The Fifth Gospel(124)
I let myself in and go to the telephone in the kitchen. It seems strange that Ugo would’ve wanted the number for this landline. Whenever we exchanged calls about the Diatessaron, he dialed my mobile. Maybe this time he was trying to reach Simon, not me. The question is, when?
I scroll through the caller ID list of incoming calls, and there isn’t a trace of Ugo’s number. There are only three calls from an unfamiliar phone—a Vatican number—all within forty minutes of each other on the night before Ugo died. Peter and I were away that whole evening, seeing a movie. I never knew about these calls.
Loose sparks float through my thoughts. I check the date on the calls again, just to be sure. It’s as if someone was checking to make sure we were gone. Casing the apartment before the break-in. Yet the following night—when the break-in actually happened—there’s not a single unrecognized call.
Losing patience, I scroll back to the unfamiliar number and punch it into my phone. It barely rings before a woman picks up.
“Pronto. Casa Santa Marta. How may I help you?”
A nun. At the front desk of the Casa.
“Hello,” I say. “I’m trying to reach someone who called me from a hotel line. Can you connect me?”
“The name, sir?”
“I don’t have the name. Just a phone number.”
“For the privacy of our guests, sir, we can’t honor that request.”
“It’s important, Sister. Please.”
“I’m very sorry.”
Thinking quickly, I say, “Ugolino Nogara, then. Can you look for a room under the name Ugolino Nogara?”
Ugo had no reason to stay at the Casa. He would’ve stayed in his apartment over the museums. But I’m fishing for anything.
I hear her typing on the computer. “No guest under that name, sir. Are you sure he hasn’t checked out? We remove guests from the system when they return their keys.”
Their keys. Suddenly it comes to me. The sliver of metal I found under Ugo’s car mat.
“Thank you, Sister,” I say. Then I hang up the phone and reach into both pockets of my cassock. Out of one I take the metal crescent from Ugo’s car. Out of the other I take my room key from the Casa.
Attached to the Casa key is an oval fob engraved with the room number. Color and thickness match perfectly. The sliver is a snapped-off edge of a Casa fob.
Looking closer, I can see the stress marks. It must’ve been used to pry something up. Whatever the job was, it failed.
I sit at the kitchen table, trying to arrange all this information into a pattern I can grasp. The phone calls to my apartment trace back to the Casa. The robbery of Ugo’s car does, too. This may be the first hint that the break-in and the murder really are connected. But I’m also haunted by the thought that Peter and I were at the Casa, sleeping under the same roof as the man who did this.
I rub the metal sliver in my palm. The Casa. It was built for out-of-town visitors, but it’s also where Secretariat priests stay when they’re passing through. On the phone, Mignatto said Cardinal Boia doesn’t want us to know who beat Michael up. He refuses to release that information. Boia, since the time of my father’s death, has been the enemy of a Catholic-Orthodox reunion . The man who has used the Secretariat as a tool to kill John Paul’s goodwill gestures toward our sister Church.
Simon must’ve known he was tempting fate by inviting Orthodox clergy to the exhibit. He must’ve tried to stay off Boia’s radar as long as he could. That would explain why his diplomatic passport has no hint of trips to Serbia or Romania. He could’ve applied for a regular Italian passport to hide what he was doing. But once an Orthodox bishop—or a metropolitan—agreed to come to Rome, the game was over. Bishops are public figures. They travel with entourages; their plans appear in announcements and diocesan calendars. Boia was guaranteed to find out.