by Morris West
Normally there were three people on duty in the laboratory. This time there were only two. Salviati wanted to know why. He was told that Miriam Latif had asked for the afternoon off to attend to some personal business. She was expected back on duty the next day. The arrangement had been cleared with the Chief of Staff’s office. People within departments covered for each other as a matter of course.
Back in his own office, Salviati summoned the Mossad man and quizzed him about the girl’s absence. The Mossad man shook his head sadly.
‘For an intelligent fellow, Professor, you’re a very slow learner. Your own staff have told you all you need to know. Best of all, they have told you the truth. The girl was called away on personal business. She made the excuse in person. Leave it at that!’
‘And the threat to our patient?’
‘Her absence has removed it. Her presence would restore it. We wait and watch, as always. For tonight at least you can sleep soundly.’
‘And tomorrow?’
‘Forget tomorrow!’ The Mossad man was impatient and abrupt. ‘You, Professor, must make a decision today – now, this moment!’
‘About what?’
‘The role you want to play: the reputable healer going about his reputable business in a wicked world, or the meddler who can’t keep his nose out of other people’s business. We can accommodate you, either way. But if you’re in, you’re in up to the neck and you play by our rules. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Either way,’ said Salviati, ‘it seems I’m being manipulated.’
‘Of course you are!’ The Mossad man gave him a vinegary smile. ‘But there’s one big distinction: as Professor Salviati you are manipulated in innocence and ignorance. The other way, you do as you’re told, eyes open, mouth shut. If we want you to lie, you lie. If we want you to kill, you kill – the Hippocratic oath notwithstanding. Can you wear that, my friend?’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘End of argument,’ said the Mossad man. ‘You’ll enjoy your dinner tonight and sleep a lot more soundly.’
But you don’t sleep,’ Tove Lundberg chided him tenderly. ‘You don’t even enjoy making love; because you’re not innocent, you’re not ignorant, and the guilt gnaws at you all the time.’
They were sitting over cocktails on the terrace of Salviati’s house, looking out at a sky full of stars, misted and blurred by the emanations of Rome: river fog, traffic fumes, dust and the exhalations of a city slowly choking itself to death. He had not wanted to share the story with her, because the mere knowledge of it put her at a certain risk. However, concealment put him at greater hazard, because it clouded his judgement, robbed him of that detachment upon which his patients’ lives depended. Tove Lundberg summed up her argument.
‘The problem is, my love, you know too little and want too much.’
‘I know Miriam Latif is going to be killed – if she’s not dead already.’
‘You don’t know it. You’re surmising. You can’t possibly be sure she’s even missing until tomorrow.’
‘Then what do I do?’
‘What would you do if it were another person altogether?’
‘I would I hear it much later than everyone else. The Chief of Staff’s office would already have inquired into her absence. If she didn’t show up in a reasonable time, they’d ask me to authorise a replacement. I would probably advise them to contact the police and immigration officials, because the clinic has sponsored the girl’s entry and guaranteed her employment. After that, it’s out of our hands.’
‘Which is no more or no less than your Mossad man told you at the beginning.’
‘But don’t you see … ?’
‘No! I don’t. I can’t see one step beyond the routine you have just outlined. Whom else are you going to tell? The Pope? He knows about the threat to his life. He knows about the security measures. He consents, tacitly at least, to anything that may happen as a result of those measures. If the girl is a terrorist, she herself has already accepted all the risks of the job for which she has been trained.’
‘But that’s just the point.’ Salviati was suddenly angry. ‘All the evidence against her is circumstantial. Some of it is negative, in the sense that no other more likely candidate has shown up on the Mossad lists. So she’s being condemned and executed without a trial.’
‘Maybe!’
‘All right. Maybe!’
‘Again, what can you do about it, when the Italian Government abdicates its legal authority in favour of direct action by the Israelis? That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?’
‘And the Vatican sits pat on the protocol of the Concordat. The Pope’s bodyguards may protect him by force of arms if necessary; but the Vatican may not intervene in the administration of justice in the Republic.’
‘So why go on beating your head against your own Wailing Wall?’
‘Because I’m not sure any more who I am or where my loyalties lie. The Pope’s my patient. Italy is my country. The Israelis are my people.’
‘Listen, my love!’ Tove Lundberg reached across the table and imprisoned his hands in her own. ‘I will not take this kind of talk from you. Remember what you told me when I first came to work for you. “Cardiac surgery is a risk business. It depends on free choice, an acceptance of known odds, clearly stated between surgeon and patient. There can be no trading back if an unknown factor tips the odds the wrong way!” So, it seems to me you’re in the same position in the case of Miriam Latif. The odds are she’s a trained assassin, nominated to kill the Pope. A choice has been made: to stop her without attracting reprisals. In this case, however, the choice was made by others. Your identity is not challenged; rather, it is confirmed. You are a healer. You have no place on the killing ground. Stay away from it!’
Sergio Salviati disengaged himself from her handclasp and thrust himself up from the table. His tone was rasping and angry.
‘So! It’s happened at last! It always does in Rome! My loyal counsellor has become a Jesuit. She should do very well with His Holiness.’
Tove Lundberg sat a long while in silence, then, with an odd, distant formality, she answered him.
‘A long time ago, my dear, you and I made a bargain. We could not share our histories or our traditions. We would not try. We would love each other as much as we could, for as long as we could, and when the loving was over we would stay friends always. You know I have neither taste nor talent for cruelty games. I know you play them sometimes, when you are frustrated and afraid, but I have always believed you had too much respect to force me into them … So, I’m going home now. When we meet in the morning I hope we can forget this ugly moment.’
The next instant she was gone, a blurred figure hurrying through the twilight towards her car. Sergio Salviati raised neither hand nor voice to stay her. He stood like a stone man, clamped to the crumbling balustrade, lonelier and more desolate than he had ever felt in his life. The valiant of Zion had rejected him with contempt. A woman of the goyim had probed with an unerring finger towards the hollow place in his heart. Each had acknowledged him as a healer. Both had challenged him to the impossible, to mend his damaged self.
That night, the Pontiff sat late with Anton Drexel. After the emotional storms of the day he felt a need for the calm, quiet discourse which Drexel dispensed. His answer to the objections raised against a papal sojourn at the colonia was typical of the man.
‘If it raises problems, then forget the idea. It was intended as a therapy, not as a stress factor. Besides, Your Holiness needs allies and not adversaries. When all the brouhaha has died down and the risks of attack on your person have diminished, as they always do, then you can visit the children. You can invite them to visit you …’
‘And what of your own plans for me, Anton? My education to new views and policies?’
Drexel laughed, a man at ease with himself and his master.
‘My plans depend on the working of the Spirit, Holiness. Alone, I could not bend you a millimetre. Besides, your Secreta
ry of State is right – as he is most of the time. I am too old and still too much the Ausländer, to be a true power-broker among the Curia. That is how Your Holiness won the battle over Jean Marie Barette. You assembled the Latins against the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons. I would never attempt the same strategy twice.’
Now it was the Pontiff’s turn to laugh – a painful business with little amusement at the end of it.
‘So what is your strategy, Anton? And what do you hope to win from me or through me?’
‘What I believe you hope for yourself – a revival in the Assembly of the Faithful, a change in the attitudes which dictate the laws which are the greatest obstacle to charity.’
‘Easy to say, my friend. A lifetime’s work to accomplish – and I have learned how short and fragile life can be.’
‘If you are thinking of serial solutions – picking off problems one by one like ducks in a shooting gallery – then of course you are right. Each issue sets off a new debate, new quarrels and casuistries. Finally, weariness sets in and the kind of creeping despair that has afflicted us since the Second Vatican Council. The fire of hope that John XXIII kindled has died to grey ashes. The conservatives – yourself, Holiness, not least among them – had a whole series of pyrrhic victories and the faithful were the losers every time.’
‘Now tell me your remedy, Anton.’
‘One word, Holiness – decentralise.’
‘I hear you. I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘Then I’ll try to make it plainer. What we need is not reform, but liberation, an act of manumission from the shackles which have bound us since Trent. Give back to the local churches the autonomy which is theirs by apostolic right. Begin to dismantle this creaking edifice of the Curia, with its tyrannies and secrecies and sinecures for mediocre or ambitious prelates. Open the way to free consultation with your brother bishops … Affirm in the clearest terms the principle of collegiality and your determination to make it work … One document would start it – a single encyclical written by yourself, not constructed by a committee of theologians and diplomats and then emasculated by the Latinists and bled white of meaning by conservative commentary …’
‘You’re asking me to write a blueprint for revolution.’
‘As I remember, Holiness, the Sermon on the mount was a revolutionary manifesto.’
‘Revolutions should be made by young men.’
‘The old ones write the documents, the young translate them into action. But first they have to break out of the prison in which they are kept now. Give them liberty to think and speak. Give them your confidence and a charge to use the liberty. Perhaps then we will not have so many casualties, like de Rosa and Matthew Neylan.’
‘You’re a stubborn man, Anton.’
‘I’m older than you are, Holiness. I have even less time.’
‘I promise you I’ll think about what you’ve said.’
‘Think about this too, Holiness. As we stand now in the Church, the centuries-old fight for papal supremacy is won – and the penalties of that victory are costing us dearly. All power is vested in one man, yourself; but you can only exercise it through the complicated oligarchy of the Curia. At this moment, you are almost impotent. You will remain so for months yet. Meantime, the men whom you appointed to positions of power are ready to range themselves in opposition to any new policies. That’s a fact. Agostini has already given you the same warning. Is that a healthy state of affairs? Is that the true image of the Church of which Christ is the head and all we are members?’
‘No, it is not.’ Leo the Pontiff was weary now. ‘But there is not a single thing either of us can do about it at the moment except think and pray. Go home, Anton! Go home to your family and your vineyards. You should be picking and crushing very soon, yes?’
‘Very soon. Two weeks, my man tells me.’
‘Perhaps I could come for that. I haven’t been to a vendemmia since I was a child.’
‘You’ll be very welcome.’ Drexel bent to kiss the Ring of the Fisherman. ‘And a papal blessing might do wonders for the wine of Fontamore.’
Long after Drexel had gone, long after the night nurse had settled him for sleep, Leo XIV, successor of the Prince of the Apostles, lay awake listening to the night noises, trying to decipher his destiny in the shadows cast by the night light.
The argument which Drexel had put to him had a certain grand simplicity on the one hand and, on the other, a very subtle distinction between authority and power.
The concept of papal power had been given its most rigid and extreme definition by Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century and Pius V in the sixteenth. Boniface had declared tout court that ‘because of the need for salvation, every human creature is subject to the Roman Pontiff’.
Pius V had elaborated the proposition with breathtaking presumption. Leo XIV, his modern successor, inheritor of his rigid will and irascible temper, could recite the words by rote: ‘He who reigns in heaven, to whom is given all power in heaven and on earth, gave the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, out of which there is no salvation, to be governed, in the fullness of authority, to one man only, that is to say, to Peter, the Prince of the Apostles and to his successor, the Roman Pontiff. This one ruler He established as prince over all nations and kingdoms, to root up, destroy, dissipate, scatter, plant and build …’
This was the ultimate and most flagrant claim of an imperial papacy, discredited long since by history and by common sense; but the echoes of it still lingered in the Vatican corridors. Power was still the ultimate human prize and here resided the power to move nearly a billion people, by the ultimate sanction – timor mortis, the fear of death and its mysterious aftermath.
Drexel’s proposal was therefore an abdication of positions held for centuries, surrendered piecemeal and then only under extreme duress. It involved not an imperial concept, but a much more primitive and radical one, that the Church was one because it possessed one faith, one baptism and one Lord, Jesus Christ, in whom all were united as branches to a living vine. It involved not power, but authority – authority founded upon free consent, free conscience, an act of faith freely made. Those who were vested with authority must use it with respect and for service. They must not pervert authority to an instrument of power. To use it rightly, they must not only delegate it, but acknowledge freely the source from which it was delegated to them and the conditions of its use. It was one of the ironies of a celibate hierarchy that when you deprived a man of one satisfaction you sharpened his appetite for others, and power was a very spicy taste in the mouth.
Even if he agreed with Drexel’s plan – and he had many reservations about it, as he had about Drexel himself – the obstacles to its accomplishment were enormous. That very afternoon his quarter-hour interview with Clemens of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had gone on for nearly forty minutes. Clemens had insisted very firmly that his Congregation was the watchdog guarding the Deposit of Faith – and if it were forbidden to bark, let alone bite, then why bother to have it? If His Holiness wanted to respond directly to the protestors of Tübingen, that was his right, of course. But a word from the Pontiff was not easily recalled, nor should it be gainsaid, as it might be, by these intransigent clerics.
It was the power game again and even he, the Pontiff, depleted of strength was not exempt from it. What chance had a rural bishop, ten thousand miles from Rome, delated from some act or utterance by the local Apostolic Nuncio? Drexel could fight, because he was Clemens’s peer, older and wiser in the game. Yet this very Olympian detachment made him, in some degree, a suspect advocate.
On the other hand, a man who called himself Vicar of Christ was given, perforce, a place in history. His words and acts were cited as precedents down the centuries and their consequences weighed in the balance on his own judgement day. So, it was hardly surprising that the dreams that haunted his pillow that night were a strange kaleidoscope of scenes from the Michelangelo frescoes and of men, masked and armed, stalking th
eir quarry through a pine wood.
Eight
Outside the enclave of the International Clinic, between the hours of five and ten, a series of trivial events took place.
A woman made a phone call and left a message; another woman boarded an aircraft which two hours later arrived at its scheduled destination. A crate, labelled diplomatic documents, was loaded on to another aircraft for another destination. In a villa on the Appia Antica a man waited for a call which never came. Then he summoned his chauffeur and had himself driven to a nightclub near the Via Veneto. At Fiumicino airport, a clerk in the office of Middle East Airlines made a photocopy of a ticket coupon, put the copy in his pocket and, on his way home, delivered it to the doorman of an apartment block. The whole cycle of small events was reported to the duty officer at the Israeli Embassy in Rome. Before he left for the clinic in the morning, the Mossad man was informed of their meaning.
The telephone call to the clinic was made at seven p.m. from the foyer of the airport. The voice was distorted and almost drowned by background noise, but the switchboard operator at the clinic claimed to have understood the message and to have logged it accurately. Miriam Latif would not be reporting for work in the morning as she had promised. Her mother was very ill. She was taking the night flight to Beirut on Middle Eastern Airlines. If she did not return, her due salary should be paid to her account in the Banco di Roma. She regretted the inconvenience but hoped that Professor Salviati would understand.
At seven-thirty a woman, veiled in traditional style, checked in at the Middle East Airlines counter. She had a ticket to Beirut and a Lebanese passport in the name of Miriam Latif. She carried only hand baggage. Since she was leaving the Republic and not entering it, the frontier police did not require her to unveil. Three hours later the same woman disembarked at Beirut airport, presented a passport in another name and disappeared.