The Fifth Gospel

by Ian Caldwell

  I look away from Ugo, feeling as if I’ve invaded his privacy. This was a man who kept two dead bolts on his door and a safe bolted to his office floor. A man who in all the time we worked together never showed me a picture of his family, if he even had any to speak of. Maybe that’s why his body is still here, three days later, languishing in a back room with no vigil or word of a burial Mass.

  “Ugo,” I say aloud, “I’m so sorry.”

  For being here. For interrupting your peace. For ignoring you when you came to me for help.

  I look away and scan the wheeled cart in front of me, searching for his belongings. Instead I find a manila folder labeled NOGARA, UGOLINO L. The first page is a diagram of a man’s skull covered with handwritten notes. Mindful of my fingerprints, I pull a pair of latex gloves from the dispenser on the wall before touching it.

  A black hole is drawn on the right side of the diagram’s skull. Measurements are beside it. An exit wound is drawn on the left side, likewise measured. On the next page is a full-body silhouette listing the scars and discolorations on Ugo’s skin. At a glance I see the word jaundice, followed by a reference to page eleven in the patient history.

  I skim forward. The file has mostly been compiled during the past eighteen months, beginning just before Ugo’s first trip to Edessa, when he was vaccinated for typhoid and tetanus. This spring, he tested positive for liver disease. Then failed a vision test. After that, the entries become more frequent. Ugo seems to have visited the doctor every time he was back in town. Page eleven, referenced in the autopsy report, was made less than a month ago.

  Patient exhibits secondary delusions consistent with alcohol dependency. Fears losing job. Fears being followed, harmed. Evidence of possible confabulation. Tested for Korsakoff, but no evidence of amnesia. Retest for memory loss in six months. Prescribed thiamine; referred to specialist.

  The date of this visit is shortly before he sent me his final e-mail. The doctors, seeing that he was an alcoholic, ignored everything else. I feel a second wave of guilt.

  Returning to the autopsy report, I finally find the inventory of personal effects. It mentions the absence of wallet and watch. It says nothing about a Casa key—with or without a nick taken out of the fob. This strengthens my suspicion that the scrap I found under his floor mat wasn’t his.

  The inventory also says the pockets of Ugo’s pants, shirt, and suit jacket were empty. But my suspicion was right. In the inner breast pocket of his raincoat, the examiner found Ugo’s mobile phone.

  No mobile phone was ever listed in an inventory of evidence Mignatto mentioned to me. I begin to search the metal trays for another red-sealed evidence bag, when my eyes catch one last line in the notes.

  Staining of both hands.

  I stop, and look again. Then I rifle through the pages for another reference. Beside the full-body diagram, a line item mentions the gunshot residue found on Ugo’s shielding hand, the one he defended himself with. But that isn’t what the notation said. It said staining of both hands.

  Thinking back, I remember what the Swiss Guard said about Ugo’s body to Simon and me in the cantina just hours after he died.

  I heard there was something wrong with it. Something about his hands or feet.

  I stare at the hump under the sheet on the metal table. And I dread what I need to do now.

  ONLY SIMON WAS ALLOWED to see Father’s body in this room. Two days afterward, when I leaned over the open casket to kiss the holy icon on his chest, I smelled the cologne the mortician had put on him, and I knew my father was gone. The body before me had become a stranger. No Greek priest wears cologne. But that smell has stayed with me, folded among the buried memories in the corners of my own skull. It returns now as I step toward the table.

  I stare at the white sheet. At the bulging landscape of Ugo’s corpse. Then I don the priest’s familiar armor against death. There’s nothing to fear here. The soul doesn’t die. As surely as Ugo lived before, he still lives, just dislocated from his body.

  And yet there’s something haunting about the facelessness of his covered corpse. It feels as if all death resides here. I’m separated from it by nothing but this thin sheet. For some reason I think of Ugo at his dinner table, showing me his replica of the Shroud. His hand hovered respectfully over the cloth, never touching it.

  The sheet feels powdery when I pull it up, just far enough to find Ugo’s arm.

  The stain on his hand is thick rust-brown. It spreads across the skin in a familiar pattern, darker on the fingertips and thumb, almost nothing in the palm.

  My heart is thrumming now, sending a shiver of blood through my arms.

  I lower the sheet and step to the other side of the table. An identical stain is on his left hand. Ugo was holding the Diatessaron not long before he died. But why? The restorers should’ve been done with it long ago. Huge enlargements of the Diatessaron’s pages are already mounted in the galleries. I assumed the last gallery door—the one Peter and I couldn’t open—was locked because the Diatessaron was already in place, elaborately mounted in that final room. Ugo had no reason to move it.

  Unless he brought it to Castel Gandolfo. Unless he showed it to the Orthodox for some reason. In which case, the Diatessaron might be what was stolen from his car. The dimensions are very close to the impression I saw under Ugo’s car seat.

  Impatiently I search the metal trays. Finally, under a small pile of paperwork, I find a plain plastic bag with no seal and no gendarme markings at all. Inside it is Ugo’s mobile phone. The battery is dead after three days in standby, so I pull the charging cords from my cassock and find one that powers it on. Then I begin working through the lists of calls.

  The last four calls made to this phone were from Simon. At 3:26, 3:53, and 4:12, Ugo didn’t answer. Then more than half an hour passed with no contact. Finally, at 4:46, my brother called Ugo for the last time. They connected for ninety seconds. Less than ninety minutes later, Ugo was dead, since Simon called my apartment shortly after six to ask me to find him at Castel Gandolfo.

  I dial Ugo’s voice mail. Sure enough, Simon has left messages. The automated voice says, “Three twenty-six PM.” Then:

  Ugo, it’s me. Just wanted to run through the script. A few reminders: Italian won’t be their first language, so speak slowly. I’ll introduce you, and you only have to talk for twenty minutes, so don’t worry. Just please don’t mention what we talked about.

  Then a pause.

  Also, I wanted to let you know that the turnout is better than expected. We talked about a small group, but the Holy Father has been very supportive, so don’t be surprised. That’s another reason it’s important for us to follow the script. We don’t want to let him down.

  A final pause.

  I know this is hard for you. But you can do it. If you’re tempted to have a drink, stay strong. I’ll be with you every step.

  I save the message. Then seven minutes until four o’clock, Simon leaves a second one. This time, his voice is more strained.

  Where are you? The porter said you went for a smoke. We’re supposed to start in a few minutes. I really need you back here.

  Twenty minutes later, the last voice mail message.

  I can’t keep them waiting. I’ll have to give the talk myself. Ugo, if you’re drinking, don’t bother coming. I’ll call you when I’m done.

  There’s nothing more. The automated voice returns. The final call—around quarter of five, when Simon and Ugo at last made ­contact—has left no message.

  I feel the bitterest relief. Simon didn’t know where Ugo had gone. He was giving a talk to a room of Orthodox priests while Ugo was alone in the gardens. Possibly even as Ugo was being attacked.

  The judges need to hear these messages. They need to draw their own conclusions about why this evidence has never been collected. Mignatto will be furious at what I’ve done, but I unplug the phone and put it in
my pocket. Then I check the room for anything I might’ve left behind, bless Ugo’s body one last time, and return to the lobby.

  Outside, in the small parking lot between here and the autopark, a car pulls up. Its lights strafe the vertical blinds, but it’s only one of my neighbors who emerges, yawning, on his way home for the night. I wait for him to disappear inside, then I pad out and lock the door with Mona’s key.

  It’s midnight. I consider calling Mignatto but decide it can wait until morning. We will meet at the courtroom in eight hours. He can rage at me then for what I’ve done. Once the anger passes, he’ll see how much easier his job has become.

  CHAPTER 25

  I’M WOKEN AT half past five by a phone call from Michael Black.

  “Where are you?” he says.

  “Michael,” I say groggily, “it’s not even dawn here. I’m not running to a pay phone.”

  “Your message said you needed to talk to me?”

  “I need you to get on a plane,” I say. “We need you to testify.”

  “Come again?”

  “The Secretariat won’t release your personnel file. We have no other way to prove you were attacked.”

  Already his tone is changing. “You want me to stick out my neck for your brother?”

  “Michael—”

  “What would I even say? He never told me anything.”

  I sit up in bed and turn on the lamp. I press the sand out of my eyes. My mind is turning at half speed, but I know I need to be careful. He never told me anything: surely untrue. Ugo’s letter referred to Michael as Simon’s “follower,” and when Michael was beaten up at the airport in Romania, it seems to have been because he was helping Simon invite Orthodox to Ugo’s exhibit. That he won’t admit as much to me in private tells me it will be hard convincing him to testify in court.

  And yet he called. Some part of him is still willing to help.

  “As soon as you get to Rome,” I say, “I’ll tell you everything I know. But I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

  “You know what? I don’t owe you anything.”

  “Michael,” I say in a harder voice, “you do owe me. You didn’t just tell those people where to find my apartment. You told them where to find my spare key.”

  Silence.

  “The police won’t help us,” I say, “because they don’t think anyone really broke in.”

  “I apologized for that.”

  “I don’t want your apologies! I want you to get on the next plane to Rome. Call me when you’re here.”

  Before he can say another word, I hang up. And I pray it was enough.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER, I arrange an impromptu playdate for Peter with Allegra Costa, the six-year-old granddaughter of two Vatican villagers. At her doorstep, Peter and I take longer than usual to say our see-you-laters. We have a ritual of never saying good-bye to each other, another residue of Mona’s disappearance. She is always there, turning up in the field of our lives like the potsherds Roman farmers find when they plow. For Peter’s sake, I need to call her back soon. But the thought flees when I glance at my wristwatch. Everything tightens inside me. There’s another place I need to be.

  The Palace of the Tribunal sits catercorner to the Casa, sharing views of the Vatican gas station, but with the additional insult of being directly behind the tailpipes of the cars, which has contributed a sfumato of petroleum gray to the chipped Vatican beige of the building’s exterior. The Rota normally operates out of a historic Renaissance palace across the river, closer to Mignatto’s office, but today three of its judges have been forced to come here. In the old days, our canonical trials were held outside the Vatican walls, and this palace was reserved for civil trials. But John Paul, the only pope ever to revise both codes of canon law—one for Western Catholics, one for Eastern Catholics—decided to change the venue as well.

  This palace often seems permeated with an air of languid underemployment. Judges loiter outside, leaning against the walls with wigs in their hands, whiling away time between cases. Like our Vatican doctors and nurses, our civil magistrates are volunteers imported from the outer world, part-time lawmen whose real jobs are in Rome. Today’s judges, though, will be different. The ancient tribunal of the Sacred Roman Rota is the second-highest judicial authority in the Church. On the merits of a case, they can be overruled by no one but the pope. The Rota is the final appeals court for every Catholic diocese on earth, and each year its justices try hundreds of cases, annulling a Catholic marriage almost every workday. This endless churn takes its toll. I’ve known monsignors from the Rota who aged faster than dogs. The job made them grim, methodical, impatient. In this courtroom, there won’t be any lackadaisical Italian-style justice.

  Mignatto is waiting outside the courtroom when I arrive. He looks especially elegant, his monsignor’s cassock tied around his waist with a sash that ends in two knotted pompoms that dangle just so, calling to mind the censers that priests and deacons swing on chains to spread the smoke of incense. Tassels like these were outlawed thirty years ago when the pope simplified the dress code for Roman priests, but either Mignatto was grandfathered in, or else there’s a subtle nod to traditionalism here that he thinks will curry favor with someone in the court. As a Greek priest, I’m an outsider to these nuances.

  “Is Simon coming?” I ask.

  His tone is strictly professional, expressing no emotion at all. “He’s on the list. Whether Cardinal Boia lets him go is another matter.”

  “There isn’t anything we can do?”

  “I’m doing everything I can think of. In the meantime, please explain your uncle’s decision to me.”

  “What decision?”

  Mignatto waits, as if he expects the answer to come to me. Finally he says, “His Eminence is already inside the courtroom. He informed me an hour ago that he’ll be sitting at the table today as procurator.”

  I glare at the courtroom doors and bite my tongue.

  Mignatto is doing his best not to look aggravated. His impression of our family is not improving. “I thought he might’ve spoken to you about it. In any case, I submitted a mandate to make him locum tenens. In your absence, I’m afraid.”

  Locum tenens. Latin for “substitute.”

  “I can’t come inside?”

  “Not today.”

  “Why’s he doing this?”

  Mignatto lowers his voice. “He told me it was to embolden your brother to testify. He thinks two nights of house arrest may have changed his attitude.”

  I’m angry at Lucio for making me look like a fool. But if he thinks he can make Simon talk, then he must have a reason. And his decision gives me the opening I needed.

  I reach into my cassock for Ugo’s mobile phone and say, “There’s something I have to tell you before you go inside.”

  When I explain, Mignatto goes white. “But I specifically asked you,” he says, “not to do anything like this. Not to interfere.”

  “You also told me the judges would accept evidence no matter where it came from or how it was gotten.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They bugged Simon’s phone to steal his voice mail.”

  He glares at me. “What I told you was that the judges are entitled to form impressions based on anything probative. Which includes our conduct. So when the Secretariat withholds evidence, or eavesdrops on its own employees, it makes an impression that works in your brother’s favor. And when the defense steals evidence, it makes an impression that can only hurt him.”

  “Monsignor, you don’t understand. The gendarmes have found things that could help Simon, but nobody’s doing anything with the evidence. Nobody’s even collecting it.”

  “What on earth are you referring to?”

  I want to tell him about the phone calls to my apartment on the night before the break-in, about the scrap of
paper in Ugo’s car that had my phone number written on it. But it would mean telling Mignatto what I did last night, and he’s too upset to take the news in perspective.

  Instead I say, “Why haven’t the judges seen this phone? Why was it never entered into evidence in the trial? The voice mail messages show that Simon didn’t know where Ugo was at Castel Gandolfo. This should’ve been one of the first things the prosecution had to turn over.”

  A pink mottle creeps up the monsignor’s neck. “I remind you again,” he says, “that this is not a criminal trial under civil law. The gendarmes do not work hand-in-glove with the prosecutor. They perform their own investigation. If the court requests it, they supply it. So the problem here is not some nefarious, invisible cabal against your brother. It’s that no one involved in these proceedings—not the judges, not the promoter of justice, not the defense, not even the vicar who performed the initial investigation—has ever tried a murder in a canonical court. We aren’t accustomed to requesting police homicide reports. We don’t know what sorts of reports are available. And though we’re making every effort to overcome these deficits, it’s extremely difficult when a trial is moving this quickly.”

  “Then why,” I say, “is the court being asked to do something it can’t do? The pressure’s coming from somewhere.”

  Mignatto grimaces. “Father, someone obviously believes Nogara’s death is a scandal threatening the arrangements for this exhibit. The best hope for resolving that problem, in someone’s mind, is a quick trial. I see nothing to suggest there’s more to it.”

  The courtroom doors are opening. Arguing is getting us nowhere. Before Mignatto leaves, I need to make sure he understands the significance of Ugo’s phone.

  “When Simon’s testifying,” I say, “please just ask him about the calls he made to Ugo. And if he won’t answer, play the messages on Ugo’s voice mail.”