Nil was leaving the studio: Mukhtar took off his headphones and rewound the tapes. One was for Calfo. He slipped the other into an envelope that he would take to the Egyptian embassy. Thanks to the diplomatic bag, it would be in the hands of the Supreme Guide at the Al-Azhar University the following morning.
His lips pursed in disgust. Not only was the American in cahoots with Nil, but he was a queer. Neither of them deserved to live.
73
That same evening, Calfo called an extraordinary meeting of the Society of St Pius V. It would be brief, but events required that the Twelve demonstrate their total solidarity around their crucified Master.
The Rector glanced over at the twelfth apostle: his eyes modestly lowered under his cowl, Antonio was waiting for the session to begin. Calfo had given him the task of putting pressure on Breczinsky, and had pointed out the Pole’s weak point: why hadn’t the Spaniard come to report to him, as had been arranged? Might his trust in one of the twelve apostles be misplaced? This would be the first time that had ever happened. He brushed away this disagreeable thought. Ever since his celebration, the night before, kneeling before Sonia transformed into a living icon, he had been afloat on a tide of euphoria. The Romanian girl had finally accepted all of his demands, keeping her nun’s cornet on her delicate little head right until the end.
Emboldened by this success, he had, on sending her away, informed her that next time he would be organizing an even more suggestive act of worship, that would unite them on a very intimate level with the sacrifice of the Lord. When he explained to her the ritual that he wanted her to join him in, Sonia had turned pale, and then fled.
He wasn’t worried: she’d be back, she had never refused him anything. This evening he needed to get through this meeting pretty quickly, so that he could return home where long and meticulous preparations needed to be done. He rose to his feet and cleared his throat.
“My brothers, the current mission is taking an unexpected and very satisfying turn. I’ve managed to get Lev Barjona, who is at present giving a series of concerts at the Academy of Santa Cecilia, to meet Father Nil. Actually, my intervention was superfluous: the Israeli intended to meet our monk in any event, which shows the extent to which Mossad too is interested in his research. In short, they’ve met, and in his conversations with the inoffensive intellectual, Lev casually dropped the information we had so long been looking for: the letter of the thirteenth apostle has not disappeared. There is indeed a copy in existence, and it is very probably in the Vatican.”
A quiver ran through the gathering, expressive of its stupefaction as well as its excitement. One of the Twelve raised his crossed forearms.
“How can that be possible? We suspected that a copy of that epistle had escaped our vigilance, but… in the Vatican!”
“We are here at the centre of Christendom, an immense web whose strands cover the whole planet. Everything ends up in the Vatican one day or another, including ancient manuscripts or texts discovered here or there: this is what must have happened in this case. Lev Barjona didn’t give away this information for free: he must be hoping that it will arouse Father Nil’s curiosity and lead him to this document, which the Jews covet as much as we do.”
“Brother Rector, is it necessary for us to run the risk of exhuming this letter? Oblivion has, as you know, always been the Church’s most powerful weapon against the thirteenth apostle, oblivion alone has ensured that his pernicious testimony remained harmless. Isn’t it better to prolong this salutary amnesia?”
The Rector seized this opportunity to remind the Eleven of the grandeur of their task. He solemnly extended his right hand, showing off the jasper of his ring.
“After the Council of Trent, St Pius V – the Dominican Antonio Ghislieri – was dismayed by the weakening of the Catholic Church, and did all in his power to save it from the shipwreck he sensed it was heading for. The most serious threat did not come from Luther’s recent rebellion, but from an old rumour that even the Inquisition had not managed to stifle: the tomb containing Christ’s bones existed and could be found somewhere in the deserts of the Near East. A lost epistle by a privileged witness of the Lord’s last moments claimed that not only had Jesus not risen from the dead, but that his body had in fact been buried by the Essenes in that region. You know all this, don’t you?”
The Eleven nodded.
“Before becoming Pope, Ghislieri had been Grand Inquisitor: he had learnt of the interrogations of the dissidents burnt alive for heresy, he had consulted certain minutes of the Templars’ trial, all documents that have now disappeared. He became convinced of the existence of Jesus’s tomb, and realized that its discovery would mean the definitive end of the Church. It was then, in 1570, that he created our Society, to preserve the secret of the tomb.”
They knew this too. Sensing their impatience, the Rector lifted his ring, which shed a brief gleam in the light of the wall lamps.
“Ghislieri ordered this episcopal ring in the shape of a coffin to be cut from a very pure jasper. Since that time, its shape has reminded every rector – when he removes it from the finger of his dead predecessor – of the nature of our mission: to ensure that no coffin containing the bones of the Crucified of Jerusalem can ever be discovered.”
“But,” one of the brothers asked, “if the echo of the thirteenth apostle’s letter has come down through the centuries, nothing proves that it indicates the exact location of the tomb. The desert is vast, and the sands have covered everything for ages!”
“Indeed, there was no risk of Jesus’s tomb being discovered so long as the desert was crossed by nothing more than camels. But the conquest of space has placed at our disposal extraordinarily sophisticated means of research. If they’ve been able to detect traces of water on a distant planet like Mars, they can also these days pick out all the bones in the deserts of the Negev and Idumaea, even those covered by sand. This is something that Pope Ghislieri could not have imagined. If the existence of the tomb becomes public knowledge, hundreds of radar planes or space probes will start to comb the desert from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. The sudden emergence of space technology creates a new risk, one that we cannot afford to run. We need to get our hands on that abominable document, and quickly, since the Israelis are on the same track as we are.”
He devoutly raised the jasper coffin to his lips, before hiding his hands under the sleeves of his alb.
“This explosive document must be placed in the shelter of the casket opposite us. We need to find it, not only to place it out of reach of our enemies, but also to obtain, thanks to its presence here, financial resources that will enable us to fulfil our ambition: to stem the drift of the West. You know how the Templars managed to acquire their immense fortune; the relic that we venerate every Friday 13th reminds us of it. This fortune can become ours, and we shall use it to preserve the divine identity of Our Lord.”
“What do you have in mind, Brother Rector?”
“Father Nil has picked up the scent of what might be the right trail: let’s leave him to follow it. I’ve reinforced the surveillance around him: if he succeeds, we’ll be the first to know. And then…”
The Rector knew that he did not need to finish his sentence. “And then” had already happened thousands of times, in the cellars of the palaces of the Inquisition whose walls were drenched with pain, or on the stakes erected to light up Christendom all throughout its history. In the present case, only the practical details of this “and then” would change. Nil would not be burned in public – Andrei had not been.
74
The sun was caressing the flagstones on the courtyard of the Belvedere when Nil and Leeland entered it. Relieved that he had told Nil those things about his private life, the American had slipped back into his usual playful demeanour, and throughout their walk he had talked of nothing but their youthful student days in Rome. It was ten o’clock when they presented themselves at the door of the stacks.
One hour earlier, a priest in a cassock had preceded
them. Seeing his accreditation signed by Cardinal Catzinger in person, the policeman had bowed and deferentially accompanied him to the reinforced door, where Breczinsky, looking anxious, was waiting for him. This second interview had been brief, like the first one. As he left, the priest had fastened his black eyes on the Pole, whose lower lip was trembling.
Nil no longer paid much attention to his very pale, almost transparent face: on arrival he did not notice that the librarian looked distressed, and merely set the equipment out on the table while Leeland went off to fetch the manuscripts they would need to examine.
After an hour’s work, he took off his gloves and whispered:
“Carry on without me, I’m going to try my luck with Breczinsky.”
Leeland nodded in silence, and Nil went to knock on the librarian’s door.
“Come in, Father, take a seat.”
Breczinsky seemed happy to see him.
“You didn’t tell me anything about your research in the Templars’ book stack the other day – did you discover anything useful?”
“Better than that, Father: I found the text examined by Andrei, the one he’d noted the details of in his diary.”
He took a deep breath and launched out:
“Thanks to my deceased brother, I’m on the trail of a document of capital importance that might put a question mark over the foundations of our Catholic faith. Forgive me if I don’t tell you any more: ever since I arrived in Rome, Mgr Leeland has been subjected to considerable pressures because of me, and if I keep quiet, it’s because I’m trying to ensure you don’t get bothered in any way.”
Breczinsky gazed at him in silence, then asked, timidly:
“But… who can exert such pressures on a bishop working in the Vatican?”
Nil decided to gamble everything. He remembered a remark the Pole had made at their first meeting: “To think that I imagined you were one of Catzinger’s men!”
“From the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and more precisely from the Cardinal Prefect himself.”
“Catzinger!”
The Pole mopped his brow; his hands were trembling slightly.
“You don’t know anything about that man’s past, or about what he lived through!”
Nil concealed his surprise.
“Yes, I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s the third principle person in the Church, after the Secretary of State and the Pope.”
Breczinsky looked at him with his hangdog eyes.
“Father Nil, you’ve gone too far, now you need to know. What I’m about to tell you is something I’ve only ever told Father Andrei, since he was the only person who could understand. His family had been linked with the sufferings of mine. I didn’t need to explain things to him; he understood straight away.”
Nil held his breath.
“When the Germans broke the German-Soviet Pact, the Wehrmacht swept across what had been Poland. For some months the Anschluss division protected the rear of the invading army around Brest-Litovsk and, in April 1940, one of its superior officers, an Oberstleutnant, came to round up all the men in my village. My father was taken away with them into the forest, and we never saw him again.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Then the Anschluss division joined the Eastern Front, and my mother tried to survive in the village with me, helped by Father Andrei’s family. Two years later, we saw the last remnants of the German Army fleeing in the other direction as the Russians advanced. It was no longer the glorious Wehrmacht, but a gang of pillagers raping all the women and burning everything in their path. I was five; one day, my mother took me by the hand, she was terror-stricken: ‘Hide in the cellar, it’s the officer who took your father away, he’s back!’ Through the gap in the door, I saw a German officer come in. Without a word he unbuckled his belt, flung himself on my mother, and raped her right in front of my eyes.”
Nil was horrified.
“Did you ever find out the officer’s name?”
“As you can imagine, I was never able to forget it and never abandoned my quest to trace him: he died shortly afterwards, killed by Polish resistants. It was Oberstleutnant Herbert von Catzinger, the father of the current Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
Nil opened his mouth, but was incapable of uttering a word. Opposite him, Breczinsky seemed distraught. With an effort, he continued:
“After the war, Catzinger became Cardinal of Vienna. He asked a Spaniard from Opus Dei to carry out research in the Austrian and Polish archives, and he discovered that his father, for whom he had a boundless admiration, had been killed by Polish partisans. Ever since then, he has hated me, just as he hates all Poles.”
“But… the Pope is Polish!”
“You can’t understand: all those forced to experience Nazism, even unwillingly, were deeply marked by it. The old member of the Hitler Youth, the son of a Wehrmacht soldier killed by the Polish resistance, has rejected his past but he has not forgotten it: nobody emerged from that hell intact. As for the Polish Pope whose right-hand man he now is, I’m certain he has overcome his visceral aversion and has a sincere veneration for him. But he knows that I come from a village in which the Anschluss division was stationed, and he knows about my father’s death.”
“And… about your mother?”
Breczinsky wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“No, he can’t know about that – I was the only witness, and his father’s memory is intact. But I know. I can’t… I just can’t forgive, Father Nil!”
Nil’s heart was filled with an immense sense of pity.
“You cannot forgive the father… or the son?”
Breczinsky replied in a whisper:
“Neither of them. For years, the Holy Father’s illness has enabled the Cardinal to do – or allow to be done – things that go right against the spirit of the Gospels. He wants to restore the Church of bygone centuries, he is obsessed by what he calls ‘the world order’. Under an appearance of modernity, it’s a return to the iron age. I have seen theologians, priests and monks reduced to nothing, crushed by the Vatican with the same absence of pity which his father once showed towards the peoples enslaved by the Reich. You tell me he’s been putting pressure on Mgr Leeland? It’s not as if your friend were the only one, alas… I’m just an insignificant little pebble, but like the others I must be crushed so that the pedestal which supports the Doctrine and the Faith does not become cracked.”
“Why you? Buried away in the silence of your stacks you don’t bother anyone, you’re not a threat to any of the powers that be!”
“But I’m one of the Pope’s men, and the post I fill here is a more sensitive one than you can imagine. I… I can’t tell you any more.”
His shoulders were trembling slightly. He got a grip on himself and continued:
“I have never recovered from what I suffered as a result of the actions of Herbert von Catzinger, the wound has never closed – and the Cardinal knows this. Every night I wake in a cold sweat, haunted by the image of my father being led off into the forest at sub-machine-gun point, and those boots that forced my mother’s body against our kitchen table. You can chain a man by threat, but you can also enslave him by keeping his sufferings fresh: you just have to revive his pain, make the wound bleed. Only someone who has known those men of bronze can understand, and this was Andrei’s case. Ever since I entered the Pope’s service here, I have been trampled under at every moment by two shiny boots, and Catzinger in his scarlet robes stands over me – just as his father, strapped into his uniform, once swaggered over my mother and his Polish slaves.”
Nil was starting to understand. Breczinsky had never managed to escape from the cellar of his childhood, huddled down against the door behind which his mother was being raped. Never had he emerged from a certain forest path down which he advanced in a dream, behind his father who was about to die, cut down by a burst of sub-machine-gun fire. Night and day he was haunted by two waxed boot
s against a table, and deafened by the echo within him of the guttural order given by Herbert von Catzinger: “Feuer!”
His father had been cut down by German bullets in that forest, but Breczinsky himself never ceased to fall, to fall forever down into a dark, bottomless well. This man was one of the living dead. Nil hesitated:
“Does… the Cardinal come here, in person, to torment you by reminding you of your past? I can’t believe that.”
“Oh no, he doesn’t act directly. He sends the Spaniard here, the one who carried out research for him in the Vienna archives. Right now, the man in question is in Rome, he’s come to see me twice recently, he… he tortures me. He dresses as a priest – but if he really is a priest of Jesus Christ, then, Father Nil, it can only mean that the Church is finished. He has no soul, no human feelings.”
There was a long silence, and Nil let Breczinsky continue.
“You can see why I helped Father Andrei, and why I’m helping you. Like you, he told me he was looking for an important document: he wanted at all costs to keep it out of Catzinger’s hands, and give it to the Pope in person.”
Nil thought quickly: not for an instant had he reflected on what he would do if he found the letter of the thirteenth apostle. Indeed, it was for the Pope to judge whether the future of the Church was compromised by its contents, and to do with it what he thought best.
“Andrei was right. I still don’t know why, but it’s clear that what I have discovered is an object that many people covet. If I manage to find this document lost for centuries, I do intend to alert the Pope and inform him of its whereabouts. Only the head of the Church can be the keeper of this secret, as he has been of the secrets of Fatima. I’ve just learnt that it could be buried away somewhere in the Vatican: think about it!”
The Thirteenth Apostle Page 25