Lazarus
Page 32
‘I believe him. I respect him. Let me say it frankly: I have come to love him as the son I never had. I am touched by the small, protective gestures he lavishes on me: Have I taken my pills? I have been sitting too long. I must stand and walk about for a while … “Let’s take a break and do fifteen minutes’ exercise. I know it’s a bore, but if you don’t do it, you’re committing suicide … “
‘I ask him how he sees his future in the Church. I have the secret thought that one day he will make a splendid bishop. His answer surprises me. ‘I’m not sure yet. There are certain dilemmas that present themselves. There’s a friend of mine, a priest like me, who works in one of the base communities in a very poor part of Brazil. He couldn’t figure out why the womenfolk refused to marry – refused absolutely. They cared for their men, were faithful to them, bore them children, but marriage? No way. Finally, he found out the reason. Once they married they were in bondage. Their men could walk all over them. They could never escape. So long as they didn’t marry, they had at least the freedom to walk away from cruelty and take their children with them. I have film of my friend and his bishop – who is also a cardinal, and he’ll be here for the Consistory administering Communion to these people at a festival Mass. Now I approve that. I’m happy to live and work in a Christian church that lives like that. If it doesn’t, then I have to do some very serious thinking.”
‘This is a revelation which I cannot let pass without comment. I ask him: “How do you justify the administration of the sacraments to people living in formal sin?” His answer comes back instantly: “How do we justify refusing them? And which is closer to the Christian ideal of marriage, a free and caring union in which children are loved and protected, or one that creates a slavery for woman and child?” He laughs then and apologises. “Forgive me, Holiness. You asked. I answered. I don’t suggest you make this an issue at the Consistory. You will have enough on your plate already.”
‘I agree with him; and I note that the Archbishop to whom he refers may well prove a sound ally in the cause I have set myself. As for the quality of the theology involved, I doubt it would recommend itself to Clemens, but at least there must be an open forum within the Church where it can be debated freely and without censure, real or implied.
‘So night falls and I am another day closer to the Feast of All Saints. I have a strange dream. I am sitting in the Hall of Consistories looking down at the assembled cardinals. I am speaking to them, although I do not hear the words I am saying. Then suddenly I notice that they have all turned to stone, like courtiers in an enchanted palace.’
Menache, Avriel, Ambassador of Israel to the Republic of Italy, was having a bad day. It was not as bad as some but, in all conscience, bad enough. In the morning, he was invited to a friendly conversation with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, on matters of mutual interest. It could have been much worse. He could have been summoned. The friendly conversation could have been an urgent conference and the matters of mutual interest could have been questions of singular concern. The Minister was a very urbane man. He liked Avriel. He recognised the usefulness of Israel in Mediterranean affairs. The last thing he needed in the world was a diplomatic incident. So, with infinite tact, he proposed: ‘My dear Menachem, we work very well together. Let us continue to do so. This Mossad fellow – what does he call himself, Aharon ben Shaul? – is very heavy-handed. So far, he has been lucky and we have profited from that. Each time he risks a little more. Enough is enough! I would like to suggest – I, personally, not Foreign Affairs – that you ship him out as soon as possible. My friend Agostini at the Vatican agrees with this advice … Understand, we are not telling you how to run your business. Send us any replacement you like, provided he has more tact than this one, and we’ll accept him without question. What do you say?’
‘I’d say it was a very timely suggestion, which I shall take under immediate advisement and refer to my government for instructions. However, my dear Minister, he’ll be out of here within forty-eight hours!’
‘Please, my dear friend! We do not demand miracles. Seven days would be fine. Even thirty would be acceptable.’
‘Forty-eight hours,’ said Avriel firmly. ‘I always say you should leave the poker table while you’re ahead. And so far we’re both ahead, are we not?’
‘I hope so.’ The Minister sounded dubious. ‘Will you take coffee with me?’
Back at the Israeli Embassy there was a letter waiting for him. The envelope was embossed with the papal coat of arms and the Embassy sticker noted that it had been delivered by Vatican courier. The letter was handwritten in Italian.
Excellency,
I owe you a debt for your personal care for my welfare during my recent illness.
November 1st is the feast day which we call All Saints. It celebrates in a special way the community of all Christian believers with men and women of good will everywhere.
To mark this festival, I shall be celebrating a Mass in St Peter’s Basilica at 1100 hours with the College of Cardinals and members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited tb the Holy See. Unfortunately, the State of Israel is not yet accredited. However, if circumstances permit, I should like you to come as my personal guest and to take your place among the members of my pontifical household. If this invitation causes you any embarrassment, please feel free to decline it. My hope is that it may prove a first step towards a closer and more formal relationship between the State of Israel and the Holy See. Centuries of unhappy history still divide us. Today’s politics ensnare us at every step. But any alliance has to begin with a handclasp.
Mindful always of protocol, my Secretary of State regrets that it is not he who is issuing the invitation, to which, however, he adds his warm personal greetings …
Leo
Menachem Avriel could hardly believe his eyes. Decades of drilling and boring and hammering had made no dent in the wall of resistance to Vatican recognition of the State of Israel. Now, for the first time, there was hope that it might be breached. Then, always the diplomat, he asked himself whether there might be any connection between the ‘invito’ to the Foreign Office and that of the Pontiff. Even the simplest Roman document was a palimpsest, with texts and subtexts and indecipherable fragments laid one upon the other.
When he called Sergio Salviati to share the news, he found that a new refinement had been added to the compliment. Salviati had his own invitation to the ceremony, which he read to Avriel:
I owe you, my dear Professor, a debt that I can never repay. I write to invite you to join me in a Christian celebration, the Feast of All Saints, which celebrates not only the holy ones in our calendar, but the essential community of men and women of good will everywhere.
If the notion embarrasses you, I shall understand perfectly. If you decide to come, you will be seated, along with Ambassador Avriel, among the members of my own household. It would give me great joy to think that, in spite of the horrors of history, you and I could join in common prayer to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Always, I wish peace upon your house …
Salviati sounded irritable and depressed. He demanded to know: ‘Do we go or don’t we?’
‘I go,’ said Menachem Avriel cheerfully. ‘Don’t you understand what this means?’
‘To you, maybe. To Israel, a very big maybe. But why should I roll over because the Pope wants to scratch my belly?’
‘I don’t know, Sergio!’ The Ambassador seemed suddenly bored with the conversation. ‘I’ve got the smell of a big diplomatic coup! All you seem to have is a royal pain in the arse!’
To Anton Drexel, drowsing in the thin autumn sun, a package was delivered: a canvas rolled inside a cardboard tube and, inside the canvas, a letter from Tove Lundberg. The canvas claimed his attention first. It was an interior, executed in a dashing bravura style, of Tove and Matt Neylan drowsing at the fireside, with a wolfhound between them and above, reflected in the mantel mirror, Britte herself, perched on her stool, painting with the brush clenched between her teeth.
‘ … Britte wanted very much that you should have this piece. She says: “Nonno Drexel used to say that as an artist grows up, the pictures grow too. This is a happy picture and I want him to be happy with us all!” That’s a long speech for her, as you know; but she still needs to share herself with her Nonno.
‘Matt has become very important in her life, though in a different fashion. He is – I am searching for the word – very comradely. He challenges her, makes her do always a little more than she is willing to attempt by herself. Before she began this picture, for instance, he sat with her for hours, turning over art books, discussing styles and periods of painting. She has always been frustrated because her disabilities prevent her from working in the finished style of the classic masters. Not that she wants to paint like that, it is a question of being deprived of the capacity. Matt understands this and insists on working through the struggle with her. What surprises me with him is that he distinguishes so clearly the sexual element in her relationship with him, and handles it with enormous care.
‘Which brings me, dear Nonno, to Matt and me. I won’t ask you to approve, though I know you will understand – and Britte’s picture says it – we are lovers and we are good for each other. We are good, too, for Britte. What more can I say? What more, indeed, can I predict? We are still under threat. The Israelis assure us the threat is real. Matt and Murtagh are always armed and there are guns in the house. I have learned to shoot and I can hit a tin can at fifteen paces with a pistol. You see, I talk as if it were a triumph. What a mad world it is … Still, this kind of nonsense cannot last for ever. Britte and I look forward to the time when we can visit our Nonno again, and drink the wine of Fontamore.
‘Oh, I almost forgot. We had a visit last week from Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly, the one who used to be the Pope’s secretary. Matt and he had quarrelled but they made friends again. He was just out of what he called the “funny farm’’, where he was taking a cure for alcohol addiction. He looked trim and fit and very confident, though Matt says the priesthood is a dangerous road for a man like him who needs a lot of real family support. We took him touring and fishing. He asked to be remembered gently to you.
‘But remembering gently is not enough for Britte or for me. She loves her Nonno very much. I love him too, because he came into our lives at a very important time and opened doors that might have been closed to us forever …’
Drexel dabbed at his eyes and wiped the mist off his spectacles. Soon the children would be coming out for their morning break. They would not understand an old man’s tears. He folded the letter carefully and put it in his breast pocket. He rolled up the canvas and slid it back into the tube. Then he strode out of the villa grounds and down the road to Frascati, where the Petrocellis – father and son and grandson – still made picture frames for the best galleries in Rome.
Book 4
Lazarus Revocatus
‘And Jesus said to them: “The light is among you still. Finish your journey while you still have the light, before the darkness overtakes you.”’
John xii: 35
Fifteen
On the twenty-ninth of October, two men and two women in a Volkswagen campervan boarded the ferry from Fishguard in Wales to Rosslare on the south-east tip of Ireland. Their van was hired from a company which specialised in rentals to Oriental tourists.
From Rosslare they drove directly to Cork, where they lodged in a modest, old-fashioned hotel much patronised by coach tours. All that was remarked about them was that they were very polite, spoke passable English and paid in cash. They let it be known that they would use the hotel as their base for a week’s tour. One of the men called telephone enquiries and asked for the number of Mr Matt Neylan, a subscriber in the county. Once he had the number it was simple to match it to an address in the directory. A tourist map supplied the rest of the information.
Matt Neylan’s address was Tigh na Kopple – Home of the Horses – Galley Head Road, Clonakilty, which put it well off the main road with nothing but open fields between the house and the sea.
So, on the thirtieth of October, in the morning, they did a trial run, identified the house and drove on to Bantry for lunch. In the afternoon they came back the same way. In the garden a girl, grossly handicapped, was painting with a brush held in her mouth. The driver stopped the van. One of the women got out and began to photograph the scene. She was so intent on getting as many shots as possible that at first she did not notice the man standing in the doorway watching.
When she turned and saw him she was totally confused, blushing, stammering, retreating crabwise towards the van. The man gave her a greeting with a big smile and stood waving until the van turned the corner. Then he went inside and made a telephone call to the Dublin number which the Israelis had given him.
A woman answered. She passed him to another woman who assured him she had been fully briefed on the situation, but did not see this incident as cause for panic. A tourist had stopped to take photographs of a girl painting in a garden. What did that signify?
‘Possibly nothing. But I can’t afford to take any risks.’
‘Of course not, Mr Neylan. On the other hand, we can’t afford to have essential staff careering around the country chasing moonbeams. You do see my point?’
‘I do indeed, madam; but if my people are shot up or kidnapped, what then?’
‘We’ll send flowers. Officially, that’s all we’re allowed to do anyway. If anything else untoward happens, please be in touch!’
Which led Matt Neylan to think that someone in Rome had shoved a mighty large spanner in the works. However, Constable Macmanus was rather more helpful. He would ‘call around and come back to yez’. Which he duly did and reported that there were two Japanese couples at the Boyle Hotel in Cork. They had driven to Bantry for lunch and had passed the farm going and coming. They were normal as mashed potatoes, no threat to anyone. Four people in a campervan, Orientals at that! How could they stage a crime and get off the island? Relax boyo, relax! Trouble will find you soon enough!
But Matt Neylan was not a believer any more and especially he wasn’t a believer in the facile logic of the Celts, who knew with absolute certainty how God ran His world and why it was only idiots and infidels who slipped on banana skins!
The constable was right. Four Orientals in a campervan made a very conspicuous team – so conspicuous, indeed, that everyone who had seen them would swear to it, with absolute conviction. But whether at any one moment there were two or three together, whether one was in the ladies’ room or in the bar or had just stepped out to take the air … who would know, who would care? In one particular, however, Constable Macmanus was right. If they were planning a kidnap, how the hell would they get off the island with the victim in a campervan? On the other hand, if the kidnap plot had suddenly been upgraded to murder, then the text read quite differently – one or two killers with a back-up of two women to transport them and provide their alibi.
Matt Neylan’s imagination was working in high gear. How would they come? When? How would the event be staged? He had never been to war, he had never done police or army training. How far could he trust himself with four lives – because with Britte and Tove there were also the Murtaghs in the cottage. Then he understood that, now or never, this thing must be ended. No one should be forced to live continually under threat. If the only way to end it was by killing, so be it. Let’s get the dying over and be done with it. Then, suddenly, he was very angry and he knew beyond all doubt that he was prepared to step on to the killing ground and stay there until the last shot was fired, the last blow struck.
Anger was not enough, however, courage was not enough. He had to choose the killing ground and entice the enemy on to it. The farmhouse, the Murtagh’s cottage, the barns and cowsheds were all close to the road, grouped in a rectangle, with the farmhouse as one long side, fronting the road. The cottage
and the cow bales formed the two short ends of the rectangle, the barns and storage sheds ran parallel to the main house. The floor of the rectangle was concrete which could be hosed down every day. The buildings were stone, plastered with white stucco and roofed with slate. They were stout enough, but as a defence position they were worse than useless. The barns would burn. A stun grenade or tear gas would turn the house and the cottage into death traps.
Given that he had weapons for close or more distant engagement, they would all be safer in open ground. There were thirty-five acres between the house and the sea, undulating land divided by low stone fences and bordered by a winding path that ran along the cliff edge and down the lower ground to the inlet, where there was a boatshed, invisible from the road. The women could spend the night there while Murtagh and he kept vigil. The assassins would come during the dark, he was sure of that; round midnight or in the small sinister hour before the false dawn. They would park some distance away. The killer or killers would approach on foot.
Just at that moment, Tove and Mrs Murtagh came in with a basket of eggs and a pail of fresh milk. Murtagh was scraping his boots at the door, waiting to be invited in for his evening whiskey. Matt Neylan gathered them round him, poured the drinks and made his announcement: ‘I haven’t a shred of proof, but I feel in my bones that we’re going to have trouble tonight. So here’s what I’m proposing …’