Before calling, I try to clear my mind. It’s been over a decade since I spoke to Michael, and we’re separated by a graveyard of hatchets. He turned his back on my father after the debacle of the Shroud’s radiocarbon dating. He also reported Simon for going absent without leave at work. Yet there was a time when I knew him better than any priest but my father. When I trusted him above any other man. That’s the Michael I try to think of as I dial.
“Pronto,” comes the voice on the other line.
“Is this Michael?”
“Who’s this?”
“Alex Andreou.”
The silence is so long that I fear there will be nothing after it.
“Michael,” I say, “there’s something I need to talk to you about. In person, if possible. Where are you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
His voice is almost exactly the way I remember it. Dry and sharp and impatient. But the flat American accent that was once so prominent has been smoothed by a decade of practice, making it easier to hear the note of defensiveness behind his words. To hear him trying to piece together why I’m calling.
When I explain about the photo, he doesn’t respond.
“Please,” I say. “I need to know who attacked you.”
“None. Of. Your. Business.”
Finally I tell him a man was killed.
“What are you talking about?”
It’s unexpectedly hard to talk about Ugo. I try to be concise—to say that he was a Vatican curator, that he had been working on the upcoming exhibit—but Michael must hear the emotion swelling in my voice. He waits.
“He was,” I say, “my friend.”
Just for an instant, Michael softens.
“Whoever did that,” he says, “I hope to hell they catch him.” Then the gruffness returns. “But I’m not going to talk about what happened to me. You got to ask someone else about that.”
I’m not sure if there’s an insinuation in it.
“I already asked my brother,” I tell him. “Simon’s under oath not to talk about it.”
Michael makes a derisive sound. There must still be bad blood between them. Or else this is the residue of something older, of the way he left things with my father.
“Please,” I say. “I don’t care what happened before—”
He howls. “You don’t care? I had my eye socket broken. I had to have my nose rebuilt.”
“I mean whatever happened between you and Simon. Or my father. All I want to know is who did this.”
“You people are unbelievable! I might as well be talking to your father. You Greeks, always the victims. He’s the one who sent my career down in flames.”
You people. You Greeks. I try to keep the anger out of my voice.
“Please. Just tell me what happened.”
He’s breathing heavily into the phone. “I can’t. I’m under oath, too.”
Something snaps inside me. “I’ve got a five-year-old son who can’t sleep in his own bed because you took an oath?”
Oaths. A bureaucrat’s best friend. How a desk-job bishop buries his mistakes: by swearing his priest-underlings to secrecy.