Papal Decree (13 page)

Gunter was like a student nervously reciting a report and afraid to make a mistake. Gavache was silent, looking at the floor.

‘That’s the official history. What about the secret one?’ Gavache finally said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The secret one. The history you don’t tell anyone, but pass along secretly.’

‘I assure you this is the history of Saint Ignatius. There are no secrets, and we’re talking about a saint from the sixteenth century. He did not commit the crimes against Zafer and Hammal,’ Gunter joked, though he sounded serious.

Gavache didn’t challenge the remark. Actually he ignored it completely. ‘We’ve got too many nationalities now.’

Gunter shrugged. What did the Frenchman mean by that?

‘Someone killed the Turk, a German, and maybe a Spaniard. The Vatican sent me two Italians who brought me to a German in French territory to see if the murderer belongs to a society of another Spaniard who lived in the sixteenth century. What a lot of shit –’

‘If you’ll permit me, Inspector,’ Gunter interrupted, ‘I don’t think we have anything to do with this.’

Gavache blew a puff into the air. ‘A lot of pieces are missing in this puzzle. And I need to find out if Zafer and Hammal knew each other. Worked together. If they ever saw each other’s faces.’ He looked at Rafael. ‘I need you in this department.’

Rafael agreed. There was something about Gavache that made him want to help. Perhaps his iron will to find the killer of his friend.

At that moment a cell phone rang. It was Gavache’s, and he took it out to answer. He listened and said a few phrases in French in his nasal, firm voice. When he disconnected, he looked at them with wide eyes.

‘The lab managed to decipher part of the recording. There’s a name.’ He looked at all of them at the same time, as if wanting to capture their reactions simultaneously. ‘Does
Ben Isaac
mean anything to you?’

Gunter prostrated himself on the floor of the church. Rafael showed no reaction. Jacopo looked at Gavache openmouthed.

‘God help us,’ Jacopo said, sitting down in the nearest pew.

‘It’s never too late to start believing,’ Gavache offered ironically.

Francesco couldn’t imagine making the trip to Ascoli without Sarah. To make the scene more troubling, he didn’t know what had happened to her. They were supposed to be going the next day to meet his mother. It was important.

‘Not even a phone call to let me know you’re okay?’ he sighed to himself, annoyed. Had something happened to her?

He pressed his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder while holding the hotel phone in his other hand. Someone must know something.

‘Sarah, let me know if you get this message. I’m getting really worried.’

He shouldn’t have let her leave without finding out where she was going. He’d looked out the window and seen her get into an imposing Mercedes. They went up Via Cavour and were lost to sight. From there they could have gone anywhere. She wasn’t coerced. She got in willingly. Still, he’d tried to read the license plate, but he was too high up to make it out.

This had happened five hours earlier. Five hours was a long time. Enough to cross the entire continent. He hung up his cell and took the earpiece from his ear. He laid his hand on the other phone to give his shoulder a rest and continued to wait.

Think, Francesco, think.
But he didn’t know what to do, except what he was doing.

The operator left him on hold too long, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of hanging up. He couldn’t stop. Finally someone answered on the other end of the line. No news. They couldn’t help him. Fury mixed with apprehension overcame Francesco.

‘Listen up. I know she was called by someone in the Vatican,’ he lied. ‘I saw the priest who came to get her. You have an hour,’ he emphasized, raising a finger, ‘one hour to give me news. If not, her face is going to be on all the lead stories of the international news media, and I’m going to accuse you of kidnapping a British citizen. Do you understand? I’ll turn the eyes of the world on you. One hour.’ Francesco was fed up.

The operator maintained the same serene, routine voice and said she’d communicate the message to the proper party, wished him good night, and hung up.

Tears filled his eyes, but didn’t fall. He covered his face in his hands and took a deep breath. He was exhausted. He looked at his wristwatch. It was two thirty in the morning. He got up and went to the window, drew the curtain back, and looked down. There was no sign of the Mercedes or Sarah. The pavement was wet, parked cars covered with drops, but it was not raining. On the other side of the street he saw the steps leading to the engineering school and the Church of Saint Peter in Chains, where the chains that had bound Saint Peter on his fateful journey to Rome could be found, as well as a monumental statue of Moses by Michelangelo. The steps passed below the palace of the Borgias – Rodrigo, Cesare, and the beautiful Lucrezia – who in other times wandered through these streets, masters of Rome, but Francesco didn’t think about this. He ignored the history of the building on the other side of the street.

Where are you, Sarah?
he asked himself.

He felt like waking up the whole place with a huge outcry, but Sarah might just saunter into the room at any time without a mark, calm, with her usual composure, calling him an idiot for entertaining these fantasies. He remembered her nausea and dry heaves, and felt tightness in his chest.

Outside there was little movement. A car or two passing in the direction of the Piazza dell’Esquilino, a car coming down Via dei Fori Imperiali. Rome slept the eternal sleep of night, disordered layers of time flowing together. The streets, plazas, alleys, avenues, and all the roads came together in Rome, this millennial city, and no street ended in a dead end. There was no better city to disappear in than this, where everything was connected, like arteries in the human body.

The phone ringing on the bed startled Francesco so much that he jumped. He immediately grabbed it and looked at the screen. An unknown number. Tonight was not going to be easy. He took a deep breath and answered the call.

Of all the professions exercised on the surface of the globe, none was as peculiar as Ursino’s.

For forty years he had carried out his illustrious office from Monday to Friday, sometimes Saturday, but never on our Lord’s day of rest, since if He rested on the seventh day, who was Ursino to do differently?

He was grateful to Pope Montini, recorded in the rolls of history as Paul VI, for having designated him for such a prestigious and picturesque role.

He had the privilege of working in the apostolic palace on the ground floor in a room called the Relic Room. It contained thousands of bones of accepted saints celebrated by the Holy Mother Church and sent them to new churches built every year throughout the world. These relics, diligently sent in small quantities by Ursino, were what gave sanctity to the new place that without a bone, without the mystery of something used or touched by the saint, would be nothing more than a space without divine aid, a temple in which the name of the Lord could not be invoked, at least not by the Roman Catholic Church, since it would be invoked in vain.

Whenever possible, Ursino took care to send a relic of the saint that the new church celebrated. A piece of Saint Andres’s tibia if the church was dedicated to him, and if one existed in the thousands of drawers that filled the giant cases with such relics. Of course, that most sacred archive contained only one of Saint Andres’s fingers, part of a skull, and pieces of the cross on which he was martyred, all sent to Patras, where he was patron, decades ago.

He was diligent, yes, but the Milanese Ursino had a fault. He wasn’t very sociable, perhaps from spending so much time alone caring for the relics, the requests, and the new sacred bones that arrived less frequently now that there were fewer saints. The protocol had become so difficult that today it was extremely hard to pass from the level of sinner to the society of saints.

Although he would deny it if asked, the requests for relics were fewer now, too. Forty years ago he had more than one request a day: a piece of Saint Jerome’s radial, a splinter from Saint Margaret’s wheel, or Saint Nicolas’s metatarsal – back when he was a saint, not long, since he ceased being one under Paul VI. Now Ursino passed weeks in which all he did was organize the immaculate archive of relics so that he knew exactly where something was stored in the immense cases that guarded such sacred content.

In earlier days the schedule was tight for the amount of work he had. Lots of discipline, rules, and organization were necessary to fulfill all the requests and sanctify thousands of Catholic churches around the world. Now he had the luxury of looking through the shelves and inventing things to occupy his time.

A portrait of Pope Benedict dominated the wall near his dark oak desk. Working in front of the wall, he often looked at it. He was an austere figure, unhappy, without joy, or charisma, but a good man. He had dealt with him a few times over the course of the last twenty years, and knew that the Holy Father was a very educated, intelligent man who wanted only to improve the church.

‘Is it too late for an old grump?’ Ursino heard a friendly voice behind him.

The Milanese didn’t turn around, and continued to sort some of the vertebrae of Saint Ephigenia, a contemporary of Jesus, into some small linen bags.

‘I can ask the same. Has the Austrian iceman come to see me?’

‘I had a meeting that lasted all night, and now I’m going to rest,’ Hans Schmidt explained.

Ursino got up, approached Schmidt, and embraced him. ‘It’s been a long time, old friend.’ He held up a linen bag. ‘I’m waiting for a telephone call.’

‘Late, it seems.’

Ursino pulled out a chair and invited Schmidt to sit. ‘Are you still running around with crazy ideas in your head?’

‘What do you call a crazy idea?’ Schmidt asked.

‘I read your writings. A little avant-garde for me. The idea of the observer over the thinker made me nervous.’

Ursino sat in his chair and sighed.

‘They’re ideas,’ Hans replied without further elaboration.

Ursino sniffed and stuck a finger in his nose to remove what was there. Forgivable manners for someone who worked alone for decades, and surely not a sin in the eyes of our Lord God. ‘The idea that my thoughts were not my own went over my head. I couldn’t understand it.’

Hans smiled. ‘Have you ever done something that was contrary to the will of your inner voice?’

Ursino thought a few moments in doubt and rubbed his chubby belly. ‘Yeah.’

‘Your inner voice is the thinker. That which didn’t hear the voice is the observer, or … you.’

‘Are you telling me I’m two people? One is already too much for me,’ Ursino joked impolitely with a grin.

‘No, Ursino. We’re only the observer,’ Schmidt explained, ‘but we think we’re the thinker, and we’re prisoners of our thoughts when ultimately our thought is simply a reasoning to help us from a practical point of view.’

‘Do you control the thinker?’

‘Totally.’

They didn’t speak for a few moments. Ursino mulled over what his friend had said and bit his nails.

‘Let’s not talk about this anymore or I’ll be invited to keep your society tomorrow morning at the hearing.’ He meant it as a joke, but didn’t manage to smile. When the last word left his mouth, Ursino felt his observation was in bad taste. ‘Are you prepared?’

‘For what?’ Hans asked.

‘For the hearing tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow is only tomorrow. Now I’m simply here with you.’ He looked Ursino in the eye, very attentively, very calmly.

Ursino sniffed again and sighed. ‘On your way, and don’t contaminate me with those ideas.’

‘Nice seeing you,’ Schmidt said, getting up.

The phone rang abruptly at that moment, and Ursino answered it. ‘Hello, Ursino.’

Whatever had been said on the other end of the line transformed Ursino in a way that left him confused and indisposed. When he hung up, he raised his hand to his chest. He felt his heart would burst.

Hans looked apprehensively at him and tried to help. ‘What’s the matter, my friend?’

Ursino felt like fainting. It was difficult to breathe, shivers ran up his spine.

‘What’s the matter, Ursino?’ Schmidt’s voice was more insistent.

‘They know about the bones,’ Ursino stammered.

‘What bones?’

Ursino stopped suddenly, as if he had been miraculously cured. He no longer panted or felt palpitations. He started pacing back and forth, thinking.

‘Call the secretary of state, please,’ the curator of relics asked him.

Schmidt quickly picked up the phone and dialed the extension he knew by heart. Trevor took time answering before he was informed of the urgency to call Tarcisio. The assistant assured them he’d get Tarcisio immediately.

‘They’re waking Tarcisio. Are you going to tell me what happened? Who are they? What bones are you talking about?’

Ursino continued thinking, thinking, thinking, until he paused and looked very seriously at Hans Schmidt. ‘The bones of Christ.’

The nausea turning her stomach made her vomit empty gasps of nothing. Try as she might to expel the sickness she felt in her stomach, Sarah succeeded only in dry heaves. She bent over the not very private toilet of the Learjet. She had started to feel bad as soon as they took off from Fiumicino. Leaving the ground provoked a sickening dizziness that made her press against the back of the seat. She tried to find the most horizontal position possible, which was still too vertical, and she knew the nausea was coming. Even before the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Sarah had unbuckled the seat belt and run for the toilet.

It must have taken half an hour to compose herself again. As suddenly as the nausea had come on, it disappeared.

She returned to the cabin, red-faced, overheated, and aching all over. The table in front of her seat held a tray with a teapot, cup and saucer, and a roll.

‘Sit down, dear,’ the comforting voice of Myriam said. ‘I asked them to make you both some chamomile tea. Drink it. It’ll make you feel better,’ she added with a knowing smile.