On the Fifth Day (16 page)

Thomas said nothing. Giovanni had spoken the phrase ver

batim, as if he'd replayed his brother's words a thousand times in his head since.

"I mean," said the priest, in his own voice, "if someone started a religion now, but they were executed, could you imag

ine that person's followers wearing symbols of the electric chair or the hangman's rope?"

"I guess not," said Thomas, grudgingly.

"But," said Giovanni, raising one finger and smiling, "the cross is the symbol because the life of Christ is finally about his death, taking on the sins of the world for the salvation of others."

"So Jesus was a suicide," said Thomas.

Again, he hadn't really meant to say it. An image of pills in a whisky tumbler had popped into his head and the words had slipped out unbidden. Giovanni looked surprised, but he an

swered evenly:

"Suicide is self-important. Self-sacrifice is the opposite."

"Okay," said Thomas. "But I don't see why Ed cared. So far as I can tell he was a priest for the present. Social justice, liberation theology: these were the things he lived for. What do they have to do with the theology of the crucifixion?"

"Everything," said Giovanni. " 'Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.' That's what the cross is about, and it's what liberation theology is about: giving up what you have so that those who have nothing might 113

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

have more. The personal and spiritual is part of the social and political. That is the message of the Gospel."

"Here endeth the lesson," said Thomas, suppressing the sneer too late.

"Tell me," said the priest, "are you an atheist from convic

tion or on principle?"

Thomas smiled a little at Giovanni's polite but firm retali

ation.

"Is there a difference?"

"Of course," said Giovanni. "One doesn't believe in God, the other refuses to."

"On principle?"

"Because of what he associates with religion, yes."

"Then I'm an atheist from conviction," said Thomas. "I see no reason to believe in God. That what gets done in the name of religion is largely ignorant, judgmental, and destructive merely reinforces my conviction."

Giovanni's eyes held his, and though he said nothing, Thomas looked down and took a sip of his coffee. The other man didn't believe him.

Maybe he's right not to.

"I'm not my brother," he said, simply. That at least was true.

"No," said Giovanni.

"Meaning?"

"Nothing," said Giovanni, his eyes still unblinking on Thomas's.

"Did you consider yourself a friend of Ed's?"

"Yes," said the priest. "We didn't correspond after he left Italy, but yes. I thought I would see him again this year. He was planning to come back. I was sorry when I heard he had died."

"Did they tell you how or where he died?"

"No," said Giovanni, his face suddenly darkening. "Is there something . . . ? I do not know the word in English. Something not right?"

"Something sinister about the circumstances of his death?

I'm not sure. I think there might be."

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"I had no idea."

"Can you think of anything that Ed was doing here or writ

ing about that could have put him in danger?"

"Danger from whom?"

"I don't know. Anybody."

"I did not see him the day he left," said Giovanni. "I was sick and in the hospital when he flew. I did not even know where he had gone. He left me a card."

"Do you still have it?"

The priest smiled and reached inside his jacket.

"I thought you might want to see it," he said. It was a postcard with views of Herculaneum and was writ

ten in English. It said, "Father G. When you get this I'll be p

gone, I'm afraid. xi ian symbol-wise, I might have hit the mother lode (should that be
father lode
??!!), but it's pointing outside Italy now and I have to follow. Will send details later. Get well soon! E."

p

"That symbol," said Thomas considering the xi . "It's famil

iar but . . ."

"It means Christian," said the priest. "He's using the Greek chi rho letters that the early Church used to signify Christ."

"What does he mean by 'the mother lode' symbol-wise?"

"I don't know," said Giovanni. "I assumed he meant some

thing to do with the cross, since that is the primary Christian symbol. But I couldn't say."

"And he had just come from Herculaneum?"

"He was going between all the ancient sites," said Gio

vanni, "Herculaneum, Pompeii, Paestum, the archaeological museum here in Naples. Every day he was at one or the other. Came home late, often excited, tired. But he kept most of his ideas to himself. Or," he added, "he did not tell me."

"Did he confide in anyone else?"

Giovanni shrugged and said nothing. Thomas gave him a hard look.

"Did he talk to Pietro?" he asked.

"Some," said the priest, grudgingly. "He and the monsignor talked. I don't know what they talked about."

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"Were they working together?"

Giovanni's face shifted in a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"Oh no. I think they did not get along. At least where Eduardo's work was concerned."

"They argued?"

"Yes. Violently sometimes. Why, I don't know."

"So Pietro was glad when he left?"

Giovanni seemed to think long about this, and his answer was uncertain and edged with something that might have been sadness.

"I think he was relieved," he said. "But he was very upset to hear of your brother's death. Now he seems . . .
different.
"

"Different how?" said Thomas, pressing.

"I don't know. Angry. Sad. Worried? Yes, I think so."

"But you've no idea what Ed could have done or said to un

settle him like this?"

"Padre Pietro is old," said Giovanni, struggling to put the thoughts into words. "His ideas, I mean."

"He's a pre-Vatican Two Catholic," Thomas nodded.

"Not just that," he said. "Some of his ideas are not just old Catholic. Some of them have never been orthodox, never been--how you say it?--
mainstream.
He doesn't talk to me about his beliefs because we don't agree. Some of his ideas I do not understand."

Thomas was intrigued, as much by the young priest's increasingly halting and anxious manner as by what he was being told.

"For example?" he said. "What does Pietro believe that you don't?"

"He believes very strongly in the . . .
mediation
of the dead. Any dead."

"Intercession?"

"Yes. In the old Church people prayed through saints, yes?

They thought in terms of rank, class . . ."

"Hierarchy?" prompted Thomas.

"Yes. So they did not speak to God directly. They went 116

A. J. Hartley

through Saint Paul or the Virgin Mary or other more modern saints: people who had died who would intercede for them be

fore the Lord. It gave them a personal link to God, a face they knew. It still goes on, of course, but it is less central to the Church. Some people think--as Luther thought--that the saints become . . ."

"An end and not a means?"

"Precisely. People are praying
to
the saint, not
through
him."

"And Pietro still holds with this?"

"This is not uncommon. But about one hundred years ago, in Naples, a particular kind of
intercession
grew around the dead in a particular place."

"The Fontanelle?" said Thomas, unable to stifle a cold thrill that moved down his back like a trickle of ice water.

"The Fontanelle," said Giovanni, with a sigh. "Pietro took me once, six or seven years ago. I have never been back. I do not wish to go back."

"What is it?"

"Originally the place was a kind of--what is the word?

Where you take stone from the ground?"

"Quarry?"

"Yes," said the priest, smiling at the term. "Quarry. It is many caves and passages below the city made by the extrac

tion of the stone for building. Naples is very old, you see, and very restricted in size. Here," he said, laying one hand on the table, "is the city. On this side are the mountains and on this side is the sea. So, as time passed--and the city goes back many thousands of years--the new town was built on top of the old town. Land was used again. It is not like Rome, which spread out so all its ancient monuments were left intact at the center. Naples builds on itself, so all the old places are under

ground. Since land is so valuable in the city, places of burial also get reused after time has passed.

"Long ago," Giovanni continued, "there were great sick

nesses that came through Italy killing almost everyone."

"Bubonic plague," said Thomas. "The Black Death."

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"Exactly. There were too many bodies to bury. Nowhere to put them. Most of them were the poor who could not afford to leave the city, and when they died their bodies were put together without names. Hundreds of thousands of dead people. Eventu

ally, they were moved to the Fontanelle."

"How were they buried if the Fontanelle was a stone quarry?"

Giovanni smiled bleakly, as if Thomas had hit the nail on the head.

"They were not. They were piled together. Just bones. Heaps of them. Filling the place."

Thomas swallowed and tried not to look uncomfortable, but the idea of these dark corridors filled with dead people was the stuff of his nightmares.

"In time, people began to treat the bones like saints," Gio

vanni went on. "They cleaned and polished the bones. They took them flowers and candles. They adopted them. They prayed to them."

Giovanni shrugged and smiled at the simplicity of it, but he was clearly troubled.

"The place attracts strange people. Some say the Mafia meet there. There are other kinds of legends too."

"Like?"

"Folk tales," said Giovanni. "There is one about a captain. I don't know it properly."

Thomas nodded encouragingly.

"It is mere foolishness," said Giovanni.

"Go on," said Thomas, smiling.

The priest sat back and looked away for a moment, then sipped his coffee and said, "Okay. A young woman wanted to get married. She tried to find a husband in the usual ways, but without success. So she went to the Fontanelle and chose a head."

"A skull?"

"Yes, a
skull.
She cleaned it, polished it till it was so bright and smooth that no dust or dirt would stick to it, and she asked 118

A. J. Hartley

it to help. One week later, she met a man and in a few months, they got married. At the wedding there was one man in the crowd she did not recognize: a tall, handsome man dressed like an army captain. He began to whisper to her. Her new husband, seeing this, was overcome with jealousy. He hit the stranger in the face very hard. At once, the handsome captain vanished, and the husband died of fright. When the young woman returned to the Fontanelle, she found that her polished skull now had a black eye!"

Thomas smiled.

"There are many such stories," said Giovanni with a dis

missive gesture. "Some funny. Some scary. Some concern particular bones, like that one. There was a skeleton of a baby that some local people particularly liked. When work was go

ing on to rebuild the Fontanelle, they said they would attack the laborers if they did not find that skeleton."

"Did they find it?"

"They said so," said Giovanni with a noncommittal shrug.

"But you see? The place attracts the
superstitious.
It is full of dark stories, strange feelings. I wish the place had never existed."

"And Pietro?"

"The Fontanelle was connected to a particular church. When Pietro was ordained, he became the priest of that church. But then, about thirty years ago, the bishops said this should not go on any more, that it was superstition. They closed the Fontanelle, separated it from the church, and now no one can go there."

"No one?"

Giovanni framed that uncomfortable shrug and smile again, and his meaning was clear: Pietro still went there, for reasons he could not begin to fathom.

CHAPTER 28

The message light was blinking on his phone back at the Ex

ecutive. Jim had called from Chicago. Thomas checked the time, counted back seven hours, and dialed.

"Jim," he said. "It's Thomas."

"I was right," said Jim, without preamble. "When I said the DHS guy was behaving as if something had happened. It had. I saw it on the news tonight."

"What?"

"At dawn this morning DHS agents working with CIA and FBI counterterrorist investigators found a cache of weapons in the basement of a single-family Chicago-area house," said Jim, sounding like he was reading from a newspaper. "AK-47

assault rifles. Sacks of fertilizer and other products that could be used in bomb making."

"So?" said Thomas. "What does that have to do with Ed?"

"It's not about Ed," said Jim. "It's about you."

"How so?" said Thomas.

"The raid took place at 1247 Sycamore in Evanston," said Jim. "Thomas, it was
your
house."

"I'm being set up," said Thomas into the phone. "I spoke to Father Jim Gornall back at St. Anthony's and he told me about the raid on my house."

It had taken him ten minutes to get through to Senator Dev

lin's office. He was now talking to Rod Hayes, the senator's chief of staff, explaining what he had heard and what he was doing in Italy. The young man listened without interruption and then said, "I'm going to pass this over to the senator. I just don't have the authority to start poking around."

"Thank you," said Thomas.

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"He's in a meeting right now," said Hayes, "but I'll get him to call you in about . . . three hours."

"Okay," said Thomas, feeling sweaty and uncomfortable.