The Fifth Gospel: A Novel Page 3

  “I threw it away.”

  The screen of my mobile phone says Sister Helena has called twice. Peter must be frantic with worry. But there isn’t enough service here to get a connection.

  Simon scratches his neck needfully.

  “We’ll get you some when we get back,” I tell him. “What happened back there?”

  He breathes out the corner of his mouth, a plume of invisible smoke. I notice his right hand squeezing the top of his right thigh.

  “Are you hurt?” I ask.

  He shakes his head but readjusts himself to make that leg more comfortable. His left hand reaches into the other sleeve of his cassock, dipping into the French cuffs that priests use like pockets. He’s looking for cigarettes again.

  I turn the key. When the Fiat comes to life, I lean forward and kiss the rosary Mona hung from the rearview mirror long ago. “We’ll be home soon,” I say. “When you’re ready to talk, let me know.”

  He nods but doesn’t speak. Drumming his fingers against his lips, he stares toward the clearing where Ugo lost his life.

  * * *

  WE COULD GET TO Rome faster driving elephants over the Alps. My father’s old Fiat is on its last cylinder, down from the original two. There are lawn mowers with more horsepower these days. The dial of the car stereo has rusted in place at 105 FM, Vatican Radio, which is broadcasting the rosary. Simon takes the string of beads off the mirror and begins to finger it. The voice on the radio says: Pontius Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified. Those words cue the usual prayers—an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, a Glory Be—and the prayers plunge Simon into faraway contemplation.

  “Why would anyone rob him?” I ask, unable to bear the silence.

  Ugo had almost nothing worth taking. He wore a cheap wristwatch. Carried a wallet whose contents would barely have covered the train fare back to Rome.

  “I don’t know,” Simon says.

  The only time I ever saw Ugo with a wad of cash was after he’d traded money at the airport following a business trip.

  “Were you on the same plane home?” I ask.

  They’ve both been working in Turkey.

  “No,” Simon says distantly. “He got in two nights ago.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  My brother glances at me, as if trying to sift meaning from gibberish.

  “Preparing his exhibit,” Simon says.

  “Why would he have gone walking in the gardens?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There are a handful of museums and archaeological sites among these hills, in the Italian territory surrounding the pope’s property. Ugo could’ve been doing research there, or meeting with another curator. But the outdoor sites would’ve closed when the storm came through, and Ugo would’ve been forced to find shelter.

  “The villa in the gardens,” I say. “Maybe that’s where he was headed.”

  Simon nods. The voice on the radio says, Weaving a crown out of thorns, they placed it on Jesus’ head, and a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” The next round of prayers starts, and Simon follows it, leaving chips of dirt on the beads as they move under his thumb. He’s never been a fastidious priest, but he’s always been trim and tidy. As the mud dries on his skin, he stares at the spiderwebs of cracks forming in it, and at the flakes of dust stripped off by the rosary.

  I remember the two of us sitting just like this, shortly after Peter’s birth, on the night I drove Simon to the airport for his first posting overseas. We listened to the radio, watching planes swim into the air overhead, leaving contrails like angels. My brother believed that diplomacy was God’s work, that negotiating tables were where religious hatreds went to die. When he accepted a post in lowly Bulgaria, where fewer than one in a hundred people is Catholic, Uncle Lucio wrung his hands and said Simon might as well work for the pork lobby in Israel. But three out of four Bulgarians are Orthodox Christians, and ever since my brother’s trip to Athens, it had been his project to promote the reunion of the earth’s two biggest Churches. That kind of idealism had always been Simon’s besetting sin. Priests in our Secretariat of State are promoted on a timetable—bishop in ten years, archbishop in twenty—which explains why so many of the world’s hundred fifty cardinals are Secretariat men. But the ones who fall short tend to be the ones waylaid by good intentions. As Lucio warned him, a maharaja has to choose between leading his people and cleaning up after his elephant. In that metaphor, Mona, Peter, and I were the elephant. Simon needed to extricate himself from us before his sense of obligation slowed him down.

  But then Simon posted to Turkey, and God tossed him a new charity case: Ugo Nogara. A lost sheep. A fragile soul struggling with the masterpiece of his career. So I can imagine what my brother must feel at this moment. An agony not entirely different from what I would feel if something had happened to Peter.

  “Ugo’s in a good place,” I remind him.

  This is the conviction that helped two boys survive the deaths of their parents. Beyond death is life; beyond suffering, peace. But Simon is still too raw to absorb Ugo’s death. Instead of thumbing the rosary, he grips it in his hand.

  “What did the gendarme ask you?” I say.

  There are wrinkles under his eyes. I can’t tell whether he’s squinting into the distance or whether a handful of years in the Secretariat has done this to a man only in his early thirties.

  “About my phone,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “To see what time Ugo called me.”

  “What else?”

  He stares at the phone in his hand. “Whether I saw anyone else in the gardens.”

  “Did you?”

  He must be swimming in darkness. His only dim answer is, “Nobody.”

  Loose thoughts tangle in my mind. Castel Gandolfo goes quiet in the fall. The pope leaves his summer residence and returns to the Vatican, so the Swiss Guards and gendarmes no longer keep detachments on the grounds. Tourist spots are deserted by evening because the last daily train to Rome leaves before five, and if the pickpockets here are anything like the ones in Rome, they become more aggressive once the easy prey is gone. For a second I’m haunted by the image of Ugo in the rain, in the empty town square, hunted down by one of them.

  “There was a carabinieri station right across the road,” I say. “Why didn’t Ugo call them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Maybe he did call them, but they refused to cross the Vatican border. And if Ugo called our Vatican emergency number, 112, I doubt it would’ve worked out here.

  “What did he say to you on the phone?” I ask.

  Simon lifts a hand. “Please, Alex. I need some time.”

  He retreats into himself, as if his memory of the phone call is especially painful. Simon must’ve been en route from the airport when it came. Maybe he told his driver to take an immediate detour, but it still wasn’t enough.

  I remember how he flew home right away when I called him with the news that Mona had left me. He vowed to stay as long as it took for me to feel human again. It took six weeks. Lucio begged him to return to the embassy. Instead, Simon helped me canvass Rome with flyers, helped me phone relatives and friends, helped take care of Peter while I meandered self-indulgently through the city, visiting the places where I had fallen in love with my wife. Later, when he returned to Bulgaria, our mailbox was flooded with envelopes addressed to Peter, each containing photos Simon had shot around the capital: a man losing his toupee in a city breeze; an accordion player with a monkey; a squirrel in a mountain of chestnuts. They became the wallpaper of Peter’s room. The ritual of reading the letters became my new beginning with my son. That was how I learned what Lucio had meant. While Simon snapped photos, lesser priests were climbing the ladder. Finally I told him that Peter and I
had turned the corner. No more letters. Please.

  The city lights have begun to rain color on us. Simon’s eyes are moving, sizing up the vista beyond the windshield. It’s been more than a month since he saw this skyline, more than a month since he breathed Roman air. Tonight was supposed to be a homecoming.

  Quietly I say, “Did you see any of the garden gates left unlocked?”

  But he doesn’t seem to hear me.

  THE VATICAN APARTMENT BUILDING where Simon and I grew up, and where I still live with Peter, is called the Belvedere Palace, because in Italian you can call anything a palace. Ours is a brick shoebox built a hundred years ago by the pope because he got tired of seeing housewives and children in his private stairwells. Belvedere means “pretty view,” but we don’t have one of those either; just the Vatican supermarket on one side and the Vatican parking garage on the other. Employee housing, is what it is.

  We live on the top floor, across the hall from the Brothers of Saint John of God who run the Vatican Pharmacy on the ground floor. From a few windows we can see the back of John Paul’s apartments in the papal palace—a real palazzo, by anyone’s standards. In the small rear lot, a gendarme is doing what God made Vatican policemen to do: check cars for parking permits. We are home.

  “Do you want me to ask Brother Samuel for a pack you can smoke?” I ask as we climb the stairs.

  Simon’s hand is shaking. “No, don’t wake him. I’ve got a stash inside somewhere.”

  A second gendarme, passing us on the steps, can’t help noticing Simon’s bedraggled appearance. Out of respect, though, he looks away.

  I stop.

  “Officer,” I blurt, wheeling around on the stairs, “what are you doing here?”

  From down the stairwell he looks up. He’s a cadet, with the eyes of a child.

  “Fathers . . .” He kneads his service cap. “There was an incident.”

  Simon frowns. “What do you mean, an incident?”

  But I’m already racing up the stairs.

  * * *

  MY APARTMENT DOOR IS open. Three men are huddled in my living room. In the kitchen, a chair has been thrown on its back. A plate of food is shattered on the floor.

  “Where’s Peter?” I shout. “Where’s my son?”

  The men turn. They are Hospitaller Brothers from next door, still wearing white lab coats over black habits after a day of work at the pharmacy. One of them points down the hall toward the bedrooms. He says nothing.

  I feel disoriented. In the hall, a credenza is overturned. The hardwood floor is littered with papers. Staring up at me, innocent and fragile, is my father’s icon of the Christ child. Its red clay frame has been smashed by the fall. From behind the bedroom door comes the sound of a woman sobbing.

  Sister Helena.

  I push open the bedroom door. They’re both here, huddled on the bed. Peter sits in Helena’s lap, cocooned in her crossed arms. Opposite them, on the bed where Simon slept as a boy, a gendarme is taking notes.

  “. . . taller, I suppose,” she is saying, “but I never got a good look.”

  The gendarme abruptly looks up at Simon, who has arrived behind me, giant and storm-swept.

  “What happened?” I say, rushing forward. “Are you hurt?”

  “Babbo!” Peter says, squirming out of her arms to reach me.

  His face is pink and puffy. The moment he reaches my embrace, he begins crying again.

  “Oh, thank heaven,” Sister Helena exclaims, rising from the bed to greet me.

  Peter trembles in my arms. I pat him, searching for injuries.

  “Unharmed,” Helena whispers.

  “What’s going on?”

  She places a hand over her mouth. The pouched skin beneath her eyes weakens. “A man,” she says. “Came inside.”

  “What? When?”

  “We were in the kitchen. Having dinner.”

  “I don’t understand. How did he get in?”

  “I don’t know. We heard him at the door. Then he was inside.”

  I turn to the gendarme. “You caught him?”

  “No. But we’re stopping everyone who tries to cross the border.”

  I press Peter against me. The officer in the parking lot wasn’t checking permits, then.

  “What did he want?” I ask him.

  “We’re looking into that,” the gendarme says.

  “Were other apartments robbed?”

  “None that we know of.”

  I’ve never heard of a burglary in this building. Petty crime is almost nonexistent in our Vatican village.

  Peter nuzzles my neck and whispers, “I had to hide in the closet.”

  I stroke his back and ask Helena, “Did he look at all familiar?”

  The village is small. Sister Helena lives in a convent, but Peter and I know almost everyone who lives inside these walls.

  “I never got a look at him, Father,” she says. “He was beating on the door so loudly that I lifted Peter out of his chair and carried him in here.”

  I hesitate. “Beating on the door?”

  “And shouting, and shaking the knob. He got inside while I was still carrying Peter. It’s a miracle we got to the bedroom in time.”

  My heart is thudding. I turn to the gendarme. “So this wasn’t a burglary?”

  “We don’t know what it was, Father.”

  “Did he try to hurt you?” I ask Helena.

  “We locked the bedroom door and hid in the closet.”

  I look down and find my son gazing at the pale, mud-spattered figure of his uncle. Their faces are both deranged with shock.

  “Peter,” I say, stroking his stiff back, “it’s okay. You’re safe. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  But he and Simon are locked in a frightening stare. Their blue eyes flash at each other. There’s an animal quality to my brother’s gaze, which Simon is trying but failing to master.

  “Sister Helena,” I repeat in a whisper, “did he try to hurt either of you?”

  “No. He ignored us. We heard him moving around out there.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “It sounded like he went to your room. He was calling your names.”

  I press Peter against me, shielding his face against my shoulder. “Whose names?”

  “Yours and Father Simon’s.”

  My skin crawls. I feel the gendarme staring at me, gauging my reaction.

  “Father,” he says, “can you shed any light on this?”

  “No. Of course not.” I turn to Simon. “Can you think of anything?”

  My brother’s stare is distant. All he says is, “What time did it happen?”

  There’s an unsettling note in his voice. It suggests something to me that seems irrational at first, but that spreads like ink through my thoughts. I wonder if this attack could be related to what happened to Ugo. If the person who killed Ugo might’ve come here next.

  “It happened only a few minutes after Father Alex left,” Helena says.

  Castel Gandolfo is twenty miles from here. A forty-five-minute drive. It would’ve been almost impossible for the same person to have committed both attacks. Nor can I think of a reason. The only thing connecting us to Ugo is the work we did on his exhibit.

  Simon gestures at the closet. “How long were you in there?”

  “Super long,” Peter says appreciatively. At last someone is focused on his suffering.

  But Simon’s stare drifts toward the window.

  “More than five minutes?” I ask, sensing what my brother really wants to know.

  “Much more.”

  The gendarme, then, wasn’t being honest with us. From the door of this apartment, the border is only a one-minute jog. No one will be caught at the gates tonight.

  The officer folds up his notebook and stands. “There’
s a car waiting for you downstairs, Sister. You shouldn’t walk home in the dark.”

  “Thank you,” Helena says, “but I’ll stay the night here. For the little one’s sake.”

  The cop opens the door a mite wider. “Your prioress is expecting you. A driver is waiting in the hall, ready to walk you downstairs.”

  Sister Helena is a willful old nun, but she won’t let Peter see her argue with the police. She gives him a good-night kiss, and as she cups his cheek, her mottled hand trembles.

  “I’ll call you later,” I tell her. “I have some more questions.”

  She nods but says no more. Peter nestles deeper into my arms as she leaves. His fingers are balled up, clutching the hem of the soccer jersey he wears everywhere. Its red bib is smeared with half-dried tears. As I cradle him, I spot the trunk pushed against the closet door. Sister Helena would’ve left the closet first, to phone the gendarmes. She would’ve had Peter stay behind for his safety. So my son has been hunkering alone in a dark closet.

  Feeling him pant on my neck, I realize it’s half an hour past his bedtime. I can sense his exhaustion in the sheer weight of his body. “Do you want something to drink?” I whisper.

  We make our way out to the kitchen, and he points to the shattered plate on the kitchen tile. “I did that,” he says. “On accident.”

  I raise the overturned chair. Helena must have snatched him right out of his seat, all forty pounds of him. From a shelf I take down the Orange Fanta, a drink reserved for special occasions. It’s been Peter’s favorite ever since he saw Cardinal Ratzinger drinking it at the Cantina Tirolese in town. As he buries himself in the plastic cup, I stare over his shoulder at the mess in the hall. It extends toward my bedroom. For some reason, it passes over Peter’s. This seems to confirm Helena’s recollection of events.

  “It’s storming outside,” Peter says, surfacing from the orange lagoon.

  I nod absently. Maybe he’s thinking about the man out there, the intruder, who hasn’t been caught. I watch the gendarme return from a tour of my bedroom. As he passes Peter’s door, Simon emerges. The gendarme asks something, but my brother answers, “No. My nephew’s been through enough for one night.”