Papal Decree (36 page)

He spent the best hours of the day in school, when his father didn’t make him come to work with him. He learned to read, though poorly, joining the syllables together with difficulty and stammering over the words like someone with a speech impediment.

One day when he was twelve, he found a book on a shelf in his parents’ bedroom, the only book in the house, and started reading it every night. He heard it mentioned in the Mass they attended every Sunday morning. His father would shave, his mother dressed them in their best clothes – his only pair of shoes and the only shirt that wasn’t torn – and they went with other parents and children to hear a man talk about Jesus and God. It was probably the only thing his father feared – not that he wouldn’t quickly forget everything that very same night, when he would return to his drunken ways.

At first he read with great difficulty, but then he made progress. It was the best story he’d ever heard. He had no idea what the title,
The Holy Bible,
meant, nor did he understand everything he read, but the impression of the stories as a whole was overwhelming. He started reading it every day, over and over, imagining the worlds described, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Moses and the freeing of the people from slavery in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the fall of Jericho, Samson, David and Goliath, David and Jonathan, Absalom’s rebellion, the wisdom of Solomon, the birth of Jesus, His baptism, temptation in the wilderness, turning water into wine, calming the storm, finding refuge in Jesus’s parables, in the special child whose parents loved him, sometimes at the end of one more violent night. The Bible was his fantasy world, Joseph and Mary the parents he wished he had, the Apostles his only friends.

One night he discovered something. His father poured a colorless, odorless fluid into his mother’s drink and kept it in the bathroom in a cupboard full of dozens of medicines, many past their expiration dates. His mother slept at the table during supper; his father beat them with the belt. He thought of the Bible, the stories and Jesus, while he endured the belt. His father loosened his trousers to do the rest, but he recalled the Bible and shouted, ‘God will punish you. God will punish you.’ Then he shut his tearful eyes. He trembled and prayed,
Help me, Jesus, help me, Joseph and Mary.
His earthly father stopped hitting him with the belt.

‘What did you say?’ his father demanded, holding the belt up to hit him again, but the boy didn’t say anything.

His father put down the belt and said nothing more. He staggered from the table, grabbed his mother, carried her to the bedroom, slammed the door, and moments later the bed began to squeak.

His father never touched him again, even if nights at home didn’t change much. His mother appeared with her arm in a sling and her lip swollen, but for him it was as if he had achieved a new status as an untouchable, silent witness, until he couldn’t take it anymore and retired to his room to take refuge in his book. But his brothers’ cries and frightened gasps pierced his ears without his being able to do anything about them. ‘Make him stop, Jesus. Make him stop,’ he begged. He opened the Bible at random and read the first verse. The crying had quieted, and the bed in his parents’ bedroom had begun to creak.

The next day he went over to his father, who was sleeping at the table and would not wake again. He struck his head so hard with a heavy plate that it broke. His mother thought it was strange when she felt her son’s hand on top of hers. ‘He’s not going to hurt us any more, Mother.’

She got up, upset, and tried to wake her husband without success. ‘What have you done, Nicolas?’ she asked in panic. ‘What have you done? What’s going to become of us?’ She couldn’t even look at her son.

One afternoon a few days after the funeral, two men in white coats came to get him from his room, just when he was about to read a passage from the Book of the Apocalypse. He struggled but couldn’t free himself, and was dragged to a white van, clinging to his book.

Young Nicolas never saw his brothers again.

He was placed in a school, required to follow a rigid schedule of classes and study a lot of subjects, most of which he’d never heard of before. He learned Latin, Spanish, English, French, and Hebrew, but his favorite class was biblical studies, about his favorite book. Of course he read other books, getting to know other stories –
The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Satyricon, The Decameron
– but none of them moved him with passion like the Bible. Perhaps because it had been his lifesaver until the death of … the man who said he was his father, but acted like a lunatic. His real father was Father Aloysius, who mentored him to adulthood and gave him his first mission with instructions. ‘This is God’s will,’ Aloysius told him. ‘Fulfill it.’ Nicolas executed that mission perfectly and continued to do so until the present moment at this corner of Via Merulana and Via Labicana.

Night closed over Rome, but the activity remained frenetic, with sounds of cars, motorcycles, buses, vans, pedestrians, horns, and shouts. The impatient Rome of late afternoon. He looked at his watch, which read six thirty. It was time.

He took out his cell phone and waited for the call, which was not long in coming, just six minutes. When he saw the Mercedes, he crossed the street, taking out his gun.

Two Volvos followed the Mercedes closely. Daniel, the commander of the guard, was in the passenger seat in the first car, giving orders to a team of eight Pontifical Guards, distributed among the vehicles, including the two that were following the secretary’s Mercedes.

The destination was the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, and the GPS detector installed in the Mercedes showed them the way, following the predetermined route.

‘This is a mistake,’ Daniel muttered to himself. ‘A big mistake.’

They weren’t using the customary motorcycle escort to clear the street ahead, since this wasn’t an official visit. They had no other option than to get jammed up in the terrible traffic at the end of the afternoon, with night already fallen, in this wild autumn season that settled over the peninsula at the beginning of November like an army of rain, wind, and cold that offered no truce.

‘
Stand by,
Adrian,’ the driver of the Mercedes called over the radio. ‘Turn right on Merulana,’ he ordered.

‘
Understood. Right on Merulana
,’ the radio answered.

A few feet later, at the Piazza di San Giovanni in the Lateran, the Mercedes cut to the right, following Daniel’s orders. The Mercedes was traveling just under the legal speed limit, about two hundred feet in front of Daniel’s Volvo. Between them was a number 714 bus, and two SUVs. Daniel’s attention was fixed on the device recording the position of the car, with only a ten-foot margin of error, which on a street as big as this was negligible.

The bus stopped to pick up passengers about thirty feet from the end of the street and caused a backup in the traffic. The GPS device indicated that the Mercedes was continuing ahead, according to the screen Daniel was concentrating on.

‘Attention, Adrian. Pull over and wait for us. We’re stuck behind the bus,’ Daniel ordered.

The GPS indicated that the Mercedes had stopped not far from where they were, close to the intersection with Labicana. Daniel couldn’t see them, and this caused him some anxiety, despite his knowing that the secretary was well protected. He let out a deep breath in frustration. The cardinal should have listened to him.

‘Nothing’s moving in front,’ the commander protested.

He ordered the driver to pull around the SUVs and the bus, but as soon as the Volvo pulled out, the SUV in front did the same and came to a stop beside the other SUV, completely blocking the road.

‘Shit,’ Daniel said, more to himself than the others in the car.

The driver leaned on the horn, but there was no reaction. Daniel gestured to the men in the back to go see what was going on. They got out immediately, but were unable to speak to anyone. The drivers of the SUVs jumped out and abandoned the vehicles, slammed the doors, and ran in opposite directions.

The GPS in the Mercedes indicated it was starting forward again.

‘What the hell?’ This was not normal. ‘Take the sidewalk,’ Daniel yelled. ‘Take the sidewalk now.’

The driver swung to the left onto the sidewalk. The pedestrians were forced to scatter, and one of them was even grazed by the taillight and ended up falling to the pavement.

‘Keep going.
Keep going,
’ Daniel shouted urgently.

The GPS indicated the Mercedes was still moving forward. It turned left on Labicana, moving very fast.

‘Attention,’ Daniel called over the radio. ‘No order was given to proceed, Adrian,’ he alerted the agent in the Mercedes. ‘Attention, Adrian. Report your position.’

There was no reply.

The agents who’d left the first Volvo got into the second one, since Daniel didn’t want to lose time.

Staring at the screen, he noticed that the Mercedes was traveling in the direction of the Colosseum.

‘Get this piece of shit moving,’ he shouted when they entered Labicana with tires squealing.

There were no traffic rules at the moment. The cardinal secretary of state was in danger.

‘Attention,’ he repeated on the radio. ‘Report your position immediately, Adrian.’

There was still no reply.

‘Fuck it,’ he swore. ‘Faster,
faster!
’ he shouted as he drummed his fingers on the dashboard.

The street was long, and the Volvo was already going too fast. Some vehicles had to pull over as far as possible or even go onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit. The agent drove skillfully. He’d been trained in evasive driving – defensive, and in pursuit – and was more than prepared for a situation like this … in theory.

The GPS indicated that the Mercedes had turned to the right to go up Via Nicola Salvi. Daniel had to make a decision. He needed to cut them off.

‘Flavian,’ he called over the radio to the driver of the second Volvo. ‘Straight ahead. Go up Nicola Salvi.’

‘Understood,’ the radio responded.

‘Turn around,’ he said to his own driver.

‘What?’

‘Turn around, now.’ As Daniel said this, he grabbed the wheel and turned it toward the left, to the clamor of horns and squealing brakes.

The Volvo accelerated again to the intersection with Merulana and turned left toward the Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore. It was a suicidal high-speed drive at over sixty miles an hour with traffic and blowing horns.

‘Straight to Cavour,’ Daniel ordered, and grabbed the radio. ‘Straight to Cavour, Flavian.’

‘Understood,’
came over the radio.

They finally came out on Cavour and careened left with no concern for the bus coming from Termini, which had to slam on its brakes to let them pass.

‘Idiot,’ the bus driver shouted, among other insults.

The GPS indicated that the Mercedes had stopped a few hundred feet from them near the juncture with Via Giovanni Lanza, and they could see it, badly parked, with a wheel on the sidewalk and all the doors open.

Daniel feared the worst. His chest tightened with anxiety, and sweat broke out on his face. The tires squealed when the Volvos stopped abruptly near the Mercedes, one on each side. Before leaving the car, Daniel could see that no one was inside the Mercedes. Shit! He should never have permitted this. Shit!

There was no sign of the secretary, Cardinal William, Father Schmidt, or the other two agents. As the commander, Daniel could not show weakness or desperation, but that’s what he felt, complete disorientation and, despite feeling cold as ice, an immensely destructive volcano within.

‘What the hell happened?’

Tarcisio couldn’t believe what his eyes had seen. He would have preferred a knife to the heart, bleeding away the life God gave him. No one should have to suffer such an enormous betrayal.

A man had appeared in the middle of the street, pointing a gun at them. The driver’s first action was to accelerate; since he was shielded, a pointed gun didn’t pose any threat, but then something seemingly impossible happened. Schmidt and the guard next to the driver stuck guns into the driver’s head.

‘Stop the car immediately,’ Schmidt ordered.

‘Wha … what are you doing, Hans?’ Tarcisio asked uneasily.

‘Shut up,’ Schmidt said coldly. His look was glacial, cavernous. Tarcisio had never seen it before, and he shivered.

William was likewise stupefied.

‘Drop the gun, Hugo,’ Tarcisio ordered the agent who was pointing his gun at his colleague.

Schmidt slapped him in the face. ‘I told you not to talk unless spoken to.’

They could hear Daniel’s voice on the radio.
Attention, Adrian. Pull over and wait for us. We’re stuck behind the bus.

Schmidt pressed the gun tighter into the back of the driver’s neck. ‘Got it? Even your boss is ordering you to stop. You don’t want the secretary to see your brains splattered all over the windshield, do you?’

The driver didn’t give in. He was trained to die for the pope or in his name. That was God’s will.

‘Stop the car, my son,’ Tarcisio ordered. ‘It’s not worth risking your life for me.’

Adrian obeyed the cardinal’s order and put on the brakes. He was shocked to see his colleague pointing a gun at him, but said nothing. No one truly knows anyone.

‘Good boy,’ Schmidt said scornfully.

The man outside the car came up beside the driver, opened the door, and plunged a syringe into his neck. It took the driver about five seconds to lose consciousness, and then he was thrown in the trunk of the Mercedes, and the stranger took over the driving.

‘It’s good to see you, Nicolas,’ Schmidt greeted him.

‘Good evening, Professor Aloysius,’ Nicolas welcomed him and hit the accelerator.

Aloysius? He calls himself Aloysius? Was it he who had misled him to negotiate with Adolph?
Tarcisio asked himself. He was, in fact, a complete unknown, this Schmidt who turned a gun on the two prelates with a forced smile.

‘They’re everywhere,’ Tarcisio whispered hesitantly to William, who continued watching all this without a word or a reaction.