by Morris West
“Of course! This is all very sinister, Georg!”
“I warned you it might be. Sit tight and light a candle for us. Auf wiedersehen.”
Mendelius set down the receiver, and began absently leafing through the typewritten pages of Jean Marie’s list. Right from the beginning he had accepted Anneliese Meissner’s dismissive description of it as “an aide-mémoire pulled out of a filing cabinet.” He had given no thought at all to the stretch and potency of friendship between high men. But Rainer had understood its importance; Rainer had opened a whole new area of investigation and was now at risk because of it.…
Lotte stuck her head around the the door and asked, “What did Rainer want?”
“He was rather cryptic. He wanted me to confirm that four names were on this list from Jean Marie. He also wanted to tell me he was coming overland to Tübingen and bringing Pia with him.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that Rainer was under surveillance but he thought better of it.
“Oh, dear!” Lotte was instantly the housewife. “That does make complications. I’ll have to change the rooms about. Do you think we could put Lars Larsen up here in the study?”
“Whatever you want, liebchen.… Any chance of some coffee?”
“Chocolate,” said Lotte firmly. “I don’t want you tossing about all night.” She kissed him and went out.
Mendelius turned back to his letter. He was tempted to make reference to Rainer’s phone call and ask for further explanation of the significance of the list, but he thought better of it. Italian mails were never secure and he did not wish to be too specific.
… So I find myself returning again and again to your letter and annexures and I am exercised by the problem of presenting your ideas in open forum. I wonder how you would wish them presented, for example, to the people on your list.…
In what terms do we discuss the Parousia with a twentieth-century audience of believers and nonbelievers? I ask, my dear Jean, whether we have not corrupted its meaning out of all recognition. We talk of triumph, judgment, “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with great power and majesty.…”
I wonder whether the power and the majesty and the glory may not demonstrate themselves far otherwise than we expect. I remember the phrase in your letter: “a moment of exquisite agony” and how you explained it as a sudden perception of the oneness of all things.… Like the dying Goethe, I cry still for more light. I am a sensual man, burdened with too much learning and too little real understanding At the end of a long day, I know I am very content with Lotte’s hot chocolate and her arms around me in the dark.…
Lars Larsen, brusque, dapper and voluble, arrived an hour before midday after a night flight from New York and a breakneck drive from Frankfurt. Within fifteen minutes he was closeted with Mendelius, reading him the facts of life within the literary establishment.
“… Yes, I’ll represent you and Rainer but not until I’ve worked out a satisfactory contract between you both—and that has to be at least sixty-forty in your favour. Before we even get that far Rainer has to disclose his arrangements with Die Welt. If he’s a staff man, pure and simple, the Springer group can claim full ownership of anything he contributes to this project.… So, first I talk to Rainer alone. You stay away until I’m ready.… Now, don’t give me any arguments, Carl. Fifty-fifty just isn’t acceptable. You have to control this thing, and you can’t do that unless you own the votes.… Besides, it’s you the customers want to buy. I’ve got three bids for world rights to serial and book publication with a million and a half up front—and that’s on your name, and your association with Gregory the Seventeenth, not on Rainer! Once I see what you’ve got we can probably raise the floor to two million… plus a whole lot of healthy spin-offs. So get it clear, Carl! You’re making Rainer a wealthy man. You don’t have to apologize for the terms.…”
“I wasn’t thinking about Rainer.” Mendelius was suddenly moody. “I was thinking about myself. When this story is published, a lot of people will want to discredit me as they discredited Jean Marie. Two million dollars could make me look like a very expensive Judas.”
“If you do it for nothing,” said Lars Larsen, “they’ll think you’re a schnook—too crazy to be believed. Money always smells clean. However, if it bothers you, talk to your lawyer, maybe he’ll advise you to set up a benefice for fallen women! That’s not my problem. The money I get you guarantees that your publishers have to get you a big readership… and that, in the end, is what you want. Now, can I look at the documents, please?”
Mendelius unlocked the old safe and brought out the envelope containing Jean Marie’s letter and the encyclical. Larsen glanced at the documents and then asked bluntly:
“These are genuine?”
“Yes.”
“You can authenticate the handwriting?”
“Of course—and I’ve verified them in personal discussion with the author.”
“Good. I’ll want a notarized deposition to that effect I’d also like to photograph some specimen passages… not necessarily the important ones. For this kind of money the clients demand boiler-plate protection. And the last thing they want is a run-in with the Vatican over phony attributions.”
“I’ve never known you so careful before, Lars.”
“We’re only at the beginning, Carl.” Larsen was not amused. “Once this story breaks, your past and present will be under the microscope. So will Rainer’s—and professionally, at least, he’d better be squeaky clean. Now do you think you could get me another cup of coffee and leave me alone to study this stuff…”
“While you’re doing it,” said Mendelius with a grin, “make a few notes on the internal evidence: the handwriting, the polished French style, the quality of the reasoning and the rendering of personal emotion.”
“I know about internal evidence,” said Larsen tartly. “One of my earliest clients was a master plagiarist.… He was sued for a million and lost. I had to return my commissions.… Now, what about that coffee?”
When he came down to lunch at one-thirty, Larsen was a different man, shaken and subdued. He picked at his food, and talked disjointedly.
“… I’m usually detached when I read. I have to be.… No one can sustain the impact of all those student personalities clamouring at you from the manuscripts.… But that letter, Lotte! It had me in tears. I never go to church except for weddings and funerals. But my grandfather on my mother’s side was an old-fashioned Swedish Lutheran. When I was little he would sit me on his knee and read the Bible to me.… Upstairs, it was as if I were listening to him again.…”
“I know what you mean.” Lotte picked up the discussion eagerly. “That’s why I keep saying to Carl that this account of Jean Marie must be done with love and fidelity.… No one must be allowed to make it cheap or vulgar.”
“How do you feel, then, about Georg Rainer?”
“I don’t know him very well. He’s charming and witty. I think he’s very knowledgeable about Italy and the Vatican. However, I do say Carl must stay in control of this project.”
“Let’s be clear about this.” Mendelius was suddenly edgy and irritable. “Georg Rainer arrives here this afternoon as our guest. The important thing is that he and I work happily and productively together. I don’t want any arguments about money to spoil that. And I don’t want to offer him a halfhearted welcome either.”
“Jawohl, Herr Professor!” Lotte made a mocking mouth at his solemnity.
“Trust me, Carl.” Lars Larsen grinned at him. “I’m a very good surgeon. I cut clean and all my patients recover!… Now I want to tie up your phone for a couple of hours. They’re open for business in New York; and after what I’ve read—oh, boy!—do we have business!”
Afterwards, in the kitchen, Lotte giggled helplessly to Mendelius.
“Lars is so funny! As soon as he starts talking money, you can feel the electricity. His eyes sparkle and you almost expect his hair to stand on end.… I’m sure he’d be shocked if you t
old him; but he’s like the fat man at the circus gate, shouting his head off, selling tickets for Judgment Day!”
Lars Larsen’s sale campaign went on all the afternoon. At five-thirty, with the bidding at two and a quarter million, he closed the market. As he explained to Mendelius, he now had a handsome cash guarantee with which to begin discussions with Georg Rainer. But Georg Rainer was late. At seven, he called in from a roadhouse twenty miles south of Tübingen. He explained that they had been followed out of Zurich, that he had shaken the surveillance team before the border post, and then driven half the country roads in Swabia to make sure they had not been picked up again. At eight-thirty he arrived with Pia, windblown and travel-worn. An hour later, relaxed over Lotte’s ample supper, he explained the melodrama.
“… The most extraordinary thing about the abdication was the secrecy with which it was accomplished. Nobody, but nobody, was willing to talk.… Which prompted us in the press corps to believe that Gregory the Seventeenth must not only have made powerful enemies, but also alienated most of his friends inside and outside the Vatican. We knew him as you did, Carl, for a man of singular charm. So where had all his friends gone?… Then you told me about this list and it seemed to me that it must have a special importance.… You said it was typewritten. So it had to have come from a file. I asked myself who would know about Gregory the Seventeenth’s private file.… I came up with his private secretary.… In my records he was listed as Monsignor Berman Logue, who, in spite of his Irish name, is a Frenchman, a descendant of one of the wild geese who fled to France to fight the English.… I enquired what had happened to him after the abdication.…”
“That was clever of you, Georg. Logue was the man who denounced the encyclical to the Curia and started the whole affair. I never thought to ask how he was rewarded.”
“Apparently not well. He was moved out of the papal household into the Secretariat for Public Communications. I had been told he was a rather unhappy fellow who might be prepared to air his grievances.… On the contrary! He was the perfect clerical functionary—precise, patronizing, absolutely convinced that the finger of God guided every scribe in Vatican City.… Clearly he was not about to spill secrets on my plate. So, I told him I was working on an account of the last days of Gregory the Seventeenth, in which he, Monsignor Logue, had played a key role.… That shook him. He asked me to define the role he was supposed to have played. I told him that he had informed the Curia of the contents of Gregory the Seventeenth’s last unpublished encyclical. That really upset him. He denied any such act. He disclaimed knowledge of any encyclical. Then I mentioned the list and quoted from it the names which you had confirmed to me. He demanded to know where I had seen that document. I told him I had to protect my sources; but clearly, I might be prepared to trade some information with him. He told me he knew about the list but he had never seen it. He went on to explain Gregory the Seventeenth was a great believer in personal diplomacy. He was altogether too vulnerable to gestures of friendship. The Secretariat of State saw great dangers also in his attitude towards Les Amis du Silence.…”
“The what?” It was almost a shout from Mendelius. Rainer threw back his head and laughed.
“I thought that would get to you, Carl! It certainly did to me. Who were the Friends of Silence? I asked. But our little Monsignore realized that he had made a big blunder and urged me to forget that I had ever heard such a phrase.… I tried to reassure him. He refused to be comforted. The interview was over. I was left with the four names: Petrov and the others and something called Les Amis du Silence.… That night, Saturday, I took Pia to dinner at Piccola Roma and afterwards to a discothèque. We left about two in the morning. The streets were almost deserted. That was when we realized we were being followed.… We’ve been under surveillance ever since.”
“But no mischief?” asked Larsen. “No violence?”
“Not yet,” said Rainer dubiously. “But once they know where the list is…”
“Who are ‘they’?” asked Lotte.
“I have no idea.” Rainer’s gesture was one of weary puzzlement. “Unlike Carl here, I am not surprised by anything the Vatican does. But in this case we are dealing with a single cleric, a zealot, a known informer, who was willing to topple his own master. He may be serving other interests than the Vatican. Pia has her own opinion.”
“Please!” Mendelius urged her into the discussion. “We could use some fresh thoughts.”
Pia Menendez hesitated for a moment and then explained quietly, “My father was a diplomat. He used to say that diplomacy was possible only between established institutions, good or bad. In a revolutionary situation you could not negotiate, only gamble.… Now, from what Georg has told me, Gregory the Seventeenth believed that a worldwide revolutionary situation would follow an atomic catastrophe and that he and others would have to gamble on men of goodwill inside and outside the Church. They might be presently obscure, but such as could survive into positions of power.”
“Men presently obscure.” Larsen seized on the phrase. “Or perhaps out of favour, or even considered dangerous to existing régimes. That would make another reason for pushing Gregory the Seventeenth off the throne.”
“But it doesn’t tell me who is having us shadowed,” said Georg Rainer.
“Let’s reason a little.” Mendelius entered the talk again. “Monsignor Logue said he had never seen the list. That’s possible. Once Jean Marie knew him for an informer he would obviously try to protect his documents. But Logue knew the list existed.… Once he knew you had access to it, Georg, whom would he tell: his present masters in the Vatican—or those other unspecified interests? Round-the-clock surveillance doesn’t sound like a Vatican tactic. As Pia points out, they, above all, play the institutional game. So, my guess is the outside interest. What’s your view on that, Georg?”
“None until I’ve read all your documents. I’d like to take them to bed with me.”
“Before you go to bed,” said Lars Larsen hastily, “I’d like a short chat about contracts.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” said Georg Rainer with a grin. “Mendelius is the Jesuit among us. If your contracts satisfy his sense of justice, I’ll sign ‘em.”
“I’ll get the stuff Jean Marie sent me,” said Mendelius. “I warn you, it will keep you awake all night.”
“For once,” said Pia, the diplomat’s daughter, “I’m happy to be sleeping alone!”
That night Mendelius lay wakeful, long into the small, sinister hours after midnight, trying, as any good historian should, to think himself back into the ancient battles of Christendom: the battle to establish a codex of belief, a constitution for the assembly and to hold them secure against the encroachments of the fantasists and the forgers.
The battles were always bitter and sometimes violent. Men of goodwill were sacrificed without mercy. Complaisant rogues flourished under the umbrella of orthodoxy. Marriages of convenience were made between Church and State. There were harsh divorcements of nations and communities from union with the elect.
The battle continued still. Jean Marie Barette, lately a Pope, was one of its casualties. He had invoked the Spirit; the Cardinals had invoked the assembly—and the assembly had won, as always, by the weight of numbers and the strength of the organization. This was the lesson the Romans had taught the Marxists: keep the codex pure and the hierarchy exclusive. With the one you smoke out the heretic; with the other you crush him.
Which brought Mendelius by swift turnabout to this question: who were The Friends of Silence? It was tempting to adopt Pia Menendez’ theory of men waiting in the shadows to be called to salvage a situation of revolution or catastrophe. On the other hand, he remembered a letter from the long-ago when Jean Marie, still a Cardinal, had inveighed against elitist movements in the Church.
… I distrust them, Carl! If I were Pope I should discourage actively anything that remotely resembled a secret society, a hermetic association, a privileged cadre in the Church. Of all societies, the assem
bly of the people of God should be the most open, the most sharing. There are enough mysteries in the universe without our fabricating any more.… But the Romans love their whispers and their gossip in the corridors and their secret archives!
It was hard to believe that the man who had written those words would set up his own elite club and give it so obvious a name. Was it not more probably that Les Amis du Silence was an outside group whose French title was designed to create the impression of approval by a French Pope? Years ago the Spaniards had set the example when they created their own authoritarian elite and called it Opus Dei—God’s work.
Still restless, Mendelius began rummaging in his memory for anything that would associate with The Friends of Silence. The word friends produced some odd correlatives: from the Society of Friends, to amicus curiae, and the Marquis de Mirabeau’s “Friend of Man.” The word silence produced a greater variety of associations. In the Mamertine Prison in Rome a dusty lamp burned in memory of the “Church of Silence”: the faithful denied the liberty to worship or persecuted for their adherence to the old faith. There was the Amyclean Silence, which forbade the citizens of Amyclae to speak to the Spartan threat, so that when the invasions did come, the city fell easy prey. There was the sinister Italian proverb: “Noble vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.”…
Drowsy at last, Mendelius decided that this might be the occasion to test Drexel on his promise to supply reference points on matters of fact. Lotte stirred and reached out in the dark for reassurance. He folded himself into her warmth and lapsed swiftly into sleep.
There were unexpected problems in Georg Rainer’s contract with Die Welt, so immediately after breakfast Lars Larsen left for Bonn and Berlin to talk with executives of the Springer group. He was jaunty and confident as always.
“They have to play ball. No agreement, no news-break—and Georg resigns! Leave it to me. You guys settle down and put the story together. I want to carry it back by hand to New York.”