by Ian Caldwell
Some of them come toward me en masse. I realize I’m standing in front of the elevator. The doors open, and I step aside. Three of them filter in, speaking a language I don’t recognize. I think I overhear the word for evening prayer, which must be why they’re going downstairs. But one of them, in Italian, instructs the operator to hold the door. More are coming.
Now a room opens down the hall. A young priest comes out. His beard is thin. He idles by the doorway, staring back into it. And in my gut I feel a thrill. I know what this means. He’s waiting for his boss.
I try not to stare as the bishop—fifty or sixty years old, with an impressive belly and a handsome loose cassock—comes striding out. Just as Gianni said, he wears the Orthodox stovepipe hat. The remaining priests in the hallway make room for him as he walks toward the elevator. The operator reaches for his key—but the bishop shakes his head. Another priest in the car says, “Wait, please. More coming.”
I peer down the corridor. From the same open door, another bishop has appeared, this one wearing a gold chain with a painted portrait of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary. Even at a distance I can see the glitter of something on his stovepipe hat: the tiny cross that signifies a high-ranking bishop or metropolitan. This bishop is more senior, surely at least seventy years old. He walks with a stoop. His aides travel on either side of him, minding that his cassock doesn’t catch under his feet.
Yet even now, the door behind him doesn’t shut. And suddenly, there’s a commotion. For some reason, the priests in the hallway begin murmuring. Some of them gather outside the open door, stealing looks inside. The rest of them separate to the far walls of the corridor. They are parting like the sea, because someone else is beginning to emerge.
A man in white.
CHAPTER 30
A SHIVER GOES THROUGH me. All through the hallway, priests bow. My eyes must be playing tricks.
As the man approaches, he comes into focus. It isn’t John Paul. It’s someone even more ancient. His eyes are black smudges. And he has a beard.
The beard encircles his long, drawn face like a wreath of white fog. It extends down to the middle of his chest, where he carries something in his hand: a white stovepipe hat with a small jeweled cross. As he passes the other priests, he lifts a hand in blessing.
I’m frozen. I know who this is.
In poor, accented Italian, the man says to me, “God bless you.”
“And you,” I fumble as two priests exit the elevator to make sure he has room to enter it.
Simon has done the impossible. The tradition of Romanian Orthodoxy is that its highest leader may wear white. Before my eyes is one of the nine patriarchs of the Orthodox Church.
I begin hurrying down the stairs. The elevator must be going to the ground floor, to the private chapel attached to the Casa.
And then I realize: I can’t follow them there. I would barely be able to communicate with these men. They might mistake me for a brother since my cassock and beard look Orthodox, but because of our schism, the Orthodox Church forbids me—a Catholic—from receiving the Eucharist with them. Even joining them for evening prayer without revealing who I am would be an act of bad faith.
Instead, I take the stairs no farther than the third-floor landing and slip inside. My nerves are ringing. I lean against the wall, wondering how this could’ve gone so wrong. How something so beautiful, so historic, could’ve cost Ugo his life. How Simon could lose his priesthood over it.
Here on the third floor, a door opens. A Roman Catholic priest steps out of his room. He walks toward the elevator. As he presses the button, he takes a second look at me.
I know this look too well. Though I have more in common with him than I have with any Orthodox upstairs—I’m a Catholic; I follow the pope; this priest and I can receive the Eucharist in each other’s churches—he seems to think I’m out of place.
“Good evening, Father,” I say in Italian to assuage his concern. Or maybe, in some dark way, to assuage mine. Then I continue on toward room 328.
At the door, I calm myself by repeating the Jesus Prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.
Nothing can happen to me here. This hall, this building, is full of men who would come running at the first shout for help. Whoever’s inside, I’ll invite him out to talk. Out; not back into his room.
I knock.
No answer.
I stare at the peephole, wondering if I’m being watched. Stepping forward, I knock again.
Still no answer.
I pull out my phone and call the front desk. “Sister, could you connect me to three twenty-eight?”
I hear the phone ring on the other side of the door. Standing in front of the peephole, I hold my phone in the air and point to it. We can talk this way, too. It makes no difference to me.
But no one responds.
Outside, through the large window at the end of the hall, the sun is setting. Something occurs to me. I glance down.
There’s no light beneath the door. That’s why the shutters are closed. Nobody’s home.
I call the lobby again and say, “Sister, I’m coming down to meet a visitor in the dining hall. Could someone tidy my room while I’m gone? It’s three twenty-eight.”
“Father, I believe your visitor just rang up. I’ll send the housekeeper right away. I’d say the tidying is a bit overdue.”
I thank her, then wait near the elevator until the nun with the cleaning cart arrives. When she unlocks the room, I follow her inside.
“What in heavens?” says the nun in alarm.
For an instant, it’s dark. From the outer courtyard comes a pale miasma of electric light, glowing through the shutter slats. Then the nun turns on the lights.
No one else is here.
“Sister,” I murmur absently, surveying the room, “don’t mind me. I left something behind.”
It’s almost identical to the room Peter and I shared. A narrow bed with a simple camelback headboard. A nightstand. A crucifix.
I sit at the desk and pretend to make notations, waiting for her to leave. She closes the closet and gathers up a pair of sheets lying on the ground beside the bed. The priest in this room might be a floor-sleeper like Simon. But the bed looks slept-in, too.
There must be two of them staying here. And there must be a reason the room is overdue for cleaning.
As the housekeeper makes the bed and empties the trash cans, I scan the floor. By the lamp is an old piece of luggage with no name tag visible. On the nightstand are a bag of toiletries, a camera, a softcover book. The nun stares at a pile of papers under the toiletry bag, then glances back at the closet.
“Father,” she says, “who’s staying in this room with you?”
“Just a colleague,” I improvise.
Something catches my attention. The softcover book on the nightstand. It’s about the Shroud.
I feel a nervous pinch in my chest. I’ve read that book. I own that same edition. It was stolen from my apartment during the break-in.
My eyes shift across the room anxiously. There’s a glass bottle in the wastebasket the nun is emptying. Grappa Julia. Ugo’s favorite drink. But there are no glass tumblers in sight, no sign that this was drunk here. Bottles like this were piled in the trash can at Ugo’s apartment. The apartment someone had broken into. I wonder what else in this room was stolen from his home or mine.
The nun looks again at the pile of papers on the nightstand, and for some reason she seems in a hurry to finish now.
As she tidies the bathroom, I step over to look at the papers. Then I freeze.
The wheels of the nun’s cart whine. The last thing I hear her say, before she closes the door behind her, is, “Father, I’m going to have to send someone up here. I don’t think this is reall
y your room.”
It isn’t a pile of papers after all. It’s a pile of photographs.
Photographs of me.
* * *
MY HAND SHAKES AS I pick up the camera. I scroll through the backlog of pictures. Me, walking in the gardens. Me, standing outside the Palace of the Tribunal. Me, holding hands with Peter in the courtyard below. Near the end, I find it. Me, exiting the Casa. The same photo that was slipped under my door with the threat written on the back.
I try to think. But the fear is spilling through me.
A name. A face. I need something.
I throw open the closet. From the hanger dangles a black, buttoned robe. A Roman Catholic cassock. The nun must’ve known it couldn’t be mine.
I check the tag. In a country of identically dressed men, we write our names in our clothing. But there’s nothing here, just the faded insignia of a tailor shop near the Pantheon. On the next hanger is a ferraiolone, the long cape that Roman priests wear to black-tie events. Finally it clicks. I’m looking at a priest’s best cassock and formalwear. This man is preparing for Ugo’s exhibit tomorrow night.
I need a way to identify him. I lay the cassock on the bed and open the penknife on my key chain. Just below the back of the collar, I make a cut through the fabric. It’s almost invisible. But when the cassock is stretched over a man’s shoulders, it’ll pucker, and I’ll be able to see his white shirt from behind.
I hear a sound in the hallway. I rehang the cassock and start to leave—when a thought comes to me.
I backtrack to the desk, checking the drawers. It must be here somewhere. I find a lunch receipt, and what appears to be a parking ticket. I stash them in my cassock. Then, on the nightstand, I see it. Under a loose sheet of paper is the pad of Casa stationery. I open the shutters and lift the pad in front of the slanting light of sunset. Just faintly, I see the impression of handwriting. The five digits of my phone number.
This is where the scrap from Ugo’s car came from. This must be the room that called me three times on the night before Ugo died.
Two priests have been sleeping here. One of them broke into my apartment while the other was breaking into Ugo’s car at Castel Gandolfo. Everything converges here, in this room. If only I had stopped the maid before she threw away that basket of trash. There must’ve been more inside it than an empty bottle of Grappa Julia.
Suddenly the door opens. A nun steps inside. Behind her is the housekeeper.
“Father! Explain yourself.”
I step back.
“You don’t belong here,” she exclaims. “Come with me this instant.”
I make no move.
Behind her appears a Swiss Guard. The same one I saw in the stairwell.
“Do what she says, Father,” he commands.
An idea comes to me.
“Den katalavaino italika,” I say to the guard. “Eimai Ellinas.”
I don’t understand Italian. I’m Greek.
He frowns. Then it dawns on him. “He’s one of them from upstairs,” the guard says. “He keeps going to the wrong floor.”
I blink as if I don’t understand. The nun clicks her tongue and waves at me to follow her. In relief, I obey.
Then the housekeeper speaks up. “No,” she says. “He’s lying. I talked to him in Italian.”
* * *
I’M BROUGHT TO THE lobby. A gendarme is waiting there. He takes me across the courtyard to the gendarme station inside the Palace of the Tribunal. There’s a holding cell inside. Instead of putting me in it, he instructs me to sit on a bench by the front desk and empty my pockets.
Out comes the lunch receipt. The parking ticket. My phone. The contents of my wallet.
He looks twice when he sees a Vatican ID. When he notices the name on it, he turns back to me and says, “I remember you.”
I remember him, too. He was one of the gendarmes at Castel Gandolfo on the night of Ugo’s murder.
“What the hell were you doing in the Casa, Father?”
The profanity is a sign that I have lost his respect. That I’m no longer worthy of being treated like a priest.
“I want to make a phone call,” I say.
I’m staring at the parking ticket, trying to memorize the license plate on it.
He thinks it over, then shakes his head. “I need to talk to my captain.”
To hell with his captain. “My uncle is Cardinal Ciferri,” I say. “Give me the phone.”
He flinches when he hears Uncle Lucio’s name. But my surname is different from Lucio’s, so he feels confident enough to doubt.
“Stay put, Father,” he says. “I’ll be back.”
* * *
THE CAPTAIN SETS HIM straight. Twenty minutes later, Don Diego arrives to pick me up. I expect Diego to be furious. And he is. But not with me.
“You’re lucky you don’t lose your job for this,” he tells the gendarme. “Don’t ever humiliate a member of this family again.”
And perhaps it says something about our country that the policeman, knowing he’s in the right, still looks afraid.
The sun is low on the horizon as we walk up the path toward Lucio’s palace. Diego doesn’t say a word. His silence conveys that I’m in a kind of trouble that it would be above his pay grade to describe. But I find it impossible to focus on him. All I see in my mind’s eye is Cardinal Boia staring back at me from between those curtains.
At the door to the palace, I say, “Thanks, Diego. But I’m not coming in.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s somewhere else I need to be.”
It’s five of eight. I have an appointment with Michael Black.
“But your uncle—”
“I know.”
“His orders about this were very clear.”
“I’ll apologize some other time.”
And I can feel him staring at me as I walk away.
THE SUN NEVER SHINES on the north face of Saint Peter’s. On hot days, this is where priests turn up, mosslike, gathering to sneak cigarettes in the long cool shadows. The stone walls are forty feet thick at these corners and rise higher than the cliffs of Dover. Hell itself couldn’t warm them.
At this hour, all the other doors are locked. The sampietrini check the basilica at dark, every staircase, every nook. But a sliver of pale light glows beneath this side door. Michael must know a sampietrino who owes him a favor.
I slip inside and drift through the cool air like a grit of sand at the bottom of the sea. Tourists visiting here by day see the marble floor and the sky-high canopy, but this church has more hiding places in between than even most priests know. There are stairways hidden from view, which lead to chapels built into the pillars themselves, where clergy can rehearse and worship away from the eyes of laymen. There are dressing rooms—sacristies—where altar boys help priests vest for Mass. Overhead, tucked behind the stage lights, are the unreachable balconies that even the sampietrini have no way to clean except by dangling from ropes, swinging through the air by the metal hooks screwed into these walls. And connecting everything like arteries is a network of passageways within the walls. Between the inner and outer skin of the basilica are tunnels through which a man can travel around the whole church without ever being seen. For those reasons, no priest ever believes he’s alone here. So no priest ever comes here for confidentiality.
Michael knows that. It must be exactly what he’s counting on. This is the last place anyone would come looking for two priests meeting in the night.
I emerge from a passage beneath an old pope’s tomb onto the main floor of the basilica. All around me is a weightless, twinkling dark. From around a corner comes a sound. A metal click, as of a lock turning.
“Alex?” I hear him say. “Is that you?”
I follow it into the north transept. When Michelangelo designed Saint Peter’s, he planned
a Greek cross, all four arms the same length. But then a nave was added, making the Greek cross into a Latin one, its long side facing east. Where I now stand is the right crossbeam, the only part of the main floor that is cordoned off to tourists. For most Eastern Catholics, it’s an unfamiliar place. Along the walls are the booths where pilgrims come to confess. The confessionals are built like triple coffins, with a priest’s stall in the middle and an open compartment on either side. Eastern Catholics, though, confess in the open. Only because of the years I’ve spent in this basilica do I recognize the sound of the heavy wooden door of a priest’s compartment being unlocked.
“Michael,” I whisper. “It’s me.”
The door opens.
For the first time in years, I rest eyes on the living Michael Black.
* * *
IT WAS SIXTEEN YEARS ago that he disappeared. Right after the carbon-dating verdict, my father returned to the Turin hotel room they’d been sharing and discovered that Michael was gone. He wasn’t on the train back to Rome, or in the office the next Monday. My father tried to track him down, but it wasn’t long before Father himself began to disappear into the depression that would become his grave. The search petered out. We never saw Michael again.
Only later did I learn what had happened. On the way out of Turin, an Orthodox reporter had confronted Michael and blamed him for luring a few naïve Orthodox priests into our Catholic humiliation. Michael took away his tape recorder and beat him with it until the reporter ended up in a hospital. Only because the Turin police weren’t about to prosecute a Catholic priest for defending their city’s relic did he escape punishment. So deals were made, and Michael was sent for treatment. No one could’ve been naïve enough, in those days, to believe that a few months in a mountain facility would cure him of anything serious. But maybe nobody really believed it was serious. Yet.
He’d always been unruly. His language had been coarse. But Italians understood that he was an American, a cowboy. The real trouble only started after he came back from the mountains. That was when he got picked up by the Secretariat.