Getting down to those tunnels wasn’t hard. A sewer will take you almost anywhere. But one night we shimmied through a whole maze of stone passageways until we found ourselves at a new metal grate. The grate led to a utility closet. And the utility closet opened inside the autopark, right next to the papal limousine.
Driving age in Italy was eighteen years old. We were thirteen. And the keys to eighty luxury automobiles were hanging from a board on the wall. One year earlier, my father had taught Simon how to drive in our old Fiat 500. That summer, I taught myself in an armored Mercedes 500 custom-fitted with a papal throne in the backseat.
Right off, I wanted to invite girls down with us. Gianni said no. I wanted to hide in a car trunk and hitch a ride with John Paul. Gianni said no. Don’t get greedy, he said when I wanted to drive a limo into the gardens. You always want too much. That was my first taste of the real Gianni. For years afterward, he would end up making a religion of not getting greedy. Of not wanting too much. After graduation, I went off to college, but Gianni said he was going to become a surfer. He went to Santa Marinella the way the blind go to Lourdes. A year later, his father found him work as a sampietrino. But there are a lot of inches in Saint Peter’s, and the sampietrini have to clean all of them. So when Gianni lost interest in scraping gum off walls and buffing marble floors with the riding machine, he thought hard about what he really wanted in life. And he decided to become a driver for the car service.
It couldn’t have been an accident that he ended up here. When he thought back to a time when life had really felt big, I doubt there was anything that came close to our summer in the autopark. And ever since he made that choice, just the sight of Gianni has made me wonder if any of us Vatican boys, other than Simon, has really ever had the guts to experience the world outside these walls.
“They took Simon into house arrest,” I tell him. “The Swiss Guards saw his car enter the palace complex. I need to find out where it went.”
The Swiss may not know. But the driver of that car can tell me.
“Alex,” Gianni says, “we’re under orders not to talk about that.”
This is what I was afraid of. Egger was telling us the same thing: he was under a gag order.
“Can you tell me anything?” I say.
Gianni lowers his voice. “It’s been pretty weird around here since that man was killed. We’re not supposed to talk about anything.” He smiles that old mischievous smile. “So all of this stays between us.”
I nod.
“Last night, a call came down for a pickup. I don’t know who the request came from, but our dispatcher sent my friend Mario to cover it. Mario ended up driving to your uncle’s palace to pick up Simon.”
“Where did he drop my brother off ?”
“At the elevator.”
“What elevator?”
“The elevator.”
The papal palace is so old that it has few modern amenities. Gianni must mean the ancient elevator in the courtyard of the Secretariat, originally built to operate on water power. This is the one presidents and prime ministers use when they visit.
But when I ask, he shakes his head. On the dust of the ground, he draws a large square with the toe of his shoe. “Damasus Courtyard.”
He means the courtyard in front of the Secretariat. I nod.
He adds a smaller square, just beside the first. “Palace of Nicholas the Fifth.”
This is the final branch of the palace, the one that famously overlooks Saint Peter’s Square.
He scrapes a line to connect the boxes. “Between them is an opening. An archway through the ground floor here. In the archway is a hidden door leading to the private elevator. That’s where Mario’s car dropped Simon off. Do you understand now?”