The Last Cato (7 page)

“I’m ready,” I said, right there in the middle of the garden. It would have been a good time to recall the expression “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” But I didn’t.

My brother turned around.

“What do you want?” he bellowed. “What is it that you’re looking for?”

“Information.”

“You can buy information. And if that doesn’t work, you can get it yourself.”

“How?” I asked, unsettled.

“Investigate, make inquiries, ask the people who are in possession of the information you need. Interrogate them wisely, search the archives, the boxes of files, the offices, computers, and even the wastebaskets… And if you find something valuable, take it.”

I
spent a restless, sleepless night, tossing and turning in my childhood bed. Lucia was sleeping next to me, her leg exposed by a tug of the sheet, and she was snoring softly. Pierantonio’s words were still ricocheting around in my mind, and yet I still couldn’t see how I could do the things he suggested: Was there any good way to get information out of that rocky cliff of a man, Glauser-Röist? How could I get into the offices of the secretary of state or Monsignor Tournier? How could I search the Vatican’s computers if I didn’t have the slightest idea of how those machines worked?

I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion as daylight seeped in through the blinds. I dreamed about Pierantonio. That I recall. But it wasn’t a pleasant dream. I was so happy the next morning when he looked refreshed, his hair still wet from a shower, celebrating Mass in our chapel.

My father, the honoree that day, was seated in the first pew next to my mother. I looked at their backs; my father’s was more curved and fragile. I was proud of them, of the wonderful family they had created, of the love they had given their nine children and now were giving to their numerous grandchildren. I thought about how they’d spent all their lives at each other’s side. They’d had quarrels and problems, sure, but also an indestructible, inseparable union.

At the end of the Mass, the youngest children went to play in the garden, tired from sitting still during the ceremony. The rest of us went inside for breakfast. At one end of the large dining table, grouped away from the adults, sat my oldest nieces and nephews. When I got the chance, I grabbed Giacoma and Domenico’s fourth child, Stefano, and drew him into a corner.

“Are you studying computers, Stefano?”

“Yes,” the boy looked at me with concern, as if I were about to attack him. Why were teenagers so weird?

“Do you have a computer hooked up to the Internet in your room?”

“Yes, Aunt,” he smiled with pride, relieved that his aunt wasn’t going to hurt him.

“I need you to do me a favor.”

Stefano and I spent the whole morning locked up in his room, drinking Coke, glued to the monitor. He was a bright boy who moved around the Internet and handled search engines with ease. By lunchtime, after giving my nephew a handsome sum of money for the terrific job he did (didn’t Pierantonio tell me to buy information?), something inside me had suddenly clicked. All those hours of my poring over research, of searching for meaning in the scars on that poor dead Ethiopian’s corpse, had finally paid off with the clarity I had suddenly been blessed with.

And just like that, as though a light had been turned on within me, I knew who my Ethiopian man was, how he had died, and why the various Christian churches were so interested in him. It was so serious a matter that my legs were beyond trembling as I descended the stairs for lunch.

CHAPTER 2

I
got back to Rome Monday night, plunged into a sea of confusion and fear, for I would have never imagined I was capable of disobeying. Against the wishes of the church, I’d retrieved important data by unorthodox means. It made me feel uncertain and intimidated, as if at any moment a divine bolt of lightning would strike me. Following the rules is always simpler: by doing so, you avoid the remorse and blame and uncertainty that comes with disobeying them. Above all, you feel proud of your work. In my case, I felt no satisfaction with myself or with my wretched snooping around. How was I going to face Glauser-Röist? Blame was written all over my face; and he, of all people, was sure to notice.

That night I prayed for consolation and forgiveness. I’d have given anything to forget what I knew and get back to the moment when I’d said to Pierantonio, “I’m ready.” I wanted to simply reverse that phrase and recover my inner peace. But that was impossible. The next morning when I closed the door to my office and saw the sad silhouette taped up, so deliberately covered with notes and scribbled labels, I recalled the Ethiopian man’s name: Abi-Ruj Iyasus. Poor Abi-Ruj, I thought to myself as I slowly approached the table where the terrible photographs of his battered body lay. He’d died a horrible death you wouldn’t wish on anybody, though surely in keeping with the magnitude of his sin.

My nephew Stefano, his index fingers poised at the keyboard and his brown hair falling into his eyes, had asked me what I’d been looking for when I forcefully asked him for help, and I responded, “Accidents… Any accident in which a young Ethiopian man died.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Sounds like you don’t know anything.”

“That’s right.” I had shrugged.

With only that to go on, he began scouring thousands of documents. He had several windows going at the same time, each one displaying a different browser: Virgil, Yahoo Italia, Google, Lycos, Dogpile, and others. We ran searches using words like
accident
and
Ethiopian,
taking advantage of the vast number of Web pages. We did so in English, too. Thousands of documents turned up on Stefano’s computer. He rejected them as soon as he verified that the accident in question had nothing to do with the Ethiopian man mentioned several paragraphs into the article, when he found out that the Ethiopian was eighty years old, or when he read that the accident and the Ethiopian that popped up were actually from the days of Alexander the Great. None had anything to do with what I was looking for. In a virtual folder called “Aunt Ottavia,” he saved only those pages that held some remote tie to what we felt may be useful in our search.

“I have some good news, Dr. Salina.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me…,” I murmured, not the least bit interested.

Stefano logged off the Internet near lunchtime, and we started to review the material we had filed. After the first time through, we eliminated all Italian documents. After the second meticulous screening, we finally got what we were looking for: five press reports published between Wednesday, February 16, and Sunday the 20th of the same year. An English edition of the Greek newspaper
Kathimerini,
a bulletin from the Athens News Agency, and three Ethiopian publications called
Press Digest, Ethiopian News Headlines,
and
Addis Tribune.

The story said that on Tuesday, February 15, a small rented Cessna 182 had crashed into Mount Helmos, on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, at 9:35 p.m. The dead included the pilot, a twenty-three-year-old Greek man who’d just gotten his pilot’s license, and the passenger, Ethiopian Abi-Ruj Iyasus, age thirty-five. According to the flight plan given to airport authorities in Alexandroupoli, in northern Greece, the plane was headed for the Kalamata Airport, on the Peloponnesus, and was due to land at 9:45 p.m. Ten minutes before, without any SOS, the plane flew over the heavily wooded Mount Helmos at an altitude of 7,736 feet, abruptly descended 2,000 feet, then vanished from the radar. Firemen in nearby Kertezi were immediately alerted by airport authorities. They hurried to the site and found the wreck, still smoking, scattered over a radius of a kilometer. The dead pilot and passenger were hanging from nearby trees. The story was then picked up in Greek newspapers, the report was corroborated by correspondents they had in the area. In the
Kathimerini
there was also a very blurry snapshot of the accident where I was able to make out Abi-Ruj on a stretcher. It was hard to recognize him, but I had no doubt it was the same man I had so intensely studied. His face was etched in my memory after having looked at his autopsy photographs over a thousand times. The correspondent from the Athens News Agency described in detail both men’s mortal wounds. Apparently, the scarification hidden under his clothes had gone unnoticed.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

“Good morning, Captain,” I answered without looking up at him. I couldn’t take my eyes off poor Abi-Ruj.

An offhanded sentence in the Athens News Agency report grabbed my attention. The firemen found, lying on the ground at the feet of Iyasus’s cadaver, as if it had slipped out of his hands after taking his last breath, an ornate silver box which, they surmised, had opened on impact, and strange pieces of wood had fallen out of it.

The Ethiopian newspapers gave very few details about the accident, mentioning it only in passing. They requested readers’ help to locate the relatives of Abi-Ruj Iyasus, who was a member of the Oromo tribe, a community of shepherds and farmers in central Ethiopia. They sent their request to refugee camps (the country was going through a devastating famine), but additionally—and this was the strangest part—to the religious authorities of Ethiopia, since they found “very valuable holy relics” in the deceased’s possession.

“You might want to turn around and take a look at what I have to show you,” the captain insisted.

The door to the lab behind me opened and closed softly. It was Glauser-Röist.

I grudgingly turned around. The Swiss man’s craggy face wore an enormous smile. In his hand was a very large photograph. I took it with all the indifference I was capable of mustering and cast a disdainful glance at him. My expression changed immediately once I realized what I was looking at. Within the image you could make out a wall of red granite, brightly lit by the sun. On the wall were two small crosses within rectangular frames topped off by small seven-pointed radiate crowns.

“Our crosses!” I uttered enthusiastically.

“Five of the most powerful computers in the Vatican have been working nonstop for four days to come up with what you have in your hand.”

“Just exactly what do I have in my hand?” I would have jumped for joy, except at my age that might have been fatal. “Tell me, Captain, what do I have in my hand?”

“A photograph representing a portion of the southwestern wall of the Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai.”

I could see that Glauser-Röist was as happy as I was. His grin was earnest and wide, although his body didn’t move a millimeter. He was as steady as ever. His hands were shoved deep into his pants pockets, and his face expressed a joy I never would have expected from a man like him.

“Saint Catherine of Sinai?” I whispered. “The Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai?”

“You got it. Saint Catherine of Sinai. In Egypt.”

I couldn’t believe it. Saint Catherine of Sinai was a mythical place for any paleographer. Its library, while inaccessible, was the most valuable repository in the world of ancient codices, second only to the Vatican’s. And like the Vatican Library, it too was shrouded in mystery.

“What does Saint Catherine of Sinai have to do with our Ethiopian man?” I asked, puzzled.

“I don’t have the slightest idea. In fact, I’d hoped we’d work on that today.”

“Well, then, let’s get to it,” I agreed, pushing my glasses up onto the bridge of my nose.

The bowels of the Vatican Library contained a large number of books, memoirs, compendiums, and treaties on the monastery. Yet most people didn’t have the vaguest idea that such an important place existed: an Orthodox temple located right at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the heart of the Egyptian desert, surrounded by sacred summits and built around a site of outstanding religious importance. It was the place where Yahweh, in the form of the burning bush, gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

The history of the temple was legendary. Around the fourth century, in 337, Empress Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, built a beautiful sanctuary in that valley. From that moment, numerous Christian pilgrims began to journey there. Among those first pilgrims was the famous Galician nun Egeria, who traveled through the Holy Land from the Passover of 381 until the Passover of 384. In her skillfully narrated
Itinerarium,
Egeria recounted that where the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai would later be erected, a group of hermits tended to a small temple whose apse protected the sacred bush, which was still alive back then. Because the temple was located on the road connecting Alexandria to Jerusalem, the hermits were constantly attacked by ferocious groups of desert nomads. Two centuries later, Emperor Justinian and his wife, Empress Theodora, ordered the Byzantine builder Stefano de Aila to construct a fort to protect the holy place from raids. According to the most recent investigations, the walls were reinforced over the centuries and to a large extent even rebuilt. Of the original building, only the southwest wall remained, and it was adorned with the same strange crosses that were scattered on our Ethiopian’s skin. The primitive sanctuary was repaired and improved by Stefano de Aila in the fourth century; since then, it has drawn the admiration and amazement of scholars and pilgrims throughout the world.

In 1844 a German researcher was admitted to the monastery’s library, where he discovered the extremely famous Codex Sinaiticus, the complete copy of the New Testament, the oldest copy ever found, which was dated to the fourth century. Of course, this German researcher, one Tischendorff, stole the codex and sold it to the British Museum, where it still remains and where I had the opportunity to eagerly observe it because, at the time, I was working on its twin, the Codex Vaticanus, which was from the same century and most likely of the same origin. The simultaneous study of both codices would have allowed me to carry out one of most important works of paleography ever. But it was never made possible.

By the end of the day, we had managed to gather a thick, very interesting stack of documents about the strange orthodox monastery, but we still hadn’t clarified what the relationship was between the scarification on our Ethiopian man and the southwest wall of Saint Catherine’s.

My mind was used to quickly synthesizing and extracting relevant data from a tangle of information, so I had already concocted a complex theory based on the elements that repeated themselves in the history in front of us. Since I was not supposed to know a good part of it, I could not share my ideas with Captain Glauser-Röist, but I was dying to know if he had reached similar conclusions. Deep down inside, I burned with the desire to squash him with my deductions and show him who was the cleverest and most intelligent of the two. In my next confession, Father Pintonello was going to have to impose a very stern penitence to expiate my pride.

“Very well, we’re done,” Glauser-Röist said casually as the afternoon waned. Satisfied, he slammed closed a heavy volume on architecture which he had been studying.

“What’s done?”

“We are, Doctor—our work. We’re done.”

“Finished?” I mumbled. My eyes were wide with surprise. Of course I knew my role in the investigation would end sooner or later, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that I would be eliminated with such matter-offactness and at such an interesting point.

Glauser-Röist looked at me for a long time with what little sympathy and understanding his rocklike nature allowed. It was as if over our twenty days together, a mysterious bond of trust and camaraderie had been created between us which I hadn’t noticed.

“We have completed the work they assigned us, Doctor. There is nothing more for you to do.”

I was so disconcerted I couldn’t speak. I felt the knot in my throat tightening till I could hardly breathe. Glauser-Röist observed me at length. I grew so pale he must have thought I was about to faint.

“Dr. Salina,” murmured the embarrassed Swiss Guard, “are you ill?”

Physically, I felt perfectly fine, but my brain was ticking away like a machine. I concentrated, hoping that my dissatisfaction would contain itself to the confines of my mind and not extend to the rest of my body. “What do you mean, there’s nothing more for me to do?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” he whispered. “You received an assignment and now it’s done.”

I opened my eyes wide and looked at him. “Why are they shutting me out, Captain?”

“Monsignor Tournier told you why before we started, Doctor. Don’t you remember? Your paleographic knowledge was essential to interpret the symbols on the Ethiopian man’s body. This is just one small part of the ongoing investigation which far surpasses anything you can imagine. Unfortunately, I am not authorized to tell you a thing, Doctor. Regrettably you must step aside and resume your usual work. Try to forget what has happened over the past twenty days.”