The Fifth Gospel (24 page)

“
Run!
” Ugo shouted into the pitch.

I sloped through the darkness, moving toward the sliver of emergency light beneath the steel door. Behind me, something lurched into motion. I could hear a tattoo of footfalls, then a piercing mechanical scream.

The alarm.

“
Go!
” Ugo shouted. “
I have it!
”

I swung into the hallway and ran for the elevator. As I frantically pressed the button, Ugo appeared, carrying the Diatessaron.

“Hurry!” Ugo cried. “He's coming!”

The doors opened, and we rushed inside. In the moments before they shut again, I stared out, frozen with surprise, waiting for a glimpse of the man's face.

But the vault remained silent. He never came.

As the elevator car rose, Ugo cradled the book in his hands and closed his eyes.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“We need to tell my uncle.”

But at the top of the elevator shaft, the gendarmes were waiting. Ugo and I were taken into custody. An hour later, Don Diego arrived to free us.

“You found
what
down there?” Uncle Lucio demanded when we returned to his palace.

Ugo's answer, in retrospect, probably saved his skin.

“Eminence,” he said, placing the manuscript on Lucio's desk, “I've discovered the fifth gospel. And I'm going to use it to authenticate the Shroud of Turin.”

Never had I seen my uncle forget his anger so quickly. “Tell me more,” he said.

Only later would we piece together the second surprise of that night: that the gendarmes never found the other man in that crypt.

“Who was he?” I asked Ugo later.

“I wish I knew,” he said. “I never saw his face.”

“His voice, though. Did it sound familiar to you?”

Ugo frowned. “Odd. Now that you mention it, I had meant to ask you the same thing.”

C
HAPTER
9

O
N THE ELEVATOR
ride down from Lucio's penthouse, I can't stop thinking of the priest in the library vault. I wonder why my uncle can't finish Ugo's exhibit without help from Simon. I wonder why Ugo wanted to keep the finale a secret. There must be something he didn't want anyone finding out.

Peter tugs at my cassock. “When is Simon coming back?” he bleats.

“I don't know. He has to help Prozio Lucio right now. And we have to check in to the Casa.”

“Why?”

I lower myself to his level. “Peter, we can't go home.”

“Because the police are there?”

“Things are just going to be different for a few days. Okay?”

Different.
He knows this word. A slinky synonym for
worse
.

CASA SANTA MARTA is
the only hotel on Vatican soil. It's where the Holy Father puts up his official visitors and where bishops stay during their required visits to see him every five years. It's also a home base for Secretariat priests in their comings and goings. Simon would be staying here if he had no family in town.

The building is almost Amish in its plainness, with six rows of identical windows, inside of which are a hundred-odd rooms slightly bigger than monastic cells. On one side, the view from the windows is of the
Vatican gas station. On the other side, guests can stare at the towering border wall that runs only an arm's length from the hotel. All of John Paul's building projects are this way. The only luxuries that interest a pope who was forced to shovel limestone in Nazi-occupied Poland are four walls and a roof.

The apologetic nun at the front desk says they can't give us our hotel room yet because the special part of the hotel reserved for us is still being cleaned. She seems not to have heard that keeping religious minorities in their own ghettoes went out of style while John Paul was shoveling limestone. We just want the first available room, I explain. But her response, after sizing up my cassock and beard, is, “Father, your Italian is very good!” I pull Peter out the front doors before I can say something I'll regret.

“Where are we going now?” he asks. “Can we get something to eat?”

I never fed him a proper breakfast. If he ate at all, it was whatever Sofia gave him back at Leo's apartment.

“Soon,” I tell him. “But there's something important we need to do first.”

IT'S BEEN WEEKS since
I came to Ugo's apartment. When we stand dumbly in front of the lintel, Peter stares at me, wondering why we don't knock. He can't see what I see. There are pry marks on the door.

Someone tried to break in. But Ugo kept two padlocks on this entrance. Unlike the door at our apartment, this one refused to give in.

I unlock it with the keys Ugo gave me so that I could watch over the place while he was in Turkey. Peter bursts inside, and I race after him, but there's no one here. The place looks just the way it did when I last saw it.

“Doctor Nogara?” Peter calls out in a singsong tone.

“He isn't here,” I say. “We're just looking for something that belongs to him.”

There will be time to explain later. I ask him to stay here, in the living room, until I return. I don't know what emotions I'm about to feel.

The modest space where Ugo Nogara slept is beyond a wall of oriental screens. The makeshift room is heavy with the kind of sadness that seems peculiar to this country. Priests are encouraged not to accumulate property, so even the most urbane cleric usually lives in a
featureless room with borrowed furniture. For Roman priests, it's even worse. Photographs on walls have no wives or children to populate them. Floors are not littered with bath toys and fist-size shoes. Closets seem underfed with no colorful jackets and miniature umbrellas making their doors bulge open. Instead, Roman priests keep newspaper clippings and postcards of the landmarks they visit and the pilgrimages they make during their mandated weeks of vacation. It shouldn't have been this way with Ugo. He was a layman. But you would never know it, to see this room.

Bottles of Grappa Julia have piled up in the trash can. There isn't even a veneer of private joy in the pictures on the walls, just monuments in Edessa with no trace of Ugo standing in the foreground. The only sign that a vibrant, living force once slept here is the wreckage of books on his desktop, where the chair isn't even tucked in. It's as if, engrossed in his work, he stepped away to answer the door and could be back any minute. Beneath the desk I make out the canted edges of Ugo's iron safe. But before I kneel to open it, I close my eyes and feel the tidal pull of a familiar emotion. My father left behind a life like this, warm with unfinished business.

Opening my eyes again, I study the corkboard Ugo kept on his wall. Pinned to it is a diagram he made. It resembles a caduceus: two serpentine lines braided around each other. One is labeled
GOOD SHEPHERD
, the other
LAMB OF GOD
. Beside each loop are gospel quotations.

Those words carve a swath of emptiness in me. The first time Jesus appears in the gospel of John, he is called “the Lamb of God.” No other gospel calls Jesus this, but the meaning is obvious. In the time of Moses, at the end of the ten plagues of Egypt, God protected the Jews from the Angel of Death by telling them to sacrifice a lamb and daub its blood on every door the angel should pass over. Now God was saving His people with a new Lamb: Jesus. Jesus saved us, spiritually, by his death. To this John adds a second metaphor: his Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd. A Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” There is a shepherd in the other gospels, a symbolic figure who finds joy in saving lost sheep, but the Good Shepherd in John is different. He will save his flock
by dying
. This diagram is morbid. Chilling. The Lamb and the Shepherd meet in death. One man dies so the rest may live. It seems ominous that this idea would've preoccupied Ugo just before he
was killed. It reminds me of the e-mail he sent me. Ugo asked for help. I failed him.

In the kitchen I hear Peter rummaging for food in the refrigerator. But I can't find the voice to tell him no. I remember, years ago, Mona returning home from the geriatric ward after an old man had died. She was in agony; for some reason, she blamed herself. A wrong medicine. A failed intervention. But no man ever died on my wife's watch because he begged her for help and she refused him.

I lower myself into Ugo's chair. Then suddenly I hear something. Peter, shouting.

“What's wrong?” I call out, rushing into the kitchen.

He's gone.

“
Peter!
” I roar. “
Where are you?
”

His head emerges beside a distant oriental screen. “Look!” he says.

I lumber toward him, disoriented. There, behind the screen, is one of the large west-facing windows that overlooks the library courtyard below. He's standing near it, holding one of Ugo's pieces of suet.

“Look at what?” I ask.

He points to the floor. There, pecking at the suet Peter took from the refrigerator, is a small bird. A starling.

“He just flew inside!” Peter says jubilantly.

But he's lying. The handle on the window is cocked at the wrong angle. He's been opening this window himself.

“Lock it,” I tell him sternly, feeling the nearness of something awful, narrowly averted. “Never do that again.”

It's thirty feet down to the stone courtyard. I'm shaking at the thought.

“I
didn't
,” Peter says crossly. And he stands on his tiptoes, raising his arm to prove it. He is inches from reaching the handle.

Then I see it. There is shattered glass on the floor behind him. The pane behind the window handle is broken.

“Did the bird do that?” I ask.

But I already know the answer.

“No,” Peter says angrily. “It was already broken.”

The front door refused to budge. So someone entered this apartment through the window.

I peer down again at the courtyard below. Thirty feet. I don't even know how it could be done.

“Stay right here,” I tell Peter. “Don't touch
anything
.”

Back in Ugo's bedroom, I understand. Ugo didn't leave the mess on this desk. He didn't leave the chair pulled out.

When I kneel, I see the pry marks on the iron safe.

Against this safe, though, no crowbar had a prayer. It weighs as much as a man and has been bolted to the floor.

The combination is the Bible verse in which Jesus established the papacy: first gospel, sixteenth chapter, eighteenth verse.
You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Despite being battered, the mechanism is silky and the hinges make no sound. Ugo bought this safe to protect the manuscripts for his exhibit, and protect them it did.

Everything inside is familiar. Two months ago, when he was stranded in Turkey, Ugo told me to lock up the manuscripts he didn't need. The leftovers; the runts. But among them is one new jewel—a cheap, bonded-­leather notebook that I've seen Ugo carry with him almost everywhere. I wonder if this is what the intruder came to find: the research diary containing Ugo's notes.

When I open it, a photo slips out. Seeing it, I feel my stomach clench. The man in the photo is lying on a tile floor. He appears to be dead.

A priest. A middle-aged Roman Catholic with fine, dark hair and one limpid green eye. His nose is broken. Where his left eye should be, there is a black bulge slotted like a coin purse. The jaw beneath it is covered with blood. Pinned under his body, as if he was pushed down on top of it, is a sign written in a language I don't understand.
PRELUARE BAGAJE
. Only some flicker of animation in his green eye suggests he isn't dead, just badly hurt. On the back of the photo, someone has written:

Be careful who you trust.

I feel dizzy. The air hums.

“Peter!” I shout.

I close the photo back into the diary. From the corkboard I take the diagram Ugo made.

“Peter, we're leaving!”

I shut the safe. Lock it. But the diary goes into my cassock. We won't be back here again.

Peter is waiting for me on the other side of the screen. “What's wrong, Babbo?” he says, still holding the suet in his hand.

I lift him in my arms and carry him out the door. I don't tell him about the picture. I don't tell him that I recognize the bloody priest.

AN UNFAMILIAR MAN is
talking to a gendarme in the hall. He glances up at the sound of Ugo's apartment door being locked, but we're already slipping down another staircase. The older wings of the palace are corkscrewed with these private passages.

“What are we doing?” Peter says.

He's too young to know these back ways, but he knows something's wrong.

“We'll be out soon,” I say.

The spiral staircase is narrow and unlit. In the darkness, the image of the bloodied priest returns to me. I haven't seen his face in years. Michael Black, my father's former assistant. Another Secretariat man.

Peter murmurs something indistinct. I'm too lost in thought to ask him to repeat himself.

So Ugo was
not
the first to be attacked. I wonder if Michael survived.

Peter pushes impatiently at my chest.

“
What?
” I demand.

“I said, why is that man following us?”

I freeze. In the tight cylinder of the staircase, there are footsteps.

C
HAPTER
10

I
BEGIN DOUBLE-STEPPING, BUT
the footsteps quicken. With a boy in my arms, there's no higher gear. I feel Peter clutching my neck, forcing his face into the crook of my throat.

Out of the murk, a shape descends. A silhouette nearly as tall as Simon. He's wearing layman's clothes.

“Who are you?” I ask, backing away.

In the dark, the man's eyes are splinters of silver.

“Father,” he says in a gruff voice, “what were you doing up there?”

His face is completely unfamiliar.

“Why are you following us?” I demand.

“Because those are my orders.”

I take one more step back. Another ten feet and we'll be in public view.

The man extends his arms so they press against the walls of the stairwell. He says, “Father Andreou?”

In my arms, Peter's body is tense. I don't respond.

The man reaches for something in his pocket. I begin to retreat. Then I see what it is: two metal laurels around a yellow-and-white Vatican flag.

A badge.

“I'm your security escort,” he says.

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU
been following us?” I say.

“Since you left the Casa.”

“Why aren't you in uniform?”

“Because those are the orders that came down from His Eminence.”

I wonder if Lucio did this for Peter's sake. To frighten him less.

“Tell me your name,” I say.

“Agent Martelli.”

“Agent Martelli, the next time you follow us, wear your uniform.”

He grinds his teeth. “Yes, Father.”

“Are you the one who's going to guard us overnight, too?”

“Someone else will work that shift, Father.”

“Who?”

“I wouldn't know his name.”

“Tell him to wear his uniform, too.”

“Yes, Father.”

He waits, as if I'm delaying his own question: why were Peter and I in Ugo's apartment? But priests don't answer to policemen inside these walls. Peter and I turn and descend toward the light.

OUR ROOM AT THE
Casa is a fourth-floor suite. Peter, who has never stayed in a hotel before, says, “Where's the rest?” No kitchen, no living room, no toys. Boys in our building have told him that hotels are like heaven. But this can't be heaven. There's no television.

A plain cross hangs over the narrow metal bed frame. The parquet floor, polished like a Secretariat priest's shoes, reflects the featureless white walls. Other than a bedside table and a valet stand that seems designed for a Roman Catholic priest suit rather than any traditional robe, there's only a radiator beneath a window. The window, though, opens onto the small inner courtyard of this oddly shaped building, and below us are earthenware flower boxes and a potted tree with fantastic stalks of sharp fronds resembling towers of green Christmas stars. The air smells of lavender.

“Who was that man?” Peter asks, hopping onto the bed while still wearing his shoes, to test the lone pillow.

“A policeman,” I say. “He's going to help keep us safe.”

There's no longer any point avoiding it. The escort will be around us at all hours.

“We're safe here?” Peter asks, rifling the contents of the nightstand.

“The gendarme station is right next door. Agent Martelli is keeping
watch in the hall. And everyone here takes special care of guests. We're
completely
safe.”

He frowns at the Bible in the top drawer. It's the Vulgate, the fourth-­century translation that Roman Catholics consider the gold standard. Written in Latin, it seems intended to suit men from all nations, just as this hotel is. But Peter sighs. He knows the evangelists wrote in Greek, the first universal language. The contribution of our people is always undervalued.

“I'm going to call Leo and ask him to bring up some food,” I say. It will give us more privacy than the dining room, and I could use the company. “What do you want?”

“Pizza margherita from Ivo,” he says.

“He's not getting takeout.”

Peter shrugs. “Then anything.”

Leaving him to peruse the Bible he can't read, I go to the small desk in the attached room. After phoning Leo, I brace myself. My next call is to Simon.

“Alex?” my brother says.

I start right in. “What happened to Michael Black?”

“What?”

“I found a photo in Ugo's office. Is he still alive?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What did they do to him?”

“You shouldn't have gone there, Alex. You need to stay safe.”

“There was a warning written on the back of the photo. Why would someone have sent Ugo a warning? Because of his exhibit?”

“I don't know.”

“He never mentioned this to you?”

“No.”

“I don't think he was robbed last night, Simon. I think all of this is connected. What happened to Michael; what happened to Ugo; what happened at the apartment. How could you not tell me Michael was attacked?”

His silence is longer now.

“Last night at the cantina,” I say, “when I showed you that e-mail from Ugo, you said it was nothing.”

“Because it
is
nothing.”

“Ugo was in trouble, Sy. He was scared.”

Simon hesitates. “The reason I didn't tell you about Michael is that I'm under oath not to talk about it. And what happened at the apartment—I spent every minute of last night thinking about it, and I don't understand it. So please, I'm asking you to stay out of this. I don't want to get you involved.”

Pressure builds behind my eyes. My hand pulls at my beard. “You knew he was in trouble?”

“Stop, Alex.”

It's all I can do to keep from shouting. Instead, I decide to hang up.

An oath. He said nothing because of an oath.

IN ANGER, I DIAL
the main number at the nunciature in Turkey. An expensive call, but I'll keep it short.

When the nun at the switchboard answers, I ask for Michael Black.

“He's on leave,” she says.

“I'm calling from the Vatican on important business. Could you please give me his mobile number?”

She offers it without a hitch.

Before calling, I try to clear my mind. It's been over a decade since I spoke to Michael, and we're separated by a graveyard of hatchets. He turned his back on my father after the debacle of the Shroud's radiocarbon dating. He also reported Simon for going absent without leave at work. Yet there was a time when I knew him better than any priest but my father. When I trusted him above any other man. That's the Michael I try to think of as I dial.

“Pronto,” comes the voice on the other line.

“Is this Michael?”

“Who's this?”

“Alex Andreou.”

The silence is so long that I fear there will be nothing after it.

“Michael,” I say, “there's something I need to talk to you about. In person, if possible. Where are you?”

“That's none of your business.”

His voice is almost exactly the way I remember it. Dry and sharp and impatient. But the flat American accent that was once so prominent has been smoothed by a decade of practice, making it easier to hear the note
of defensiveness behind his words. To hear him trying to piece together why I'm calling.

When I explain about the photo, he doesn't respond.

“Please,” I say. “I need to know who attacked you.”

“None. Of. Your. Business.”

Finally I tell him a man was killed.

“What are you talking about?”

It's unexpectedly hard to talk about Ugo. I try to be concise—to say that he was a Vatican curator, that he had been working on the upcoming exhibit—but Michael must hear the emotion swelling in my voice. He waits.

“He was,” I say, “my friend.”

Just for an instant, Michael softens.

“Whoever did that,” he says, “I hope to hell they catch him.” Then the gruffness returns. “But I'm not going to talk about what happened to me. You got to ask someone else about that.”

I'm not sure if there's an insinuation in it.

“I already asked my brother,” I tell him. “Simon's under oath not to talk about it.”

Michael makes a derisive sound. There must still be bad blood between them. Or else this is the residue of something older, of the way he left things with my father.

“Please,” I say. “I don't care what happened before—”

He howls. “
You don't care?
I had my eye socket broken. I had to have my nose rebuilt.”

“I mean whatever happened between you and Simon. Or my father. All I want to know is who did this.”

“You people are unbelievable! I might as well be
talking
to your father. You Greeks, always the victims.
He's
the one who sent
my
career down in flames.”

You people.
You Greeks.
I try to keep the anger out of my voice.

“Please. Just tell me what happened.”

He's breathing heavily into the phone. “I can't. I'm under oath, too.”

Something snaps inside me. “I've got a five-year-old son who can't sleep in his own bed because you took an
oath
?”

Oaths. A bureaucrat's best friend. How a desk-job bishop buries his mistakes: by swearing his priest-underlings to secrecy.

“You know what?” I say. “Forget it. Enjoy your vacation.”

I'm about to hang up when he shouts, “You asshole, my nuncio ran me up the pole for not being able to answer his questions. I don't need it from you, too. If you want to know what happened, go ask the Holy Father.”

I falter. “The Holy Father?”

“That's right.
He's
the one who ordered it.”

I'm caught by surprise. So that's why Simon can't tell me. There are oaths, and then there are oaths.

But an uncomfortable feeling scrapes at me. John Paul would have no reason to silence something like this.

“Michael, I—”

Before I can speak another word, though, the line goes dead.

THE KNOCK COMES A
moment later. Standing at the door is Leo, bearing a basket of food.

“Who's the stiff ?” he murmurs, stepping inside. He nods in the direction of Agent Martelli, who hovers a few feet beside the door.

“The security detail my uncle got us.”

Leo wants to say something disparaging—the Swiss Guards and gendarmes are old rivals—but he holds his tongue. Instead he lifts a ceramic dish from the basket and says, “From the wife.”

I thought he would pick up food from downstairs. Instead, Sofia has cooked us a meal.

“How's Little P holding up?” he asks.

“Scared.”

“Still? I thought kids were supposed to rebound fast.”

Fatherhood has many surprises in store for him.

I enter the bedroom with Peter's food, only to find he has fallen asleep. I close the wooden shutters to dim the room almost to black. Though the autumn afternoon is warm, I pull the counterpane over him.

“Come on,” Leo whispers, handing me a plate of food. “Let's talk.”

But just as we sit down, my mobile phone begins to ring. The voice on the other end is gruff.

“Alex, it's Michael again. I've been thinking about what you said.”

He sounds different. More on edge.

“I didn't know you had a kid,” he goes on. “There are some things you deserve to hear.”

“Then tell me.”

“Go to the pay phone outside the walls, near the train station.”

“We're safe. This is my mobile.”

There is rampant fear in our country of talking on bugged lines. Some Secretariat men won't use phones at all, except to set up face-to-face meetings.

“I don't trust your idea of safe,” he says. “Go to the phone on Via della Stazione Vaticana. It's near the billboard by the service station. I'll call you there in twenty minutes.”

The place he is describing is almost immediately behind the Casa. I could be there in five. I turn to Leo and mouth,
Can you stay with Peter for a few minutes?

When he nods, I say, “Fine. I'll be waiting.”

THE SERVICE STATION IS
a dump with spray-painted walls and metal grates behind its porthole windows. On the billboard, a woman with football-size breasts advertises phone service. The dumpster across the street gapes at her with a half-open lid. From here I can make out the rear of the Casa over the Vatican walls, and towering above it, the dome of Saint Peter's. What catches my eye, though, are the train tracks in the distance.

Simon and I used to love watching the freight trains come and go at the Vatican station. Instead of hoppers of coal or grain, they carried business suits for our department store, or marble for Lucio's construction projects, or vaccines for missionaries in far-off countries. When I was twelve, Guido Canali tried to steal a box of wristwatches from a train car and ended up tipping two stacks of crates on himself.
FOR HIS HOLINESS ONLY
, the crates said, so the other boys wouldn't touch them, not even to lift them from Guido's body. Only Simon would heave them off, a hundred pounds apiece. Blood oranges: that's what ended up down on the station platform, smashed like Easter eggs. Blood oranges sent to John Paul by some monastery in Sicily. That's what Guido had almost died for.

I wonder if the Simon of that night lives only in my imagination now. If the Secretariat has trained him out of existence. An oath is a weighty thing for any Catholic; there can be penalties under Church law for breaking one. But even Michael Black has the heart to make an exception.

Michael is the Judas of our family—in Simon's eyes, at least. Sixteen years ago, Michael and my father traveled together to Turin for the unveiling of the radiocarbon dating on the Shroud. My father left Turin shattered. By the time he died, eight weeks later, Michael had quit his job and written my family a letter saying that our idea of a reunion between the Churches was laughable. The Orthodox obviously wanted nothing from us but fodder for ancient hatreds, fresh reasons to blame us for everything. Michael demanded to know why my father would push for a reunion with three hundred million Orthodox who treated Eastern Catholics—many of us minorities in Orthodox countries—like heretics and turncoats. Soon after, Michael found a new job working for the Vatican's new second-in-command: Cardinal Boia.