The Fifth Gospel: A Novel Page 2

  It was the first trip by any pope to our homeland in thirteen centuries, and our countrymen weren’t happy to see him. Nearly all Greeks are Orthodox, and John Paul wanted to end the schism between our Churches. Simon went there to see it happen. But hatreds are something my brother has never understood. From our father he inherited an almost Protestant immunity to the verdict of history. Orthodox blame Catholics for mistreating them in every war from the Crusades to World War Two. They blame Catholics for luring Orthodox away from their ancestral Church for a new hybrid form of Catholicism. The mere existence of Eastern Catholics is a provocation to some Orthodox, yet Simon couldn’t fathom why his own brother, a Greek Catholic priest, wouldn’t join him in Athens for the trip.

  The trouble arrived even before Simon did. When news spread that John Paul was going to touch down on Hellenic soil, Greek Orthodox monasteries rang funeral bells. Hundreds of Orthodox took to the streets in protest, carrying banners that read ARCH-HERETIC and TWO-HORNED MONSTER OF ROME. Newspapers carried stories about holy icons that had begun bleeding. A national day of mourning was declared. Simon, who had made arrangements to sleep in the rectory of my father’s old Greek Catholic church, arrived to find that Orthodox reactionaries had vandalized the doors with spray paint. He said the police wouldn’t help. My brother had finally found the underdog he was born to defend.

  That night, a small group of Orthodox hard-liners broke into the church and disrupted the liturgy. They made the great mistake of stripping the parish priest of his cassock and stomping on the antimension, the sacred cloth that makes a table an altar.

  My brother is almost six and a half feet tall. His sense of obligation toward the weak and helpless is intensified by the knowledge that he is larger and stronger than anyone he meets. Simon vaguely remembers pushing an Orthodox man out of the sanctuary in an attempt to save the Greek Catholic priest. The Orthodox man says Simon threw him. Greek police say he broke the man’s arm. Simon was arrested. His new employer—the Holy See Secretariat of State—had to negotiate his immediate return to Rome. That was why Simon never saw firsthand how John Paul dealt with the same hostilities, with much better success.

  The Greek Orthodox bishops made a point of snubbing John Paul. He didn’t complain. They insulted him. He didn’t defend himself. They demanded he apologize for Catholic sins from centuries ago. And John Paul, speaking on behalf of one billion living souls and the untold Catholic dead, apologized. The Orthodox were so amazed that they agreed to do something they had refused to do until that moment: to stand beside him in prayer.

  I’ve always hoped that John Paul’s performance in Athens was a corrective to Simon’s behavior. Another lesson sent down from heaven. Since then, Simon has been a changed man. That is what I tell myself, again and again, as I drive south from Rome into the heart of the storm.

  IN THE DISTANCE, CASTEL Gandolfo comes into view: a long hilltop breaching over the weird prairie of golf courses and used-car lots that yawn south from the outskirts of Rome. Two thousand years ago, this was the playground of emperors. The popes have been summering here for only a few centuries, but it’s enough to qualify the land as an official extension of our country.

  As I round the hill, I see a carabinieri squad car at the bottom of the cliff—Italian policemen from the station across the border line, sharing a cigarette while the storm rages. But Italy’s laws have no force where I’m going. There’s no sign of Vatican police in this slashing rain, and their absence allows the pinch in my chest to begin to loosen.

  I park my Fiat where the hillside sinks into Lake Albano, and before stepping out in the rain I dial a number on my phone. On the fifth ring, a gruff voice picks up.

  “Pronto.”

  “Little Guido?” I say.

  He snorts. “Who’s this?”

  “Alex Andreou.”

  Guido Canali is an old childhood acquaintance, the son of a Vatican turbine mechanic. In a country where the only qualification for most jobs is blood relation to someone else with a job, Guido has been unable to find better work than shoveling manure at the pontifical dairy on this hilltop. He’s always looking for a handout. And though it’s no accident our paths don’t cross anymore, I’m looking for some help of my own.

  “It’s not Little Guido anymore,” he says. “My old man died last year.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “That makes one of us. To what do I owe the call?”

  “I’m in town and need a favor. Could you open the gate for me?”

  From his surprised tone, he has no inkling about Simon. More good news. We negotiate a deal: two tickets to the upcoming exhibit, which Guido knows I can get from Uncle Lucio. Even the proudest sloth in our country wants to see what my friend Ugo has done. When I hang up, I follow the dark trail up the hill to our meeting place, where the wind sharpens to the high hissing sound I heard behind Simon’s phone call.

  I’m surprised—and at first, relieved—to see no signs of trouble here. Every time I’ve collected my brother from the police in the past, he’s been part of some agitation. But there are no villagers picketing in the square here, no Vatican employees marching for better wages. At the north end of the village, the pope’s summer palace looks abandoned. The two domes of the Vatican Observatory rise from its roof like lumps on the head of the cartoon characters Peter watches on television. Nothing is amiss here. Nothing even seems alive.

  A private walkway leads from the palace to the papal gardens, and at the garden gate I see a pixie of cigarette light hovering in a black fist.

  “Guido?”

  “Hell of a time for a visit,” the cigarette says, then drops in a puddle to die. “Follow me.”

  As my eyes adjust, I see that he looks exactly like the late Big Guido: pug-faced, with a broad beetlelike back. Manual labor has made him a man. The Vatican directory is littered with staff Simon and I knew as children, but my brother and I are almost the only priests. Ours is a caste system in which men proudly replace the fathers and grandfathers who shined floors or fixed furniture before them. It can be hard, though, to watch old playmates rise to a higher station, and there’s a familiar tone in Guido’s voice when he opens the metal lock, points to his truck, and says, “Get in, Father.”

  The gates here are to keep out the riffraff, and the hedges are to keep out their eyes. An Italian village sits on either side of our land, but you’d never know it. The spine of this hill, half a mile long, is a private wonderland for the pope. His property at Castel Gandolfo is bigger than the entire Vatican, but nobody lives here, only some gardeners and workmen and the old Jesuit astronomer who sleeps during the day. The real inhabitants are potted fruit trees and avenues of stone pines, flower beds measured in acres, and marble statues left behind by pagan emperors, now mounted in the gardens to give John Paul a smile on his summer walks. From up here, the view is from lake to sea. As we drive down the unpaved garden path, there isn’t another living thing in sight.

  “Where were you looking to go?” Guido says.

  “Just drop me in the gardens.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “In the middle of this?”

  The storm rages. His interest piqued by the strangeness of my request, Guido turns on the CB radio to see if there is any chatter. Yet it, too, is silent.

  “My girl works down there,” he says, lifting a finger off the wheel to point. “In the olive groves.”

  I say nothing. I give tours of this place to new recruits at my old seminary, so in daylight I would know the landscape better. But in the darkness, in this driving rain, all I can make out is the strip of road before the headlights. As we approach the gardens, there are no trucks, no police cars, no gardeners with flashlights sloping through the rain.

  “She drives me up a wall,” Guido says, shaking his head. “But Alex, the ass on this girl.” He whistles.

  The deeper we drive into these shadows, the more it blooms in m
e that something is deeply wrong. Simon must be alone in the rain. For the first time, I consider the possibility that he’s hurt. That he’s been in some kind of accident. Yet on the phone he mentioned the police, not an ambulance. I replay our conversation in my mind, searching for something I misunderstood.

  Guido’s truck jackknifes up a road through the gardens and comes to the edge of a clearing.

  “Far enough,” I say. “I’ll get out here.”

  Guido looks around. “Here?”

  I’m already descending.

  “Don’t forget our deal, Alex,” he calls out. “Two tickets to opening night.”

  But I’m too preoccupied to respond. When Guido is gone, I take out my phone and call Simon. The coverage up here is so spotty that there’s no reliable connection. Just for an instant, though, I hear another mobile phone ring.

  I move toward the sound, fanning my flashlight into the distance. The hillside has been carved into a vast staircase, three monolithic terraces that descend one after another in the direction of the far-off sea. Every inch is planted with flowers arranged in circles within octagons within squares, not a petal out of place. The space up here is infinite. It creates a wild anxiety in me.

  I’m about to shout Simon’s name into the wind, when something comes into view. From up here, on the highest terrace, I make out a fence. The eastern border of the pope’s property. Just before the gate, the beam of my flashlight tangles with something dark. A silhouette dressed entirely in black.

  The wind snaps at the hem of my cassock as I run toward it. The earth is choppy. Clods of mud are turned up, grass roots sticking out like spider legs.

  “Simon!” I call toward him. “Are you okay?”

  He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even move.

  I’m lurching toward him now, trying to keep upright in the slicks of mud. The distance between us shrinks. Yet he doesn’t speak.

  I arrive in front of him. My brother. I lay hands on him, saying, “Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay.”

  He’s soaked and pale. His wet hair is painted to his forehead like a doll’s. A black cassock clings to his ropy muscles the way a pelt clings to a racehorse. Cassocks are the old-fashioned robes that all Roman priests once wore, before black pants and black jackets came into style. In this darkness, on my brother’s looming figure, it creates an almost ghoulish impression.

  “What’s wrong?” I say, because he still hasn’t answered me.

  There’s a thin, distant look in his eyes. He’s staring at something on the ground.

  A long black coat lies in the mud. The overcoat of a Roman priest. A greca, named for its resemblance to a Greek priest’s cassock. Underneath it is a hump.

  Not in any imagining of this moment have I conceived of something like this. At the end of the hump is a pair of shoes.

  “My God,” I whisper. “Who is that?”

  Simon’s voice is so dry that it cracks.

  “I could’ve saved him,” he says.

  “Sy, I don’t understand. Tell me what’s going on.”

  My eyes are drawn to those loafers. There’s a hole in one of the soles. A feeling nags at me, like a fingernail scraping against my thoughts. Stray papers have blown against the high fence that separates the pope’s property from the border road. Rain has pasted them to the metal links like papier-mâché.

  “He called me,” Simon murmurs. “I knew he was in trouble. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Who called you?”

  But the meaning of the words slowly registers. Now I know the source of that nagging feeling. The hole in those loafers is familiar.

  I step back. My stomach tightens. My hands curl up.

  “H-how . . . ?” I stammer.

  There are suddenly lights moving down the garden road toward us. Pairs of them, no bigger than BBs. When they come closer, they resolve into police cruisers.

  Vatican gendarmes.

  I kneel down, hands trembling. On the ground beside the body is an open briefcase. The wind continues to tug at the papers inside it.

  The gendarmes begin jogging toward us, barking orders to step away from the body. But I reach over and do what every instinct in my body requires. I need to see.

  When I pull back Simon’s greca, the dead man’s eyes are wide. The mouth is cocked. The tongue is stuffed in its cheek. On my friend’s face is a dull grimace. In his temple is a black hole leaking a pink nubbin of flesh.

  The clouds are pressing in. Simon’s hand is on me, pulling me back. Step away, he says.

  But I can’t take my eyes off it. I see suit pockets turned out. A bare patch of white skin where a wristwatch has been removed.

  “Come away, Father,” says a gendarme.

  Finally I turn. The gendarme has a face like a leather knuckle. From his needlepoint eyes, from his frost of white hair, I recognize him as Inspector Falcone, chief of Vatican police. The man who runs beside John Paul’s car.

  “Which one of you is Father Andreou?” he says.

  Simon steps forward and says, “We both are. I’m the one who called you.”

  I stare at my brother, trying to make sense of this.

  Falcone points to one of his officers. “Go with Special Agent Bracco. Tell him everything you saw.”

  Simon obeys. He reaches into the pocket of the greca for his wallet and phone and passport but leaves his coat draped over the body. Before following the officer, he says, “This man has no next of kin. I need to make sure he receives a proper funeral.”

  Falcone squints. It’s a queer statement. But coming from a priest, he allows it.

  “Father,” he says, “you knew this man?”

  Simon answers in a faint voice. “He was my friend. His name was Ugolino Nogara.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE POLICEMAN LEADS Simon out of earshot to answer questions, and I watch the other gendarmes rope up the clearing. One studies the eight-foot fence beside the public road, trying to understand how an outsider penetrated these gardens. Another stares at a security camera mounted overhead. Most gendarmes were city cops in another life. Rome PD. They can see that Ugo’s watch has been stolen, that his wallet is gone, that his briefcase is pried open. Yet they keep working over the details as if something doesn’t square.

  In these hills, people’s love for the Holy Father is fierce. Locals tell stories about popes knocking at their doors, making sure every family in town had a chicken in its pot. Old-timers are named in honor of Pope Pius, who shielded their families from harm in wartime. It’s not the walls that protect this place, but the villagers. A robbery here seems impossible.

  “Weapon!” I hear one of the officers call.

  He’s standing at the mouth of a tunnel, a giant thoroughfare built for a Roman emperor as a covered path for after-meal walks. Two more gendarmes jog to the opening, guided by a pair of gardeners. There is grunting. Something large topples over. Whatever the police find, though, isn’t the gun they were hoping for.

  “False alarm,” one of them barks.

  My chest shudders. I close my eyes. A wave of emotion rolls through me. I’ve watched men die before. At the hospital where Mona was a nurse, I used to anoint the sick. Say prayers for the dying. And yet I have trouble swallowing back this feeling.

  A gendarme comes by, taking pictures of footprints in the mud. There are police everywhere in these gardens now. But my eyes return to Ugo.

  What is his special claim on my heart? His exhibit will make him, now posthumously, one of the most talked-about men in Rome, and I’ll be able to say I had a hand in that. But what won me over were his battle scars. The eyeglasses he never found time to repair. The holes in his shoes. The awkwardness that evaporated once he began talking about his great project. Even his neurotic, incurable drinking. Nothing on earth mattered to him except his exhibit, and on it he lavished every waking thought. He ex
isted for its future. That, I realize, is the source of my feelings. To this exhibit, Ugo was a father.

  Simon returns now, followed by the gendarme who questioned him. My brother’s eyes are blank and wet. I wait for him to say something. Instead it’s the officer who speaks.

  “You may go now,” he says. “Fathers.”

  But the body bag has just arrived. Neither of us moves. Two gendarmes lift Ugo on top of it and stretch the sides around him. The zipper makes a sound like velvet ripping. They begin to carry him off when Simon says, “Stop.”

  The policemen turn.

  Simon lifts a hand in the air and says:

  “O Lord, incline Your ear.”

  Both gendarmes lower the body bag. Everyone within earshot—every cop, every gardener, every man of every caste—reaches up to remove his hat.

  “Humbly I ask,” Simon says, “that You show mercy on the soul of Your servant Ugolino Nogara, whom You commanded to pass out of this world into the region of peace and light. Let him be partaker with Your saints. Through Christ the Lord, amen.”

  In my heart, I add those two essential Greek words, the most succinct and powerful of all Christian prayers.

  Kyrie, eleison.

  Lord, have mercy.

  Hats return to heads. The bag rises once more. Wherever it is going, it goes.

  There is an aching stillness between my ribs.

  Ugo Nogara is gone.

  WHEN WE REACH THE Fiat, Simon pops open the glove box and feels it out with his fingers. In a faint voice he says, “Where’s my pack of cigarettes?”