The Fifth Gospel(54)

            Simon and I used to love watching the freight trains come and go at the Vatican station. Instead of hoppers of coal or grain, they carried business suits for our department store, or marble for Lucio’s construction projects, or vaccines for missionaries in far-off countries. When I was twelve, Guido Canali tried to steal a box of wristwatches from a train car and ended up tipping two stacks of crates on himself. FOR HIS HOLINESS ONLY, the crates said, so the other boys wouldn’t touch them, not even to lift them from Guido’s body. Only Simon would heave them off, a hundred pounds apiece. Blood oranges: that’s what ended up down on the station platform, smashed like Easter eggs. Blood oranges sent to John Paul by some monastery in Sicily. That’s what Guido had almost died for.

            I wonder if the Simon of that night lives only in my imagination now. If the Secretariat has trained him out of existence. An oath is a weighty thing for any Catholic; there can be penalties under Church law for breaking one. But even Michael Black has the heart to make an exception.

            Michael is the Judas of our family—in Simon’s eyes, at least. Sixteen years ago, Michael and my father traveled together to Turin for the unveiling of the radiocarbon dating on the Shroud. My father left Turin shattered. By the time he died, eight weeks later, Michael had quit his job and written my family a letter saying that our idea of a reunion   between the Churches was laughable. The Orthodox obviously wanted nothing from us but fodder for ancient hatreds, fresh reasons to blame us for everything. Michael demanded to know why my father would push for a reunion   with three hundred million Orthodox who treated Eastern Catholics—many of us minorities in Orthodox countries—like heretics and turncoats. Soon after, Michael found a new job working for the Vatican’s new second-in-command: Cardinal Boia.

            Boia was just beginning to clamp down on John Paul’s outreach to the Orthodox, and Michael fit into his plans as a type of priest known as a Quasimodo—a man sent out to frighten the villagers, to create ugly misunderstandings and ruin the clockwork of diplomacy. The Quasimodo is the valve of dissent in a bureaucracy where no one can outwardly defy the pope. Michael got into shouting matches with Orthodox bishops, uttered public slurs, made an art of the bombshell interview. To Simon, this was the deepest betrayal. My brother could never accept that faith sometimes lends itself to wild changes of heart, and that a man who turns his back on one thing will often repent by becoming its opposite. Get behind me, Satan.

            The Michael I remember is different. In a world of uptight Roman priests in cassocks, he was a young American in a short-sleeved priest shirt with a cheap tab collar. He wore a digital watch and Nike high-tops in priestly black. Two years before the radiocarbon fiasco, he brought Simon and me to the Spanish Steps for the opening of Rome’s first McDonald’s. He scandalized the Italians by drinking Coca-Cola at breakfast. I never understood, until I met Michael, the possibility of being successfully different. Of being happily and completely unassimilated. I am saddened to think that the Secretariat took that wonderful golem and shaped him into something worse than an ordinary bureaucrat. At the bottom of my father’s sadness I always sensed the unanswered conviction that the world would someday budge. That it would meet him in the middle. I never knew why Michael had his change of heart, but I suspected it was my father’s fault for infecting him with too much optimism. A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep his dreams in check, but there’s nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.

            The phone begins to ring, and I turn to grab it. Only then do I notice there’s a man standing at the next street corner, watching me.

            I step back. But the man raises a hand in the air.

            Agent Martelli. I didn’t even notice him follow me here from the Casa. Michael was right. My idea of safe isn’t safe enough.

            I pick up the receiver. “Michael?”

            “Are you alone?”

            I hesitate. “Yes.”

            “Before we do this, I need to be clear. If you tell anyone that I talked to you, these people will find me again.”