Blood Symbols

by Izak Botha

  Lioni pushed past Franco. ‘We heard screams,’ he said.

  Franco resisted. ‘Stop!’

  ‘What do you mean, “Stop”? I have to investigate.’

  Franco’s customary gentle manner did not prevent him from executing orders. He would not let Lioni intimidate him. ‘I can’t let you in, Arno,’ he said in a firm tenor.

  As if it were yesterday, Lioni recalled Father Franco’s impact on his early life. Lioni had grown up on a small farm just outside Novara. As the resident priest, Father Franco had often visited Lioni’s family. Lioni’s father had an abusive streak, which intensified when he was drunk. Lioni had once discovered his mother in shock and crying in the bathroom. She had had marks on her neck from his father’s attempts to strangle her. He remembered joining his father on the backyard porch where the older man sat smoking a cigarette rolled in a bit of newspaper. He had challenged the old man. Standing in front of him, he had told him he would kill him if he ever disrespected his mother again. His father had just sat there, dazed like the wino he was. They never mentioned the incident afterwards, but his father never touched his mother in anger again—not while Lioni still lived in the house anyhow.

  Lioni respected the Father caring for him as a child and appreciated the help he had given him and his family, but right now he had a job to do. He pushed ahead again and once more the priest resisted.

  Franco had orders to locate Cardinal Cardoni. Dialing the number of the libraries and simultaneously keeping an eye on Lioni, he waited for an answer. On recognizing the curator’s voice, he froze. The curator must have also heard the cries to be answering himself. ‘Most Reverend Monsignor. ... It’s Father Franco ..., from the Penitentiary,’ he stuttered. ‘Is His Eminence Cardinal Cardoni available? It’s really very urgent.’

  ‘Pull yourself together, Father,’ the curator barked. ‘What’s happening over there? We heard shouting.’

  Franco did not have time to explain. In any case, he did not know what to say. ‘Most Reverend Monsignor,’ he continued, ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but I have orders to contact His Eminence the Cardinal. Again, I say it is urgent. In fact, I cannot emphasize enough how urgent it is.’

  ‘He is in a meeting, Father. Can I come over?’

  Franco’s heart thumped against his chest with all the force of a vengeful boxer. Between needing to respect the request of the Monsignor and having to carry out His Excellency’s instructions he was nearly petrified with indecision. Still, Santori’s orders had been clear: ‘I’m not allowed to let anyone in except His Eminence the Cardinal and perhaps His Holiness the Pope.’

  ‘Oh, it’s the Holy Father you need. I’ll be sure to get your message to him right away.’

  Speaking with the curator had always been a challenge—the Spanish ancestry of the Argentinean priest did have its drawbacks. ‘Most Reverend, I just need His Eminence Cardinal Cardoni,’ Franco said, his voice now a quivering falsetto. ‘He must come right away.’

  Chapter 6

  The elevator’s descent into the nuclear bombproof bunker seemed endless. Jennifer moved the trolley over to the other side and pressed her sweaty palms against the back wall like a runner, readying herself to dash forwards when the doors opened. In the absence of any better plan, she would simply bowl over anyone who tried to stop her.

  She heard a telephone ring. Her heart raced like a caged tiger’s when the elevator’s doors at last slid open. What now?

  Before her was a lobby with a control desk set against one of the concrete walls about twenty feet from the elevator. A priest stood in front of the desk, his arms akimbo. Although he had his back to her, she recognized him instantly; with a heightened sense of danger, she easily spotted Father Romano’s spidery fingers. Another priest sat beside the counter. He answered the phone and spoke briefly, hurrying through the required protocols. The person at the other end must have been curt with him, because the priest soon passed the handset to Romano, immediately sitting back and crossing his arms as he listened.

  When Romano uttered ‘Monsignor’, she knew it was Bishop Albani alerting them of her breach of security. She peered out of the elevator. Passages ran from left to right. Another priest with a laden trolley was approaching from the left, removing that option. There was no time to think and no alternative; she turned right, pushing the trolley from the lift. As Romano returned the receiver to its place behind the desk, she turned to retreat, but the elevator doors had already closed behind her.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss, can I help you?’

  The priest beside Romano was pointing in her direction. Feigning deafness, she started down the passage, the sound of several sets of footsteps propelling her forwards. She had no idea why she was even attempting to reach the steel door at the far end of this passage. She glanced behind her—Romano was closing in as if possessed, while the other priest was close behind him. With about fifteen feet to go, she realized she would not make the door, so just before reaching it, she let go of the trolley. Accelerating past it, she managed to squeeze between it and the closed door. Then, using the door as support, she stopped the trolley and with all the might she could muster, heaved it and its contents back towards the approaching priests.

  Romano was not expecting a trolley laden with valuable manuscripts to come speeding towards him. Stopping abruptly to steel himself for impact, he slid across the floor; instinctively flinging his arms protectively across the manuscripts to prevent their crashing to the ground. A loud groan escaped his lips as the trolley’s handrail hit his solar plexus. And, though the priest behind him, apparently realizing what was about to happen, tried to scuttle past, the trolley swept sideways and both were knocked backwards, trapped beneath the tumbling manuscripts.

  Jennifer watched all this, somewhat amused, despite the extreme nature of her situation. Her response was short lived, for seconds later, the elevator behind the priests dinged and out stepped Cardinal Cardoni, his temples bulging with pulsating veins and his skin crimson with anger. Close on his heels was Bishop Albani.

  ‘Stop this instant!’ Cardoni screamed.

  Swinging towards the steel door, Jennifer tried the cardinal’s key card. A red light flashed. Oh, God no! The footsteps behind her were growing louder causing her hands to shake uncontrollably. She swiped the card again. Please God! A split-second delay felt like an eternity. It flashed green! The magnetic lock kicked back. She flung the door open and leapt through, slamming it shut just in time to keep Romano from jamming it with his foot.

  Jennifer turned from the door. Before her hundreds of steel shelves stood in rows like coaches at a rail yard. If she had ever needed God’s help, now was the time. She knew the archives had only two climate-controlled storerooms with acid-free cardboard casings for the Vatican’s ancient parchments. And if the ducts lining the ceilings and rows of steel cabinets were any indication, she had found one of them. Glimpsing the Vaticanus was now a distinct possibility.

  Outside, Cardoni’s fist crashed against the door. She turned as he pressed his nose against the reinforced glass. He demanded that she open the door, but she waved him off. She would not leave until she had achieved her objective. She heard Cardoni call for Albani’s card. God mostly did not listen, but He was especially deaf this morning. Still, she had to try. Again, she prayed for a miracle.

  To the rear of the bunker, a row of display cabinets stood under fluorescent lights. Hoping to glimpse something—anything—she ran towards it. The door burst open behind her as she reached the first display. She did not look back but rested her hands on the Plexiglas top. Inside the cabinet lay an open papyrus scroll. At eighteen inches by at least twelve feet, it filled the cabinet. She tried to read the text and saw it was in Koine Greek. Skimming a few lines, she recognized the dialect as that of a first-century Judean, possibly a Galilean, but certainly from the early Roman Empire, sometime between the reigns of Nero and Trajan. Scholars had long suspected the original Gospels and Pauline Epistles were in Koine, hence the term New Testament Greek
. The fact that the author had used such an early dialect must mean the scroll dated from that era. But, suddenly appalled at the thought of relinquishing her freedom to read a parchment that only confirmed what she already knew, Jennifer turned away and continued her search for the Vaticanus. She recognized nothing that resembled the photos she had seen. Had she utterly failed? Feeling she probably had, she began sinking into the same despondency that had affected her earlier. Just then, though, her eyes fell on a bronze plaque below the parchment. She moved her head out of the way for the lamp above her to light the inscription. The first line was in Latin, and the second was in Koine. Without thinking, she translated both into English:

  The Sayings of Jesus

  At that moment, Cardoni stalked towards her. ‘You’ve gone far enough!’ he cried out.

  Jennifer’s eyes were deceiving her, surely. The first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, differed vastly from John. Of course, they also disagreed with each other in many respects, but as they included many of the same stories and sequences, as well as similar wording, scholars had long ruled coincidence out of the question. Their congruities could be explained as each successive Gospel simply borrowing from its earlier predecessor, but it was their incongruities that had long made for one of history’s most mysterious literary enigmas. Known as the Synoptic Problem, the phenomenon had left academics puzzled for centuries. Jennifer had herself spent years pondering the theoretical dilemma it posed. Matthew and Luke attributed many of the same sayings to Jesus, and of these shared quotations, nearly a quarter in each was found nowhere else in the New Testament. One theory held that a fifth Gospel, named die Quelle (the German word for source), or simply ‘Q,’ was where these shared sayings most likely originated; accordingly, proponents of this view also hypothesized that Mark and Q had served as the antecedents of Matthew and Luke. Theories abounded around these Q-based similarities, but after more than a century of exhaustive archaeological searching and critical speculation, solid evidence of Q had yet to emerge. Of course, one yet unexplored idea was that Q represented several sources, some written and some oral, but if Jennifer had just read what she thought she had …

  Cardoni grabbed her. ‘That’s enough. I’m calling the guards.’

  Despite her capture, Jennifer was elated. If the scroll was what she suspected, she had just made one of the most extraordinary finds of the past two millennia. She yanked herself free.

  ‘This is Q, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m having you removed from the library.’

  ‘You said you don’t have anything older than the Vaticanus, but this is way older!’

  Cardoni grasped her arm and gripped it even more tightly. ‘There is no “Q”. Now step away from the cabinet.’

  Again, she shook him off, and this time she stepped back. No reference to Quelle existed on the Vatican’s website or in its encyclopedia, so clearly the Holy See did not acknowledge its existence. Yet here she stood, mere feet from a text the Church had omitted from the biblical canon and hidden from the faithful since before Jerome translated the Vulgate. She stared at Romano, who now looked like a cat whose milk had been stolen.

  ‘Have you ever seen this?’ she asked.

  God could strike Romano at any moment. He had never been this far into the archives before, nor had he ever heard anything about this Q business.

  ‘Out!’ Cardoni commanded, glaring first at the control-desk priest, then to Romano. ‘Father, help me get this woman out of here.’

  Naturally, Romano would not wish to contradict a cardinal, but he needed an explanation: ‘I’ve never heard of ...’

  ‘Of course not,’ Jennifer said, interrupting him. ‘Your See would prefer you believe the Apostles wrote the Gospels, but they didn’t. The existence of Q proves the Gospel writers weren’t even contemporaries of Jesus.’

  Cardoni lunged for Jennifer’s arm, but she dodged his grasp. ‘Who wrote this?’ she demanded.

  ‘Are you crippled, Father?’ Cardoni snapped at Romano.

  ‘Where does it originate?’ Jennifer persisted.

  ‘She has a point,’ Romano thought. His right to know made him back away from the combative cardinal.

  Realizing he needed Romano’s assistance, Cardoni finally conceded. ‘It’s from Antioch,’ he hissed.

  Jennifer brightened at this first blood, realizing that she too owed Romano. ‘When was it found, Your Eminence?’ she asked.

  ‘The twelfth century.’

  ‘By ...?’

  ‘“By!” You think I’m on a first-name basis with long-dead monks? Enough!’

  Grabbing Jennifer in one swift motion, Cardoni began propelling her towards the chamber’s exit, but again she jerked away. ‘If you do that again, I’ll call the cops myself!’ Then, avoiding another altercation, she strode back towards the door. She had seen enough. She had to get the hell out of there.

  Chapter 7

  Santori was pacing. Where was Cardoni? He wondered if his secretary had understood the importance of calling the Cardinal Librarian. He opened his office door.

  ‘Did you get Cardinal Cardoni?’ he snapped.

  With the pane obscuring his view, he could not see the gendarme and Swiss guards talking to Franco.

  ‘Your Eminence, he is in a meeting,’ Franco responded.

  On hearing the cardinal’s voice, one Helvetian struck his halberd against the floor in salute.

  As Lioni advanced, Santori stiffened like a drawn bow. He did not need any help from a gendarme or Swiss guards, nor was there time to explain. He gazed at Franco.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ he asked, blaming his assistant for their presence.

  Lioni’s initial instinct to kneel and kiss Santori’s ring was short-lived, for when he saw the cardinal half-dressed and covered in blood, he leapt up to help him.

  Again, Franco stepped in to block the adjutant.

  Santori could not waste any more time quibbling over Lioni’s presence. He gestured towards the adjutant’s two-way radio. ‘Sound the alarm and secure the complex,’ he snarled.

  Lioni was not sure he understood the cardinal correctly. ‘What complex, Your Eminence?’

  ‘The entire city, idiot. There’s been a breach.’

  In the six years Lioni had served as a gendarme, nobody had ever called him an idiot. Neither had he heard anyone demanding the Vatican be closed. Yet there he stood, facing a high-ranking official who was demanding just that. ‘Your Eminence, we cannot simply close the Vatican. We have thousands of dignitaries and visitors.’

  Santori stepped out of his office to face Lioni. ‘Close off all entrances immediately,’ he roared, his eyes baleful. ‘Do not let anyone out. That’s an order.’

  ‘The entire Vatican, Your Eminence?’ Lioni’s name might symbolize Africa’s fiercest predator, but in confronting the Maggiore, he was but a cub.

  ‘Stop parroting me, and do as I say!’ Santori barked.

  Lioni stood, his arms hanging limply. ‘I cannot authorize that,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll have to report to Command.’

  Every second Lioni wasted gave the fugitive more time to escape. Santori could not afford that. This predicament required immediate action. To get Lioni’s cooperation, he changed his strategy. ‘Get a hold of Colonel Schreider,’ he said. ‘He must come at once. Tell him a priest is dead.’

  ‘Dear God!’ Father Franco’s blood drained from his face. Having arrived fifteen minutes late for work, he did not know who had come in before him. ‘Your Eminence, who ...?’

  ‘Father Yilmaz.’

  Franco gasped. Everyone at the Vatican knew Father Yilmaz. In the short time, he had been at the library, he had become one of their most admired priests. Coming from Antioch, he had been an inspiration to them all. ‘How, Your Eminence?’

  ‘Murdered!’ Santori spat. ‘Now get a hold of His Eminence Cardinal Cardoni and get me Colonel Schreider. I need them both here immediately.’

  Lioni felt as if a signal scrambler had blurred his thoughts. He
had worked at the Vatican for three years now, but had not experienced anything as dramatic before. Santori’s demanding Colonel Schreider come to the Penitentiary did not make it any easier on him either. As Commander of the Swiss Guard, the colonel only provided security for the Holy See and the pope. A slain priest therefore fell under gendarmerie jurisdiction. Lioni should be calling his own Inspector General, Arnaldo Verretti. All the same, preferring to avoid more trouble, he decided to oblige the blood-covered cardinal. Once he had reported the incident to Command his Inspector would hear about it anyway. Suddenly, though, it dawned on him that he had not even seen the body yet. How could he report a murder before verifying it?

  ‘Your Eminence, I need to see the body,’ said Lioni, fearing the answer he knew he would get.

  Santori reddened as his blood sweltered. ‘Give me that damned radio!’ Then, snatching the two-way from Lioni, he pressed the talk switch. ‘Command, this is Cardinal Santori. A priest has been murdered. Send Colonel Schreider to the Penitentiary immediately.’ And, passing the radio back. ‘Now do as I say. Tell them to shut the city gates.’

  Hoping to prevent the Maggiore from taking his two-way again, Lioni started for the exit. He needed a moment to compose himself before he called Command.

  Santori’s skin felt stiff from the blood drying on it. He leaned against Franco’s desk, ordering his secretary to fetch a damp towel.

  Franco disappeared into the adjacent bathroom. Moments later and still shaken by the death of Father Yilmaz, he reappeared with a silver bowl half-filled with water. Damping the towel, he started wiping the blood from Santori’s face. He could not believe anyone would kill their library Father. He had not heard a bad word said about the man.

  Meanwhile, sitting with his eyes closed, Santori used the moment’s respite to prioritize his next moves. Recovering the stolen artefact came first. Keeping the contents of the stolen items secret was crucial. Nobody could see it. That meant they would have to catch the thief. He had two choices: Colonel Schreider, Commander of the Swiss Guard, and Inspector General Verretti, head of the Vatican’s Gendarmerie. Colonel Schreider was surely the best man for the job; he was Swiss, and the Swiss were the most reliable people on Earth. As Commander of the Swiss Guard, the colonel had also sworn an oath to protect the Holy See with his life. They could worry about Father Yilmaz later.