Flicker (79 page)

“By taking in orphans.”

“Exactly. Or, where the opportunity presents itself, by creating orphans.”

“You don't mean by killing the parents?”

“No, no. They will not shed blood—not even the blood of animals. They are strict vegetarians, you know. They will not even taste milk and eggs. But they have been known to kidnap children. Or to buy them.”

“Buy them?”

“There are parts of the third world where that is possible. You see how nicely it all fits together? The ranks of the faithful are amply restocked from the orphanages with minds that have been shaped from infancy by the Great Heresy.”

Angelotti spoke in a smooth, rolling baritone that modulated all he said with a tone of absolute authority. I realized I was being carried along on the current of his conviction as he narrated this astonishing tale of survival and conspiracy. But there were questions that had to be asked. “Look here, there's something that's bothered me all along. In the eyes of the church, the orphans are heretics. No doubt about that, am I right?”

“Correct.”

“All right, then. Here are these particularly malignant heretics who are still with us today making mischief. And you tell me the church knows all about them—because you, I mean Oculus Dei, have been sounding the alarm loud and clear inside the Vatican for a century or more. But the church does
nothing.
Or rather, it turns against
you.
Denounces you, defrocks you. Why?”

Angelotti squinted at me, a twinkle of curious amusement in his eyes. “What would you expect?”

“That the church would listen to you, believe you, go after the culprits. After all, once upon a time, it was willing to slaughter the Albigenses down to the last man, woman, and child.”

“But that option is thankfully no longer open, is it?”

“There are other ways to strike at them. The pope could speak out, condemn the heresy … ”

“And if he did, what would that accomplish but to make the church look like an intolerant bully all over again? Besides, do you really think anybody in the modern world cares about heresy? If the church once began anathematizing heretics, where would it stop? From the church's point of view, the Lutherans are heretics, the Baptists are heretics, the Holy Rollers are heretics. So what? Who cares? Even loyal Catholics have no interest in resurrecting these old disputes.”

“But surely people would be alarmed to learn that the movies—the movies they grew up on, that their kids are watching—are being used as a proselytizing device by a small, conspiratorial movement.”

Angelotti gave a bitter little chuckle. “Have you ever noticed what happens when the charge of conspiracy is introduced into any discussion? Automatically, everything one says is discredited. Why? Because no right-thinking person believes in such a thing. Only charlatans or cranks like poor Rosenzweig invoke conspiratorial rumors. The word alone is enough to mark you as suspect. Can you imagine the pope lecturing the world about a seven-hundred-yearold
conspiracy and expecting to be taken seriously? He would become a laughingstock.” Angelotti took a long sip of cognac. “And even if the church had the nerve, it would not be free to speak out.”

“Why not?”

Now Angelotti's face turned several shades more somber. “You cannot guess how it grieves me to tell you. Of course we know that all human institutions are doomed to be imperfect. In the hands of fallible men, nothing remains infallible. And yet did not our Lord proclaim that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail' against this church,
his
church?”

He seemed now to be looking into the distance beyond me. There was a glitter in his eyes that might have been tears. “It is like this, my friend. Listen closely. Somewhere in the world there is a box. Not very large. The size of a small suitcase. Possibly it lies in the vaults of a Swiss bank deep beneath the Alps where it would survive even the atomic apocalypse. Or so I have always imagined. Where exactly this box is hidden is the deepest secret of our age. There is only one secret that approaches it in importance: Who holds the keys to this box? I say ‘keys.' but there may be only
one
key. Perhaps there is only one person who can find that key and open that box. And that person's identity is guarded by the massed ranks of the orphans with such dedication that they would surely die to the last man to defend his name.

“What does this box contain?” Here Angelotti swallowed hard as if his throat had locked down on the words. “Shame. Filth. Corruption. Moral horror. What form does this horror take? Numbers for the most part. Mere numbers. Amounts of money. Bank accounts. Deposits. Withdrawals. Payments rendered. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Loans. Debts. To these numbers are attached names, dates, small annotated reports of meetings, agreements, bargains. Also court records, affidavits, deathbed confessions, the accounts of various investigators. Some of the materials are very old, yellow with age. But I would assume that by now, the box also contains more contemporary forms of evidence. Photographs, Xerox copies, tape recordings.”

He paused to study my reaction. It was one of blank bewilderment. I had no idea what he was talking about. He poured more cognac and went on. “The Roman Catholic Church is a rich institution. This all the world knows. But
how
rich, and what the sources of that wealth might be, and to what uses it has been put—this the world does not know. These are matters the church has sought to guard more closely
than anything ever spoken in the confessional. But that effort has not been a success.
The orphans know.
Yes, they have done their work cleverly and completely, working from within over centuries, documenting the invisible finances of the Vatican. In this box one might find records reaching back to the papacy's dealings with the House of Fugger, before Columbus sailed for the New World. Arrangements with the Doge of Venice in the time of the scandalous Fourth Crusade. Transactions with Saracen moneylenders and Moslem potentates. And, yes, the disposition of the Templars' treasures, that too would be there.

“Disgraceful beyond description. Nothing short of the betrayal of the faith. Ah, but all so long ago. Such quaint matters would be of little more than antiquarian interest today. There are, however, more contemporary documents in the box, and these no less disgraceful. Indeed, more so. Worse than merely illegal. Deeds so heinous that no laws have been framed to cope with them. Things that one kills to keep hidden. Profitable investments made in the most unspeakable trades. Moneys paid to thugs, cutthroats, assassins. Contributions made to clandestine agencies, to unscrupulous despots, to movements dedicated to violence and terror. Treasures taken as security from the bloodiest regimes on the planet. Loans to the sorts of governments that pledge the gold collected from human teeth as their collateral. Do you follow me?”

“I'm not a Catholic,” I reminded him, “so probably this should make no difference to me. But, well … I'm frankly shocked. Are you telling me these things are true?”

“Of course Vatican authorities would dispute much of it. But I assure you, Jon, if only
one
accusation in ten is true, it is enough. Enough to blacken the name of the Catholic Church for the rest of time. And there is every reason to believe that far more than a tenth is true, more than half. Perhaps
all.
Consider the centuries over which the church has accumulated its riches and power. Where does the control of this wealth and power reside? In the iron-clad secrecy of the Holy Curia, a clique of faceless men who are a law unto themselves. Do you know what kind of men flourish in such an environment? I have met them, shared their private moments, their gossip, their sometimes drunken ruminations. Bring just these two things together—vast power, absolute secrecy—and you have built the gates of Hell
inside
Christ's church!

“Ah, but, as it turns out, the secrecy was not absolute after all.
There were those who were more cunning, more ruthless than the Machiavellian princes of the church. The masters of another church, an ancient rival driven by infinite hatred, willing to work with infinite patience. Yes, the orphans penetrated the
sanctum sanctorum,
laboring with the cold, meticulous fury of ants, boring deep, collecting every scrap of the Vatican's dung, storing up every dropping. For this, they knew, would finally be their only defense against annihilation on that day when Rome once again identified them for what they were.

“Why does the church not strike at its detested enemy? Because, my friend, to put it crudely, that enemy has the goods on us. One threatening word from the Holy See, and the orphans would drown St. Peter's in an avalanche of muck, muck of its own making.”

For the next few hours, Angelotti dilated upon the crimes of the Vatican, describing to me what he knew of the devices the orphans had used to discover and document them. There were moles the orphans had sequestered in the ranks of the most highly placed prelates for thirty and forty years, there to filch one document, to record a single conversation. It was a story of ecclesiastical espionage that dwarfed anything I knew in the world of modern politics.

Somewhere after 1:00
A.M.
I heard Clare's key in the door. I hadn't glanced at the clock since I sat down with Angelotti hours before. Clare looked in on us as she passed along the corridor.

“Don't let me interrupt,” she said, standing in the doorway to the living room. She was swaying slightly and her eyes were glassy. I realized I hadn't seen Clare drunk since the old days, though I knew she was still a heavy drinker. “I'm just going to collapse. Lousy film, great party. Feel free to use the facilities for the night.” She studied me, bleary-eyed, for a moment, then tottered across to where I sat to bend over me. “We can talk tomorrow … some time, yes?” And she leaned to give me a long, clinging kiss. As if she were confessing a crime, she whispered to me, “Supposed to get the review in tonight. You know, I can't remember the bloody film.” She giggled, then kissed me again, this time holding her lips on mine an ambiguous few seconds too long.

Feebly, I mentioned that I'd brought a paper with me for her to read. “About Simon Dunkle … and everything.” I pulled a copy of the article from my briefcase and held it out to her, but her attention had drifted. She laid it on the coffee table, and turned to move unsteadily toward the door, murmuring, “Tomorrow, tomorrow,”
then stopped in the hall to look back and add histrionically, “After all, tomorrow is another day.” Shoes off, she padded down the corridor, humming off-key the theme that went with the line. After I heard her bedroom door close, I tried to pick up the thread of my conversation with Angelotti.

“All this you're telling me—top-secret stuff, right? How do you know about it?”

He gave a sad little smile. “For my sins, I once moved within these inner precincts. Oh yes, for the greater part of my life in the church, I was I suppose what you might call an up-and-comer in the Vatican elite. You have heard of Cardinal Mazzarini? No? Very important, very powerful. Also quite vicious. The old Medici prelates would have paled beside him. I was his personal secretary for eight years. Even so, it took years longer before I could put the pieces together. ‘We have enemies,' the cardinal tells me one day. I am given a new position, to take over one of Mazzarini's most sensitive responsibilities. Monitoring the orphans. I learn their story. It is well documented in the Vatican archives, a file in which your FBI would take pride, but going back before the American Revolution. In the course of my duties, I come upon mention of Oculus Dei. I seek out one of its members. We meet. We meet several times. I am astonished by what I am told. And even more astonished to find that the cardinal is
not
astonished. Yes, he knows all about Oculus Dei. ‘Stay away from these people,' he warns me. But why? Isn't that like ignoring a fire alarm?

“The cardinal grows stern with me. I seem to have disappointed him. Next I am removed from my assignment. I learn that I will be sent to some distant new position. At this point, I find myself asking my superiors the very question you have raised this evening. And slowly, slowly I unearth the truth, a scrap here, a fragment there. The church is paralyzed by its dirty secrets, blackmailed into silence. Unwisely, I now realize, I make a nuisance of myself. Mazzarini disciplines me, but it does no good. And soon I find myself cast out like others before me. Like Rosenzweig. He too was a Vatican insider.”

He went on to tell me the strange, twisted history of Oculus Dei. It was more than I cared to know, but he told the tale with a certain relish, as if he had been waiting to find a friendly audience for a long while. The organization, I discovered, had been hatched within the Vatican at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It was the original intelligence
unit assigned to report on the orphans. Angelotti seemed to know the names of its every member for the past century. At some point, the small circle of orphan-watchers became alarmed at what it saw happening. That was about the time the first Zoetrope motionpicture instruments came on the scene. This was no mere toy, Oculus Dei realized. It was an orphan invention meant to inculcate the Great Heresy. Angelotti was convinced the ODs had a clear idea even then of what would follow from these early cinematic experiments. They clamored for the Holy See to take action. But it refused. Instead, it clamped down on Oculus Dei, at least as an official operation of the church. But several members of the agency wouldn't play dumb. They bolted the church and became an independent, unsanctioned crusade against the orphans.

“But you can imagine,” Angelotti continued, “how much success they had trying to convince anybody that there was some great danger attached to amusements like the Zoetrope, the phenakistoscope, Edison's peep-show. ‘Wheel of the Devil'—that is what Oculus Dei named Horner's Daedalum, the first mechanical animation. But who would listen? What harm could there be in such toys, eh? Besides, in most parts of the so enlightened western world, my predecessors found themselves confronted by anticlerical prejudice, especially where Catholics or, worst of all, Jesuits, were concerned. This was the great age of science and reason. And now along come these renegade priests ranting about some ancient heresy. Even their own benighted church rejects them. You see why, after a certain point, our members might be tempted to turn to other methods.”