by Tom Fox
“You know the filing deadlines. You sit ten meters from my office,” Antonio Laterza continued like a barking rat. Alexander opened his eyes and stared up at the other man.
Laterza was medium height, with a fair build, fair face and all the signs of being completely obsessed with his physical appearance. His chestnut hair flowed neatly toward his neck, its swirls fixed with spray and ends lightened to ensure that the highlights and shades of sunshine were as vividly contrasting indoors as they were out. The suit draped over him compensated for an average body build with more than average style: an immaculate monument to fine tailoring, washed in light brown silk, accentuated with a belt and matching shoes—overpriced memorials to the alligator they had formerly been.
Twenty-seven-year-olds with money, ambition and subscriptions to GQ: if they came shrink-wrapped and prefabricated, they would look like Antonio Laterza.
“You have no excuse, Alexander,” the polished man continued. His expression and tone were disapproving, like a scolding parent. Never mind the fact that he was more than a decade and a half Trecchio’s junior.
“I needed to check a few facts.”
“That’s why we give you seven days. You’re not writing a daily column, coglione. What the hell were you doing all week?”
Alexander took another drag from his wilting cigarette and blew the smoke demonstratively in Laterza’s direction, ignoring the overused Italian insult. He’d been called worse things than a set of bull’s testicles. The truth was, Alexander had no idea what he’d been doing all week. Talking to a priest on the phone? Looking into the finances of some-or-other local parish? Sifting like an obsessed stalker through an inconsequential youth worker’s Facebook timeline? Maybe one of those. Maybe all of them. It was all the same, and it was all so boring.
“I had some sources I had to confirm,” he finally muttered, plucking out a probable-sounding excuse. He was good at that, the result of years of practice. And there were always plenty to choose from. “You’re aware of the occasional necessity.”
“Bullshit.” Laterza glowered down at him. Alexander had known he wouldn’t buy the explanation, but he also knew the overly ambitious and vastly overcologned editor couldn’t fire him. Local religious affairs was not a section of the paper for which reporters climbed over each other to gain the few column inches on page eleven that came with the job. And Alexander had two distinct advantages: he’d had one big story a few years back that had proved he wasn’t completely worthless, and he was old friends with La Repubblica’s owner, Niccolò Marre. His job was about as secure as they came in the business.
“You’re getting lazy,” Laterza continued. He had something close to post-teenage spite on his face, and Alexander wondered now, as he had done more regularly lately, whether twenty-somethings were getting younger or he was just getting stodgier. Forty-four wasn’t that old, but next to Laterza, Alexander felt prehistoric.
“You have no ambition, and your work is tired,” Laterza snorted.
“Yet you publish it every week. Rome isn’t Rome without the Church, and a Roman paper isn’t worth its salt without a few column inches of Vatican scandal-reporting. Especially La Repubblica.”
That felt good. A little snapping back at the diminutive shit, especially if he could make the man look like he didn’t know his own turf. Ever since Eugenio Scalfari had founded it in 1976, La Repubblica had held a reputation for being a harsh critic of the Catholic Church. It wasn’t a paper that was going to give up religious reporting, however tired it became.
“That story you kept us waiting for last week,” Laterza sneered back. “It was about two parishes going over budget on their renovation costs. Over budget. You think this counts as Vatican scandal? You think our readers give two shits about such nonsense?”
He gesticulated broadly as he spoke, raising his voice to a well-practiced almost-yell. It was clear he wanted the scolding to be noticed by the bullpen, though few beyond the cubicle partition seemed to be paying any attention to the exchange.
Alexander sighed, slumped back into his chair and drew his cigarette close. He’d be so much more eager to fight, to kick up an energetic response and retaliation, if at his core he didn’t agree with the kid’s points. No one cared about these stories, least of all him. Alexander had wound his way into the paper not out of zeal but availability. A man entering his forties and lumbering toward middle age with two degrees in theology and a short career as a parish priest in his pocket wasn’t exactly vocationally primed for the twenty-first century. When he had finally tossed his dog collar aside and left the life he’d prepared for since his childhood—disillusioned at the irreconcilable conflict between an institution that was meant to be holy and the men who ran it, who so often were anything but—he’d discovered a limited set of options. He wasn’t a programmer leaving Apple for Google. He was a priest leaving the church for a world that, with every passing year, was less and less sure just what the Church was, and increasingly convinced that it was out of date, out of touch, and didn’t matter.
But Alexander had always been a strong communicator. As long as he didn’t aim at any of the high-visibility or competitive areas of journalism—the kind that twenty-year-olds fought for and senior reporters clutched close to their chest—the paper provided a viable option. Add in the journalistically sexy angle of the ex-cleric with a chip on his shoulder and he’d been a natural enough fit for La Repubblica’s Church Life section, which amounted chiefly to a gossip column on whatever could be dug up from the murky depths of current ecclesiastical affairs.
And that had been that. For three years he’d probed the lower limits of what human attention could be persuaded to care about. Yes, occasionally there were sex scandals, and the election of a new pope, which had taken place only eleven months before, always brought excitement and attention. But the rest of the time . . . the rest of the time, “mildly interesting” was a height to which he could only hope to climb. And most days he was perfectly willing to sit at the base of that mountain, caring just as little about these things as the paper’s average reader.
He gazed up from his desk. Depressingly, his editor was still there. Alexander waited for the next barrage of choreographed abuse, but Laterza’s reddened face was gradually fading to a normal color. He looked for an instant like a child who’d been told by his parents that he had to do something nice for the boy next door, even though he’d much rather tie him to a flagpole and steal his bicycle.
“I’m giving you an assignment, Trecchio.” The words came out as if it disgusted Laterza to say them.
Alexander was startled. Management was generally happy to let him troll for stories himself.
“What sort of assignment?”
Laterza scowled. “There’s been some sort of activity over at St. Peter’s—something about the cripple standing upright. Quite the buzz online since the end of this morning’s Mass. Surely you’ve heard?”
“Online buzz doesn’t do much for me,” Alexander answered. “The bastion of idiots and gossips.”
“Well, those idiots and gossips have been hopping for the past two hours, and their hype is spreading.” Laterza gave him a pitying look. “Some of them have footage. Surely even you can make a story out of that.”
The Vatican: 9:31 a.m.
“Seal the doors. Do it now.”
The voice of Cardinal Secretary of State Donato Viteri was rich and resonant. He’d held his post, the highest in the Vatican city state apart from the pontiff himself, for twenty-three years, through the reigns of three different popes. The tall, broad-shouldered man was known for being neither friendly nor verbose: the kind of elderly clerical administrator that anyone who knew the Vatican considered old school and the droves of faithful everywhere else rarely encountered. Viteri was a man whose spirituality resided within, never bubbling to the surface in shows of piety or overt reverence—a prelate more at home behind a desk than an altar, who prayed with the same businesslike tones in which he conducted meetings or ov
ersaw political functions. His love for the Church, he occasionally said, was manifest in a commanding, untiring practicality in overseeing its affairs. He did not give sermons but orders; and when he spoke, he expected to be obeyed.
“Which doors?” The commandant of the Swiss Guard, Christoph Raber, stood next to him, still in his colorful ceremonial attire from the Mass that had concluded only minutes before. Holding the rank of oberst, colonel, the highest of all military ranks in the Holy See and held by only one man, Raber was a bulky officer, pure muscle over firm bone, which even the billows of the formal attire could not make look less than fiercely imposing. In the hierarchical world of the Vatican, only the Pope and Cardinal Viteri himself were in a position to give Raber orders.
“All of them,” the cardinal completed his command.
A pause, long and awkward. But then, Raber thought to himself, everything that morning had been awkward. Inexplicable. The commandant, despite his long years of experience, had not yet fully regained his composure from the Mass.
“All of them?”
Viteri repeated the command, his voice exuding a finality that was not open to question. He rested his aging eyes directly on Raber. In this moment they were not the stalwart windows into an unflappable soul they were renowned to be. The cardinal’s brown eyes were troubled, the deep crow’s feet at their corners furrowed into trenches, as if the gravity of his instruction had affected the deliverer as much as the recipient.
Oberst Raber’s own expression only gave indication of his surprise for a fraction of a second. He’d had too many years of training to permit it to linger any longer. But underneath, the commandant’s surprise was overwhelming. In all his decades of service, such an order had never been issued.
“The whole basilica?”
St. Peter’s was a vast structure. Built to the aggrandizing standards of a pope who had inadvertently fostered the Protestant Reformation by seeking to pay for it by selling indulgences to the masses, it covered over five acres of land, with more than 163,000 square feet of floor space and one of the largest worshipping enclosures on the planet, where a walk from the main doors to the chancel was more than an eighth of a mile beneath soaring, gilded ceilings. And though parts of it were at various times closed to the public and lesser members of the clergy, it was unheard of for the whole complex to be locked down. St. Peter’s was the heart of Christendom, the seat of the Lord’s reign on earth, and it would not shut its doors until the end of time.
“No,” Cardinal Viteri answered, “not the basilica.”
Despite his best efforts at stoicism, Raber could feel the features change on his face. Even legendary Swiss unflappability had its limits. If the Cardinal Secretary of State had not meant St. Peter’s, then Viteri could only have intended his instruction to relate to one thing.
“Your Eminence, you mean the . . .” Raber’s voice trailed off.
“Every gate. Every street. Every point of entry,” Cardinal Viteri confirmed.
He placed an old hand on the commander’s shoulder, his gold episcopal ring shimmering in the basilica’s orange light. Viteri’s grip was as firm as his stare.
“Clear the remaining people out of here,” he said, motioning toward the worshippers and tourists still filling the church, “then shut down the Vatican.”
3
Polizia di Stato, Monteverde XVI Station, Rome: 9:34 a.m.
The Monteverde XVI branch of the Italian Polizia di Stato is an uninspiring building perched midway through a residential block in an urban district near the center of the city. Most who pass it by do so without knowing that the unimpressive facade conceals one of Rome’s most active police departments, its members working in concert with the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza to complete the local infrastructure of Italy’s fantastically complex national policing system.
Within the bowels of the station, in an office even more uninspiring than the building that housed it, Ispettore Gabriella Fierro sighed a long, frustrated breath. The desk at which she sat was factory-produced metal, and to say that it favored functionality over form would be to commit an act of spectacular understatement. It was ugly, as were the crooked metal shelves along one wall and the two aluminum filing cabinets on another, both of which looked like they’d been battered and tired since the day they were made. There were no windows, and Gabriella had never bothered to decorate the walls with plaques or posters. It had never seemed worth the effort. No one came to Inspector Fierro to be impressed with credentials. Few entered her office at all. And ugly was ugly, even if you threw a poster over it.
Gabriella glanced down at her diminutive Bulova watch, one of the few luxuries in her otherwise rather plain life. She had a rumbling in her stomach. For normal people, lunch would only be a few hours away, but she knew that wasn’t going to be her lot. Not today. If she was going to get a lunch break at all, it was going to have to come much later. She was buried beneath a pile of paperwork that would make Atlas himself cower, and every time she risked getting through it, her repugnant supervisor, Sostituto Commissario Enzo D’Antonio, added more to the pile.
It was going to be a long, long day.
Gabriella Fierro had been with the Polizia di Stato for over four years, and each of those had been a battle with her boss. When she’d initially graduated out of cadet status, D’Antonio had kept her at the base rank of agente far longer than would have been normal. For a time Gabriella had wondered whether she would retire from the force at the same rank she held when she entered; but eventually D’Antonio had granted her a promotion, forced into the act when a case she’d led two years ago had made the national news. He’d given her that file as a write-off—a gift intended to humiliate and disappoint. But sometimes gifts surprise the giver. The case had turned out to be major news: financial scandals in the Church, a murdered cardinal overseas. Her supervisor hadn’t been able to prevent her earning a few stripes from the affair, but he’d given them grudgingly.
The source of D’Antonio’s animosity toward her remained a mystery to Gabriella, though she had her ideas. The fact that she was a woman clearly rubbed him the wrong way, in a predictably misogynist manner. That alone was probably enough to account for his hostility—a woman daring to stick her toes into a man’s territory. Add in that she knew she was fairly good-looking and it made matters worse. If she had to be a woman, at least she could have done D’Antonio the courtesy of being as ugly a woman as he was a man. And then there was the fact that she had grown up a pious Catholic, and managed somehow to remain one in her adulthood. An individual as openly antagonistic toward belief of any kind as D’Antonio wasn’t going to count her faith as a strong point.
Maybe they were all factors; maybe it was something else entirely. At the end of the day, the only sure thing was that the Deputy Commissioner of the Monteverde XVI station loathed his subordinate inspector and made no attempt to hide it.
Take the fact that she was here, in the office, today. Gabriella had been assigned to work Sundays every week for the past two years. There was nothing coincidental in this. Attending Sunday Mass—once a cherished tradition—had become only a memory, wiped out of present experience by her boss. She now had to settle for weekday services and lunch breaks on a Sunday, when at least she could go and reflect quietly by herself.
Generally, about throttling her boss. Though occasionally she did try to pray.
Today, if she was to get the chance, she was going to have to buckle down and focus on the extra work. And that meant ignoring the louder-than-usual chatter taking place in the station’s kitchen-cum-coffee-break-room, just beyond her office door. There had been a bustle around the station for the past hour, giving the normally quiet morning air something of a buzz. “Something’s going on at the Vatican,” was all Gabriella had been able to make out through the thin walls—but she’d heard it multiple times, spoken each time with increasing vigor. Her personal interest in church matters was enough to propel her toward her internet connection a few minutes ago, ju
st to find out what it was. And yet—fates be damned—at precisely the moment her finger hovered before the desktop’s power button, her supervisor had appeared in the doorway. D’Antonio himself, in all his greasy glory, with a stack of documents under his arm. Three new files. Time-critical. “Report back to me within thirty minutes with a status update.”
Time-critical.
If that wasn’t the joke of the week. Nothing that D’Antonio handed to Inspector Fierro was ever critical, time- or other-wise.
But he was still her boss. Gabriella drew her finger away from the computer. Its screen remained dark. The bustle outside would have to wait.
Headquarters of La Repubblica newspaper: 9:40 a.m.
At first glance, the story looked like a let-down to Alexander and he immediately began to suspect his editor was using it to punish him. In terms of public interest, there was far more activity online about the recent surfing death of Abigaille Zola, a rising teen actress whose world of fandom was taking to the internet to express its grief. That was the kind of material, inconsequential as it was, that was on the front pages in this country. Fashionistas and celebrities, even dead, made great cover.
By contrast, the first reports coming in about the “buzz” to which Alexander’s editor had referred seemed to indicate nothing more than a man who’d disrupted the Sunday morning papal Mass.
Chrissakes, let’s rush to press.
An intrusion on normal Vatican propriety might, perhaps, be worth a mention in the paper—the kind of interestingly uninteresting dross that caused people to read articles on Coca-Cola shipping centers being disrupted in India, or soap production plants in Mexico suffering power shortages, despite the fact that these had no conceivable bearing or impact on their everyday lives. But a story this was not. Had the murmurs been that the man had walked into church stark naked, chanting anti-Western rants or speaking in tongues, preferably carrying a banner that read “Screw the capitalist agenda,” Alexander might have the chance of making something of him.