The Fifth Gospel (38 page)

I nod.

“Last night, a call came down for a pickup. I don't know who the request came from, but our dispatcher sent my friend Mario to cover it. Mario ended up driving to your uncle's palace to pick up Simon.”

“Where did he drop my brother off ?”

“At the elevator.”

“What elevator?”

“
The
elevator.”

The papal palace is so old that it has few modern amenities. Gianni must mean the ancient elevator in the courtyard of the Secretariat, originally built to operate on water power. This is the one presidents and prime ministers use when they visit.

But when I ask, he shakes his head. On the dust of the ground, he draws a large square with the toe of his shoe. “Damasus Courtyard.”

He means the courtyard in front of the Secretariat. I nod.

He adds a smaller square, just beside the first. “Palace of Nicholas the Fifth.”

This is the final branch of the palace, the one that famously overlooks Saint Peter's Square.

He scrapes a line to connect the boxes. “Between them is an opening. An archway through the ground floor here. In the archway is a hidden door leading to the private elevator. That's where Mario's car dropped Simon off. Do you understand now?”

I do. This explains everything. I wonder how Simon can ever have allowed himself to be put under house arrest there. I wonder if he even knew where they were going to take him.

“What's wrong?” Gianni asks.

The Palace of Nicholas V has four floors. The ground floor, as in many Renaissance palaces, was designed for servants or horses. The top two floors belong to the Holy Father, who would've had no reason to cover his tracks if he'd wanted Simon under house arrest. The only remaining floor is the private residence of the Cardinal Secretary of State.

“Gian,” I murmur, putting my head in my hands, “they took him to Boia's apartments.”

THIS IS A GIANT
setback. No one will be able to reach Simon there. Not even Lucio. When Simon submitted to house arrest, surely he assumed the order came from the vicar's office, not from his own boss.

“What about afterward?” I say. “Has Mario taken Simon anywhere else?”

He shakes his head slowly. “Al, as far as I know, no driver's seen Simon since. If he went anywhere else, it was on foot.”

But that part of the palace is crawling with Swiss Guards. If Simon was escorted elsewhere, Leo would've heard about it.

“I don't get it,” Gianni says, half to himself. “Why would they take him there?”

I tell him I don't know. But I can imagine an answer. House arrest would be the perfect pretext for ensuring that Simon couldn't return to the museum to erase the damning part of Ugo's exhibit: 1204.

“Any other strange calls?” I ask.

Gianni smiles thinly. “How long do you have?” He lowers his voice. “The day that man was killed—I've never seen anything like it. Five
o'clock in the morning, I get a call at home. They want me to work a new shift, noon to eight. I tell them I've got a doctor's appointment at two o'clock. Heck, I just got off my last shift five hours ago. They tell me to cancel the appointment. Lo and behold, when I arrive, we're
all
there. Every single one of us got the same call.”

“Why?”

“The dispatcher only tells us that someone at the palace needs cars running shuttles. According to the schedule, we're supposed to be doing short trips to an event in the gardens. But suddenly there's a change of venue. Now two junior guys will stay back to cover the regular calls, while the rest of us run pickups to Castel Gandolfo completely off the books.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“No clocking in or out. No pickup logs. On paper they wanted this to look like any other day.”

The sky looms, vertiginously high. This sounds like what Corporal Egger said about the Swiss Guard's checkpoint sheets—cars coming and going with no paper trail. The unknowns are beginning to grow.

“It gets stranger,” he says. “They tell us we can't step out of our cars except to open doors for our pickups. We can't greet anyone by name. And we're supposed to drive them forty-five minutes each way without saying a word.”

“Why?”

“Because these guys apparently don't speak Italian, don't know Rome, and don't like small talk.”

“Who were they?”

He pulls at an imaginary beard on his chin, then points to me. “Priests. Like you.”

My pulse quickens. The Orthodox priests Simon invited to the exhibit.

“How many of them?”

“I don't know. Twenty? Thirty?”

I can only stare at him. My father invited nine Orthodox priests to Turin for the radiocarbon announcement. Four came.

Gianni nods.

“Can you tell me exactly how they were dressed? Were they wearing crosses?”

The details could pinpoint where they came from. The family tree of Orthodoxy splits between Greeks and Slavs. Slavic priests wear crosses around their necks, but Greeks aren't allowed to.

“My pickup definitely wore a cross,” Gianni says.

That suggests a priest from the Slavic tradition, including Serbia and Romania.

Gianni adds, “On his hat.”

I'm taken by surprise. “Are you sure?”

Gianni squeezes his fingers together. “Just a small thing. Fingernail size.”

This is the sign of a decorated Slavic bishop. Or even a metropolitan, the second-highest of all Eastern ranks. These are Orthodox royalty, outranked only by the ancient brother-bishops of the pope, the patriarchs.

“Did some of them wear chains around their necks?” I ask. “With little paintings in them?”

Gianni nods. “Like an amulet with the Madonna in it? Sure, one of my pickups wore that.”

Then he was right about the little crosses. These medallions are another sign of an Orthodox bishop. I try to hide my amazement. For a bishop to have accepted Simon's invitation is a coup. I can't believe my brother was able to broker this.

And yet the more successful his diplomacy was, the more devastating it makes Ugo's discovery about 1204. I fear I'm beginning to see the outlines of the prosecution's case.

“Go back,” I say. “You said they relocated the meeting to Castel Gandolfo. Where was it originally supposed to be?”

“In the gardens.”

“Where in the gardens?”

If I'm right, then everything is starting to converge.

“The Casina,” he says.

This is it. Ugo's letter was about a meeting at the Casina. They must be the same: the meeting at Castel Gandolfo was the one Ugo and Simon had discussed weeks earlier, in which Ugo was slated to deliver the keynote address about his discovery. The site may have been changed at the last minute, but the gathering had been planned long in advance.

“Were all the passengers who rode to Castel Gandolfo priests?” I ask.

Gianni nods.

So Diego's calendar was right: this had nothing to do with a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The academy's scientists would've been laymen. This event seems to have revolved entirely around the Orthodox.

Still, that doesn't explain why the location was changed.

“Can't the Casina hold twenty or thirty people?” I say.

“Definitely.”

So the size of the crowd can't have been the reason. And in a country overrun with grand meeting halls, why choose a new location forty-five minutes away? The only advantage of Castel Gandolfo was the privacy.

“Why were you told not to keep records?” I ask. “Was someone in particular not supposed to find out about this?”

This strikes me as an extreme precaution. Almost no one would've known those records existed, let alone would've had the power to flush them out to track down the location of the meeting.

Gianni slices a hand through the air over his head. The answer is above his pay grade. But the timeline nags at me. As I try to arrange the dates in my mind, it seems to me that Michael was attacked around the same time Ugo wrote that letter. And everything since then—the secret transport of the Shroud, the furtive change of meeting place, the total silence Simon adopted even before he was accused of Ugo's murder—could be a reaction to Michael's attack. What happened to Michael might've been a warning sign that word of Simon's outreach was leaking. And in that vein, I can't help remembering that Mignatto said Simon's phone was tapped. If there was a leak, I wonder if it started there: Ugo and Simon discussing the Casina meeting too openly.

My silence seems to make Gianni nervous. “So,” he says, popping a mint, “is Simon going to be okay?”

He catches me unprepared. “Of course. You know he didn't murder anyone.”

He nods. “Not in a thousand years. I told the other drivers he would've put himself in the way of that bullet if he could've.”

I'm relieved to hear him say it. At least someone in this country remembers the real Simon. We both watched my brother fight in the boxing pit, so Gianni knows what he's capable of, but also knows where he draws his lines.

“So,” I say, steering the conversation away from Simon, “tell me about the Alfa they brought back from Castel Gandolfo.”

“Something must've happened out there. The gendarmes were asking the mechanics about some problem with the driver's seat.”

Mignatto wouldn't approve of what I'm about to say, but I say it anyway. “Could you go down and have a look? Anything you can find out would help.”

“The Alfa's not here. It's in another garage that they turned into an impound lot.”

Even Ugo's car is being hidden away. I'm beginning to feel that Castel Gandolfo is a black box. Fighting the accusations against Simon will be impossible without knowing what happened on that hillside.

“I'll ask around,” Gianni volunteers. “I'm sure one of the other drivers has been in that lot since they put the Alfa there.”

But I can't afford to have Gianni ask around. And I can't settle for seeing things through other men's eyes.

“Gian,” I say, “I need to ask an even bigger favor. I've got to see it myself.”

He stares as if I must be kidding.

“Please,” I say.

“It could get me canned.”

I look him in the eye. “I know.”

I wait for him to ask for something. A favor. A promise. A handout from Uncle Lucio.

But I've misjudged him. He empties his last mint into his palm and stares at it. “Damn,” he says. “Simon could lose his collar, and here I'm worried about my bullshit job.” He hurls the mint into the darkness, then rises and tucks in his shirt. “Stay here. When you see me pull up, get in.”

C
HAPTER
23

W
HEN HE'S OUT
of sight, I hurriedly call Mignatto.

“Monsignor, I found out where Simon is. They took him to Boia's apartments.”

“Damn it,” he growls. “They're closing ranks. Cardinal Boia's secretary called me an hour ago to say we won't be getting Father Black's personnel file.”

“Father Black's?”

“To see what the Secretariat concluded about the attack against him.”

As I scan the darkness for a sign of Gianni and his car, I hear ­Mignatto breathing into the phone. I wonder again why Simon accepted house arrest. Whether it was to protect the secrecy of his Castel Gandolfo meeting or to protect Peter and me. Maybe, after what happened to Michael, he wouldn't have made a distinction between the two.

“Your brother is on the list to testify tomorrow morning,” Mignatto says finally, “after the character witnesses.”

“Can you file a protest with the court to get him released?”

“It wouldn't change anything.”

“So what do we do?”

He makes a long, inarticulate sound, then says, “We wait and see how powerful your brother's guardian angel is.” He thinks a moment longer, then adds, “Very well, be at the Palace of the Tribunal at eight o'clock tomorrow.”

I hesitate. “Am I testifying?”

“Father, you're procurator. You're sitting beside me at the defense table.”

Below me I hear the autopark doors open. Instinctively I crouch, in case another driver's sedan rounds the bend. But it's Gianni rumbling toward the foot of the stairs. And I can't believe my eyes.

“Monsignor,” I say, “I've got to go.”

“If you find out anything else,” he says, “at any hour—”

“I'll call you.”

I hang up and slink down the terrace steps, trying to suppress the nervous urge to laugh. Gianni's car is a Fiat Campagnola, the white military jeep that the rest of the world knows as the popemobile.

“Get in,” Gianni says anxiously. “Before anyone sees you.”

I know the vehicle well. When we were thirteen, Gianni and I spent a whole night searching for dots of John Paul's blood in the bed, because it was in the back of this truck that he was shot by a gunman in Saint Peter's Square.

“Get in
where
?” I say.

There's no room in back, where an armchair has been installed for John Paul. The passenger seat is stacked with a removable plastic tarp that covers the Holy Father when it rains.

Gianni moves the plastic. “Under there.”

It takes me a moment to understand. He wants me to crawl into the foot well.

“And no matter what happens,” he adds in a voice that hums with uncertainty, “don't say a word. Okay? There's a gendarme outside the door, but once we get past him, the garage should be empty. I think I can buy you five or ten minutes inside.”

I do what he says, and Gianni piles the plastic tarp back over the foot well. Then the jeep starts to move.

The ride is rough. The popemobile is almost as old as I am. John Paul received it as a gift a quarter-century ago when he visited Turin, Fiat's headquarters, on a trip to venerate the Shroud. Thirteen months later, on the day he was shot in it, a team of Shroud scientists was in Saint Peter's Square, waiting to deliver their preliminary findings. One of the mysteries of living inside these walls is that there are no loose ends to our lives.

“Stay quiet,” Gianni says. “We're close.”

There's a jarring thud as we cross the raised barrier into the industrial quarter of town, a grimy area of workshops and warehouses. I see only the flash of electric lights as we plunge through it. Then the jeep slows, and I hear the first voice.

“Signore! No farther!”

Gianni brings the Fiat to a halt. He scrapes his foot toward me as a warning.

“No access here tonight,” the gendarme says.

He's approaching. Voice growing louder.

Gianni says, “I have orders from Father Antoni.”

The village nickname of Archbishop Nowak.

“What orders?”

I hope Gianni knows what he's doing. When John Paul travels in this jeep, he always has a gendarme escort. One call to the station could disprove anything Gianni says.

But he thumps the pile of plastic with his hand and says, “Chance of rain tomorrow.”

The gendarme says, “All right. How long will it take?”

“Ten minutes. I have to check the spare tarp.”

Now I understand his plan. Tomorrow is Wednesday, the day of John Paul's weekly audience. The only time this open-topped Campagnola is used anymore.

“It's been a dead zone out here tonight,” the gendarme says. “I'll give you a hand in there.”

Gianni tenses up. His foot makes the engine idle at higher RPM. But before he can refuse, I hear the gendarme opening the steel door on its metal rollers. Gianni turns the jeep around and reverses slowly into the bay.

“Whose Alfa is that?” I hear him say.

We've found Ugo's car.

“Not your business,” the gendarme says sharply. “Where's the thing you need?”

Gianni hesitates. My pulse is thready. He's never been a good liar.

“Inside one of the boxes back there,” he says.

He takes the keys out of the ignition and reaches down as if to pick up something he dropped. When his hand is in front of my face, he jabs
a finger toward the door, pointing. Something must be on the other side of the jeep.

Then he's gone. The two voices fade away.

Carefully I raise my head over the low doors of the popemobile. The garage is long and narrow, just wide enough for two cars abreast. Gianni has parked right beside the Alfa Romeo, which has its doors propped open, as if someone's been inspecting the interior.

Now I see why the gendarmes brought it here. The driver's window is shattered. A crinkled eggshell of glass surrounds a hole larger than a man's head. There are pebbles of glass on the seat.

My heart begins to hammer. I can't climb out of the Fiat without the gendarme seeing me. Instead I lower the hinged windshield, push it flat, and silently slide down the hood.

Ugo's car is waterlogged. It smells of mildew. In the foot well, the gendarmes have left a plastic red marker in the shape of an arrow. It points backward, under the driver's seat. But there's nothing down there, just a rectangular impression on the upholstery, as if something
was
there. I need a closer look.

Behind me, Gianni and the gendarme have started building the rain shield. My five or ten minutes have begun.

I lower myself onto Ugo's seat and scan the underside with my keychain flashlight. Gianni said the gendarmes were asking questions about the driver's seat. The seat is attached to the car body with metal sleds, and one part of the sleds is rubbed away. Whatever was on the floor must've been attached here.

I play the flashlight beam around, and something glints. Jutting out from the floor mat is a sliver of metal, no bigger than the white of a fingernail. I reach down to pick it up, then remember to be careful about fingerprints. In a prison outreach group I belong to, an inmate in our Bible class was caught hiding a used syringe, so the whole group had its fingerprints and blood taken. I roll my hand under the fabric of my cassock before picking up the bronze-colored arc.

Its outer edge seems smooth, but the inside is jagged and bent. Something about it seems familiar, yet I can't think why.

There's a noise in the distance. Gianni, warning me. I put the sliver of metal into my pocket and start crawling back toward the popemobile.

On the way out, though, I pass a utility cart. On top of it, in plastic
bags, are the objects that must've been removed from Ugo's car. A car charger for a mobile phone. A flask engraved with Ugo's initials. A scrap of stationery. There are several others below. I stop.

The plastic bags have red seals that say
EVIDENCE
. Their backs are embossed with boxes for the time and place of collection, the case number, the chain of custody. It seems odd that these would still be here, rather than entered as exhibits at the trial. A loose sheet of paper atop the utility cart says
HOLD FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTION
. I wonder if Mignatto knows any of this was found.

There's something else. No object here matches the impression under the driver's seat. Nothing the size of a small laptop computer, nothing that could've been tied around the metal sleds of the seat. Maybe that's why the window was broken: to steal whatever was down there.

I start to reach for the bags at the bottom of the heap, whose contents I can't see—when my eyes focus on the scrap of stationery.

A number is written on it. A phone number.

I look closer, and the breath catches in my lungs.

My
phone number. The landline at my apartment.

Another sharp clang comes from the back of the garage—Gianni knocking over the rain frame, warning me that time's running out.

I scurry to the Fiat.

Gianni doesn't even check that I'm in the foot well. He turns the ignition and shifts the jeep into first. The drive is short. In the same dark corner of the autopark where we started, he stops to let me off.

I want to thank him, but his eyes are wide and anxious, glancing behind him in the mirror. Distractedly he says, “So did you find anything useful?”

“Yes,” I say.

His head bobs. “Good. That's good.”

I step away from the jeep. He's panting. “If you need anything else . . .” he says.

“You've done plenty,” I say, thinking only of the phone number on that scrap of paper. “I really appreciate it, Gian.”

He offers a small wave and makes the sign of a telephone, as if I should call if I need anything else. He's trembling. The Fiat drives away toward the autopark doors.

I think to myself how often I've seen Ugo's handwriting. How many
sheets of his homily paper scrawled with gospel verses I've corrected when he insisted on giving himself homework after our lessons. I would recognize his penmanship anywhere. But the writing on that scrap of stationery was not his.

The contents of those evidence bags shouldn't still be locked in the impound garage. If the gendarmes are waiting for someone to collect them, then that someone seems to have decided to keep them out of sight.

Gianni's final gesture lingers with me. The sign of the telephone. It gives me an idea.