Immaculate Reception (13 page)

I
pulled and Holly pushed, and soon the brown crate marked 1933 was jerked free from the shelf. The three-car garage held not a vehicle, but its walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with open shelving units, which contained several hundred packing crates. At the back wall, the crates were ordered by year and had the seal of the Vatican. We started there.

Mrs. Castiglione returned to the house almost as soon as we'd entered the garage, in need, she said, of some coffee. We helped ourselves, as our hostess bid us, to look around. Although less than steady, Mrs. Castiglione did remember speaking with her brother's secretary the day before. She remembered clearly that the boxes were to be made available for a research project. We thanked her and got to work.

The crates were of an old design, with lids and leather straps that fit into buckles. They were quite beautiful in themselves. I imagined them sitting in a storeroom at the Vatican and felt the thrill of being close to history.

Inside the crate, files and notebooks were neatly stacked. Ledger books, which contained daily journals, were filed at the back. The dark blue covers opened upwards where two strong metal brads held each page, punched at the top for that purpose. The long legal-size sheets fastened within contained handwriting in blue fountain pen ink. In places the blue ink was quite light, in others it blobbed.

Up until this moment, I'd kept fatigue at bay by sheer
will chased by a shot of adrenaline. But now, with the truth written somewhere nearby, I lost it. As my eyes tried to focus on the tight script, they blurred. The harder I tried to pull them into focus, the more my eyes stung. I was toast.

I put my hand over my eyes and tried to relax them, rubbing the sockets gently.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” Holly asked, yawning herself.

“Holly,” I said, sitting down on the cool cement floor, “I'm getting old.”

“I hear you,” she said.

With my eyes somewhat rested, I tried to read the fine penmanship again. The writing was elegant, with perfectly formed letters that slanted to the left in compressed pointy parallels. Beyond that I had little to observe. The words were swimming.

“Holly,” I said, defeated. “Read this to me.”

Holly took the ledger and turned it towards herself.

“Houston, I think we have a problem,” Holly announced.

I looked again and sighed. The pages were written in Italian. What the hell had I been thinking? Without someone to translate, I was lost. And by the number of crates, even a fluent translator could be stuck for years trying to make it through all the notebooks and files and ledger journals.

Holly yawned again and sat down on the floor beside me. “What now?” The cat silently jumped onto her purple lap.

“Mrs. Castiglione?” I suggested, with little conviction. “She can read Italian.”

Holly looked at me and shook her head. “Dead end.”

I put the ledgers back in the crate, adjusted the straps, and fastened the buckle.

“Let's take it with us,” I suggested, for lack of a better idea. “Maybe someone Xavier knows will have an idea of how to get through this stuff.”

Holly scooted the cat off her lap and got to her feet. She
took a handle on one side of the crate. I took the other.

When we stopped into the main house, Mrs. Castiglione's voice could be heard singsonging with its odd emphasis down the hall in the direction of the kitchen. Holly and I carried our prize there and put it down on the dark tile floor.

The monsignor's elderly sister was sitting on a settee at the back of the kitchen along a bank of French doors. Next to her were another senior citizen and her daughter, Maria.

“Are you girls
finished
already?” asked Mrs. Castiglione. “My, that was fast.”

“We ran into a little glitch,” Holly said.

“Oh, dear. And we've
just
had the exterminators,” Mrs. Castiglione said, and turned to Maria. “Could you call those pest people? The very nice gentlemen. You know the ones.
Dewey
. That's the name. I can always remember a name. Let's have Dewey come again.”

“That's not the trouble, Mom,” Maria said, smiling up at Mrs. Castiglione.

“Nothing like that,” I added. “We didn't realize just how many documents we'd have to look through.”

“What kind of project are you working on?” the second elderly lady asked. She had more wrinkles than a prune, but her hair was an interesting shade of jet black.

“Research,” Mrs. Castiglione answered her. “Benny's
memoirs
, I should imagine.”

“We really don't want to disturb you any further,” I told her. “Do you think we might borrow this one crate of files so that we can go over the papers in greater depth?”

“Be my guest, dear,” Mrs. Castiglione said, her head bobbing ever so slightly to the left.

“We should get a receipt, I imagine,” Maria suggested.

“Splendid,” Mrs. Castiglione agreed. She pulled out a slip of paper and found a pen and began to write.

“I'm surprised you'd take
this
one,” she said, handing me the pen to sign for it.

“Why? Is there a better year?”

“I'm
sure
I wouldn't know,” Mrs. Castiglione sighed.
“Never looked through the boxes myself. I just naturally thought you would be more
comfortable
reading Benny's journals in English.”

The room really did rock. As an adopted Californian, I immediately looked up at the chandelier hanging over the kitchen table, the better to judge the magnitude. It swung in a slow arc about one inch off plumb. For the little quakes, we're a bunch of amateur seismologists, trying to outguess each other as to how strong the jolt actually is before the experts at Cal Tech give the official number. On the Richter scale, this one had felt like maybe a 2.3, 2.4 tops.

“I think perhaps, Maria, I've had quite enough coffee for the morning,” Mrs. Castiglione said resolutely, setting down her cup.

We don't fuss too much over the small temblors. As soon as we figure it's over and nothing fell on us, we simply go on. Holly and I were already over it, but Maria looked unsettled, Mrs. C was confused, and I was convinced the elderly lady with the jet-black hair never even felt it. As for Stan, he was nowhere to be seen.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Castiglione, what English journals?”

“My dear brother, may God rest his soul, had a nice boy out not too long ago to help put the journals into English. Now
what
was the dear child's name? Maria, you remember that nice young man who came to us from a cathedral in Liverpool and lived at the house for those two years. He was called Raymond Something. Yes, I've got it. Raymond Moon. Isn't that right, Maria?”

“I think the man was here when I was away at college, Mother. I never knew the fellow.”

“Can that be true? It couldn't have been too long ago. Now I remember. He loved to listen to the Beatles. So loud. But a nice man just the same. How long ago did the Beatles sing?” she asked Holly, who was Mrs. C's entertainment reference guide.

“Sixties,” Holly said.

“
Yes
, it must have been in the sixties. Anyway, we've
got his manuscripts in English. Such a
shame
you can't use them.”

I was so overtired, I had actually begun drifting. Conversations with Mrs. Castiglione took their own precious time, but with a little help from Maria we were soon out of the house and the back of my Grand Wagoneer held six cardboard boxes with the entire contents of Monsignor Picca's personal journals from 1922 until 1964.

In English. Thank the Lord.

I
crashed in Wesley's guestroom. I surrendered to sleep as my brain found the darkness it craved, and Saturday afternoon disappeared.

Five hours were all I dared steal, and my head ached as I climbed out of the king-size bed and splashed water on my face. The business of running a major event requires organization. I sat down at Wesley's dining room table and began to work. We were in the final countdown, just a few more hours until the city of Los Angeles welcomed the leader of the Roman Catholic Church over maple-chicken brochettes. And since they were
our
maple-chicken brochettes, the team recently dubbed Mad Bean Events was in high gear to make sure it all came off right.

From 6 until 8 p.m., I returned calls and e-mails that seemed critical. While I was sleeping, a message had been left by Chuck Honnett. The police had gone back over the monsignor's office and come up empty. No copy of Brother Ugo's Latin confession had been found in his office or at the rectory. He suggested that Wes and I and Xavier come down to the station so we could put together our best memory of what the thing had said, after the pope event, of course. With all three copies of that old document now missing, I wondered what secret it might have contained that all of us missed.

I looked at my watch. Wesley was out at the venue, overseeing the load-in. The floor looked good, Wes re
ported in his understated way by cell phone. The custom-ordered slipcovers for the chairs weren't there. The food had been delivered without major mishap. All in all, a promising report.

Holly had grabbed a few hours of sleep and was now at my side, going over lists and making reconfirmation calls to florists, candy-makers, rental houses, linen suppliers, and the ladies from St. Mary's who were sewing the slipcovers. Virtually every item had been donated to the city, and many were donated by good Catholic businesses and families. Xavier told me there was one faithful gentleman who donated one hundred thousand dollars to the city to cover the additional cost of hiring extra security and traffic cops.

This party was causing deep anxiety at many levels. From the cubicle of the lowliest grunt at city hall to the chambers outside the most venerated office in Rome, men and women were working furiously. Secretaries were charged with procuring unobtainable tickets, speechwriters were up all night polishing speeches for insecure politicians, and network news directors were ordered to produce the unbookable interview of the year, with the pontiff himself.

What we were doing, frankly, was the fun part. We developed the creative concept, designed the menu and décor, and fashioned everything else from invites to party favors to custom white chocolates. Wes and I selected every item. We talked Tiffany's into creating three thousand tiny commemorative gold crucifixes which then had to be FedExed to Rome for advance papal blessing and returned to us within our two-week deadline. Wes and I strongly believe in the right party favors.

We color-coordinated everything, from the lights under the ballroom floor to the centerpieces of bright red tulips to the postage stamps with white doves on the invitations. We also took care of the nitty-gritty. We got approvals from the Vatican, pulled city permits, and submitted every detail for okay from the FBI, LAPD, and Archdiocese of L.A. In addition, we fielded requests from journalists, agreed to in
terviews, coordinated the volunteers, trained the staff, placed all orders, managed the money, and prayed that it all would work like a dream.

Each member of Mad Bean Events fills a specific function. Wesley is our line manager, out in the trenches. Holly coordinates all vendors. There is nothing she can't procure on a moment's notice. I book contracts, handle PR, make final design decisions, and plan all preproduction. As the party nears, I am available to handle the unexpected. But some events are blessedly free of major last-minute crises, and sometimes I find myself without much to do in the hours right before show time.

While Holly kept to her endless list of calls, I felt I could steal a few minutes to look at Monsignor Picca's journals, which began with a summary of his childhood and continued through 1964, translated into English by the visiting Beatles fan.

I love history. Benecio Picca was born in La Storta, Italy, just outside of Rome, in November of 1912. As a boy of ten, he witnessed the pageantry at St. Peter's Basilica as Cardinal Achille Ratti was elevated to the church's highest office and became Pope Pius XI. In 1929, when Picca was just seventeen, he entered the seminary and began his studies for the priesthood. It was the same year that Pius XI worked the political miracle that saw Vatican City established as an independent state.

Young Picca was a rising star in his class. Even at twenty, he showed a gift for writing and documenting church history. It was March 19, 1933, on the Feast of St. Joseph, when the twenty-one-year-old was ordained to the priesthood, with his future bright. Looking back, how could he ever have imagined the path he would find ahead. I sighed, wondering what my journals would look like when I'm eighty-seven.

Picca recorded his personal story with the same objectivity that he used to detail the political climate in Rome. In the year he was ordained, 1933, he reported what to me seemed like a staggering event. He calmly noted that Pius
XI signed an agreement that would provide protection for the Roman Catholic Church in Germany during the political upheaval that was threatening Europe. In essence, the church agreed to cooperate with the Nazis.

I stopped reading. If true, this information was explosive. Recently, there were many stories floating around regarding the church and its apparent passivity with the Nazis. But the date was significant. It was too early for the world to predict the coming madness. Back in 1933, the Nazis were a bunch of thugs, gaining a frightening amount of political power. Rome must have felt vulnerable to their heavy breathing. With the Vatican's independence only a few years old, the church was on the defensive.

I wondered if any of this history was known.

I wanted to read further, but I stopped myself. I didn't have the luxury of time. I had been hoping to find some mention of Brother Ugo and the affair that Monsignor Picca remembered. If Picca, as a young priest, was given an assignment to investigate the death of the Jesuit brother baker, I'd seen no mention of it. I flipped ahead quickly through the next several years.

I was stunned, therefore, when I saw some further notations regarding how Rome was planning to deal with the growing horror of Hitler. Too caught up in the vivid story, I had to read on.

According to Picca's journal, by 1938, relations between the Vatican and Nazi Germany were strained. Under mounting concern, Pope Pius XI called a secret meeting with his staff. Picca, as secretary to one of the cardinals present, was there taking notes.

The pope was no longer willing to remain altogether passive. While his advisers worried about what might become of the millions of Catholics living in Europe should Hitler make them his special target, Pius XI persisted. He was still critically aware of the enormous threat to Rome, but the pontiff did not believe the church could remain silent.

Perhaps to maintain their tenuous neutrality, the Vatican would not attack Hitler nor mention the Nazi movement by
name. Instead, the pope commissioned a select group of priests to draft an “encyclical” that would denounce the evils of anti-Semitism.

Again, I was stunned. There had been bad feelings for almost sixty years because the Vatican had remained silent during the Holocaust. I wondered what had happened?

I called Wesley at the Otis Mayfield and got through to him as he was testing the lights placed under the banquet floor.

“I've found something in the monsignor's papers.”

“Do you know what happened to Brother Ugo?” Wes asked with interest.

“Not yet. But I'm reading a lot about the Nazis and I need to know, what exactly is an ‘encyclical'?”

“An encyclical?” Wes barely paused before beginning his spiel. “When the Catholic church wants to come out with their position on something major, they prepare an official document and publish it. It's like a very heavy speech from the head man. Popes issue encyclicals, but not very often. It's the most influential form of communication between popes and the universal church. You know. It sends the word down from Rome to all the churches throughout the world on the party line. Why?”

Simply put, Wes knew everything.

“I've been reading Picca's old journals. He says Pope Pius XI ordered an encyclical condemning the Nazis.”

“Impossible,” Wes said. “The pope never did anything like that. Wow, are you kidding? It would have been a monster deal. An encyclical would have spelled out for all Catholics that they must fight the Nazis. I doubt the Nazi party could have survived the defections. If such a document was ever published it might have ended the Nazi domination of Europe. Believe me, it never happened.”

“That's odd, isn't it? Because Picca was there when the pope discussed it. He was actually at the meeting taking notes for a cardinal.”

“Maddie, these are very controversial ideas. The news is full of stories of how the Vatican handled this very sub
ject. The state of Israel has been insisting for years that the church rectify its past silence. The point being, my dear, that now even Rome has agreed that they didn't do very much at the time. I believe Rome even half-apologized.”

“Yes. That's what's so intriguing. From these private journals, I'm getting the impression that Picca was in on some secret plans. Don't you wonder what happened?”

“This is a much hotter topic that we should be discussing right now,” Wes warned me. “The pope has landed in Los Angeles, for Pete's sake. His Holiness has trod upon our miserable soil. He's going lead a mass tomorrow for sixty thousand. I know we're supposed to entertain the man, but I do not recall our contract specifying that, in addition, we inflame the Jewish community.”

“But Wesley,” I said, using my most persuasive tone of voice. “Use your brain. These papers support the idea that the Pius XI was
against
the Nazis. This is a positive thing, controversy-wise.”

“Yes, well…” Wes thought it over. “Then riddle me this. Why, when the weight of ecumenical pressure came down on the Vatican a couple of years ago, did Rome apologize for keeping mum while the Nazis ripped across Europe?”

“I'll keep reading,” I said.

“Mad, honey, maybe you should come over here and look things over.”

Distraction stopped working on me when I was six.

“I hear you, Wesley. This is not a light subject. Don't worry about me.”

“Any bad guys breaking in over there?” Wes asked, just to mother hen me.

“One or two. But Holly is beating them all off with her Rolodex. Bye.”

I went back to Father Picca's journals. I was up to 1938 and had expected to find some mention of Ugo the baker by this time.

I should have skipped ahead, but something about the mystery of the secret encyclical drew me back into the
young Father Picca's clear narrative. At that time, Picca was the assistant to Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, who was the prefect of the Vatican library. That was the year, I learned, in which the Italian government began imposing racial legislation on Jews. I became overwhelmed with sadness. My mother's family was Jewish. I couldn't imagine that period of darkness. I knew distant relatives of hers lived in Europe during that time. But she had always been vague about who and where and what had been their fate.

I reread the part where Picca had transcribed the pope's instructions for the drawing up of the dangerous document. Pius XI denounced anti-Semitism as “a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part.” He had apparently been moved to say such things in public, for which he and the church had come under increasing pressure from the Nazis. Still, he meant to persist.

Cardinal Tisserant had Father Picca contact an obscure Jesuit from France. He was the Reverend John LaFarge. This unassuming man, Picca wrote, was Harvard-educated and had committed his life to fighting segregation. In his humble way, LaFarge wrote and spoke out often, displaying exemplary concern for the rights of all men. It appears his calling was leading him to Rome.

LaFarge was personally selected by Pius XI to draft the secret encyclical denouncing anti-Semitism. Pius XI instructed LaFarge, a most obscure and unknown Jesuit, to say “what you would say if you yourself were pope.”

The pope's own words. I was fascinated. The journals were recorded in date order, and many of the entries concerned the daily routines at the Vatican. I skipped ahead, trying to pick up the thread of the encyclical. What had become of it? I skimmed along, looking for another entry about LaFarge, turning the pages quickly until a familiar name jumped from the page and stopped me cold. Finally, I found what I had originally been looking for: the name of Brother Ugo Spadero.

The entry was posted in 1939. It was datelined from the
pope's summer residence in the Alban Hills. There were only a few brief sentences, telling much the same story Monsignor Picca had recalled. Brother Ugo Spadero's death seemed sudden. He took violently sick in the night. Rumors circulated. He had been morose in the days before his death, some said inconsolable. The death was considered suspicious, the key piece of evidence being that no one had ever before seen the gentle brother baker depressed. Slim. Even Perry Mason would not have been able to make a case.

A little later, a notation mentioned that Picca was asked to drop the inquiries into the death of Brother Ugo Spadero by the office of Pope Pius XII.

There was no more to go on than before.

Occasionally, in the margins of the typed journal, I would notice words, which had been scribbled in pencil. I began to recognize Monsignor Picca's handwriting in those scribbles as he notated items that he found worthy of further research. I tried to read the scribble at the top of the page that dealt with the investigation surrounding the question of Brother Ugo Spadero's death.