Papal Decree (9 page)

The sound filled the room.
What is the code
[static noise]
they gave you?
a voice asked.
I know the Vatican ordered the codes given.

HT,
responded a voice Rafael recognized as his friend.

In what order?

I have no idea.
Zafer seemed to be in great pain.

This is over now. You were a great help, Yaman Zafer. May the Lord have mercy on you and Ben Isaac. The pope will pray for your soul,
the other voice said.

The rest were disconnected sounds that could be anything, but Rafael knew. Zafer dying. He heard the death rattle that had occurred in this very place. Finally, silence. He heard some steps and a word of farewell.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Gavache turned off the phone and looked at Rafael.

‘Does this shit tell you anything?’

Rafael looked at him with icy coolness and a dead expression. The devil is in the details. ‘He’s a Jesuit.’

It’s said the night is always a good counselor, but under cover of night, crimes are committed, secrets told, and mysteries perpetrated.

They dined at table 205 on deck 14. Myriam wanted them to go see what was playing in the theater – a review called
Broadway Hits,
some of the principal scenes and music from
Cats, West Side Story,
and
Phantom of the Opera.
It wasn’t unforgettable, but pleasant, a kind of easily consumable pastiche.

They returned to their room after eleven. Myriam was happy, and that was the objective.

‘Are you okay, my love?’ she asked him. ‘You seem very distant today. Do you feel all right?’

‘I’m fine, Myr. Don’t worry.’

‘Did you talk to Ben tonight?’

‘I did,’ he lied. ‘I’m going to call him again at midnight, if you don’t mind. Today was an important day for him.’

‘So late? And even later in Jerusalem?’ she objected, wrinkling her brow.

‘Yes. He asked me to.’

‘Okay, but don’t stay on the phone an hour. You know I’m cold at night.’

‘Relax, dear. I’ll be quick,’ his voice rose a little.

He hadn’t been able to reach little Ben. The phone was always busy. His assistant wasn’t able to locate him anywhere. He wasn’t at the property Isaac had in Tel Aviv, or at the office at work. Isaac feared the message he’d received at breakfast was related to his son’s disappearance. He had no idea who had sent it, nor who would know the latest about the Status Quo. He’d know in a little while.

He spent the day suspecting everything and everyone: the smiling employees, the other tourists – only Myriam escaped suspicion. He asked himself hundreds of times whether the sender of the message was on the ship, if he were watching him, if, if, if. This in a man who always avoided ifs. After lunch, they’d made port in Livorno, and it could very well have been there the intruder boarded, in time to leave the following day, in Naples, taking advantage of the coming and going from port to port on the western coast of Italy. He was a needle in a haystack of three thousand people.

He kissed Myriam tenderly on the forehead and left for the pool.

‘Don’t be late,’ she reminded him as he closed the door gently.

He didn’t know what reply to give except an ‘I’ll be quick.’ The truth was he didn’t know what he was going to find. He normally assigned a time frame to everything – a meeting, a telephone call, a lunch, buying a present, flowers for Myriam – but for this appointment, nine minutes before midnight, there was a blank.

He walked through the corridor of deck 14 toward the elevator. Going up a ramp and from there to the pool would not take more than two or three minutes at his slow, nervous pace. His legs trembled as if an abyss were opening before him. He passed some tourists stumbling to regain enough balance to return to rooms whose location they couldn’t remember. The employees tidied up the disorder of the day or cleaned up trash thrown on the floor without regard – cigarette butts, plastic cups, bits of food.

Strangely, or maybe not, there was little movement near the pool. Ben Isaac was panting. It wasn’t a difficult walk, no steep up-and-downs. No one was around. The water undulated to the motion of the giant ship. The pool water was illuminated by vivid blue underwater lighting, and transformed in appearance to a living organism by its undulation. He didn’t see a living thing. Strange. But nothing today was normal. He looked at his watch: 11:57. In his mind, seconds were turning over, or was it his heart pumping into his veins that marked the rhythm? The three minutes seemed six, then twelve, until midnight arrived and … nothing happened. True, it was midnight only on his watch, maybe it still wasn’t midnight on the other person’s watch, whoever he, or she, was.

He looked around and saw no movement. The night was cold and unpleasant. The ship floated slowly toward the south, opening up the waters to the Mediterranean. Two minutes past the hour, according to his watch. He heard the echo of a gunshot. He couldn’t pinpoint where it had come from, but wherever it was, it wasn’t nearby. Moments after the mysterious shot he saw something slowly descending from the sky. It was about a hundred feet up, descending toward the pool. At first he couldn’t figure out what it was. An unidentified flying object. At fifty feet he could give it a name. A parachute. Oblivious to Ben Isaac’s attentive observation, the parachute maintained its serene descent. It was about two feet long and another object, black, was secured to its cords. Seconds later it fell silently into the pool and remained floating.

Ben Isaac kept looking at the parachute that now seemed more like a small sheet in the middle of the pool.

What now?
Ben Isaac was cautious. There was no brilliant solution, and he was a pragmatic man. He went to the closest ladder; took off his shoes, socks, and jacket; and slipped into the water. The temperature was pleasant, but swimming was not something he liked to do, especially at that hour of the night. In a few strokes, he reached the parachute. He dragged it over to the ladder and sat on the edge of the pool. It carried a package wrapped in plastic. Frantically, he tore it open. Inside he found a box, and in the box an electronic apparatus. It was a viewfinder the size of a hardcover book. He tried to figure out how to turn it on. It only had an on-off button. With his heart beating like a hammer inside his chest, he pressed it. The viewer turned on. A signal to play appeared in the middle of the screen, apparently touch activated. Ben Isaac took a deep breath and pressed it.

He didn’t know how long it took him to get to his room, whether he ran or walked, if he took the elevator or went down stairs, but somehow he found himself in front of the door to his room. He hugged the apparatus to his breast as if it were a sacred object. He was completely wet and left a trail of water. If someone saw him, he saw no one. He entered the room and looked for Myriam, who was sleeping on her stomach like a baby, her face turned toward Ben Isaac. He tripped on a chair and almost fell, just enough to wake his angel.

‘Are you okay, dear?’

She didn’t see at first with her sleepy glance that he was drenched with water and conflicting feelings. He wasn’t the same Ben she knew, but a weak, old, disoriented man. He paced from side to side, soaked, holding on to something. Now, yes, Myriam saw it. She turned on the light, blinking her eyes in the contrast, and confronted Ben.

‘What’s the matter, Ben? Tell me right now.’

Ben Isaac kept his head down, not daring to look at her directly.

‘Our son, Myr. Our son,’ and he began to cry.

History never lies. Books that record it can relate what they understand: truths, lies, half-truths equivalent to whole lies, speculation, eulogies, heroic acts that never happened. Glorious acts last because someone was paid to extol them. There’s no better example than Rome, the Eternal City, the glory of God on earth, where He chose to dwell, without doubt.

Rome is a whore of a city with a palazzo on every corner.

They entered one of these palazzi, which in this case belonged to the wealthy family of the Medicis. Two famous cousins lived there before they moved to other, more sumptuous palaces, Giovanni and Giuliano, who became Leo X and Clement VII, respectively, the most powerful men in the world – by their own estimation, at least. The celebrated Catherine, the niece of Clement, who married Henry II of France, also resided there. Curiously, none of them gave his or her name or the family’s name to the palazzo, which, in an era when influential cardinals or Supreme Pontiffs engraved their names on every place they ordered built or reconstructed for posterity, did not escape notice. So Madama Margherita of Austria baptized a palace that to this day is called the Madam palace in her honor. The Medicis are long gone – Margaret, too – but the Palazzo Madama today houses the Senate of the Italian Republic.

The Mercedes entered through a side gate and circled the enormous edifice to the back. There it parked. The black priest who had come to Sarah’s room was the first to get out of the front passenger seat, open the back door for his superior, the cardinal, and would have opened Sarah’s door if she had not already done so.

They’d filled the brief ride with polite small talk,
Are you enjoying your stay? The weather is beautiful for this time of year. The famous, warm Roman autumn.
Unimportant observations that only served to fill an awkward silence. The cardinal, trained to be a good conversationalist, didn’t allow a single moment of unease to fill the backseat. Strangely, or not, Sarah was very much at ease. The situation required her to be alert and distrustful, since she was in a car with a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, completely at the mercy of his will, whatever that might be, given that his career with the church was not very well known, but she didn’t worry about that for one moment.

They invited her to enter the palace through a back hall, a large, ample area with a stairway rising to the higher floors. There was no doubt the Romans of the Renaissance knew how to build palaces. This proved it, if proof was necessary. They went up two flights.

‘I didn’t know this palazzo belonged to the Holy See,’ Sarah said to break the silence. She was panting, the result of not having worked out for a while.

‘It doesn’t,’ the cardinal replied in a friendly way. ‘Actually it’s the Italian Senate’s. We’ll see in a minute.’

‘Then why are we here?’

They reached the second floor, which opened into an immense atrium with enormous closed double-paneled wooden doors at the other end.

‘What better place for a private conversation?’ the cardinal disclosed.

The priest opened the doors.

‘Please.’ The cardinal motioned Sarah to go in before him.

Sarah accepted with a decisive step inside.

‘This used to be the library of the palazzo.’

The room had high walls, like everything else in the palace. Sarah tried to imagine it filled with bookcases from top to bottom. Now the walls were hung with paintings by artists who were unfamiliar to her, on various themes: religion, paganism, erotica, all chosen by someone who kept his reasons to himself. Two busts were placed against two facing walls. They were two men, Medicis, Popes Leo and Clement. The painting of a woman dominated the back wall. It wasn’t difficult to guess who she was … Madama Margherita of Austria.

There were in fact traces of modernity; a temporary exhibition spread across the room with paintings, parchments, and photographs.

Sarah gave herself time to get used to the atmosphere and then looked at the cardinal.

‘Why is it that the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wants to talk to me?’

‘You recognized me? I’m flattered,’ the prince of the church joked.

They walked side by side. The cardinal looked at the priest assisting him, who, with an obedient motion of his head, left the room without turning his back, and closed the doors.

Sarah looked at the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inquisitively. She was still waiting for his reply.

‘Did your book signing go well?’ the prefect asked, changing the subject with a congenial smile.

‘You tell me, Your Eminence,’ Sarah said provocatively.

‘Call me William.’

If he’d been dressed like an ordinary man in a suit, shirt, perhaps matching tie, she might have complied with the request, but not in these circumstances. Not with a man in a black cassock with a scarlet slash dominating his chest, a gaudy gold cross hanging from his neck, and a cardinal’s cap.

‘I don’t think it’s standard practice for men so prominent in the church to seek out women in their hotels, drive off with them in their cars, and bring them to a palazzo. We’ll have to talk about that eventually, Cardinal William,’ she said, settling on a half title.

The cardinal looked at Sarah and smiled. Then he stepped forward to a display that showed a poster of Jesus Christ, a common image, recognized by everyone regardless of his or her faith. At the bottom was the title of the exposition in large letters. Sarah found them curious: THE FACES OF CHRIST.

And in subtitle: Artistic Representations of Christ Through the Centuries.

An engraving dating from the first century
A.D
. was next to the poster. An image of the Nazarene in a somewhat crude sketch that was faithful to the idea of Christ at that time.

Curious,
Sarah thought to herself.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ William asked.

‘Very,’ Sarah agreed, still looking at the artistic representations.

‘We have an image so associated with Him that we don’t realize that it came from the mind of an artist, and later from others, and so forth through the centuries,’ William explained. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, pointing to a painting in the third display that showed a powerful man with a sparse beard and his hand on the head of a kneeling man.

‘Is that Him?’ Sarah asked, curiously. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

‘But it is. An artist’s vision.’

Sarah had not expected an evening like this, wandering through a room in a palace side by side with one of the most influential cardinals in the college.