I do. This explains everything. I wonder how Simon can ever have allowed himself to be put under house arrest there. I wonder if he even knew where they were going to take him.
“What’s wrong?” Gianni asks.
The Palace of Nicholas V has four floors. The ground floor, as in many Renaissance palaces, was designed for servants or horses. The top two floors belong to the Holy Father, who would’ve had no reason to cover his tracks if he’d wanted Simon under house arrest. The only remaining floor is the private residence of the Cardinal Secretary of State.
“Gian,” I murmur, putting my head in my hands, “they took him to Boia’s apartments.”
* * *
THIS IS A GIANT setback. No one will be able to reach Simon there. Not even Lucio. When Simon submitted to house arrest, surely he assumed the order came from the vicar’s office, not from his own boss.
“What about afterward?” I say. “Has Mario taken Simon anywhere else?”
He shakes his head slowly. “Al, as far as I know, no driver’s seen Simon since. If he went anywhere else, it was on foot.”
But that part of the palace is crawling with Swiss Guards. If Simon was escorted elsewhere, Leo would’ve heard about it.
“I don’t get it,” Gianni says, half to himself. “Why would they take him there?”
I tell him I don’t know. But I can imagine an answer. House arrest would be the perfect pretext for ensuring that Simon couldn’t return to the museum to erase the damning part of Ugo’s exhibit: 1204.
“Any other strange calls?” I ask.
Gianni smiles thinly. “How long do you have?” He lowers his voice. “The day that man was killed—I’ve never seen anything like it. Five o’clock in the morning, I get a call at home. They want me to work a new shift, noon to eight. I tell them I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at two o’clock. Heck, I just got off my last shift five hours ago. They tell me to cancel the appointment. Lo and behold, when I arrive, we’re all there. Every single one of us got the same call.”
“Why?”
“The dispatcher only tells us that someone at the palace needs cars running shuttles. According to the schedule, we’re supposed to be doing short trips to an event in the gardens. But suddenly there’s a change of venue. Now two junior guys will stay back to cover the regular calls, while the rest of us run pickups to Castel Gandolfo completely off the books.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“No clocking in or out. No pickup logs. On paper they wanted this to look like any other day.”
The sky looms, vertiginously high. This sounds like what Corporal Egger said about the Swiss Guard’s checkpoint sheets—cars coming and going with no paper trail. The unknowns are beginning to grow.
“It gets stranger,” he says. “They tell us we can’t step out of our cars except to open doors for our pickups. We can’t greet anyone by name. And we’re supposed to drive them forty-five minutes each way without saying a word.”
“Why?”
“Because these guys apparently don’t speak Italian, don’t know Rome, and don’t like small talk.”
“Who were they?”
He pulls at an imaginary beard on his chin, then points to me. “Priests. Like you.”
My pulse quickens. The Orthodox priests Simon invited to the exhibit.
“How many of them?”