this were piled in the trash can at Ugo's apartment. The
apartment someone had broken into. I wonder what else in this room was stolen from his home or mine.

The nun looks again at the pile of papers on the nightstand, and for some reason she seems in a hurry to finish now.

As she tidies the bathroom, I step over to look at the papers. Then I freeze.

The wheels of the nun's cart whine. The last thing I hear her say, before she closes the door behind her, is, “Father, I'm going to have to send someone up here. I don't think this is really your room.”

It isn't a pile of papers after all. It's a pile of photographs.

Photographs of me.

MY HAND SHAKES AS
I pick up the camera. I scroll through the backlog of pictures. Me, walking in the gardens. Me, standing outside the Palace of the Tribunal. Me, holding hands with Peter in the courtyard below. Near the end, I find it. Me, exiting the Casa. The same photo that was slipped under my door with the threat written on the back.

I try to think. But the fear is spilling through me.

A name. A face. I need something.

I throw open the closet. From the hanger dangles a black, buttoned robe. A Roman Catholic cassock. The nun must've known it couldn't be mine.

I check the tag. In a country of identically dressed men, we write our names in our clothing. But there's nothing here, just the faded insignia of a tailor shop near the Pantheon. On the next hanger is a ferraiolone, the long cape that Roman priests wear to black-tie events. Finally it clicks. I'm looking at a priest's best cassock and formalwear. This man is preparing for Ugo's exhibit tomorrow night.

I need a way to identify him. I lay the cassock on the bed and open the penknife on my key chain. Just below the back of the collar, I make a cut through the fabric. It's almost invisible. But when the cassock is stretched over a man's shoulders, it'll pucker, and I'll be able to see his white shirt from behind.

I hear a sound in the hallway. I rehang the cassock and start to leave—when a thought comes to me.

I backtrack to the desk, checking the drawers. It must be here somewhere. I find a lunch receipt, and what appears to be a parking ticket.
I stash them in my cassock. Then, on the nightstand, I see it. Under a loose sheet of paper is the pad of Casa stationery. I open the shutters and lift the pad in front of the slanting light of sunset. Just faintly, I see the impression of handwriting. The five digits of my phone number.

This is where the scrap from Ugo's car came from. This must be the room that called me three times on the night before Ugo died.

Two priests have been sleeping here. One of them broke into my apartment while the other was breaking into Ugo's car at Castel Gandolfo. Everything converges here, in this room. If only I had stopped the maid before she threw away that basket of trash. There must've been more inside it than an empty bottle of Grappa Julia.

Suddenly the door opens. A nun steps inside. Behind her is the housekeeper.

“Father! Explain yourself.”

I step back.

“You don't belong here,” she exclaims. “Come with me this instant.”

I make no move.

Behind her appears a Swiss Guard. The same one I saw in the stairwell.

“Do what she says, Father,” he commands.

An idea comes to me.

“Den katalavaino italika,” I say to the guard. “Eimai Ellinas.”

I don't understand Italian.
I'm Greek.

He frowns. Then it dawns on him. “He's one of them from upstairs,” the guard says. “He keeps going to the wrong floor.”

I blink as if I don't understand. The nun clicks her tongue and waves at me to follow her. In relief, I obey.

Then the housekeeper speaks up. “No,” she says. “He's lying. I talked to him in Italian.”

I'M BROUGHT TO THE
lobby. A gendarme is waiting there. He takes me across the courtyard to the gendarme station inside the Palace of the Tribunal. There's a holding cell inside. Instead of putting me in it, he instructs me to sit on a bench by the front desk and empty my pockets.

Out comes the lunch receipt. The parking ticket. My phone. The contents of my wallet.

He looks twice when he sees a Vatican ID. When he notices the name on it, he turns back to me and says, “I remember you.”

I remember him, too. He was one of the gendarmes at Castel Gandolfo on the night of Ugo's murder.

“What the hell were you doing in the Casa, Father?”

The profanity is a sign that I have lost his respect. That I'm no longer worthy of being treated like a priest.

“I want to make a phone call,” I say.

I'm staring at the parking ticket, trying to memorize the license plate on it.

He thinks it over, then shakes his head. “I need to talk to my captain.”

To hell with his captain. “My uncle is Cardinal Ciferri,” I say. “Give me the phone.”

He flinches when he hears Uncle Lucio's name. But my surname is different from Lucio's, so he feels confident enough to doubt.

“Stay put, Father,” he says. “I'll be back.”

THE CAPTAIN SETS HIM
straight. Twenty minutes later, Don Diego arrives to pick me up. I expect Diego to be furious. And he is. But not with me.

“You're lucky you don't lose your job for this,” he tells the gendarme. “Don't ever humiliate a member of this family again.”

And perhaps it says something about our country that the policeman, knowing he's in the right, still looks afraid.

The sun is low on the horizon as we walk up the path toward Lucio's palace. Diego doesn't say a word. His silence conveys that I'm in a kind of trouble that it would be above his pay grade to describe. But I find it impossible to focus on him. All I see in my mind's eye is Cardinal Boia staring back at me from between those curtains.

At the door to the palace, I say, “Thanks, Diego. But I'm not coming in.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's somewhere else I need to be.”

It's five of eight. I have an appointment with Michael Black.

“But your uncle—”

“I know.”

“His orders about this were very clear.”

“I'll apologize some other time.”

And I can feel him staring at me as I walk away.

THE SUN NEVER SHINES
on the north face of Saint Peter's. On hot days, this is where priests turn up, mosslike, gathering to sneak cigarettes in the long cool shadows. The stone walls are forty feet thick at these corners and rise higher than the cliffs of Dover. Hell itself couldn't warm them.

At this hour, all the other doors are locked. The sampietrini check the basilica at dark, every staircase, every nook. But a sliver of pale light glows beneath this side door. Michael must know a sampietrino who owes him a favor.

I slip inside and drift through the cool air like a grit of sand at the bottom of the sea. Tourists visiting here by day see the marble floor and the sky-high canopy, but this church has more hiding places in between than even most priests know. There are stairways hidden from view, which lead to chapels built into the pillars themselves, where clergy can rehearse and worship away from the eyes of laymen. There are dressing rooms—sacristies—where altar boys help priests vest for Mass. Overhead, tucked behind the stage lights, are the unreachable balconies that even the sampietrini have no way to clean except by dangling from ropes, swinging through the air by the metal hooks screwed into these walls. And connecting everything like arteries is a network of passageways within the walls. Between the inner and outer skin of the basilica are tunnels through which a man can travel around the whole church without ever being seen. For those reasons, no priest ever believes he's alone here. So no priest ever comes here for confidentiality.