The Fifth Gospel(15)
Simon quickly steps into the closet.
“Come on, Peter,” I say, leading him back toward the kitchen. “Let’s wait for Uncle Simon out here.”
CHAPTER 4
THE SWISS GUARD barracks is down the street from our apartment. Outsiders are forbidden, but Simon and I spent many nights in these halls after our parents died. The recruits let us join their training runs, share their weight room, crash their fondue parties. My first hangover was born inside these walls. Most of our old friends have flown back to Switzerland for new adventures, but the rest have become officers. When the cadets at the desk call up for orders, we’re immediately waved through.
I’m agog at how young the new halberdiers seem. Other than their required stint in the Swiss military back home, they look fresh from high school. Once, these were the men I most admired in our country. Now they’re overgrown boys, ten years my junior.
Three long buildings form the barracks, each separated from the next by an alleylike courtyard. New men bunk together in the building that fronts the Rome border. The officers’ building, where we’re headed, is the innermost one, backing to the papal palace. We take the elevator up and knock at the apartment of my closest friend in the Guard, Leo Keller. His wife, Sofia, answers the door.
“Oh, Alex, how awful,” she says. “I can’t believe what happened. Come in, come in.”
News travels fast in this barracks.
Peter exclaims, “Can I feel the baby?” And before Sofia can answer, he places both hands on her pregnant belly.
I begin to pull him back, but she smiles and places her own hands over his. “Baby has hiccups,” she says. “Can you feel them?”
She is a pretty woman, slight in figure like Mona was, similar in posture. Even her hair is reminiscent of my wife’s: a shale color that’s been brightened by the Roman sun so that it sometimes makes a red halo around her face, like filaments of steel wool about to catch fire. It’s been a year since she and Leo were married, but I still find myself staring at her, seeing what’s not there. The memories of Mona she brings back, and the appetites a man feels for his wife, make me blush. They also make me aware of a loneliness I’ve otherwise done well to bury.
“You three, come sit,” she says. “I’ll get you something to eat.” But then she seems to change her mind. “Ah, ah, I see, no.” She’s staring over my shoulder, at Simon. “I’ll stay with Peter here. You Fathers get a drink downstairs.”
She has seen something in his eyes.
“Thanks, Sofia,” I say. Then I kneel before Peter and add, “I’ll be back soon to tuck you in. Best manners, okay?”
“Come on,” Simon whispers to me, tugging at my cassock. “Let’s go.”
* * *
THE SWISS GUARD CANTINA is downstairs in the barracks. It’s a dim place, dungeonlike, where the permanent haze is punctured by a few grim chandeliers. The walls, decorated with life-size murals showing this five-hundred-year-old army in its ancient heyday, were actually painted during John Paul’s lifetime. They’re so embarrassingly cartoonish that for an artist to have created them in the shadow of the Sistine Chapel seems to require a belief in the existence of purgatory.
Simon and I drift to an empty table in the corner, looking for something stronger than wine. Because of his size, he must work hard at his drinking to feel any effects. Wine, though, is what they have here, so Simon’s first little goblet is already behind him when I say, “Why would someone come looking for us?”
He rubs a thumb against the ridged glass of the thick goblet, armored like a grenade. His voice is full of darkness. “If I find out who did that to Peter . . .”
“You really think this could be related to what happened to Ugo?”