The Third Revelation (14 page)

What would the confused faithful make of the claim that the Church had deliberately suppressed the judgment of the Blessed Virgin, that the Council itself had been subversive, that the Church had been conquered by her enemies, enemies within the walls who would be made to seem far more menacing than those without?

His phone rang. It was Rodriguez telling him that Brendan Crowe was nowhere to be found. Crowe was to have accompanied him on his visit to the Holy Father.

“You're sure.”

“He's gone to the United States.”

“Is that an invitation?”

In the Sala di Prenza on the Via della Conciliazione, questions were asked about the deaths of Cardinal Rampolla, the secretary of state, and Cardinal Maguire, the prefect of the Vatican Library. Two cardinals in one day. What would a slot machine pay off on that? Neal Admirari asked the question of Pescatore of the
Corriere della Sera
and got a smile. But then Pescatore always smiled when he hadn't heard what was said. Pescatore began waving his hand at the Iberian smoothy who was spokesman for the Vatican. Opus Dei. A medical doctor. What was he doing here? Secret assignment? The press called him Ferdinand the Bull. Pescatore's hand was ignored, but Neal's was not.

He stood. It seemed a sign of respect. But otherwise he might not have been visible to his cameraman. “As a medical doctor, what do you think is the likelihood of two prominent figures expiring on the same day, at the same hour, in the same place?”

“Are they in an airplane?”

Laughter all around. Neal joined in. He could be a good sport. “Say they have offices in the Vatican?” Neil asked.

“And are well into their seventies? Even with the advances of modern medicine, those in their seventies are in the twilight of their lives.”

The melodious voice dropped as he spoke, lids half lowered over dark eyes, portrait of a medical man lamenting the limits of his art.

“What were the exact ages of Rampolla and Maguire?”

“Copies of their obituaries are available in the back of the room. Next.” He looked brightly about the room in search of other questions not to answer.

Before sitting down again, Neal looked toward the corner. Rorty, his photographer, touched the tips of thumb and index finger. Of course there was no assurance that the footage would be used. Neal wasn't sure he wanted his performance shown on the network news at home.

“That was a good question,” Pescatore said to him when the press conference was over. He seemed serious.

Neal shrugged. Pescatore's next remark was more typical, a criticism.

“You might have mentioned young Buffoni, the secretary's secretary.”

The description made the priest sound like Jeeves, a gentleman's gentleman. “Did you ever play the slots?”

Pescatore backed away, as if his honor had been questioned. Neal shouted after him, “Take two if you can get them. You don't need three to win.”

Pescatore, who had a wife in an apartment on Monti Parioli and a mistress in another in EUR, reacted with alarm. He bowled his way out of the press room, looking back at Neal as if fearful of some further outrage.

“What's with the guinea?” Rorty asked. The cameraman's snobbishness had caused him to overlook Neal's origins.

“A guinea is a shilling more than a pound.”

“Shillings are obsolete.”

“So is calling Italians guineas.”

They parted on the sidewalk outside the building, which was located on the Via della Conciliazione, the thoroughfare now clogged with buses, taxis, other vehicles. The walk swarmed with sweaty tourists. Rorty looked about him with disdain. Rorty would be off to a shower, and then, dressed the part, the means of his livelihood stashed, he would hang around the lobby of the Grand Hotel hoping to be picked up. Someone had told him he looked like George Clooney, and he could usually be found in places where affluent, unspoken-for ladies were looking for diversion. Neal was sure that someone must have meant Clooney in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Vatican correspondents were an odd group: the Europeans, militant secularists; the Asians, inscrutable; those from the third world pretending innocence and naïveté. Among the so-called first world representatives, there was a preponderance of laicized priests with a chip on their shoulder or lapsed Catholics of various kinds, mostly those whose doctrinal difficulties had emerged from their irregular personal lives. There were also writers from Catholic news services, a few columnists famous in the pages of diocesan papers. Neal Admirari did and did not fit in with this group, a hesitation felt on all sides. Who among them had won so important an honor as the Pulitzer? Alas, that had been years ago, but Neal still lived in the large hope of repeating his feat by coming up with a scoop that would reinvigorate his career. What else did he have? His long-term affair with Lulu van Ackeren had finally run its course and she had married a man five years her junior. Neal had felt betrayed.

“Neal, if I wanted a career as a waiter, I could have taken a job in a restaurant.”

“Okay, we'll get married.”

“Go to hell.”

“I mean it.”

“A civil wedding?” she hissed. “Or have you found some priest who will overlook my previous marriage?”

Among the impediments to a sacramental marriage, having a valid previous marriage where the former spouse was still living was a bar to a Church-sanctioned union. He had tried to convince Lulu that it was only a matter of time until she could find a way to get her previous marriage annulled.

“When?” she asked. “A century? Two centuries?”

The cynic he thought he was would long since have made Lulu the wife of his heart by whatever ceremony she chose. Before Lulu, he had been a marauding bee, avid for the nectar of many and various flowers. Serial fornication, or adultery, as the priests might call it; whatever they called it, he knew it was sinful. Periodically, Neal had gone to confession and was dealt a new hand. But he had soon returned to the same game as before. But Lulu had been different. He had loved her exclusively for five years. Only after he realized he was in love with her, that he wanted to marry her, had she mentioned her first marriage.

She tried to load it all on him, but Lulu was Catholic, too. She knew Neal Admirari didn't make up the rules. She accepted those rules herself. It added a zestful dash of tragedy to their affair. The star-crossed lovers, forever prevented from plighting their troth before a minister of God. During all that time Lulu had honed her role, knowing she could count on Neal's adherence to Church law, safe to suggest that she would settle for one of those chapels in Las Vegas.
Casamentos.
He told Lulu it meant casements. The ladder into the pits.

And she had married Martinelli.

Martinelli!

“He's Italian?” Neal asked.

“Only on his parents' side.”

“Have you become a widow?”

“For the kingdom of heaven's sake.” She had actually gotten an annulment of her first marriage.

Neal had stared at her in disbelief. The big impediment was no more. And she had married Martinelli.

That was the unkindest cut of all. Neal volunteered for the Rome post when his predecessor was arrested for currency speculation and had to be spirited out of the country. Rome was either the end or the new beginning of his career. Pescatore's praise came back to him. Were these simultaneous deaths his ticket out of impending oblivion?

He beat out a fat couple for a free table, ordered a birra alla spina, and called Donna Quando, the contact he had inherited with the job.

“Tell me about Buffoni.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“I was thinking of Sabatini's.”

“I'll meet you there.”

“Better well hung than ill wed.”

Gabriel Faust had a dream, a dream that had been considerably scaled down over the years.

Once he would have imagined ending in a villa near Florence, filled with art works, a magnificent library, with scholars from around the world coming to him for consultation. I Tatti as it had been, that is, and himself the Bernard Berenson of the day. But many things had conspired to alter the dream.

What had happened to Europe? What had happened to Italy? What had happened to Florence? He had read the inflammatory trilogy by Oriana Fallaci, the famous Florentine journalist's enraged indictment of the Italian government's capitulation to the demands of the Muslims who had poured into the country and were now intent on redefining it as a caliphate. Their contemptuous desecration of the baptistery in Florence seemed a sign of things to come. It was appalling. And he could accept for himself Fallaci's self-description—a Catholic atheist. No, Italy was no longer the land of his dreams. Not Florence. Not even Sicily. Sardinia, perhaps, or Corsica? But either would have been a poor second best. And now he had come to Corfu and had to erase one more island as the possible candidate for the land of his dreams.

Where can one hide in the modern world? That had become the question that haunted him. Possible answers to the question had to be dismissed one by one, but he could not entirely abandon his dream. Somewhere his Shangri-la must still be awaiting him.

The problem, however, was not so much location as his personal status. However much, in the privacy of his own mind, he rehearsed the role of art mentor to the Western world—his wealth an incidental accompaniment perhaps, but wealth indeed, if not beyond the dreams of avarice, certainly exceeding the limits of immoderate appetite—an arctic honesty came over him. The role eluded him because he did not fit the role.

A corner had been turned when he entered into alliance with the incredible Inagaki; one that had made him the agent of the talented Japanese, not to say his pimp. Faust no longer sought the modest commissions that had kept him afloat. He no longer bothered applying for grants—the getting of them was child's play but being awarded them left him treading financial water. None of his research projects had come anywhere near the vast promise he had expressed in understated form in order to receive the pittance that seemed only to provide more time for witnessing the dying of his dream. His last major grant had been from the NEA when he had failed to emerge from Renaissance into modern art, classifying Delacroix as modern. His last commission had been the cataloguing of the impressive if modest collection that Zelda Lewis had inherited and added to in a small way. It was her purchase of the bogus Delacroix that had been Gabriel Faust's Rubicon. In the cold light of wakeful early morning, or when too drunk to kid himself, he knew he had entered the world of art fraud. Inagaki was indefatigable and incurious about the commissions Faust got him. But then the Japanese, who could paint anything at least as well as the original he copied, exhibited no curiosity as to the way Faust marketed his wares. Inagaki could always plausibly claim not to know that Faust sold his copies as originals. Those who bought and marketed the copies were no more deluded about what they were than Faust himself. He had entered a network of crooks, and he was one of them.

It was in a hotel in Corfu, where Faust had planned to stay just overnight, that, in the morning, he let the ship go on to Greece without him. His midday breakfast was a cup of thick, strong coffee and a local pastry. From the window of his hotel dining room he looked out at the sea that had known a thousand shipwrecks and still rolled on in blithe indifference to the hopes and dreams of men. It seemed particularly disdainful of the dreams of Gabriel Faust, sliding into the shore and curling back on itself. He had arrived at a moment of sober truth. It was there, in the all-but-deserted dining room, that he heard, though he was on the wrong coast for the allusion, the thin, seductive siren call of Zelda Lewis.

He remembered her home, he remembered her collection, he remembered the warmth with which they had sinned together. His thoughts began to travel along unfamiliar lines. Was Zelda Lewis the destiny toward which he had been headed all along?

He waited for the thought to depress him, but the more he entertained it, the more gently attractive it became. Her estate, her wealth, could be his equivalent of Robert Louis Stevenson's South Pacific final resting place. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. He put through a call to Zelda, collect.

It was morning in New Hampshire and Zelda took the call while still abed. Her softly seductive voice seemed to emerge from the world of dreams. Where was he calling from?

“Corfu.”

“You needn't be nasty.”

He located it for her and her tone altered, as if she were sitting up in bed and propping the pillows behind her. She had never been to Corfu.

“I'm not sure I've ever heard of it before.”

“It's still largely unspoiled,” he lied. “Prince Philip, the queen's consort, was born here. You would love it.”

“Is that an invitation?” Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver, in this case the telephone receiver.

“You mustn't raise my hopes, Zelda.”

“Darling, are you serious? Would you like me to join you there?”

“You must have a hundred better things to do.”

“How long do you plan to stay?”

“That's up to the doctor.”

“The doctor! What's wrong?”

“Physically, nothing. But he insists that I need complete rest for an indefinite period. I will not bore you with the story of how hard I've been working.”

“And you're alone?”

“Zelda, I'm always alone.”

“Oh, that sounds so sad,” she cried and, after a moment, added, “I know exactly how you feel.”