The Thirteenth Apostle (33 page)

One hour earlier, a priest in a cassock had preceded them. Seeing his accreditation signed by Cardinal Catzinger in person, the policeman had bowed and deferentially accompanied him to the reinforced door, where Breczinsky, looking anxious, was waiting for him. This second interview had been brief, like the first one. As he left, the priest had fastened his black eyes on the Pole, whose lower lip was trembling.

Nil no longer paid much attention to his very pale, almost transparent face: on arrival he did not notice that the librarian looked distressed, and merely set the equipment out on the table while Leeland went off to fetch the manuscripts they would need to examine.

After an hour's work, he took off his gloves and whispered:

“Carry on without me, I'm going to try my luck with Breczinsky.”

Leeland nodded in silence, and Nil went to knock on the librarian's door.

“Come in, Father, take a seat.”

Breczinsky seemed happy to see him.

“You didn't tell me anything about your research in the Templars' book stack the other day – did you discover anything useful?”

“Better than that, Father: I found the text examined by Andrei, the one he'd noted the details of in his diary.”

He took a deep breath and launched out:

“Thanks to my deceased brother, I'm on the trail of a document of capital importance that might put a question mark over the foundations of our Catholic faith. Forgive me if I don't tell you any more: ever since I arrived in Rome, Mgr Leeland has been subjected to considerable pressures because of me, and if I keep quiet, it's because I'm trying to ensure you don't get bothered in any way.”

Breczinsky gazed at him in silence, then asked, timidly:

“But… who can exert such pressures on a bishop working in the Vatican?”

Nil decided to gamble everything. He remembered a remark the Pole had made at their first meeting: “To think that I imagined you were one of Catzinger's men!”

“From the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and more precisely from the Cardinal Prefect himself.”

“
Catzinger!
”

The Pole mopped his brow; his hands were trembling slightly.

“You don't know anything about that man's past, or about what he lived through!”

Nil concealed his surprise.

“Yes, I don't know anything about him, except that he's the third principle person in the Church, after the Secretary of State and the Pope.”

Breczinsky looked at him with his hangdog eyes.

“Father Nil, you've gone too far, now you need to know. What I'm about to tell you is something I've only ever told Father Andrei, since he was the only person who could understand. His family had been linked with the sufferings of mine. I didn't need to explain things to him; he understood straight away.”

Nil held his breath.

“When the Germans broke the German-Soviet Pact, the Wehrmacht swept across what had been Poland. For some months the
Anschluss
division protected the rear of the invading army around Brest-Litovsk and, in April 1940, one of its superior officers, an
Oberstleutnant
, came to round up all the men in my village. My father was taken away with them into the forest, and we never saw him again.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Then the
Anschluss
division joined the Eastern Front, and my mother tried to survive in the village with me, helped by Father Andrei's family. Two years later, we saw the last remnants of the German Army fleeing in the other direction as the Russians advanced. It was no longer the glorious Wehrmacht, but a gang of pillagers raping all the women and burning everything in their path. I was five; one day, my mother took me by the hand, she was terror-stricken: ‘Hide in the cellar, it's the officer who took your father away, he's back!' Through the gap in the door, I saw a German officer come in. Without a word he unbuckled his belt, flung himself on my mother, and raped her right in front of my eyes.”

Nil was horrified.

“Did you ever find out the officer's name?”

“As you can imagine, I was never able to forget it and never abandoned my quest to trace him: he died shortly afterwards, killed by Polish resistants. It was
Oberstleutnant
Herbert von Catzinger, the father of the current Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

Nil opened his mouth, but was incapable of uttering a word. Opposite him, Breczinsky seemed distraught. With an effort, he continued:

“After the war, Catzinger became Cardinal of Vienna. He asked a Spaniard from Opus Dei to carry out research in the Austrian and Polish archives, and he discovered that his father, for whom he had a boundless admiration, had been killed by Polish partisans. Ever since then, he has hated me, just as he hates all Poles.”

“But… the Pope is Polish!”

“You can't understand: all those forced to experience Nazism, even unwillingly, were deeply marked by it. The old
member of the Hitler Youth, the son of a Wehrmacht soldier killed by the Polish resistance, has rejected his past but he has not forgotten it:
nobody emerged from that hell intact.
As for the Polish Pope whose right-hand man he now is, I'm certain he has overcome his visceral aversion and has a sincere veneration for him. But he knows that I come from a village in which the
Anschluss
division was stationed, and he knows about my father's death.”

“And… about your mother?”

Breczinsky wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“No, he can't know about that – I was the only witness, and his father's memory is intact. But
I know
. I can't… I just can't forgive, Father Nil!”

Nil's heart was filled with an immense sense of pity.

“You cannot forgive the father… or the son?”

Breczinsky replied in a whisper:

“Neither of them. For years, the Holy Father's illness has enabled the Cardinal to do – or allow to be done – things that go right against the spirit of the Gospels. He wants to restore the Church of bygone centuries, he is obsessed by what he calls ‘the world order'. Under an appearance of modernity, it's a return to the iron age. I have seen theologians, priests and monks reduced to nothing, crushed by the Vatican with the same absence of pity which his father once showed towards the peoples enslaved by the Reich. You tell me he's been putting pressure on Mgr Leeland? It's not as if your friend were the only one, alas… I'm just an insignificant little pebble, but like the others I must be crushed so that the pedestal which supports the Doctrine and the Faith does not become cracked.”

“Why you? Buried away in the silence of your stacks you don't bother anyone, you're not a threat to any of the powers that be!”

“But I'm one of the Pope's men, and the post I fill here is a more sensitive one than you can imagine. I… I can't tell you any more.”

His shoulders were trembling slightly. He got a grip on himself and continued:

“I have never recovered from what I suffered as a result of the actions of Herbert von Catzinger, the wound has never closed – and the Cardinal knows this. Every night I wake in a cold sweat, haunted by the image of my father being led off into the forest at sub-machine-gun point, and those boots that forced my mother's body against our kitchen table. You can chain a man by threat, but you can also enslave him by keeping his sufferings fresh: you just have to revive his pain, make the wound bleed. Only someone who has known those men of bronze can understand, and this was Andrei's case. Ever since I entered the Pope's service here, I have been trampled under at every moment by two shiny boots, and Catzinger in his scarlet robes stands over me – just as his father, strapped into his uniform, once swaggered over my mother and his Polish slaves.”

Nil was starting to understand. Breczinsky had never managed to escape from the cellar of his childhood, huddled down against the door behind which his mother was being raped. Never had he emerged from a certain forest path down which he advanced in a dream, behind his father who was about to die, cut down by a burst of sub-machine-gun fire. Night and day he was haunted by two waxed boots against a table, and deafened by the echo within him of the guttural order given by Herbert von Catzinger: “
Feuer!
”

His father had been cut down by German bullets in that forest, but Breczinsky himself never ceased to fall, to fall forever down into a dark, bottomless well. This man was one of the living dead. Nil hesitated:

“Does… the Cardinal come here, in person, to torment you by reminding you of your past? I can't believe that.”

“Oh no, he doesn't act directly. He sends the Spaniard here, the one who carried out research for him in the Vienna archives. Right now, the man in question is in Rome, he's come to see me twice recently, he… he tortures me. He dresses as a priest – but if he really is a priest of Jesus Christ, then, Father Nil, it can only mean that the Church is finished. He has no soul, no human feelings.”

There was a long silence, and Nil let Breczinsky continue.

“You can see why I helped Father Andrei, and why I'm helping you. Like you, he told me he was looking for an important document: he wanted at all costs to keep it out of Catzinger's hands, and give it to the Pope in person.”

Nil thought quickly: not for an instant had he reflected on what he would do if he found the letter of the thirteenth apostle. Indeed, it was for the Pope to judge whether the future of the Church was compromised by its contents, and to do with it what he thought best.

“Andrei was right. I still don't know why, but it's clear that what I have discovered is an object that many people covet. If I manage to find this document lost for centuries, I do intend to alert the Pope and inform him of its whereabouts. Only the head of the Church can be the keeper of this secret, as he has been of the secrets of Fatima. I've just learnt that it could be buried away somewhere in the Vatican: think about it!”

“The Vatican is huge: don't you have any clues?”

“Just one, and it's a slender lead. If it has indeed come to Rome, as I believe, it must be somewhere among the Dead Sea manuscripts it was found with. The Vatican will have received it after the Israeli War of Independence, around 1948. Do you have any idea of the place where Essenian manuscripts
from Qumran might be kept, the ones that have not yet been examined?”

Breczinsky rose to his feet. He looked worn out.

“I can't say right away, I need to think. Come and see me here in my office tomorrow afternoon: there won't be anyone apart from you and Mgr Leeland. But I beg you not to tell him about our conversation, I shouldn't have told you all this.”

Nil reassured him: he could trust him, just as he had trusted Father Andrei. Their objective was the same: to inform the Pope.

75

“I raise my glass to the day the last Jewish settler leaves Palestine!”

“And I raise mine to the definitive establishment of the Greater Israel!”

The two men smiled before draining their glasses. Lev Barjona suddenly turned scarlet and choked.

“By my tefillin, Mukhtar Al-Quraysh, what the hell is it? Arab petrol?”

“
Centerbe
. A liqueur from the Abruzzi. Seventy degrees – a kind of drink that sorts out the men from the boys.”

Ever since they had spared one another's lives on the battlefield, a strange complicity had grown between the Palestinian and the Israeli – of the sort that once existed between the officers of regular enemy armies, and as sometimes exists between adverse politicians or executives of big rival groups. Fighting in the shadows, they feel at ease only with their peers, who are engaged in the same conflicts as they are. They despise the society of ordinary civilians, their dull, flat lives.
More often than not they are locked in fierce confrontation with each other – but when they are not fighting, they won't refuse to share a glass, a girl or two, or a common operation, if the opportunity of some neutral terrain arises.

The present opportunity was provided by Mgr Calfo. He had proposed that they carry out one of those operations that the Church does not like to perform or even officially to admit – the sort where you get your hands dirty.
Ecclesia sanguinem abhorret
– the Church hates blood. Unable to get its dirty work done for it by a secular arm that tended to ignore it, the Church was now constrained to call in independent agents. These were usually men of the European extreme right. But they could not refuse the lure of media exposure, and always asked for their services to be rewarded with tiresome political manoeuvrings. Calfo appreciated the fact that Mukhtar had only asked for dollars, and that the two men had left no trace behind them. They had been as discreet as a breath of wind.

“Mukhtar, why did you ask me to meet you here? You know that if we were seen together it would be considered by our respective bosses as an extremely grave professional failing.”

“Come on, Lev, Mossad has countless agents, they're all over the place. But not here: this restaurant only serves pork, and I know the manager – if he knew you were Jewish, you wouldn't be able to stay under his roof for a minute longer. We haven't met since the Germigny slab was brought to Rome, but you've just met our two scholar monks, and I listen in on them regularly. We need to talk.”

“I'm all ears…”

Mukhtar signalled to the manager to leave the flagon of
centerbe
on the table.

“Let's not beat around the bush, Lev. We're playing the same game here. But I don't know everything, and it bugs me: the
Frenchman is starting to poke his nose into the Koran – there are things that Muslims won't tolerate, you know. Let me make this clear: I'm not just on this mission for Mgr Calfo, Hamas is concerned too. But what's less clear to me is the reason why you've got personal about it, meeting up with Nil and casually letting him in on information that's worth its weight in gold.”