by Morris West
The household gossip was meagre enough. His Holiness rose late and bedded early. He said his Mass in the evening instead of the morning. He was on a strict diet and was losing weight rapidly. Every day a therapist came to supervise him in an hour of exercise. For the rest – he received visitors from ten till eleven in the morning, walked, read, rested and was in bed by nine every night. One change, however, was noted by everyone. He was less tetchy, less demanding and much more gentle in manner. How long it would last, of course, was anyone’s guess. After all, an intervention like that reduces a man’s vitality.
The garrulities of Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly were much more revealing. Life at Castel Gandolfo was a bore at the best of times. There was a castle, the village and the black lake below; damn small diversion for a gregarious Celt who loved convivial company. ‘… but with the old man in this mood it’s Tombstone Terrace, believe me! He won’t read letters. I have to send holding notes. He’s become quite obsessive about what he eats and how much exercise he does, and I wish I could drop the weight off the way he’s doing. But he’s very quiet. When his visitors come, he doesn’t talk more than courtesies: ‘Thank you and how’s your father’, that sort of thing. He’s not fey, just distant and abstracted. He reminds me sometimes of Humpty Dumpty, trying to put the pieces of himself together again. Except he isn’t fat any more – and the Pontifical tailors are working overtime to refit him before he goes back to the Vatican … I notice he reads a lot more than he used to, prays a lot more too – which doesn’t exactly leap to the eye, but you become aware of it, because he’s in another world, if you take my meaning. It’s as if he’d put himself in retreat, a self-imposed solitude …
‘What is he reading? Well now, that’s interesting. He’s reading the very fellows that have been in trouble with Doctrine of the Faith – the Dutch, the Swiss, the Americans. In a moment of boldness – or excessive boredom – I remarked on it. He gave me the oddest look. He said, “Malachy, when I was young, I used to watch the test pilots streaking along the Po valley and out to sea. I used to think how wonderful it would be to risk oneself like that to discover something new about a machine or about myself. As my life settled into its pattern, I forgot the wonder. Now that my life has become less important, I am reliving it again … Time was when we burnt men like Giordano Bruno who speculated about plural worlds and the possibility of men travelling between them. Of course, we don’t burn our speculative thinkers any more. Instead, if they’re clerics we silence them, remove them from their teaching posts, prohibit them from public utterance on contentious matters. All this we do in the name of holy obedience. How do you feel about that, Malachy?”
‘That stumped me for a minute. I didn’t want to put my foot in a cowpat, so I said something like: “Well, Holiness, I suppose there’s some kind of principle of progressive enlightenment.” To which he said: “Malachy, you’re not half the fool you try to be. Don’t play games with me. I haven’t the time!” Needless to say, I ducked for cover; but he didn’t make a big issue of it. It’s hard to know what he’s really thinking. I’d love to get a look at his diary. He writes in it every evening before he goes to bed. The rest of the time it’s locked in his private safe …’
‘As a young bishop, I was asked to bless a new ship, about to be launched from the slips at La Spezia. Everyone was there: the builders, the owners, the shipwrights and their families. The tension was quite extraordinary. I asked one of the executives of the cantiere to explain it to me. He said: ‘Once they knock the chocks away and she slides down the slipway, all our lives are riding with her. If our calculations are wrong and she broaches, we’re as good as dead … so give us your best blessing, please Excellenza …” I am like that now. All my temporary supports have been taken away – Drexel, Salviati, Tove Lundberg, the staff at the clinic. I am launched. I am afloat. But I am a hulk without fittings, without crew, dead in the water …
‘The sense of isolation weighs on me like a leaden cope. Castel Gandolfo, Vatican City – these are my empire and my prison house. Outside, I move only by the permission of others. But my confinement is not by frontiers, it is by the identity to which I was elected Bishop of Rome, Successor to the Prince of the Apostles, Vicar of Christ … thus and thus and thus, every title a new barricade between me and the commonality of humankind. There is another confinement too – the Lazarus syndrome. I am not, nor can I ever be again, the same as other men. I have never understood until now – how could I? – the trauma of a young woman who can no longer breed because of a surgical intervention … the anger and despair of the soldier maimed in a minefield. They have become as I have: irretrievably other …
‘I can share these thoughts only with those who have shared the experiences; but they are not accessible to me … I do not see myself making the rounds of hospital wards and prison cells, patting hands and mumbling platitudes. Neither can I see myself closeted with Clemens as I have been in the past, sniffing out heresies, putting this academic and that under silence and obedience to test their faith. That is a torture more acute than the rack and the thumbscrew. I will have no more of it …
‘Now comes the rub. Clemens is where he is because I put him there. I put him there because of what he is, because of what I was. What do I say to him now? Everything is changed because I have seen a great light? He will face me down – because he does not lack courage. He will say: “This is the oldest heresy of all. You have no right to impose your private gnosis upon the People of God.” I will be vulnerable to that, because even now I cannot explain the change in me …
‘And that, dear Lord, is the strangest irony of all. I procured the deposition of Jean Marie Barette because he claimed a private revelation of the last things. I cannot move forward or backward until I am convinced that I am not myself entrapped in the ancient pride of private knowing. Against this kind of evil there is no remedy but prayer and fasting. I am fasting! God knows, I am fasting! Why does the prayer refuse to frame itself on my lips? Please God, put me not to the trial of darkness. I do not think I shall be able to bear it!
‘I woke this morning with this same fear hanging over me. There is no one here to whom I can communicate it, as I did to Tove Lundberg, so I must grapple with it alone. I went back to that marvellous first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, where he speaks first of offices and functions in the community: “God has given us different positions in the Church; apostles first, then prophets, thirdly teachers; then come miraculous powers, gifts of healing, works of mercy, the management of affairs …” Then he speaks of the better way which transcends all others: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am like sounding brass and tinkling cymbal … “
‘This is what I must remember every day when, after the summer vacation, I begin my personal dialogues with the Church. I must not be the man who tears it apart with contention. I must heal the grievous wounds within it.’
For Nicol Peters, the tag-end of summer had settled into its somnolent routine. The Miriam Latif story was dead. The Sword of Islam was no longer a headline item. The Pope was safely home. Mr Omar Asnan was living the agreeable life of a prosperous merchant. The Israeli Ambassador was on vacation, the Mossad man, Aharon ben Shaul, had faded back into his grey netherworld and was no longer available. This was the way life rolled in the news game. You learned to roll with the rhythm of events and non-events. You kept your story-files up to date and hoped to be ready when the next rocket went up.
Katrina was busy at the boutique. The summer visitors were out in force and the cash register was playing merry little tunes every day. The Romans had a proverb: only cani and Americani – dogs and Americans – could tolerate summer in the city. There was, however, an art to it. You worked in the morning. At midday you swam and lunched at the swimming club, where you also entertained your contacts. You worked again from five until eight, then rounded off the evening with friends at a taverna where you were well enough known to get a reasonably honest bill.
&n
bsp; Their friendship with Sergio Salviati and Tove Lundberg was maturing slowly. Distance was a problem. It was nearly an hour’s drive from Castelli to the city, longer in the peak hour traffic. The shadow of the terrorist threat still hung over them. They travelled to and from the clinic at staggered hours in a Mercedes driven by a former member of the highway police trained in evasive driving.
On Saturdays, Tove worked with the other parents at the colonia. Sundays she kept for Salviati, who was busier than ever at the clinic and more and more dependent on the brief tranquil time they spent together. It was Katrina who made the astute comment: ‘I wonder how long they can keep it up, both so dedicated and controlled. It’s like watching a trapeze act at the circus …You know if one mistimes, they both go. Somehow I think she’s in better shape than he is, even though she’s the one under threat.’
Matt Neylan had become something of a fixture in their lives. His affair with the lady of the mysteries had run its cheerful little course and ended with a touching farewell at the airport, after which Neylan drove back to Rome to lunch with his New York editor and drive her up to Porto Ercole for a weekend editorial conference.
It was all good clean fun and the book – a popular study of Vatican diplomacy and the personalities involved in it – was beginning to take hold of him. However, he was becoming more and more aware that not all the attention he was paid was due to his wit or good looks.
There was a steady trickle of invitations through his mailbox; to embassy affairs, to seminars, to art shows sponsored by this or that cultural committee, screening of obscure films, appeals for victims of sundry wars and permanent famines. It was a useful antidote to boredom, provided you were not infected – as Matt Neylan knew himself to be – with the massive cynicism of the ex-believer. Once you had renounced the Almighty and all his prophets, it was hard to pin your faith to the petty propagandists of the cocktail circuit, or the recruiters of the flyblown intelligence networks who infested the city.
So, while he took full advantage of the free food and liquor and company, Matt Neylan devoted half his days to the demanding business of authorship and the other half to the passionate pursuit of women. Since he was proficient in five languages and haltingly adequate in three others, he was offered a wide range of choices. The odd thing was that he felt obliged, sooner or later, to run them past Katrina Peters for her nod of approval. Katrina found it beguiling. Nicol was not amused.
‘Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. Matt’s naive but he’s not stupid. You’re his mother hen. He’s relying on you for his sentimental education.’
‘I find that rather flattering, Nico darling.’
‘It’s a warning, lover. Matt’s an agreeable friend but, like a lot of men with his history, he’s a user. All these years he’s lived a protected and very privileged bachelor life. He’s never had to worry where his next meal was coming from; his career was laid out by the Church, he didn’t have to battle for it, people paid him the respect they always give to the clergy and he didn’t have to dirty his hands to get it. Now that he’s out – and moderately well off by all accounts – he’s doing exactly the same thing: freeloading, and freeloading emotionally, too … I get a little bored watching the game and I get irritated when I see you involved in it. There now! I’ve said my piece!’
‘And I’ve listened very politely; so now let me say mine. Everything you’ve said is true – not only about Matt, but half the clerics we meet here. They’re like Oxford dons, living in their own very comfortable bunkers while the world goes to hell in a basket. But there’s something about Matt that you’re missing. He’s a man with a great black hole in the middle of himself. He doesn’t have faith any more and nobody’s ever taught him about love. He’s grabbing for sex as if it were being taken off the market; then when the girl goes home or he sends her – whichever is the scenario of the day – he’s back in the black hole. So don’t be too rough on him. Times are, my love, when I could strangle you with my bare hands; but I’d hate to wake up and find you weren’t there!’
For Matt Neylan, there were other and more subtle problems than those diagnosed by his friends. The work he had taken on, for which his publishers had paid him a very substantial advance, was easy to outline; but to finish it required a great deal of documented research for which the most necessary source was the Vatican Archive itself where, classified in various degrees of secrecy, a thousand years of records were preserved. As an official insider he had access by right; as an outsider, a recent renegade from the ranks, he could hardly claim even the privileges granted to visiting scholars and researchers.
So, well trained in the shifts and stratagems of diplomacy, he set about building a new set of alliances and communications, with junior clerics in the Secretariat of State, with lay members of the Archive staff, with foreign academics already accredited as researchers in the Archive and in the Vatican Library itself.
In this enterprise he found help from an unexpected quarter. After several feints, the Russian Ambassador made what seemed like a straightforward proposition.
‘You are a citizen of a neutral country. You have long experience in a specialised field of religious and political diplomacy. You have no present affiliations. You are continuing your studies in the same field. We should like to retain you, quite openly, on a written contract, as adviser to our Embassy here. The pay would be generous … What do you say, Mr Neylan?’
‘I’m flattered, of course. However, I need to think about it very carefully.’
‘Take all the time you need. Talk to whomever you choose. As I said, this is a matter of considerable importance in the future development of our European policy.’
In the end, Matt Neylan decided to take the Ambassador at his word. He sought and obtained a meeting with the Secretary of State, who received him in the bleak conference room reserved for casual visitors. Neylan came straight to the point.
‘I am offering you a courtesy, Eminence. I need a favour in return.’
‘So far,’ – Agostini made a little spire of his fingertips and smiled at him over the top of it – ‘so far you are admirably clear. What are you offering me?’
‘A piece of information. The Russians have invited me to advise them on what they call religious and political diplomacy. They offer good money and an open contract – presumably to save me the taint of espionage.’
‘Will you accept the offer?’
‘I’ll admit it has a certain fascination – but no. I’m turning it down. However, I think it determines for your department where certain emphases are being laid in Soviet policy.’
‘You could be right. It could also be that you are doing exactly what they expected. You are the bearer of a signal from them to us. Either way, I am in your debt. How can I repay you?’
‘You know the work on which I’ve embarked?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need access to the Archive – the same access which would normally be granted to any scholar or researcher.’
Agostini was puzzled.
‘Has it ever been denied you?’
‘No; but I thought it more tactful not to apply so soon after my exit.’
‘I'll send a note to the prefect tomorrow morning. You can begin work whenever you choose.’ ‘Thank you, Eminence.’
‘Thank you. How are things with you? I hear on various authorities that you are much in demand socially.’
‘I’m enjoying myself,’ said Matt Neylan. ‘And Your Eminence? It must be a relief to have His Holiness safe behind the ramparts.’
‘It is; though I do not believe the threat to him is past. That is something you could do for me. If you hear any news, any rumour of terrorist activity that makes sense to you, I should be grateful if you would contact me. Also His Holiness has personal concerns about Tove Lundberg and her child … This is a small town. News and rumour alike travel fast. Thank you for coming, Matt.’
‘Next time, Eminence,’ said Neylan with a grin, ‘could you invite me into your office?
I’m not a travelling salesman.’
‘My apologies.’ Agostini was urbane as ever. ‘But you must admit it’s a little hard to define what you are.’
In his search for a sexual identity, Matt Neylan was making discoveries that to men half his age were already clichés. The first was that most of the women he met at official functions were married, divorced, dedicated to dreams of permanent union, or otherwise disqualified from listing in a bachelor’s telephone directory. He had also discovered that it was sometimes less expensive and less exhausting to buy the obligatory two drinks at the Alhambra Club and watch the floor show than to waste an evening and a dinner at Piccolo Roma with a bore, a bluestocking or a featherhead.
The Alhambra Club had another advantage, too: Marta the cigarette girl, who was always ready for a laugh and a few moments of gossip when business was slow. She was small, dark, and lively and, she said, a Hungarian. When he asked her for a date, she demurred. She worked the club every night. She couldn’t leave until three in the morning. However, if he felt like taking her out to lunch one day …
Which he did, and was happy with the experience, and they both decided to repeat it, same day, same time, same place, next week.
And that was how Matt Neylan, one time Secretary of Nunziatures in the Vatican service, author to be, heir to a prosperous little holding in the Ould Sod, came to bed once a week with Marta Kuhn, Mossad agent assigned to surveillance duty in the Alhambra Club, the contact point for members of the Sword of Islam.
At ten o’clock on a warm summer morning, Leo the Pontiff was taking coffee on the terrace and wrestling with the problem of Cardinal Clemens, a man whom he himself had appointed, who had fulfilled punctually the brief he had been given, but who now was an obstacle to his master’s plans.
A flight of birds passed overhead and he looked up to see a man scrambling precariously around the dome which houses the telescope of the Vatican observatory. He recognised him as Father John Gates, the director of the observatory and superior of the small community of Jesuits who ran it. He signalled to Gates to come down and join him for coffee.