Mignatto hunches over the defense table, emptied of strength. Only Lucio sits upright, disregarding everything else—gendarmes, notary, wreckage of order. He stares at the crucifix over the bench, crosses himself, and murmurs, “Grazie, Dio.”
I hear a familiar voice behind me.
“Eminence, your car is waiting.”
Don Diego brushes past me.
“Uncle,” I say, “what’s going to happen to Simon? What’s going to happen at the exhibit?”
But Lucio’s focus is elsewhere. When Diego offers to assist him out of the palace, my uncle redirects him toward Mignatto. “Help the monsignor to our car. Give him anything he needs.”
The last thing Mignatto says to Lucio before leaving is, “Eminence, you have to be prepared. The Holy Father could resume proceedings as soon as the exhibit is over.”
Lucio merely nods. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today, he is victorious.
“Please, Uncle,” I say when Diego and Mignatto are gone. “What’s happening?”
He places a hand on my head. The physical weakness is returning. His hand shakes. “We’ll know more tonight,” he says. “After the exhibit.”
He turns and walks away. I begin to ask another question, but he never looks back.
* * *
WHEN LUCIO’S SEDAN SLIDES away from the tribunal, I stand outside in the courtyard, trying to orient myself in a world that has changed since I left it. All around me, laymen are walking out of their offices, sent home early to empty the country before Ugo’s exhibit. Cars are lined up at the border gates to leave. Black sedans wait near the doors of the Casa. Through the glass hotel doors I see Orthodox priests milling in the lobby. I hear, just faintly, frenzied nuns calling messages in different languages. Orthodox clergy are checking out their valuables from the hotel safe—jeweled crosses and golden rings and diamond-fretted medallions—and I feel like an altar boy watching priests vest in the sacristy, feeling the mystery of the Church gather in the presence of outward signs. My body vibrates with anxious energy. I try to keep myself in this outer world. But inside, everything is raging.
I’ve always imagined that my father died in agony. When his heart stopped, the pain killed him before the lack of oxygen. He wasn’t found in his chair or bed, but on the bedroom floor, having pulled the Greek cross off his own neck. Mona told me I was wrong. She said he suffered, but not the way I thought. Yet I still keep his cross in a box deep in my closet, never to be touched. And to this day, no image frightens me more than of my father on that floor.
The gospel of John says the final words of Jesus on the cross were triumphant: It is finished. His mission, completed. But only the theological Jesus could’ve spoken those words. The earthly Jesus suffered horribly. Mark’s description has always shattered me: Jesus shouted in a loud voice, “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?” which is translated, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Gospel scholars call this the cry of dereliction. It expresses a suffering so total that God the Son felt abandoned by God the Father. Ugo told me once that crucifixion is like a heart attack prolonged to hours or days. The heart slowly fails. The lungs slowly collapse. The ancient Romans, who set Christians on fire to use them as torches, and carted them into stadiums to watch wild animals devour them, considered crucifixion the worst punishment of all.
These are the two deaths Simon knows best. Our father’s and our Lord’s. So to say he killed another man is to say he was willing to inflict on another living creature an experience he believed to be the sum of torment. This, from the boy who found his father dead on the bedroom floor. In my heart, I will never believe it.
Yet for a moment at the witness table, Lucio seemed to consider it possible. And even now, thoughts creep into my mind. Ugo seemed so angry in the voice message he left Simon. So hurt. He had probably been drinking shortly before he died, since a man who would take the Diatessaron out of the museum to show it to the Orthodox wasn’t acting reasonably. I don’t know what really happened in those final minutes, when only God was watching. And though I tell myself there must’ve been someone else at Castel Gandolfo besides Simon and Ugo—two men were sleeping in that Casa room, and only one man broke into my apartment—the truth is that Lucio’s doubt has left a deep impression.