The Road to Gandolfo: A Novel

  “That’s silly.”

  “You vill do as I say! Dere is no time to argue! You vill be contacted. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Hey, wait a minute! I just got up. I haven’t had breakfast; I’ve got to shave—–”

  “Fourteen minutes, mein Herr!”

  “I’m hungry!”

  The connection was broken by a loud click on the line. “To hell with him,” said Devereaux, turning back in anticipation to the extraordinary Lillian.

  But Lillian was not where she should have been. Instead, she was standing on the other side of the bed in Sam’s bathrobe.

  “To coin a phrase, my darling, we were saved by the bell. You have things to do, and I really must get ready for class.”

  “Class?”

  “Der erstklassig Strudelschule,” said Lilly. “Less expert but probably more fun than the Cordon Bleu in Paris. It starts at noon. We’re over in the Leipziger Strasse; that’s past Unter der Linden. I really should hurry.”

  “What about—us? And breakfast and—don’t you shower in the morning?”

  Lillian laughed; it was a nice, genuine laugh. “Der schule is finished by three-thirty. I’ll meet you back here.”

  “What’s your room number?”

  “Five eleven.”

  “I’m five nine.”

  “I know. Isn’t that marvelous.”

  “Or something.…”

  The confusion in the Kempinsky lobby was absurd. “Der fart chair in front of der vindow” was occupied by an elderly gentleman whose close-cropped, bejowled head kept nodding down into the folds of neck flesh as he dozed. On his lap, unfortunately, was a folded copy of Der Spiegel.

  The elderly man was, at first, annoyed, then furious at the two men who flanked his chair and told him in no uncertain terms to get up and come with them. Twice Sam tried to intercede, explaining as best he could that he, too, had a folded copy of Der Spiegel. It did no good; the troopers were interested only in the gentleman sitting in the huge armchair. Finally, Devereaux stood directly in front of the two contacts and every twenty seconds, crossed and uncrossed his legs.

  At which point the bell captain came up to Sam and in perfectly good, loud English gave him the directions to the men’s room.

  Whereupon a large woman with a striking resemblance to Dick Butkus approached the trio around the armchair and began hitting the two Gestapo men with both a hatbox and an extremely large, black leather handbag.

  There was only one thing for it, thought Devereaux. He grabbed one of the contacts around the neck and pulled him away from the fire zone.

  “You crazy son of a bitch! I’m the one! You’re from Koenig, aren’t you?”

  Thirty seconds later Devereaux was propelled out of the Kempinsky entrance and into a nearby alley.

  Halfway down the alley, taking up most of the space between the buildings, was an enormous open truck with a canvas tarpaulin stretched across the rear rigging poles. Under the tarpaulin, from deck to canvas, were hundreds of crates piled on top of one another, filled with thousands (it seemed like thousands) of screeching chickens.

  There was a narrow corridor in the center of the van between the crates. It led to the rear window of the cab. In front of the window were two tiny stools.

  “Hey, come on! This is ridiculous! It’s—goddamn it, it’s unsanitary!”

  His escorts nodded Germanically and smiled Germanically, and Germanically heaved Sam up into the tiny corridor and shoved him down the eighteen-inch passageway toward the stools.

  All around him sharp beaks pecked at his person. The noonday sun was completely blanketed out by the heavy canvas tarpaulin above. The odor of chickenshit was unbearable.

  They drove for nearly an hour into the countryside, stopping every now and then to be looked over by cooperative East German soldiers who waved them on, pocketing deutschmarks as they did so.

  They entered a large farming complex. Cattle were grazing in the fields, silos and barns could be seen, barely, through the opening of the tiny passageway between the crates and the flying feathers at the rear of the truck.

  Finally they stopped. Escort number one grinned his Germanic grin and led Sam into the sunlight.

  He was marched into a large barn that reeked of cattle urine and fresh manure. He was led—Germanically—down a crisscross series of turns through the stinking building until they came to an empty stall. A row of blue ribbons denoted the residence of a prize steer.

  Inside, sitting on a milking stool, surrounded by piles of bullshit, was the heavyset man Sam knew was Heinrich Koenig.

  He did not get up; he sat there and stared at Devereaux. In his tiny eyes, surrounded by folds of blemished flesh, were thunderbolts.

  “So.…” Koenig remained immobile, drawing out the word disdainfully, waving the escorts away.

  “So?” replied Sam, his voice cracking slightly, aware of the wet chicken droppings on his back.

  “You are the representative from this monster, General Hawkins?” Koenig pronounced the word “general” with a hard Germanic G.

  “I’d like to clear that up, if I may,” said Devereaux with false laughter. “Actually, I’m just a slight acquaintance, barely know the man. I’m a low-profile attorney from Boston; actually not much more than a law clerk. I work for a little Jewish man named Pinkus. You wouldn’t like him. My mother lives in Quincy and through the strangest coincidence—–”

  “Enough!” A very loud fart could be heard in the vicinity of the milking stool. “You are the contact, the intermediary, with this devil from hell!”

  “Well, as to that, I would have to debate the legal association; said association subject to the clarification of intent with regard to foreknowledge. I don’t believe—–”

  “You are a jackal, a hyena! But such dogs bark loudly if the meat is sufficient. Tell me. This Hawkins. He is a Gehlen operation, nein?”

  “A who?”

  “Gehlen!”

  Devereaux remembered. Gehlen was the master spy of the Third Reich who bought and sold for all factions after the war. It would not do for Koenig to think there was any connection between Hawkins and Gehlen; for it would mean there was a link to one Sam Devereaux, who was way out of his league.

  “Oh, I’m sure not. I don’t think General Hawkins ever heard of what’s-his-name. I know I haven’t.” The chickenshit was melting under Sam’s shirt, all over his fevered back.

  Koenig rose slowly from the milking stool, a second flatus loudly proclaiming his ascent. He spoke with quiet, intense hostility.

  “The general has my reluctant respect. He has sent me a babbling idiot. Give me the papers, fool.”

  “The papers—.” Sam reached into his jacket pocket for another Xerox copy of the Shepherd Company’s limited partnership agreement.

  The German fingered the papers silently, squeezing each one as he flipped it. His audible reactions were blunt: a combination of farts and grunts.

  “This is outrageous! A great injustice! Political enemies everywhere! All wishing only to destroy me!” Beads of saliva formed at the corners of Koenig’s mouth.

  “I agree wholeheartedly,” said Devereaux, eagerly nodding his head. “I’d throw it away if I were you.”

  “You would like that? All of you. You are all out to get me! My great contributions that kept peace in the world, enemies in constant touch, that opened hot lines and red lines and blue lines between the great powers—these are forgotten. Now you whisper behind my back. You tell lies about nonexistent bank accounts, even my humble places of residence. You never concede that I earned every deutschmark I possess! When I retired, none of you could tolerate it; you did not have me to kick around any longer! And now this! The injustice!”

  “Oh, I understand.”

  “You understand nothing! Give me something to write with, you idiot.”

  He farted and signed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The bells of the Angelus pealed in solemn, vibrant splendor. They echoed throughout St. Peter?
??s Square, floated above Bernini’s marble guardians, and were heard in quiet celebration beyond the dome, deep in the Vatican gardens. Seated on a bench of white stone, looking up at the orange rays of the descending sun, was a corpulent man with a face best described as having weathered seven decades good-naturedly, if not always peacefully. The face was full; but the peasant quality of the bone structure under the folds of flesh would tend to deny that the face was pampered. The man’s eyes were wide and large and brown and soft; they held nearly equal parts of strength, perception, resignation, and amusement.

  He was dressed in the splendid white robes of his office. The highest office of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church, the descendent of Peter himself, the Bishop of Rome, the spiritual commander of 400 million souls throughout the earth.

  Pope Francesco I, the Vicar of Christ.

  Born Giovanni Bombalini in a small village north of Padua in the first years of the century. It was a birth that was recorded sketchily, at best, for the Bombalinis were not affluent. Giovanni was delivered by a midwife who, as often as not, forgot to report the fruits of her labors (and her patient’s labors) to the village clerk, secure in the knowledge that the church would do something; christenings made money. Actually Giovanni Bombalini’s emergence into this world might never have been legally recorded at all except that his father had a wager with his cousin Frescobaldi, three villages to the north, that his second child would be a male. Bombalini Senior wanted to take no chances that his cousin Frescobaldi would renege on the bet, so he went to the village hall himself to report the birth of a male child.

  As it happened, part of the wager was that Frescobaldi’s wife—who was expecting in the same month—would not give birth to a boy. But of course she did, and the bet was canceled. This child, Guido Frescobaldi, was born—according to the sketchy records—two days after his cousin, Giovanni.

  Early in his life Giovanni showed signs of being different from the other children of the village. To begin with he did not care to learn his catechism by verbal repetition; he wanted to read it, then memorize it. This upset the village priest for it smacked of precociousness and somehow was an affront to authority, but the child would not be denied.

  The ways of Giovanni Bombalini were indeed extraordinary. Although he never shirked his labors in the fields, he was rarely too tired to stay up half the night reading whatever he could get his hands on. When he was twelve he discovered the biblioteca in Padua, which was hardly the library in Milan, nor Venice, nor certainly Rome, but it was said by those who knew Giovanni that he read every book in Padua, then Milan, then Venice. By which time his priest recommended him to the holy fathers in Rome.

  The church was Giovanni’s answer to a prayer. And as long as he prayed a great deal—which was easier, though no less time-consuming than laboring in the fields—he was allowed to read more than he ever thought would be allowed him.

  By the age of twenty-two, Giovanni Bombalini was an ordained priest. Some said the best-read priest in Rome, an erudito fantastico. But Giovanni did not possess the properly stern visage of a proper Vatican erudito; nor did he assume the proper attitudes of certainty with regard to everyday truths. He was forever finding exceptions and flexibilities in liturgical history, pointing out (some said mischievously) that the writings of the church found their strength in honest contradictions.

  At twenty-six Giovanni Bombalini was a sharp pain in the large Vatican ass. Aggravated further by his matured appearance, which was the antithesis of the gaunt, academic image so desired by Rome’s eruditi. He was, if anything, the caricature of a field peasant from the northern districts. Short of stature, stocky, and wide of girth, he looked like a farmhand more at home in the goat stables than in the marble halls of the various Vatican collegia. No amount of theological erudition, or good nature, or, indeed, deep belief in his church could counteract the combined aggravation of his mind and appearance. So posts were found for him in such unlikely locations as the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Malta, and, through an error, Monte Carlo. An exhausted Vatican dispatcher misread the name Montes Claros and inserted Monte Carlo—no doubt because he had never heard of Brazil’s Montes Claros—and the fortunes of Giovanni Bombalini turned.

  For into the cauldron of high stakes and high emotions wandered the simple looking priest with the bemused eyes, gentle humor, and a head packed with more knowledge than any twelve international financiers put together. He’d had little to do in the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and Malta, so he had occupied his time, when not praying or teaching the natives, by subscribing to scores of reading services and adding to his already extraordinary memory bank.

  It is common knowledge that people who live with constant motion, and high risk, and a great deal of alcohol, occasionally need spiritual consolation. So Father Bombalini began to comfort a few stray lambs. And to the amazement of these first few strays, they found not so much a simple priest who outlined penance, but a most amusing fellow who could discourse at length on almost any subject: economic conditions of world markets, historical precedents for anticipated geopolitical events, and, particularly, food. (Here he favored the more basic sauces, eschewing the artifices of the often inappropriate haute cuisine.)

  Before too many months had passed, Father Bombalini was a regular guest at many of the larger hotel suites and great houses of the Côte d’Azur. This rather odd-looking, rotund prelate was a marvelous raconteur, and it always made everyone feel better to have him around before going out to covet—successfully—his neighbor’s wife.

  And a number of excessively large contributions to the church were made in Father Giovanni’s name. With increasing frequency.

  Rome could no longer overlook Bombalini. The exchequers of the Vatican treasury said so.

  The war found Monsignor Bombalini in various Allied capitals and occasionally attached to various Allied armies. This was brought about for two reasons. The first was his adamant deposition to his superiors that he could not remain neutral in light of the known Hitlerian objectives. He catalogued his thesis with sixteen pages of historical, theological, and liturgical precendents; none but the Jesuits could understand it, and they were on his side. So Rome shut its eyes and hoped for the best. The second reason for his wartime travels was that the international rich of Monte Carlo in the thirties were now colonels and generals and diplomats and ambassadorial liaisons. They all wanted him. There were so many intra-Allied requests for his services that in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover marked Bombalini’s file: Highly Suspect. May be a fairy.

  The postwar years were a time of rapid acceleration up the Vatican ladder for Cardinal Bombalini. Much of his success was due to his close friendship with Angelo Roncalli, with whom he shared a number of unorthodox views, as well as a penchant for decent, but not necessarily exclusive, wine and a good game of cards after the evening prayers.

  As he sat on the white stone bench in the Vatican gardens Giovanni Bombalini—Pope Francesco—reflected that he missed Roncalli. They had accomplished much together; it had been good. And the similarities of their respective ascendencies to the chair of St. Peter never ceased to amuse him. Roncalli, John, would have been amused, too; no doubt, was, of course.

  They were both compromises offered by the stern, orthodox constituencies of the Curia to quiet the fires of discontent within the global flock. Neither compromise expected to reign very long. But Roncalli had it easy; he had only theological arguments and undeveloped social reformers to contend with. He didn’t have damn fool young priests who wanted to marry and have children and, when of other persuasions, run homosexual parishes! Not that any of these personally bothered Giovanni; there was absolutely nothing in theological law or dogma that actually prohibited marriage and offspring; and, as far as the other, if love of fellow man did not surmount biblical ambiguities, what had they learned? But, Mother of God, the fuss that was made!

  There was so much to do—and the doctors had made it clear that his time was limited. It was the only thing they were clear about;
they could isolate no specific illness, no particular malady. They just conferred and confirmed that his “vital signs” were slowing down at an alarming rate. He had demanded openness from them; Mother of God, he had no fear of death! He welcomed the rest. He and Roncalli could plow the heavenly vineyards together and take up their baccarat again. At last count Roncalli owed him something over six hundred million lire.

  He had told the doctors that they looked too long in their microscopes and too little at the obvious. The machine was wearing out; it was as simple as that. Whereupon they nodded pontifically and uttered somberly: “Three months, four at the most, Holy Father.”

  Doctors. Basta! Veterinarians with cugini in the Curia! Their bills were outrageous! The goatherders of Padua knew more about medicine; they had to.

  Francesco heard the footsteps behind him and turned. Walking up the garden path was a young papal aide whose name escaped him. The youthful priest carried a clipboard in his hand. There was a painted crucifix on the underside; it looked silly.

  “Your Holiness asked that we resolve some minor matters before the vesper hour.”

  “By all means, Father. What are they?”

  The aide rattled off a series of inconsequential functions, ceremonial in nature, and Giovanni flattered the young prelate by requesting his opinion on most of them.

  “Then there is a request from an American periodical, Viva Gourmet. I would not mention it to the Holy Father except that the inquiry was accompanied by a strong recommendation from the United States Armed Forces Information Service.”

  “That is a most unusual combination, is it not, Father?”

  “Yes, Your Holiness. Quite incomprehensible.”

  “What was the request?”

  “They had the effrontery to ask the Holy Father to submit to an interview with a lady journalist regarding the pontiffs favorite dishes.”

  “Why is that an effrontery?”

  The young prelate paused; he seemed momentarily perplexed. Then he continued with confidence. “Because Cardinal Quartze said it was, Holy Father.”