The Fifth Gospel(5)
From his surprised tone, he has no inkling about Simon. More good news. We negotiate a deal: two tickets to the upcoming exhibit, which Guido knows I can get from Uncle Lucio. Even the proudest sloth in our country wants to see what my friend Ugo has done. When I hang up, I follow the dark trail up the hill to our meeting place, where the wind sharpens to the high hissing sound I heard behind Simon’s phone call.
I’m surprised—and at first, relieved—to see no signs of trouble here. Every time I’ve collected my brother from the police in the past, he’s been part of some agitation. But there are no villagers picketing in the square here, no Vatican employees marching for better wages. At the north end of the village, the pope’s summer palace looks abandoned. The two domes of the Vatican Observatory rise from its roof like lumps on the head of the cartoon characters Peter watches on television. Nothing is amiss here. Nothing even seems alive.
A private walkway leads from the palace to the papal gardens, and at the garden gate I see a pixie of cigarette light hovering in a black fist.
“Guido?”
“Hell of a time for a visit,” the cigarette says, then drops in a puddle to die. “Follow me.”
As my eyes adjust, I see that he looks exactly like the late Big Guido: pug-faced, with a broad beetlelike back. Manual labor has made him a man. The Vatican directory is littered with staff Simon and I knew as children, but my brother and I are almost the only priests. Ours is a caste system in which men proudly replace the fathers and grandfathers who shined floors or fixed furniture before them. It can be hard, though, to watch old playmates rise to a higher station, and there’s a familiar tone in Guido’s voice when he opens the metal lock, points to his truck, and says, “Get in, Father.”
The gates here are to keep out the riffraff, and the hedges are to keep out their eyes. An Italian village sits on either side of our land, but you’d never know it. The spine of this hill, half a mile long, is a private wonderland for the pope. His property at Castel Gandolfo is bigger than the entire Vatican, but nobody lives here, only some gardeners and workmen and the old Jesuit astronomer who sleeps during the day. The real inhabitants are potted fruit trees and avenues of stone pines, flower beds measured in acres, and marble statues left behind by pagan emperors, now mounted in the gardens to give John Paul a smile on his summer walks. From up here, the view is from lake to sea. As we drive down the unpaved garden path, there isn’t another living thing in sight.
“Where were you looking to go?” Guido says.
“Just drop me in the gardens.”
He raises an eyebrow. “In the middle of this?”
The storm rages. His interest piqued by the strangeness of my request, Guido turns on the CB radio to see if there is any chatter. Yet it, too, is silent.
“My girl works down there,” he says, lifting a finger off the wheel to point. “In the olive groves.”
I say nothing. I give tours of this place to new recruits at my old seminary, so in daylight I would know the landscape better. But in the darkness, in this driving rain, all I can make out is the strip of road before the headlights. As we approach the gardens, there are no trucks, no police cars, no gardeners with flashlights sloping through the rain.
“She drives me up a wall,” Guido says, shaking his head. “But Alex, the ass on this girl.” He whistles.
The deeper we drive into these shadows, the more it blooms in me that something is deeply wrong. Simon must be alone in the rain. For the first time, I consider the possibility that he’s hurt. That he’s been in some kind of accident. Yet on the phone he mentioned the police, not an ambulance. I replay our conversation in my mind, searching for something I misunderstood.
Guido’s truck jackknifes up a road through the gardens and comes to the edge of a clearing.