The Fifth Gospel(115)
Egger turns to me. “I don’t know you. And I didn’t see Father Simon in any car.”
“Hey,” Leo says, tapping him on the chest. “I’m telling you he was in that vehicle. So did you see it or not? This would’ve been about . . .” He draws a scrap of paper from his pocket and plays his own flashlight over it. “Eight ten PM.”
“There was a car at eight oh seven,” Egger says.
Leo glances at me. “Okay, so where did it stop?”
I know what Leo’s thinking, so I just say it. “Was it going to the old jail?”
When the Vatican became its own country, the pope built a three-cell jail in the courtyard Leo mentioned. It used to hold the occasional thief or Nazi prisoner of war, but these days it’s used as a storage warehouse. No one looking for Simon would search for him there.
“Maybe you should just look at the sheet,” Egger says.
Leo grits his teeth. “I did, Egger. And since you didn’t record a sedan passing through the gate, we’re asking if the car stopped in the courtyard beside the jail.”
“Corporal,” I say, “Simon helped you. Please help him.” I try to lock eyes with Egger, staring into the black zeroes. Simon always chooses the lost sheep.
“The car didn’t stop in the courtyard,” Egger murmurs. “It came through the gate.”
“Into the palace?” Leo’s anger flashes. “Then why the hell is there no record on the sheet?”
Egger’s head slowly pivots. “Because I was doing what I was told.”
Leo grabs Egger’s uniform, but I pull him back and whisper, “That means there’ll be records of it on the other sheets, right?”
Leo never takes his eyes off Egger. “Wrong. I checked all the sheets for last night, and there’s no car on any of them. So what are you telling us, Corporal?”
I can see it in Egger’s eyes, though. The spell is broken. He’s done helping us.
“Leo,” I whisper, “I believe him.”
But Leo clamps a hand on Egger’s jaw and says, “Tell me how it’s possible for a car to go past three checkpoints and not get recorded once.”
For the first time, Egger’s partner speaks up. “You’re out of line, Corporal Keller.” He breaks Leo’s grip and pulls his partner away. Leo stands in their way, blocking the end of the tunnel, but I sense we’re not going to get more information than this. We may have hit on something bigger than Egger.
“Let them go,” I whisper to Leo. “You got me what I needed. I’ll take it from here.”
* * *
AFTER DROPPING LEO AT his post beside Saint Peter’s Square, I weave down a route I’ve known since I was a boy. Between the square and the Vatican village is a narrow no-man’s-land where walls have been built and torn down for centuries as the borders between public and private have changed. In the untraveled darkness beyond Bernini’s colonnade there are small gaps where the walls meet. I slip back into our village and head for a forgotten place.
For years it’s been Uncle Lucio’s job to quietly demolish historic sites inside our walls. Our country of five hundred people hosts fifteen hundred commuters and ten thousand tourists a day, so the sad fact is that we need parking spaces more than we need ancient ruins. The first place to receive the treatment was the Belvedere Courtyard. Where Renaissance popes once held jousts and bullfights, palace employees now park their Fiats and Vespas. Next came a Roman temple beside our oldest church, which Lucio converted to underground parking for two hundred fifty. More recently he excavated a second-century villa to fit another eight hundred cars and a hundred tour buses. When people saw garbage trucks leaving our land with ancient mosaics heaped up like shavings of Parmesan, there was an uproar. But the granddaddy of them all is the garage I’m headed to now.