The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  “Close enough,” Kane said. The librarian regarded Maryse respectfully through his puckered, blinking eyes.

  “But what is it?” she asked him.

  “It is the Esechiel, the capitolo 21, the verso 25.”

  “A verse of the Old Testament. From the Latin Vulgate Bible,” the ancient curator observed. “But what is the context?” He pulled the tablet toward himself, and his fingers were surprisingly quick on the keys. He read from the screen for only a moment: “In this passage the Prophet Ezekiel warns the wicked king at Jerusalem of his coming downfall. It is a prophecy of the Babylonian captivity.”

  “The Babylonians attacked Jerusalem in 589 BCE, executing the royal house, destroying the temple, and taking the Jews into slavery,” Maryse added. “The wicked king of the Jews, along with the priests of the temple, was blamed for the destruction.”

  Kane breathed out. “Obviously, the assassin had a disagreement with his Pope.”

  Palace of Sant’Uffizio, Vatican City, 1250h

  Leo Cardinal Tyrell, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, looked out the window of his office at the damp cobbled square below. A line of Swiss Guards stood at the gates, their heavy waterproof overcoats sluicing rain. He could hear the low noise of thousands of mourners from the plaza in front of St. Peter’s, and wondered if the Church could withstand this blow. In life, this pope had torn the Church in two—now, in death, what kind of gigantic influence might he yet have?

  The congregation secretary, Manolo Estades, opened the door and strode in, full of the latest news. “The note has been leaked. Leo, everyone will now know. You are finished.” The plump Portuguese collapsed with a loud arthritic moan into an armchair.

  “I stopped playing the fool with Chandos years ago. Everyone knows that as well.”

  “Yes, but first, he was your man. Who will seriously believe that it was not your influence, your position, that confused and blinded him? That will be the theory.”

  “I know. I’m bound to be the villain in this drama, as usual. Let it come.”

  Estades looked up at the robust figure of the Cardinal, not without admiration. Tyrell was a pyramid of a man with strong, iron Irish hair and stony muscles astonishing for his age. The Cardinal had followed a weight-training regime his entire adult life and had used the energy he gained to pound and wear away at his opponents until his influence had strained even the strength of the popes. That is, until the time of Zacharias II, an agile contender against whom Tyrell had come up short. The Pope’s moves had been so outrageous, so provocative that Tyrell had been pushed off-balance again and again. His antagonism for Zacharias was now an old story, a joke in some circles; but today Estades wondered just how deep the enmity had really gone.

  “Popes come and go, they die in bed or madmen kill them. But you have the doctrine of the holy faith to consider. To safeguard,” Estades theorized aloud. “You cannot afford to have your position compromised.” That’s what they will say.”

  Tyrell continued to look calculatingly out the window. Knots of mourners passed by in the drizzle. On a silent flatscreen in the corner a CNN correspondent was making a banal comparison in teletext between the rain and the tears shed at St. Peter’s Square. Then the screen flashed with the words “Breaking News” and a picture of the Chandos note sat squarely in front of the eyes of the world.

  “Tu autem impie profane dux Israhel…” Estades intoned as he watched.

  “And that’s precisely what he was,” Tyrell said. “An impious man. A profane man.”

  “And the infallible Vicar of Christ.”

  Tyrell ignored this. “The damage he has done will take generations to repair, if by God’s grace it can be repaired at all.”

  “So you are glad he was…stopped?”

  Tyrell ignored this as well. His GeM rang. He answered and began shouting at someone from the Congregation on Elections; Tyrell invariably spoke on his mobile as if he were in the street calling for a taxi. Estades got wearily to his feet and walked into the Cardinal’s private bathroom. On the corridor wall hung a portrait of Tyrell and Chandos standing together in some alcove of the Vatican; they were smiling. It was interesting that the Cardinal had not taken the photo down.

  Tyrell had brought Chandos to the Vatican before Estades himself had come to work there. According to Tyrell, the young man was the son of a friend who had convinced him of the boy’s intelligence and talent, and Chandos had lived up to the report. When Estades knew him, he had been remote but zealous, a constant student of the congregation’s work and a haunter of the archives. Tyrell had brought him up in the traditions of Newman and Ratzinger and other conservative Catholic scholars. “Never lose faith in the fundamentals” was Tyrell’s decree.

  Although they had worked together on important projects for the congregation, Estades had never been close to Peter Chandos. They had traveled the world together, met with clergy and religious on all continents, and labored together on position papers well into many nights. But Peter always remained private. He would not drink with anyone, would seldom eat with anyone, and always withdrew into the dead quiet of his own room when the work was done for the day.

  But Peter’s writing was impeccable. With a more expansive personality, he might have become another Cardinal Ratzinger, the famous defender of Catholicism who had once held Tyrell’s job and then gone on to become Pope Benedict. There was wit, reason, and inspiration in Peter’s work—all three—and, in addition, a certain colorful way of reading Scripture. He took it literally.

  Once he had stood with Peter in front of a wall mural of the Holy Family escaping into Egypt—they had been at a seminary somewhere in South America. The painting itself was some pedestrian nativist thing.

  “It’s true,” the young man had said.

  “What?”

  “It’s true. There really was a holy mother, and she really was forced to flee with her son.”

  “Well, of course,” Estades had replied. “At any rate, I assume it’s true.”

  He remembered how insistent Peter had been: “You don’t understand. It actually happened. And there was an old man who watched over them, but he wasn’t really the father.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I don’t understand’? Everyone understands that.”

  Peter Chandos had simply smiled at him and moved on. Although he was given to occasional outbursts of literalism like this, the young man had fit in perfectly at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: his quiet zeal pleased the Curial bureaucracy, and his gift for diplomacy in talking to the public, particularly to the press, eventually brought him to the attention of the hierarchy.

  In a little African country, he had watched while Peter Chandos defused a nettlesome public debate over abortion by talking about love. Estades had been impressed; the young man had disarmed both sides in the argument. “Christ loves mothers. Christ loves children. All are loved.” He had gone on in this way all through the discussion, fending off the orthodox niceties and the leftist cant equally, smiling, insisting that love was the issue. One important woman, a particularly loud and difficult person, had dissolved into tears. Estades could not remember which side she was on.

  In the doctrinal debates that were inevitable in their work, Peter Chandos quietly raised more questions than answers. He seemed to calculate his questions, timing them for a point when the talkers were talked out. He knew when people had had their say, and then he would ask a question that would often lead to some new alternative no one had thought of.

  But he knew that Chandos was thoroughly orthodox. His devotion to Mary and the saints was unquestionable. Everyone in the congregation had some partisan identity: some had revolutionary sentiments, others were deeply conservative, still others were more interested in some particular constituency—Estades himself, for instance, had a strong stake in the community of Fatimists. Estades saw the Catholic Church as a c
onfederation of many national churches, each with its own political games to play. Many of the Curial staff were there to score goals at home. Few ever spoke of their personal religious beliefs, but they wore their politics in bright colors. Chandos, by contrast, seemed peculiarly apolitical, going along unstained, pure and remote in his devotions. For this reason, he was unpredictable and therefore a bit troubling. Good material for a saint…or for an assassin, thought the Cardinal Secretary for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

  Estades returned to the office to find Tyrell busily going through paper files that were stacked on his usually empty table. The old man looked up at him abruptly.

  “Elections material,” he explained. “There are one or two points they want a ruling on.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow? It’s Sunday after all.”

  “You know the Curia never take a day of rest, especially at a time like this.”

  “I wonder who it will be.”

  “It won’t be me. I’m too old.”

  Estades chuckled at this. Tyrell’s age was the least of the reasons for his disqualification for the papacy. The very public quarrels between Tyrell and the late Pope had left no doubt in anyone’s mind where the Cardinal stood; quite automatically, Tyrell was the candidate of the opposition.

  “Still, someone must step up,” Tyrell said, suddenly leaving off his files, his eyes narrowing and his heavy lips tightening. He frowned, Estades thought, with anxiety.

  For years the Curia’s chief industry had been speculation over candidates for the papacy, but with the election of Zacharias II, all of that had come to a stop. The new pope was young and vigorous and totally engaged in reviving a dying church—the usual speculative drone about who would come next had been silent for nearly three years. Now, just a day after the assassination, the old machine was creaking to life again. All over the Curia, which had no love for Zacharias, people were asking the same question, and—in private—with the same level of passion.

  “Personally,” Estades said, a bit dramatically, “I don’t care who the next pope is.”

  “That’s because you’re old and you have too much faith. You think the Church is God’s to run; therefore, he will take care of it while we stand on the verges looking on. I tell you, we have come very close to losing God in this church.” The Cardinal returned to his files.

  “I know what you think, Leo. I’m just not sure that I believe God is so concerned with the old celibacy or our male exclusivity or the other things that Zacharias swept away.”

  “Take care you don’t sweep God away as well.”

  “I remember what Peter Chandos once said, that these were not matters of faith but of practice.”

  Tyrell looked up with anger in his eyes. “Peter Chandos was obviously no guide in faith…or practice! Look at this.” He lumbered to his feet and pulled up on his tablet an American news magazine. “Page forty-five. See for yourself.”

  The article was titled “The New Catholic Church,” and under the title a video of three women wearing floral robes, white flowers in their hair and white collars around their necks carrying out some ceremony in what appeared to be a pasture—at any rate, cows lay in a field in the background, watching the proceedings with interest. The women bent gracefully into a crowd of partially dressed, scabrous-looking youth reclining on grass and wildflowers, holding out what looked like plates of biscuits and tiny cups. “A Rainbow Mass,” read the caption, “conducted by the first female priests in Washington, using cookies and juice for Communion.”

  “A Rainbow Mass for perverts,” Tyrell snorted. “So called women ‘priests.’ Biscuits and fruit juice. This is the ‘new Catholic Church’ that Zacharias built.”

  Estades scanned the article. “But it also says here that millions are returning to the Church, now that so many obstacles to their faith have been removed.”

  Tyrell looked sharply at him and leaned over the table. “It’s the abomination that makes desolate. The Book of Daniel foretells it,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Pope Leo XIII foretold it, in his dream of the Church of Rome overcome by evil.”

  “Prophecy is always ambiguous; you know that.”

  “Your own Fatima foretold it!”

  Estades twisted his weight uncomfortably in his chair. “Fatima is not part of the Deposit of Faith. It was a gift to three children, that’s all.”

  “Strange to hear you, of all people, conceding that.”

  A GeM sounded. Tyrell picked it up and listened for a moment. “No. We won’t avoid it. It’s best to get it over with,” he boomed and then rang off.

  He rubbed his huge face with his hands. “The media want a statement about the Chandos note. I need to think this through.”

  Estades, now anxious to leave, took this gratefully as his signal to go away. As he closed the door behind him, he heard Tyrell talking on the phone again—very quietly.

  Shin Bet Headquarters, Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1330h

  Tovah Kristall, chief of operations for Shin Bet, ached for a cigarette even more than for her missed lunch. The familiar double grinding of pain in her stomach and in her veins alarmed her for only a moment—it would pass. Years before she had been told to stop smoking and never to miss a meal if she wanted to prevent worsening stomach problems, but her doctor had no concept of what went on in this room with the calm impressionist-blue wall screens and white trim.

  But the pain didn’t pass. She knew why. How long could a human being stay steady or even sane under the continuous threat of annihilation—or worse, under the continuous possibility of a fatal misjudgment on her part that could bring on annihilation. At sixty-five she still sometimes felt young and scared, but long exposure to an unforgiving world of terror and soul-bending responsibility had left her heart leather-bound and the skin of her face as tense as an iron spring.

  The energies compressed in her by a mournful childhood in Odessa filled with ghosts had thrust her into the Israeli Defense Forces at eighteen; there she found out what a rock thrown in the face felt like, and what it meant to spray a crowd with rubber bullets. The rock had ended certain possibilities for a young woman in those days, and so her taut energies impelled her into the intelligence force. She had risen rapidly in the purge following the assassination of Rabin, and had combined an intense, almost Talmudic study of the opposition with a tactical instinct born of face-to-face fighting in the streets to qualify herself for the post she now held. She knew her opponents to be ingeniously deadly; what she had not foreseen was her country’s growing capacity for producing a high-tech death wish of its own. And that’s why the pain would not pass this time.

  Ari Davan arrived. The debris of the morning meeting was still flung across the table, and the images on the wall screens looked frozen in place. A picture of a man’s torso with navel, chest, and neck blown open; swirls of dried blood on a tiled floor; and the photo of a man’s smiling face rising out of a black collar with a faint white rim. Ari recognized the other photos—Miner had taken them—but he did not recognize this one. Not at first.

  “I’ve got to have something to eat,” she groaned as Ari came into the room

  “Can I get you something?” Ari asked, taken by surprise. In all the scattered downpour of conversation she had flooded him with over the years, he had never heard his chief speak about anything remotely personal to herself—certainly not about lunch.

  “No,” she muttered, and phoned her assistant. “Anything. Bring it now.” She pulled a cigarette from her computer case, looked hungrily at the No Smoking sign over the door, and lit up. Ari smiled to himself and turned the switch on the ceiling fan. He had no desire to share her smoke and didn’t want her to think otherwise.

  The cigarette immediately calmed her. She sat back in her chair and stared at him, her wet black eyes blinking fast in the smoke. “You’re an athlete, aren’t you? You take risks. You hang from
cliffs, don’t you?”

  “I like rock-climbing, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Tell me about hanging off a handhold when you know you shouldn’t.”

  “I don’t do that. If you want to live to enjoy the sport, you reach for handholds you’re sure of.”

  “I doubt that. I doubt that very much.” He had experienced occasionally this kind of banter with her and looked fixedly at her face, at the cheek flattened on one side like a steel plate and the crushed nose, the fluid eyes. “You cannot be sure of any handhold. Rock gives way. Or it’s an exciting climb, a dangerous climb, you’re feeling your strength, and you take a chance you might not take another day.”

  She was right, of course. But so what?

  She went on. “I want to understand the mentality. Why overreach? That handhold is a bit too far away, a bit too ambitious—but you reach for it anyway?”

  “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp…”

  “What?”

  “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? English poet, Browning, I think.”

  “Even if the consequence is hell rather than heaven?”

  Ari tried not to smirk. Although he was uncomfortable, these reflective moments of hers were too few and too interesting to spoil. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me.”

  He thought it over. It was true; the limestone strata at Shalit where he liked to climb were notoriously unstable, and he occasionally took a chance and then paid dearly for it—a blinding knock on the forehead in one instance. For a fearful few hours he had been unable to see. But he liked the strain of it, the way his muscles felt when they were stretched out as if the skeleton would come apart, the tickle of the sweat, and the clean smell of stone. To hang from two fingers and a thumb and will yourself against cramp and then with a breath-collapsing effort swing to the next tiny break in the rock and catch it—it was startling how good it felt.