Lux Domini: Thriller: A Catherine Bell Story

by Alex Thomas

  Hollywood had shown the anointed’s final breath in multiple monumental films: Jesus’ head, falling onto his breast, followed by a gigantic lightning bolt that split the darkness and an ear-deafening thunderclap. Catherine still had this vision ahead of her as the last one had brought her to the mountain of Galilee upon which the risen Jesus had spoken to his disciples. The young woman had recognised Benelli and Darius and she was quite certain that Sylvester and Isabella were also present. Hadn’t there also been a female figure in a blue and white sari?

  "Peace be with you," said the voice of the anointed on the mountain. "Our mission is not yet over. My journey on Earth has ended whilst yours has just begun. Forget not that the powers of heaven and Earth are with you. So go and create peace amongst the people. Teach them everything that the heavenly light has taught us and forget not that you are with the people all the days until the world’s end, as are the shadows…"

  "No shadows without light, no light without shadows. The seductive power of the apocalypse," Catherine could suddenly hear Benelli’s voice next to her. "You reminded us all of that in your last publication, Sister."

  The scene changed. Catherine was seamlessly witness to Judas Iscariot’s desperate suicide. Joseph of Arimathea retrieved his body along with the anointed’s. She saw the carefully rolled together scrolls that they had discovered in Judas’ robe.

  The scrolls…what did they mean?

  Benelli motioned to her to follow him. Together they walked to the edge of the field of blood. In the middle of the landscape they passed through a door that led them to a room with mountains of files and documents and a large steel cabinet.

  "We are in the Tower of the Winds," explained the old cardinal as he pulled out a key from his robe and opened the heavy cabinet. Catherine knew that the Tower of the Winds was a part of the Vatican’s secret archives. Only a few of the consecrated were even allowed to enter. Cardinal Ciban most definitely had permission. She most definitely did not. Pope Gregory XIII had built the tower as an observatory in the sixteenth century. The Gregorian calendar reform originated here.

  "Here it is!" Benelli pulled out a little red book with gold letters from the cabinet and showed it to her. Catherine randomly noticed that although it was night outside the walls and there was no electric light in the Tower of the Winds, she could see as well as if it were daylight! The cardinal held the book up to her, but the vision began to dissolve in that very moment. Benelli, the files, the documents and the steel cabinet got blurry as if they were behind a moving wall of water. Before the dream completely disappeared, she was able to catch the title of the book: The Book of Acts.

  Catherine turned her gaze back to the Basilica’s interior and returned to the winding path to the Apostolic Palace. When she got to her room, the last dream sequence wouldn’t let her be. The Book of Acts. That was the name of one of the Acts of the Apostle from the New Testament. But what had Benelli wanted to tell her about it?

  52

  Ben looked around Sister Silvia’s tiny cell. Of course her corpse hadn’t resurfaced and no one had a clue where it could have disappeared to. Not even Sister Bernadette or Mother Superior. Could the corpse have revealed something to Ben that would have led him to the murderer?

  Ben sighed. He had heard about the corpse traders in Calcutta that collected all the human and animal corpses that lay about the streets in the entire city and did God knows what with them. A flourishing industry that partially replaced the vultures, rats and starving dogs, thereby keeping a few epidemics at bay. Should Sister Silvia have fallen into the hands of such a trader, there was most likely nothing left of her except her shroud. Most likely, however, the murdered body had already been burned somewhere.

  Ben opened the wardrobe that contained nothing other than Sister Silvia’s few pieces of clothing. Two neatly folded Saris, a second pair of sandals, the usual stuff. It was true what Sister Bernadette had said. The missionary had placed no value on material possessions. She had come to peace with all things worldly. Including her family. Ben had yet to find a single photo of Silvia’s parents, siblings or even friends. Her possessions were even sparser than Darius’ had been. The nun lived solely for the mission and for the poor.

  He closed the wardrobe again, made a routine scan under the bed and lifted the simple mattress. Nothing. He finally opened the tiny drawer of the narrow table that stood together with an old chair at the window.

  For a moment he stood there paralysed as if he had had a serious déjà vu. It wasn’t the black soft leather-bound Bible from Darius that he discovered in the drawer, but rather its counterpart.

  He removed the volume from the drawer and noticed how his hand shook slightly. Then he sat down and opened the old book. It was obvious that it had been used often. The pages of the New Testament were well worn, especially those of the Acts of the Apostles. Following an impulse, he carefully flipped through the respective pages and could hardly believe his eyes. Many lines had been highlighted with a ruler. He started to read the highlighted passages. It appeared to be the exact verses that Darius had emphasised.

  Silvia and Darius? Had they known one another and discussed these Bible verses? And if that were true…had Father Sylvester and Sister Isabella also owned the same Bible version?

  A light bulb suddenly went on in Ben’s head: LUKE! The evangelist Luke! The Gospel of Luke who had written the Acts of the Apostles! But what did the Gospel of Luke have to do with the murders, Lux Domini and the secret file LUKE?

  Ben took a deep breath in an attempt not to lose his cool. He had the feeling he was close to solving the case although he knew his impression was wrong. He had a new clue at best. Nothing more. And following this clue could be life-threatening.

  He swept his eyes over the Bible pages once again. Two lines jumped out at him in particular:

  Acts 4:20 – "For we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard."

  Acts 8:37 – "If you believe with all your heart, you may."

  There was no longer any doubt. The underlined text passages were more than just the readers’ contemplative mood. They suggested a type of commonality between them.

  Ben snapped the book shut and pocketed it. Cardinal Ciban would most likely remain stubborn and reveal nothing of what he knew, but perhaps Catherine would be able to recognise the hidden meaning behind the highlighted passages.

  53

  The master sat back in his comfortable chair on the veranda and swept his gaze across nocturnal Rome. His hands, covered in snow-white paper-thin gloves, rested on Pope Leo’s journal.

  He couldn’t find any further names of the papal congregation in Leo’s private notes, which didn’t surprise him, but they confirmed another one of his suspicious: this naïve idealist of a Pope, this daydreamer before God, actually planned a third Vatican Council.

  The master thought with a great deal of unease about the harrowing consequences that the second Vatican Council had had on the Church. Although the cardinals of the Roman Curia, especially Popes such as Paul and Innocence, had been able to prevent the worst from happening, the post-Council crisis still had an effect to this day. There was no end in sight to the damage that these shockwaves had created. Clergy such as Catherine Bell were merely a product of this crisis. Leo’s naivety was unfathomable. This Council had to be nipped in the bud! It was time that he, the master, take over behind the scenes.

  He looked out over the stony edge of the veranda toward the seemingly close dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. His expression grew dark. He still had yet to find out where Leo’s sudden renewed energy came from. The success of his entire plan depended on finding the solution to this riddle. Time was running out!

  For a brief moment he doubted his choice of murders, but he could absolutely trust Innocence on this one. The deceased pontiff and he had ruled the Church for two decades. They had been a nearly insurmountable stronghold against the modernists in their own ranks. Innocence had viewed the master as his successor. Everything had been arranged fo
r the transfer of power. In part due to his powers of persuasion, Innocence had entrusted him on his deathbed with a few of the names in the secret congregation. Six names to be exact. He wasn’t able to tell him the seventh. But for the master’s plan, the six names that he did have were more than enough, at least for now. Their elimination had proven at first to be most effective. The reason for Leo’s surprise recovery had to lie elsewhere. But where?

  Were the murdered papal counsellors, these spirituals as his friend Innocence had always called them, been replaced? As far as the master knew, this had only happened a few times in the papacy in the past two thousand years. It usually took an additional conclave, a renewed covenant with the new Pope to release the necessary force for the papal congregation to regain its strength. The master had no concrete idea how it happened, but he knew that it did. It seemed to be as miraculous as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  His house servant’s subtle cough pulled him out of his dark thoughts. "Monsignor deRossi wishes to speak with you, Eminence."

  The master nodded and asked the house servant to accompany the priest to the veranda, carefully hiding Leo’s journal and the paper-thin gloves in a side pocket of his comfortable chair. When deRossi entered, the master ordered a light meal and some good wine from the servant. His most capable student shouldn’t submit his report on an empty stomach. Besides, it was easier to think more clearly, to chat and strategise over a good meal.

  "Good evening, Eminence," greeted deRossi.

  The master pointed to a chair across from him. Strange. He thought he heard deRossi’s heartbeat. Was there an issue? Did the mission in Calcutta fail? But as the Monsignor took a seat across from him, it was as if his protégé’s accelerated heartbeat had never existed. In effect he was as cold as Ciban, but he had at least chosen the right master. He took a deep breath. The memory of such a deep disappointment that Marc Ciban had inflicted upon him rose up again like bile from his stomach. One could even say that what he had done was close to treason. The prefect had responsibilities first and foremost to the Church, not to some Pope who had lost all grip on reality.

  "The mission is complete," said deRossi calmly.

  "Were there any…issues?" asked the master tactfully.

  DeRossi looked around for the house servant. When he couldn’t find him anywhere, he leaned in closer and whispered: "No. Not a single difficulty. But the corpse has disappeared and I have no idea where it is."

  The master hid his amazement.

  "Are you certain?"

  "Our agent in the archdiocese told me right before my flight."

  "Then Monsignor Hawlett stands before the exact same problem," said the master calmly.

  "I thought you might have an explanation for it, Eminence," said deRossi in a whisper, leaning back once again in his chair. "Up to now, we have never had a missing body."

  The house servant returned with fresh white bread, cheese and wine. When he had left and closed the veranda door, the master explained: "You mustn’t worry about a thing, Nicola. The corpse trade has a long history in Calcutta."

  "But a Catholic missionary?"

  "We are all the same in death. Most certainly one of the colony residents sold the corpse in secret. There isn’t a soul outside the quarter around Shanti Nagar who knows who the woman really was. Let us enjoy our meal and talk of the future."

  They ate in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Every now and then the house servant came to check on them and would disappear again. When they had finished their meal, the master finally said: "Your next mission is going to be a challenge, Nicola." DeRossi didn’t blink an eye, appearing to be his normal self. "Your next operation is in the heart of the Catholic Church." As if it were an ancient ritual, the master made a short note on a sketchpad, ripped off the top pages to prevent a carbon copy and handed it to his loyal protégé.

  DeRossi stared at the page as if in a trance. This time it was none other than the director of the Vatican’s Internet office: Sister Thea. "What is the timing?" he asked softly as if speaking to himself.

  "Within the next thirty-six hours. You have free reign. Tomorrow I will be lunching with His Holiness and three other cardinals of the Roman Curia."

  The master didn’t reveal the deeper meaning behind his meeting with the Pope. He himself had initiated the meeting to get behind the secret of Leo’s miraculous recovery. It was quite possible that Benelli had pulled a few strings before his death.

  Besides it was time to grill Cardinal Ciban. He still couldn’t believe that, of all people, the prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith had placed himself on the Pope’s side. What did the man hope to achieve? Innocence had promoted Ciban, whose potential he had readily recognised, had made him the youngest member of the College of the Cardinals to strengthen the conservatives’ fraction and now Ciban was striking back at the conservatives’ power. And all because the Vatican’s secret service had shut up a few overeager loudmouths in Italy, France and Germany on the progressive side. And now the prefect had to prove himself to be a moraliser as if he hadn’t worked for the secret service under Innocence, as if he didn’t know what this crusade was really about.

  But what was even more interesting to the master was the fact that Ciban knew about the secret as well as the running investigations. That could be most useful, if the younger cardinal were to make a mistake.

  The master poured himself and deRossi another glass of wine. The sun had long since disappeared behind Rome’s rooftops and the city lights glimmered like a sea of stars weighing mightily on the ground. The master would not allow Leo and his devilish congregation to destroy the Church’s centuries-old power.

  54

  Ben arrived to Rome in the middle of the night. The fifty-minute taxi ride from the Leonardo di Vinci airport to his flat was a dreary infinite loop past a monotonous, empty wasteland until they reached the edges of the city. When he got home, he placed his luggage down and fell straight into bed. He was dead asleep within seconds. Four hours later the alarm clock rang, tearing him out of a deep sleep. In order to clear his head, he made an extra strong coffee, took a cold shower and put on a fresh cassock. He burned his tongue on the coffee. He swore in a most non-Christlike manner, but at the moment he could care less, although he crossed himself automatically when doing so.

  Then he sat down at his desk, opened the middle drawer and got out Darius’ Bible to compare it to Silvia’s. Both copies were indeed identical. They had even been published in the same year by an American publishing house.

  Ben compared each highlighted section in the Gospel of Luke. He wasn’t wrong: the underlines were exactly the same. He tried to recognise a code or a message in which he read each and every letter or word that appeared in specific intervals. No dice. He then wondered if the verses themselves had some kind of deeper meaning, independent of the text’s regular context. He googled several of the highlighted verses. But even there he came up empty-handed aside from a number of cross references to the respective Bible verses and links to countless ominous forum posts.

  Then he remembered that meeting with Ciban in which he forbade him to investigate the murder case any further. "Did you find anything unusual in Father Darius’ belongings?" the cardinal had asked. Ben had denied it, but now he was certain that Ciban must have meant Darius’ Bible. He had to speak with Catherine as soon as possible because if the prefect learned of both Bibles, he would once again take him off the case. Lux Domini was somehow behind this devilish matter even if it wasn’t the original cause. And Ciban seemed to be covering for Lux.

  Ben grabbed his briefcase with the report for the cardinal and made his way to the Vatican. Fifteen minutes later he entered the headquarters of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, ran up the well-worn steps to Ciban’s office and met Rinaldo in the antechamber.

  "You are out of luck, Father," said the young man, shaking his head. "His Eminence has been gone all morning. Right now he is sharing a meal with His Holiness."

&
nbsp; "When will he return?"

  "He didn’t say. It sounded like an unusual meeting."

  Ben looked at Rinaldo’s right hand at the envelope he was holding. "Now don't tell me this is the same envelope that you were carrying around with you just a few days ago."

  The young priest gave him a slanted grin. "If that were the case, my esteemed colleague, then His Eminence would have long since fired me. Did someone order you here?"

  "As a matter of fact, yes. I will try again later."

  Rinaldo nodded. "I must return to the archive. Good luck."

  When Ben entered his own office, he first opened all the windows. He had the feeling he might suffocate at any moment if he didn’t let in a little fresh air, even if Rome’s air quality was really quite poor. He placed the briefcase behind the desk and switched on the computer to check his emails.

  There wasn’t a single message from Ciban. Not even an encrypted one. The modern Inquisition had a special encryption programme for special messages that were absolutely not hackable. After Ben had read and answered the most important emails, he quickly ran through his archived private messages on his Internet provider. Catherine had written him a message only a few hours ago. She had had some more "dreams". At the end she told Ben about something that made him gasp for air. Cardinal Benelli had shown her The Book of Acts.

  It suddenly made sense in Ben’s head. Darius’ Bible! In addition to the Gospel of Luke there was an apostle’s story of Luke, also known as The Book of Acts!

  He looked at the clock. Darn! He wouldn’t have a chance to chat with Catherine at the Apostolic Palace at this hour. He went through a series of possible meeting points in his mind that were not outside the Vatican walls. The best thing would be to meet tonight at St. Peter’s tomb. He sent her a text message. He would now have to wait until he spoke with Catherine. Anything else would be too risky. He didn’t even know if he could still trust Ciban.