by James Codlin
The man bowed, his arms down straight, hands close to his knees, and replied, “Sorry to interrupt you. You are most welcome. I am very honored to have a visitor from your country.”
Gina was shocked. The man, a Caucasian, was speaking Japanese flawlessly, and even knew the culture’s courtesies.
She returned the bow and said in Japanese, “Do you know this cemetery and this town? I have some questions.”
He gave her an enigmatic smile. “I do know some things about it. But please, you are too warm out here in the sun. Would you care to have some cool tea?”
“If it will not take you out of your way,” Gina replied. She followed him into the church. Once inside, she turned toward the altar and crossed herself. This time it was the young man’s turn to wear a shocked expression.
“You are a Catholic?”
Gina looked at his serious young face and laughed. “Yes, and I’m afraid I have misled you. I am not Japanese, I am Brazilian.”
He looked a bit flustered. “Proving again, one must never assume. I am sorry, I speak no Portuguese.” He led her to a small kitchen, took a jug from a wheezing old refrigerator, poured tea into two glasses, and handed her one.
“And you,” she asked, “do you live around here?”
The young man gave her his crooked smile again. “Yes… in the rectory. I am the priest.”
Once more, it was Gina’s turn to be surprised. “And your Japanese language?”
“Straight out of the seminary, I went to Japan for three years.”
“I have never been there,” Gina said. The words hung in the air for a moment before the young priest began to laugh. Thinking he was being impolite, he tried his best to stifle the laughter, but Gina joined him moments later as they both absorbed the irony.
“Well, then,” he said as their laughter subsided, “what exactly are you doing here, in my little French village?”
She switched to French. “I’m not being fair to you. I went to school in Geneva. I’m a journalist and I’m trying to come up with an original story on Guy Legendre—excuse me, on His Holiness.”
The priest grimaced. “I’m afraid I’ll be overrun with the press. Also, tourists… priests… nuns—everyone will want to visit this place, now that it has suddenly become famous.” His warm smile returned. “But you are the first. What do you want to know?”
Gina sipped her tea as she looked around at her relatively modern surroundings. She couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed that the photos in her story would be of a 20th-century structure rather than one dating back hundreds of years. Still, she was glad that she was here and, at least for the time being, she had the resident priest all to herself. “I want to put together a complete story of his family, with photos of anything of interest related to his roots here.”
“You found his parents’ tombstones,” he said, nodding toward the cemetery. “But you won’t find his grandparents and great-grandparents, even though they were buried here. During World War I this village was in no man’s land between the Allied and German trenches. It was pounded to rubble by artillery. A tragedy. The original church and cemetery dated back to the thirteenth century.” The priest regarded her for a moment. “But once again, I’ve forgotten my manners. I’m Father Croix.” He extended his hand.
“Gina Ishikawa.”
Croix raised his eyebrows. “Same name as the president of the Latino Union?”
“My father,” she heard herself say a little more curtly than she had intended. “Are there any surviving written records I could see? Something, anything, about his time here. Birth, baptism, christening… even from when he was a parish priest?”
Father Croix considered the question. “We keep Bibles for most families in the parish. And baptism records. Let’s go to my office.”
They went through the sanctuary and into a small, tidy room. One wall was occupied by shelves overstuffed with books of all kinds. Croix moved his finger along a long line of Bibles, coming to one with LEGENDRE printed in gold on the cover. He pulled it out and laid it on the desk. Inside the front cover was a family tree penned in variously colored inks and disparate handwriting.
Gina gently touched the facing pages with her fingertips. “Am I looking at history?”
Croix looked rueful. “I’m sorry—this is reconstructed, starting in 1920. When the church was destroyed, the original family Bibles were also.”
Gina frowned. “What else do you have?”
For twenty minutes, Croix pulled more books off the shelf and rummaged through a battered metal file cabinet, emerging with a handful of additional papers. He sorted through them by hand, produced baptism and christening papers for Guy Legendre, and spread them on his desk. He also laid out a number of parish papers signed by the young priest.
Gina took photographs of the documents, but she wasn’t satisfied. “Father Croix, is there any way I can reconstruct his lineage with original documents?”
The young priest put his hand on his chin. “Lille was the department seat for the church and wasn’t hit as hard during the war. I think we can find documentation there.”
Gina smiled. “We?”
“I like your project—it will result in something original. I want to help.”
“Can you go now? I have a car.”
They walked back outside. “Father,” Gina said, “since you know the way, perhaps it would be easier if you drive.”
The young man looked chagrined. “This will be a case of the priest confessing to the parishioner. I don’t know how to drive.”
Gina laughed. “How is that possible?”
“My parents were extremely strict, and very fearful of what troubles a young man could get into once he had access to a car.” Father Croix chuckled. “I suppose it must have worked, given my choice of profession. Once I was at the seminary I never had time to learn. And it was too complicated to get a license in Japan… well, I’ve just never bothered. My passion is bicycling, and this is a small town, so… that’s how I get around.”
Gina shook her head and laughed again as they got into her rental car.
“Please do remember the centuries-old sanctity of the confessional,” Father Croix said, smiling broadly. “You cannot tell anyone! No one in Vincennes knows of my disability.”
*
Gina drove to Lille and parked at the cathedral where Father Croix whisked her past outer-office clerks and directly to the archives. There, they worked together to pull birth and death certificates as well as bishopric copies of baptism and christening records. Gina took notes and photos as they reconstructed the pope’s family. Many documents were missing, but Father Croix proved to be resourceful. Using the information gleaned from what they found at the cathedral, they drove to three other nearby churches where their digging produced a few additional records. The new pope’s grandparents were Guy and Nicole Legendre, and Jean and Nicolette Legendre were his great-grandparents. The Holy Father’s great-great-grandparents were Christian and Marie Legendre, christened in 1825 and 1831. There they were, the four generations of the official biography. Gina spread the papers on the floor of the church and carefully took pictures of each one.
When Gina finished, she looked up to see that Father Croix had disappeared. She followed the sounds of cabinet doors opening and closing and found him shuffling carefully through a stack of papers. She looked over his shoulder as he knelt on the floor.
He held a stained piece of vellum inscribed with a church birth record of Antoine Legendre, dated 1791. He picked another sheet off the floor and held it beside the first, this one a marriage record for Antoine and Claire Legendre. It bore the year 1821. A badly worn third document showed Antoine’s death in 1825.
“Five generations,” Gina whispered. “You did it, Father. You went beyond what even the Vatican knew.”
Father Croix looked pensive.
“What’s wrong?” Gina asked.
Father Croix pulled several papers off a stack on the floor. “Look at these. Ch
ristening records for three children of Antoine and Claire. But all three are girls. I can’t find any documents for Christian, the male child who carried the Legendre name forward.”
“But Father, you said yourself records were not always made. And even then, there might not have been copies. The originals, if they existed, could have been destroyed in Vincennes.”
“Yes, you are right, of course,” he said, but the priest still seemed preoccupied. He absently glanced at his watch and his face filled with alarm. “Merde!” Croix exclaimed. “I’m late for confessions!” He turned to Gina with a genuinely dejected expression. “I am afraid that my time as a genealogist has come to an end. As much as it pains for me to say so, I need you to take me back right away, if that is not asking too much.”
The two drove back to Vincennes in silence, each in their own thoughts. When they stopped in front of the church, Croix hurriedly jumped from the car, but then paused before shutting the passenger door to ask, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Gina grinned with genuine affection. “You have done so much, Father. There is just one more thing. Can you tell me where the Legendre farm is?”
Despite his tardiness for confession, Father Croix gave her detailed instructions to a location a few kilometers away, and then turned with a warm wave goodbye and ran into the church.
Gina sat in the rental car and took a moment to soak in the late-afternoon sun. Then she pulled a pad of paper and her notes out of her briefcase. On the paper she drew lines for an ahnentafel and began filling in the names and dates she now knew:
Generation 1:
#1—Guy Legendre; born 1970
______________________________________________
Generation 2 (parents):
#2—Gaston Legendre (father); born 1922, died 1994
#3—Lucille Legendre (mother); born 1928, died 1993
______________________________________________
Generation 3 (grandparents):
#4 —Guy Legendre (father’s father); born 1890, died 1936
#5 —Nicole Legendre (father’s mother); born 1896, died 1933
#6—Name Unknown (mother’s father)
#7—Name Unknown (mother’s mother)
______________________________________________
Generation 4 (great-grandparents):
#8—Jean Legendre (father of #4); born 1861, died 1916
#9—Nicolette Legendre (mother of #4); born 1871, died 1919
#10—Name Unknown (father of #5)
Gina impatiently scribbled “etc.,” anxious to get on with the ones she knew.
______________________________________________
Generation 5 (great-great-grandparents):
#16—Christian Legendre (father of #8); born 1825, died 1905
#17—Marie Legendre (mother of #8); born 1845, died 1910
______________________________________________
Generation 6 (great-great-great-grandparents):
#32—Antoine Legendre (father of #16); born 1791, died 1825
#33—Claire Legendre (mother of #16); born 1795, died 1838
Gina studied her diagram, fixing the relative dates in her mind.
After several minutes, she put the car in gear and headed out of town.
*
Gina pulled up in front of a farmhouse with a warm and textured facade of brown bricks and tan-colored natural stone. The shutters flanking each window were pleasantly silvered by weathering. Although it was getting late in the afternoon, the summer sun would be out for some time, giving Gina plenty of light for photographs. She went to the front door and dropped the heavy brass knocker twice but no one came to the door.
Gina drove back onto the road, continued for a minute, and then pulled off onto the grass. Emerging from the car, she could still see the house and outbuildings. She shouldered her camera bag and waded through waist-high golden grain toward the farm, taking photos as she walked.
She found her way to the side of the barn opposite from the farmhouse. There was a weathered wooden table under a copse of trees, some wooden chairs, and a bucolic stone bridge arching over a small brook. Gina knelt to change her lens. A shadow fell over her and she cried out and spun around, looking upward. A masculine figure stood over her, but the sun was directly behind him, so all she saw of his head and face was a fiery corona around a black void.
“Who are you?” a hoarse voice demanded.
“Gina Ishikawa… journalist.” She dug into her camera bag and pulled out her press credentials.
“My God,” the voice rasped. “Vietnamese?”
“Brazilian. But my grandparents were Japanese.”
“Come closer,” the voice demanded.
She moved so she could see the face. The man was easily more than eighty, with a craggy face as wizened and weathered as the stones of the nearby bridge. A week’s worth of beard stubble dotted his face.
“You look Vietnamese,” he insisted.
“No, sir.” she said.
The man was suddenly taken by a coughing spell that doubled him over. Gina took his bony arm and led him to one of the wooden chairs. His face turned purple while he coughed and wheezed. Panting, he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, which he put in his mouth with trembling hands and lit with a disposable lighter.
“I still see Vietnamese every night,” the old man said. He sat up a bit straighter as he exhaled smoke through his nose. “Foreign Legion. Dien Bien Phu.”
“You were there, sir?”
“Yes. Damned near starved. Mortar barrages day and night. Viet Minh sappers inside the perimeter, killing us one at a time. Then prison in Hanoi. Months. Fish heads and rice. Are you Vietnamese?”
“No sir, Japanese.”
“Just as bad. Yellow horde.”
“Sir, I am a journalist.” She hesitated. “The Legendre family. Are you of that family?”
“Legendre? Me? No.”
“But this farm was theirs for many years.”
The old man studied the cloud of smoke that billowed around his head. “Legendre?” He shook his head. “Debray, now. Before, Cartier… Bovier… I can’t remember.”
“And before them, the Legendres, yes? Do you know the pope?”
“The pope? Who is it now? John?”
Gina sighed. “Sir, did you ever know Guy Legendre? Parish priest here?”
“Legendre? Are you Vietnamese?”
“No, sir, Japanese.”
“Same damned thing. Yellow bastards.”
“Sir, Guy Legendre—the priest.”
“Legendre? Just a kid, doesn’t know shit. Why’d they make him the priest here? Where is Father Dubois?”
Gina realized it was hopeless—the man had no touch with reality. She took his hand. He looked up with terror in his eyes and jerked it away.
“You devil, you worshipper of Ho Chi Minh, damn you! Get away from me, leave my men alone—don’t kill us! We’re so hungry, so hungry—just some food, for the love of Christ!”
“Sir, may I help you back to the house?” Gina asked.
“You’ll take me out there in that yard and shoot me, like you’ve done to the officers. Vietnamese bitch! Whore of Giap!”
Gina sighed, collected her camera gear, and started to walk away.
“Legendre?” the old man asked. She stopped. “Legendre?” he asked again. He waved his hand toward the hedgerow that came up to the trees. “That’s where you’ll find Legendre.”
Gina squinted in the diminishing light. “Sir, what do you mean? Where is Legendre?”
The old man waved his hand again. She walked in that general direction, seeing only dense shrubs forming the hedgerow. He motioned her on. She got down on her knees and wriggled between two bushes, pushing branches out of her face. After three meters, she broke into a tiny clearing. There were bumps in the thick thatch on the ground and she reached out to one of them. It was solid. She pulled at the grass, peeling it away to reveal a stone. In the dense vegetation there was no sunli
ght, so Gina pulled out her phone and thumbed her flashlight application. The limestone had eroded badly, but she could make out letters. She took a deep breath.
The name on the stone was Antoine Legendre.
She pulled the ahnentafel out of her pocket and checked it. The birth date, 1791 agreed with the stone. But the death date on the stone was 1815. The document at the church in Lille said he died in 1825, the same death date as had been reported by the Vatican.
Antoine had died ten years before the documented birth of his son, Christian Legendre.
CHAPTER FIVE
Valladolid, Spain—1610
Brother Sebastián Cruz knocked twice on the abbot’s door and waited. The animated men’s voices inside the room were abruptly silenced by his knock. The door opened, and the abbot answering looked at him grimly.
“Come in, Brother Cruz,” he said.
Cruz entered and saw a bishop, his rank indicated by his vestments, seated facing the chair that the abbot had vacated to answer the door.
“This is Bishop Sergio Cano, a judge from the Holy Office of the Inquisition here in Valladolid.”
There was no greeting or offer of a hand from the visitor.
“He has spoken to me of troubling things, and I expect full cooperation from you and absolute truthfulness—with an eye to your eternal soul.”
Brother Cruz said nothing.
Cano spoke for the first time. “A monk of the Monastery Santa Maria de la Vid has declared, under oath, that you serve the Holy Office.”
Cruz knew that “under oath” meant that the declaration had come during torture. “Bishop, if that were true—which it is not—why would that demand your attention?”
“Because the Holy Office has crown-established rules, procedures, canon laws, and jurisdictions,” Cano said. “You have been identified as a rogue member of the Holy Office who is operating outside the bounds of these laws and procedures, which were given to us by His Holiness the Pope Paul V and our king.”
“Bishop Cano, may I know the name of the monk who made this claim?” Cruz asked.