The Fifth Gospel(125)

            Around that time, though, Simon must’ve had an even nastier shock. It was in the thick of my brother’s negotiations with the Orthodox that Ugo discovered the Shroud had been stolen from Constantinople.

            That discovery must’ve set the rest of this in motion. Michael was attacked by men who wanted to know what Ugo had discovered. The same threat was written on the back of the photo I was sent. Cardinal Boia seems to know Ugo uncovered something, but not what it is. Maybe this is what he hopes to squeeze out of Simon by putting him under house arrest.

            Ironically, though, all he needs to do is walk through Ugo’s exhibit. Even though the galleries are unfinished, the answers are in plain sight. If His Eminence would learn a few words of Greek, he would realize the truth is painted on the walls.

            I stand and wade through the darkness back to my bedroom. My brother may put this exhibit above his own career, but I don’t. Simon was made for greater things than inviting some Orthodox clergy to Rome. When he testifies tomorrow, the judges need to hear what’s really at stake.

            I look in my dresser but don’t find what I’m looking for. So I cross the imaginary line between my side of the room and Mona’s and open the jewelry box her father made her after our engagement. She disappeared without anything but a carry-on bag of clothes, and since a priest’s wife rarely wears jewelry anyway, it’s all still here: the diamond stud earrings, the nostalgic teenage rings, the gold necklace with the Latin cross on it, superseded by the Greek cross she would’ve been wearing the day she left. I open the small lower compartment. Inside is a key. I loop it onto my chain.

            On my way to the door, I stop and open the credenza that was overturned during the break-in. Inside it is the plastic bag where Peter and I keep our rat’s nest of extra wires and cables and adapters. Anything I see that might charge a mobile phone, I roll up and stuff in my cassock.

            Then, before going downstairs again, I try to brace myself for what I’m about to see.



* * *



            ON THE BOTTOM FLOOR of our apartment building is Vatican Health Services. When Simon and I were boys, American priests would fly back to New York for their checkups rather than risk a trip to the Vatican doctors. Horror stories have followed every pope for half a century. Fifty years ago, Pius XII came down with recurring hiccups, so his doctor prescribed injections of ground lamb brains. Another papal doctor sold Pius’ medical records to newspapers and embalmed his dead body using an experimental technique that made the pope’s corpse bubble and fart like a tar pit while pilgrims queued up to view it. Ten years later, Paul VI needed his prostate removed, so Vatican doctors decided to perform the operation in his library. His successor, John Paul I, died thirty-three days into his papacy because our doctors didn’t yet know he took pills for a blood condition. So you might think our Vatican morticians would be world-class, considering all the practice they get. But there’s no such thing as a Vatican mortician and no such place as a Vatican morgue. Popes are embalmed in their apartments by volunteer undertakers from the city, and the rest of us settle for the back room at Health Services. That room is where I’m headed now.

            There are two doors to the clinic, one for bishops and one for everyone else. Even now, I use the door appropriate to my rank. Mona’s key opens the lock without a hitch. Before Peter was born, she worked here pro bono, like all our medical staff, in addition to her real job in the city.

            I haven’t stood in this waiting room since the day of my father’s heart attack. The windows look out onto the autopark and the museums beyond, so I don’t dare turn on the lights. But I don’t need them to remember how this place looks. The white floors and walls, the white slats of the plastic window shades. The white-coated doctors and nurses who moved so slowly when we carried Father inside, as if they’d already decided this would be his doorstep to heaven. When Mona volunteered here, not once did I come down to meet her after work, and not once did she have to ask me why.

            I walk down the hall, opening the waiting rooms one by one. As expected, the one I want is at the very end. Even before I open the door, I smell the embalming fluid. Inside the room there’s no reclining bed dressed with sanitary paper, just a steel table draped with a white sheet. Under the sheet is the hump of a body.