The Third Revelation (36 page)

“What's wrong with that?” John asked.

“Such a comparison could of course be made now by anyone interested.”

“I don't understand.”

“All the documentation released in two thousand is still on the web. Nothing at all like this passage that has so stirred our Muslim brothers is to be found there. But, as perhaps you know, suspicion has long been trained on that documentation. There is a certain kind of mind that demands apocalyptic warnings. Doubtless that is why the Apocalypse was made the final book of the New Testament.” Piacere smiled. “A book that has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and interpreted again and whose meaning remains elusive. But I digress.”

John still did not see the problem. Invite a number of Muslim scholars, let them put the documents side by side and make their own judgment.

Cardinal Piacere's expression was sad. “Because the authentic document is missing from the archives.”

Heather sat forward. “I gave it to Vincent Traeger for safekeeping. It was when his office was broken into and Beatrice was killed that it was taken from the safe.” Heather pronounced Beatrice
modo italiano
this time.

“And where did you get it, my dear?” Piacere asked.

“From Father Brendan Crowe.”

Piacere fell back. “Of course, of course. One of the few men who would have been able to remove the file. He took it to America?”

“I thought I was bringing it back.”

He brought his long-fingered hands together. “So you see we have an insoluble problem. God only knows how long this rioting and outrage will continue. It seems to grow more intense every day.”

What had happened first in Florence had spread across the Continent, with natives opposing the trashing of churches and museums by the Muslim mobs. In Paris, when the police were called out, a battle broke out between the Muslim and Christian members of the metropolitan police. The divided force was now on different sides of the barricades formed by burning automobiles.

Cardinal Piacere insisted that they have a glass of wine. He wanted Heather to thank Mr. Hannan for his thoughtfulness in wishing to return what he had thought was a document stolen from the archives.

“He paid four million dollars,” Heather said.

“Mamma mia.”
He clapped his hands and Bernagni ran in from the outer office. Piacere shooed him away. “No, no, Father, I was simply being emotional.” And then to Heather, “To whom did all that money go?”

“I think there was a middleman,” Heather said.

Piacere sat thinking, with his eyes closed. After a minute, John feared that he might have fallen asleep from the exertion of his reaction to the news that four million dollars had been paid for a forged document. When he spoke, his eyes were still shut.

“And how is your Vincent Traeger, my dear?”

Heather was not bothered by the possessive pronoun. “He's in Rome. He's grown a beard.”

“I should like to see him again. We have met, you know.”

“Would you like me to bring him here, Your Eminence?”

“I will get word to him. Thank you, Father Burke.”

He rose, they rose, Bernagni appeared, and soon they were on their way back to Heather's convent.

“All this bloodshed over a forged document.”

As he often did, John missed Brendan Crowe, but particularly now. Brendan would no doubt have had any number of historical instances of forgeries altering the course of history.

CHAPTER SIX

“Did you tell her it was a fake?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Oh my God, he's been kidnapped,” Zelda cried when she came to Empedocles for word of her husband.

Zelda had thought that Gabriel Faust was on a mission for Ignatius Hannan, to return the presumed Vatican Archive file to its rightful owner. Laura told her this wasn't the case and was trying to calm her as Nate inched toward the door.

“Nate, you stay here,” she said. She was not going to be left alone with a hysterical woman. Hannan was watching Zelda warily as Laura got her into a chair. Ray brought a cup of coffee, which she held in both hands, looking from one face to the other. Written all over her well-preserved, still handsome face was the unasked question: have I lost another husband?

“He bought a fake,” Nate said, sitting down himself, but then he had the desk between himself and Zelda. “For four million dollars.”

Zelda gasped.

“No one has tried to cash the check yet.”

“So far as we know,” Ray said, always the life of the party.

“Where is Gabriel?” Zelda wailed.

It was a question everyone in the room wanted answered, for different reasons.

“Have you told the police yet?”

Laura and Ray exchanged glances. Nate had lost millions before, in a sense he did so every day, but not like this. “Find him,” he had ordered Ray. “No police. We know how good they are.”

Laura took Zelda off to the ladies' room, where there was a cot on which Zelda could lie. Not the best place to play her big scene, the twice-widowed woman, but it got her away from Nate. Zelda had been thinking.

“Vincent Traeger,” she said, her voice now under control. “It must be Vincent.”

Laura did not ask why, but she got the reason anyway.

“He was jealous of Gabriel. I don't know if you noticed his reaction when Gabriel and I showed up here as man and wife.”

“No, I didn't.”

“He's the one. We must find him.” Zelda sat up. “I know who to call.”

Laura eased her back onto the cot. She had brought Zelda's cup of coffee along, but it was no longer hot. Zelda waved it away. “How can I eat or drink?”

She began to weep. She told Laura of their first argument.

“Not argument exactly. We just didn't agree. I suggested he give a painting he had obtained for me to the new foundation. Hang it in his office.”

“And he disagreed,” Laura said, feeling that she was taking part in a Beckett drama.

A smile drove away the tears. “He said he thought of it as our first real link.”

Laura brought her a tissue and Zelda dabbed away the tears. Fifteen minutes later, Laura brought the now calm Zelda back to Nate's office.

“I intend to hire a detective,” she announced.

“Work that out with Ray,” Nate suggested. It was an order, and Ray now took Zelda off to his office.

“Did you tell her it was a fake?” Hannan asked.

“You mentioned that. She may not have understood.”

The cable from John Burke had arrived half an hour before Zelda. The document Heather had brought to the Vatican had been examined. It was a fake. The message that was filling the streets and plazas of the world with rampaging, enraged Muslims was an interpolation.

“Faust said it was authentic,” Hannan said.

“He said an expert assured him it was authentic,” Laura corrected.

“Inagaki.”

“I think you're right.”

“I want to talk to him,” Hannan said grimly.

Ray was already on that. The notion of hiring a private detective to locate Gabriel Faust had already occurred to him. It was pretty clear that Faust had disappeared, and neither Laura nor Nate could seek consolation in the theory that he had been kidnapped. Only a wife could believe that in the circumstances.

After the cable came, Laura talked with John on the phone and got an account of their meeting with Cardinal Piacere.

“They're sure it's a fake?”

“Laura, he said the experts needed only minutes to determine that.”

“How were we to know?” Laura might have been addressing that question to Nate. The truth was that she felt she had let Nate down. And she felt irrationally responsible for the whole sad sequence of events. She had invited John and Brendan Crowe to Empedocles. A thought occurred.

“Father Crowe checked Gabriel Faust's dossier and okayed him.”

“So?” John said.

“Gabriel Faust is missing.”

Later she would wonder aloud to Ray of a possible previous connection between Brendan Crowe and Faust. How convenient to have a man from the Vatican there to assure Nate Hannan that Gabriel Faust was the kind of expert he needed to run Refuge of Sinners. Where was Faust when Crowe was killed? Had Father Crowe brought the phony document with him? Ray followed this with a wry smile. “Don't ever write a novel,” he advised.

“What do you mean missing?” John had asked.

“He's not here. We don't know where he is. His wife doesn't know where he is.”

“The Vatican experts did admire the calligraphy of the faked passage.”

“John, are you safe there? The news is absolutely horrible. How is Heather?”

“I've put her into a convent of Carmelites.”

“Do they make candy?”

John ignored this. “A convent within the walls of the Vatican. She's as safe as I am.”

Laura would have liked to find that more reassuring than she did. Laurel and Hardy had returned with the plane in which Heather and Traeger had been flown to Rome, deadheading it back to Logan, as they put it.

“She should come back, John.”

“I think she likes it here.”

“Heather has the capacity to like wherever she happens to be.”

“Oh it's more than that, I think. Traeger came with her,” he added.

“I know.”

“I got him into a clerical residence. Cardinal Piacere seems to know him.”

Ray was right. She would never write a novel. Things should hang together more than they seemed to do.

“It's not the money,” Nate said.

“I know.”

Nate had plainly been shocked by the thought of buying and selling something like the secret of Fatima. Hence his immediate decision to send the document to Rome. If only Trepanier hadn't broadcast the fake passage, the whole thing would have been settled. They had bought a fake and lost some money, but that would have been that.

“So where is the real document?” Nate asked.

Good question.

“Father Trepanier still won't take my calls.”

“I make it myself.”

Jean-Jacques Trepanier listened with a skeptical smile when Laura Burke and Ray Sinclair told him the judgment of the Vatican experts on the passage he had made public with consequences beyond the scope of imagination. The two minions of Ignatius Hannan had waylaid him as he came from the television studio where he had been informing his viewers that they were now witnessing the heavenly scourge Our Lady had warned of. He was on his way to lunch and he asked them along. At the table, over clam chowder, they had told him what they had come to say.

“Of course they would say that,” Trepanier said.

“You don't believe it?”

“My dear woman, what else could they say? Don't you see that half a century of deceit has been exposed? Their duplicity has brought bloody chaos to the world.”

“I think you can take credit for that, Father,” Ray said.

“I?”

“You broadcast it.”

“The truth can never be suppressed forever,” Trepanier said.

“Where did you get hold of that passage?” Laura asked.

He should have been prepared for this attempt to blame him for the rioting and outrages being perpetrated throughout so much of the world. Nonetheless, he was surprised. And Laura's question put him in a tight spot. How could he, as the voice accusing the Vatican bureaucracy of mendacity, take refuge in what could have been plausibly described as a mental reservation?

“I bought it.”

“Bought it!”

“From Gabriel Faust?” Ray asked.

“Yes.”

“But he had already sold it to Ignatius Hannan,” Laura said.

“I was content to have a photocopy of the relevant passage.”

“Which is fake,” Ray said.

“Then why is what it predicted taking place? It is the single topic of the news.”

“What would it take to convince you that you bought something fraudulent?”

Again he resented that they had the audacity to blame him. “And what is Gabriel Faust's reaction to this Vatican judgment?”

“He didn't stay around long enough to hear it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He vamoosed.” The two of them looked at him expectantly. Surely they wouldn't lie about such a thing. If anything, it weakened their case.

“That is neither here nor there,” he told them.

They looked at him as liberal seminary professors had looked at him years ago.

“At any rate, now you know,” Ray Sinclair said.

“This is very good chowder,” Laura said.

“I make it myself.”

 

 

When they had gone, he admitted to himself that what they had said made him uneasy. He tried to retain his original reaction that of course Vatican bureaucrats would seek to deny their culpability for keeping such a message to themselves. Hadn't they once pretended to make the third secret public? They had been hoist by their own petard. Convincing as that interpretation was, it no longer satisfied him completely.

The implication of their visit was that Gabriel Faust had been responsible for the passage Trepanier had paid a huge sum for. He got out the photocopy and studied it. He compared it with the pages that had been provided in 2000 when the third secret had supposedly been made public. No expert could deny that the hands were identical. But then the experts would not have been dealing with a photocopy.