The Fifth Gospel: A Novel

by Ian Caldwell

  He makes a long, inarticulate sound, then says, “We wait and see how powerful your brother’s guardian angel is.” He thinks a moment longer, then adds, “Very well, be at the Palace of the Tribunal at eight o’clock tomorrow.”

  I hesitate. “Am I testifying?”

  “Father, you’re procurator. You’re sitting beside me at the defense table.”

  Below me I hear the autopark doors open. Instinctively I crouch, in case another driver’s sedan rounds the bend. But it’s Gianni rumbling toward the foot of the stairs. And I can’t believe my eyes.

  “Monsignor,” I say, “I’ve got to go.”

  “If you find out anything else,” he says, “at any hour—”

  “I’ll call you.”

  I hang up and slink down the terrace steps, trying to suppress the nervous urge to laugh. Gianni’s car is a Fiat Campagnola, the white military jeep that the rest of the world knows as the popemobile.

  “Get in,” Gianni says anxiously. “Before anyone sees you.”

  I know the vehicle well. When we were thirteen, Gianni and I spent a whole night searching for dots of John Paul’s blood in the bed, because it was in the back of this truck that he was shot by a gunman in Saint Peter’s Square.

  “Get in where?” I say.

  There’s no room in back, where an armchair has been installed for John Paul. The passenger seat is stacked with a removable plastic tarp that covers the Holy Father when it rains.

  Gianni moves the plastic. “Under there.”

  It takes me a moment to understand. He wants me to crawl into the foot well.

  “And no matter what happens,” he adds in a voice that hums with uncertainty, “don’t say a word. Okay? There’s a gendarme outside the door, but once we get past him, the garage should be empty. I think I can buy you five or ten minutes inside.”

  I do what he says, and Gianni piles the plastic tarp back over the foot well. Then the jeep starts to move.

  The ride is rough. The popemobile is almost as old as I am. John Paul received it as a gift a quarter-century ago when he visited Turin, Fiat’s headquarters, on a trip to venerate the Shroud. Thirteen months later, on the day he was shot in it, a team of Shroud scientists was in Saint Peter’s Square, waiting to deliver their preliminary findings. One of the mysteries of living inside these walls is that there are no loose ends to our lives.

  “Stay quiet,” Gianni says. “We’re close.”

  There’s a jarring thud as we cross the raised barrier into the industrial quarter of town, a grimy area of workshops and warehouses. I see only the flash of electric lights as we plunge through it. Then the jeep slows, and I hear the first voice.

  “Signore! No farther!”

  Gianni brings the Fiat to a halt. He scrapes his foot toward me as a warning.

  “No access here tonight,” the gendarme says.

  He’s approaching. Voice growing louder.

  Gianni says, “I have orders from Father Antoni.”

  The village nickname of Archbishop Nowak.

  “What orders?”

  I hope Gianni knows what he’s doing. When John Paul travels in this jeep, he always has a gendarme escort. One call to the station could disprove anything Gianni says.

  But he thumps the pile of plastic with his hand and says, “Chance of rain tomorrow.”

  The gendarme says, “All right. How long will it take?”

  “Ten minutes. I have to check the spare tarp.”

  Now I understand his plan. Tomorrow is Wednesday, the day of John Paul’s weekly audience. The only time this open-topped Campagnola is used anymore.

  “It’s been a dead zone out here tonight,” the gendarme says. “I’ll give you a hand in there.”

  Gianni tenses up. His foot makes the engine idle at higher RPM. But before he can refuse, I hear the gendarme opening the steel door on its metal rollers. Gianni turns the jeep around and reverses slowly into the bay.

  “Whose Alfa is that?” I hear him say.

  We’ve found Ugo’s car.

  “Not your business,” the gendarme says sharply. “Where’s the thing you need?”

  Gianni hesitates. My pulse is thready. He’s never been a good liar.

  “Inside one of the boxes back there,” he says.

  He takes the keys out of the ignition and reaches down as if to pick up something he dropped. When his hand is in front of my face, he jabs a finger toward the door, pointing. Something must be on the other side of the jeep.

  Then he’s gone. The two voices fade away.

  Carefully I raise my head over the low doors of the popemobile. The garage is long and narrow, just wide enough for two cars abreast. Gianni has parked right beside the Alfa Romeo, which has its doors propped open, as if someone’s been inspecting the interior.

  Now I see why the gendarmes brought it here. The driver’s window is shattered. A crinkled eggshell of glass surrounds a hole larger than a man’s head. There are pebbles of glass on the seat.

  My heart begins to hammer. I can’t climb out of the Fiat without the gendarme seeing me. Instead I lower the hinged windshield, push it flat, and silently slide down the hood.

  Ugo’s car is waterlogged. It smells of mildew. In the foot well, the gendarmes have left a plastic red marker in the shape of an arrow. It points backward, under the driver’s seat. But there’s nothing down there, just a rectangular impression on the upholstery, as if something was there. I need a closer look.

  Behind me, Gianni and the gendarme have started building the rain shield. My five or ten minutes have begun.

  I lower myself onto Ugo’s seat and scan the underside with my keychain flashlight. Gianni said the gendarmes were asking questions about the driver’s seat. The seat is attached to the car body with metal sleds, and one part of the sleds is rubbed away. Whatever was on the floor must’ve been attached here.

  I play the flashlight beam around, and something glints. Jutting out from the floor mat is a sliver of metal, no bigger than the white of a fingernail. I reach down to pick it up, then remember to be careful about fingerprints. In a prison outreach group I belong to, an inmate in our Bible class was caught hiding a used syringe, so the whole group had its fingerprints and blood taken. I roll my hand under the fabric of my cassock before picking up the bronze-colored arc.

  Its outer edge seems smooth, but the inside is jagged and bent. Something about it seems familiar, yet I can’t think why.

  There’s a noise in the distance. Gianni, warning me. I put the sliver of metal into my pocket and start crawling back toward the popemobile.

  On the way out, though, I pass a utility cart. On top of it, in plastic bags, are the objects that must’ve been removed from Ugo’s car. A car charger for a mobile phone. A flask engraved with Ugo’s initials. A scrap of stationery. There are several others below. I stop.

  The plastic bags have red seals that say EVIDENCE. Their backs are embossed with boxes for the time and place of collection, the case number, the chain of custody. It seems odd that these would still be here, rather than entered as exhibits at the trial. A loose sheet of paper atop the utility cart says HOLD FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTION. I wonder if Mignatto knows any of this was found.

  There’s something else. No object here matches the impression under the driver’s seat. Nothing the size of a small laptop computer, nothing that could’ve been tied around the metal sleds of the seat. Maybe that’s why the window was broken: to steal whatever was down there.

  I start to reach for the bags at the bottom of the heap, whose contents I can’t see—when my eyes focus on the scrap of stationery.

  A number is written on it. A phone number.

  I look closer, and the breath catches in my lungs.

  My phone number. The landline at my apartment.

  Another sharp clang comes from the back of the garage—Gianni
knocking over the rain frame, warning me that time’s running out.

  I scurry to the Fiat.

  Gianni doesn’t even check that I’m in the foot well. He turns the ignition and shifts the jeep into first. The drive is short. In the same dark corner of the autopark where we started, he stops to let me off.

  I want to thank him, but his eyes are wide and anxious, glancing behind him in the mirror. Distractedly he says, “So did you find anything useful?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  His head bobs. “Good. That’s good.”

  I step away from the jeep. He’s panting. “If you need anything else . . .” he says.

  “You’ve done plenty,” I say, thinking only of the phone number on that scrap of paper. “I really appreciate it, Gian.”

  He offers a small wave and makes the sign of a telephone, as if I should call if I need anything else. He’s trembling. The Fiat drives away toward the autopark doors.

  I think to myself how often I’ve seen Ugo’s handwriting. How many sheets of his homily paper scrawled with gospel verses I’ve corrected when he insisted on giving himself homework after our lessons. I would recognize his penmanship anywhere. But the writing on that scrap of stationery was not his.

  The contents of those evidence bags shouldn’t still be locked in the impound garage. If the gendarmes are waiting for someone to collect them, then that someone seems to have decided to keep them out of sight.

  Gianni’s final gesture lingers with me. The sign of the telephone. It gives me an idea.

  CHAPTER 24

  BEHIND THE AUTOPARK is the Belvedere Palace. I jog up the stairs to my apartment. Before entering, I listen for sounds on the other side of the door. Until the locks are changed, this will have to be a part of my visits here. But I see that Leo has left something behind from our last visit: the flap of a matchbook, stuffed between the frame and the door. It’s a trick he uses in the barracks to make sure cadets don’t sneak into Rome. Paper on the floor means someone’s come and gone. Paper in the door means the seal is unbroken. I’m relieved.

  I let myself in and go to the telephone in the kitchen. It seems strange that Ugo would’ve wanted the number for this landline. Whenever we exchanged calls about the Diatessaron, he dialed my mobile. Maybe this time he was trying to reach Simon, not me. The question is, when?

  I scroll through the caller ID list of incoming calls, and there isn’t a trace of Ugo’s number. There are only three calls from an unfamiliar phone—a Vatican number—all within forty minutes of each other on the night before Ugo died. Peter and I were away that whole evening, seeing a movie. I never knew about these calls.

  Loose sparks float through my thoughts. I check the date on the calls again, just to be sure. It’s as if someone was checking to make sure we were gone. Casing the apartment before the break-in. Yet the following night—when the break-in actually happened—there’s not a single unrecognized call.

  Losing patience, I scroll back to the unfamiliar number and punch it into my phone. It barely rings before a woman picks up.

  “Pronto. Casa Santa Marta. How may I help you?”

  A nun. At the front desk of the Casa.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’m trying to reach someone who called me from a hotel line. Can you connect me?”

  “The name, sir?”

  “I don’t have the name. Just a phone number.”

  “For the privacy of our guests, sir, we can’t honor that request.”

  “It’s important, Sister. Please.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  Thinking quickly, I say, “Ugolino Nogara, then. Can you look for a room under the name Ugolino Nogara?”

  Ugo had no reason to stay at the Casa. He would’ve stayed in his apartment over the museums. But I’m fishing for anything.

  I hear her typing on the computer. “No guest under that name, sir. Are you sure he hasn’t checked out? We remove guests from the system when they return their keys.”

  Their keys. Suddenly it comes to me. The sliver of metal I found under Ugo’s car mat.

  “Thank you, Sister,” I say. Then I hang up the phone and reach into both pockets of my cassock. Out of one I take the metal crescent from Ugo’s car. Out of the other I take my room key from the Casa.

  Attached to the Casa key is an oval fob engraved with the room number. Color and thickness match perfectly. The sliver is a snapped-off edge of a Casa fob.

  Looking closer, I can see the stress marks. It must’ve been used to pry something up. Whatever the job was, it failed.

  I sit at the kitchen table, trying to arrange all this information into a pattern I can grasp. The phone calls to my apartment trace back to the Casa. The robbery of Ugo’s car does, too. This may be the first hint that the break-in and the murder really are connected. But I’m also haunted by the thought that Peter and I were at the Casa, sleeping under the same roof as the man who did this.

  I rub the metal sliver in my palm. The Casa. It was built for out-of-town visitors, but it’s also where Secretariat priests stay when they’re passing through. On the phone, Mignatto said Cardinal Boia doesn’t want us to know who beat Michael up. He refuses to release that information. Boia, since the time of my father’s death, has been the enemy of a Catholic-Orthodox reunion. The man who has used the Secretariat as a tool to kill John Paul’s goodwill gestures toward our sister Church.

  Simon must’ve known he was tempting fate by inviting Orthodox clergy to the exhibit. He must’ve tried to stay off Boia’s radar as long as he could. That would explain why his diplomatic passport has no hint of trips to Serbia or Romania. He could’ve applied for a regular Italian passport to hide what he was doing. But once an Orthodox bishop—or a metropolitan—agreed to come to Rome, the game was over. Bishops are public figures. They travel with entourages; their plans appear in announcements and diocesan calendars. Boia was guaranteed to find out.

  Around that time, though, Simon must’ve had an even nastier shock. It was in the thick of my brother’s negotiations with the Orthodox that Ugo discovered the Shroud had been stolen from Constantinople.

  That discovery must’ve set the rest of this in motion. Michael was attacked by men who wanted to know what Ugo had discovered. The same threat was written on the back of the photo I was sent. Cardinal Boia seems to know Ugo uncovered something, but not what it is. Maybe this is what he hopes to squeeze out of Simon by putting him under house arrest.

  Ironically, though, all he needs to do is walk through Ugo’s exhibit. Even though the galleries are unfinished, the answers are in plain sight. If His Eminence would learn a few words of Greek, he would realize the truth is painted on the walls.

  I stand and wade through the darkness back to my bedroom. My brother may put this exhibit above his own career, but I don’t. Simon was made for greater things than inviting some Orthodox clergy to Rome. When he testifies tomorrow, the judges need to hear what’s really at stake.

  I look in my dresser but don’t find what I’m looking for. So I cross the imaginary line between my side of the room and Mona’s and open the jewelry box her father made her after our engagement. She disappeared without anything but a carry-on bag of clothes, and since a priest’s wife rarely wears jewelry anyway, it’s all still here: the diamond stud earrings, the nostalgic teenage rings, the gold necklace with the Latin cross on it, superseded by the Greek cross she would’ve been wearing the day she left. I open the small lower compartment. Inside is a key. I loop it onto my chain.

  On my way to the door, I stop and open the credenza that was overturned during the break-in. Inside it is the plastic bag where Peter and I keep our rat’s nest of extra wires and cables and adapters. Anything I see that might charge a mobile phone, I roll up and stuff in my cassock.

  Then, before going downstairs again, I try to brace myself for what I’m about to see.

  * * *

  O
N THE BOTTOM FLOOR of our apartment building is Vatican Health Services. When Simon and I were boys, American priests would fly back to New York for their checkups rather than risk a trip to the Vatican doctors. Horror stories have followed every pope for half a century. Fifty years ago, Pius XII came down with recurring hiccups, so his doctor prescribed injections of ground lamb brains. Another papal doctor sold Pius’ medical records to newspapers and embalmed his dead body using an experimental technique that made the pope’s corpse bubble and fart like a tar pit while pilgrims queued up to view it. Ten years later, Paul VI needed his prostate removed, so Vatican doctors decided to perform the operation in his library. His successor, John Paul I, died thirty-three days into his papacy because our doctors didn’t yet know he took pills for a blood condition. So you might think our Vatican morticians would be world-class, considering all the practice they get. But there’s no such thing as a Vatican mortician and no such place as a Vatican morgue. Popes are embalmed in their apartments by volunteer undertakers from the city, and the rest of us settle for the back room at Health Services. That room is where I’m headed now.

  There are two doors to the clinic, one for bishops and one for everyone else. Even now, I use the door appropriate to my rank. Mona’s key opens the lock without a hitch. Before Peter was born, she worked here pro bono, like all our medical staff, in addition to her real job in the city.

  I haven’t stood in this waiting room since the day of my father’s heart attack. The windows look out onto the autopark and the museums beyond, so I don’t dare turn on the lights. But I don’t need them to remember how this place looks. The white floors and walls, the white slats of the plastic window shades. The white-coated doctors and nurses who moved so slowly when we carried Father inside, as if they’d already decided this would be his doorstep to heaven. When Mona volunteered here, not once did I come down to meet her after work, and not once did she have to ask me why.

  I walk down the hall, opening the waiting rooms one by one. As expected, the one I want is at the very end. Even before I open the door, I smell the embalming fluid. Inside the room there’s no reclining bed dressed with sanitary paper, just a steel table draped with a white sheet. Under the sheet is the hump of a body.