by Morris West
‘In spite of soothing noises and half-hearted verbal amends, the Vatican has never repudiated its anti-semitic stance. It has never recognised the right and title of the Jewish people to a traditional homeland … These things trouble Sergio. They help him, too, because they drive him to excellence, to make himself a kind of banner-bearer for his people … Yet the other part of him is a Renaissance man, seeing all, trying desperately to understand and pardon all.’
‘You love him very much, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So … ?’
‘So sometimes I think I love him too well for my own good. One thing I’m sure of, marriage would be the wrong move for both of us.’
‘Because he’s Jewish and you’re not?’
‘No. It’s because …’ She hesitated a long time over the words as if testing each one for the load it must bear. ‘It’s because I’ve arrived at my own standing place. I know who I am, where I am, what I need, what I can have. Sergio is still travelling, still searching, because he will go much further and stand much higher than I could even dream. A moment will come when he will need someone else. I’ll be excess baggage … I want to make that moment as simple as possible, for him and for me.’
‘I wonder …’ James Morrison poured himself another glass of wine. ‘I wonder if you really know how much you mean to him?’
‘I do, believe me. But there are limits to what I can provide. I’ve spent so much love and care on Britte, there is so much more that I shall have to spend, that there’s none left for another child. I haven’t grudged any of it; but my capital is used up … I am almost at the end of my breeding time – so that special part of my passion for a man is gone. I’m a good lover and Sergio needs that because, as you well know, James, surgeons spend so much of their lives thinking about other people’s bodies, they sometimes forget the one beside them in bed. On top of all that, I’m a Dane. Marriage Italian style or Jewish style isn’t for me. Does that answer your question?’
‘It does, thank you. It also raises another one. How do you read our distinguished patient?’
‘I rather like him. I didn’t at first. I saw every objectionable feature that sixty years of clerical education, professional celibacy and bachelor selfishness can produce in a man – not to mention the greed for power that seems to afflict some elderly bachelors. He’s ugly, he’s cross-grained, he can be quite rude. But as we talked I caught glimpses of someone else, a man who might have been. You will laugh at this, I know, but I was reminded of the old fairy story of the Beauty and the Beast … remember? If only the Princess could summon up courage to kiss the Beast, he would turn into a handsome prince.’
James Morrison threw back his head and laughed happily.
‘I love it! You didn’t try, did you?’
‘Of course not. But tonight, on my way home, I called in to see him. It was a few minutes after nine. They had just given him the sedatives to settle him for the night. He was drowsy and relaxed but he recognised me. There was a lock of hair hanging down into his eyes. Without thinking, I brushed it away. He took my hand and held it for the briefest of moments. Then he said, so simply I almost wept: “My mother used to do that. She used to pretend it was my guardian angel, brushing me with her wings.”’
‘Is that what he said, “her wings”?’
‘Yes. Suddenly I saw a little, lonely boy with a girl-angel for a ghostly playmate. Sad, isn’t it?’
‘But for that one small moment, joyful. You’re quite a woman, Tove Lundberg, quite a woman! Now, I’m going to bed, before I make a fool of myself.’
In the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, the lights burned late. The Cardinal Secretary of State had summoned into conference the senior officials of his Secretariat and those of the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church. These two bodies between them dealt with all the external relations of Vatican City State and, at the same time, held together the complex and sometimes conflicting interests within the body of the Church. In the daily conduct of Curial affairs they were a kitchen cabinet; tonight, with the safety of the Pontiff at stake, they were a very cool and quite ruthless council of war.
Agostini, the Secretary of State, summed up the situation.
‘I accept the Israeli information as authentic. I accept, with considerable relief, that Mossad undercover agents will be working with normal staff around the intensive care unit and, later, on the ward occupied by His Holiness. This is an irregular and unofficial intervention, so we can take no formal notice of it. We rely upon the forces of the Republic of Italy – especially the Nucleo Centrale Anti-Terrorismo, who are at this moment reinforcing the perimeter protection of the clinic and will be placing plainclothes guards at strategic points within the building itself. This is about as much as we can do for the physical security of the Pontiff during his illness. However, a hurried check this evening with our diplomatic contacts indicates that things may not be quite so simple as they seem. Our colleague Anwar El Hachem has something to say on the Arab-Israeli aspect of the matter.’
El Hachem, a Maronite from Lebanon, delivered his report.
‘Sword of Islam is a small splinter group of Iranians from Lebanon, operating in Rome itself. They are not associated with the mainstream of Palestinian opinion, but are known to be able to touch large funds. Even as we speak, Italian security agents are pulling some of them in for questioning. Embassy representatives of Saudi Arabia and the North African republics, as well as the Emirates, disclaim all knowledge of the threat and offer full co-operation against what they see as a free-booting operation which can only do them harm. One or two of them raised the question as to whether the Israelis were setting up the whole thing as a provocative gesture. But I found little support for this view.’
‘Thank you, Anwar.’ The Secretary continued. ‘Is there any doubt at all that the contract offer of $100,000 was made by Sword of Islam?’
‘None at all. But the man who made it is now in hiding.’
‘The Americans know nothing.’ Agostini hurried through the list. ‘The Russians disclaim all knowledge but are happy to exchange news if they get any. The French are referring back to Paris. What about the British?’
The British were the territory of the Right Reverend Hunterson, titular Archbishop of Sirte, a senior Vatican servant for many years. His report was brief but specific.
‘The British Embassy said tut-tut how distressing, promised to look into it and came back about nine with the same information as Anwar, that Sword of Islam is a shop-front title for an Iranian-backed group out of Lebanon. They do have money in the quantities suggested. They do finance hostage-taking and murder. In this instance, His Holiness presents a prominent target-of-opportunity.’
‘Which he wouldn’t be,’ said the Substitute Secretary tartly, ‘if we’d gone to Salvator Mundi or Gemelli. We have only ourselves to blame for exposing him to a hostile environment.’
‘It’s not the ground that’s hostile.’ Agostini was testy. ‘It’s the terrorists. I doubt we could provide as good security elsewhere. But it does raise one important issue. His Holiness talked of spending his convalescence outside Vatican territory, in a private villa perhaps. I don’t think we can permit that.’
‘Can we stop it?’ This from a German member of the Council. ‘Our master does not take kindly to opposition.’
‘I’m sure,’ said the Secretary of State, ‘the Republic has very good reason not to want him killed on its own soil. His Holiness, Italian born, has very good reason not to embarrass the Republic. Leave that discussion to me.’
‘How soon can we get him home?’
‘If all goes well, ten to fourteen days.’
‘Let’s make it ten. We could move a team of nursing sisters into Castel Gandolfo. I could talk to the Mother General of the Little Company of Mary. She could even fly in some of her best people from abroad.’
‘As I remember,’ said Archbishop Hunterson, ‘most nursing orders are hard put to service the hospitals they ha
ve. Most now depend on lay staff. Quite frankly, I don’t understand the hurry. So long as security can be maintained, I’d leave him at the Villa Diana.’
‘The Curia proposes,’ said Agostini, with tart humour, ‘but the Pontiff disposes – even from his sickbed! Let me see what notions I can plant in his head while he’s still amenable.’
It was at this precise moment in the discussion that Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly presented himself, in response to a beeper summons from the central communications office. He was flustered and breathless and slightly – only slightly – befuddled from the white wine and the red and the strong brandies he had taken to help him through Matt Neylan’s defection from the Faith.
Neylan, too, was summoned because he was a first-class Secretary of Nunziatures and his work was to edit the news and spread it around his bailiwick. They bowed to the assembled prelates, took their seats in silence and listened respectfully while Agostini first admonished them to secrecy and then walked them through the outline of threats and remedies.
Monsignor Matt Neylan had no comment to make. His functions were predetermined. His punctual performance was taken for granted.
O’Rahilly, on the other hand, with drink taken, was inclined to be voluble. As a personal assistant to the Pontiff and the bearer of a Papal commission as to the conduct of his office, his address to Agostini tended to be more emphatic than discreet.
‘I already have a list of those to be given access to His Holiness at the clinic. In the circumstances, should they not be supplied with a special card of admission? After all, the security people cannot be expected to recognise faces, and a soutane or a Roman collar readily disguises a terrorist. I could have the entire set printed and distributed within half a day.’
‘A good idea, Monsignore.’ Agostini nodded approval. ‘If you will put the matter in hand with the printers first thing in the morning. My office will be responsible for distribution – against signatures always.’
‘It will be done, Eminence.’ Wildly elated by the commendation – rare and precious in Curial circles – O’Rahilly decided to push his luck a little further. ‘I talked with His Holiness earlier this evening and he asked me to make special enquiries into the case of one Lorenzo de Rosa, formerly a priest of this diocese whose wife – that is to say, under the civil code – died in the Salviati clinic yesterday. Apparently de Rosa had made repeated but unsuccessful bids to be laicised canonically and have his marriage validated, but …’
‘Monsignore!’ The Secretary of State was cool. ‘It would seem this matter is neither relevant to our present concerns nor opportune in the context …’
‘Oh, but it is, Eminence!’
O’Rahilly with the bit between his teeth would have put a Derby runner to shame. In the midst of a frozen silence, he described to the assembly his personal encounter with de Rosa and his later discussion with Monsignor Matt Neylan as to whether or not the threat should be taken seriously.
‘… Matt Neylan here was of the opinion, which I shared, that the poor fellow was simply overwhelmed with grief and that to expose him to interrogation and harassment by security forces would be a great and unnecessary cruelty. However, after what we’ve just heard, I have to ask myself – and to ask Your Eminences – whether certain precautions, at least, should not be taken.’
‘They most certainly should!’ The Substitute Secretary was in no doubt about it. His name was Mikhaelovic and he was a Jugoslav already preconditioned to security procedures. ‘The safety of the Holy Father is of paramount concern.’
‘That is, at best, a dubious proposition.’ Matt Neylan was suddenly a hostile presence in the small assembly. ‘With great respect, I submit that to badger and bedevil this grieving man with police inquiries would be an unconscionable cruelty. The Holy Father himself is concerned that, even before his bereavement, de Rosa may have received less than Christian justice and charity. Besides, what Monsignor O’Rahilly has omitted to mention is that I have already instituted a private inquiry into de Rosa’s circumstances.’
‘And by so doing have exceeded your authority.’ Cardinal Mikhaelovic did not take kindly to correction. ‘The very least precaution we can take is to denounce this man to the security people. They are the experts. We are not.’
‘My point precisely, Eminence.’ Neylan was studiously formal. ‘The anti-terrorist troops are not bound by the normal rules of police procedure. Accidents happen during their interrogations. People have their limbs broken. They fall out of windows. I would remind you also that there are two young children involved.’
‘Illegitimate offspring of a renegade priest!’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake! What kind of a priest are you?’
The blasphemy shocked them all. Agostini’s rebuke was icy.
‘You forget yourself, Monsignore. You have made your case. We shall give it careful consideration. I shall see you in my office at ten tomorrow morning. You are excused.’
‘But Your Eminence is not excused – none of you is excused – the duty of common compassion! I bid Your Excellencies good night!’
He bowed himself out of the meeting and hurried back to his small apartment in the Palace of the Mint. He was blazing with anger: at Mal O’Rahilly who couldn’t keep his big Irish gob shut, but had to make a great fellow of himself with a bunch of elderly eminences and excellencies; at the eminences and excellencies themselves, because they symbolised everything that, year by year, had alienated him from the Church and made a mockery of the charity which was radical to its existence.
They were mandarins, all of them, old-fashioned imperial Kuan, who wore bright clothes and buttoned headgear, and had their own esoteric language and disdained all argument with the common herd. They were not pastors, ardent in the care of souls. They were not apostles, zealous for the spread of the godspell. They were officials, administrators, committee men, as privileged and protected as any of their counterparts in Whitehall, in Moscow, or the Quai d’Orsay.
To them a man like Lorenzo de Rosa was a non-person, excommunicated, committed with a shrug to the Divine Mercy, but excluded for ever from any compassionate intervention by the human Assembly – unless it were earned by penitential humiliation and a winter vigil at Canossa. He knew exactly what would happen to de Rosa. They would delate him to the Security Services. A quartet of heavies would pick him up at his apartment, take him down town, hand the children to a police matron for custody, then bounce him off the walls for two or three hours. After that they would make him sign a deposition he would be too groggy to read. It would all be quite impersonal. They wouldn’t mean any real harm. It was standard procedure, to get the facts quickly before a bomb went off, and to discourage any counteraction from an innocent suspect – but then, under the old inquisitorial system, no one was innocent until proven so in court.
And what of himself, Matt Neylan? The quiet exit he had planned for himself was impossible now. The unsayable had been said. There was no way to recall the words – and all because Mal O’Rahilly couldn’t hold his liquor and had to go trailing his coat-tails at a crisis conference of the biggest big shots in the Holy Roman Church! But wasn’t that the way of it, the whole conditioning process that produced a perfect Roman clerical clone? The trigger-words in the formula had never changed since Trent – hierarchy and obedience. The effect they produced on simple priest or lordly bishop was always the same. They stood with eyes downcast, tugging their forelocks, as if listening to thunders from the Mountain of Revelation.
Well, tonight was one time too many for Matt Neylan. Tomorrow he would pack and go, without regret, without a by-your-leave. The day after, they would name him a renegade like de Rosa and strike his name out of the book of the Elect and commit him with something just short of contempt to the God who made him.
He reached for the Rome telephone directory and ran his finger down the list of folk called de Rosa. There were six entries with the initial L. He began dialling them in sequence, trusting that a mention of the Salviati c
linic would bring forth an identifying response. He hoped the man would be sane enough to accept a warning from a one-time colleague. It would be nice to set Brother Fox well on his way to a safe earth, before the hounds began baying in his tracks.
Over the compound of Salviati’s house, the new summer moon rode high in a sea of stars. In the shadows of the garden a nightingale began to sing. The light and the music made an antique magic in the vaulted chamber where Salviati slept and Tove Lundberg, propped on her elbow, hovered over him like a protecting goddess.
Their loving had followed their familiar pattern: a long, tender prelude, a sudden transition to play, a swift leap to the high plateau of passion, a series of fierce orgasms, a languid recall of fading pleasures, then Sergio’s sudden lapse into sleep, his classic features youthful and unlined against the pillow, the muscles of his shoulders and breast frozen into marble in the moonglow. Tove Lundberg always lay wakeful afterwards, wondering that so wild a storm could be followed by so magical a calm.
Of herself she had no clear image; but the role she was expected to play on these crisis nights was one she knew by heart. She was the servant of his body, the perfect hetaera, pouring herself out on him, asking nothing but to serve him. The why of it for him was buried deep in his unconscious and she had no desire to lug it out into the light. Sergio Salviati was the perennial alien. He had become a prince by conquest. He needed the spoils to attest his victories – the gold, the jewels, the slave girls, and the respect of the mighty in the land.
The why for her was different, and she could confront it without shame. As mother, she had delivered defective offspring; she had no wish to repeat the experience. As lover, she delivered perfect pleasure and while time might diminish her charm or her capacities as a bed-mate, it could only increase her stature and influence as a professional comrade. Best of all was Sergio’s own acknowledgement: ‘You are the one wholly calm place in my life. You are like a deep pool in the middle of a forest and every time I come to you I am refreshed and renewed. But you never ask me for anything. Why?’