Manetti unrolled a blueprint of the proposed repair across the conference table to help explain the crux of the problem. When the Renaissance master builders raised the present St. Peter’s Basilica with a facade of over 140 tons on top of Constantine’s earlier basilica, the foundation of the Renaissance basilica did not settle evenly. Cracks snaked down that facade. Other cracks erupted in the vaults below the main altar. Underwater springs added to the problem of an unstable foundation ever since the excavations of Pius VII. The unprecedented wave of earth tremors further destabilized the foundation. More quakes, and the structure could come crashing down.
“Geniuses built this edifice. It has stood for centuries,” the cardinal said. “God watches over his church.”
“It took one hundred twenty years to complete St. Peter’s,” the architect replied. “It could destruct in minutes if we delay.” He tapped the blueprint with his rubber-tipped pointer. “We need a decision, Your Holiness . . . as soon as possible.”
“Your own report says you’ll disturb the holy ground under the main altar.” The cardinal tapped a crumpled document with his forefinger. “Out of the question.”
“We have no choice.” The architect shrugged, avoiding the cardinal’s eyes. “We can minimize any damage.”
Celestine VI had hoped for a more robust rebuttal of the cardinal’s objection. Only weeks before, he had toured the necropolis under St. Peter’s. He saw the ancient drawing of Christ in the form of the sun god driving two white steeds into the heavens and the cartoonish drawing of what some said was a bald-headed Saint Peter. The sacred Vatican Grottoes contained the tombs of nearly 150 popes, plus a king or two, and a queen. A priceless heritage lay under St. Peter’s Basilica.
What to do?
“We are on the precipice of disaster, Your Holiness. We cannot postpone this any longer. The quakes could return anytime.” The architect rolled up his blueprint. “You must decide now.”
***
After meeting with Architect Manetti and Cardinal Furbone, the pope canceled all appointments. He retired to the study after picking at his favorite meal of fish stew and pounded yams prepared indifferently by a German Benedictine nun. His eyes glazed over, and his mind shut down as he pored over blueprints and documents related to the proposed buttressing of St. Peter’s Basilica.
On the rooftop of the Apostolic Palace, he strolled under trees and along the flower beds in his garden of Gethsemane. Trouble stalked his papacy. The Vatican power brokers no longer bothered to camouflage their faultfinding out of his presence with flattery in his presence. They no longer feared him. Even the anticlerical architect—What’s his name?—had called him Your Holiness whereas Cardinal Furbone had not.
What to do?
Shortly before midnight, Celestine VI looked up from his desk. The study lit up like a lone candle against the outside darkness blanketing St. Peter’s Square. He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He rang up the papal secretary to proclaim his decision before he changed his mind again.
Chapter Forty-Eight
In a conference room of CEDAD, Commissario Leone paced like an expectant father. If he wasn’t on a mission for the American archaeologists and the advancement of his investigation, he wouldn’t have worn himself out by traveling to the distant center located in the heel of Italy. Exasperated by continuous excuses for the delay in carbon-dating the previously sent samples from the Callinicus letter, Will Fisher had implored him to personally deliver samples from the Unity Report to CEDAD to move things along. With the original Callinicus letter destroyed in the museum arson, it was critical to carbon-date the Callinicus samples if the photographic copies were to be authenticated. While the Americans translated the Unity Report in the Castello of Julius II in secrecy, Leone stewed until the scientists pronounced the birth date of the samples from both documents.
Fat, black thunderhead clouds swept off the Adriatic toward the city like UFOs. Why hadn’t the Americans faxed the translation yet? Had something gone wrong?
To make matters worse, the CEDAD staff killed time with mind-numbing explanations of injection magnets, gas ionization detectors, beryllium lines, and whatnot, until the physicist-director made up his mind whether to close the center before student-led demonstrators trashed it.
Ranks of riot police wielding shields and batons formed up between the building and the protestors. The demonstrators taunted the front rank with placards and banners. Stop Nuclear Madness read an oversized sign held up by a pair of protestors in skeleton-imaged jumpsuits. The pair darted back and forth, coming ever closer to the front rank, baiting the police to charge. From the window, his trained eye detected masked figures gathering rocks and bottles at the rear of the demonstration. Negotiators from both sides stepped into the no-man’s-land between battle lines while a wind kicked up, blowing debris across the clearing.
Leone slumped, exhausted, onto a sofa. The tension had resurrected the craving. He took a cinnamon stick from his shirt pocket. He rolled one end around in his mouth, and following his doctor’s advice, he tried to imagine the taste of bittersweet wood was the taste of a cigarette. It wasn’t working. Maybe he should try bubble gum like Wesley Bemis. Hoping he could still pull it off, he closed his eyes and breathed in and out as though he were inhaling and exhaling nonexistent cigarette smoke.
“Am I interrupting?”
He opened his eyes to see the physicist-director standing over him in a white lab coat.
“What’s in your mouth?”
Jumping to his feet, he jammed the cinnamon stick back into his shirt pocket. “Never mind that. What about the test results?”
“Is that all you’re worried about?” The physicist-director looked toward the window. “They’re threatening to destroy the center, and you want us to continue.” He jutted out his chin. “For the safety of the staff, I plan to send everyone home until this riot ends.”
Lightning flashed through the window followed by the roar of a thunderclap. Rain pelted the glass. Leone called the physicist-director to the window. The protest melted away into clumps of drenched demonstrators scampering helter-skelter for cover with shirts and signs over their heads.
“The heavens have spoken. If the protestors return, the local police have promised me to provide round-the-clock protection.” Leone made a shooing movement with the back of his hand. “With the greatest respect I urge you to get me those results.”
***
At dawn on the top story of the Castello of Julius II in Ostia, Will Fisher startled awake in a castle built for the Warrior Pope, Julius II. Outside the walls, the putt putt of a motorcycle revving up broke the morning calm.
Across the stone floor, Nicole, exhausted from her late-night return to the castle after her father’s funeral, had fallen asleep on her sleeping bag in her clothes. Her T-shirt revealed a coffee-colored birthmark on her upper arm. The butterfly mark fluttered in sync with her breathing as if preparing to fly. She mumbled, rolling over on her side, and faced the wall. The joke on the back of her T-shirt—“An Archaeologist Is Someone Whose Career Is in Ruins”—was on him. His career was in ruins, not hers.
Not enough that his father had deserted him and his mother in Milwaukee, the war criminal had left lies behind. The old wreck of a man fabricated the story about being drafted into the German army and sitting out the war at a desk job in Bavaria. He had instead volunteered for the SS unit involved in the Ardeatine Caves massacre. Now under arrest in Rome, his father had crossed the ocean and messed up his life once again.
Circumstances forced him to tell Nicole about his university dismissal. She would find out anyway. But he didn’t have to tell her about his father. The paparazzi scavengers were too busy gorging on the details of his father’s war crimes to examine the family tree—at least for now. He had done what he could to sever his identity as the son of Otto Fischer. Changing the spelling of his last name was not enough.
He had to figure out how to better fudge his filial connection to the war criminal. He might just deny Otto Fischer’s paternity. Who would believe a broken-down Nazi?
His friend Jack Daniels offered solace from the thermos emblazoned with the words: “My Blood Type Is Caffeine.” The professor struggled to avoid the thermos. He could not let alcohol screw up his career. With the aid of a lighted magnifying glass and Latin reference works, they had translated enough to know the Unity Report was a bombshell.
The humidification chamber and the cutting-edge gelatin had uncurled the papyrus in record time. The barely legible Latin letters, bunched horizontally across the papyrus, looked like black musical notes erupting across an almond-colored score sheet from a symphony lost in time. He picked up the partial translation from a worktable. He could already hear the applause of acclaim resounding down the corridors of academia for his stupendous discovery.
Nicole mumbled herself awake. She lifted herself on the sleeping bag, her eyes puffy and filled with tears. They exchanged good mornings.
“He was a good man.” She rubbed a tear away. “If only I knew what tormented him before he died.”
“You couldn’t know. He wouldn’t say what troubled him.”
“Just a tight-lipped hero, my dad.” She forced a crooked smile. “Where are you going?”
“The Neanderthals on the faculty call me a bomb thrower.”
“Why do you care what they think?”
He waved the translation above his head.
“Wait till they read the bomb I’m faxing to Commissario Leone.”
***
Holding an incoming fax, the CEDAD secretary bustled into the conference room just in time to avoid bumping into Leone. “Excuse me. This is for you, Commissario.”
“You were to inform me when the fax arrived. I was to pick it up.”
“I didn’t read a word . . . if that’s what you’re insinuating.” She placed a hand on her hip. “Please don’t tie up our fax machine. At CEDAD we have work to do.”
So much for Fisher’s paranoia that a fax was more secure because a computer could be hacked. Upon the secretary’s departure, Leone read the cover-page notation from Professor Fisher. The placement of a scroll rod near the opening sentences in the Unity Report smudged them so they could not be read. His eyes darted to what could be deciphered.
Seneca: Callinicus will record your words as my notary.
Paul: Why can I not report directly to Emperor Nero?
Seneca: Because the emperor desires your connection with him kept secret. He wishes the plausibility of denial should this project be exposed.
Paul: Why must my words be written? You are his counselor. You can report to him confidentially without arousing curiosity, just like before.
Seneca: I am now retired. In any case, the emperor does not trust my words any longer but only your report in your own words. Oral words fly away, written ones stay.
Paul: I beg the emperor’s forgiveness for the delay in my report.
Seneca: The emperor did not summon you to Rome from a backwater province in the guise of a successful legal appeal by a Roman citizen only to be snubbed.
Paul: I beg forgiveness. My affliction forced me to bed.
Seneca: The emperor’s instructions were clear. With our support you agreed to organize one religion in one empire for Jew and non-Jew alike based on the most useful elements of Jewish and non-Jewish religious traditions.
Paul: So I have tried to the best of my ability. I have used the Mithras cult in my native city of Tarsus as my model. I have turned Jesus into Mithras and Mithras into Jesus. The Jewish sect of Jesus and the cult of Mithras seek a brotherhood of men under God beyond the artificiality of social and ethnic distinctions, just as you Stoics profess.
Seneca: That is all well and good. But you have committed a serious blunder by promoting the Jewish messiah as the divine son of God. The emperor did not grant you license to turn this Jewish preacher into a divinity. By so doing you have not only offended the emperor who claims divinity but also your Jewish brethren. They believe you commit blasphemy and are no longer a Jew.
Paul: I am all things to all people.
Seneca: But you have become the wrong thing to us.
Paul: I needed to connect the abstract monotheism of the Jews to the culture of Greece and Rome. The Jews prohibit images of God and fear to utter his true name. Are there not here in Rome statues of Apollo, Venus, and the other gods that are the wonders of the world? Do you not glory in their names far and wide? How then shall we worship God through Jesus unless he has a divine status? I have combined the best of the Jewish and non-Jewish religions.
Seneca: But combined to such a dangerous extreme, my dear fellow. The God of the Jews overshadows our gods in perfection. The Jews say we are made in his image whereas Jupiter seems to me more made in ours.
MORE DYNAMITE TO FOLLOW . . . WILL
***
After Fisher returned from the fax machine, Garvey asked, “Before we get to work, have you reconsidered my concerns about the Unity Report?”
“You know, that butterfly mark on your arm.” He readied the magnifying glass for a new assault on the report. “Around here it means your pregnant mother had an unfulfilled wish. The possibility of fulfillment is reborn in the child.”
“Stop stalling, Professor.” She became serious. “My only wish is to warn you. Your bombshell could explode in our faces.”
“We’ve been through this. You told me about your doubts.” He folded his arms across his chest. “The Unity Report says: ‘I am all things to all people.’ Saint Paul uses the same phrase in his first letter to the Corinthians.”
“What does that prove?” She shook her head. “Ancient forgers inserted what a reader might expect to find. It made the forgery more plausible.”
“It’s just as possible Paul repeated a pet phrase. People do it all the time.”
“We’re not going to settle this now. Let’s get to work.”
Despite their divergent views, she liked the way he relied on her paleographic expertise when it came to deciphering the identity of particular letters. With him, she was part of a team instead of an appendage. Whenever they differed on the meaning of a word or phrase, he listened and treated her as an equal, even though classical languages were his specialty. She hadn’t often found this in other men, certainly not her ex-husband nor her father. They were cocksure about everything. In the days before GPS, Will would’ve been the guy who stopped to ask for directions when lost.
In the Unity Report, the As were not difficult to identify, though they lacked crossbars. But the similarity of the Es and Fs took time. The writer—if a forger—had used the same cursive style as in the Callinicus letter. The Roman playwright Plautus had compared the style to the scratching of a hen’s foot. Wouldn’t a document like this have been penned in the more formal and legible rustic-capital style? The writing showed starts and stops, as if the author had hesitated numerous times before completing letters and words.
Garvey shared her thoughts. “Whoever wrote this paused a lot. The penmanship doesn’t flow evenly as in the Callinicus letter. I think this is a different person.”
“Maybe a scribe wrote the letter. Callinicus says in his unfinished letter he had a slave with him.” He rubbed his finger along his chin. “Anyway, you have to admit the formation of the letters is the same in both documents, even the individual peculiarities.”
“Too much the same, if you ask me.” She shook her head. “If I were you, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on the report’s authenticity.”
“Truce,” he said, shaking her hand, “until we get word from Leone on the results of the carbon-dating test.”
***
“Get away from the fax machine.” Commissario Leone tapped the shoulder of the CEDAD physicist from behind. “I’m expecting an important fax.”
“Go away.” Without turning, the physicist continued tinkering with the machine as it whirred and flashed a blinking yellow light. “I’m trying to fix this damn relic. I need to send something. Our computer’s down.”
He reached around the physicist’s head and flashed police ID in the man’s eyes.
“OK. I’m going.” The physicist gathered his papers. “But you fix it.”
The commissario struggled with the glitch until the blinking yellow light stopped. The machine purred and disgorged the additional translation from its jaws.
Paul: Warn the emperor. The more rabid followers of this Jesus mutter about burning down the new Babylon. This is their code word for Rome. But I believe this nothing but idle talk.
Seneca: That is not for you to decide. Understood?
Paul: Of course.
Seneca: This unrest is the result of your apocalyptic preaching. Instead of pacifying the Jews here and in Judaea, you have stirred up the rabble. Even certain followers of this messiah no longer trust you. The technicalities of Jewish law must not be abolished all at once. You do things too impetuously.
Paul: What would the emperor have me do? Peter and the others in Jerusalem consider Jewish law eternal.
Seneca: One thing at a time. The Jews will not sacrifice to the emperor as a god, but we compromised. They sacrifice to their God on behalf of the emperor. That suffices for them and for us.
Paul: I have done so with the Sabbath. My letter to the Romans leaves Sabbath observance to the conscience of each person, neither condemning nor demanding observance.
Seneca: That was well done. The forced idleness of the Jewish Sabbath has always bothered me. It only spawns thoughts of rebellion.
Paul: I have nothing more to report at this time.
Seneca: Next time, tell me the names and plans of those who threaten to burn Rome. The emperor needs to know everything. Or you might never again be able to tell us anything.
The Mithras Conspiracy Page 20