"The church is in possession of Ben Isaac's documents," Jacopo repeated.
"Thank you. We'll talk later." He hung up without taking his eyes off the superior general of the Society of Jesus.
He wanted to laugh in Adolph's face, but the moment demanded seriousness. For the first time in a long time, Tarcisio felt good. "You're too late, Adolph. Later I'll communicate my demands. Now get out of my presence."
57
T
he temperature rose that afternoon, and the day was sunny and pleasant. Jerusalem was a city that permanently swarmed with building cultural, artistic, and intellectual activity, the capital of eclec ticism, with a people who adapted rapidly to the modern world and what it had to offer.
The Holy City knew how to prepare for the future. Every year it received millions of tourists eager to visit the places where Jesus walked. It was the most important city for two religions of the book, and the second most important for the followers of an equally impor tant book. It was those books that gave meaning to all this history. Without them the world would be different.
The car was parked in the middle of a residential street. Francesco and JC were sharing the backseat. There was no sign of the cripple in the Armani suit. Francesco was afraid of JC. There was something about him, an invisible power, extrasensory almost—as ridiculous as it was to think—that radiated omnipotence more than any other person Francesco had known.
"Now what?" he asked suspiciously.
JC took something out of his jacket pocket—an airline ticket, a passport, some shekels—and handed them to Francesco.
"Your participation has come to an end," JC declared fi rmly. "I don't have to tell you that none of this ever happened."
Francesco was puzzled. What kind of random plan was this?
"Is that it? Call someone to instruct them to give some documents to Sarah to take to the Gare du Nord? Couldn't you have done that?" He wanted to understand, no matter what happened. "Why did you kidnap me in Rome and bring me here?"
JC looked at Francesco with a sardonic smile and raised two fi ngers. "Two reasons. The first, so Sarah would know everything was going as planned. Hearing your voice meant everything was under control. And there's a second reason." But he said nothing.
Francesco waited for clarification, but he had to ask for it. "What is it?"
JC looked out at the street, calm in the midst of Jerusalem frenzy. "What are your intentions toward Sarah?"
"What?" What kind of question was that?
JC didn't repeat himself. Francesco had heard him.
"Are you her father?" Francesco asked, irritated by the invasion of privacy. Although he did not personally know Raul Brandao Monteiro, retired from the Portuguese army, he knew who Sarah's father was.
JC didn't react, but only waited for an answer.
"Sarah is an astonishing woman; discreet, professional, very respon sible, and until recently I thought we might have a future together. But now, the truth is, I don't know," Francesco confessed. It was not worth the trouble to make up a reason for the old man; besides, Francesco was afraid JC would have sensed the lie.
JC thought about Francesco's words briefly. He was a practical man.
"I'd like to give you a glimpse of what Sarah's life is like. It's not always luncheons at embassies and ministries, nights at the paper, a movie at the Odeon in Leicester Square or the Empire, a play at the Adelphi, lunches at Indigo or home to fuck all night."
Francesco felt totally naked after that list of very specific, very real, intimate nights that he thought belonged to his private life.
"Part of her life has no schedule or plan," JC continued. "Don't expect that she'll fulfill all your expectations, because she won't. Or that she'll come home after work every night, because there'll be days she won't. Or answer all your phone calls; some she'll hang up on."
"Why are you telling me this?" Francesco wanted to know, his heart full of foreboding.
"So you'll know how your future with her will be. I know about her morning sickness."
This old man knows everything,
Francesco thought.
"If you're thinking of continuing your relationship with her, you need to know these things. Marrying Sarah implies bringing me along. That's why we're having this conversation."
"You're trying to dissuade me from having a relationship with her."
"Of course not." JC smiled and coughed. "I'm showing you the whole picture. I know it's not common to do so in relationships. Only much later do you see the dark side of the one you marry. Consider this conversation a bonus. You can make a concrete decision about your future. Risk it or not, knowing all this implies."
It was too much to digest at one time, and this wasn't the place to do it.
He saw the cripple leave one of the houses on the other side of the street and come over to the car. He had a young man with him.
"We're going to take you to the airport. Don't forget: you saw and know nothing. Only that will guarantee I forget about you," JC warned.
The cripple put the boy in the backseat with those already sitting there. He had dark bruises on his face and traces of dry blood in his nose and mouth. The rest were covered up by clothes.
"Who are you?" he asked fearfully.
"Your father sent us. Don't worry. Everything is fine," JC reassured him.
"Where's my father?" he asked, looking around uneasily.
JC took his cell phone and dialed a number. A little later someone answered and spoke in French.
"How did everything go?" JC asked.
"Just fine. The woman has the documents and is on the plane,"
some one responded.
"Perfect. Can you get little Ben's father on the line? His son wants to talk to him. Good work, Gavache." He handed the phone to the young man. "Talk to your parents. They're very worried."
While little Ben calmed parental anxieties, JC lowered the window of the door. The cripple bent down to listen.
"Our work is almost concluded," JC whispered.
"What about Jerome and Simon?" the cripple asked, without look ing at JC.
"Thank them for taking care of the kid, and tell them to put in a good word for me when they meet their Creator."
The cripple took a gun out of his holster, checked the chamber, and put it away again. "It'll be done. I'll be back in fi ve minutes."
Little Ben said good-bye to his father and gave the phone back to JC. "Thank you so much. That was terrible. I can't thank you enough," he said breathlessly.
The old man smiled with satisfaction.
"You're going home now."
"What is your name, sir?"
"You can call me JC."
58
T
he Domus Sanctae Marthae was a five-story building ordered built by John Paul II in the 1990s to give some comfort to those visiting the Holy See on business or for devotion. Cardinals, bishops, or priests, some emissary from another country, it was for anyone who came under the good graces of the Holy Mother Church. It was best known for lodging the College of Cardinals in 2005. It was built on the site of the former Saint Martha Hospice, which Leo XIII constructed dur ing a cholera epidemic, and served as a refuge for Jews and others with troubled relations with the Italian government during World War II.
It was certainly not a fi ve-star hotel, but it provided all the neces sary comfort for anyone whose only requirement was a good night's sleep.
Hans Schmidt rested a little, not as much as his body would have liked, since he was no longer at an age when he could stay up all night and part of the following day without rest and food. He remembered he hadn't had a decent meal since arriving the previous night. He'd had coffee, some water, eaten half a sandwich, but nothing nutritious.
He opened his eyes. The room was dark, but the afternoon was only half over. He turned on the light over the bed and looked at his watch. It was four fifteen. He'd slept only an hour. He'd give himself fi fteen minutes more of rest before going to see Tarcisio and the fi nal developments in his case.
He turned off the light and shut his eyes again. He shut off his mind, refusing to think about anything. During the hour of rest one shouldn't think. Besides, any thought that had no practical effect was an excuse not to do what should be done when reality required it. People revived too many scenes from the past that they later embel lished in the way they wished things had happened or anticipated events that had not yet come. Most people lived in expectations and illusions. Hans didn't. He knew perfectly well that expectations grew to the extent they were imagined, and developed according to one's own wishes. Illusion, or delusion, was also a hope, just different, since one hoped that something one didn't really possess would bear marvelous fruit. Both attitudes were mistakes.
So when his cell phone began to ring in the room, interrupting his expected rest, it left him irritated, but he answered the phone with a smile.
"Good afternoon." Even if it was dark as night.
Whatever the call was about, whoever was calling, didn't give Schmidt a chance to reply to anything that was said, not even an inter jection or expression of surprise. The flush on his face indicated that the subject was uncomfortable to him in some way. Expectations and illusions could be controlled in theory, but not in real life.
"Okay, I'll find a way," he said. Just as he was hanging up the phone, someone knocked timidly on his door."Who is it?" he called out loudly.
"Trevor," he heard from the other side.
Schmidt got up from the bed, still in his clothes, and went to open the door.
"Good afternoon, Reverend Father."
"Good afternoon, Trevor. Come in, please. I was just getting up to go see the secretary," he explained.
The secretary's assistant came in with a certain shyness appropriate to his position.
Schmidt sat down on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes.
"His Eminence asked that you come to see him. He has news," Trevor informed him.
"Oh, yes? What news?" he asked, tightening the laces on his shoes.
"The parchments are in the possession of the church," Trevor said, uncertain if he should reveal anything, but prompted by the obvious affection between Schmidt and Tarcisio.
"Yes, I was informed."
Trevor looked at him in amazement. "May I ask by whom?"
"By Cardinal William. He called to say the congregation was meet ing to decide my future," Schmidt replied.
"I see," Trevor replied, a little confused by the explanation. Cardinal William had been with the secretary when he was asked to go look for the Austrian priest. There was no meeting of the congregation.
One of the two was lying, either William to Schmidt or . . .
There was no more time to devise plausible or credible explana tions. A belt tightened around his neck with suffocating intensity. He couldn't breathe. He tried to resist, but Schmidt twisted harder from behind, applying more pressure. The fight for life under these unequal circumstances couldn't last long, not two minutes, and Trevor's life left him.
Schmidt removed the belt from around the corpse's neck, and slipped it through the loops of his pants.
Finally he took the phone and dialed three numbers, sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked at Trevor's body with a serious expres sion. When the call was answered, he assumed a stricken tone.
"Tarcisio, please, come here, for the love of God. Come quickly. The murderer. The murderer is still in the Vatican."
59
W
hen a routine is broken, altering the natural predisposition of events that, normally, are governed by a well-outlined chronol ogy, it is God's way of showing believers and heretics that everything obeys His will. At least that's what he believed as he returned down the Via degli Astalli, for the second time looking for suspicious eyes. No one was following him.
He'd received the message on his cell phone at his personal num ber and not on the other card, the black one, where he communicated when he needed information, locations he couldn't find on his own, or some request that required special authorization. This time, against all rules, they demanded his presence, overriding all the standards of security, a sign of urgency. Although the message included a security sign that only his mentor used in the name of God, he couldn't be too careful.
He looked at his watch and decided to take a third turn around the neighborhood to remove all doubt. Ten minutes later he came out on the Piazza di Gesù. He glanced at the passersby, few at that hour, perhaps because it had rained hard earlier in the afternoon. A smat tering of tourists were admiring the facade of the Church of the Gesù, designed by Giacomo della Porta, and taking pictures; others walked by in a hurry, paying no attention to what was around them. The traf fic was heavy, since the plaza was a central location of the Eternal City with access to the heart of Rome and a transfer point for many other locations.
At first glance all the doors were closed, but he knew that was not so. Not for him.
He walked to the door on the far left, opened a glass-paned door and another wooden one painted green. The creaking hinges announced his presence.
The interior was grandiose. Ten side chapels dedicated to various religious subjects from the Passion to the Sacred Heart, and to the mor tal remains of Saint Ignatius, the helmsman for eternity for the society.
At the back, next to the high altar, a man in black was kneeling, hands joined, head bowed. With his back turned he couldn't see who it was.