The Fifth Gospel(155)
I’m speechless.
“What’s the only question the judges are asking themselves? The security footage is missing. The carpool logs are gone. Witnesses are under oath not to speak. The salient fact of the trial is the silence. The judges want to know where the pressure is coming from, and that’s exactly what the promoter of justice is answering for them. Your brother called you for help. Your hair in the car suggests you helped him clean it out. Your uncle swore all his drivers to secrecy, then let your brother edit Nogara’s exhibit as he saw fit. The exhibit is no longer permissible as a topic of testimony. Where do the silences point, Father? What does it say when your brother refuses to testify? Our possession of Nogara’s mobile phone only confirms everything the prosecution is hinting at.”
“Monsignor . . . I’m sorry.”
He extends an arm in the air. “Enough. Go.”
“Go where?”
“Do you really think,” he snaps, “that I’m going to let you sit beside me while the tribunal considers the evidence of your own complicity? You’ve put me in the position of having to tell the court, in bad faith, that the hair is probably from some other time you drove with Nogara in his car. I have to invent excuses for the phone call, the bribe, the exhibit, the mobile phone. Get out of my sight! The only reason I’m letting you stay on as procurator is that I can’t risk having you testify.”
“Monsignor, I don’t know what to say. I—”
But he swings his briefcase up and gives me his back as he walks away.
In the doorway to the palace stands the promoter of justice. He’s too far away to have overheard anything, but he sizes me up. Mignatto passes him, and they exchange no words. But the prosecutor continues to stare.
CHAPTER 29
I WAIT. LONG AFTER Mignatto and the promoter have returned inside the palace, I stay in the courtyard. Pacing. Hovering in sight of the courtroom doors. No one comes out. I don’t expect them to. But the illusion that I’m waiting for something is all that keeps this reckless feeling in check. This angry, anxious tension that shouts for me to do something.
I start making calls. Michael Black doesn’t answer. So I try again, then a third time. He’s ignoring me, but I’ll wear him down.
On the sixth try I leave a rambling message.
“Michael, pick up your phone. Pick up your phone. If you’re too scared to come to Rome, then you need to talk to Simon’s lawyer. He has to know what happened in that airport.”
As I talk, I stare down the road to the papal palace, looking for Simon. In vain.
Twenty minutes later, Corvi, the forensic analyst, emerges. A gendarme escorts him to the border and out the gate into Rome. Still no sign of Simon.
Then a sedan with tinted windows pulls up in front of the courthouse. I jump to my feet. When the driver gets out to open the rear door, I hurry over.
The back seat is empty. The driver motions me away, but I sidestep him to look into the passenger seat. Empty, too.
A moment later, the courthouse doors open. Archbishop Nowak exits the palace and shuffles to the open car door. I step back.
Nowak’s eyes are downcast. He doesn’t even look at my face. But he extends an arm in front of him to let me pass by first. “Please,” he says.
“Your Grace.”
He repeats the gesture with his arm, waiting for me to pass.
“Your Grace, may I speak to you?”
He’s a large, stooped man, several inches taller than I am. His cassock is untailored. In his face is a faraway sadness, an abstraction that prevents him from looking up and recognizing me as a familiar face from the courtroom. People say that his father, a police officer in Poland, was killed by an oncoming truck at a traffic stop when he was a boy. Now he’s driving home to a second dying father in John Paul. It seems impossible to bring up Simon’s plight with a man who considers suffering a fact of life, but I have to do something.