Gospel (41 page)

“Se non ti é di troppo disturbo, mi chiami il Signore O'Hanrahan?”

“Spiacente, signore, ma é impossibile. Vuol lasciare detto a me?”

Lucy decided not to wait for the lift. She briskly climbed the three flights of stairs, ran to O'Hanrahan's room and knocked.

“I'm not here…”

“It's really important—let me in!”

He growled, probably still siesta-ing.

She knocked again. “There's that guy downstairs we saw on the train. And he wants to see you, but they won't let him up.”

Some rustling within. The door opened, and there was O'Hanrahan without his jacket on, his tie loosened. “Wants to see
me?
”

“That guy who walked into our compartment and looked at your briefcase like he might swipe it. That guy who looks like a crook,” she added nervously. “I heard him say your name.”

“No priest's collar? He's not a monk?”

But just then they heard the lift engage. Someone was in the lift. Perhaps coming up to their floor.

“The kid downstairs looked like he was about to give way,” Lucy said tensely. “And the guy saw my key.”

The lift whirred past the intervening floors and was headed for theirs.

“Come on,” said O'Hanrahan, scooping her along down the hall to her room, after quickly locking his door. She fumbled with her key, trying to get it in the door. The lift, they could hear, stopped, the metal gate clanged open. Then shut. They heard footsteps … and as Lucy got her door opened, the man rounded the corner of their hallway. Quietly they closed Lucy's door behind her and Lucy bit her fingernails while O'Hanrahan knelt down and listened at the keyhole.

Silence. Then a knock on O'Hanrahan's door.

“That's him,” Lucy breathed.

Another knock. Then a loud, impolite series of knocks, to rouse the dead. Angry knocks. Lucy felt a chill run up her spine. Then they heard whoever-it-was fiddling with the lock to O'Hanrahan's suite.

“What's he doing?” whispered Lucy.

“Trying to break into my room.”

“Where's your briefcase?”

“In the hotel safe, thank God. I didn't get it out for our sightseeing spree this morning—”

They heard a crunch. He had jimmied the lock and was in O'Hanrahan's room now, two doors away. O'Hanrahan pressed himself to the door, trying to hear. He heard a lamp break. Then a bottle. Lucy put her hand to her mouth, shaking her head … that man was tearing O'Hanrahan's room apart. More noises, then a pause. O'Hanrahan stroked his chin pensively; he seemed to Lucy abnormally calm.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered.

“He won't find the gospel and he'll probably go away.”

They heard the door close.

Lucy mouthed: “Well?”

O'Hanrahan shrugged.

Then there were more footsteps, slow deliberate ones. Coming toward them. Toward Lucy's room. He was right outside. Then the stranger walked on a little further and paused.

Silence.

“Is he gone?” Lucy said out loud.

O'Hanrahan blanched, turned and sssshed her in sign language—
he may have heard that,
his eyes told her.

Footsteps, this time back toward Lucy's room. He stopped outside Lucy's door. O'Hanrahan heard the squeak of his shoes.

Knock knock.

Lucy was biting her fingernail until it bled, and O'Hanrahan took a few steps back from the door, and then pulled Lucy closer to him as they stood next to the story-high Italian clothes cabinet. She looked around for a phone to call for help but, as in many continental rooms, there was none.

Knock knock again.

Neither of them breathed, frozen there in the corner of the hotel room. Lucy closed her eyes.

Then the man began to jimmy the lock, something like a screwdriver was stuck in the keyhole and he started wrenching it, shaking the doorknob—

O'Hanrahan whispered: “
Aiuto
is help,
stupro
is rape. When he breaks in, you scream your lungs out.” Lucy began to whimper.
“Do it,”
he hissed with unmistakable firmness, as he hid behind the dresser, out of view from the doorway.

Lucy stepped toward the door.

SMASH! The door sprang open: the swarthy man looked up and stared in surprise at Lucy. A momentary freeze. He took a step toward her and she knew somehow he intended to put a hand over her mouth—

“STUPRO! AIUTO AIUTO! STUPRO!”
And then she let out a bloodcurdling scream for good measure.

He looked quickly around the room, for whatever it was he was after, then he angrily fixed Lucy with a savage glance, one that promised revenge. Then he fled to the exit at the end of the hall.

“AIUTO! STUPRO!”

“No, darling, it's ah-ee-OO-toh, put some stress on the
u,
” said O'Hanrahan, stepping from behind the cabinet, reverting to language teacher. “You can stop now, Miss Dantan.”

O'Hanrahan left her room to see what had become of his own.

A panting chambermaid arrived:
“Cosa sta succedendo?”
Then she saw the broken lock. “
No no no … mamma mia … É ferita?
You American?”

Lucy joined the professor in his room—it was a mess all right. Lamp broken, clothes everywhere, cologne bottle smashed, O'Hanrahan's
Herald Tribune
scattered about. This burglar wanted to register his unhappiness with not finding what he was looking for. Then O'Hanrahan went into the bathroom:

“Damn that guy!”

“What is it?” asked Lucy, still trembling. The maid, right behind Lucy, noticed the jimmied lock of O'Hanrahan's room as well.
“Mi dispiace, signore … Maria…”
she muttered, astonished, before scurrying to tell someone downstairs.

“Damn that lousy two-bit hood to hell!”

“My God, sir, what is it?”

O'Hanrahan thundered, “He broke my bottle of homebrew grappa—I have been after that stuff for centuries,
centuries,
Luce. He did it out of spite, too! Smashed all over my bathroom floor—”

“You're upset about
that?
This guy wants to kill us and you're worried about your grappa?”

O'Hanrahan was calm again. “He doesn't want to kill us, he wants the
Gospel of Matthias.
Someone has hired him to steal the scroll from us, maybe the Ignatians—they're pissed off at us, I'm sure. Whoever it is,” pondered O'Hanrahan, “doesn't know we don't have it.”

Lucy's heart stopped beating so fast and she began to breathe normally. “I didn't bargain on this,” she said. “I didn't bargain on … what are you laughing about?”

“Heh heh heh,” he went on with his forced laugh, picking up some of his clothes only to scatter them for a bigger mess.

“Do you mind telling me what's so funny about this?”

“Nothing's funny. But there's something very reassuring…” He paused to turn his suitcase upside down and dump out the rest of its contents. “… in having someone be this interested in what we're after. Interested enough to hire a hood to steal it.” O'Hanrahan laughed some more, in jubilant spirits. “And Lucy, brava! Brava!” He unexpectedly took her by her sunburned shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. “What lungs!”

“Is this what I have to expect if I keep traveling with you?”

“Heh heh,” he said, delighted by the whole incident, “it'll get worse, I suspect.” Lucy was out of her depth and looked it. “Aw, c'mon,” O'Hanrahan added, “this is sort of fun, isn't it?”

“I didn't expect that we'd be pursued by hoods, Dr. O'Hanrahan. I think I better go home.”

“Now
what
have I been telling you?”

She looked at the floor. “You've been telling me to go home all along, and now I see your point, sir. I'll go quietly. I guess you better take me to the airport.”

O'Hanrahan almost agreed but he stopped short. He was aware of standing there, open-mouthed, drawing a blank. Damn it, he'd gotten used to his one-woman audience.

(Ask her to stay with you, then.)

Oh I can't, he thought, not after all my rant.

(Again, Patrick, you pay the price of pride. There are things that We have set in motion—get on with it!)

O'Hanrahan busied himself by trying to break a cheap vase on his nighttable left unsmashed by the burglar. And he thought: It's a shame Lucy's leaving, since frankly I could help that girl. She's a Roman Catholic disaster in the making, a future Beatrice. O'Hanrahan could see it all in perfect focus: she would marry the first Bridgeport lout who would have her, a loser whom she would romantically devote her life to correcting, and then when it became apparent this no-count mick was a rube for life, she would enter into the oldest and most ancient conventual order for the Irish female: the nagging malcontent, made miserable by marriage, made morally superior by the all-embittering One True and Holy Roman Catholic Church—

“Sir?” Lucy demanded, still waiting for an answer.

“I'm not taking you to the goddam airport,” he snapped. “Go get a cab,” he added, as he dumped out his shaving kit on the floor.

“Dr. O'Hanrahan,” asked Lucy, matching his calm, “why are you messing up your room even more?”

“Stay tuned.”

In a moment the hotel manager appeared, a thin bald man with a humorously thick mustache: “
Signore,
my apologies! I cannot believe!” He looked around and assessed the room, the broken lock, muttered something in Italian Lucy gathered had to do with the soon-to-be-fired desk clerk. “I can't believe thees happened in the Hotel Davide!”

O'Hanrahan in a mock rage lashed out at the man:
how dare
the establishment let a criminal up to rob the guests! Just wait until Fodor and Frommer and the
New York Times Travel Magazine,
which he worked for, heard about this! Where are the carabinieri? Of course, this hotel is liable for everything that was stolen …

“The carabinieri,
signore?
”

No hotelier wants the carabinieri around or the Frommer guide informed, so O'Hanrahan was led to the manager's office for a soothing glass of Amaro and to discuss this regrettable incident, this regrettable incident that surely the two of them could come to some form of—how do you say?—understanding about, no?

Lucy went to her room to relax and recover from all the excitement, and lay down on the bed until she felt calm. She propped a chair before her now-unlockable door.

“Rise and shine,” said O'Hanrahan, in what seemed a moment later.

She must have napped. Lucy looked at the window and it was dark outside. “What's going on?” she asked, as O'Hanrahan shoved the chair out of his way.

To avert the publicity and keep himself out of court, the hotel manager had replaced O'Hanrahan's bottle of grappa with a fine brand purchased by his secretary, as they negotiated, and the stolen money—

“
What
stolen money?”

“The extra cash I told him I keep in my shaving kit. He was more than happy to reimburse me.”

Lucy sat up on the bed. “I was feeling sorry for myself, but now I see I should feel sorry for the manager. You just … just invented that so you could steal money from the poor man?”

“Poor man? With what this clip joint charges? Besides, I expropriated this money for
you,
Miss Dantan. For traveling expenses. We can't put everything on the credit card.”

She stood up and began packing her things, shoving the unwritten postcards into her handbag. “I don't want your ill-gotten money. Although, I'll take it if it'll help me to the airport.”

“But you're not going to get a flight to America tonight.”

She looked at her watch. “It's not late.”

“It is for Florence's airport. You could get to London maybe, spend the night in a lounge chair and get something to the U.S. in the morning.”

Lucy hurled her handbag into her suitcase. “Whatever it takes to get me out of the black market.”

“How are you going to pay for your ticket?”

“Your credit card,” she said hopefully.

“I'm not going thirty miles out to the airport so you can pay with my credit card, nor am I giving it to you. I'm going to Assisi on the eleven
P.M.
locale,
and I'm not going to miss it.”

Lucy's eyes flashed frustrated anger. “Then
how
am I supposed to get out of here? I'm not staying here with some goon breaking into my room every five minutes!”

“They don't care about you, it's
me
they want, and only because they think I've got the scroll
here.
” By here, O'Hanrahan meant the satchel he was now holding tightly.

Lucy sat on the bed, not sure what to do. Hitting O'Hanrahan was among the options, kicking the old goat as hard as she could in the shins.

(Patrick, you could bring some comfort to this situation.)

“Lucy,” he said begrudgingly, “this scroll may be a 5th-Century pseudo-gospel, it may be a medieval fake, it may be half a dozen things. But the Ignatians went to great lengths to get it, and now the Franciscans have gone to great lengths to steal it, and Mordechai Hersch and Hebrew University have spent forty years and a ton of money to track it down, and now we know someone else wants it, and good God, we've got a University of Chicago credit card so they want it too. Doesn't it suggest we're on to something?”

Lucy still didn't say anything.

“You know, honey, if you want to stay and work with me, you can, I suppose. Maybe … maybe you don't want to stay, I don't guess I blame you. You're not happy, you're not well. You're complaining all the time, you hate me—”

“I
am
happy, I
don't
complain all the time, Dr. O'Hanrahan, and … and I
don't
hate you. But can you understand that this cloak-and-dagger stuff is sort of scary?”