The Tower (3 page)

Jobert immediately picked up on Philip’s impatience. ‘What I mean to say is that we don’t ask about the past when we’re hiring soldiers, but that’s not the case with officers. All of our officers are French and their lives, their backgrounds, hold no secrets for the Legion. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Selznick. We had been led to believe that he was a naturalized Frenchman, born in eastern Europe, but he succeeded in hiding his true identity from us. We have learned since then that a man named Selznick was stabbed and killed many years before in a bar-room brawl in Tangiers, and that someone stole his documents and assumed his identity. A marked physical resemblance to the deceased man helped him to carry it off. We have still not managed to learn the true identity of the man we knew as Selznick, but we have well-founded suspicions that he is, in reality, a highly intelligent and frighteningly ferocious criminal . . . a ruthless man who, during the Great War, carried out a number of missions for various governments, missions that required enormous courage, an absolute lack of scruples and the capacity to strike out at anyone in any way, by any means.’

Jobert paused and swallowed hard as he noticed the pallor of Philip’s face.

‘For ours as well?’ asked Philip.

‘Pardon me?’

‘You understand me perfectly well, Jobert. You’re saying that that man did our government’s dirty work during the war, aren’t you?’ Jobert’s embarrassed silence seemed an eloquent answer. ‘So, in other words, you put a bloodthirsty monster on my father’s tail as his guardian angel—’

Jobert interrupted again. ‘Let me finish before you judge me, Dr Garrett, please. You have to understand the context we’re working in, the forces to be reckoned with, the pawns to be moved. This is a very big game. We have to play the game, but most of all we have to win.

‘At first Selznick was diligent in reporting your father’s movements. I learned that Dr Garrett was following a very ancient trail, marked by recurring rock carvings which portrayed . . . a scorpion, I believe. It seems that he had succeeded in discovering something – what, I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. That was when he disappeared. And so did Selznick, along with several men from his unit. The others were found murdered. One survived to tell us what I’ve just told you. He reported that some of the men refused to follow Selznick. A gunfight broke out, and apparently there was a duel, a sword duel between him and your father, in which Selznick was wounded. We have been searching for him ever since. He is wanted for desertion and homicide. When we find him, he will suffer the fate of all traitors. He will be shot in the back.

‘So, what I’m offering you is the chance to find your father. In exchange we need your help in order to achieve two enormously important objectives. The first is to lay our hands on Selznick, as there’s much he still has to tell us. The second is to establish exactly what is happening in the south-eastern quadrant of the Sahara and to find out if these events are connected with your father’s studies. Do you accept?’

Philip took a deep breath. ‘You see, Jobert, there’s something that doesn’t make sense in all this. The gap between what you expect from me and what I can effectively give you. As far as finding my father is concerned, you have much more information, greater means and a far better knowledge of the territory than I could ever hope to have. And thus a much greater chance of success.’

Jobert pointed his well-manicured hand at Desmond Garrett’s book, which was still on the table. ‘Dr Garrett, there’s one more thing you must know. We believe that this book contains a coded message for you. We discovered it quite by chance. It was in a post office in North Africa that had been destroyed by a sandstorm some seven years ago. It was addressed to you, although you obviously never received it. We have been going through it for months in vain. There are several phrases written in pen at the start of some of the chapters. We imagine that they must have a precise meaning, meant for you, and that only you can decipher them. That’s why your role in this matter is absolutely essential. I will be leaving for Africa in two days, going straight to the place this book was posted from. I need your answer now.’

Philip leafed through the book with much greater attention than he had a few moments before, pausing to read the added phrases. It was, without doubt, his father’s handwriting, although what was written didn’t seem to make much sense, at least not at first glance. He looked up and stared firmly into Colonel Jobert’s eyes. ‘I accept,’ he said. ‘I will leave for Italy as soon as possible and I will carry out my own investigation, but that doesn’t mean that our paths will ever cross again.’

P
HILIP
G
ARRETT
caught a train to Rome one hot, hazy day in late September. He found a seat, took out his notebook and began for the hundredth time to copy out the handwritten phrases. The first was at the beginning of the opening chapter and was in Latin:
‘Romae sacerdos tibi petendus contubernalis meus ad templum Dianae.’

After having considered the various possible translations, he thought the most likely was: ‘Look in Rome for the priest who lived with me at the Temple of Diana.’ He knew that whenever his father visited Rome, he used to stay in a
pensione
on the Via Aventino, near the ancient Temple of Diana. The message was clear to him, although it would be incomprehensible to anyone else.

As soon as Philip arrived at the station he took a cab to the
pensione
on Via Aventino where his father had most likely stayed when he’d come to Rome ten years earlier. Luckily, the little hotel was still run by the same person, Rina Castelli, a robust, jovial woman who loved to chatter. As she bustled around, preparing the room, Philip asked her a few questions about his father. Oh, she remembered him well: such a good-looking man, no more than fifty, refined and elegant, but he kept mostly to himself, she recalled, always immersed in those books of his.

‘Do you remember if there was anyone who came to see him regularly, someone you knew?’

The woman placed the fresh towels and lavender soap she was carrying on an oak chest. ‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked, and at Philip’s nod she called out to the maid from the doorway, then sat down next to a little table, her hands in her lap.

‘Did he see anyone here? Well . . .’ she continued, slightly embarrassed, ‘your father was a good-looking man, as I was saying, very elegant, quite a hit with the ladies . . . And, you know, back then most people were quite badly off. Not that things are much better now but, believe me, life was tough then. The Great War had just finished. There was no work to be had, no bread. A man like your father . . . he was a good catch. And a widower to boot.’

Philip raised his hand to interrupt her. ‘No, that’s not the kind of encounter I’m wondering about, signora. I was thinking of someone who may have struck you as peculiar, caught your attention. Someone who may have had something to do with his work.’

The maid entered with the coffee and Signora Castelli poured a cup for her guest, who sat down beside her.

‘Someone a little out of the ordinary, you’re saying. Well, now that I think about it, I do remember him meeting several times with a priest, a Jesuit. I think his name was Antonini or Antonelli . . . Yes, that’s right. His name was Father Antonelli.’

Philip was startled. ‘Do you know if he’s still alive? If he lives here in Rome?’

The woman took a sip of coffee and gave a voluptuous little lick of her lips. ‘Still alive? Goodness, I would imagine so – he wasn’t very old – but I have no idea where he might be now. You know how it is with men of the cloth. When their superiors give an order, they have to jump. As soon as they get settled in, they are transferred somewhere else. Who knows? He may even have gone abroad as a missionary . . .’

‘Are you sure he was a Jesuit? That could be a very important starting point.’

The woman nodded. ‘Yes, sir, he was a Jesuit all right.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Only a Jesuit could let his trousers show under his robes in Rome in the 1920s. Any other priest would have worn knickerbockers, so only his stockings showed, like a woman’s. Believe me, there’s nothing I don’t know about trousers.’

Philip couldn’t hold back a smile. He finished his coffee and then said, ‘Signora, you don’t remember this Father Antonelli’s first name, do you? If I knew his first and last names, perhaps the order could locate him and I could arrange a meeting.’

‘His first name . . . no, I don’t remember it. Wait, wait, I know. Maybe I can help you. I’m a person who likes to keep my things in order. I never throw anything away. I remember that he stayed here at the hotel one night, because he was working or studying, I’m not sure which, with your father. I’m sure I must have had him sign the register, for the police. I certainly don’t have the time to go through them all myself, but the old registers are still in my office. If you have the patience to look through them, I’m sure you’ll find him. It must have been 1920 or 1921, if I’m not mistaken, in September or October. It was the early autumn, like now. All you need is a bit of patience.’

Philip thanked her and followed her down to her office on the ground floor, a small room with curtains at the windows and a bunch of daisies in a vase on top of a wooden column.

‘Here,’ she said, opening a cupboard. ‘They’re all here. Take your time.’

Philip sat at a little table and began to take out the guest books, big registers with stiff marbled covers tied with a black ribbon. He began to leaf through them one by one, until he saw, his heart quickening, his father’s signature.

That brief, forceful scribble instantly brought the man to mind. Philip could see him in his mind’s eye, sitting at his work table, in a study crowded with an unimaginable quantity of papers. His books were kept in strict order on the shelves: texts in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. Philip had expunged the tragic circumstances of his mother’s death from his mind, and what he most remembered of her was the photograph that his father had kept on his table; she was at the height of her beauty, wearing her long opera-singer’s gown.

Philip had always considered his father the man who had an answer for everything. Desmond Garrett would apply the most rigorous logic to his investigations of the past, but his mind remained open to any hypothesis, no matter how foolhardy it might seem. He had handed his passion for research and his boundless curiosity down to his son, along with his sense of just how immense the mystery of the past could be.

Desmond had even been affectionate with Philip, as affectionate as a man alone could be, giving him the insecure, distracted attention of someone who had never got over the loss of his one love.

When he disappeared into the desert, the event was not wholly unexpected. Philip was at university when it happened and had already taken his first steps on the road to what would become a brilliant career. He knew that he could navigate the world on his own and he was aware that his father would probably just leave one day, without saying goodbye, without saying where he was going and whether he would ever be back.

Philip brushed the faded ink with his fingers. That name identified the only person who had meant anything to him after the death of his mother and he swore that he would find him. He had a question to ask and his father was the only one who could answer it.

He focused on finding Antonelli’s signature as well. There it was, Giuseppe Antonelli, SJ. The signora hadn’t been wrong; Antonelli was a Jesuit. It all fitted perfectly: Antonelli was a
sacerdos
, a priest, and had stayed under the same roof as his father and was thus his
contubernalis
or ‘tent companion’. Easy. Even too easy. But if he knew his father, the tough part wouldn’t be long in coming.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Philip left the
pensione
early in the morning, walked over to the Circus Maximus and started down Vico Jugario. To his right, he could see archaeologists at work up on the Palatine Hill and a little later on there were more down below in the Roman Forum, digging in the area of the ancient Temple of Vesta. The new regime had given quite a boost to the excavation of ancient Rome and the whole city was crawling with demolition and reconstruction crews. He’d heard they were undertaking a major overhaul of the Mausoleum of Augustus and were opening a road that would connect the Castel Sant’ Angelo district to St Peter’s Square, razing all the houses of the ancient Spina del Borgo that stood in the way. Another road would connect Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, demolishing the medieval and Renaissance quarter built among the ruins of Nerva’s Forum. Philip did not understand how the Italians could tolerate a political administration that boasted of reviving the glories of a millenary past, as they proceeded to tear down a sizeable portion of that very past in such highly questionable projects.

He hailed a cab in Piazza Venezia and made his way to the Curia Generalizia, the headquarters of the Society of Jesus, where he was greeted with polite interest.

‘Father Antonelli? Yes, he lived with us for several years, but he is no longer in Rome.’

‘I must speak to him about a very urgent matter.’

‘May I know the reason for your request, Mr . . .’

‘Garrett. Philip Garrett. I’m American, naturalized French. I live in Paris and have been working for several years as a researcher at the Musée de l’Homme.’

‘Garrett, you said? No relation, I suppose, to—’

‘That’s right, Father, I’m the son of Desmond Garrett, the American anthropologist who was working with Father Antonelli on some research here in Rome ten years ago. Father Antonelli was the director of the Vatican Library back then, I believe.’

The Jesuit fell silent for a few moments, as if trying to collect his thoughts, then said, ‘That’s true, Dr Garrett. But unfortunately it’s not possible for you to meet Father Antonelli. You see, our brother is quite ill and cannot receive anyone.’

Philip could not hide his disappointment. ‘Father, I must speak with him. It concerns a matter of the utmost importance. You see, my father vanished without trace ten years ago in the Sahara, and I’m trying to find him by piecing together the last journey he made, here, before he disappeared. Father Antonelli may have precious information. Please excuse my insisting, but I’m sure I won’t need more than a few minutes of his time . . .’