Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  FORTY-TWO

  Rome, 2 March

  The Madonna was very old and very worn. Her face was a filigree of cracks, the blue paint of her robe was flaking in places, and the gold leaf of her halo had all but disappeared. Whether it was age that had most taken its toll, or adoration, it was impossible to say. But her eyes seemed tired and unfocused, as though the prayers and laments of numberless generations had at last proved too much for her. The spirit, like the flesh, has its limits, and compassion, whatever the theologians say, is not inexhaustible.

  Assefa stepped forward and added his candle to those already burning in front of the icon. He stood for almost a minute gazing at her ravaged face. She was black like him, and tired like him, and in her crumbling features he found more comfort than in all the city’s statues and paintings put together. He sighed and dropped to his knees, turning a plastic rosary between exhausted fingers.

  In a shadow close behind him, Patrick stood in silence, his hands clasped before him, keeping careful watch. Santa Maria delle Grazie was a little-frequented church off the beaten track in the Vicolo de’ Renzi, just south of the river in Trastevere. No tourists came here, not even the clever sort who toss aside their Baedekers and lose themselves deliberately among alleyways smelling of cats and rotting citrus peel. Even pilgrims were few and far between, a mere handful of cognoscenti drawn by the Black Virgin.

  According to legend, the icon had originally been brought to southern France from the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades, by a Templar knight, Guillaume de Pereille. Some said that it was, like so many other Black Virgins, the work of Saint Luke. After the Albigensian crusade of the thirteenth century, it had been carried from Languedoc to Turin, and from Turin to Rome, where it had been housed in its own chapel in Santa Maria delle Grazie and named La Madonna Mora. The more prosaic said it was probably the work of the Roman artist Pietro Cavallini, who was known to have painted a very similar Madonna di Constantinopoli for the Benedictine Abbey in Montevergine around 1290.

  Assefa had found the little church early in his seminary days. It had, in a sense, become his private chapel, his place of retreat. At first the Virgin herself had been the attraction: he had sought in her blackness a sort of mirror for himself, a spiritual location for all that was African in him and in danger of being engulfed by the legacy of Greece and Rome. He had prayed to her, and she had answered him in her tired and wounded fashion. But with time the church itself had won his heart: the small side chapels, in which a single light burned before the altar; the shadowed recesses, with their tiny figures of saints on marble pedestals; the odours of beeswax and frankincense, of polish and dry rot, of musty linen and crumbling stone.

  In the past, he had directed his feet to this asylum at least once a week. To flee the uninterrupted roar of traffic, the blaring of radios, the incessant chatter of the streets. To escape the cramped and closeted worlds of the seminary and the Accademia Pontificia. And more recently, to still the frenzied babble of his own thoughts.

  Now he had been driven here by fear. By fear and loathing and a world of doubts. He felt frozen by doubt, unable to think or act, yet aware that, if he did not act soon, he would fail to avert a terrible tragedy.

  Patrick waited patiently in the shadows. He himself felt no need for prayer. It was not a question of belief or disbelief; he had a simple horror of the numinous dark, of the loss of self that all these pleasant odours and muted colours signified. To Patrick, God would reveal himself in daylight or not at all.

  Assefa rose at last. His face was marked with tears, but he seemed less ill at ease.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already taken more time than I should.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘What about you, Patrick? Don’t you want to offer a single prayer?’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘I think it would only confuse me,’ he said.

  What about your friend?’ He meant Francesca. She was waiting outside, keeping watch on the streets.

  ‘You know what she thinks, Assefa. That all this is just a travesty, that the truth lies somewhere else.’

  Assefa sighed.

  Won’t you at least light a candle for her? The Madonna may be old, but she isn’t deaf or blind.’

  Patrick drew out a five-thousand-lire note from his pocket and dropped it in the slot at the candle stall. He took a long candle and lit it from Assefa’s. As he placed it in the holder, he glanced up at the icon. The fluttering light stroked the ancient gold like a moth’s wing brushing flame. The Virgin gazed at him. Had she really been in Languedoc? he wondered. Had she witnessed the first fires of the Inquisition, the blood of innocent children spilled at Beziers and Perpignan?

  For the expiation of sins, for the glory of the true Church.

  He turned his back on her. Not deaf? he thought. Not blind? Just callous, then.

  The photograph Assefa had found in Dublin had in small measure prepared Patrick for seeing Francesca again, but not for touching her or talking with her. More than anything, he found it difficult to accept the changes in her. He now realized that, from the moment in San Michele when he had first taken seriously the possibility of her still being alive, he had thought of her as frozen - a girl of twenty preserved in a magic, timeless realm out of which she would re-emerge to him exactly as he remembered her, young, energetic and in love.

  For him, of course, she had indeed been in limbo: a silent, frosted figure, wrapped away in his memory. The Francesca who had returned to him out of the darkness of San Vitale, however, was anything but a fragment of someone else’s past. There were streaks of grey in her hair, and her face was thin and pale and tired. In her eyes he could detect a far-away sadness, as though something deep within her had indeed died all those years ago.

  Since her appearance on San Vitale, they had hardly spoken. She had taken them to the mainland in absolute silence, steering by means of small, bobbing lights she had placed along the channels. The man with her had been introduced to them as Roberto Quadri, a lawyer. After beaching the boat, they walked to Caposile, where Francesca and Quadri had left a vehicle, a windowless Transit van with bedding on the floor. While Patrick and Assefa tried to rest in the back, she and the lawyer drove through the night to Rome, travelling on the autostrada via Bologna and Florence.

  Quadri had accompanied them as far as an apartment on the Via Grotta Pinta, a narrow, curving street in the old city, not far from the Campo de’ Fiori. The apartment was situated on the top floor of a tall, ochre-coloured building in a row of small shops and trattorie. It was large, sparsely-furnished and draughty, and it was clearly not anyone’s permanent residence. More like a safe house, Patrick thought.

  Who does this place belong to?’ he had asked.

  ‘Later,’ she had replied. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later. But now I want to sleep.’

  Quadri kissed her lightly on the cheek and shook hands with Patrick and Assefa.

  ‘I will see you all later,’ he said. ‘I have to sleep as well. But before that, I have other work to do. Ciao, Francesca. I’ll call on Dermot, tell him all went well.’

  Francesca slept until after ten, and in the end both Patrick and Assefa had relaxed sufficiently to give in to sleep as well. Over a breakfast of rolls and coffee, Assefa had asked if he could visit Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he knew was just a short distance away, on the other bank of the Tiber.

  Now, they walked back slowly over the Ponte Sisto. The river flowed sluggishly beneath their feet, yellow and muddy, almost out of strength. Assefa walked several paces ahead, preoccupied. Now that he was alone with Francesca, Patrick felt awkward and tongue-tied.

  ‘I feel this is still all a dream,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t make sense. You were dead: I saw them bury you.’

  Francesca shook her head. Her hair was tied back in a pony tail, just as he remembered it.

  ‘I was never dead, Patrick. Not ... in the sense that you mean. In other ways, perhaps. In all the ways t
hat matter.’ She paused. For a moment, just as they stepped down from the bridge, he caught sight of her profile. At that moment, he knew for the first time that she was truly alive. Other things might alter, but her profile was exactly the same.

  ‘I lost over twenty years, Patrick. I’m sorry, for you more than anything or anyone. Nothing I can do can ever make that up to you. But I had no choice; or I thought I had none. Believe me, I really thought that then.’

  ‘And now...?’

  ‘If I thought I could undo a single moment... But I can’t, so I don’t even try. I just try to make amends, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I know that. But in a few minutes we can get down to explanations. I’ve asked Roberto and another friend to meet us at the apartment. They’ll help me make things clear.’

  They walked through to the Campo de’ Fiori, where several market stalls were still open for business. Francesca seemed to know the stall-keepers well, and bought a quantity of vegetables, cheese and fish. Next to the fish stall stood an arch leading into a narrow alleyway.

  Francesca led them along it, explaining that it was a short-cut through to the Via Grotta Pinta. Half-way along, the alley became a covered passageway, dark and smelling of urine. They passed heavy iron gates on either side, and Patrick noticed that, behind them, the ground was littered with used hypodermics. Francesca glanced behind her.

  ‘You have to take care round here,’ she said. ‘Never come this way alone at night. There are muggings, sometimes worse.’ She walked on, her feet echoing between the passage’s narrow walls. ‘The old campo,’ she went on, ‘used to be the place where executions were carried out. They burned Giordano Bruno there in 1600. Because he said the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe, that nothing was finite.’ She paused and looked back again at Patrick, at the rusting hypodermics. ‘Do you think it hurts,’ she asked, ‘to be burned alive? Slowly, without strangulation? Would ideas help? Like a drug.’

  ‘Ideas?’

  ‘Beliefs, convictions, some sort of certainty.’ She looked into his face. He thought he saw traces of tears at the corners of her eyes. ‘Do you think it would ease the pain, believing the universe to be infinite? Do saints or scientists feel less than criminals when it comes to the stake?’

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘No one can.’ Assefa stood near them silently.

  Francesca said nothing. She looked along the dark passage to a patch of sunlight that indicated the position of the square.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No one has ever been able to give me an answer.’

  She turned and walked quickly away down the passage.

  FORTY-THREE

  When they got back to the apartment building, two men were waiting for them at the street door. Francesca smiled and greeted them warmly, kissing each briefly on the cheek. The taller of the two was a heavy man of about fifty, dressed in a short leather jacket and lightly checked trousers. His companion was Quadri, whom they now saw clearly for the first time. He was elegantly dressed, in his early thirties, and very thin.

  ‘Patrick, Assefa,’ said Francesca, calling them closer, ‘let me introduce Father Dermot O’Malley. Father O’Malley is an Irishman by training, but an Italian by profession. He’s lived here almost as long as I have. And he speaks better Italian.’

  The older man stepped forward and shook hands. He was robust, built more like a soldier than a priest. At one time, he had sported red hair, but the life had gone out of it years ago, leaving a thick grey mop that had broad streaks the colour of an old russet apple. Patrick fancied his sermons would lean towards the declamatory. He noticed that he did not wear a dog-collar.

  ‘You’ve already met Roberto,’ Francesca continued, turning to the younger man. ‘When he isn’t rescuing strangers from mysterious islands, Roberto works with Father O’Malley. That’s why he looks so tired, isn’t it, Roberto?’

  Patrick detected the concern underlying the mockery in her voice, and for a crazy instant felt something like a pang of jealousy. But he felt only grief for Francesca now, not love; what right had grief to jealousy?

  Quadri shook hands a little formally and stepped back. Patrick thought he looked ill. The handshake had been that of a sick man.

  ‘Patrick,’ said Francesca, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but Father O’Malley wants you to go with him while I take Assefa and Roberto up to the apartment. We’ll all meet here for lunch in about two hours.’

  Patrick felt a prick of disappointment. He was gradually growing accustomed to the thought that Francesca was not dead after all, and he had been anticipating an opportunity to ask some direct questions about what had happened to her. The questions, he supposed, would have to wait.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he lied. He wished someone would explain just who these people were and what their connection was with Francesca.

  O’Malley had parked his car, a Fiat, further down the street. As the priest lurched off into a maelstrom of honking traffic, Patrick braced himself for a rough ride and asked where they were going.

  ‘A mystery tour, Mr Canavan, a mystery tour. Not very magical, perhaps, but I think you’ll find it interesting.’ He spoke in what Patrick recognized as a broad Cork accent, an accent that thirty-odd years in Rome had done nothing to diminish.

  ‘Why just me? What about Assefa?’

  ‘Now, Mr Canavan, you must have noticed that your friend is not inconspicuous. There are people everywhere looking for the both of you. I don’t think they know yet that you’re in Rome, and I’d as soon keep it that way. I’m sure you would too. To be honest, I’m taking risks enough with yourself, but Father Makonnen is another matter entirely. He has far too many friends in this city for him to be wandering the streets. As it is, he should never have been out this morning.’

  The car swung across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, joining the traffic on the other side like a bee taking its place in a fast-moving swarm. As they headed up towards the Tiber, Patrick took a deep breath. He had guessed where they were going.

  O’Malley glanced sideways at him.

  ‘Relax, Mr Canavan. Or may I call you Patrick? You’ll be perfectly all right with me. We won’t stray within a million miles of Cardinal Fazzini’s office. Or a number of other offices I could mention but won’t.’

  As they drew closer to the Piazza Paoli, the traffic began to thicken and snarl up. Finally they came to a complete standstill among a pack of honking cars and motorcycles, yards from the bridge. O’Malley slipped into neutral and pulled on his handbrake.

  ‘We’ll be here for a little while,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad time of day. But then, in Rome it’s always a bad time of day. Suppose we fill in the time by your telling me how you came to be mixed up in all of this.’

  Bit by bit, Patrick went through the events that had brought him here, while all around him the traffic roared and drivers took out a lifetime’s frustrations on everybody in sight. The priest listened to him in silence, his manner growing increasingly serious as Patrick’s story unfolded. He asked no questions, showed no surprise, expressed no sentiments of either outrage or sympathy. By the time Patrick had finished, the brawling, angry world around them seemed to have been switched off, leaving them quiet in the sunshine, ringed by darker shadows and menaced by a different anger.

  ‘How well did you know Eamonn De Faoite?’ the priest asked finally.

  ‘Very well. I met him first when I was a student, in my Freshman year. He helped me a lot. You speak as if you knew him yourself.’

  O’Malley nodded.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, gazing out through the small windscreen at rays of sunlight falling on metal and glass, ‘Eamonn and I were old friends, very old friends. We met when I was a seminarian at May-nooth. He used to hear my confessions.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Jesus, I was never done confessing my sins in those days. I think I had the idea that, since I was going to be a priest, I had to be better than everybody else, get a
bsolution for the most trivial act. Well, Eamonn got me out of that habit soon enough. Mind you, if I thought I had things to confess then ...’

  There was a roar outside as the traffic began to loosen up. O’Malley let in the clutch and moved off honking loudly.

  We kept in touch after that, a bit like yourself and him. In fact, I think he mentioned your name to me once or twice. From time to time he’d come to Rome for a visit, and we’d have a week or two together then. He never could stand to stay at the Irish College. And I didn’t blame him: they think the only food in the world is champ and carrots.’

  Patrick could tell that O’Malley was struggling to smother powerful emotions, that Eamonn De Faoite’s death had brought him intense and permanent personal pain.

  They turned into the Via dei Corridoni, heading down towards the Vatican. On their left, the massive dome of St Peter’s struggled above the rooftops as though aching to be free of the nervous, jostling streets that hemmed it about like relatives about the bedside of a dying man.

  On the Via di Porta Angelica, they turned left through St Anne’s gate, the Vatican’s service entrance. It was almost clogged with cars, vans and motorcycles. The Swiss Guard on duty waved them

  through. A second guard on the inner gate took greater care. O’Malley wound down his window and held out a small pass. The guard nodded, saluted, and let them through.

  They headed straight along the Via del Belvedere and through a short tunnel into a courtyard where dozens of cars were parked, most of them bearing plates with the letters SCV, standing for Sacra Citta Vaticano. O’Malley drove into a space on the left.

  ‘Have you ever been in the Vatican before, Patrick?’

  Patrick shook his head.

  ‘Oh, that’s a pity. It’s a great place. Maybe we’ll have time for a proper tour another time. For your present information, you’re in the Cortile del Belvedere, the Belvedere Court. That door on your right takes you into the Vatican Library. But the door on the left is the one for us. It leads to the Secret Archives.’