The Fifth Gospel (39 page)

C
HAPTER
24

B
EHIND THE AUTOPARK
is the Belvedere Palace. I jog up the stairs to my apartment. Before entering, I listen for sounds on the other side of the door. Until the locks are changed, this will have to be a part of my visits here. But I see that Leo has left something behind from our last visit: the flap of a matchbook, stuffed between the frame and the door. It's a trick he uses in the barracks to make sure cadets don't sneak into Rome. Paper on the floor means someone's come and gone. Paper in the door means the seal is unbroken. I'm relieved.

I let myself in and go to the telephone in the kitchen. It seems strange that Ugo would've wanted the number for this landline. Whenever we exchanged calls about the Diatessaron, he dialed my mobile. Maybe this time he was trying to reach Simon, not me. The question is, when?

I scroll through the caller ID list of incoming calls, and there isn't a trace of Ugo's number. There are only three calls from an unfamiliar phone—a Vatican number—all within forty minutes of each other on the night before Ugo died. Peter and I were away that whole evening, seeing a movie. I never knew about these calls.

Loose sparks float through my thoughts. I check the date on the calls again, just to be sure. It's as if someone was checking to make sure we were gone. Casing the apartment before the break-in. Yet the following night—when the break-in actually happened—there's not a single unrecognized call.

Losing patience, I scroll back to the unfamiliar number and punch it into my phone. It barely rings before a woman picks up.

“Pronto. Casa Santa Marta. How may I help you?”

A nun. At the front desk of the Casa.

“Hello,” I say. “I'm trying to reach someone who called me from a hotel line. Can you connect me?”

“The name, sir?”

“I don't have the name. Just a phone number.”

“For the privacy of our guests, sir, we can't honor that request.”

“It's important, Sister. Please.”

“I'm very sorry.”

Thinking quickly, I say, “Ugolino Nogara, then. Can you look for a room under the name Ugolino Nogara?”

Ugo had no reason to stay at the Casa. He would've stayed in his apartment over the museums. But I'm fishing for anything.

I hear her typing on the computer. “No guest under that name, sir. Are you sure he hasn't checked out? We remove guests from the system when they return their keys.”

Their keys.
Suddenly it comes to me. The sliver of metal I found under Ugo's car mat.

“Thank you, Sister,” I say. Then I hang up the phone and reach into both pockets of my cassock. Out of one I take the metal crescent from Ugo's car. Out of the other I take my room key from the Casa.

Attached to the Casa key is an oval fob engraved with the room number. Color and thickness match perfectly. The sliver is a snapped-off edge of a Casa fob.

Looking closer, I can see the stress marks. It must've been used to pry something up. Whatever the job was, it failed.

I sit at the kitchen table, trying to arrange all this information into a pattern I can grasp. The phone calls to my apartment trace back to the Casa. The robbery of Ugo's car does, too. This may be the first hint that the break-in and the murder really are connected. But I'm also haunted by the thought that Peter and I were at the Casa, sleeping under the same roof as the man who did this.

I rub the metal sliver in my palm. The Casa. It was built for out-of-town visitors, but it's also where Secretariat priests stay when they're passing through. On the phone, Mignatto said Cardinal Boia doesn't
want us to know who beat Michael up. He refuses to release that information. Boia, since the time of my father's death, has been the enemy of a Catholic-Orthodox reunion. The man who has used the Secretariat as a tool to kill John Paul's goodwill gestures toward our sister Church.

Simon must've known he was tempting fate by inviting Orthodox clergy to the exhibit. He must've tried to stay off Boia's radar as long as he could. That would explain why his diplomatic passport has no hint of trips to Serbia or Romania. He could've applied for a regular Italian passport to hide what he was doing. But once an Orthodox bishop—or a metropolitan—agreed to come to Rome, the game was over. Bishops are public figures. They travel with entourages; their plans appear in announcements and diocesan calendars. Boia was guaranteed to find out.

Around that time, though, Simon must've had an even nastier shock. It was in the thick of my brother's negotiations with the Orthodox that Ugo discovered the Shroud had been stolen from Constantinople.

That discovery must've set the rest of this in motion. Michael was attacked by men who wanted to know what Ugo had discovered. The same threat was written on the back of the photo I was sent. Cardinal Boia seems to know Ugo uncovered
something
, but not what it is. Maybe this is what he hopes to squeeze out of Simon by putting him under house arrest.

Ironically, though, all he needs to do is walk through Ugo's exhibit. Even though the galleries are unfinished, the answers are in plain sight. If His Eminence would learn a few words of Greek, he would realize the truth is painted on the walls.

I stand and wade through the darkness back to my bedroom. My brother may put this exhibit above his own career, but I don't. Simon was made for greater things than inviting some Orthodox clergy to Rome. When he testifies tomorrow, the judges need to hear what's really at stake.

I look in my dresser but don't find what I'm looking for. So I cross the imaginary line between my side of the room and Mona's and open the jewelry box her father made her after our engagement. She disappeared without anything but a carry-on bag of clothes, and since a priest's wife rarely wears jewelry anyway, it's all still here: the diamond
stud earrings, the nostalgic teenage rings, the gold necklace with the Latin cross on it, superseded by the Greek cross she would've been wearing the day she left. I open the small lower compartment. Inside is a key. I loop it onto my chain.

On my way to the door, I stop and open the credenza that was overturned during the break-in. Inside it is the plastic bag where Peter and I keep our rat's nest of extra wires and cables and adapters. Anything I see that might charge a mobile phone, I roll up and stuff in my cassock.

Then, before going downstairs again, I try to brace myself for what I'm about to see.

ON THE BOTTOM FLOOR
of our apartment building is Vatican Health Services. When Simon and I were boys, American priests would fly back to New York for their checkups rather than risk a trip to the Vatican doctors. Horror stories have followed every pope for half a century. Fifty years ago, Pius XII came down with recurring hiccups, so his doctor prescribed injections of ground lamb brains. Another papal doctor sold Pius' medical records to newspapers and embalmed his dead body using an experimental technique that made the pope's corpse bubble and fart like a tar pit while pilgrims queued up to view it. Ten years later, Paul VI needed his prostate removed, so Vatican doctors decided to perform the operation in his library. His successor, John Paul I, died thirty-three days into his papacy because our doctors didn't yet know he took pills for a blood condition. So you might think our Vatican morticians would be world-class, considering all the practice they get. But there's no such thing as a Vatican mortician and no such place as a Vatican morgue. Popes are embalmed in their apartments by volunteer undertakers from the city, and the rest of us settle for the back room at Health Services. That room is where I'm headed now.

There are two doors to the clinic, one for bishops and one for everyone else. Even now, I use the door appropriate to my rank. Mona's key opens the lock without a hitch. Before Peter was born, she worked here pro bono, like all our medical staff, in addition to her real job in the city.

I haven't stood in this waiting room since the day of my father's heart attack. The windows look out onto the autopark and the museums beyond, so I don't dare turn on the lights. But I don't need them to
remember how this place looks. The white floors and walls, the white slats of the plastic window shades. The white-coated doctors and nurses who moved so slowly when we carried Father inside, as if they'd already decided this would be his doorstep to heaven. When Mona volunteered here, not once did I come down to meet her after work, and not once did she have to ask me why.

I walk down the hall, opening the waiting rooms one by one. As expected, the one I want is at the very end. Even before I open the door, I smell the embalming fluid. Inside the room there's no reclining bed dressed with sanitary paper, just a steel table draped with a white sheet. Under the sheet is the hump of a body.

I look away from Ugo, feeling as if I've invaded his privacy. This was a man who kept two dead bolts on his door and a safe bolted to his office floor. A man who in all the time we worked together never showed me a picture of his family, if he even had any to speak of. Maybe that's why his body is still here, three days later, languishing in a back room with no vigil or word of a burial Mass.

“Ugo,” I say aloud, “I'm so sorry.”

For being here. For interrupting your peace. For ignoring you when you came to me for help.

I look away and scan the wheeled cart in front of me, searching for his belongings. Instead I find a manila folder labeled
NOGARA, UGOLINO L
. The first page is a diagram of a man's skull covered with handwritten notes. Mindful of my fingerprints, I pull a pair of latex gloves from the dispenser on the wall before touching it.

A black hole is drawn on the right side of the diagram's skull. Measurements are beside it. An exit wound is drawn on the left side, likewise measured. On the next page is a full-body silhouette listing the scars and discolorations on Ugo's skin. At a glance I see the word
jaundice
, followed by a reference to page eleven in the patient history.

I skim forward. The file has mostly been compiled during the past eighteen months, beginning just before Ugo's first trip to Edessa, when he was vaccinated for typhoid and tetanus. This spring, he tested positive for liver disease. Then failed a vision test. After that, the entries become more frequent. Ugo seems to have visited the doctor every time he was back in town. Page eleven, referenced in the autopsy report, was made less than a month ago.

Patient exhibits secondary delusions consistent with alcohol dependency. Fears losing job. Fears being followed, harmed. Evidence of possible confabulation. Tested for Korsakoff, but no evidence of amnesia. Retest for memory loss in six months. Prescribed thiamine; referred to specialist.

The date of this visit is shortly before he sent me his final e-mail. The doctors, seeing that he was an alcoholic, ignored everything else. I feel a second wave of guilt.

Returning to the autopsy report, I finally find the inventory of personal effects. It mentions the absence of wallet and watch. It says nothing about a Casa key—with or without a nick taken out of the fob. This strengthens my suspicion that the scrap I found under his floor mat wasn't his.

The inventory also says the pockets of Ugo's pants, shirt, and suit jacket were empty. But my suspicion was right. In the inner breast pocket of his raincoat, the examiner found Ugo's mobile phone.

No mobile phone was ever listed in an inventory of evidence Mignatto mentioned to me. I begin to search the metal trays for another red-sealed evidence bag, when my eyes catch one last line in the notes.

Staining of both hands.

I stop, and look again. Then I rifle through the pages for another reference. Beside the full-body diagram, a line item mentions the gunshot residue found on Ugo's shielding hand, the one he defended himself with. But that isn't what the notation said. It said staining of
both
hands.

Thinking back, I remember what the Swiss Guard said about Ugo's body to Simon and me in the cantina just hours after he died.

I heard there was something wrong with it.
Something about his hands or feet.

I stare at the hump under the sheet on the metal table. And I dread what I need to do now.

ONLY SIMON WAS ALLOWED
to see Father's body in this room. Two days afterward, when I leaned over the open casket to kiss the holy icon on his chest, I smelled the cologne the mortician had put on him, and I
knew my father was gone. The body before me had become a stranger. No Greek priest wears cologne. But that smell has stayed with me, folded among the buried memories in the corners of my own skull. It returns now as I step toward the table.

I stare at the white sheet. At the bulging landscape of Ugo's corpse. Then I don the priest's familiar armor against death. There's nothing to fear here. The soul doesn't die. As surely as Ugo lived before, he still lives, just dislocated from his body.