The Thirteenth Apostle (18 page)

“The controls are strict,” the American whispered. “The Vatican Library is open to the public, but its stacks contains ancient manuscripts that only a few scholars are allowed to see. You'll meet Father Breczinsky, the guardian of the place. Given the priceless value of the treasures stored here, the Pope appointed a Pole to this post, a timid and self-effacing man, but one who's totally dedicated to the Holy Father.

The policeman returned and handed Nil's accreditation back to him with a nod.

“You'll need to show that paper every time you come here. You're not allowed in by yourself, but need to be accompanied by Mgr Leeland, who has a permanent pass. Follow me.”

A long corridor, sloping gently downwards, bent off under the building and led to a reinforced door. Nil had the impression he was entering a citadel that was prepared for a siege.
“This spot is buried under the thousands of tons of St Peter's Basilica. The tomb of the Apostle isn't far.” The policeman inserted a magnetic card and typed in a code: the door opened with a swish.

“You know your way around, Monsignor. Father Breczinsky is waiting for you.”

The man standing at the entry to a second reinforced door had a face whose pallor was set off by his severe black cassock. Round glasses on his short-sighted eyes.

“Good morning, Monsignor – and this is the French visitor for whom I have received accreditation from the Congregation?”

“The very man, my dear Father. He'll be helping me with my work: Father Nil is a monk at St Martin's Abbey.”

Breczinsky started.

“Are you by any chance a colleague of Father Andrei?”

“We were colleagues for thirty years.”

Breczinsky opened his mouth as if he were about to ask Nil a question, but then thought better of it and concealed his unspoken curiosity behind a quick nod. He turned to Leeland.

“Monsignor, the room is ready – if you will follow me…”

In silence he led them down a series of vaulted rooms, each communicating with the next by a broad arched opening. The walls were covered with glass-fronted shelves, the lighting was uniform, and a low hum indicated the hygrometer necessary for the safe conservation of ancient manuscripts. Nil's gaze darted along the shelves as they passed them: Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance,
Risorgimento
… From the labels, he surmised that these were the most precious witnesses of Western history, and had the impression he could survey it all within a few dozen yards.

Amused by his astonishment, Leeland whispered:

“In the music section, the only one I can use, I'll show you autograph scores by Vivaldi, pages from Handel's
Messiah
, and the first eight bars of Mozart's
Lacrimosa
– the last notes he ever wrote as he was dying. They're all here…”

The music section was in the last room. In the centre, under the adjustable lighting, a bare table covered with a sheet of glass on which you would have sought in vain for a single grain of dust.

“You know your way around, Monsignor, I'll leave you to it. Er…” He seemed to be in a state of some mental turmoil. “Father Nil, could you come into my office? I need to find you a pair of gloves that will fit, you need them to handle the manuscripts.”

Leeland looked surprised, but allowed Nil to follow the librarian to an office that opened directly onto their room. Breczinsky carefully closed the door behind them, took a box off a shelf and then turned to Nil with an embarrassed look.

“Father… may I ask you exactly what was the nature of your relations with Father Andrei?”

“We were very close. Why?”

“Well, I… he and I wrote to one another – he sometimes asked for my advice on the medieval inscriptions he studied.

“So…
it's you?
”

Nil thought to himself, “I sent the photo of the stone slab of Germigny to a Vatican employee. He wrote back to say that he had received it, but made no comment.”

“Andrei had told me about his correspondent in the Vatican Library – I didn't know it was you and didn't think I'd get to meet you!”

With downcast eyes, Breczinsky was mechanically fingering the gloves in the box.

“He would ask me for technical details, the same way other scholars do: we had established a relation of trust, albeit at a distance. Then one day I found, as I was sorting out the Coptic holdings, a tiny fragment of a manuscript that seemed to come from Nag Hammadi and had never been translated. I sent it to him: he seemed most disturbed by this piece, which he sent me back without his translation. I wrote to him about this, and he then faxed me the photo of a Carolingian inscription found in Germigny, asking me what I thought of it.”

“I know, we took the photo together. Andrei kept me up to date with his work. Almost all of it.”

“Almost?”

“Yes, he didn't tell me everything, and made no bones about it – something that always surprised me.”

“Yes, he came here: it was the first time we'd ever met, a very… intense meeting. Then he vanished, I never saw him again. And I learnt of his death in
La Croix
– an accident, or suicide…”

Breczinsky seemed to be very ill at ease, and his eyes evaded those of Nil. Finally he handed him a pair of gloves.

“You can't stay with me too long, you need to get back into the room. I… we will talk again, Father Nil. Later on – I'll find some means. Beware of everyone here, even Mgr Leeland.”

Nil's eyes opened wide in amazement.

“What do you mean? I'll probably not be seeing anyone apart from him here in Rome, and I trust him completely: we were students together, I've known him for ages.”

“But he's been living in the Vatican for a while. This place transforms all those who come near it, and they're never the same afterwards… Anyway, forget what I've just told you, but look after yourself!”

On the table, Leeland had already spread out a manuscript.

“Say, he sure took his time finding you some gloves! There's a drawer full of them in the room next door, every size…”

Nil did not reply to his friend's anxious glance, and went over to the big rectangular magnifying glass placed over the manuscript. He glanced at it.

“No illumination, probably before the tenth century – to work, Remby!”

At noon they ate sandwiches brought to them by Breczinsky. Suddenly all smiles, the Pole asked Nil to explain what his work would be consisting in.

“First deciphering the Latin text of these manuscripts of Gregorian chant. Then translating the Hebrew text of the ancient Jewish chants which have similar melodies and comparing them… I'm only looking at the words, of course. Mgr Leeland is doing the rest.”

“Ancient Hebrew is all Greek to me, like medieval scripts!” explained the American with a laugh.

When they came out, the sun was low on the horizon.

“I'll head straight back to San Girolamo,” said Nil apologetically, “this air-conditioned atmosphere has given me a headache.”

Leeland stopped him: they were in the middle of St Peter's Square.

“Seems to me you've made a big impression on Breczinsky: usually he doesn't say more than a few sentences. So,
mon ami
, I have to warn you: beware of him.”

“Oh Lord!” reflected Nil. “What kind of place have I come to?”

Leeland insisted, a serious expression on his face.

“Make sure you don't make any faux pas. If he talks to you, he's trying to worm things out of you – here, nobody's
innocent. You don't know what a dangerous place the Vatican is – you have to mistrust each and every one here.”

43

A whirlwind of thoughts was still swirling around in Nil's head when he entered his room in San Girolamo. He first assured himself that nothing had disappeared from the wardrobe – which was still locked – and then went over to the window: the sirocco, that terrible south wind that covers the city in a fine film of sand from the Sahara, had just started to blow. Rome, usually so luminous, was immersed in a yellowish, watery haze.

He closed the window to keep out the sand. This would not stop him suffering from the brutal drop in atmospheric pressure that always comes with the sirocco and causes the population migraines that Roman justice considers to be an attenuating circumstance in cases of crimes committed under the influence of the baleful wind.

He went over to the shelves to take an aspirin to keep headaches at bay, and halted at the sight of the objects left by Andrei. Nil had been rejected by his family when he had entered the monastery, and wounded by the death of his friend; he was easily swayed by emotion, and his eyes misted over with tears. He gathered together what were now precious souvenirs for him, and slipped then into his suitcase: they would find a place in his cell at St Martin's.

He mechanically opened the diary and leafed through it. A monk's calendar is as uneventful as his life: the pages were empty up until the start of November. Here, Andrei had
jotted down the date and time of his departure for Rome, then his appointments at the Congregation. Nil turned the page: a few lines had been hastily scribbled down.

His heart thumping, he sat down sideways on the chair and lit the lamp on the desk.

At the top of the left-hand page, Andrei had written, in capitals: LETTER OF THE APOSTLE. There followed, a little lower, two names: Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea – the latter followed by three letters and six figures.

Two Fathers of the Greek Church.

On the opposite page, he had scrawled: “SCV Templars”. And, opposite, another three letters, followed by just four figures.

What were the Templars doing in the company of the Fathers of the Church?

Was it an effect of the sirocco? He was starting to feel a little light-headed.

Letter of the Apostle.
In their conversations, Andrei had, rather vaguely, mentioned something of this kind. And it was one of the four leads on the note he had written on the Rome express.

Nil had often wondered what to make of this mysterious allusion. And here was his friend again talking to him about this letter, as if he were still at his side. Andrei seemed to be telling him that he would learn something about it from the writings of two Fathers of the Church, from whom he had here noted down something that looked like a scholarly reference.

He needed to track down these two texts. But where?

Nil went over to the washbasin for a glass of water and dropped his aspirin in it. As he watched the cloudy column of bubbles swirl up, he started to think hard. Three letters
followed by figures: these were the classification marks from the Dewey system, telling you where to find a book in a library. But which library? The advantage of the Dewey system is that it is infinitely extendible: librarians can adapt it to their needs without having to stray outside it. With a good deal of luck, the two last figures could enable you to find one library among hundreds.

If you asked every librarian. Throughout the entire world.

Nil swallowed his aspirin.

Finding a book just from its Dewey classification mark was like looking for a particular car in a car park with four thousand spaces without knowing either where it was parked nor what make it was. Nor the name of the attendant at the entry. Nor even what car park it is…

He rubbed his temples: the pain was coming on more quickly than the aspirin.

The three letters after Origen and Eusebius were followed by six figures: so this was a complete classification mark, giving the precise position of a book on a particular shelf. But the three letters accompanying “SCV Templars” were followed by only four figures: they indicated a book stack, or perhaps a zone in a given library, without giving the exact position.

Was SCV the abbreviation of the name of a library? In what part of the world?

Now Nil's head was grasped in a painful vice that prevented him from thinking. For years, Father Andrei had been in communication with librarians from all across Europe, often by means of the Internet. If one of these classification marks were that of a library in Vienna, he could hardly see himself asking the Reverend Father Abbot to book him a return ticket for Austria.

He took a second aspirin and went up to the terrace that looked out over the local district. In the distance, you could make out the lofty dome of St Peter's Basilica. The Apostle's tomb had been dug into the
tufo
of the Vatican Hill that was in those days outside Rome; here Nero had built an imperial residence and a circus. It was here that thousands of Christians and Jews, pursued by the same indiscriminate hatred, were crucified in 67
AD
.

His research had revealed an unexpected face of Peter, a man filled with murderous impulses. The Acts of the Apostles attest that two Christians from Jerusalem had perished by his hand, Ananias and Sapphira. The killing of Judas was only a hypothesis, but one that was supported by some highly persuasive evidence. And yet his death in Rome had been that of a martyr. “I believe” – says Pascal – “those who die for their faith.” Peter had been born ambitious, violent, calculating – perhaps, in the last moments of his life, he had finally become a true disciple of Jesus? History is no longer in a position to decide, but he had to be given the benefit of the doubt.

“Peter must have been like all of us: a two-sided man, capable of the best after doing the worst…”

Nil had just been warned to mistrust everything and everybody. This idea was intolerable to him; if he dwelt on it for too long, he'd jump into the first train, just like Father Andrei.

So as not to lose his equilibrium, he needed to concentrate on his research. He should live in Rome as if it were the monastery, and in the same solitude.

“I will seek. And I will find.”

44

Vatican Hill, 67 AD

“Peter… If you won't eat anything, you can at least drink!”

The old man pushed away the pitcher proffered to him by his companion, who was wearing the short tunic of slaves. He leant over, picked up a straw and slipped it between his back and the bricks of the
opus reticulatum
. He shuddered: in a few hours he would be crucified, and his body coated in pitch. At nightfall, the executioners would set fire to these living torches, which would provide light for the show the Emperor was putting on for the people of Rome.