The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  The solemn oath sworn by the two popes who succeeded Peter was transmitted from century to century.

  * * *

  And the obelisk in front of which Father Nil paused for a moment, that morning – the sirocco had dropped, and Rome was sparkling in all its glory – was the very same one at the foot of which, nineteen centuries earlier, one of Jesus’s disciples, reconciled with his God by penitence and pardon, had willingly faced up to a terrible execution.

  For Peter had hidden the truth from the Christians: he alone knew that he did not deserve their veneration, and wished to die a shameful death, scorned by all. But he had not fled the persecution. Quite the opposite: he had gone to hand himself over to Nero’s police to expiate his faults. And to be able to get Linus to swear that he would transmit the secret.

  Ever since, that secret had gone no further than the Vatican Hill.

  The thirteenth apostle had not spoken.

  45

  Nil loved to stroll and daydream in St Peter’s Square early in the morning, before the tourists got there. He moved out of the shadow of the obelisk to enjoy the already warm sunshine. “They say that it’s the obelisk that stood in the centre of Nero’s circus. In Rome, time doesn’t exist.”

  His left hand kept a tight hold on his bag, in which he had placed, on leaving San Girolamo, the most precious of his notes, extracted from the papers he had placed on the bookshelves. His room could be searched here just as easily as in the Abbey, and he knew that now he had to mistrust everyone. “But not Remby – never!” As he left, he slipped into his bag the roll with the negative of the snapshot he had taken in Germigny. One of the four leads that Andrei had left behind, though he still didn’t know what to make of it.

  When Leeland reached his office, while Nil was still day-dreaming at the foot of the obelisk and musing on the empires that are consolidated by time, he found a note summoning him immediately to see a minutante of the Congregation. A certain Mgr Calfo, whose path he had sometimes crossed in a corridor, without altogether knowing what place he occupied in the organization chart of the Vatican.

  Two storeys and a labyrinth of corridors further down, he was surprised to see the prelate installed in an almost luxurious office, whose single window looked out directly over St Peter’s Square. The man was short, podgy, and looked both self-confident and smooth-tongued. “An inhabitant of the Vatican galaxy,” reflected the American.

  Calfo did not ask him to sit down.

  “Monsignor, the Cardinal has requested me to keep him informed of your conversations with Father Nil, who has come to give you a hand. His Eminence – and it would be surprising if this were not the case – takes a close interest in the studies of our specialists.”

  On his desk, in full view, lay the note handed over by Leeland to Catzinger the day before: in it, he summarized his first conversation with Nil, but said nothing whatever about his friend’s confidential remarks on his research into St John’s Gospel.

  “His Eminence has passed your first report on to me: it shows that there is a friendly, trusting relation between yourself and the Frenchman. But that’s inadequate, Monsignor, quite inadequate! I can’t believe that he told you nothing about the nature of the talented work he has been doing, and for so long!”

  “I didn’t think that the details of a general conversation could interest the Cardinal to such an extent.”

  “All the details, Monsignor. You need to be more precise, and less reserved, in your reports. They will save a lot of the Cardinal’s valuable time, since he wants to follow every new scientific advance – it’s his duty as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. We expect you to collaborate, Monsignor, and you know why – don’t you?”

  A feeling that Leeland could not suppress, an upsurge of muted anger, overcame him. He pursed his lips and said nothing.

  “Do you see this episcopal ring?” Calfo stretched out his hand. “It’s an admirable masterpiece, fashioned at a period when people still understood the language of precious stones. Amethyst, which most Catholic prelates choose, is a mirror of humility and reminds us of the ingenuousness of St Matthew. But this is a jasper, which is the reflection of faith, associated with St Peter. At every instant it forces me to face anew the thing for which my life is one long struggle: the Catholic faith. It is that faith, Monsignor, which is concerned at the work being done by Father Nil. You must hold back nothing of what he tells you – as you have done.”

  Calfo dismissed him in silence, then sat at his desk. He opened the drawer and drew from it a bundle of pages torn from a notepad: the shorthand account of the previous day’s conversation. “I’m still the only person who knows that Leeland isn’t playing the game. Antonio has worked well.”

  As he made his way back along the corridors to his office, Leeland tried to stifle his anger. That minutante knew that he had concealed a whole swathe of his conversation with Nil. How did he know?

  “Someone’s been overhearing us! I’m being bugged, here in the Vatican!”

  Once again the hatred welled up in him. They had made him suffer too much, they had destroyed his life.

  As he came into Leeland’s tiny office, Nil apologized for being late.

  “Sorry, I was having a stroll out on the Square…”

  He sat down, propped his bag against one of the chair legs, and smiled.

  “I’ve put all my most precious notes together in there. I need to show you my conclusions – they’re provisional, but you’ll start to understand…”

  Leeland interrupted him with a wave of his hand, and scribbled a few words on a piece of paper, which he held out to Nil, placing his forefinger on his lips. In surprise, the Frenchman took the paper and glanced at it. “They’re listening in on us. Don’t say anything, I’ll explain. Not here.”

  He raised his eyes to Leeland in astonishment. In a tone of volubility, the latter carried on:

  “So, settled into San Girolamo okay? Yesterday there was quite a sirocco – hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable for you?”

  “Er… oh, yes, actually, I had a headache all evening. What…”

  “There’s no point in us going back to the Vatican book stacks today: I’d like to show you what I’ve got on my computer, you’ll see what I’ve already done. It’s all over at my place. Would you like to come with me? Now? It’s ten minutes’ walk, Via Aurelia.”

  He nodded imperiously at the flabbergasted Nil and rose to his feet without waiting for him to answer.

  Just as they were leaving the corridor for the stairwell, Leeland let Nil go on ahead of him and turned round. From the office next to his own he saw a minutante emerge, someone he didn’t know. The man quietly locked the door and started to come towards them. He was wearing elegant clerical costume, and in the darkness of the corridor Leeland could make out only his dark gaze, both melancholy and disquieting.

  He quickly caught up with Nil, who was waiting for him on the first steps of the stairwell, looking just as bewildered.

  “Let’s go down. Quick.”

  46

  They crossed Bernini’s colonnade. Leeland looked all round and took Nil’s arm in a familiar gesture.

  “My friend, this morning I obtained the proof that our conversation yesterday was overheard.”

  “Like in an embassy in Soviet times!”

  “The Soviet Empire no longer exists, but here you’re at the nerve centre of another empire. I’m dead certain about what I’m saying, don’t ask me any more. Mon pauvre ami, what hornet’s nest have you got yourself embroiled in?”

  They walked in silence. The traffic was extremely heavy on the Via Aurelia, and made any conversation impossible. Leeland stopped outside a modern apartment block at the corner of the next street.

  “Here we are, I’ve got a studio on the third floor. The Vatican pays the rent, my salary as a minutante wouldn’t be enough.”

  As they crossed the threshold of Leeland’s studio, Nil whistled in quiet admiration.

  “Monsigno
r, what a wonderful place!”

  A spacious living room was divided into two. The first part contained a baby grand piano, around which a whole battery of electro-acoustic equipment was scattered. An openwork bookshelf filled with books separated off the second part: two computers linked to the most sophisticated peripherals – printers, a scanner and keypads that Nil was unable to identify. Leeland invited him to make himself comfortable and uttered an embarrassed little laugh. “It’s my American abbey that gave me all this stuff. It’s worth a fortune! They were furious at the way I was dismissed from my post as abbot – which I’d been elected to in the proper way – for reasons of church politics. The Vatican requires me to sign in at my office mornings and evenings. Then I go off to work in the book stacks or come back here. Breczinsky has authorized me to photograph certain manuscripts, which I’ve scanned into the computer.”

  “Why did you tell me not to trust him?”

  Leeland seemed to hesitate before replying.

  “During the years when we were students in Rome, you could see the Vatican from the Aventine Hill, a mile or so away: it was a long way, Nil, a really long way. You were fascinated by the prelates dancing their ballet round the Pope, you enjoyed it as a spectator, proud to belong to a machine that possesses such a prestigious bodywork. Now you’re not a spectator any longer: you’re an insect, pinned to the canvas, caught in the spider’s web, stuck there like a defenceless fly.”

  Nil listened to him in silence. Ever since Andrei’s death, he had sensed that his life had been turned upside down, that he had entered a new world of which he knew nothing. Leeland continued:

  “Josef Breczinsky is a Pole, one of those they call ‘the Pope’s men’. Totally dedicated to the person of the Holy Father, and thus torn between the different tendencies in the Vatican, all the more violent because they bubble away underground. For years I’ve been working ten yards away from his office, and I still know nothing about him – except that he bears the weight of an infinite suffering – you can read it in his face. He seems to have taken a liking to you: take great care about what you tell him.”

  Nil restrained his desire to seize Leeland by the arm.

  “And what about you, Remby? Are you also an… an insect stuck in the spider’s web?”

  The American’s eyes misted over with tears.

  “Me?… My life’s over, Nil. They destroyed me, because I believed in love. The same way they can destroy you, because you believe in truth.”

  Nil realized he should not persist. “Not today,” he thought. “Such distress in his eyes!”

  The American got a grip on himself.

  “I’m completely unable to collaborate with you on your scholarly work, but I’ll do my very best to help you: Catholics have always tried to ignore the fact that Jesus was Jewish! Make the best use of your stay in Rome, the Gregorian manuscripts can wait if necessary.”

  “We’ll work in the book stacks every day, so as not to arouse suspicions. But I’m resolved to pursue Andrei’s research. His note mentioned four leads that can be followed. One of them concerns a recently discovered stone slab in the Germigny church, with an inscription dating back to the period of Charlemagne. We took a quick snapshot opposite it, the inscription had greatly surprised Andrei. I have the negative here – do you think that with your computer equipment you can maybe develop it?”

  Leeland seemed relieved: talking technology enabled him to escape the ghosts he had just referred to.

  “You’ve no idea what a computer can do! If they’re the characters of a language that it possesses in its memory, it can reconstitute letters or words from a text that has been eroded by time. Show me your negative.”

  Nil picked up his bag and held the roll over to his friend. They moved to the other part of the room, and Leeland switched on the boxes that started to blink. He opened one of them.

  “Laser scanner, latest generation.”

  Fifteen seconds later, the slab appeared on the screen. Leeland manipulated the mouse, tapped away at the keyboard, and the surface of the image started to be swept, very smoothly, by a sheaf of light.

  “It’ll take twenty minutes. While it’s getting on with it, come over to the piano, I’ll play you Children’s Corner.”

  While Leeland, eyes closed, brought Debussy’s delicate melodic lines to life under his fingers, the sheaf of light from the computer passed untiringly over the reproduction of a mysterious Carolingian inscription.

  Photographed, in the twilight of the twentieth century, by a monk led to his death by this snapshot.

  At the same moment, Mgr Calfo was picking up his mobile phone.

  “So they’ve left the office of the Congregation and headed straight off to the Americano’s apartment? Okay, stay in the neighbourhood, keep a discreet eye on their movements, and this evening you can write your report for me.”

  He mechanically stroked the elongated lozenge shape of his green jasper.

  47

  On the computer screen, the inscription on the Germigny slab now showed up more clearly.

  “Look, Nil: it’s perfectly legible. They’re Latin letters, the computer has restored them. And then look, at the beginning and end of the text there are two Greek letters – alpha and omega- which it had identified beyond any possibility of error.”

  “Can you do a copy for me?”

  Nil was contemplating the inscription on the printout. Leeland waited for him to speak.

  “Yes, it’s the text of the Symbolon of Nicaea, the Creed. But it’s set out in a completely incomprehensible way…”

  They brought their chairs closer to each other. “It’s like before,” thought Nil, “when I went to his room to study with him, side by side under the same lamp.”

  “Why has the letter alpha been added before the first word in the text,” he continued, “and the letter omega after the last one? Why are those two letters, the first and the last in the Greek alphabet, artificially put down on a text written in Latin and considered to be unalterable? Why have the words been chopped up like that, without their meaning being taken into account? I can see only one possible explanation: we mustn’t bother about the meaning, since there isn’t one, but about the way the text has been set out. Andrei told me he had never seen this; he certainly suspected that this way of cutting up the text had a particular meaning, and he had to come to Rome before realizing that the Creed, modified in this way, had something to do with the three other clues jotted down in his note. Right now, I’ve only deciphered one, the Coptic manuscript.”

  “You haven’t told me about that…”

  “That’s because I’ve discovered the meaning of the words, but not the sense of the whole message. And the sense may lie in the incomprehensible way this text was inscribed in the eighth century.”

  Nil reflected, then continued:

  “As you know, for the Greeks alpha and omega signified the beginning and end of time…”

  “As in the Apocalypse of St John?”

  “Exactly. When the author of the Apocalypse writes, ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth’, he has Christ in glory say:

  ‘I am Alpha and Omega,

  the first and the last,

  the beginning and the end.

  “The letter alpha means that a new world is beginning, and the letter omega indicates that that world will last for eternity. Framed between those two letters, the odd way the text has been cut up seems to allude to a new world order, one which cannot ever be modified: ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, something that must last until the end of time.”

  “Are alpha and omega frequently used as symbols in the Bible?”

  “Not at all. They are found only in the Apocalypse, traditionally ascribed to John. So the conclusion seems to be that if this text is ‘set’ between the alpha and the omega in this way, the arrangement must have something to do with St John’s Gospel.”

  Nil got up and stood right in front of the closed window.

  “The text is arranged in
dependently of the meaning of the words, and has some link to St John’s Gospel. That’s all I can say, until I can sit down at my desk and look at this inscription every which way, as Andrei must have done. In any case, everything gravitates around the Fourth Gospel, and that’s why my research was of such interest to my old friend.”

  Nil motioned Leeland to join him at the window.

  “You won’t see me tomorrow: I’ll be locked away in my room in San Girolamo, and I’m only coming out when I’ve found the meaning of this inscription. Let’s meet up the day after tomorrow; I hope I’ll have a better idea by then. Then you’ll have to let me use the Internet, I need to do research in all the great libraries of the world.”

  He jutted his chin towards the cupola of St Peter’s dome, emerging from above the rooftops.

  “Perhaps Andrei died because he’d come across something that threatened all that…”

  If, instead of gazing at the Vatican dome, they had glanced down into the street, they would have spotted a young man having a quiet smoke, sheltering from the December chill in a carriage entrance. Like any casual passer-by, he was wearing light-coloured trousers and a thick jacket.

  His dark eyes never left the third floor of the apartment block on the Via Aurelia.

  48

  Late that evening, Catzinger’s office was the only one with its lights on in the Congregation building. He told Calfo to come in, and addressed him in tones of command:

  “Monsignor” – the Cardinal was holding a simple sheet of paper – “late this afternoon I received Leeland’s second report. He’s kidding around with us. According to him, the only thing they discussed today was Gregorian chant. But you tell me they stayed locked up together in the apartment on the Via Aurelia all morning long?”