The Fifth Gospel(131)
As the gendarmes open the courtroom door for him, I get a peek inside. The three judges sit at the bench with expressions like pallbearers. Behind them is a wooden façade like a mausoleum entrance, overhung by a black iron crucifix.
Then the door closes, and I’m blind again. The waiting begins. For the next fifty minutes I pace the dusty courtyard, unsure how else to help. Then Bishop Pacomio resurfaces, looking placid. I want to ask how it went, but he wouldn’t be allowed to answer me. The oaths of court forbid it. So I watch him trot away, and I check my phone for any message from Mignatto.
Nothing.
Soon after, a lowly Volkswagen Golf pulls up with its windows rolled down. It disgorges a man I haven’t seen in a decade: Father Stransky, who worked with my father in the Christian Unity office back when it was nothing but a Vatican-owned apartment with a bathtub for its filing cabinet. Time has bleached his hair and lengthened his face, but he stops in front of me, stares quizzically, then makes the connection. “My heavens,” he says. “It’s little Alex Andreou!”
“Father Tom.”
He embraces me as if I were a son, and I wonder how Mignatto could possibly have tracked him down. Last I heard, he was the rector of an institute in Jerusalem.
“Just happened to be in Rome,” he says with a wink. “Fortuity, I guess.”
Lucio. Only Lucio could have flushed these men out of the woodwork. I wonder if he paid to fly them here overnight.
Father Tom lowers his voice. “So what did your brother get himself into?”
“Father, he didn’t do anything wrong. He just won’t tell the judges he’s innocent.”
Stransky shakes his head. Simon in a nutshell. He points to the door and says, “Join me?”
When I explain that I can’t, he smiles and says, “Well, let’s pray I don’t make an ass of myself. Haven’t dusted off ye olde canon law in a decade.”
Modest words from a living legend. Working with two cardinals, Father Tom drafted a historic Church document on the future of our relations with non-Christians. Though he can’t testify to anything except Simon’s behavior as a young man, Mignatto’s strategy seems clear: to dazzle the judges with my brother’s character witnesses.
An hour passes. Father Tom leaves. The third witness arrives—and he’s a showstopper.
Archbishop Collaço is the former nuncio at Simon’s first posting in Bulgaria. Born in India, trained in Rome, Collaço is one of the most senior of all Vatican diplomats, the embodiment of Secretariat service. In his quarter-century career he’s been nuncio to a dozen countries. Today he wears a pure white cassock with purple sash, the attire worn by priests in the tropics, which lends even more dignity to his arrival. I have no trouble understanding the reason he’s here. Mignatto and Lucio are sending an important message: the Secretariat stands behind Simon even if its leader doesn’t.
A final hour passes. Then, at two o’clock, Archbishop Collaço is followed by the last of the defense’s character witnesses. This time, I can’t believe my eyes.
Even Lucio must’ve been hard-pressed to pull strings this high. Cardinal Tauran is a Secretariat giant. There was a time when people said he would become the new Cardinal Secretary, replacing Boia and revolutionizing our relations with the Orthodox. Then Tauran was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, just like John Paul, so out of concern for his health he was transferred to the less demanding job of Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. But not before getting to know Simon in a diplomacy class His Eminence taught at the Academy. The papal librarian is about to finger my brother as one of his favorite pupils.
Tauran slips by discreetly, lowering his head and smiling self-consciously. With that, the pieces of the defense are assembled. I wish I could be inside to see the judges’ faces as they witness this conveyor belt of Church celebrities. No wonder Lucio wanted to watch it for himself.