The Third Revelation (11 page)

Then of course he thought of what had happened to the cardinal in that redoubt of peace. And he thought of Traeger. He was the man's prey, he was sure of it. And even if he weren't, Traeger's investigation would turn up things about Father Crowe, his connection with Catena, and that would be the end of his Vatican career. It was fear that had prompted him to agree to this incredible trip. It meant respite from Traeger's incessant and unsettling questions. And now he was being offered permanent refuge. In the Refuge of Sinners.

Cardinal Maguire's little rooftop garden had been transported from Ireland the way Hannan had made a replica of Lourdes here in New Hampshire. Hannan had been to Lourdes and to Fatima. Again, Crowe was struck by the power of the man. No need to make arrangements for flights, bend his schedule to that of airlines. He had only to call for his private plane—one of his private planes, as it turned out—and off he went. What must it be like to be able to act immediately on any impulse like that? What kind of person would he himself be in such circumstances?

Most moneyed people were self-indulgent libertines, forming marriages, breaking them up, finally not even bothering to marry. Nouveaux riches, actors and actresses, athletes. Money seemed to sweep aside all inhibitions; it certainly swept aside most obstacles to instant gratification. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Carpe diem. Go for all the gusto you can get. Had Hannan gone down any of those other paths before he got religion? Apparently not.

Earlier, when Laura was taking them to Hannan's office, showing them the Empedocles complex, as she called it—it sounded vaguely Freudian—Crowe had said, “It's like a religious community.”

“And Nate is our abbot.”

“What was he like before he returned to the faith?”

“He's always been a monk. He didn't have to change much.”

Crowe had sensed Laura's distance from her boss's religious enthusiasms. Nothing overt, no condescension. More like a wistful envy of his simplicity. What was her own life like, he wondered. John seemed to assume that Laura was just a lovely young woman who had been too busy to marry yet, but Crowe guessed something else when Ray Sinclair was with them. Not that he would ever bring up the subject with John, of course.

Hannan liked the little lecture on Thomas Aquinas. They sat on one of the benches that were positioned at intervals along the path.

“I want you in on this, Father.”

“That's very flattering, of course.”

“I'll be frank. Maybe there are others who know as much as you. I doubt it, but say there are. You've got the Roman connection.”

“Exactly. And that's why your offer is unrealistic.”

“I thought we settled that.”

“Did we?” He found himself wishing that they had.

“You could be the chief consultant. You don't have to move here. You can get back and forth as often as needed. It won't interfere with your life.”

He seemed actually to believe that. He was offering him a kind of instant mobility not even the pope could command. A double life.

But what else had he been living for years? He had been ready to respond to Bishop Catena, had shared the dissident prelate's conviction that things had gone woefully wrong in the Church as a result of the Council. That conviction had weakened under John Paul II, weakened but not gone entirely away. Some of the bishops that had been named! The madder heretics untouched by discipline or even scolding. The long patience of Rome, that was the usual explanation. But under Benedict a new intellectual rigor had been introduced. Crowe had come to think that a quiet revolution was going on. He remembered the hope that had risen at the time of Cardinal Ratzinger's interview with Vittorio Messori, the
Ratzinger Report
. The hopes raised had not been realized. But now Ratzinger was Benedict XVI. It was possible to believe that the decades of tumult were coming to an end. John Paul II had been a tireless cheerleader for the Council through his papacy. Benedict had spoken frankly of wrong turns taken, turns that had to be reversed.

“Why doesn't he just do it then?” Catena had said, his voice heavy with skepticism.

Crowe had sought out a meeting with Catena, to see if the confraternity was changing its attitude toward the papacy under the new regime.

“You can't just reestablish the Latin liturgy overnight.”

“Why not?”

“If the people have been confused during these decades, what would a sudden change like that do to them?”

Catena obviously relished the thought of such an upheaval. He seemed to long for an immediate separation of the sheep from the goats.

“And don't forget the trickery about the third secret.”

All that had flared up again when Cardinal Bertone published
The Last Seer of Fatima.
In the book he claimed that Sister Lucia agreed that what he and his then boss Cardinal Ratzinger had released in 2000 was all there was to the third secret. But zealots had immediately attacked Bertone for lying to the faithful. Scocci, Trepanier. And of course Catena.

They had met on the parapet of the Castel Sant'Angelo, the huge mausoleum that had been built to contain the remains of the emperor Hadrian. Two millennia had passed and the building still stood, a feature in much of the intervening history of the Eternal City, now a tame station on the tourist rounds. Crowe looked at the stern profile of Catena. He was glaring at the dome of Saint Peter's half a mile off, as if at the camp of the enemy. Crowe was suddenly weary of it all. Had he actually ever thought that this grumpy American knew something the Holy Father didn't?

Catena rehearsed all the familiar complaints. What had been made public could not be the whole secret. It did not connect with the text that had been long known, broken at the point where Lucia had been told to tell the rest only to the Holy Father. “In Portugal, the faith will . . .” Why hadn't the text Ratzinger had made public continued from that point?

“We know why.”

What Catena knew, or thought he knew, was that the text had gone on to speak of the travails the faith would know in lands other than Portugal. It would have spoken of the ravages that had been wrought on the Church by Vatican II. That of course had to be suppressed. The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not likely to make public the Blessed Mother's rejection of the Council. That was the key. The status quo had to be protected, no matter the desires of the Mother of God.

“You must have looked at the secret,” Catena said. He had turned toward Crowe and studied his face.

“No.”

“Surely you could.”

“It is under the direct control of the prefect. And the Holy Father.”

“Of course.”

The beauty of Catena's theory was that everything fit into it.

The memory of that meeting at the Castel Sant'Angelo had come back when he found the documents on Cardinal Maguire's bedside table. It had taken no lengthy inner debate to take them and put them in his briefcase and spirit them out of the library. He had no desire at all to read the documents. His motive was to keep them away from people like Catena. Or Remi Pouvoir. Let the matter be closed, once and for all. That must have been Ratzinger's thought in 2000 when he had made public what he had.

Now Brendan Crowe sat on a bench with Ignatius Hannan in the Empedocles Complex in New Hampshire and the subject came up again.

“What do you think of these people who claim that parts of it were suppressed?” Hannan asked.

“Not much.”

“Where is the thing kept?”

“In the Vatican Archives.”

“Where you work?”

“Yes.” Brendan got out a cigarette and lit it. Hannan watched with fascination.

“I never smoked.”

“It's not necessary for salvation.”

It took a while, but finally Hannan smiled. “Have you looked at it?”

The secret. “No.”

“Could you?”

What would Hannan think if he knew that the document was in Crowe's briefcase in his suite in the guest building?

“Anybody can. It was made public in the year two thousand.”

“Let me tell you about a priest named Jean-Jacques Trepanier.”

“I thought you wanted money.”

Gabriel Faust had a doctorate in art history from the University of Chicago, but his subsequent academic career had been brief. The lure of foundation grants, short-term tasks—cataloguing the holdings of private collectors—and modest dealings in minor art works, bringing buyers and sellers together, had brought him at the age of fifty to the recognition that he had not become what he had set out to be. His beau ideal was Bernard Berenson, whose villa in Florence had become the property of Harvard University. An early fellowship at the Villa I Tatti where the legendary Berenson, long since gathered to his fathers, remained the genius loci had caused Faust to turn his back on campus and classroom and embark on what he had hoped would be the replication of Berenson's career. With thus far unsatisfying results.

What fascinated Faust in Berenson was the fact that his model had fashioned his own job description, managing by shrewdness, vast knowledge, and a touch of larceny to dominate the art world, becoming the all but universally recognized final arbiter on art. It was that little touch of larceny, accounts of questionable dealings that had come under scrutiny only posthumously, that became central to Faust's admiration for Berenson and came to define the character of his own hoped-for career.

The epiphany had come on the night of his fiftieth birthday. He was in Paris on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A planned celebration with friends had been postponed when a freakish bout of weather covered Paris with snow and all but extinguished life in the City of Light. In the end, he dined alone, had two bottles of wine, and then trudged back to his apartment where he continued to drink, nursing the feeling that the world was treating him badly. After fifteen years of abstinence he opened the pack of Gauloises Bleues he had bought on the way home and lit up. It was his way of giving a return one-up to the fickle finger of fate.

Any birthday can be the occasion of long thoughts, but to hit the half-century mark makes brooding mandatory. Faust reviewed his career and, in his melancholy mood, found himself concentrating on the defeats and reversals of his life since graduate school. He felt as bank tellers must, condemned to count out the money of others and receive a pittance in recompense. Art auctions were bringing in unprecedented prices. Faust had sat through half a dozen auctions during his stay in Paris and marveled at the amount paintings commanded long after their makers were dead. Great art that had been produced in garrets became a commodity traded for sums of which the artist would not have dared to dream. What irony. It became clearer to him than ever that it was the dealers, the middlemen, who were cleaning up. What had his broad and deep knowledge of Renaissance art brought him except small grants, the occasional commission to write a catalog for an exhibition in some midwestern town, dribs and drabs of income, and a reputation that hovered between anonymity and recognition from those whose recognition meant little? Must he return to academe and the security of a tenured position, frozen in mediocrity?

In search of aesthetic consolation, he began to shuffle through the small reproductions he had bought at Versailles some days before. This brought back his admiration for a Japanese artist, Inagaki, who worked at his easel making an exact copy of an El Greco while tourists wandered past, sometimes stopping to kibitz, then moving on. Faust did not move on. He sat on a windowsill behind the artist and watched him work. All that skill devoted to reproducing the work of others. Surely, the artist had not set out to become what he was. Faust thought of violinists in the metro playing their instruments with consummate skill to indifferent passersby whose thoughts were only on the next train. From time to time, someone would drop coins into the beret the musician had put on the pavement before him. All musicians play the music of others, of course, but surely this haunted fellow had not devoted months and years to mastering his instrument in order to coax a few coins from indifferent subway passengers. But Faust could not put the copyist in the Versailles palace among other instances of dashed hopes. For one thing, the man seemed wholly absorbed in what he was doing, as if this had indeed been what he set himself to do. His copy was as good as the original; in some ways it seemed better. But hadn't Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and come in third?

Faust finally drifted away, but with the intention of returning to the spot when the museum was closing. He wanted to make the acquaintance of the Japanese copyist. But when he went back, the easel was covered with a cloth and the artist was gone. His surge of disappointment made clear to him that his interest in the man was not a whim. And then, ah destiny, kismet, providence, he saw the artist waiting at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette. Faust hurried toward him as if he were keeping an appointment. He introduced himself. The artist smiled in incomprehension. Faust repeated himself in French.

Faust shook his head. “
Une photographe est une copie. Ce que vous faites est quelque chose tout à fait autre.”

“I do speak English.” A little bow. “I thought you wanted money.”

Not a flattering estimate, but Faust brushed away the remark that had the makings of an unintentional insult. He felt that this was a moment of maximum importance in his life, though he scarcely knew why.

“Gabriel Faust,” he said, putting out his hand.