The Fifth Gospel: A Novel

by Ian Caldwell

  I lift the page. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good. Now look carefully at the judges listed there, and tell me if any of them are familiar.”

  Morbid fascination pushes my eyes through the text.

  August 22, 2004

  Rev. Simon Andreou

  c/o Secretariat of State

  Vatican City 00120

  DECREE OF CITATION

  Dear Rev. Andreou:

  This letter is to inform you that a formal ecclesiastical penal process has begun against you in the Diocese of Rome. You are requested to identify an advocate who will represent you in this process. Your immediate response is required to the charge established in the enclosed document.

  Sincerely,

  Bruno Card. Galuppo

  Vicar for Vatican City

  Diocese of Rome

  cc: Presiding Judge: Rev. Msgr. Antonio Passaro, J.C.D.

  cc: Associate Judge: Rev. Msgr. Gabriele Stradella, J.C.D.

  cc: Associate Judge: Rev. Msgr. Sergio Gagliardo, J.C.D.

  cc: Promoter of Justice: Rev. Niccolò Paladino, J.C.D.

  cc: Notary: Rev. Carlo Tarli

  My pulse quickens. “I know the first judge. And the third one. Passaro and Gagliardo. Stradella is the only one I don’t recognize.”

  Mignatto nods as if he expected this. “All three have been Rotal judges for almost twenty years, so it’s not surprising you might have crossed their paths in Rome. It’s very surprising, however, that a penal case against a priest would be tried by Rotal judges. Only a bishop or legate is supposed to receive that treatment unless the Holy Father approves otherwise. So the question arises: would you say Passaro and Gagliardo are hostile toward your brother?”

  Now I understand. He’s saying this is the form the threat would take. Cardinal Galuppo would stack the bench against Simon.

  “No,” I tell him. “Passaro taught Simon at the Academy, and Gagliardo is a friend of my uncle’s. They’re both friendly.”

  Mignatto smiles. “Monsignor Gagliardo was two years behind me in seminary. Your uncle was his tutor. Sadly, both will have to recuse themselves. But if Cardinal Galuppo were threatening your brother, are these really the judges he would’ve chosen?”

  I hesitate. “Maybe Galuppo knows they’ll recuse themselves. Maybe the bad ones will replace them.”

  Mignatto shuffles the pages in his hands. “Then this may convince you otherwise.”

  When he offers me another paper, I’m mesmerized. It’s the final sheet of the accusation. The libellus itself.

  Before The Reverend Father Lord John PASSARO,

  Presiding Justice

  VATICAN

  Penal Case

  Promoter of Justice v. Rev. Andreou

  Prot. N. 92.004

  -LIBELLUS-

  I, Niccolò Paladino, the Promoter of Justice at this Apostolic Court, hereby accuse the Reverend Simon Andreou, a priest incardinated in the Diocese of Rome, of the delict of homicide against the person of Ugolino Nogara, in violation of Canon 1397 of the Code of Canon Law. The accusation is that, on August 21, 2004, at or about five o’clock in the evening, Fr. Andreou deliberately shot to death Dr. Nogara in the gardens of the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo. The following evidence is adduced:

  As witnesses: Mr. Guido Canali, employee of the pontifical farm at Castel Gandolfo; Dr. Andreas Bachmeier, curator of medieval and Byzantine art for the Vatican Museums; and Inspector General Eugenio Falcone, chief of the Vatican gendarmerie.

  As documentary evidence: Fr. Andreou’s personnel file at the Secretariat of State; a voice message left by Dr. Nogara at the Apostolic Nunciature in Ankara, Turkey; and video footage from security camera B-E-9 of the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo.

  I ask the Court to find him guilty and, thereupon, to impose the following penalty: dismissal of Father Andreou from the clerical state.

  On this 22nd day of August, in the Year of Our Lord, 2004,

  Reverend Niccolò Paladino

  Promoter of Justice

  I hang on the threatened punishment. The court has the power to throw Simon out of the Secretariat and even banish him from Rome. But the libellus asks for the heaviest penalty of all: to laicize my brother. I knew this was possible, but it casts a pall to see the prosecutor beg such a thing.

  “Look at the evidence,” Mignatto says. “Anything familiar?”

  “Guido Canali,” I say sickly, pointing to his name on the libellus. “The night Ugo was killed, he opened the gates and drove me down to see Simon.”

  Mignatto makes a note. “What did he see?”

  I’m at a loss. “I made him drop me off before we got close enough to see anything.”

  “And this?”

  He points to a line of text. Simon’s personnel file at the Secretariat.

  “I don’t know. Simon was cited for missing work this summer, but I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  “Why was he cited?”

  “For visiting Ugo in the desert.”

  But it returns to me now that Michael said Simon was doing something else.

  Mignatto glances up. “Should I know anything about their relationship? Your brother and Nogara?”

  He doesn’t even try to disguise his meaning.

  “No,” I say sharply. “Simon was just trying to help him.”

  Mignatto leans back. “Then, with the exception of the security-camera footage, I see no direct evidence here. It’s a circumstantial case, which needs a motive. And if the motive isn’t your brother’s relationship with Nogara, what is it?”

  “Simon had no motive.”

  Mignatto lays his pen at the leading edge of the page. A boundary separating us. “Father Andreou, why do you think they’re prosecuting him under canon law instead of criminal law?”

  “You already know what I think.”

  “In two decades of service at the Rota, I’ve never seen a murder trial. Not one. But I can tell you why I think they’re doing it. Because in a canonical trial, the proceedings are secret, the records are classified, and the sentencing is private. At every level there’s confidentiality to protect against uncomfortable things coming to light.”

  There is the gentlest lilt in his voice, offering me an opportunity to reveal any information I might have.

  “I know nothing about it,” I say.

  “And yet,” he continues, “in two decades of service at the Rota, I’ve also never seen a man refuse to defend himself. Which suggests to me that my client already knows what the uncomfortable something is.”

  I nod. “I told you. They think Ugo had a secret, and they think Simon knows what it is.”

  “What I’m asking you is: are they wrong?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re agreeing that this trial is a way to threaten Simon.”

  “You misunderstand. This trial is a way to prosecute him while guarding against the contingency that something confidential might come up in the proceedings.”

  “My brother didn’t hurt Ugo.”

  “Then let’s start at the beginning. Why was he at Castel Gandolfo the night Doctor Nogara was killed?”

  “Ugo called him and told him he was in trouble.”

  “Did they have some kind of exchange on that afternoon, prior to the murder?”

  “I don’t think so. Simon said he got there too late to save Ugo.”

  Mignatto points to the section of the libellus detailing the evidence. His finger hovers beneath the words video footage from security camera. “Then what is this going to show?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He grimaces and writes a few short notes on his pad.

  “Would you explain something?” he says, looking up. “I overheard you talking to your uncle about Doctor Nogara’s exhibit. Why did you think Cardinal Galuppo
would threaten your brother over an exhibit on the Turin Shroud, when the Shroud has been proven to be medieval?”

  “Ugo was going to prove that the tests were mistaken.”

  Mignatto’s eyes widen slightly.

  “He was also going to prove,” I continue, “how the Shroud got here. How it ended up in Catholic hands.”

  Mignatto begins writing notes again. “Go on.”

  “It used to be in Orthodox territory, in Turkey, where my brother works. And Simon may have invited Orthodox clergy to the exhibit without permission from the Secretariat.”

  Mignatto taps the pen on the page. “Which is important why?”

  “Because the message of Ugo’s exhibit may be that the Shroud isn’t ours. It belongs to the Orthodox, too. We owned it together when we were a single Church, before the schism of 1054.”

  How it came to the West, I don’t know for sure, but no matter how it came, the implications remain the same.

  “Is this a controversial thing to suggest?” Mignatto asks.

  “Of course. It could open to the door to a custody battle. Especially if we were to say it at the pope’s own museum.”

  Mignatto begins writing again. “And in that battle, you think Turin stands to lose.”

  “Turin stands to lose no matter what. Without the custody battle, Ugo told me the Shroud might be moved into a reliquary at Saint Peter’s. It’s not going back to Turin.”

  “So your theory,” Mignatto says, “is that the enemies of Nogara’s research wanted to stop the whole exhibit.”

  “Yes.”

  He looks up. “Which means Nogara was killed in the hopes of silencing him.”

  I haven’t admitted this to myself so frontally. “I guess so.”

  “Yet you said people are being threatened—you are being threatened—because someone believes Nogara had a secret and wants to know what that secret is.”

  “Yes.”

  He stops. Rolls the pen between his palms. Modulates his voice so that it sounds both kind and firm. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Father Andreou. Someone wants to stop the exhibit, to silence it. Yet you’re being threatened to reveal what it’s about.”

  “If you don’t believe me, I can show you the message that came to my hotel room.”

  Grudgingly he agrees. For the first time, though, it occurs to me that he’s deciding how far to trust me.

  When I return to the bedroom, I find Peter passed out on the bed. After tucking him in, I come back to Mignatto with the envelope. He studies the text on the back but remains silent for a long while. Finally he says, “I need time. May I take this back with me tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “I also need to think about everything you’ve just told me.” He checks his watch. “Would you meet me in the morning at my office?”

  “Of course.”

  He hands me a business card and writes 10 AM on the back. “I’ll have more questions for you about Nogara’s exhibit, so please come prepared to answer them. In the meantime, I expect to find out shortly where your brother is. If you find out, please contact me immediately.”

  When I nod, he rises and packs the libellus back into his briefcase.

  “One last thing,” Mignatto says, clicking the locks. “You need to speak to your housekeeper about the break-in.”

  “She didn’t lie about what happened.”

  He lowers his voice. “Father, you’re asking me to believe a theory of this murder that I consider almost impossible. In return I need you to do the same. Speak to your housekeeper. I have to know why the gendarmes came to the conclusion they did.”

  CHAPTER 15

  FOR A WHILE after Mignatto leaves, I sit alone at the meeting table. I stare at the chair where Simon sat. At the place on the red baize where he placed the libellus after refusing to look at it. With Mignatto gone, the reckoning comes. He has done it. My brother has finally cut his own throat.

  We are a religion of captains hoping to go down with the ship. Though we teach our children that the worst thing Judas ever did—worse even than betraying Jesus—was committing suicide, the truth is that what moves the lifeblood of our faith is a thumping impulse toward self-destruction. Greater love has no one than this, Jesus says in the gospel of John. To lay down one’s life for one’s friends. I wonder why Simon is doing this. For Ugo? For the memory of our father?

  Or for me?

  * * *

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER our father died, when Simon was seventeen, he went to a bar with some of our Swiss Guard friends and found a pack of gendarmes running arm-wrestling matches. Nothing organized, just policemen letting off steam. Simon wasn’t even old enough to drive, but he had grown to be the tallest man in our country. Since our father’s death, he’d also spent every day developing an interest in punching the speed bag in the Swiss Guard gym. So by the time he walked into that bar, his forearms were thicker than his biceps, and when the gendarmes got a look at them dangling from the bottoms of his rolled-up sleeves, they wanted to see what he could do.

  The guards felt protective of my brother. He and I were already slipping into the dark pit that our father’s death left behind. No one understood our loneliness better than those boys from the faraway cantons. That day at the bar, they pulled Simon away and started to lead him out the door—when their own Guard officer ordered them to wait. He wanted to see what would happen.

  Simon lost the first match. He lifted his elbow off the table, a foul, and the gendarme smashed him into the wood. But they reset the table, and Simon got some coaching from the Swiss Guard officer. This time he won, nearly breaking the man’s arm. That was how it started.

  The same night, the officer took Simon to the deck of his apartment in the Swiss barracks. He posed two questions: Was it true Simon wanted to be a priest? And would he consider another kind of service to the Holy Father?

  Simon listened as the officer explained there was a military tradition in our Church, which moved hand-in-hand with the priesthood. Five centuries ago, the Jesuits were founded on military discipline, by a soldier, and now the time had come to rekindle that spirit: to recruit men, train them, and enlist them in a military order to serve a troubled world. For a man like Simon, it would capitalize on physical gifts the priesthood would never use. So the next night, Simon followed the man into Rome for what the officer described as a demonstration of what he meant. And the officer encouraged my brother to keep an open mind.

  I discovered later that the place they went was a dogfighting pit. The Rome police had shut it down a month before, but it had found new life running street-boxing matches instead. Most of the fighters were homeless people and immigrants, and the purse was big enough that the fights were bloody.

  The officer showed Simon that there were children in the crowd. Boys and girls, eight and ten and twelve years old, greasy like rats, shouting for their favorite fighters. Those kids don’t come to Mass, the officer said. If we want to reach them, this is where we have to do it.

  Later, Simon would tell me about the things he saw that night. The children were stretching out their arms to touch the fighters who passed by, grabbing the hems of their shorts as if they were a disease they wanted to catch. Everyone old enough to gamble was in the front of the crowd, putting money on the fights. But the children were in back. That was when the officer spoke the words Simon never forgot: Tell me you’ve ever seen a kid look at his priest that way. And he pointed to a boy in the ringside stands, pressed between gamblers, watching the fight with upturned eyes. Simon said it was like a saint being martyred in a painting.

  “Sir,” Simon said, “I don’t fight.”

  “But if I trained you,” the officer told him, “you could. And when you win, these boys will follow you. Even to Mass.”

  Simon said nothing. So the officer explained: “It’s a dance. Two men agreeing not to turn the other cheek. Not sinful. I
would train you for a couple of months, then we would get you in the ring.”

  “A couple of months,” my brother said.

  “Son, you’re already good on the speed bag. If we work the heavy bag and some blocking, you could be ready in ten weeks.”

  And Simon, never taking his eyes off that boy in the crowd, said, “If this place is still standing in ten weeks, I’ll burn it down.”

  “Don’t fool yourself. They’ll find another place. They have no parents, no priests. But you: the arms on you, the strength. You could lead them.”

  “I thought you wanted to create military priests. These are just boys.”

  “Not them, son. You. Your strength is a gift. What do you say?”

  And I know what Simon must have thought, hearing that officer call him son, son, son. Father was dead. The doctors hadn’t found cancer in our mother yet, but it was there, spreading its wings. And Simon, who had always been a year ahead in school, was a college man now, swimming in the general population, pulling friends out of fistfights and watching them drink until they didn’t bother getting out of bed to relieve themselves, just urinated like beasts on themselves and the girls they brought home, who looked more inconvenienced than degraded. I never asked Simon why he said yes to those fights. But I imagined him staring at that boy in the crowd and thinking of me.

  So the guards trained him. They brought him down to the dojo in their barracks, where neither of us had been allowed before, and Simon learned the jab, the hook, the cross. Not the uppercut, because he drew the line at a punch you always aimed at a man’s head. But with strength like Simon’s, it was enough.

  Nine weeks later, he had his first fight. I heard about it afterward, the way I heard about everything until that final bout. He fought a hairy Algerian whose day job, people said, was drinking fig liquor when he should’ve been unloading bags at the airport. What people said about Simon, I never knew.

  It was ugly. Simon danced and jabbed until the Algerian got impatient; then, when the man leaned in for something big, Simon tattooed him with body blows. Late in the third round, it registered on the man’s face that this oversize boy was wearing him down. That those meaty forearms were throwing fire. But the boys in the back seats hated Simon’s style. The bobbing and weaving, the bloodlessness. They sympathized with the Algerian, who thought there might’ve been some hitting in the ring. But after the match, Simon went to them and told them he wasn’t a fighter, just a kid hoping to become a priest someday. He was fighting for them, for his boys. And he repeated this, match after match, until it sank in. He talked to them about how it felt to be scared by the men he fought. How he prayed before each fight, and how he prayed after. Soon he discovered how cheaply the affection of lonely kids can be bought. Before long they were bleeding their lungs for him, waiting for Simon’s signature punches each night, for the way my brother could turn a man’s aggression against him, eye for an eye, dialing up hooks and crosses like fire and brimstone.