Pandora's Curse

by Du Brul, Jack

  A week after Giuseppi Salvi became Leo XIV, he was in the hospital and the cardinals feared their solution had been too temporary, much like the first John Paul, who’d been pope for just over a month in 1978. However, tests confirmed that his ill health was not a grave concern. Instead, doctors found he suffered from gastric reflux, a condition he’d never discussed. Surgery for his malformed stomach valve was performed, and within a few weeks, he had made a near-miraculous recovery.

  It was at this point that Leo XIV began to change the church, reshaping it into his vision of what it should be with a vigor that stunned the hard-liners who’d elected him. He appointed his closest friend, the liberal Cardinal Peretti, to the secretariat of state, the Vatican’s number two position. Leo had always been considered a moderate but this crucial appointment loudly stated that the status quo was about to end. He made it clear that the topic closest to him, and thus all of the church, was raising religious tolerance around the world and stamping out fanaticism. Rather than issue papal decrees on the subject, he decided to go directly to the bishops who oversaw the dioceses.

  He called for a special synod of bishops, and such was the importance he placed on this meeting, he made Peretti its president. In another unusual step, Leo XIV invited other religious leaders to attend. Though they would have no voting rights, he wanted them all to understand the Vatican’s position on the subject of tolerance. Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and bishops were common at synods, but Leo also wanted Jewish leaders from Israel and the United States, prominent Buddhist monks including the Dalai Lama, influential Mullahs and Imams from both the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam, Shinto priests from Japan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who headed the Anglican church, and hundreds of others.

  Gathering this great body fell on Cardinal Peretti, and the sheer logistics were staggering. An ordinary synod took a year to organize and the pope had given him only six months, not only to bring together one hundred and seventy bishops from the Catholic Church, but all the others as well.

  Dominic Peretti was a native Roman, sixty-five years old and something of a Curia outsider because of his modernist views on artificial birth control. Like Leo, he believed that some form of population control was going to be crucial for the sustainability of civilization. As pope, Leo couldn’t openly declare such a belief, but by giving Peretti power within the Vatican, his intentions were clear.

  The Synod on Tolerance was a planned first step to bring the church closer to other religions so that, at some point, this other topic may be discussed. The Vatican was a two-thousand-year-old institution that moved at the ponderous pace of the world’s largest bureaucracy. Incremental change was the only way to get the church to reform and even the synod was seen as a radical departure.

  Peretti was sitting at his desk on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace when a priest knocked at his door. “Forgive me, Cardinal Peretti. His Holiness has finished with his lunch and will see you now.”

  “Grazie.” Peretti removed his reading glasses and slipped on his all-purpose pair. He’d tried bifocals but they gave him a pounding headache.

  He stood and stretched. At six foot five inches, he was the tallest person in the Vatican, excluding a few of the corpo di vigilanza, the Holy See’s police force, and a couple of the ornamental Swiss Guards. As a boy, he’d been something of a basketball star and on rare occasions he would still shoot a few baskets with some of the Vatican’s lay workers. His face was remarkably unlined except for a deep crease on each side of his large, hooked nose. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses, his eyes were dark and possessed captivating intelligence. He grabbed up two bundles of papers and left his spacious office.

  Although the Palace was a place of opulence and quiet dignity, Peretti moved through it with a looselimbed gait that was only now beginning to slow. He climbed the marble steps to the papal apartments and found the pontiff in the gilded library. With him already was Bishop Albani, relator for the Synod on Tolerance. He would act as a facilitator for the discussions and make sure that a consensus was reached at the event’s close.

  “You look tired,” the pope greeted his secretary of state.

  “I am,” Peretti agreed and took a chair across the desk from Leo. “This has been a trial.”

  “Another week and we’ll convene the synod, Dominic,” the pontiff said with genuine sympathy. “Our relator here will take over and you can get some sleep. While I’ve limited the time allowed for opening remarks to quicken the pace, you’ll have a few quiet days before anything of significance takes place.”

  Before Albani could mutter a protest that the opening discussions would be important, Leo XIV raised his hand, the sunlight streaming through the windows glinting off his fisherman’s ring, one of the many symbols of his office. “I’m joking, of course. We’ve given ourselves only two weeks for the synod, half the normal time, and not a moment will be wasted. Have there been any last-minute delays?”

  “Hundreds,” Peretti sighed. “But I’m dealing with them. If I may speak frankly, many of the other religious leaders are acting like prima donnas on opening night. Some want more time to address the bishops. Others want better control over their meals. Still others resent the cabin assignments. For men and women who dedicate themselves to the spiritual salvation of others, they seem inordinately preoccupied with their own corporeal needs.”

  “There are many dietary and cultural customs we must be sensitive to,” the pope reminded.

  “Those I can understand. However my office has been deluged with other requests. Why an American minister needs to bring his wife with him, I’ll never know, but he telephones me every day repeating his displeasure that she won’t be allowed to join him. I finally relented and told him she could come.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Tommy Joe Farquar. He’s a former car salesman turned evangelist with a substantial television ministry.”

  “How America puts up with some of those charlatans I’ll never understand,” Albani said

  “How about the ship?”

  Because of the international scope of the Synod on Tolerance, the pope had wanted it in Rome, as was tradition. However several of the key invitees refused to come to Vatican City. Jerusalem would have been his second choice, but that turned out to be even more contentious than Rome. It was Peretti’s suggestion to avoid the question of territory altogether. Rather than deal with political squabbling, he recommended that the synod be held at sea, on a cruise ship large enough to accommodate the two thousand people attending. The vessel they had leased, the Sea Empress, was one of the newest cruise liners in the world.

  Having so many important people on one ship had created other sets of problems, not the least of which was security. The Swiss Guards were responsible for checking every member of the ship’s crew and the attendees. They would work with the individual security specialists from dozens of countries. Getting the group safely on board was the biggest single concern. Once the ship was in international waters, she was well beyond the reach of all but the most sophisticated terrorists. Still, the pope procured the services of the Italian Navy to provide an escort for the modern ocean liner—a destroyer that would follow behind the Sea Empress on her voyage.

  “The ship is ready. With one week to go before we depart, the crew has been sequestered aboard her. No one not already checked by Interpol and the Swiss Guards is allowed anywhere near her.”

  “She’s provisioned, then?” asked Albani.

  “With everything from champagne to dog food for the bomb-sniffing dogs that sail with us.”

  “Dominic, you’ve done a remarkable job. This meeting is as much a testament to your organizational skills as to the need for world understanding.”

  Peretti demurred. “I will gladly fade into the background if we can get just one person to stop killing in the name of religion.”

  “We will, my friend,” the pope said with unwavering faith. “How about the items we are returning to the other faiths? Are they at the ship
yet?”

  “Everything has been put aboard the Sea Empress already. The response we’ve gotten has been tremendous, I might add.”

  “I thought it would. John Paul’s Mea Culpa in March of 2000 was a first step. The church should have made such a formal apology to the world decades ago. Some of the atrocities carried out under our banner were unspeakable. The Inquisition, crusades, pogroms, and our failure to counter fascism are just the most notable. Saying we are sorry was not enough. I thought it necessary to give back something tangible and what better than the thousands of religious texts and artifacts belonging to other faiths that the Vatican has accumulated over the centuries? These items should have been returned long ago.”

  “Has there been a final count of items we are returning?” Albani asked Peretti. “I need to know for my speech to the assembly.”

  Cardinal Peretti rifled through one of the batches of papers he’d brought to the meeting. “Seven thousand eight hundred books, mostly Jewish texts and torahs that we hid during the war, Islamic writings that were captured during the Crusades, and Eastern Orthodox material that we’ve held on to since the Council of Chalcedon in 451.”

  “That’s it?” The pope’s eyes widened at such a low figure.

  “You gave us only six months to prepare.” It was fact, not complaint. “There are two million books in the Vatican library as well as 150,000 manuscripts. This doesn’t include the seventy-five kilometers of documents in the archives. We’ve only begun to comb through to find material that belongs to others.”

  “I’m sorry.” Leo smiled. “Forgive me. What else is being given back to the proper owners?”

  “Five hundred icons that belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church. They will decide what particular group gets what. There are also forty statues, about two hundred paintings and a great many religious pieces such as candlesticks, menorahs, ornamental crosses, and reliquaries. In all, we’ve shipped eleven containers to the docks in Belgium. I’ve already drawn up a manifest of what goes to whom, and we’ve kept some of the more symbolic pieces separate so you can give them out directly.”

  “And you say that the world’s interest in this step is high?”

  “Despite the best efforts of our press office, many journalists are focusing on the restoration more than the synod, which by the way we can’t seem to dissuade them from calling the Universal Convocation.”

  “It is our synod, but it is also a universal gathering,” the pope countered. “I actually prefer the title they’ve bestowed on the gathering. A synod smacks of secrecy. What we want is an openness that has never been seen before. This meeting is not about religion. It is about people and how to get them to improve relations with each other.”

  Albani, who would be leading the synod, picked up the thread. “Modernism is dividing the world into fanatics or secularists. Evangelism has become such a bitter battle that many religious leaders have lost sight of why we spread our various beliefs. Souls have become a commodity, no different from oil futures or stock shares.”

  Suddenly the pope laughed aloud, and it took him a moment to recover. “I’m sorry, Albani. In my head I heard a radio announcer quoting religions like a stock ticker.” He deepened his voice. “In today’s trading, Catholicism is up two points, Judaism up a quarter, and Buddhism down an eighth.” He laughed again before the reality of his joke hit him. He became subdued once more. “We have to put an end to this way of thinking. I hate to think what will happen if we don’t. Politics and race breed fanaticism on their own. The world does not need its religious leaders adding fuel to such an incendiary mixture.”

  MUNICH, GERMANY

  Anika Klein spent her morning packing for her trip. She was leaving tomorrow, Monday, to spend a few days in Iceland before the rest of the team assembled for the ship to Greenland. Her domestic chores took her longer than expected but still she went for a run after lunch and returned to her apartment an hour and a half later.

  After a long shower, she spent thirty grudging minutes in front of the mirror attending to beauty details she’d put off for too long. Her eyebrows were particularly bothersome since they hadn’t been tweezed in three months. The ritual left her eyes swimming in tears. She purposely kept her glossy black hair trimmed almost like a man’s, with short bangs and just a little length at her neck. A dollop of gel and a quick slash with a brush was all it took to tame it.

  Her face was angular, with large, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a sharp chin. Her mouth was wide, luxurious. Except on dates, she’d learned to not wear lipstick because of the distraction her pout caused. Her ears were tiny, with a total of nine rings, five in one, and four in the other. Anika was thirty-six years old but had the style of someone half that age. And she could get away with it. Studying her reflection closely, she decided she could maintain the ruse for a few more years. Because she’d rarely allowed herself to tan, her skin, which would eventually give her away, had yet to show lines.

  She gave her reflection a smile. It was only then that her face lost the intensity she showed to the outside world. Her smile made Anika look like a teenager. Her ex-husband had often compared her beauty to Audrey Hepburn’s. She’d done little to dissuade him of that opinion.

  Normally she wore all black in a pseudogothic look that hadn’t yet gone out of fashion in Europe. For today, she was meeting someone for her grandfather, so she threw on a bright but modest skirt, a creamy silk blouse, and flats. She was comfortable enough with her height to wear heels only when necessary.

  In the kitchen on her way out of her apartment, she grabbed a liter bottle of water from the fridge and a container of oily kalamata olives. She had chewing gum in her car for her breath later. Her purse was a small leather backpack. Anika tossed the water inside, fished the keys to her battered Volkswagen Golf from the bottom, and popped a handful of the rich olives into her mouth. Her car was in the garage under her building; it started after a mere five attempts.

  The town of Ismaning was only about a half hour from her apartment, which worked well for her grandfather. Had this Otto Schroeder he’d asked her to speak with lived any farther from Munich, she would have postponed the interview until after her trip to Greenland. Opa Jacob had insisted that she visit him before heading north, but he treated everything about his work as a matter of urgency.

  Anika did what she could to help. He knew she would never take up the crusade, but by assisting him when she could, Anika hoped that Opa knew she wouldn’t forget either. He’d often said that people aren’t truly dead until they are forgotten. He’d told her that the first time when her own father, Opa Jacob’s son-in-law, died from a heart attack. As long as she remembered her father, he was alive. That was why Jacob worked so hard. As long as he remembered, the six million were still alive, and if Anika could carry even a part of the memory, then the victims would not fade for another generation.

  The traffic was heavier than she expected. She’d forgotten that road repairs were under way even on the weekend. The Volkswagen’s air conditioner had not worked since she’d bought it thirdhand and heavy blasts of hot air percolated from the asphalt. Anika felt constricted, the seat belt like a band of iron across her chest. The back of her blouse was sticky. She tried to take a deep breath and managed to inhale a dose of diesel exhaust from the truck idling next to her.

  The frustration pricking her skin was only partially due to the delay. She’d hoped the distraction of driving would banish thoughts of work but the constant starts and stops served as a reminder. Was her career going to go forward or end? The choice was hers.

  She dug out her water bottle and took a gulp, forcing herself to calm down. Rather than deal with the decision, she fumbled through her bag for the directions to Otto Schroeder’s farmhouse that Opa Jacob had dictated a few days ago from Vienna. She knew from the research she’d done for him in the past not to be surprised how he had tracked the former military officer. Jacob Eisenstadt could find anyone, it seemed, once he put his mind to it.

&n
bsp; On the sheet of paper with the directions was a list of questions Jacob wanted answered. Anika had read through the list once after writing them down and found herself more intrigued with this interview than the previous ones she’d done. It appeared that Schroeder might know the whereabouts of a huge shipment of gold spirited out of Russia in 1943. According to Jacob, this wasn’t one of the fabled “lost shipments” that had never been recovered. Until very recently neither he nor Theodor Weitzman had even known of its existence. They were convinced that they were on the trail of something completely new.

  Anika doubted that anything would come of her interview. Opa had learned that Schroeder had been a career soldier from before Hitler came to power. He hadn’t been part of the Nazi elite. In fact, he hadn’t even been a member of the party. It wasn’t very likely that he would be privy to secrets of stashed gold or anything else for that matter. She had said this to Opa Jacob, and he had reminded her that, even if Otto Schroeder was simply another link in the chain, it put them one link closer to their goal. His absolute dedication and unshakable faith was something Anika knew she could learn from. She was sorely lacking in both.

  In the center of Ismaning stood a tall stone tower, a medieval leftover whose original purpose was lost to time. She turned right and very quickly the urban congestion vanished. It was as if she’d traveled a hundred kilometers from the city. Plowed fields and dense forests flanked the narrow road, with farmhouses nestled at the end of long, crushed stone driveways.

  She felt herself relaxing. Anika loved the country, the clean air, the open vistas, and especially the lack of people. She checked her directions again. She had to stay on this road for eight kilometers and then veer to the left for another three. There she would find Otto Schroeder’s house. According to her grandfather’s report, Schroeder owned the land but no longer worked it. That was leased to local farmers while he stayed on in the isolated house, living out the last of his years.