The Fifth Gospel(9)

            “Why would anyone rob him?” I ask, unable to bear the silence.

            Ugo had almost nothing worth taking. He wore a cheap wristwatch. Carried a wallet whose contents would barely have covered the train fare back to Rome.

            “I don’t know,” Simon says.

            The only time I ever saw Ugo with a wad of cash was after he’d traded money at the airport following a business trip.

            “Were you on the same plane home?” I ask.

            They’ve both been working in Turkey.

            “No,” Simon says distantly. “He got in two nights ago.”

            “What was he doing here?”

            My brother glances at me, as if trying to sift meaning from gibberish.

            “Preparing his exhibit,” Simon says.

            “Why would he have gone walking in the gardens?”

            “I don’t know.”

            There are a handful of museums and archaeological sites among these hills, in the Italian territory surrounding the pope’s property. Ugo could’ve been doing research there, or meeting with another curator. But the outdoor sites would’ve closed when the storm came through, and Ugo would’ve been forced to find shelter.

            “The villa in the gardens,” I say. “Maybe that’s where he was headed.”

            Simon nods. The voice on the radio says, Weaving a crown out of thorns, they placed it on Jesus’ head, and a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” The next round of prayers starts, and Simon follows it, leaving chips of dirt on the beads as they move under his thumb. He’s never been a fastidious priest, but he’s always been trim and tidy. As the mud dries on his skin, he stares at the spiderwebs of cracks forming in it, and at the flakes of dust stripped off by the rosary.

            I remember the two of us sitting just like this, shortly after Peter’s birth, on the night I drove Simon to the airport for his first posting overseas. We listened to the radio, watching planes swim into the air overhead, leaving contrails like angels. My brother believed that diplomacy was God’s work, that negotiating tables were where religious hatreds went to die. When he accepted a post in lowly Bulgaria, where fewer than one in a hundred people is Catholic, Uncle Lucio wrung his hands and said Simon might as well work for the pork lobby in Israel. But three out of four Bulgarians are Orthodox Christians, and ever since my brother’s trip to Athens, it had been his project to promote the reunion   of the earth’s two biggest Churches. That kind of idealism had always been Simon’s besetting sin. Priests in our Secretariat of State are promoted on a timetable—bishop in ten years, archbishop in twenty—which explains why so many of the world’s hundred fifty cardinals are Secretariat men. But the ones who fall short tend to be the ones waylaid by good intentions. As Lucio warned him, a maharaja has to choose between leading his people and cleaning up after his elephant. In that metaphor, Mona, Peter, and I were the elephant. Simon needed to extricate himself from us before his sense of obligation slowed him down.

            But then Simon posted to Turkey, and God tossed him a new charity case: Ugo Nogara. A lost sheep. A fragile soul struggling with the masterpiece of his career. So I can imagine what my brother must feel at this moment. An agony not entirely different from what I would feel if something had happened to Peter.

            “Ugo’s in a good place,” I remind him.

            This is the conviction that helped two boys survive the deaths of their parents. Beyond death is life; beyond suffering, peace. But Simon is still too raw to absorb Ugo’s death. Instead of thumbing the rosary, he grips it in his hand.

            “What did the gendarme ask you?” I say.