The Gemini Contenders (29 page)

“The heretics of Constantine chose well: the apostates of Campo di Fiori. The enemies of Christ.”

“Animal! Butcher!” Victor could barely whisper; the muscles of his neck and windpipe had been damaged severely. “You
murdered
us! I saw you!”

“Yes. I thought you might have.” The cardinal spoke with quiet venom. “I would have fired the weapons myself, had it been required. And thinking thus, you are quite correct. Theologically, I was the executioner.” Donatti’s eyes grew wide. “Where is the crate from Salonika?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll tell me, heretic. Believe the word of a true priest. You haven’t got a choice.”

“You hold me against my will! In the name of
God
, I presume!” said Fontine coldly.

“In the name of preserving the
mother church!
No laws take precedence over that.
Where is the shipment from Salonika?”

The eyes, the high-pitched voice triggered the memory of years ago—a small child outside a study door. “If that knowledge was so important to you, why did you execute my father? He was the only one who knew.…”

“A
lie!
That is a
lie!”
Donatti caught himself, his lips trembling.

Fontine understood. A raw nerve had been exposed. An error of extraordinary magnitude had been made, and the cardinal could not bear to face it. “You know it’s the truth,” said Victor quietly.
“Now
you know it’s the truth and you can’t stand it.
Why?
Why was he
killed?”

The priest lowered his voice. “The enemies of Christ deceived us. The heretics of Xenope fed lies to us.” And once more Donatti roared abruptly.
“Savarone Fontini-Cristi
was the
communicator of those lies!”

“What lies could
he
tell
you?
You never believed him when he told you the truth.”

Again the cardinal trembled. He could barely be heard. “There were two freights out of Salonika. Three days apart. The first we knew nothing about; the second we picked up at Monfalcone, making sure that Fontini-Cristi would not meet it. We did not know then that he had already made contact with the first train. And now you will tell us what we wish to know. What we must know.”

“I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

Donatti looked at the priests and said one word. “Now.”

Victor could never remember the length of time, for there was not time, only pain. Excruciating, harrowing, stinging, convulsive pain. He was dragged within the gates of Campo di Fiori and taken into the forest. There the holy apostolic priests began the torture. They started with his bare feet; every toe was broken, the ankles twisted until they cracked. The legs and knees were next: crushed, inverted, racked. And then the groin and stomach—
O God! He wished to die!
—And always, above him, blurred in the vision of tears of pain, was the priest of the Curia with the shock of white in his hair.

“Tell us! Tell us! Enemy of Christ!”

His arms were sprung from their sockets. His wrists were turned inward until the capillaries burst, spreading purple fluid throughout the skin. There were moments of blessed void, ended suddenly by hands slapping him back to consciousness.

“Tell us! Tell us!”
The words became a hundred thousand hammers, echoes within echoes.
“Tell us! Enemy of Christ!”

And all was void again. And through the dark tunnels of feeling, he sensed the rhythm of waves and air and suspension. A floating that deep within his brain told him he was near death.

There was a final, convulsive crash, yet he could not feel it. He was beyond feeling.

Yet he heard the words from far, far away in the distance, spoken in a chant.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus sancti. Amen. Dominus vobiscum.…”

Last rites.

He had been left to die.

There was the floating again. The waves and the air. And voices, indistinct, too far away to be really heard. And touch. He felt touching, each contact sending shafts of pain throughout his body. Yet these were not the touches of torture; the voices in the distance were not the voices of tormentors.

The blurred images at last came into focus. He was in a white room. In the distance were shining bottles with tubes cascading in the air.

And above him was a face. The face he knew he would never see again. What was left of his mind was playing horrible tricks on him.

The face was crying; tears rolled down the cheeks.

His wife Jane whispered. “My love. My dearest love. Oh,
God
, what have they done to you?”

Her beautiful face was next to his. Touching his.

And there was no pain.

He had been found by worried men of MI6. The priests had carried him to a car, driven him to the circular drive, and left him to die in Campo di Fiori. That he did not die was not to be explained by the doctors. He
should
have died. His recovery would take months, perhaps years. And, in truth, he would never completely recover. But with care he would regain the use of his arms and legs; he would be ambulatory, and that in itself was a miracle.

By the eighth week he was able to sit up. He concluded his business with Rome’s Court of Reparations. The lands, the factories, the properties were sold for seventy-five million pounds sterling. As he had promised himself, the transaction did not include Campo di Fiori.

For Campo di Fiori he made separate arrangements, through a trusted lawyer in Milan. It, too, was to be sold but he never wanted to know the name of the buyer. There were two inviolate restrictions: The purchaser was to have nowhere in his history any connection with the fascists. Nor was he to have any association whatsoever, regardless of denomination, with any religious body.

On the ninth week an Englishman was flown over from London on instructions of his government.

Sir Anthony Brevourt stood at the foot of Fontine’s bed, his jaw firm, his eyes compassionate and yet not without hardness. “Donatti’s dead, you know. He threw himself off
the balustrade of St. Peter’s. Nobody mourns him, least of all the Curia.”

“Yes, I knew that. At the end an act of insanity.”

“The five priests who were with him have been punished. Three were excommunicated, prosecuted, and in prison for several decades. The other two are under life penance in the Transvaal. What was done in the church’s name horrifies its leaders.”

“It seems to me that too many churches permit the fanatics, then look back in astonishment, amazed at what was done in ‘their names.’ It’s not restricted to Rome. Trappings often obscure purposes, don’t they? That goes for governments, too. I want
questions answered!”

Brevourt blinked several times at Fontine’s outburst and replied rapidly, mechanically. “I’m prepared to offer them where I can. I’ve been instructed to withhold nothing.”

“First, Stone. The order of execution has been explained; I have no comment. I want to know the rest. All of it.”

“Precisely what you’ve been told. I didn’t trust you. I was convinced when you first arrived in London that you’d made up your mind to reveal nothing about the train from Salonika. I expected you to make your own arrangements, on your own terms. We couldn’t let that happen.”

“Stone reported my movements then?”

“Every one. You made eleven trips across the Channel, and one to Lisbon. With Stone’s help we had you covered each time. In the event of capture, we were prepared to negotiate an exchange with the enemy.”

“Suppose I’d been killed?”

“In the beginning it was a risk we calculated, overshadowed by the fact that you might have bolted, made contact with regard to ‘Salonika.’ And in June of forty-two, after Oxfordshire, Teague agreed not to send you across any longer.”

“What happened at Oxfordshire? The priest—if he
was
a priest—who led those planes in was Greek. From the Order of Xenope. Your first constituency, I believe.”

Brevourt pursed his lips and breathed deeply. Admissions were being made that both pained and embarrassed him. “Stone, again. The Germans had tried for two years to locate the compound at Oxfordshire. He leaked the precise bearings to Berlin, and at the same time made his own arrangements with the Greeks. He convinced them there was
a way to break you. It was worth trying; a broken man talks. He didn’t give a damn himself about ‘Salonika,’ but the raid served his primary aim. He put a fanatic priest in the compound and coordinated the strike.”

“For God’s sake,
why?”

“To kill your wife. If she’d been killed, even severely wounded, he assumed you’d turn on all things British, get out of M.I.-Six. He was right. You nearly did, you know. He hated you; blamed you for ruining a brilliant career. As I understand it, he tried to keep you in London that night.”

Victor remembered the horrible night. Stone, the methodical psychopath, had counted the minutes, projected the speed of a car. Fontine reached for his cigarettes on the bedside table. “The last question. And don’t lie to me. What was on the train from Salonika?”

Brevourt walked away from the bed. He crossed to the hospital window and was silent for a moment.

“Parchments, writings from the past which, if made public, could bring chaos to the religious world. Specifically, they would tear the Christian world apart. Accusations and denials would be hurled back and forth, governments might have to choose sides. Above everything, the documents in enemy hands would have been an ideological weapon beyond anything imaginable.”

“Documents can do this?” asked Fontine.

“These documents can,” replied Brevourt, turning away from the window. “Have you ever heard of the Filioque Clause?”

Victor inhaled. His mind went back over the years to the impartial lessons of his childhood. “It’s part of the Creed of Nicaea.”

“More properly, the Nicene Creed of the year 381; there were many councils, subtle alterations of the creed. The Filioque was a later addition that once and for all established the Christ figure as one substance with God. It’s rejected by the Eastern church as misleading. For the Eastern church, especially the sects that followed the scholar-priest Arius, Christ as the son of God was the teacher; his divinity was not equal to God’s. No such equality could exist for them in those times. When the Filioque was first proposed, the Patriarchate of Constantine recognized it for what it was: a doctrinal division that favored
Rome. A theological symbol that was the excuse to divide and conquer new territories. And quite right they were. The Holy Roman Empire became a global force—as the globe was known. Its influence spread throughout the world on that single premise, this specialized divinity of Christ:
Conquer
in the name of
Christ.”
Brevourt stopped, as if searching for words. He walked slowly back toward the foot of the bed.

“Then the documents in that vault,” said Victor, “refute the Filioque? If so, they challenge the foundation of the Roman church and all the Christian divisions that followed.”

“Yes, they do that,” replied Brevourt quietly. “Collectively they’re called the denials … the Filioque denials. They include agreements between crowns and caesars from as far away as Spain, in the sixth century, where the Filioque originated, for what many believe were purely political reasons. Others trace what they term the ‘theological corruption.’… But if that was all they did, the world could live with them. Son of God, teacher, one substance. These are theological differences, subjects for biblical scholars to debate. They do more, I’m afraid. In the Patriarchate’s fervor to deny the Filioque, it sent out priests to search the holy lands, meet with the Aramaic scholars, unearth everything that ever existed relative to Jesus. They unearthed more than they were looking for. There were rumors of scrolls written during the years just preceding and after the mark of the first century. They traced them, discovered several, and brought them back to Constantine. It is said that one Aramaic scroll raises profound and very specific doubts as to the man known as Jesus. He may never have existed at all.”

The ocean liner headed toward the open waters of the Channel. Fontine stood at the railing and watched the sky-fine of Southampton. Jane was at his side, one hand gently around his waist, the other crossed in front of her, over his hand on the railing. The crutches with the large metal clasps that held his forearms were to his left, the shiny half circles of stainless steel glistening in the sunlight. He had designed them himself. If it was going to be necessary, as the doctors said, for him to use crutches for a year or more he could damn well improve on.the existing product.

Their two sons, Andrew and Adrian, were with their nurse from Dunblane—one of those who had elected to sail to America with the Fontines.

Italy, Campo di Fiori, the train for Salonika were in the past. The cataclysmic parchments that had been taken from the archives of Xenope were somewhere in the vast range of the Italian Alps. Buried for a millennium; perhaps never to be found.

It was better that way. The world had passed through an era of devastation and doubt. Reason demanded that a calm be restored, at least for a while, if only on the surface. It was no time for the vault from Salonika.

The future began with the rays of the afternoon sun on the waters of the English Channel. Victor leaned toward his wife and put his face next to hers. Neither spoke; she held his hand in silence.

There was a commotion on the deck. Thirty yards aft the twins has gotten into a quarrel. Andrew was angry with his brother Adrian. Childish blows were exchanged. Fontine smiled.

Children.

Men.

They were men, thought Victor Fontine as he watched his sons thread separately through the guests in the bright sunlight. And twins, second. It was an important distinction, he felt, although it wasn’t necessary to dwell on it. It seemed years since anyone had referred to them as the twins. Except Jane and himself, of course. Brothers, yes; but not twins. It was strange how that word had fallen into disuse.