The Fifth Gospel: A Novel Read online

  The only time in history, until now.

  Most relics are kept in special vessels called reliquaries. Seven years ago, in 1997, a fire in the Turin cathedral nearly destroyed the Shroud while it lay in its silver reliquary. Afterward, a new vessel was designed: an airtight box made of an aeronautic alloy, designed to protect the precious cloth from anything. The new box, not coincidentally, resembles a very large casket.

  Over that casket is draped a gold cloth embroidered with the traditional Latin prayer for the Shroud. Tuam Sindonem veneramur, Domine, et Tuam recolimus Passionem.

  We revere Your Holy Shroud, O Lord, and meditate upon Your Passion.

  I am sure, to a moral certainty, that what Leo saw in the bed of that cargo truck was the most famous icon of our religion. The capstone of the historic exhibit that Ugo Nogara created in the Shroud’s honor.

  I MET UGO NOGARA because I made it my business to try to meet all of Simon’s friends. Most priests are good judges of character, but my brother used to invite homeless men over for dinner. He would date girls who stole more silverware than the homeless men. One night, when he was helping nuns operate the Vatican soup kitchen, two drunks got into a fight, and one pulled a knife. Simon stepped in and wrapped his hand around the blade. He refused to let go until the gendarmes came.

  The next morning, Mother decided it was time for therapy. The psychiatrist was an old Jesuit with an office that smelled like wet books and clove cigarettes. On his desk was a signed picture of Pius XII, the pope who said Freud was a pervert and Jesuits shouldn’t smoke. My mother asked if I should wait outside, but the doctor said it was only an informal evaluation, and if Simon needed treatment, she would have to wait outside as well. So my mother, in tears, took her one chance to ask if there was a medical term for Simon’s problem. Because the term in all the magazines was “death wish.”

  The Jesuit asked Simon some questions, then asked to see where the drumstick of his thumb was sutured back to his palm. Finally he said to my mother, “Signora, are you familiar with a man named Maximilian Kolbe?”

  “Is he a specialist?”

  “He was a priest at Auschwitz. The Nazis starved him for sixteen days before poisoning him. Kolbe volunteered for this punishment in order to save the life of a perfect stranger who would have been killed instead. Would you say this is the sort of behavior that concerns you?”

  “Yes, Father. Exactly. Do you have a name in your profession for men like Kolbe?”

  And when the Jesuit nodded, my mother cracked a hopeful smile, because anything with a name might have a cure.

  Then the doctor said, “In my profession, signora, we call them martyrs. And in the case of Maximilian Kolbe, we call him the patron saint of this century. A death wish is not the same as a willingness to die. Take heart. Your son is just an unusually good Christian.”

  One year later, Mother escaped her greatest fear: that she would outlive Simon. And the last thing she said to me before she died, other than I love you, was: Please, Alex, watch over your brother.

  By the time Simon finished seminary, it looked as if he might not need the watching. He was asked to become a Vatican diplomat, an invitation that only ten Catholic priests, out of four hundred thousand in the world, receive each year. It meant studying at the most exclusive Church address outside Vatican walls—the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy. Six of the eight popes before John Paul were Vatican diplomats, and four were Academy men; so other than the Sistine Chapel during a conclave, no place on earth is likelier to house a future pope. If Simon remained in diplomatic service, the sky was the limit. All he needed to do was avoid giving away the family silverware.

  Still, it seemed a surprising choice for my brother. There are two dozen departments in the Holy See bureaucracy, and if Simon had chosen a job at almost any other, he could’ve stayed at home. Everyone would’ve welcomed him at our father’s old haunt, the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, or he could’ve made a statement by joining the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, which defends the rights of Eastern Catholics. Uncle Lucio, like most Vatican cardinals, had been given a few extra appointments outside his bailiwick, so he had suggestions of his own: the Congregation for the Clergy, or the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, where he could help nudge Simon up the ladder. And of all the reasons Simon had for turning down the Secretariat, the biggest was our family’s history with its leader, the Vatican’s second-in-command, Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Boia.

  Boia came to office just as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe. The Orthodox Church was reemerging after years of enforced atheism behind the Iron Curtain, and John Paul tried to offer it an olive branch—only to find his new secretary of state standing in the way. Cardinal Boia mistrusted the Orthodox Church, which had split from Catholicism one thousand years ago in part because of disagreements over the pope’s power. Orthodox consider the pope to be, like the nine patriarchs who lead their Church, a bishop worthy of special honor—first among equals—but not a superpower, not infallible. This seemed dangerously radical to Boia. So began a silent struggle in which the second-most powerful man at the Vatican tried to save the pope from his own good intentions.

  His Eminence began a campaign of diplomatic snubs against the Orthodox that would set back relations by years. One of his most ardent helpers was an American priest named Michael Black, who had once been my father’s protégé. In Simon’s eyes, no department could have embodied hostility toward our father’s ideals more than the Secretariat. Yet instead of refusing the invitation, he seemed to take it as a sign. God wanted him to take up our father’s work of trying to reunite the Churches. And the Secretariat was where He wanted it done.

  At the Academy, while other men studied Spanish or English or Portuguese, Simon studied the Slavic languages of Orthodoxy. He turned down Washington so that he could go to Sofia, capital of Orthodox Bulgaria. There, he bided his time until something came open in Ankara, the same nunciature where Michael Black was now working.

  I knew that Simon had taken up Father’s old torch, but what he intended to do with it, I thought even he himself didn’t know. Then, a week before I met Ugo for the first time, Uncle Lucio called.

  “Alexander, were you aware that your brother has been missing work?”

  I was not.

  Lucio clicked his tongue. “He was reprimanded for disappearing without cause. And since he won’t talk to me about it, I’d appreciate it if you would find out why.”

  Simon’s excuse was office politics: Michael Black had reported him, out of spite. A week later, though, my brother was unexpectedly in Rome.

  “I’m here with a friend,” he said.

  “What friend?”

  “His name’s Ugo. We met in Turkey. Come have dinner with us at his place tonight. He’d like to meet you.”

  * * *

  NEVER IN MY LIFE had I been to an apartment like Ugolino Nogara’s. Most families who work for the pope rent Church-owned apartments around Rome. My parents, with Lucio’s help, had been lucky to win a flat inside the walls, in the employee ghetto. But here, before my eyes, was how the other half lived. Nogara’s apartment was inside the papal palace, right at the corner where the Vatican Museums met the Vatican Library. When Simon answered the door, Peter ran eagerly into his uncle’s arms, but my eyes drifted into the vast space behind them. There were no frescoes on the walls, or ceilings worked with gold, but from front to back the apartment ran so far that screens had been put up to divide it into smaller rooms, the way cardinals once did at conclaves. The west wall had a view of the courtyard where scholars from the Vatican Library sipped drinks at a secluded café. To the south, where the crown of trees parted, the rooftops made a path straight to the dome of Saint Peter’s.

  From deep inside the apartment came a boisterous voice.

  “Aha! You must be Father Alex and Peter! Come in, come in!”

  A man cam
e loping at us, arms outstretched. At first sight of him, Peter tucked himself into the protective recess of my legs.

  Ugolino Nogara had the dimensions of a small bear, with skin so sunburned that it seemed phosphorescent. His eyeglasses were held together with a thick knot of tape. In his hand sloshed a glass of wine, and after he kissed me on each cheek, the first thing he said was, “Let me get you a drink.”

  Those would be telling words.

  Simon tenderly took Peter by the hand and spirited him away, offering him a gift from Turkey. I found myself alone with our host.

  “You work at the nunciature with my brother, Doctor Nogara?” I asked while he poured.

  “Oh, no,” he said with a laugh. He pointed to the building across the courtyard. “I work at the museums. I’ve just been in Turkey to put the last touches on my exhibit.”

  “Your exhibit?”

  “The one that opens in August.”

  He winked, as if Simon had surely told me. But in those days, no one knew yet. Rumors hadn’t circulated about the black-tie opening night, the reception in the Sistine Chapel.

  “So how did you meet?” I asked.

  Nogara loosened his tie. “Some Turks discovered a poor fellow in the desert, passed out with heatstroke.” He pulled off his eyeglasses to show me the tape. “Facedown.”

  “They found Ugo’s Vatican passport,” Simon called out, beginning to drift back, “so they phoned me at the nunciature. I had to drive four hundred miles to find him. He was in a city called Urfa.”

  Peter, detecting adult conversation, slumped into a corner, staring foggily at the Attila the Hun comic book Simon had brought him from Ankara.

  Nogara’s face came alive. “Father Alex, imagine it. I was in a Muslim desert, and your brother, God bless him, arrived at my hospital bed in full cassock, with a basket of dinner and a bottle of Barolo!”

  I noticed Simon didn’t smile. “I didn’t realize alcohol was the worst thing for sunstroke. Though someone else did know that.”

  “I could not inform him,” Nogara said with a grin, “because after a few glasses of that Barolo, I had passed out.”

  Humorlessly, my brother rubbed the rim of his glass. A thought began to gnaw at me. An explanation for what I was seeing. Nogara was a curator, which meant he had a special incentive for befriending Simon. His superior was the director of the museums, who answered to Uncle Lucio. Access to Lucio could explain how Nogara had landed an apartment like this.

  “So what were you doing out there in the desert,” I said, “when you have such a beautiful place here? Peter and I would kill for a flat like this.”

  The more closely I looked, though, the odder the apartment seemed. The kitchen was nothing but a portable refrigerator, a pair of hot plates, and a jug of bottled water. A clothesline was hung across the room, but I saw no sink or machine to do the wash. It felt improvised, as if he’d just moved in. As if friendship with Simon was paying dividends more quickly than he’d expected.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Nogara said. “They gave me the space up here because of my exhibit. And my exhibit is the reason I asked your brother to invite you here tonight.”

  A buzzer sounded, and he turned to check the food cooking on the hot plates. I glanced at Simon, but he avoided my eyes.

  “Now,” Nogara said, and a sly look crept across his face, “allow me to set the stage.” He lifted his wooden spoon like a conductor’s baton. “I want you to imagine the most popular museum exhibit in the world. Last year, that exhibit was a Leonardo show in New York. Seven thousand people visited it on an average day. Seven thousand—a small town, moving through those galleries every twenty-four hours.” Nogara stopped theatrically. “Now, Father, imagine something bigger. Much bigger. Because my exhibit is going to double that.”

  “How?”

  “By revealing something about the most famous image in the world. An image so famous that it outdraws Leonardo and Michelangelo combined. An image that outdraws entire museums. I’m talking about the image on the Shroud of Turin.”

  I was glad Peter couldn’t see my reaction.

  “Now, I know what’s going through your mind,” Nogara said. “We carbon-tested the Shroud. The tests revealed it to be a fake.”

  I knew it better than he could possibly imagine.

  “Yet even now,” Nogara continued, “when we exhibit the Shroud, it attracts millions of pilgrims. At a recent exhibition it drew two million people in eight weeks. Eight weeks. All to see a relic that has allegedly been disproved. Put that in perspective: the Shroud draws five times as many visitors as the most popular museum exhibit in the world. So imagine how many will come once I prove that the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud was wrong.”

  I faltered. “Doctor, you’re putting me on.”

  “Not at all. My exhibit will show that the Shroud is indeed the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.”

  I turned to Simon, waiting for him to say something. But when he kept silent, I couldn’t do the same. The carbon-dating had stunned our Church and crushed my father, who’d pinned his hopes on the scientific authentication of the Shroud as a rallying point between Catholics and Orthodox. Father had spent his career trying to make friends across the aisle, and before the announcement of the radiocarbon verdict, he and his assistant Michael Black had coaxed and urged and pleaded with Orthodox priests from around Italy to join them at the press conference in Turin. Risking the displeasure of their bishop, some of those priests came. It would’ve been a milestone, if it hadn’t been a catastrophe. The radiocarbon tests dated the linen cloth to the Middle Ages.

  “Doctor,” I said, “people’s hearts were broken sixteen years ago. Please don’t put them through that all over again.”

  But he was undaunted. He served us plates of food in silence, then rinsed his hands with bottled water and said, “Please, begin eating. I’ll return in a moment. It’s important that you see this for yourself.”

  When he disappeared behind a screen to fetch something, I whispered to Simon, “Is this why you brought me here? To listen to this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Simon, he’s a drunk.”

  My brother nodded. “When he blacked out in the desert, it wasn’t from heatstroke.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “He needs your help.”

  I ran a hand through my beard. “I know a priest in Trastevere who runs a twelve-step program.”

  But Simon tapped his head. “The problem’s up here. Ugo’s worried that he won’t finish his exhibit in time.”

  “How can you be helping him with this? You really want to relive what happened to Father back then?”

  Every television in our country had been tuned to the news conference when the lab results were announced. That night, the only sound in the Vatican was of children playing in the gardens, because our parents needed time to be alone. The experience wounded my father in a way he would never recover from. Michael Black abandoned him. Phone calls from old friends—from Orthodox friends—dried up. Father’s heart attack came two months later.

  “Listen to me,” I whispered. “This is not your problem.”

  Simon squinted. “My flight to Ankara leaves in four hours. His flight to Urfa isn’t until next week. I need you to keep an eye on him until he leaves.”

  I waited. There was something more in his eyes.

  “Ugo’s about to ask you a favor,” he said. “If you don’t want to do it for him, then I want you to do it for me.”

  I watched Nogara’s shadow approach us down the hallway. It paused there, while his body was still out of sight, and like an actor preparing his entrance onstage, he made the sign of the cross with one hand. In his other hand was something long and thin.

  “Have faith,” Simon whispered. “When Ugo tells you what he’s found, you’re going to believe in him, too.”

/>   * * *

  NOGARA REENTERED CARRYING A bolt of fabric. He unspooled it along the clothesline strung across the room, then said, in a reverent tone, “I’m sure this needs no introduction.”

  I froze. Before me was an image that had lain undisturbed in my memory for years: two silhouettes, the color of rust, joined together at the tops of their heads, one of a man’s front, one of his back. On top of the silhouettes were bloodstains: along the head, from a crown of thorns; on the back, from scourging; and under one rib, from a spear in the side.

  “A one-to-one reproduction of the Holy Shroud,” Nogara said, raising a hand to point, but never allowing his fingers to touch the cloth. “Fourteen feet long, four feet wide.”

  The image created a strange tension inside me. The ancient tradition of Eastern Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, is that holy icons are portraits of saints and apostles that have been accurately copied and recopied for centuries. Of all these images, the Holy Shroud is king, the image at the heart of our faith.

  It is also our greatest relic. The Bible says that the bones of Elisha raised a dead man to life, and that sick people were healed by touching the garments of Jesus, so to this day every Catholic altar and every Orthodox antimension has a relic inside it. Almost none of these can claim to have touched our Lord, and only one—the Shroud—can claim to be his self-portrait. Never has so important a holy object been shunned.

  Yet even after the carbon dating, the Church never transferred the Shroud to a museum, never quietly swept it under the rug. The cardinal of Turin said it was no longer correct to call the Shroud a relic, but he didn’t order the cloth removed from the cathedral. It took John Paul a decade after the radiocarbon tests to visit it again. When he came, though, he called the Shroud a gift from God and urged scientists to keep studying it. This had been the Shroud’s place in our hearts—in my heart—ever since. We had no answer for the radiocarbon tests. But we believed we hadn’t heard the last word, and until that word came, we would not abandon the defenseless. We would not forsake the forsaken man.