The Debt

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘Professor Donovan!’ Orlando said, his eyeglasses dangling from a neck holder. ‘I heard you were coming today. I hope you are well.’

  Cal shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries before the archivist asked if he could be of service.

  ‘Well, maybe you could tell me if I’m heading to the right place.’

  ‘Of course. What is the nature of your research?’

  ‘Ever hear of a cardinal named Luigi Lambruschini?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. He came close to being elected pope in the mid-nineteenth century, I believe.’

  ‘You know your cardinals, Maurizio. He was Pope Gregory XVI’s secretary of state and came within a hair’s breadth of getting the big job at the 1846 conclave. He was a central figure in the 1848 revolutions in the Italian states. I’m writing a paper on his role in suppressing the revolts by enlisting the support of the French so I’m looking for primary documents. Thinking about starting on the Diplomatic Floor.’

  Nodding, Orlando said, ‘I would do the same. Let’s see, 1848. That’s the reign of Pope Pius IX. The official correspondence of the Curia with his ambassadors in the court of Napoleon III and senior clerics in Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, and other key cities might be fertile ground.’

  ‘Maurizio, you’re a scholar and a gentleman.’

  Orlando beamed. ‘Happy hunting, Professor. Ring my office if you need any further assistance.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  Orlando’s expression suddenly became serious. It looked like he wanted to say something else, so Cal gave him an opportunity by staying put.

  ‘I hesitate to bring this up, Professor, but I received an awkward phone call a few days ago from your department chairman at Harvard, Professor Daniels.’

  ‘Really? Awkward in what way?’

  ‘He – how shall I say – strenuously requested the same privileges as the archive affords to you. He said that as your chairman it was only right and proper.’

  Cal’s blood began to boil. ‘And how did you respond, if I could ask?’

  ‘I merely told him that your privileges were unique and personally afforded to you by Pope Celestine, not the archive staff or even the cardinal librarian. I explained that there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘And how did he take it?’

  ‘He was rather irate.’

  Cal shook his head. ‘I’ll bet he was.’

  One week earlier

  Cal’s sneakers squeaked noisily on the hardwood basketball court of Harvard’s Hemenway Gym. The player guarding him was no ordinary opponent. He was Cal’s boss, if tenured full professors – a highly protected species – could be said to have bosses. More accurately, Gil Daniels was Cal’s dean, a distinguished professor of theology at the Harvard Divinity School. The two of them were always a bit yin and yang and it was only fitting that they dueled periodically on opposing faculty sports teams. Daniels was a flinty Brit with an academic career centered on the history of the synoptic gospels, a topic that overlapped a tad with Cal’s areas of expertise. Daniels was a decade older, and more importantly for the moment, he was freakishly tall, a full head taller than Cal, a six-footer himself. And while Cal had always been just a pick-up game type of player, Daniels had been a member of a championship men’s team at Oxford University.

  Cal had been pressed into an unaccustomed role as center because his teammates who turned out on the day were all on the short side.

  ‘Where the hell is Cromer?’ he had asked the team captain, an English literature professor, about their usual center.

  ‘I think he’s getting some kind of geophysics award.’

  ‘Daniels is going to be a problem,’ Cal had said.

  ‘You’ll run around him as if he were but a rooted tree.’

  ‘Nicely put, Harold. You should do something with words one day.’

  The captain had been correct. Cal was quicker and handled the ball better. He’d outscored Daniels two-to-one in the first half. When the second half began, Daniels unleashed a new strategy. He started draping himself over Cal like a new suit of clothes.

  Since it was only a club game with a bunch of faculty duffers there was no referee; they relied on self-calling fouls and collegial acknowledgements of transgressions. But Cal didn’t much go in for shouting, ‘Foul! You fouled me!’ He preferred letting the mild infractions slide and settling the major ones with quiet retaliation.

  The ethos had come from his father, a strict disciplinarian and very much a man’s man, who had taught his only child to deal with bullies and tough kids, not by tattling to the teachers, but by bloodying a nose or two. His mortified mother would handle the call from the principal’s office by sending Cal into his father’s paneled inner sanctum.

  From behind his big desk, his father, the famed archeologist Hiram Donovan, would listen to the boy’s account of the fight and would say, ‘Get ready to scream really loudly,’ and he would thump his desk hard with a book.

  The smiling boy would say, ‘Ow!’ and his father would reach into a cigar box in one of the desk drawers and give Cal a worn Roman coin for his collection.

  ‘Now get out of here and look miserable. For your mother.’

  When Cal made a move to the basket, Daniel’s long arm reached around Cal’s neck and blocked his shooting arm. The ball bounced out of bounds.

  Cal’s captain called ‘foul’ but Daniels sported a what-did I-do look and said, ‘It’s Cal’s call to make, Harold, not yours.’

  ‘You calling it, Cal?’ Harold asked.

  Cal shook his head, wiped sweat from his eyes, and went on defense, whispering to Daniels, ‘Gil, what’s it going to take for you to play fair?’

  Daniels grinned and said, ‘I’m scrupulously fair, Cal. Everyone knows that.’

  On the next possession, Cal took a pass and dribbled past the flat-footed Daniels to the top of the key where he set for a jump shot. As his arms went up he was rocked from behind by Daniel’s chest. Off balance, he tucked the ball in his left arm and furiously delivered his right elbow into Daniel’s breastbone, sending the taller man reeling backwards.

  ‘Foul!’ Daniels cried when he regained his balance.

  ‘You fouled him first,’ Cal’s captain responded. ‘You’ve been fouling him all day.’

  ‘Christ, Cal, that hurt,’ Daniels said, rubbing his chest.

  ‘When you play dirty, that’s what you get,’ Cal seethed.

  ‘I’m playing you tight, goddamn it,’ Daniels protested, ‘not dirty. An elbow is dirty.’

  Cal wasn’t backing down. ‘I know dirty when I see it.’

  A member of Daniel’s team, a young economics professor, laughed and said, ‘Easy, Cal. He’s your dean.’

  Cal gave the guy a withering look. ‘We’re all equal on the court.’

  Another player tried to defuse the situation with this comment: ‘Good thing you guys are at the divinity school. If you were in the government department there’d be blood on the floor.’

  Harold suggested a five-minute break and the two teams parted to opposite sidelines. There was a single spectator in the stands, a young, compact man with a receding hairline, dancing eyes, and a clerical collar.

  ‘Somewhat surprising,’ the priest said with his Galway accent when Cal joined him.

  Cal wiped at his forehead with a towel. ‘What’s surprising?’

  ‘I expect fisticuffs when I go to your boxing matches. Always thought basketball was tamer.’

  ‘Boys being boys.’

  ‘Is that what it is? Still it gladdens my heart.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  The priest deadpanned, ‘If you can do that to your chief, I’m free to imagine what I might do to you.’

  For the rest of the game Daniels behaved and Cal’s team won by eight points. Afterwards, Daniels came up to him and said, ‘Hey buddy, no hard feelings.’

  ‘Of course not, Gil.’

  ‘Gotta play hard, play to win, right?’

  ‘Words to live by,’ Cal sai
d unconvincingly.

  Cal sat down on the bench to pack up his gear and Daniels did the same.

  ‘I hear you’re off to Rome,’ Daniels said.

  ‘Day after tomorrow.’

  Every year like clockwork Cal spent two weeks in Rome during the Christmas break and a further month or more in the summer doing research on whatever project was on the front burner.

  ‘Going to hang out at the Vatican?’

  ‘Is the pope Catholic?’

  Daniels chuckled and zipped his sports bag.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be using your golden library card.’

  Cal could have predicted the comment. The resentment was palpable. As a reward for Cal’s extraordinary service to the Vatican on the matter of the stigmatic priest, Giovanni Berardini, Pope Celestine had granted him a unique and singular privilege coveted by every ecclesiastical scholar in the world. Cal was now the first outside academic in history to have unfettered browsing rights at the Vatican Library and the Vatican Secret Archives. Cal could wander the endless stacks and pluck out anything that caught his fancy. Any manuscript. Any book. Any stack of letters. Any financial ledger. Any papal bull and proclamation. Cal never advertised it or boasted about his unique status but these things get out and envy – some good-natured, some not – began rolling his way. Daniels had a penchant for laying it on thick, laced with his irritating brand of sarcasm.

  ‘What are you working on?’ Daniels asked.

  ‘Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini. Ever hear of him?’

  ‘Can’t say that I have.’

  ‘Early nineteenth century. He’s on the obscure side.’

  ‘Well, if you need someone to sharpen your pencils or your quills, give me a call.’

  ‘You’re a man of many talents, Gil.’

  Daniels shouldered his bag and got ready to leave.

  ‘And don’t get lost in there. I’ve read the archives are pretty endless.’

  ‘About eighty-five kilometers.’

  Daniels whistled. ‘If you don’t make it back we’ll send a St Bernard with a cask of brandy.’

  ‘Fill it with ice-cold vodka and I’ll make sure I get lost.’

  Father Murphy was still in the stands, waiting to walk with Cal back to their offices on Divinity Avenue. Daniels spotted him and said, ‘That’s Joe Murphy, isn’t it?’

  Cal was sure that Daniels knew exactly who he was. Cal had showcased Murphy at a recent faculty symposium that Daniels had attended. The priest had given a talk about the subject of his successful Ph.D. thesis on new insights into Pope Gregory’s chronicles of St Benedict. Now that Murphy had his degree, Cal was pushing for his appointment as a junior faculty member. Not that there were quotas, but Cal thought a Jesuit priest would make a good addition to the Divinity School and Murphy unquestionably had become an accomplished young scholar.

  ‘It is,’ Cal said. ‘You’ve had his folder for a while. Any thoughts?’

  ‘Honestly, I’ve been swamped. Maybe I’ll have a chance to look at his paperwork over the break. I’ll be stuck in Cambridge. No golden library card for me.’

  Cal slipped on sweatpants and a sweatshirt for the snowy walk through the campus. The priest had to motor to keep up with Cal’s long-legged strides and he had to fight to light his cigarette on the fly.

  ‘I thought you were quitting?’ Cal said.

  ‘I thought so too.’

  ‘Sinning in public.’

  The smoke coming out of his lungs mixed with snowflakes. ‘Well, you know what St Benedict said about that: a priest must not hide from his abbot the evil thoughts that enter his heart or the sins he commits in secret.’

  ‘Didn’t know I was your abbot.’

  ‘One’s academic advisor is not light years away. Let’s call you my secular abbot. You had a word with Daniels about me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Either you’ve got amazing hearing or you’re a lip reader.’

  ‘The latter. When I was growing up I had a deaf friend. I learned it for solidarity.’

  ‘He said he hasn’t reviewed your application yet.’

  ‘Believe him?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Time for a back-up plan?’ the priest asked. ‘I might have to dust off the old bench in the confessional back home.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen. I know for a fact that you could get an appointment at Boston College or Notre Dame in a heartbeat. We’ve got time. I want you here, Joe. Leave it in my hands.’

  Cal shrugged off his irritation over Gil Daniels and breathed in the musty air of the Diplomatic Floor. He had it all to himself. The large wooden cabinets that lined the walls were unlabeled and even though he had done prior research there, it was hit or miss to find the right ones. Fortunately they were generally in chronological order. Once he located the cabinets containing diplomatic correspondence between 1848, when Pope Pius IX was chased into exile by revolutionaries, and mid-1849, when he was escorted back to the Vatican under the protection of French troops, he began climbing a tripod ladder to pull down thick bound volumes.

  It was slow going wading through densely lettered documents written in Italian and French, looking for any mention of Cardinal Lambruschini. The hours dragged on and he began to feel the effects of jet lag compounded by the discomfort of the unpadded straight-backed benches, the only places to sit. The quest proved largely fruitless; he found only a single oblique mention of the cardinal in one communiqué. Cal wasn’t particularly surprised. Most of the relevant correspondence from that period revolved around the sitting secretary of state, Cardinal Gabriele Ferretti. Lambruschini, having left the high office in 1846, would have been a quieter presence in Pope Pius’s regime, whispering in the liberal pontiff’s ear, advocating for an iron-fisted approach to deal with upstart revolutionaries. Had the conservative Lambruschini prevailed in the 1846 conclave and become pope the Vatican would surely have taken an earlier and more militant approach to the nascent republican revolution and history may have been altered. But even though Lambruschini was no longer secretary of state during the revolution, he still possessed a powerful anti-rebel voice and for that, the republicans hated him with a passion. His house in Rome was sacked and he had to flee for his life.

  Cal’s stomach began to rumble and thoughts turned to coffee and a sandwich. Still, he pressed on into the 1840s until he finally made it to the critical year of 1848, the year of the Italian Revolution. There were no fewer than five hefty volumes covering that fateful year. By the time he got to the last of the five, his backside was sore from the wretched bench so he took to the floor, sitting cross-legged against a cabinet, the heavy book resting on his lap. It was then that one of the young assistant librarians happened upon him and tried to suppress a grin. He had seen her before and her name came to him just in time.

  ‘How are you, Mariagrazia? I expect you’re wondering what I’m doing down here.’

  She was dark and pretty, perhaps thirty, probably not quite. ‘In fact I was wondering, Professor.’

  ‘The benches were killing me.’

  ‘I could bring the books down to the reading room for you. The chairs aren’t great but they’re better than these benches.’

  ‘I prefer it up here. It’s quiet.’

  ‘As you wish. I’ll leave you to it then.’

  She wasn’t wearing a ring; he noticed these things. He considered asking her out for lunch or maybe a drink after work. Maybe one thing would lead to another – one never knew.

  A wicked daydream sped through his mind. He was in his mother’s apartment, high over Central Park.

  ‘Mother, I’d like you to meet my new wife, Mariagrazia. Yes, she’s very young but so were you when you married Father. Did I tell you that she’s a good Catholic girl? Mother, what’s the matter? Are you all right?’

  Two days before Cal left for Rome he had stopped at Manhattan for an obligatory visit with his mother. Bess Donovan was a formidable woman. Upon the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday party at an old-line, swanky Manh
attan restaurant, Cal had risen to deliver a toast to a hundred of her intimates. He had begun his remarks by describing his mother with a single word: Indomitable. Everyone understood exactly where he was going. Nothing had ever defeated her, or to be more precise, she had never publicly admitted to any defeat, large or small. She had overcome breast cancer and was currently battling her chronic leukemia to a draw. She had plowed through the emotional upheaval over the loss of her husband, who had died in mysterious circumstances during a dig in the Middle East. After she buried Hiram Donovan in Boston she had moved back to her native New York, where she had become a major player in philanthropy for the arts.

  When Cal had finished his warm and slightly irreverent remarks, his mother had followed him to the podium and a little tipsy from champagne had said, ‘I want to thank my son, Calvin, for his speech. Isn’t he gorgeous, ladies? He’s like a young Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, don’t you think?’

  A friend, equally tipsy had shouted from her table, ‘You’re showing your age, Bess. I think he looks like John Hamm from Mad Men.’

  ‘Now that’s a gorgeous man too,’ Bess had said. ‘But seriously ladies, from one Jewish mother to another, he’s not a doctor or a lawyer but he’s a Harvard professor like my late husband and he’s still single, not even divorced. So email me the names and bona fides of your eligible daughters, nieces, or, for my really old friends, your granddaughters, so we can make a match. And I know what you’re thinking – never married, in his forties, but no, he’s not gay! Ask his old girlfriends.’

  During his visit Cal had taken tea with her in the sitting room of her Park Avenue apartment against the muffled soundtrack of honking taxis far below. She was dressed to the nines, caked in makeup, her hair a lacquered fortress. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her natural complexion or her hair in rollers, even as a boy. These days she had become frail, her skin translucent, her hands covered in liver spots. She walked with a cane. Not a drugstore cane, mind you, but a splendid ebony and mother-of-pearl antique, made practical by the addition of a new rubber grip. When she lifted the tea to her mouth her tremor had become more pronounced. Her maid had made a compensatory adjustment by only half-filling the china cup.