The Fifth Gospel (59 page)

Simon intervenes. “My brother didn't know the book was in there. His confession was a lie.”

Falcone reaches into his back pocket for his handkerchief. He spreads it over his palm and gently lifts the gun case from the Holy Father's hands.

I scramble for words, trying to cobble together anything that would change this. That would mitigate Simon's guilt. But my brother's expression as he stares at the gun case is so horrified that my thoughts go to pieces. He shrinks from the cold appraisal in Falcone's eyes. He can't even look at me.

The police chief shuts the clamshell. But he does not move it from Simon's eyes. The sight is agony for Simon, and Falcone knows it.

“Take it, Father,” he says.

Simon recoils.

There is no trace of humanity in the gendarme chief's eyes. “
Take it
,” he repeats.

“No.”

“Open it.”

“I won't touch that thing again.”

“Then give me its combination.”

Numbly Simon says, “One, sixteen, eighteen.”

The same combination as the vault in Ugo's apartment. The verse from Matthew that establishes the papacy.

Falcone dials in the digits. Before pulling the clasp, he glances back at Simon. There's something between them that I don't understand.

“Your brother took you by surprise, didn't he?” Falcone says.

Simon's face is blank. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Falcone's fingers pull. The lock does not open.

Simon is paralyzed. He glances at me as if Falcone and I are in collusion.

The old police chief turns the case and considers it from all angles. Then, for the first time, he turns away from Simon. He addresses John Paul.

“Holiness, one of the reasons the Swiss Guards recommended this gun case is that its combination is set by the manufacturer. It cannot be changed.” He lifts a scrap of paper in his hand. “I have just called the factory. And ‘one, sixteen, eighteen' is not the combination.”

Consulting the scrap, he turns the dials one at a time. The lock clicks open. I feel the breath slip out of me.

“Father,” Falcone says to Simon, “I saw it in your eyes.”

Archbishop Nowak murmurs, “Saw what, Inspector? What does this mean?”

Falcone stares at the gun case as if it has beguiled him. Darkly he says, “There was gunshot residue on Doctor Nogara's right hand.” He extends an index finger down the edge of the clamshell, making the shape of a pistol. “His shooting hand.”

The tone of his voice says everything.

The expression on Simon's face tells me it's true.

C
HAPTER
43

“S
IMON . . .” I SAY.

He doesn't answer. He looks dimly at the gun case.

Archbishop Nowak squints at me, trying to square my confession with Falcone's demonstration.

But I know. At last, I understand. The relief is so intense that I don't feel, at first, the crushing sadness of how Ugo really died.

“The only person who knew the combination,” Falcone says, “was Nogara. He was the one who opened it.”

Simon says nothing. He will maintain his silence to the last.

“But he wouldn't have had to break the window to enter his own car,” Falcone says. “So what happened, Father?”

It's Mignatto who says, almost in a whisper, “The surveillance video.”

The two minutes between Ugo's arrival and Simon's. It was almost the first thing Simon said to me when I got to Castel Gandolfo.

He called me. I knew he was in trouble. I came as soon as I could
.

“But why,” Falcone repeats, “did you break the window of his car?”

This explains the sequence of sounds Mignatto heard in the footage. Gunshot.
Then
glass breaking.

Simon still doesn't speak. But he doesn't need to.

“Because,” I say, “the gun case was inside the car.”

“But Nogara had already opened the case,” the promoter of justice protests. “It was empty.”

But it wasn't empty. Simon wouldn't have locked a case he couldn't reopen. The case must've been locked before he ever got to it.

“
Ugo
put the manuscript in there,” I say.

It was pouring that night. He was protecting the Diatessaron.

In a hushed voice I say to my brother, “How did you know?”

Simon wouldn't have saved the gun case unless he'd known what was in it. And he couldn't have known what was in it unless Ugo told him.

My brother still doesn't speak. But I think again of those two minutes separating him from Ugo.

“Did you catch up to him,” I say, “before he died?”

Simon raises a hand to silence me. Then the thumb and forefinger of his hand come together until they almost meet. Almost. And he stares at me, bottomlessly, through that tiny gap.

I'm mute. If only those giant strides had been a fraction longer. A fraction faster. I can see Simon now, in my mind's eye, just fifteen years old, standing on the narrow balcony of Saint Peter's, reaching out his hands to prevent that stranger from jumping. I wonder how close he came this time. What final words passed between him and the friend whose life he thought he had already saved.

But not even the beginning of an explanation comes from my brother's mouth. The room is silent. At last Archbishop Nowak speaks in a faint voice. In his hands are Ugo's lecture notes.

“Why would you hide this from us
?
” he asks. “Both of you?”

I look to Simon. He doesn't want to look at Nowak, but he won't disrespect him by continuing to look away. The muscles of his neck tighten. His nostrils flare.

“Why,” the archbishop repeats, “would you hide it?”

Even now, Simon still doesn't utter a sound. But a weaker voice speaks up. It chokes out a question, and the room goes perfectly still.

“Why did this—” John Paul says, “—poor man—take his own life?”

The greatest crime of Judas was suicide. It was not long ago that suicides were refused Church funerals. Denied cemetery plots. Shame, though, isn't why Simon hid the truth.

John Paul thumps his hand down. He moans, “Answer me!”

At last Simon weakens. The cloak of silence drops.

“Holiness,” he says, “Ugo never knew how much the exhibit meant to you until he saw the patriarchs at Castel Gandolfo.”

John Paul frowns.

Archbishop Nowak says, “You didn't tell him he would be addressing the Orthodox?”

Simon says nothing. He refuses to blame anyone else.

But John Paul croaks, “You did as I asked.”

My brother won't trace any of this back to the Holy Father. Instead he says, “I begged him not to tell anyone what he'd discovered about the Shroud. I pleaded with him. But Ugo insisted on telling the truth. He came to Castel Gandolfo to tell the Orthodox what he'd found. But then he saw who was in the audience. He never knew, until that moment, what his exhibit was going to make possible. He couldn't live with himself if he lied to you about the Shroud, but he couldn't forgive himself if he destroyed your dream with the Orthodox.” My brother's face is agony. He lowers himself to his knees. “Holy Father, I am so sorry. Please forgive me.”

I think of Ugo, alone, arriving at Castel Gandolfo with his notes and his manuscript, prepared for the bravest act of his life. To disown the Shroud he had considered as precious as a child. To sacrifice it in the name of truth. My brave friend. Fearless to the end. Even in that awful, terrifying final act.

John Paul murmurs to Simon, “Why would you not tell me this?”

My brother struggles to compose himself. Finally he says, “Because if you knew, then you would never have offered the Shroud to the Orthodox. And if we had nothing to offer them, then we had no hope of a reunion. Ugo was willing to die for this secret. His choice was my choice, too.”

I have seen thousands of pictures of John Paul. He is one of the most photographed men in history. But never have I seen him like this. The lines of his face converge in pain. His eyes squeeze shut. His head lolls back, tensing the muscles in his great thick neck. Archbishop Nowak lowers himself and whispers concerned words in Polish.

There are trails of reflected light down Simon's cheeks. Not a hair of him moves.

Quickly Nowak announces, “We will recess until the Holy Father wishes to reconvene.” Then he wheels John Paul into the adjoining study and closes the door.

A moment later, a different door opens. Monsignor Mietek, the sec
ond secretary, abruptly enters. Looking pale, he says, “I will see you all down on the service elevator now.”

We're led away in a herd. As we wait in the hallway, Mietek keeps a finger on the elevator call button. When the car comes, he shepherds us inside and touches the button. Only at the last instant does he place a hand on Simon's forearm and say, “Not you, Excellency. You are to remain.”

It happens so quickly that I barely see Simon as the doors close between us. He's staring back at me. Not at anyone or anything else. But behind him, in the distance, a door has opened. Archbishop Nowak stands in it, looking at my brother, who sees nothing but me.

C
HAPTER
44

I
WAIT FOR HIM
the rest of the morning. Then into the afternoon. I watch from my apartment windows as the treetops begin to sway. As litter in the cobblestone fairways begins to shift and scatter in the rising wind. Rain is close at hand. Just past five, there's a rapid knock at the door. I rush to answer it.

Brother Samuel. His face is pinched. His voice is agitated when he says, “Quick, Father Alex. You have to go downstairs.”

I race down. But what I find, instead of Simon, is a small procession. Leaving the door of Health Services are two deacons carrying candles, led by a cross-bearer. Then comes a priest chanting quietly, followed by Ugo's coffin.

In the lot outside, no hearse is waiting. Instead, the procession walks down the village streets, into the spitting rain, and turns left just before the border gate, entering the Vatican parish church.

A metal bier is waiting in the empty nave. The coffin is lifted onto it, Ugo's feet facing the altar. Every motion is gentle and thoughtful and silent. I feel short of breath. I step outside and phone Simon again. Still no answer.

Just inside the door, the priest places a funeral notice on a board.
CALLED TO ETERNAL LIFE. UGOLINO LUCA NOGARA
. The vigil will be tonight. Mass in the morning. Graveside ceremony to follow.

As I watch him spell the words, I feel the rain at my back, splashing
off the steps, spattering my cassock. When he's gone, I lift the board and place it outside, in the open air, where passersby will see it. But there's no one on the streets. Thunder rolls in the distance.

From the door of the church I look across the road at the papal palace, waiting for Simon to appear in the archway. This brief vigil will be the only time for eulogies. Once the funeral Mass starts, none will be allowed. But there's not a living thing in sight.

Finally I go to the coffin and pray. The closed casket feels like an accusation. Surely the morticians could've covered up Ugo's wounds, but there's a message here, in the hasty way Ugo was brought to this church, in the way his announcement was buried on this overlooked board, in the way no villager is coming down after seeing a coffin travel through these streets. They will say it was raining. They will say they didn't know Ugo. They will say anything except that it was a suicide.

I sit in the first pew and offer my prayers. Then, to fill the silence, I talk to him. I tell him about his exhibit. I tell him what a success it was. I look at the coffin when I speak, but in my mind I am talking to the still-living Ugo, in whatever place he now finds himself.

Just before dark I hear someone enter the church. I turn and see Ugo's assistant, Bachmeier. He takes a middle pew and prays for almost a quarter hour. When he's done, he comes forward and puts a hand on my shoulder, taking me for the bereaved. Ugo thought this man never cared for him. Before Bachmeier goes, I thank him.

When he's gone, the parish priest comes up to me. “Father,” he says, “you know you're welcome to stay as long as you want. But if you're waiting out the storm, I'm happy to lend you my umbrella.”

I explain that I won't be leaving. That my brother will be here soon. The priest keeps me company a moment, asking how I knew Ugo, admitting that he didn't know Ugo well himself. A funeral silence is so different from the silence of a baptism or wedding, so unlike the hush that builds with hope and expectation. To fill it, the pastor asks about my Greek rite, about the ring on my right hand. And though I don't want to talk about it, we are all ambassadors for our churches and traditions. Married six years, I tell him. Eighth-generation Vatican priest, and my son's only dream in the world is to be a professional footballer. He smiles. “Your cassock's still wet,” he says. “May I dry it for you?”

I decline and let him drift away.

Midnight comes. The candles around the coffin burn their brightest. Suddenly the air behind me changes. The noise of the rain is dampened. Something large is blocking the sound. I recognize the way it makes the air part; I recognize the long strides of the quiet footfalls as they approach.

He kneels beside me. His silhouette is gold in the candlelight. My fingers grip the coffin rails. With one stabbing breath, he reaches his hands across the casket, as if to hold Ugo in his arms. Then he lowers his head against the wood and moans.

I watch his hand reach into his collar. His fingers remove the chain from around his neck. On the end of it, beside the Latin cross, is a ring. A bishop's ring. He closes his palm around it and puts it on the casket. Then he turns and puts his hands on my shoulders. We clasp each other.

I whisper, “What did they do to you?”

He doesn't hear me. His only answer is, “I'm so sorry.”

“Did they dismiss you?”

From the priesthood. From the only life we have ever known.

He answers, “Who gave Ugo's eulogies?”

“No one. Nobody even knows he's here.”

He clamps his fists together and presses them against his jaw. He rises and peers at the wood of the coffin. His gaze seems to stare down through it.

“Ugo,” he murmurs.

His voice is thin, the volume of a prayer, not a eulogy. I step back, giving him space. But the silence is so pure that I can hear even his shallow breaths, even the dry rasp before his words.

“You were wrong,” he says. “God didn't abandon you. God didn't let you fail.”

He bends over, almost stooping, the way I imagine he did long ago, finding our father on the floor after his heart attack. Wanting to cradle, to give comfort even in death. His words are stern but his hands reach out into the darkness tentatively, tenderly, seeming to find this wooden box so unyielding and cruel. Mighty the boundary that even these mighty hands can't shatter. And I think, as I watch his great form lower itself to the edge of the coffin to whisper to his friend: how I love my brother. How impossible it will be to think of him as anything other than a priest.

“Ugo,” he says, so severely that I know his teeth are clenched, his emotion barely willed back, “God put
me
there to help you.
I
am the one who failed you.”

“No,” I say. “Simon, that isn't true.”

“Forgive me,” he whispers. “O God, forgive me.”

Unsteadily, he makes the sign of the cross. Then he hides his face in his hands.

I put my arm around him. I pull him against me, holding him there. His massive body shudders. The flames of the candles bow low and rise again. I look down at those giant hands now balled up in fists, digging into his thighs, and silently I join in his prayer. I beg forgiveness for us all.

WE WAIT TWO DAYS
for punishment to be handed down. Then four days. A week passes. No phone call. No letter in the mail. I become unable to get Peter out the door for school on time. I burn dinner. My distraction is becoming total. Each new day of waiting changes the scale of waiting yet to be done. It may be weeks. By October, I realize it may be months.

I visit Ugo's cemetery plot often, keeping out of sight of the mourners at other headstones, not wanting to scandalize villagers with the sight of Simon or me by Ugo's grave, not knowing what they might have heard. After so many days of praying from afar, the distance begins to feel symbolic. When Ugo abandoned me, I kept him at arm's length. I never let him reenter my life. And though this is a small sin in the world of laymen, it is a significant one for a priest. The Church is eternal, proof against all setbacks, so whatever may happen to the Turin Shroud, I know in my heart that Catholics and Orthodox will someday reunite. But the life of a single man is precious and brief. Guido Canali told me once about an old man at Castel Gandolfo who has no other job but to collect eggs from the henhouses without breaking them.
A job
, Guido said,
you might figure anyone could do,
except it takes special hands
. I often think of those words as I stand in the graveyard. They seem equally true for priests.

During breaks in my workday I visit the exhibit. It satisfies an ap
petite that gradually comes to feel like an addiction, the need to see people interacting with Ugo. He remains here, some part of him intact. These galleries are a reliquary, holding the best of a good man. And yet it causes a churning uneasiness in me to see these thousands of innocent people staring at the walls, reading the placards and stenciled letters, following Ugo's timeline of Christian art. The relic they've come for isn't the memory of a dead friend but the cloth of Christ, still mounted in the Sistine Chapel, so in their eyes this exhibit is a reliquary of a different sort. A vessel so ornate and impressive—paintings so grand, manuscripts so old, a confession so frank that we stole the Shroud from the Orthodox—that it convinces them the relic is authentic. Droves of them react the same way, with nods of understanding and agreement, then gradually with tongues clicking and even hands clasped over hearts as if to say,
I knew it
. The exhibit has given the world permission to believe again. So has the news that the Holy Father is returning the Shroud to the Orthodox, which most of Rome seems to have absorbed not as a milestone in Church relations, but as proof that Ugo's exhibit is the gospel truth about the Shroud. If only John Paul could see the people in these galleries, he would know what I know. I will miss having Ugo so close by. But this show can't go on.

On October the twelfth, I am called into the office of the pre-­seminary rector, Father Vitari, for the only unscheduled meeting I have ever had with my boss. Vitari is a good man. He rarely complains that I have to bring my son to work sometimes or ask for days off when Peter's sick. Even so, there's something oddly hospitable about the way he sits me down and asks, right off, if he can get me anything to drink. I notice that my personnel file is on the desk. Sadness settles over me. The small but insistent fears that have hovered around me like flies, the uncertainties about the future, now go quiet with expectation. So this is how it will happen. Mignatto said the verdict would come in the form of a court document, but I see now that it would be easier to sweep the problem away quietly. It couldn't be difficult, in a country of priests, to find a replacement gospel teacher.

Yet Vitari lifts the file in his hand and asks if I realize I've been working at the pre-seminary for five years. “Five years,” he repeats, and then smiles. “That means you're due for a raise.” I leave with a handshake and an appreciation card signed by all my boys. I leave, also, trembling and
almost sick. That night, the dreams begin. I'm a boy again, watching the crate of blood oranges fall on Guido at the train station. Watching the jumper in Saint Peter's fall through the air to the floor. I feel a pinch in my chest, as if a finger is nocking an arrow on my heartstrings. Before long, even in daylight, it comes to seem as if something is rattling inside me, a bass note of anxiety like the far-off vibration of an approaching train. I'm afraid. Whatever's coming, I fear it.

ONE MORNING, THE DIRECTOR
of the museums announces that the exhibit will end ahead of schedule. Someone, possibly Lucio, slips word to the press that Church politics are to blame. A journalist at
l'Espresso
develops this into an article saying John Paul pulled the plug because he feared the Orthodox would take umbrage. After all, we can't continue to make money off the relic we promised them. So on the show's final day, I return to say good-bye. The crowds are astonishing. The exhibit will set records beyond even what its creator could've imagined. I can barely see the walls through the oceans of people. Ugo is fading away.

That night, the Shroud leaves the Sistine Chapel. John Paul's spokesman announces that for reasons of security the cloth's location can no longer be disclosed. This seems to mean we're preparing to send it east. But when I ask Leo if the Swiss Guards have seen a major shipment leaving any of the gates, they haven't. I repeat my question every day until he's just as puzzled as I am that the answer never changes. After a while, a reporter at a press conference asks for an update and the papal spokesman explains that the logistics are complicated and the negotiations private. In other words, don't expect news about the Shroud or the Orthodox for a while.

Soon the other priests at my Greek church in town begin to ask me if the rumors are true. If John Paul's health has become an obstacle. If he's dying too quickly to navigate the next steps with the Orthodox. I tell them I wouldn't know. But I do know. The rumors are true in a way my friends can't understand: this has surely become, for John Paul as it once was for Ugo, a matter of conscience. He would sooner die than base a reunion on a lie. And so, with time as his ally, that is exactly what he plans to do.

There's a parable in the gospel of Matthew about an enemy who comes in the night and sows weeds in a man's field of good wheat. The
man's servants ask if they should pull up the weeds, but their master says to wait, or else the good may be lost with the bad. Let everything grow until the day of harvest, he says; then the wheat will be reaped and the weeds will be burned.