The Fifth Gospel

  Before Peter finishes in the bathroom, I quickly follow in the man’s footsteps. Sister Helena heard him calling for Simon from the hall outside Peter’s room. The hall leads to the bathroom and, across the way, to my bedroom. The bathroom is untouched; so was Peter’s bedroom. I feel an electric tingle down my neck. It looks as if the intruder went straight to the master bedroom.

  My bed is undisturbed. If the dresser drawers were rifled, then Simon erased all sign of it when he dressed after showering last night. But when I look more carefully, I see one shelf was touched: the one where I keep my travel books on the countries where Simon is posted. The volume on Turkey lies on the floor. Below it, an odd gap has appeared on the bottom shelf. Something’s missing.

  “Alli,” I hear Simon call from the foyer. “Come here a sec.”

  My books on the Shroud. They’re gone, along with my handwritten research for Ugo.

  My heart knocks against my ribs. My very first instinct was right. The break-in and Ugo’s murder must be connected. This surely has to do with Ugo’s exhibit.

  “Alex!” Simon repeats, louder now.

  When I walk numbly back to the foyer, he’s pointing at something on the floor. In his eyes is a new wariness. “I’ve been staring at it all morning,” he says quietly. “But it just clicked.”

  “Simon,” I murmur, “whoever did this must’ve known we helped Ugo on his exhibit.”

  But Simon is too distracted to process it. “Notice anything missing?” he says through his teeth.

  I kneel beside him among the capsized toys and phone books.

  He’s pointing to my day planner. It’s turned to yesterday’s page. Not until I leaf forward do I understand.

  Today and tomorrow have been torn out.

  I’m frozen. It bubbles up in me like tar, what this means.

  “What was on those pages?” Simon asks.

  Everything. A cross-section of our lives. Fall term starts next week, so I had written down my teaching schedule. All our plans with Simon were there, too.

  I murmur what Simon has already figured out. “He’s still looking for us.”

  My brother begins to dial a number on his mobile phone. “I’m going to reserve a room at the Casa for you and Peter.”

  The Casa. Our Vatican hotel. Very private; very anonymous. It solidifies what this all means. Peter and I aren’t safe anymore in our own home.

  Even as Simon talks to the receptionist, a sharp knock comes at the door. Peter instantly comes running out of the bathroom in terror. With him pressed against the backs of my legs, I step forward and turn the knob.

  It’s a gendarme. The same one from last night.

  “Officer,” I say eagerly, “you caught someone?”

  “Unfortunately, no, Father. I just need to take a few more notes.”

  I invite him inside, but he chooses to stand on the threshold, stooping to inspect the doorjamb.

  Peter tugs at me, not wanting the policeman to be here. Maybe not wanting to be here himself.

  The cop glances up. “Father, your nun told me the door was locked when the man entered.”

  “That’s right. When I leave the apartment, I always lock it.”

  “Even last night?”

  “I double-checked it before I left for Castel Gandolfo.”

  He stares at the doorjamb. One of his fingers runs up and down the wood. He tests the knob. It takes me a second to understand. There’s no damage to the door or frame.

  “I’m going to need to take some photos,” he says. “I’ll call you later to discuss some things.”

  * * *

  PETER REFUSES TO STAY at the apartment while the policeman is there, so we pass an hour outdoors before our meeting with Uncle Lucio. Keeping to the well-guarded trails, we visit the fountains in the pope’s gardens, which Simon and I know by unofficial names from our childhood. Fountain of the dead frog. Fountain of the unexplained eel. Fountain of the night Caterina Fiori drank too much and danced. Eventually we find ourselves at the little playground beside the Vatican tennis court, where Peter asks his uncle to stand behind the swing and push him higher and higher. From the arc of his flight, he cries out, “Simon! Do you know why the leaves change color? It’s chlorophyll!”

  His hobbyhorse of late.

  Simon is staring elsewhere, into the distance. When he becomes aware of his silence, he says, “Why don’t all trees change color?”

  He was never a strong student, but after four years of college, and four years of seminary, and three more years of Academy, he has become an advertisement for our Church’s constitutional obsession with schooling. John Paul holds a doctorate in theology and a doctorate in philosophy. We encourage Peter to learn anything and everything.

  “Because,” Peter shouts, “the chlorophyll just stays in their leaves!”

  Simon and I trade a glance, deciding this sounds right. “Do you know,” Simon says, “what I’ve been reading about?”

  “Tigers?” Peter cries.

  “Remember Doctor Nogara?”

  I send him a high-voltage stare, but he ignores me.

  “He let me feed the birds,” Peter says.

  For the briefest moment, Simon smiles. “A long time ago, near the city where Doctor Nogara and I met, there was a saint named Simeon Stylites. He sat on top of a pillar for almost forty years and never came down. He even died up there.”

  His voice seems to come from far away, as if he finds something entrancing about this detachment. About the thought of retreating into himself like a monk rather than embracing the world like a priest.

  “So how did he go pee?” Peter asks.

  The one, timeless question.

  Simon laughs.

  “Peter,” I say, trying to muster a serious look, “do not repeat that at school.”

  He swings higher, grinning. There are few greater joys than to make his uncle happy.

  Little by little, the hour slips by. We see nobody we know. We hear no news. There’s a distinct impression, as we peer down over the Vatican walls, that nobody in Rome this morning is paying close attention to the facts of our lives.

  When we’ve nearly reached the doorstep of Lucio’s palace, Sister Helena calls to say she can’t watch Peter later today. Then, sounding as if she’s nearly in tears, she rushes to get off the phone. As we hang up, I wonder if there’s something she didn’t tell me. Something she may not even have realized until she got home last night. Sometimes she takes Peter to visit with neighbors in the building. She might’ve left the door unlocked.

  * * *

  THE GOVERNOR’S PALACE IS a young building by local standards—younger than John Paul. It dates to 1929, when Italy agreed to make the Vatican an independent country. The blueprint was for a seminary, but the pope, finding himself in need of a national government, converted it to an office building. Today it’s where Vatican bureaucrats come and go, planning postage stamps of Michelangelo. We call it the Governor’s Palace in remembrance of the days when a layman ran this town, but there are no more governors anymore. The new sheriff wears a collar. Lucio lives in a suite of private apartments on the top floor with his priest-secretary Don Diego, who answers the door when we arrive.

  “Come in, Fathers,” he says. “And son.”

  He bends down to welcome Peter, mainly so that he can avoid looking at Simon. They are the same age, two priests on the fast track, and to Diego this means competition. Behind him, gloomy classical music fills the air. Lucio was an accomplished pianist before the onset of arthritis, and he used to keep a framed newspaper article here describing a performance of Mozart he gave in his youth. Now the piano goes unplayed, and the soundtrack is macabre Russians and Scandinavians. This particular work by Grieg sounds like the theme music of Calvinism.

  Diego ushers us into my uncle’s private office. Instead of facing Saint Peter’s, it has a no
rthern exposure that keeps it clammy. One of Lucio’s predecessors was a plain-talking American archbishop who kept a bearskin rug on the floor and Westerns playing on the television. That was an apartment Peter would’ve enjoyed visiting. But my uncle’s taste runs to oriental rugs and claw-footed chairs because they’re available free of charge from the Vatican warehouse, where the stockpile of baroque furniture grows each time another prelate dies.

  “Forgive me,” Lucio says, raising his arms, “for not being able to stand and welcome you.”

  This has been his greeting since he suffered a small stroke last year. In its aftermath he has given up wearing the scarlet skullcap and scarlet-­trimmed cassock of a cardinal because his balance sometimes fails and his hands can’t manage the buttons or sash. Instead he dresses in a loose-fitting priest suit, and a nun drapes a pectoral cross over his neck every morning. Simon and I come forward to clasp his outstretched hands, and Simon, as always, gets a longer squeeze than mine. The longest, however, is reserved for Peter.

  “Come over here, my boy,” Lucio says, tapping his desk eagerly.

  The stroke paralyzed part of Lucio’s face, but he worked hard at rehab so that his appearance wouldn’t frighten Peter. While they embrace, I glance at the papers on the desk, looking for gendarme reports about Ugo or our apartment. But there are only the budget reports that are the oxygen of Lucio’s existence. He is the mayor of a small city that always needs updated facilities and new parking lots; the minister of culture to the world’s greatest collection of ancient and Renaissance art; the employer of more than a thousand workers who receive free health care, duty-free shopping, and subsidized food, without paying a penny in income tax; and the negotiator of a fragile relationship with secular Rome, to which our landlocked country owes all its petroleum shipments, garbage collection, and electricity. I try to remind myself, whenever I brood on the way Lucio neglected Simon and me, that he was busy honoring the promise he made to John Paul.

  “Do you want a drink?” he says to Peter now, managing to make both halves of his mouth move. “We have orange juice.”

  Peter’s face brightens. He almost leaps off my uncle’s lap to follow Diego out of the room to fetch it.

  “I trust,” my uncle adds in a lower voice, “there were no other incidents last night?”

  The question seems like a courtesy. Nothing happens in this country without his knowing.

  “No,” I say. “Nothing else.”

  But Simon jumps in. “The gendarmes don’t have anything,” he says with an edge. “Meanwhile Alex and Peter can’t even sleep under their own roof.”

  His tone takes me by surprise.

  Lucio gives him a long, unappreciative stare. “Alexander and Peter are welcome to stay under this roof. And you’re mistaken: I received a call from the gendarmes twenty-five minutes ago saying they may have caught an image of a suspect on one of the security cameras.”

  “That’s great news, Uncle,” I say.

  “How long before they have something definite?” Simon asks.

  “I’m sure they’re working as quickly as they can,” Lucio says. “In the meantime, what can you tell me about all of this?”

  I glance at Simon. “We found some things in my apartment this morning that suggest the two . . . incidents . . . were related.”

  Lucio adjusts the angle of a pen lying on his desk. “The gendarmes are examining that same possibility. It’s obviously very concerning. You told them about these things you found?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll ask them to contact you again.” He turns to Simon. “Is there anything else I should be aware of ?”

  My brother shakes his head.

  Lucio frowns. “Such as, what you were doing at Castel Gandolfo in the first place?”

  “Ugo called me and asked for help.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “A driver from the car service.”

  Lucio clicks his tongue. The car service reports to him, but ordinary priests aren’t allowed to call for rides, and the boss’s nephews are expected to stay above reproach.

  “Uncle,” I say, “have you ever heard of someone getting through the gates at Castel Gandolfo? Or here?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “How would someone have known our apartment number?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  Through the open door I watch Diego serve Peter the orange juice in a crystal glass. Peter recoils, remembering that he broke one of these last year. The nuns were on their knees for half an hour collecting shards. I glare at Diego for not remembering.

  “Well, then,” Lucio says, “there’s another matter I called you here to discuss. Unfortunately, Nogara’s exhibit needs to be changed.”

  Simon explodes. “What? ”

  “My curator is gone, Simon. I can’t mount his exhibit without him. In some of the galleries it’s not even clear what’s to be hung where.”

  My brother rises from his seat. Almost hysterically he says, “You can’t do that. He gave his life for this.”

  I murmur to Simon that after what happened last night, a change or postponement might be a good idea.

  Lucio taps a bony forefinger on a budget sheet. “I have four hundred invitations out for opening night. Postponing is out of the question. And as of right now, since Nogara never finished setting up the last few galleries, it isn’t really a matter of changing an exhibit so much as mounting one. Therefore I’d like to discuss the possibility—particularly with you, Alexander—of centering the exhibit around the manuscript rather than the Shroud.”

  Simon and I are agog.

  “You mean the Diatessaron?” I ask.

  “No,” Simon says. “Absolutely not.”

  Lucio ignores him. For once, only my opinion counts.

  “How would that even be possible?” I ask.

  “The restorers are done with the book,” Lucio says. “People want to see the book. We put the book in a case and show it to them. The details would be up to you.”

  “Uncle, you can’t fill ten galleries with one manuscript.”

  Lucio snorts. “If we remove the binding, we can. Each page can be mounted separately. And we’ve already made some large photographic reproductions for the walls. How many pages in the book? Fifty? One hundred?”

  “Uncle, that’s probably the oldest intact binding on any gospel ever discovered.”

  Lucio makes a brushing motion with his hand. “The people in the manuscript laboratory know how to manage these things. They’ll do whatever we need.”

  Before I can refuse, Simon slams a hand on Lucio’s desk. “No,” he says firmly.

  Everything freezes. With a look, I urge Simon to sit. Lucio raises one great, snaking eyebrow.

  “Uncle,” Simon says, running a hand through his hair, “forgive me. I’m . . . grieving. But if you need help finishing the exhibit, I can tell you what you need to know. Ugo told me everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “This is very important to me, Uncle.”

  There was a time when these unpredictable eruptions doomed Simon in my uncle’s eyes. They were a Greek trait, Lucio said, not a Roman one. But now he says this is what sets Simon apart. What will launch him places even my uncle has not been.

  “I see,” Lucio says. “I’m glad to hear that. Then you’ll need to direct the other curators, because we have much to do in the next five days.”

  “Uncle,” I interject, “you realize Simon and I are dealing with a situation of our own right now?”

  He shuffles the pages on his desk. “I do. And I’m having Commander Falcone send an officer to guard you and Peter as a precaution.” He turns to Simon. “As for you: you’ll sleep here, under this roof, until the exhibit work is done. Agreed?”

  Simon would sooner sleep on a street corner o
utside of Termini station. But this is the price of all this uncharacteristic pleading. He’s shown Lucio who holds the cards.

  Simon nods, and Lucio raps his knuckles twice on the desktop. We’re done. Don Diego returns to see us to the elevator.

  “Should I send someone for your bags?” Diego needles Simon.

  They will be suitemates for the next five nights. Warden and prisoner. But there is momentary solace in the hollow of Simon’s eyes. Relief. He won’t take the bait. When the metal door slides open, Peter rushes inside, eager to push the elevator button. Before Diego can find another way to prod Simon, Peter and I are descending.

  CHAPTER 8

  IT WAS SHORTLY after my dinner at Ugo’s apartment that I helped him break into the Vatican Library to see the Diatessaron. “Meet me at my apartment at four thirty,” he’d said. “And bring a pair of gloves.”

  At four thirty I was at the apartment. Ugo arrived a quarter-hour later. In his hands were two plastic bags from the Annona, the Vatican grocery store. One of them bore the unmistakable contours of a bottle of alcohol.

  “To calm the nerves,” he said, winking. But his brow was damp and his eyes were uneasy.

  Once we were inside his flat, he drank shot after shot of Grappa Julia. “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you know how to find your way around down there?”

  Down there: below his apartment, in the library.

  “How could I?” I said testily. He’d given me the impression that he’d done this before. That I would just be following. After all, just to get in the front door of our library required an application with references from accredited scholars. To see a book required paperwork. To fetch it required a library employee, since no patron was ever allowed to enter the stacks.

  “If we already know where the manuscript is,” I asked, “then can’t we just take it off the shelf and read it?”

  His other supermarket bag contained a trove of equipment. Two flashlights, an electric camping lantern, a box of latex gloves, a loaf of bread, a bag of pine nuts, a pair of slippers, a notebook, and what appeared to be a loop of wire the size of a child’s tennis racket. All of which he was proceeding to bury in a duffel bag.