The Fifth Gospel(10)
There are wrinkles under his eyes. I can’t tell whether he’s squinting into the distance or whether a handful of years in the Secretariat has done this to a man only in his early thirties.
“About my phone,” he says.
“Why?”
“To see what time Ugo called me.”
“What else?”
He stares at the phone in his hand. “Whether I saw anyone else in the gardens.”
“Did you?”
He must be swimming in darkness. His only dim answer is, “Nobody.”
Loose thoughts tangle in my mind. Castel Gandolfo goes quiet in the fall. The pope leaves his summer residence and returns to the Vatican, so the Swiss Guards and gendarmes no longer keep detachments on the grounds. Tourist spots are deserted by evening because the last daily train to Rome leaves before five, and if the pickpockets here are anything like the ones in Rome, they become more aggressive once the easy prey is gone. For a second I’m haunted by the image of Ugo in the rain, in the empty town square, hunted down by one of them.
“There was a carabinieri station right across the road,” I say. “Why didn’t Ugo call them?”
“I don’t know.”
Maybe he did call them, but they refused to cross the Vatican border. And if Ugo called our Vatican emergency number, 112, I doubt it would’ve worked out here.
“What did he say to you on the phone?” I ask.
Simon lifts a hand. “Please, Alex. I need some time.”
He retreats into himself, as if his memory of the phone call is especially painful. Simon must’ve been en route from the airport when it came. Maybe he told his driver to take an immediate detour, but it still wasn’t enough.
I remember how he flew home right away when I called him with the news that Mona had left me. He vowed to stay as long as it took for me to feel human again. It took six weeks. Lucio begged him to return to the embassy. Instead, Simon helped me canvass Rome with flyers, helped me phone relatives and friends, helped take care of Peter while I meandered self-indulgently through the city, visiting the places where I had fallen in love with my wife. Later, when he returned to Bulgaria, our mailbox was flooded with envelopes addressed to Peter, each containing photos Simon had shot around the capital: a man losing his toupee in a city breeze; an accordion player with a monkey; a squirrel in a mountain of chestnuts. They became the wallpaper of Peter’s room. The ritual of reading the letters became my new beginning with my son. That was how I learned what Lucio had meant. While Simon snapped photos, lesser priests were climbing the ladder. Finally I told him that Peter and I had turned the corner. No more letters. Please.
The city lights have begun to rain color on us. Simon’s eyes are moving, sizing up the vista beyond the windshield. It’s been more than a month since he saw this skyline, more than a month since he breathed Roman air. Tonight was supposed to be a homecoming.
Quietly I say, “Did you see any of the garden gates left unlocked?”
But he doesn’t seem to hear me.
THE VATICAN APARTMENT BUILDING where Simon and I grew up, and where I still live with Peter, is called the Belvedere Palace, because in Italian you can call anything a palace. Ours is a brick shoebox built a hundred years ago by the pope because he got tired of seeing housewives and children in his private stairwells. Belvedere means “pretty view,” but we don’t have one of those either; just the Vatican supermarket on one side and the Vatican parking garage on the other. Employee housing, is what it is.
We live on the top floor, across the hall from the Brothers of Saint John of God who run the Vatican Pharmacy on the ground floor. From a few windows we can see the back of John Paul’s apartments in the papal palace—a real palazzo, by anyone’s standards. In the small rear lot, a gendarme is doing what God made Vatican policemen to do: check cars for parking permits. We are home.