The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  But terror, like fire, can be channeled, he thought. It requires great care. The arrows radiating from the Middle East might be reversed. And then…

  His earpiece came to life.

  “Go ahead, Intel.”

  “Chatter indicates that they’re bringing the curator of the Vatican Museums to the site. He’s coming unmarked.”

  “The curator.”

  “Yes. It has to do with the chapel. They want him to look at some damaged artifacts. It all sounds casual over the air…”

  “Then why an unmarked car?” Kane asked.

  “It doesn’t add up.” Kane was pleased with his Intel chief, who had the indispensable qualities of curiosity and of not keeping him waiting. “There’s a full download waiting for you. Items on the Pope, on the shooter, and on the scene.”

  “Thanks.” Kane set his GeM down and tapped it. The GeM projected on to the table a high-def portrait of Pope Zacharias II, his face arched heavenward, a thin, confident smile on his lips. When Kane tapped the table, the screen changed. He leafed through screen after screen, watching the Pope grow up from a child in a Catholic town in Brittany, to a gregarious young seminarian, to a militant priest working in the barrios of Managua. As archbishop of Paris, he had led a large and growing cadre of liberal thinkers in the most progressive of Catholic churches.

  Kane switched to files on Monsignor Peter Chandos. Most of the information was preliminary—just news clips. There were few pictures, almost all with the Pope. Chandos looked young, Kane thought as he carefully studied one picture after another, despite the barest wisp of white in his hair at the temple. The face was sober and benevolent, olive colored with dark blue eyes. There was one picture with Cardinal Tyrell. Items came up from the Osservatore Romano: Reverend Chandos recruited to the Holy Office; Chandos appointed to the Papal staff; Chandos named a Monsignor and private secretary to the Pope; Chandos heading this commission or that project; Chandos as a key facilitator of Vatican III. Kane gazed into the face, trying to read something, trying to feel anything.

  At last he changed to the news channel. The same images appeared in miniature on the table and on the giant wall screen. It was the regulation litany of world leaders, in approximate order of importance, expressing appropriate levels of shock and grief. The US president, the Chinese president, the German chancellor, the British Prime Minister, and so forth down to the premier of Catholic Ireland.

  The Irishwoman was cut off abruptly by a new scene. A dizzying, fibrous image wavered across the screen. “We have obtained a digital video of the moments on the scene just following the assassination of Pope Zacharias II. This video was made by an eyewitness on the plaza of the Lateran. What we will see here is the immediate first response to the assassination—the police entering the building. We may be able to see the Pope on the stairway.” The voiceover was as excited as a child with a new toy. Kane couldn’t make out the images; he stood abruptly and walked closer to the big screen. There was the arch of the Holy Stairs and a sudden rush of black-clad policemen charging up the tunnels next to the stairway and vague shouting; then the segment stopped and began again. The only sign of the Pope was a faint white smudge halfway down the stairs that disappeared as the police reached him. The scene looped around over and over. Kane studied each loop intensely.

  “Chandos was an Arab,” the deep voice of Intel suddenly interjected into his earpiece, and at first it didn’t register.

  “Would you repeat that?”

  Intel was clearly energized. “He was an Arab. From Lebanon. A Maronite Catholic who went to school in Dublin and a protégé of Cardinal Tyrell—that’s how he got into the Vatican.”

  “That makes some sense at least. If Chandos was Tyrell’s man …”

  “Then how on earth did he become private secretary to the Pope?”

  Kane mused on this. “Good question. Surely you’re the man to answer it.”

  Then Intel took a dramatic pause—uncharacteristic of him, Kane thought. “And there’s something else. Something that makes no sense at all.”

  Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, 1615h

  Helicopter lights swept over the ocean of people who filled the square of Notre Dame. Paris had not seen a mob like this in years. Thousands surged forward, candles in their gloved hands, as hazy darkness fell over the city. Everything had turned to gold: the ragged trees around the parvis, the stones of the great church illuminated by spotlights, the candlelit faces of the crowd.

  “Isn’t Paris beautiful when it’s angry?” Kane remarked to his pilot as they circled the square.

  Traffic had stopped. Buses were idle, taxis abandoned. The city had emptied itself into this square, all in homage to the murdered pope whose cathedral this had been. Zacharias—one of their own, archbishop of Paris, the first French pope in centuries. He had brought to the see of Peter an eager Gallic rationality and the instincts of a rebel.

  People streamed into the square, obeying the old Parisian impulse to take to the streets when the scent of injustice was in the air—particularly injustice to the French. They were of all ages, lean men holding hands with each other, old women in black, a flood of faces from every tributary on earth: Asians, Africans, Arabs, Turks, Russians. Latin Quarter university faculty, unquestioning atheists, keened alongside militant Catholic matrons who brandished their candles like weapons.

  “A mad Parisian mob,” Kane said, an odd satisfaction in his voice. “I’ve always wanted to watch one in action.” The pilot smiled and ducked the helicopter onto a brightly lit pad within the walled Ministry of Justice complex adjacent to Notre Dame. Kane emerged to shake hands with the local Interpol director and a distracted ministry official who was intent on his earpiece.

  “He’s getting reports from the city. It’s a lot of confused crowds, harmless, but he has to look important, you know,” the Interpol man mumbled to Kane.

  “There’s no joie de vivre in Paris tonight, I expect.”

  “Don’t be fooled. The French love this kind of drama.”

  “Is she still here?” Kane had business to do.

  “Yes. Our man spotted her a while ago. She’s in the abside, just as you expected. We’ll wait for you.”

  Kane left the Ministry and walked alone into the crowd flooding the Boulevard Saint-Michel. A white-faced man, lips rigid with sorrow, was distributing cupped candles at the corner of the parvis of the cathedral. Kane gave him a euro coin and took a candle. He had seen this kind of bleak celebration once before, at Lourdes, on one of those nights when the hopeful thronged the gates of the grotto of miracles, their thousands of candles sparkling like stars. He was taller than most and could see his way through to the north portico of the cathedral. There the great door hung open. Kane joined the wave of people ebbing toward the entrance and was swept patiently in with them.

  Only the Corinthian capitals upholding the arches could be seen above the hundreds of people swaying forward into the south aisle. There was distant chanting; few spoke as they strained to hear what could not be heard from the high altar. Most seemed not to know where they were or what to do, like the empty-faced tourists who circled the sanctuary all day every day. Loops of light moved along the walls from candles that only vaguely symbolized prayer for most of these people—on their confused faces was sorrow over something irretrievably lost but still echoing from these walls.

  Eventually Kane came to the vast aisle curving inward around the high altar. He glimpsed a red lamp through the grillwork of the sanctuary and crossed himself, then left the current of the crowd at the apex of the nave. He stepped into the St. Louis Chapel, which was illuminated by hundreds of candles in red glass cups and shadowed by a towering gold crucifix that rose up behind the high altar. A stone-faced image of King Louis IX looked down. Overhead, the bells of Notre Dame began to toll slowly, as they would through the night.

  With the first moan of the bells, a woman seated in th
e crush of worshipers looked up from her prayer and saw Kane. Sad surprise came over her face; she hesitated for a moment but rose and made her way to him through the crowded benches.

  He had not seen her for a long time, but her pale smile and brown hair were still the same.

  “David. What a pleasure.” There was a trace of Irish in the “r” and in the spare freckles on her face. Her hand was firm in his—he thought wryly of the many times he had held this hand in his thoughts. Her long, black coat was open, revealing a black jumper and a narrow olive skirt. The faint beginnings of age were in her face, in a laxness beneath the chin and in the dry hair reflecting red candlelight from the chapel.

  He put on urgency. “We need to talk straightaway,” he said, and motioned her toward the door. They made their way through the crowd and out the north portal into darkness. People with glass candles walked past along the pavement in the small park of the cathedral close. They sat on a bench by a bank of mulberry trees; only the palest iron-gray sunset lit the sky above the illuminated buttresses that towered overhead.

  The woman shivered and buried her hands in the pockets of her coat. “What are you doing here, David?” She looked at him sidelong. “Today of all days, I thought you’d be.…”

  “Exactly where I need to be,” he cut her off. “The attack on the Pope doesn’t concern us much, especially as the assassination itself appears straightforward enough. A disenchanted disciple, it seems.”

  “Then what?”

  “May I see your GeM?” he asked briskly.

  She pulled the card-like phone from her pocket and held it up. “Here it is. I’ll turn it off, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  He touched the screen on his own silvery little device. After a pause, it made a pinging noise. “You’re clean.”

  “Every whit. What would I be bugged for anyway? What is it, David?”

  “Standard stuff. I can’t talk to you without this little formality first. Let me get to the point.” He kept his eyes averted from her face. He could tell that her surprise was growing into vexation.

  “This sounds like business,” she said. “I’m not in your business any longer, and you know that better than anyone.”

  “I do know that. Far better than anyone. But in this situation, you are the only resource I can turn to.”

  “David, I am not your ‘resource,’ as you put it. Nor am I an ‘asset,’ nor any of the other euphemisms you people have for each other. What I lost in your business cannot be counted among your ‘resources.’”

  “When you understand the position, you’ll feel different.”

  They were both looking straight into darkness now, through the patchy shadows of the trees toward the Seine. The reflected light from a passing barge skittered in leaf shapes across the ground. He could feel her sitting erect next to him, shivering slightly.

  “It’s cold,” she said finally, as a sort of offering.

  He nodded and asked, “Are you familiar with the term Acheropita?”

  “Of course. It refers to a religious object supposedly produced by a miracle.” Then she breathed in suddenly and turned to him. “It’s not been damaged?”

  “Then you know what I’m referring to.”

  “It’s the holiest object in the world. In the papal chapel…where Zacharias II was killed today.”

  “It’s been taken.”

  “Taken? How? It’s been locked down for centuries, inside a heavy frame bolted to the wall.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “But there’s been nothing on the news, not a word.”

  “No. The Vatican prefer to keep it quiet for now.”

  “And that’s why you’re here. It…it’s about the theft.”

  Impatient, he turned to her. “Look. I know what you’ve lost…what we both lost, although I’m not comparing my loss to yours. But this is an incomprehensible business. The Holy Father is dead, and the holy image has been ripped from the altar. The face of Christ himself.”

  The air was like cold water. He looked skyward at the golden spire of Notre Dame and felt her eyes following his. “I’m on a very strict timetable. I need you now.”

  She hesitated—then stood, as he knew she would.

  With no further words, they walked out of the park together. Just outside the gate, a car with an official license plate waited for them in the street. Faces lit by candles still flowed past toward the cathedral as Kane and the woman got into the car together and drove away.

  Bloomfield Stadium, Tel-Aviv-Yafo, Israel, 2100h

  Ari Davan leaped up and screamed with seventeen thousand other people at the fifth Maccabi goal of the match. The hot October night thundered. Ari was always surprised by how much louder the cheering sounded here than in some of the much vaster stadiums he had visited. He had once been to a match in Madrid with four times this many people. There, the sound of tens of thousands slowly rose like distant surf; here, the cheers were deafening. People shouted, danced, and flung sweat in each other’s faces. His friend Miner was screaming like a child, and even Toad was nodding with satisfaction.

  The crowd was near delirium with the crisis, the heat, the holiday, and the match. Shirts were off, girls jumped and danced on their chairs. Then Efraim, the star of the team, put the ball over with his head, and the whole stadium saw nothing but stars. Efraim’s long, brilliant black hair blazed wet in the stadium lights. The players sprang up in yellow and blue and the crowd leaped up—the stadium seemed filled with bright flowers.

  “Leshanah Tovah! Leshanah Tovah!” a man behind Ari shouted and slapped him on the shoulder. Ari turned, smiled at the stranger, and was glad that people could be happy, even if for one night. “Happy New Year,” he called back, also in Hebrew.

  Miner gave Ari a wry smile and clapped hands with him high above their heads. “Amazing skull, Efraim,” said Miner. His bony reddish-blond face was soaked, and Toad’s balding head was a whole watershed of rivulets. An Israeli folk song detonated with a rock beat overhead, making a sudden flash of fireworks inaudible in the sky.

  Ari glanced up and thought about missiles. Two attacks out of nowhere in the past month, on the holiest sites in Jerusalem; unexpected and startling, rousing with surprised horror people who mostly couldn’t remember the Iraqi Scuds that bombed their cities decades before. His morning meetings took place every day now, even on Sabbath, even on New Year—meaning even today and tomorrow—leaving him in a permanent state of anxiety. Miner and Toad did not go to those meetings, so their sweat was only from honest joy.

  After a while victory went out of reach for Valencia, and their game turned into that slow but wild chaos that precedes inevitable loss. Maccabi played simply, without mistakes, and Ari was seeing little of it now. As the vast party calmed down, he thought he could hear the occasional yelp of a protester outside the stadium.

  “You go against the law. It’s aven. You and your kind will destroy us,” his father had said to him that morning.

  “Papa, please, it’s just a football match…against Valencia, one of the best. If Maccabi win, they’re ranked second in the world—how can I miss that?”

  His father looked ridiculous, his brows clustered in anger and his short white beard bristling like the quills of a tiger. It had always been like this, and it always went on and on like this. The old man had seen action in the Yom Kippur War, had seen Jews die, had seen Arabs kill. Ari’s own wife had died at their hand.

  “A Palestinian threw a rock at Elena’s car. It smashed the windscreen and she died. They killed her, they murdered her. And you—you go to a football match on the Sabbath, on a holy day.”

  “The holy day will be over, the sun will be down, and the match won’t start for an hour after sunset. Now get in the car,” he pleaded soothingly. His mother, understanding little, smiled at him and hugged him gently as he helped her into the passenger seat.

&nbs
p; It was not a long drive, thankfully, and required no petrol at all downhill through a canyon as dry and brown as old dates. He ran the air conditioner full-force, crucial in the unbelievable autumn heat. Even so, he could feel the hot window on his shoulder through his shirt. He turned on the radio and scanned through the satellite stations.

  It was all about the Pope. What the Pope’s life meant, what his death meant, what it meant for the future…what it all meant. After a few minutes Ari grew tired of what it all meant and shut it off. Usually this sort of thing would stir his professional interest, but today he was too hot and anxious to care.

  Soon the pale white plain of the Dead Sea came into view, a mineral mirage, and before him the squat palm trees of Jericho.

  His father insisted on making this trip every New Year to the running water of Jordan. The old man had been upset that it was to be done on the Sabbath, but Ari could not drive them the next day, the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah but for him a workday. Ari slowed down through the village and through the scrub along a little gravel road to the Jordan. There was no one else around, so Ari stopped the car as near the riverbank as possible and helped his aged parents to their feet. The old man was dressed all in black, his coat shiny with use; his best silk skullcap, creased sharply from being folded away, covered the remnants of his fraying hair. Ari’s mother, dressed lightly in a plain blue dress and beret, leaned heavily on him as they made their way through the blistered rocks toward the river. Ari reached out more than once to steady his father, but the old man shook him off.

  The Jordan was a small green trickle at this point, like a lazy snake in the middle of its shallow ditch. Most of the water was diverted far upstream for irrigating crops, and only this rivulet remained to feed the dying sea a few miles to the south. Ari’s mother was breathing heavily, and he began to worry about the heat. It was tremendous.