Sign of the Cross

by Glenn Cooper

  Giovanni, dressed in clerical black, was splayed out upon the green grass, his body forming a cross.

  Four shiny steel spikes pinned his wrists and his ankles to the turf. A knife, its handle wet with blood, was sticking out of the right side of his chest.

  But Cal didn’t want to look at the pieces of steel piercing his body.

  He wanted to look at his face, an open-eyed face, seemingly searching the sky, fixed into an expression of pure, unadulterated joy.

  At the mouth of the Tiber at Ostia, where the great river empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea, two boys were fishing. The waters were murky brown, a swirling torrent and the boys were frustrated that their buckets were still empty.

  In Berlin on the Potsdamer Platz, the German Federal Police were drilling open Lambret Schneider’s office safe, discovering a small leather-bound notebook containing the particulars of all the men who called themselves the Knights of Longinus.

  At the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Pope Celestine was celebrating morning mass with his household staff and wiping away bitter tears as he dedicated his homily toward the memory of Padre Gio, a young priest who was touched by God and taken too soon.

  On the Viale Nettuno in Francavilla, the trunk of his hire car open, Cal was holding Irene and letting her cry her eyes out into his shoulder. He knew at that moment they would never see each other again for Cal would always remind her of the saddest time in her life.

  ‘I could stay a few more days.’

  She shook her head and looked away. A tear slowly made its way down her cheek.

  ‘Two people who’ve been through so much together are never going to be separated,’ he said.

  ‘Quantum entanglement?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Quantum entanglement.’

  And on the riverbank one boy turned to the other and said,

  ‘One more cast. I’m getting hungry.’

  ‘No, three more.’

  ‘All right, three more,’ the first one said.

  He cast his lure low and long, one of the best of the day and began jigging the lure back to the shore.

  Disappointment set in when the line was almost reeled all the way in but then he hit a resistance, a big one, and he jerked his rod up to set the hook.

  ‘Reel harder! Harder!’ the other boy cried.

  ‘It’s huge, it’s a monster,’ the first boy said straining with exertion.

  Something huge indeed broke the water but it was no fish.

  First there was a bare arm with black ink. Black as night. The tattoo of the Holy Lance with SS lightning bolts.

  Then the rest of him, a shirtless man with a plastic identification badge looped around his neck.

  The badge read: Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic, Dr U. Tellini.