The Thirteenth Apostle (40 page)

The Pole had been broken by his father, but that was the fate of all the vanquished. The Cardinal, without admitting it to himself, felt humiliated by a tragedy in which he had not after all taken part himself. But his father… That feeling of humiliation galvanized him in his permanent combat on behalf of the purity of Catholic doctrine. There lay his mission – he would not be part of the lineage of the vanquished. The only superior race, the only one that could win, was the race of men of faith. The Church was the last rampart against the modern apocalypse.

Breczinsky had become hateful to him, and needed to be got rid of. Catzinger would find no peace as long as he had in front of his eyes that last witness to his own history and that of his father.

For the time being, his energies were mobilized by one dossier, and one alone: the canonization of Escrivá de Balaguer that was to take place in a few months' time. The founder of Opus Dei had managed to consolidate the edifice founded on the divinity of Christ. Thanks to men of his mettle, the Church could carry on resisting.

But he'd still need to make up his mind to perform a miracle. These things can be arranged.

89

The desert of the Abruzzi was just as Nil wished – and no doubt just as the thirteenth apostle had experienced it after his flight from Pella, as Jesus had experienced it after his encounter with John the Baptist on the Jordan. The hermit had pointed to a straw mattress in the corner.

“It's the one that Beppe uses when he spends the night here. That boy has grown attached to me as if I were the father he never knew. He doesn't talk, but we manage to communicate all right.”

Then he had said no more, and for several days they lived together in complete silence, sharing without a word their meals of cheese, herbs and bread on the terrace, where the mountain spoke its own language to them.

Nil realized that the desert is first and foremost an attitude of mind and soul. One that he could have experienced just as easily at the Abbey, or in the centre of a city. A certain quality of inner asceticism, an abandonment of all the usual landmarks of social life. The extraordinary poverty of the place soon became a matter of indifference to him, to such a point that he soon ceased even to notice it. His contact with the hermit meant that he was soon sensing a very strong, warm presence, of an unsuspected richness. To begin with, he perceived it as coming from outside, from nature, from his companion. Then he realized that it was linked to another presence inside him. And that if he became attentive to it, contenting himself with observing it before welcoming it, nothing else would ever matter again. There would be no more discomfort, nor loneliness, nor fear.

Nor, perhaps, any memory of the past and its wounds.

* * *

One day when Beppe had just left them after replenishing their supplies, the hermit smoothed down his beard and turned to him.

“Why do you still wonder what my words of welcome meant, when I said: ‘I was expecting you, my son'?”

This man could read him like an open book.

“But… you didn't know me, you hadn't been informed of my arrival, you don't know anything about me!”

“
I do know you
, my son, and know things about you that you yourself are unaware of. You'll see – living here you will acquire the vision of inner Awakening, the one that Jesus possessed when he left the desert and that enabled him to see Nathanael under the fig tree, even though this was outside his field of vision. I know what you have suffered, and I know why. You are seeking the most precious treasure, the one to which not even the Churches possess the key, and to which they can merely indicate the way – when they don't actually block access to it.”

“Do you know who the thirteenth apostle was?”

The hermit gave a silent laugh, and there was a sparkle dancing in his eyes.

“And do you think one always needs to know facts in order to be acquainted with realities?”

He allowed his gaze to wander across the valley where the high-altitude clouds cast moving shadows. Then he spoke as if he were addressing someone other than Nil.

“Everything can be known only from within. Abstract knowledge is merely a rind, you need to get past it to reach the heart, the sapwood of real knowledge. This is true of minerals, plants, living beings – and it is also true of the Gospels. The ancients called this inner knowledge ‘gnosis'. Many of them
were intoxicated by the excessively rich nourishment they found in it, it went to their heads, and they thought themselves superior to every one else,
catharoi.
The person you meet in the Gospels – the same person you experience in prayer – is neither superior nor inferior to you: he is with you. The real presence of Jesus is so strong that it joins you to everyone but also separates you from everyone. Already you have started to experience this, and here you will not live on anything but that presence. That is why you came.

“I was expecting you, my son…”

90

Rome observed with indifference as the Society of St Pius V was taken in hand by Cardinal Emil Catzinger. In the name of the Pope, he himself appointed the Rector who would succeed the Neapolitan Alessandro Calfo, who had suddenly died at home without having been able to transmit the coffin-shaped ring, which recalled his formidable task as the guardian of the Catholic Church's most precious secret: that of the real tomb in which the bones of the crucified man of Jerusalem still rest.

He chose this rector from among the Eleven, and wanted him to be young, so that he would have the strength to combat the enemies of the man who had become Christ and God. For those enemies would soon be lifting their heads again, just as they had always done, ever since it had been necessary to wipe out the person and especially the memory of the impostor, the so-called thirteenth apostle.

As he slipped the precious jasper onto his ring finger, he smiled at the deep black eyes, as tranquil as a mountain lake. Antonio's
only thought was that, now that he was Rector, he was finally safe from Opus Dei and its tentacles. For a second time the son of
Oberstleutnant
Herbert von Catzinger, the ward of the Hitler Youth, was offering him his protection – but he would still be requesting his dividends. In the coffers of the Society, Antonio found a file marked
confidenziale
, in the Cardinal's name. If he had opened it, he would have seen documents concerning his powerful protector, documents bearing a swastika at their heading. Not all of them went back to before May 1945.

But he didn't open it, and handed it over in person to His Eminence, who in his presence fed it into the shredder of his office in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In his severe black cassock, Breczinsky watched the monotonous and gloomy Polish countryside go by. He had been apprehended in his office in the stacks by Antonio in person, and bundled away to the central station in Rome. Since that moment he had been incapable of thinking. After crossing the whole of Europe, the train was now speeding across the plains of his native land: he was surprised to discover that he felt no emotion. Suddenly he sat up, and his round glasses hazed over with tears. He had just raced past a small provincial station: Sobibor, the concentration camp around which the
Anschluss
division had regrouped before embarking on its hasty retreat westwards. Pushing ahead of it one last convoy of Poles, who were to be exterminated in this very spot, just before the Red Army arrived. In this convoy had been all that was left of his family.

A few days earlier, a young priest, Karol Wojtyla by name, scorning the danger, had taken him by his hand and hidden him in his cramped apartment in Cracow, to shelter him from the round-up organized by the German officer who had just succeeded Herbert von Catzinger, killed by Polish partisans.

Breczinsky would be getting off at the next station: it was there, a small Carmelite nunnery far from the world, that he had been placed under house arrest by His Eminence Cardinal Catzinger. The mother superior had been sent a letter bearing the coat of arms of the Vatican: the priest they were sending her must never be allowed any visitors, nor could he correspond with the outside world in any way whatsoever.

He needed care and rest. Probably for a long time.

91

The audience rose to its feet as one: for Lev Barjona's last concert in Rome, the Academy of Santa Cecilia was filled to bursting. The Israeli was going to perform the third concerto for piano and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns, and in the first movement he would be showing off his panache, in the second the extraordinary fluidity of his fingers, and in the third his sense of humour.

As usual, the pianist came on stage without deigning to glance at the audience, and went straight over to the piano stool. When the conductor motioned that he was ready, his face suddenly became set, and he played the first solemn, pompous chords that announce the romantic theme, introduced by the orchestral
tutti.
In the second movement, he was dazzling. The acrobatic twists and turns spun magically under his fingers, the notes came rippling out, each of them distinct in spite of the infernal tempo he had adopted right from the start. The contrast between this perilous quicksilver and the total impassivity of his face fascinated the audience, which, after the last chord, gave him one of those standing ovations with which the Romans never fail to acclaim those who have conquered their hearts.

There was a general expectation that, as was his habit, Lev would immediately vanish off into the wings, without granting the audience the traditional encores. So the audience was greatly surprised when he advanced to the edge of the stage and signalled for a microphone. He took it and looked up, dazzled by the footlights. He seemed to be gazing far away, beyond the audience which had suddenly relapsed into silence, beyond even the city of Rome. His face was no longer set, but wore an expression of gravity that was unusual in such a relentless charmer. The scar that vanished into his mop of blond hair heightened the dramatic character of what he was about to say.

It was very brief.

“To thank you for your warm welcome, I am now going to play you the second
Gymnopédie
by Erik Satie, a marvellous French composer. I especially dedicate it this evening to another Frenchman, a pilgrim of the absolute. And to an American pianist who died tragically, but whose memory will never leave me. He himself performed this music from within, since, like Satie, he had believed in love, and he had been betrayed.”

While Lev, his eyes closed, seemed to abandon himself to the perfection of this simple melody, a man at the back of the hall watched him with a smile. His muscular body was hunched up, and he rather stuck out among the poised and elegant women around him.

“Those Jews!” Mukhtar Al-Quraysh was thinking. “They're all so sentimental!”

With the death of Alessandro Calfo, his mission was coming to an end. He had had the satisfaction of eliminating the American with his own hands. As for the other man, he had vanished, and Mukhtar had still not picked up his trace. It was just a question of time. The next day he would go back to
Cairo. He would report to the Council of Hamas and receive his instructions. The Frenchman
must
be got rid of: to track him down, Mukhtar needed help, financial and practical. Lev had just publicly declared his admiration for the infidel, he could no longer count on him.

As for Sonia, she was now out of a job. It wouldn't be long before he brought her over to Cairo. Wearing a black veil, her gorgeous shape would do him honour. He'd keep her for himself. After passing through the hands of a perverse prelate from the Vatican, she must know how to do things that the Prophet might well have condemned if he had been aware of them. The Koran merely states: “Women are a field to be ploughed: go up and down that field and plough it as you wish.” He would plough Sonia. Completely indifferent to the delicate music that was emerging from Lev's fingers, he felt the blood swelling his virility.

92

Three weeks had gone by since Nil had arrived in the Abruzzi, and he felt as if he had spent his whole life in these solitudes. Little by little he had told the hermit his whole story: his arrival in Rome, Leeland's attitude up until his dramatic confession, the meeting with Lev Barjona, the apostolic letter that had been so hard to track down and its discovery in the secret Vatican collection…

The old man was smiling.

“I know that this changes nothing in your life and the direction it is taking. It's the truth that you have always sought; you have found the rind, you now need to deepen that understanding in prayer. You must never bear a grudge against the Catholic
Church. She does what she has always done, that for which every Church is designed: to win power and then keep it at all costs. A monk of the Middle Ages defined it realistically:
casta simul et meretrix
, the chaste whore. The Church is a necessary evil, my son: its continual abuse of power must not lead you to forget that it is the repository of a treasure, the person of Jesus. And that without the Church you would never have known him.”

Nil knew he was right.

Intrigued by this newcomer who so much resembled his adoptive father – including even his white hair – Beppe started coming up to the hermitage a little more frequently than usual. He would sit next to Nil on the dry stone parapet of the terrace, and their eyes would meet just once. Then the Frenchman would perceive nothing more than his breathing, regular and calm. Suddenly he would get up, give a nod, and disappear down the forest path.

One day, Nil said to him:

“Beppe, will you do me a favour? I need to get this letter to Father Calati in Camaldoli. Can you do that for me? You have to give it to him in person.”

Beppe nodded and slipped the letter into the inside pocket of his sheepskin jacket. It was addressed to Rembert Leeland, Via Aurelia. Nil told him briefly about his arrival at the hermitage, the life he was leading in it, the happiness that for so long had evaded him and that seemed, here, to have become a reality. Finally, he asked after his news, and whether Nil would need to go back to Rome to meet up with him.