The Third Revelation (28 page)

He had seethed. He had grown careless. That is when Traeger had turned the tables on him, tailing Anatoly, and then confronting him.

He had learned that Traeger and Carlos Rodriguez, the chief of Vatican security, had come to the archives asking for a file.

“Did they get it?”

“What they wanted was not there.”

So where had it gone? The Irish priest, Brendan Crowe, was the one who had surprised him on the rooftop of the Vatican Library and spoiled the operation. He was named acting prefect. Anatoly asked himself what the one responsible for the archives would do with a file that was not safe in his archives. Of course Traeger had questioned Crowe. And then Crowe had flown off to America. It could mean anything, or it could have, until Traeger went in pursuit of him. Anatoly followed.

What had happened in the guest residence at Empedocles was a farcical repetition of what had happened in the villa atop the Vatican Library. Anatoly had just entered the suite when he heard footsteps. He concealed himself in the bedroom, but when Crowe shut the hall door he came out and confronted him.

“Where is it?”

“Who are you?” the priest demanded.

Anatoly put the point of his knife on the man's chest. He had not expected resistance from a priest. The priest's arms lifted, and the knife flew free. He pushed Anatoly, who careened toward the bedroom, falling on the bed. How much time before the priest stood over him? He had Anatoly's knife in his hand. He extended it to him, handle toward his hand.

“Take this and get out.”

Anatoly had taken it, and this time the point of the knife did not stop on the surface of the priest's chest. Even wounded, he had fought. Finally, weakened like a bleeding bull, he had been unable to fight anymore. Anatoly stood over the body, breathing heavily. And then, my God, once again, footsteps.

It had been a nice touch to flee in the car Traeger had been driving. He had driven half a mile after leaving Empedocles before he pulled over and waited. Sure enough, a car came tearing along the road with Traeger at the wheel. Anatoly had pulled out and followed him.

He would have given the coup de grace in that hotel in Cambridge, but Traeger, the old pro, must instinctively have known he was in danger. And so Anatoly had lost him.

His aim had become to avenge himself on Traeger. This he had done by publicizing Traeger's hitherto secret activities with the CIA. Traeger's presence at Empedocles when the Irish priest had been killed, the fact that he had left the scene, did the rest.

If those murders in the Vatican could also be pinned on Traeger, Anatoly felt that he might be ready to return to Odessa and try retirement again. Meanwhile, he caught his breath in Montreal, keeping an ear out for news from across the porous border.

“You're avoiding the question.”

“John, I'm so sorry that things turned out this way.”

He put his arm around Laura's shoulders. No need for any other response. They were in Logan Airport, where he would catch his flight back to Rome, having fended off Ignatius Hannan's persistent offer of a private plane. To travel once that way had been an adventure, but it would not do to make it a habit. Besides, on the flight over he had been able to enjoy the novelty with Brendan.

All departures are sad, at least in part. “I wish I'd gone to see Mom again,” John said.

It was her turn not to reply.

She finally said, “We have time for a drink.”

He had checked his bag and gotten his seat assignment and there lay ahead the annoyance of security. A drink sounded just right.

When they were settled at a table, drinks ordered, the two of them drawn closer by the conversations around them, the bustle, the constant unintelligible announcements, she leaned toward him. “All right, what do you really think of Ray Sinclair?”

“That you'll be very happy together. Have you set a date?”

She sat back, smiling ruefully. “ ‘No date has been set for the wedding.' I was always struck by that statement in the announcement of engagements. It makes everything sound so tentative.”

“You could marry in Rome.”

“In Santa Susanna?”

John laughed. Zelda and her new husband had added a half comic note to recent days.

“John, you do approve of Ray?”

“I approve of everything you do.”

“You're avoiding the question.”

“I like him. I like him a lot.”

Saying it seemed to make it true. The truth was that John didn't know what to make of Ray. There seemed more intensity on Laura's part than on his, and John mildly resented that. He was more impressed than ever with Laura's obvious success. Nothing happened at Empedocles without her imprimatur. Ray seemed to take her for granted.

“Good.” She put her hands over his. “Pray for us?”

“I remember you and Mom in every Mass I say.”

“And Ray?”

“He's part of the package now.”

She sipped her drink. “Nate is a bit overwhelming, isn't he?”

“You seem to have him pretty well under control.”

“I'm glad you didn't let him bully you into accepting his offer of a plane.”

“How much money does the man have?”

She just lifted her eyes. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Not that the amount stays the same. Mainly it just grows.”

He wondered if he should repeat Father Krucek's description of Ignatius Hannan as a Barnum and Bailey Catholic. Better not.

“I like Heather.”

“Our resident saint.”

“She took instruction from Krucek. He thinks the world of her.”

“My only fear is that she'll run off to a convent.”

“A fate worse than death?”

“I'm thinking of what it would mean to Empedocles.”

They finished their drinks and Laura came with him as far as was permitted, then threw her arms around him. He patted her back. “My sister. All departures are sad.” There were tears in her eyes when he turned to go.

 

 

John had never crossed the Atlantic by ship. Now few people do. Once it had been a prolonged adventure, months on the water. That is how their great-grandparents had come from the old country, in steerage. People complained about coach accommodations, but imagine being tossed about for week after week, looking forward to you knew not what. The mystery of families. All those forebears of whom he had no knowledge. Back to his grandparents they knew the names, but little else, and before . . . The thought of all the anonymous generations stretching back to the dawn of time gave a powerful sense of the contingency of life. How easily one link in the chain might not have been formed and he and Laura would not have been even logical possibilities. Now there were just the two of them, and if she did not marry and have children one line would be broken forever.

Napping, trying to ignore the inane films that went on nonstop on screens that seemed to draw the eyes to them, the jangled incoherent memories of his visit succeeded one another in his mind. Krucek. John smiled. Young priests had a way of being condescending toward the previous generation; after all, they had been implicated in the mess that followed the Council. But then there were stalwarts like Krucek.

“You taught philosophy?” he asked the older priest.

“Well, I gave courses in it.”

“Such as?”

“The usual seminary fare. The fare that no one was interested in anymore. Worse, I was a Thomist.”

“From Louvain?”

“Nowadays you could say from anywhere. It's all dead as the dodo.”

“It's coming back,” John said.

“The thing itself is as true as it always was. I speak of the reception, or nonreception, of it.”

The thought took Krucek back to Heather. “The Church doesn't deserve such converts. But then converts don't deserve the Church.”

He meant that conversion was a grace.

“You took your doctorate at Louvain,” John said.

“Yes.”

“What was your dissertation topic?”

Krucek smiled. “How long it has been since I thought of such things. I wrote on the phenomenology of Edith Stein.”

“Ah.”

“Louvain is, at least was, a hotbed of phenomenology. The Husserl papers ended up there, thanks to a wily Franciscan. What do you know of Mercier?”

“Not much.”

“Ah, the vagaries of reputation. Read David Boileau's life of the man. The same fight is fought over and over. I was there with Whipple and Sokolowski. I suppose you don't know them either.”

John laughed. “I feel that I'm flunking an exam.”

“Most of the time I feel posthumous.”

It had proved more difficult to have a conversation with Heather. In desperation, he asked her what she was reading.

“Thomas à Kempis.” She paused. “And Oriana Fallaci.”

“What a combination! She's under indictment in Italy for defaming Muslims.”

“If what she says is true, why is it defamation?”

“You have to live in Europe to understand.”

Well, maybe understanding wasn't the right word. John had become aware during his visit of the wrangling over Latino immigration in the States, but Europe faced a far more radical problem. Did she know of the Battle of Lepanto?

“I know Chesterton's poem. I can't say that I understand it.”

“What if all the battles, all the crusades, are going to be negated simply by flooding Europe with Muslims?” He laughed. “That sounds bigoted.”

“No, it sounds like Oriana Fallaci.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“I actually fell asleep.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the garden, under a palm tree, seated on a stone bench with his finger marking his place in his breviary, Bishop Catena succumbed to distraction.

His first reaction to the news of Brendan Crowe's death was that justice had been done, but this was unworthy of him and he pushed the thought away. But there were more unworthy thoughts to come.

Documents were missing from the Vatican Archives, there was no doubt about it. There were too many rumors to that effect; not all of them were consistent, but the net effect was inescapable. Catena was left to contemplate the fact that Sister Lucia's letter, the third secret, had been spirited out of the archives. And by whom better than by Crowe. Who had then flown off to America.

“Trepanier,” Harris said.

“But why?”

Harris cleared his throat. “Perhaps he thought he would make more effective use of it.”

It was almost refreshing to have it said. Ever since Jean-Jacques Trepanier had burst onto the scene, Catena had felt that the confraternity was threatened. He had been in Europe too long. He had lost the American knack for promotion. For advertisement. The confraternity had become as dusty and irrelevant as the dicasteries it grumbled about. Dear God, imagine what a showman like Trepanier could do with a secret message from the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“And money,” Harris added.

Money. Catena stared at Harris, who closed his eyes and nodded, a great Buddha of a man. There were three things that undermined a priestly vocation: sex, drink, and money. Those wholly immune to the lures of two of these seemed almost helpless before the blandishments of the third. The lure of sensual pleasure, mastered and controlled in one form, could spring up in another and overpower a soul. Eternal vigilance, that was the key. As for drink, it was now more or less received opinion that it was more of a disease than a moral fault when a man became the toy of alcohol. But both of these vices, sex and drink, were concrete, of the earth, far more human that the abstract lure of money.

For money is an abstraction and has become ever more so. From pieces and bags of rare metals, shaped, imprinted, and carried about—the coins of previous civilizations were scattered about the world—to paper certificates, to numbers entered in a ledger, we have come to mere digits on a computer monitor. One's money is anywhere and nowhere. Any ATM in the world enabled one to tap into his funds, but where were they? The question no longer made sense. How could anyone be led astray by so ephemeral a thing?

Catena developed these thoughts aloud, with Harris as his audience. They stood and paced the graveled paths of the garden, slowly because of Harris's bulk. They paused to look at the fountain in the center of the garden from which water dripped indecisively rather than flowed, then resumed their walk to the far wall where terra-cotta figures were embedded in the stone.

“Father Burke is back in Rome,” Harris said.

Catena had to think. The young priest with whom Crowe had flown off in a private plane. And then the epiphany came.

“No,” he said to Harris, as if continuing a previous line of conversation. “Not Trepanier, Ignatius Hannan.”

Harris considered the thought and found it good.

“I want you to go talk with Father Burke. It is time for direct approaches,” said Catena.

“He is a resident in Domus Sanctae Marthae. Within the walls of the Vatican.” Harris, a devout sede vacantist, shuddered.

“You must. This damnable uncertainty must be overcome. Who has the third secret and what do they intend to do with it?”

 

 

Harris took a 64 bus to the Vatican, entering and leaving the vehicle with an effort, because of his weight, and stood for a time in the Via della Conciliazione looking at the massive basilica and the circling colonnades that seemed to reach out for him. Harris had been ordained in Saint Peter's, by the pope himself, the real Paul VI, not the imposter with the odd earlobes.