Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (6 page)

Instead, at his father’s insistence, he developed a sense of false pride, of bravado, and had been beaten by the others all the more frequently because of it.

“Careful, Father.”

There was a tug at the cardinal’s sleeve and he looked up at the young businesswoman pulling at him. Before he could ask her, crankily, what she was doing, he noticed the concern on her face, and then the traffic started to speed by. He had been about to step into the street as the light changed.

Smiling now, he thanked the woman and muttered under his breath at himself. He was nervous and afraid for the first time since he was a little boy, but he was also angry. He turned and looked at his reflection in the window of a restaurant. Bennigan’s, he saw it was called. He was still skinny at sixty-four; over six feel tall and fairly healthy. He stared at the ghostly transparency of his own silver-maned, leathery face, into his own crystal-blue eyes. The ghost’s forehead was furrowed and angry looking, and with good reason, he thought. He couldn’t allow himself to be careless; there was too much at stake.

An attractive young couple having lunch on the other side of the window looked uncomfortably out at him, a very angry-looking priest staring in at them as they finished their cheeseburgers. He smiled again and chuckled, amused by the scene.

“Sorry,” he mouthed to them, shrugged his shoulders, and walked on.

The whole, ugly thing began to play itself out once again in his mind, and he knew it would continue to do so until the situation was resolved—one way or another.

The little, perpetually bruised Normannic-Sicilian boy had become a humble and intelligent young man. Imbued with his father’s staunch Catholic beliefs and thirsting for more than the precious little education with which he had thus far been blessed, young Henri decided that the only practical path was the priesthood. He still believed it was the best and most important decision he ever made. The church provided him with an education, with responsibility, and with a divine mission. As the priest of a small parish just outside Palermo, he continued to educate himself, learning French, Latin, and then English. He was stationed in Paris when he was made a bishop, and finally, five years ago, was named cardinal.

Rome was everything he had wished for, needed really, at the time. The comings and goings of bishops and cardinals, kings and queens, presidents and the pope himself had enchanted the man. His years in Paris had proven to him that the church was just as rife with corruption as any organization policed by man. It depressed him to realize how few of the Catholic powerful still had any faith at all. He knew that the power struggles that had endured for centuries were still going on, but in a far more clandestine fashion. Indeed, the church had sacrificed awe and wonder for earthly, material power, and at times Guiscard was nauseated upon meeting those to whom the collar was naught but a symbol.

But Rome was different, for some reason. The city reassured him, overwhelmed him really. It returned to him some of the magic of faith. He steeled himself against the cynicism of the outside world and again devoted himself fervently to study, despite his advanced age. He spent his days sharing new insights into modern theology with his brethren, and at night he pored over every volume the Vatican Library had to offer, digging ever deeper as time passed.

Except—and it had not bothered him at first, not until his studies became feverish, obsessive investigations into such complex things as truth and reality—there was one room he could not enter. What was more aggravating was that he had no idea what it was he was being kept from. Only with the consent of the pope could one enter that wing of the library, and in his time in Rome, he had never seen or, in truth, heard of anyone entering that room. Curiosity, though it was hardly as innocent as the word sounds, became a daily burden for him.

On that night he had been, as he most often was during waking hours, reading and doing research in the library. It was quite late, though this was not unusual, as he rarely got more than five hours sleep each night. It had been a particularly unfruitful evening and he was tired. His lingers pushed back his glasses, and he wiped the sleep from his eyes.

The light was low in that oldest among old rooms. He sat at a long oak table, in a typically uncomfortable high-backed wooden chair. Everything about the room was dark, old, and uncomfortable, seeming to confirm something he had suspected for some time now: that this truth-seeking institution cared not a whit for the truth, only for the semblance of truth, and discouraged anyone interested in looking past the veneer of modern faith.

No wonder the Dead Sea Scrolls have been decades in the translation and revelation!

Of course, he couldn’t blame them, really. Nobody wanted to know the truth, only to believe what they were “supposed” to believe and be done with it.

But here in the low light, among the thousands of ancient volumes, and seated on uncomfortable furniture, Henri Guiscard wanted to know. He wanted to know everything that was knowable, even if he could not understand it. Let them enjoy their stagnation, he thought.

Ah, old and cynical. He’d known it would come to that eventually.

He was tired and cranky and his eyes hurt from straining in the light. He was in the oldest wing of the library, which housed the most ancient books. The only thing that appeared to be older than those books was the oaken door behind him, the door to that room that so infuriated him. He put his head down for a moment and his eyes closed. He let them rest for a moment as his mental complaining subsided. Only later, when it was over, did Guiscard realize he had fallen asleep.

The intruder had entered the Vatican unseen by police, undetected by alarms, had made his way down long, darkened echoing halls, past the private quarters of cardinals and priests, had avoided discovery while descending into the bowels of the Vatican—a trip that took the better part of ten minutes when secrecy was not a factor—somehow walked right by the three attendants in the first section of the library without being seen, and had finally passed within two feet of the sleeping form of Henri Guiscard to stand in front of that forbidden door. Had he not been asleep, the cardinal might have applauded.

He did not know what woke him, but whatever the reason, he did indeed wake. He did not drowsily raise his head, rub his eyes, and yawn, nor did he snap awake, his eyes wide open. No, in his usual fashion, his head still down on his crossed arms on the table, he simply slid easily into conscious thought as if he had never left it.

He did not move for a moment, though completely unaware that anything was amiss. When he finally picked up his head, he removed his glasses and shut his eyes tightly before opening them again.

No, he reminded himself, it’s not tired eyes . . . just bad vision.

He rubbed them anyway, put his glasses back on, and began picking up his things. He placed the book he had been reading on the shelf nearest the table, where he could find it again the next night. He prepared to go and turned for one last hateful glance at that eternally closed door.

Which was open.
Wide open.
He rubbed his eyes again and blinked twice, voluntarily. The door remained as it was. His first move was instinctual; he stepped nearer the small alcove framing the door. The possibilities sped through his brain. Those people allowed in the room, if they did indeed exist, might only come there very late so as not to arouse interest in others. But the presence of his sleeping form would then surely have deterred them. Number two, there could be an emergency of some kind, but in this case, there would most certainly have been a great clamor. Finally, whoever had opened the door could be there without consent, in which case he should find a library attendant.

He had decided not to enter the room, and was about to search for an attendant, when his eyes caught a glimpse of metal in this room of wood and leather and paper. The dim light of the library was reflected off some kind of silver metal above the door. He had looked at that door so many times, had studied it the way he had studied the books; he knew there was no metal.

Without knowing he was going to move, he found himself standing in that small alcove only inches from the open door, examining the metal strip that ran the length of the frame above it. It was a hole about an inch high and two inches deep, and propped against the door frame was the piece of wood that had been perfectly fitted into that hole. The wood had disguised more than metal, however. Inside the hole were a number of different-colored wires, and Guiscard could see that some of them were cut, along with a row of numbered buttons, similar to that of any alarm system.

They didn’t trust anybody!

Guiscard had naively thought that a simple order, especially coming from this high in church hierarchy, would have been enough to deter even the most curious. Even in his most obsessive moment, he would never have dared to defy a direct order from the holy father. Upon closer inspection he realized he must be one of few so innocent. It appeared that the entire door frame was metal on the inside, the wood merely a facade. The whole thing was a huge, mechanized locking system.

He started, not breathing for a moment.

Yes, a mechanized locking system, but who had broken that lock? Was the intruder still inside?

He could breathe again, but did so as quietly as he could. Overwhelmed by his need to know, by his curiosity,

(killed the cat)

he pushed lightly on the door and soundlessly it opened wider. Over the threshold into the darkness, and he was standing still, heart pumping, pushing him forward, brain stalling, tugging him back.

The wall on his right continued on about twenty feet into the dark, while the wall on his left disappeared into the abyss of this mystery three feet from where he stood. In this little alcove, he made a conscious decision that would change his life, and many others as well. It was not impulse or accident, but choice.

He stepped forward.

The room was about twenty by fifteen with no windows. What little light there was emanated from a small lamp—almost a night-light like the one in his bathroom—that was plugged into an outlet next to the only piece of furniture in the room, a short glass case whose top now stood open. Tools beside him on the floor, the intruder reached into the case with both gloved hands.

Conjecture became conviction became fear became regret and Guiscard struggled to force himself to withdraw from the room. Wanting only to be gone, he turned too quickly, his shoe scraped the floor, his pants rustled softly.

The intruder’s head snapped around as if twisted by an unseen force, and the cardinal stared at him, frozen by his terror and yet fascinated by it. Expecting attack, he tried to brace himself for flight, but Just then the burglar began to sway. Slowly swaying back and forth, he clutched at his chest and then, without a sound, fell on his face, hitting the marble floor with a loud smack.

Minutes passed before the cardinal had the courage to approach the body of the stranger lying before him, and when he did, it was carefully. No pulse. He turned over the corpse, far from the first he’d seen. The body was heavy and the man was old; he knew he ought to call someone, but here was a mystery, right before his eyes. A number of mysteries in fact. Knowledge and information were old friends to him by now, but in his most private of thoughts, he had always wished for a real mystery. An almost perverse pleasure swept through him and he tried to fight it down—disrespectful of the dead, you know.

And what was our thief stealing? Guiscard wanted to know. He went to the case and removed its contents; a single, leather-bound book. Though it was in good condition, he knew instinctively that it was even more ancient than the library’s oldest volumes. Opening the book, he read the Latin title page, which identified the book as
The Gospel of Shadows
, though the title itself seemed to have been written far more recently than the other text, and the Latin was more modern. He began to read and was at once seized by a feeling unfamiliar to him, an uncontrollable and incredibly powerful emotion it would take weeks for him to identify.

Dread.

The feeling grew in proportion to his awe and anger and the minutes passed and he delved ever deeper into the volurne of forbidden knowledge before him. How could the pope keep such insane things on sacred ground? Did he actually believe them? Didn’t the mere fact that the book was hidden mean that the holy father of Rome believed them to be true? And didn’t he know, in the pit of his stomach, didn’t he himself believe it to be true?

God in heaven, if it
were
true, what should he do?

But no heavenly reply broke the predawn silence in that city of ancient secrets. Enough. The cardinal chose his own course. He had perhaps ninety minutes before the sun rose, and he would need every one of them. Book held tightly in his arms, he closed the door gingerly behind him. He arranged his discovery among his other things, went upstairs and across the courtyard, up to his room without notice. He packed a few pieces of clothing, identification, all the money he had, and the book.

No one questioned him on his way out. When the theft was finally discovered, Cardinal Henri Guiscard was already on a plane bound for New York. His world no longer existed, and he was running headlong into the void.

A week later he was in Boston, and now, nearly three more weeks had passed and he had set in motion a series of events that he hoped would accomplish the impossible. He plotted the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church. Foolish it might be, he assured himself, to think one renegade priest could do that kind of damage in a world where the faithful believed what they wished.