When I nod, he rises and packs the libellus back into his briefcase.
“One last thing,” Mignatto says, clicking the locks. “You need to speak to your housekeeper about the break-in.”
“She didn’t lie about what happened.”
He lowers his voice. “Father, you’re asking me to believe a theory of this murder that I consider almost impossible. In return I need you to do the same. Speak to your housekeeper. I have to know why the gendarmes came to the conclusion they did.”
CHAPTER 15
FOR A WHILE after Mignatto leaves, I sit alone at the meeting table. I stare at the chair where Simon sat. At the place on the red baize where he placed the libellus after refusing to look at it. With Mignatto gone, the reckoning comes. He has done it. My brother has finally cut his own throat.
We are a religion of captains hoping to go down with the ship. Though we teach our children that the worst thing Judas ever did—worse even than betraying Jesus—was committing suicide, the truth is that what moves the lifeblood of our faith is a thumping impulse toward self-destruction. Greater love has no one than this, Jesus says in the gospel of John. To lay down one’s life for one’s friends. I wonder why Simon is doing this. For Ugo? For the memory of our father?
Or for me?
* * *
A FEW MONTHS AFTER our father died, when Simon was seventeen, he went to a bar with some of our Swiss Guard friends and found a pack of gendarmes running arm-wrestling matches. Nothing organized, just policemen letting off steam. Simon wasn’t even old enough to drive, but he had grown to be the tallest man in our country. Since our father’s death, he’d also spent every day developing an interest in punching the speed bag in the Swiss Guard gym. So by the time he walked into that bar, his forearms were thicker than his biceps, and when the gendarmes got a look at them dangling from the bottoms of his rolled-up sleeves, they wanted to see what he could do.
The guards felt protective of my brother. He and I were already slipping into the dark pit that our father’s death left behind. No one understood our loneliness better than those boys from the faraway cantons. That day at the bar, they pulled Simon away and started to lead him out the door—when their own Guard officer ordered them to wait. He wanted to see what would happen.
Simon lost the first match. He lifted his elbow off the table, a foul, and the gendarme smashed him into the wood. But they reset the table, and Simon got some coaching from the Swiss Guard officer. This time he won, nearly breaking the man’s arm. That was how it started.
The same night, the officer took Simon to the deck of his apartment in the Swiss barracks. He posed two questions: Was it true Simon wanted to be a priest? And would he consider another kind of service to the Holy Father?
Simon listened as the officer explained there was a military tradition in our Church, which moved hand-in-hand with the priesthood. Five centuries ago, the Jesuits were founded on military discipline, by a soldier, and now the time had come to rekindle that spirit: to recruit men, train them, and enlist them in a military order to serve a troubled world. For a man like Simon, it would capitalize on physical gifts the priesthood would never use. So the next night, Simon followed the man into Rome for what the officer described as a demonstration of what he meant. And the officer encouraged my brother to keep an open mind.
I discovered later that the place they went was a dogfighting pit. The Rome police had shut it down a month before, but it had found new life running street-boxing matches instead. Most of the fighters were homeless people and immigrants, and the purse was big enough that the fights were bloody.
The officer showed Simon that there were children in the crowd. Boys and girls, eight and ten and twelve years old, greasy like rats, shouting for their favorite fighters. Those kids don’t come to Mass, the officer said. If we want to reach them, this is where we have to do it.
Later, Simon would tell me about the things he saw that night. The children were stretching out their arms to touch the fighters who passed by, grabbing the hems of their shorts as if they were a disease they wanted to catch. Everyone old enough to gamble was in the front of the crowd, putting money on the fights. But the children were in back. That was when the officer spoke the words Simon never forgot: Tell me you’ve ever seen a kid look at his priest that way. And he pointed to a boy in the ringside stands, pressed between gamblers, watching the fight with upturned eyes. Simon said it was like a saint being martyred in a painting.