by Tom Fox
The Pope didn’t know what to call the man who had appeared before him during the Mass. He didn’t know what to think of him. He didn’t know how to interpret the strange, unexplained fire burning in his heart. He only knew that at this moment he sat upright, which he had never before done. That he’d walked himself into his apartments, alone, for the first time in his life. That he could stand straight. Whole. Healed.
That God was somehow speaking to him. It was terrifying, and it was awe-inspiring.
“I want all the cardinals summoned back to the Vatican,” he announced to his Secretary of State as the towering man reached his desk. “I want them here within twenty four hours, if not sooner.”
“Your Holiness,” Cardinal Viteri answered, shaking his balding head, seemingly startled by the sudden command, “it will take longer than that for such arrangements to be made.”
“Exercise expediency, Donato,” the pontiff replied. “I want them here now.” He did not feel the urge to explain himself further to the older cardinal.
“As Your Holiness wishes.” A long, tense silence passed.
“I have already isolated Vatican City,” Viteri eventually added. “We shall be alone within these walls for as long as you see fit.”
“Good,” the Pope muttered. His eyes were elsewhere.
“Would you like anyone else brought in?”
“No.” He looked to the Secretary of State. “Have the bishops tend to the functioning of the churches. Issue an instruction for all parishes throughout the world to celebrate a daily Mass of intention.”
Viteri hesitated. A global call for Masses dedicated to specific causes was not made lightly, or often.
“For what intention precisely, Holiness?”
Pope Gregory looked past him to a gilded wooden crucifix on the far wall of his office. That was the question. For what? He sighed softly. For now, there could be only one answer.
“For the will of God to be revealed.”
7
Above Rome: 12:17 p.m.
Drago Lazzari gazed out from the curved Plexiglas of the Radiotelevisione Italiana RAI 2 news helicopter, scanning the territory beneath him through the viewfinder of his ARRI Amira camera. He never tired of the spectacular scenery and up-close aerial views that few people had the privilege to see. Drago considered his post as airborne videographer one of the best at the station, and he felt intimately familiar with every corner of Rome. At least, from above.
The Roman skyline always looked majestic, and there were few sights to rival the view from the vantage points of the Eternal City’s famed seven hills. But from the air it was something else entirely: an undulating sea of ancient brickwork and even more ancient roads, punctuated by domes and towers that shimmered orange beneath the large Mediterranean sun. It was an image of the past, painted out like a great canvas from the hands of one of the Renaissance artists it had housed. The haze from the automobiles crowding its streets provided a glow that made the vast city look even more like a dreamscape.
But little of that interested Drago today. His focus was solely on a singular, narrow plot of land: the 110-acre expanse of the world’s smallest city state.
Vatican City had sealed its walls less than an hour after the appearance at St. Peter’s of what people were already calling “the stranger.” The world had seen a miracle, and then the doors had been closed. Had been slammed closed. Church officials had given no reason for the action. They seemed intent on keeping the public in the dark as to what was taking place internally in response to the inexplicable transformation of the Holy Father. And the identity of the man who had wrought it. And with a few notable exceptions, the Vatican had a pretty good track record of keeping secrets and closing out public scrutiny when it chose to.
But they could not seal off the skies.
Drago scoped out the walled compound through the camera’s powerful telephoto lens. The helicopter’s pilot maintained the legally mandated sovereignty of the Vatican’s airspace, keeping the craft outside the immediate vertical territory above the state, which meant a necessarily oblique camera angle. But this could be worked around. Drago had worked under such conditions before.
He swept the lens from one courtyard to another, each pause in the viewfinder’s path framing a scene that was printed on a million postcards sold in the shops below. The Vatican was so small that every public corner was known the world over. Yet despite its tiny size, nearly half of its interior space was closed off to the public, rarely seen by any but the Church’s innermost circle and the holders of its highest offices. And what was hidden was as beautiful as what was revealed. Behind gates and walls were narrow cobblestone pathways that ran through manicured gardens into palaces and offices that had housed some of the greatest religious figures of Europe.
Drago panned the frame to his left. A bustle of activity caught his eye on a balcony near the Apostolic Palace, but as he increased the zoom he saw it was only a domestic worker, sweeping away dust and debris from the orange-tiled surface.
A few dozen meters to the right, a large tree swayed in the gentle breeze. Drago swung slowly in its direction, his senses at their height.
Then he caught it. The sight he needed—and something well beyond anything he could have hoped for.
The Santa Anna garden was tiny, barely more than a bench on a patch of well-watered grass surrounded by flowers and containing a minuscule, if artistic, fountain. It was a private escape within a private world. But at this moment, to Drago, it was the most glorious spot on earth. For it was surrounded by far more of a Swiss Guard presence than could ever be thought normal—they were at every exit, even along the walls. And bizarrely, they were all facing inward, interested not so much in those who might invade this small space, as in keeping an eye on those who were already within it.
The Pope himself sat on the solitary bench at its center. His white cassock and zucchetto marked him out with perfect clarity, even from so far above.
And beside him was the man that Drago recognized as the stranger.
They were talking, nestled in this intimate surrounding, seemingly oblivious to anything beyond the tiny expanse and its walls.
And then—by the blissful fortune of divine providence, a moment after Drago thumbed the record button—the Pope leaned down and kissed the other man’s hand.
The skin of his guest’s hand felt soft against Gregory’s lips. As a Catholic since birth, he had kissed bishops’ and cardinals’ hands a thousand times in his life, but since ascending the throne of St. Peter, that had changed. Today, though, in this moment, the sign of affection and humility felt right.
The man sitting next to him on the bench had a warmth about his person that had nothing to do with the sunshine of the early afternoon. He gripped the Pope’s hand in return, smiling. In the distance, a guardsman appeared to tense at the gesture. But the Pope had instructed them not to interrupt his discussion.
“You realize,” the stranger said softly, a thumping noise beating in the air high above, “that your world is about to become far less calm.”
Pope Gregory sighed. It was not exasperation, simply acceptance. “So be it.” He wasn’t sure why he felt so confident accepting what lay before him. He had more questions than a mind could contain. Doubts. Anxieties. Fears. Yet they all, somehow, seemed to give way to an unexpected trust.
“You’re ready to face a storm?”
Gregory reflected silently. “My predecessor in this office,” he finally answered, gazing out at the serene landscape, “the first to hold it, was once called to step out of a boat and walk on a stormy sea.”
The stranger smiled softly. “Your point, Your Holiness?”
“My point is that he had to step on to the water whether he was ready or not.”
“St. Peter had help,” the stranger answered.
The Pope turned to face his guest. Their eyes locked long before he finally spoke.
“So do I.”
The frenzy that broke out in Rome twenty minutes
later consumed the city. For all that the ancient capital seemed, on a day-to-day basis, unconcerned by the affairs of the church headquartered on the plot of land at her heart, it loved nothing more than those rare occasions when two thousand years of tradition confronted a moment of singular irregularity and the strange life of the Church suddenly took center stage.
When RAI 2 broadcast the live footage of His Holiness the Pope kissing the hand of the man who only hours earlier had stood at the high altar of St. Peter’s and, by all accounts, healed him, that craving exploded into a storm of attention. Drago Lazzari’s footage broke through the afternoon news, streaming live on to tens of thousands of televisions. Within minutes it was the fastest-trending video on YouTube within Italy.
Within twenty minutes, it was trending internationally.
Before an hour had passed, it was the most watched online video anywhere in the world.
8
Headquarters of La Repubblica newspaper: 1:18 p.m.
The way into a story is research. Research requires sources. And chasing up sources is a skill at which every reporter, however meager his remit, is forced by necessity to excel.
When live feeds of the Pope kissing the hand of the stranger in the Vatican gardens started to roll out across television channels throughout Rome, Alexander realized he was going to have to switch into a far faster gear than that in which he usually worked. He needed sources to talk to, and he needed them now. The little story he’d been handed was fast turning into the biggest news event in recent memory.
But so far, no one was willing to talk.
A stranger in the Vatican was interesting. The healing of a pope was impressive. The pontiff’s act of reverence toward another man was unusual. But as yet it was all something that hard-and-fast sources—people with credentials, with substantive things to offer that papers and editors counted as credible and therefore printed—wouldn’t touch. It was sensational.
Line up a conclave to elect a new pope and scholars and politicians would trip over their robes to offer expert opinions on historical precedents, future pathways of moral leadership or any other matter, however incidental, that might put their name in the press as expert commentators or talking heads.
But set up a situation where a man the internet buzz was calling “a divine visitor” works an inexplicable miracle and heals the unhealable, in a church, no less, and those same experts didn’t want to come near the story. Conversations about God and miracles might be the stuff of wonder for the religious, but they were tantamount to a leper’s touch to credentialed commentators.
Alexander lit up a new cigarette in frustration. At least a dozen phone calls over the past twenty minutes had resulted in the same disappointment. He was getting nowhere.
In front of him, his Twitter feed raced through refreshes at a speed he’d never before seen. Ironic. None of the people he wanted to speak to were talking, but it seemed like everyone else was.
Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome: 2:04 p.m.
What does it mean to truly believe? To know beyond doubt that you are here, that you are never far from my side? O Lord, I believe. Help my disbelief.
Gabriella Fierro whispered her prayers silently from her customary perch at the end of the sixth pew in Santa Maria in Trastevere. Her lunch break had finally come, a good two hours into the afternoon, and she’d immediately made her way to her preferred spot in all of Rome. She’d at last escaped the clutches of her boss, wholly deprived of any interaction with the buzz going on outside her office door all morning. But she hadn’t arrived here ready to curse him, as she’d thought she might. She was genuinely in need of refreshment. Of spiritual strength. And D’Antonio had no part to play in that.
Gabriella had discovered the Santa Maria in Trastevere church in her teens and it had been her personal sanctuary ever since—despite an encounter two years ago in which it had suddenly become anything but peaceful. Gunshots and death in an ancient shrine were hard to put from one’s mind, but she’d not allowed them to rob her of her one place of solace.
She sat with the creases of her beige slacks running in neatly parallel lines down her legs, pressed together with her hands folded on her lap. Her hazel eyes stayed open as she stared up at the shimmering mosaic that covered the apse behind the altar. She knew that most people prayed with their eyes closed, but what were these glorious scenes for, if not to help a heart draw closer to God? And in a life as demarcated by the lonely lines of the struggle for advancement as hers, such closeness was precisely what she desired. If she couldn’t find it with another human being, she would take it with God.
Gabriella supposed she’d always believed in God in some way or another. That had been true even in the long years of her difficult childhood, before her family had discovered the Church. She wouldn’t have known what to call him, or what to make of him, back then. But then she and her parents had undergone a kind of family conversion, and no one had taken their entrance into the Catholic faith more seriously than Gabriella. For a while, in her late teens, she’d even considered becoming a nun. She’d spent a summer as a postulant at the Convent of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy, living with the sisters and waiting for God to call her fully into the habit. But that call hadn’t come.
She’d been disappointed at the result, but it hadn’t dulled her piety. Now, looking back through her thirty-one-year-old life, she could see that her faith had always stayed with her—which in the midst of so many other trials was a source of comfort.
Still, that didn’t make it straightforward. As Gabriella experienced more of life, she was coming to appreciate the scripture’s strange statement all the more personally. Lord, I believe. Help my disbelief. How strange a mystery, the human heart, that it could contain belief and disbelief in apparently equal measure. That it could be afraid of that which supposedly did away with fear.
The crooked orange light that beamed through the high windows of the church glinted on the colored tiles of the thirteenth-century mosaics. Christ sat enthroned on his marble seat wearing white and flowing gold. The Blessed Virgin was at his right, while around them a host of apostles and bishops gathered in pious council. Beneath Christ’s feet were a flock of sheep, artfully produced from white stone and keeping their gaze upon their chief shepherd. High above, blue and white rays of mosaic light poured down from the Holy Spirit, represented by a tiny dove.
Gabriella gazed longingly at the image. The picture was perfect. It was the vision of a harmony and peace so rarely echoed in the world she knew outside.
As if on cue, the tiny Nokia in her breast pocket started to buzz. For the first time since entering the space, Gabriella closed her eyes, forcing herself not to capstone her moment of retreat with anger at the intrusion. Work was work. It was going to break through the silence eventually. Her boss would make sure of that.
Opening her eyes once again, she made the sign of the cross and slid out of the side of the old pew into the church’s center aisle. Genuflecting toward the altar, she turned and walked to the exit. With each step the pious, humble woman was transformed into the professional that Gabriella Fierro had to be at all times outside these walls.
As she approached the door, she reached into her jacket pocket and retrieved the tiny buzzing phone. She’d been left alone for nearly forty-five minutes. That was far longer than she usually got. Maybe miracles really did happen.
She flipped open the phone. The station’s familiar number flashed on the display.
Pulling the thin floral silk scarf from the top of her head and bundling it into her bag, she shook loose her golden-blond hair. She stepped through the doors into the colonnaded portico that led to the Piazza di Santa Maria. The afternoon hour in the popular quarter meant that, as usual, it was buzzing with young, fashionable types filling the cafés that poured out on to street-side tables.
She took a refreshing breath. Her break was over. The phone was at her ear, and over the bustle around her she began to speak.
“Hello, this is In
spector Fierro.”
Another woman’s voice sounded from the far end of the line. Agente Flora Costanzo was one of the few members of the Monteverde XVI station whom Gabriella considered a close friend. A fellow woman battling it out in a man’s profession in a man’s universe, and under the same oppressive thumb of the man they both called boss. And Flora was still several rungs down the ladder, poor thing.
“Gabriella, where are you?” she asked.
“Where am I always at around this time?”
“You’re in church? Holy shit, it’s Sunday. I forgot.”
Gabriella cringed at her friend’s irreverent language. Flora wasn’t a believer, though she did Gabriella the favor of treating church matters with as much reverence as she could muster. Which wasn’t all that much.
Her next words were less irreverent than puzzling.
“I take it you’ve heard, then?”
Gabriella’s movement hesitated before the steps of the massive fountain at the center of the piazza.
“Heard what?”
“Christ, Gabriella! You, of all people! I thought you prayed to the man, after all!”
Another cringe, but now Gabriella was confused. “Flora, who are you talking about? What are you talking about?”
“The Pope!” her friend cried down the line. “Your Supreme Leader, or Excellent Holiness, or whatever you call him.”
The tightening at Gabriella’s shoulders this time was more pronounced.
“What about him?” she snapped.
“He’s been healed. In front of the whole damned world! And Gabriella, you won’t believe who people are saying did it.”
9
Headquarters of Global Capital Italia, Rome: 2:48 p.m.
The two assassins walked through the head office with impunity, a right reserved for a select few. None of the three secretaries en route to the corner suite so much as spoke to them as they approached, the third only pressing a small red button at her desk, illuminating a light in the room beyond, which gave indication to its inhabitant that visitors were imminent.