Two penitentiary guards in sky-blue berets and indigo uniforms jumped out.
While newspaper photographers snapped pictures, the guards argued in loud voices with a carabiniere who insisted on helping them unload Otto Fischer and perp-walking him in handcuffs to the prison entrance. Leone overheard the guards insist they had jurisdiction over the prisoner transport, while the carabiniere countered that since his law enforcement agency had arrested Fischer, he should have a role in the transport. The dispute widened to include a uniformed officer of the Polizia di Stato, who claimed the right to place the crowd-control barriers. Grateful only three of the six separate law-enforcement departments were getting in one another’s way, Leone went back to soliciting alms, hoping to snuff out the first signs of riot.
The two penitentiary guards trundled Fischer out of the van. A weathered stick of a man, Fischer leaned on his walker while the guards yelled avanti, avanti. A bottle hurtled into the street and shattered not far from the prisoner. Hands behind the barriers grabbed for the Nazi. A few protestors broke through the barriers. A uniformed contingent of the Polizia di Stato beat them back with riot shields and batons.
Like a cat intent on a mouse, Leone looked over shoulders to fix on Fischer lurching on his walker toward the prison entrance. The old man behind the crinkly face should have flashed traces of a devil. Instead, he just looked like a stereotypical senior citizen in a television ad. Leone caressed the Beretta 92FS pistol concealed in his wrinkled and stained trousers.
A riot would erupt any minute.
In the confusion and escalating tensions, no one would blame him if a shot from his Beretta was thought to have gone astray and killed the monster of the Ardeatine Caves.
To get a better view, he shoved his way to the first row behind the barriers, people yelling at him and kicking him, just another pushy street bum who didn’t know his place.
Someone forced Leone sideways against the bandaged hand of a man leaning up against the barrier. Under the wrapped hand, Leone felt pressing into his ribs a lump hard as steel. Who would bandage a prosthetic hand?
The man tried hiding the hand under a cardigan sweater tied around his neck by its arms. Who would wear a sweater on such a humid day?
Though he kept tugging at his sweater, the man couldn’t quite cover his hand. Why would he even try to shield a hand already protected by a bandage?
“Watch where you’re going,” the man said. The bandage came loose.
The glint of sun on metal flashed into the commissario’s eyes locked in a trance with those of the man, both knowing but not saying what the hand held.
He would not bear the responsibility if the man shot the monster. They didn’t censure the police guards when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in broad daylight.
The Nazi relic limping along on his walker like a windup toy made a fine target. Leone pretended not to see the man next to him remove the bandage and jerk the pistol free of the sweater.
The man took aim.
Not to stop the man would betray an oath of office and his self-image as an upholder of law.
To allow the killing of the has-been Nazi would kill a part of himself. He would be just another dog in a mondo cane world where dogs ate dogs.
Leone grabbed the arm with the pistol. The gun discharged, causing the mob to stampede through the barrier. The police beat back the crowd with shields and batons. He twisted the arm behind the man until the pistol clunked on the ground. Rossi rushed to help Leone wrestle the would-be killer into submission.
An egg smashed against Otto Fischer’s back followed by a volley of tomatoes splattering Leone and Rossi. The penitentiary guards held up the prisoner, about to fall from his walker.
Personnel from Regina Coeli rushed out a wheelchair. The uniformed Polizia di Stato formed the ancient Roman military formation called the tortoise. They aligned their shields to make a compact marching unit protected with a shield wall on the sides and overhead. In the protected center, Fischer moved forward in his wheelchair. The formation lockstepped toward the prison door as eggs, rocks, tomatoes, and bottles ricocheted off the shields.
The Polizia di Stato dragged the foiled assassin to a police car. Dangling the bandage from his hand, he shook a clenched fist at Leone. “If there were a God, that Nazi beast would have also butchered someone in your family.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
“Time’s almost up,” the prison guard said. He tilted his chair back against the visiting-room wall and crossed his legs on a desk.
The old man folded his hands. “Can you please help me?” He pressed his forehead against the grillwork.
“Help you?” Will Fisher stared at his father’s scraggly white whiskers. He looked withered almost beyond recognition. Did he want money? A lawyer?
“The prison warden helped you.” More than you deserved. “Without isolated detention, the other prisoners would have torn you apart.”
“I need you.”
“No you don’t. You abandoned us.”
“Forgive me.”
“Ask your Nazi victims to forgive.”
“I beg your forgiveness.”
“Hurry it up, you two.” The guard plucked an iPhone from his pocket.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Fisher spread his palms across the grillwork. “You were with the SS third battalion in Rome, not at a desk job in Bavaria. You murdered Benjamin Leone in the Ardeatine Caves. It’s all over the newspapers and TV.”
“Pipe down, you two.” The guard followed up his command by plugging himself into the earbuds of his iPhone.
“I was young and drunk. I shot him under orders. They said he was a terrorist.” Otto Fischer bowed his head. “Every day I remember. So late we learn.”
“Why did you tell the reporters you were my father?”
The old man returned to destroy a son’s lifelong struggle to forget.
“But I am.”
“You lied to me.”
“You tell always the truth, my son?”
“I’m not on trial for war crimes.”
“Ein neues Leben.” His father started to cry. “A new life, I said in my heart. Starting fresh in America.”
The son couldn’t remember the stone face ever shedding a tear.
“A new life? I remember you as a drunk when you weren’t trying to relive your life through me. You deserted us. You left a stack of debts. That was your new life, not mine. Mine is as far away from you as I could get.”
Aware of his shrillness, Will Fisher looked at the guard, tuned out on his iPhone.
“I am so, so sorry, my son. Don’t be like me.”
Don’t be like me, not like me, his father would say, hugging him after a drunken fit of rage, leaving him confused and ashamed of a father coming unglued.
“Why do you visit me in Regina Coeli?”
“I’m only here because of my colleague, Dr. Nicole Garvey. Before her father died, he claimed her real great-grandfather was Benjamin Leone. Is it true?”
“It is true.” Otto rubbed his red-rimmed eyes, his voice now hoarse. “I saw the birth paper. La Sirena was die Mutter—”
“Stop.” His father’s linguistic contortions and German lapse under stress embarrassed him enough in Milwaukee. “No German.”
“La Sirena was the mother and Benjamin Leone the Va . . . the father. I showed the police the birth paper. The birth paper said the baby had a . . . how do you say in English? I forget now . . . Schmetterling—”
“Butterfly mark?” He’d seen it on Nicole’s arm in the Castello of Julius II.
“Ja . . . Yes, I mean. I’m sorry.”
“Who betrayed Leone?”
“Jesse Soames, an American spy. Not La Sirena.” The father steadied his hand on the walker next to the stool he sat on. “I have Parkin-sohn’s disease.”
“It’s call
ed Parkinson’s . . . if you’re still speaking English.”
“Du musst . . . You must forgive.”
You must do this—you must do that. He had enough musts from this man.
“Remember, my son, when I took you home?”
His father had bailed him out of jail, a drunk teenager. He cleaned the vomit off his son and put him to bed without blame.
“You only did it because I was a drunk like you.” He didn’t care if this was true or not. He just wanted to hurt the man who had hurt him. The desire to hurt stung him.
“Not so, not so.” Otto Fischer’s hand trembled. “My son, what can I do things better to make?”
“Tell me and the commissario about Lucio Piso and associates.”
“Piso helped me. How can I turn on him?”
“Do you want more deaths? Help us find the terrorists.”
The guard ripped off the earbuds and raced toward them.
“Don’t get excited,” Will Fisher said to the guard as he put on his jacket. “I’m leaving now.”
“You misunderstand,” the guard said. “Wonderful news. The Holy Father has come out of his coma!”
“I will tell you about Piso . . . if you visit again.”
“I will visit. I will also leave and never come back if you don’t tell all.”
“Will you forgive me then?”
“I don’t know.”
Chapter Sixty
In the semicircle of stairs descending into the bowels of St. Peter’s Basilica, the glow of nearly a hundred vigil lights flickered across the faces of Cardinal Gustavo Furbone and Carlos Stroheim.
“I’m not postponing the inspection.” The cardinal walked farther down the steps. “We’re going under without him.”
“We should wait.” The prefect of the secret archives hesitated to follow. “The pope commanded his participation in the inspection.”
“That’s why we’re leaving.” How dare this outsider from the African bush order a maverick like Fisher to oversee him? After all, Cardinal Gustavo Furbone was the scion of aristocrats, the new administrator of St. Peter’s Basilica, and God willing, the next pope.
They said Celestine VI’s deliverance from the coma was God’s miracle.
The cardinal thought it the devil’s work.
Since his recovery, the pope was not himself. The doctors had warned of mood swings. From a hospital bed he struggled for control of the Vatican bureaucracy as the pace of recovery quickened. He issued commands instead of his former suggestions. He demanded information about things previously of no interest to him. He ordered around subordinates to whom he had once abdicated total discretion.
Wary of the low archways in the Vatican Grottoes under St. Peter’s, cardinal and prefect walked single file down into the gloom of what seemed the entrance to the mythological underworld. Whining about germs, the Colombian hypochondriac wiped away the condensation on his wire-rimmed glasses with a sanitizer tissue.
Celestine VI now treated his cardinal like a flunky functionary instead of a more knowledgeable partner. By what right did this darkie pope overrule his decision to stop work on retrofitting the basilica foundation? The pope’s disrespect pained him like fishhooks working their way ever deeper into his intestines. He would spin the pope’s transformation as a mental dysfunction caused by the trauma on a mind already enfeebled by polio. One way or another, Celestine VI had to go.
They came to the Street of the Dead, an ancient Roman lane about ninety meters long and two stories under the main altar. The necropolis glistened in beaded humidity thick as sweat. Mausoleums with the names of the departed lined both sides of the lane. Walls pocked with niches for funeral urns enclosed courtyard pavements on which lay tombstones. Bare lightbulbs held the enveloping darkness at bay and played tricks with the cardinal’s eyes. Ghostly shapes seemed to flit about in the shadows where light and dark battled for dominance.
As they intruded farther into this underworld, they encountered even more mausoleums with cracked plaster and dislodged bricks. Between the mausoleums, boundary walls had tumbled into rubble. Fissures ripped across the ground like the clawing of a monster raging to burst into the upper world.
“Careful.” Stroheim steadied the cardinal. “Quakes have made this place dangerous.”
The cardinal bristled. “The basilica above is safe.”
“The Vatican architect thinks otherwise.” The prefect pointed left, then right. “Emperor Constantine used pillars to support his fourth-century basilica. They’re under the outer edge of the current one.” He kicked mud from his shoe. “This makes the present foundation more rigid at the perimeter. The rigidity makes it more likely to crack under the stress of an earthquake.”
“Even so, St. Peter’s is safe.” Furbone pointed to the main altar above them. “This location is not rigid. It lacks pillars from Constantine’s time.”
“Trust your eyes.” The prefect kicked away debris from a collapsed pedestal. “See the devastation even here.”
About to respond, the cardinal froze. Into the murky atmosphere, a shape flitted out of a mausoleum onto the Street of the Dead. The cardinal resumed breathing. It was only the architect’s Japanese assistant. When the churchmen caught up to the assistant, he led them to a paved courtyard below the main altar. A linear pile of brick and plaster fragments from a collapsed wall lay next to a red brick wall still standing.
“What happened,” the cardinal said, “to this wall where they found Saint Peter’s bones?”
“My Italian is limited.” The assistant fumbled for the words. “New earth shakes. So sorry.”
“Thank God.” The cardinal crossed himself. “St. Peter’s bones are secure in the Apostolic Palace.”
“The alleged bones.” The prefect clasped his hands together. “Many deny they’re his.”
“Those who matter don’t.” The cardinal dabbed at his forehead with a lace handkerchief. “And that’s what counts . . . not the opinion of naysayers.”
“Not done.” The Japanese assistant gestured forward. “Come see surprise.”
Near the end of the Street of the Dead, recent tremors had cracked open a mound of earth. The assistant had had workmen excavate the opening and buttress the limestone walls of the underground burial chamber. “Take look.”
Covered by a marble lid, a sarcophagus rested on a platform in the center of the chamber. The cardinal trained a flashlight on the sarcophagus. He strained to make out the Latin inscription incised into the lid. Panic seized him. His eyes must have failed.
It could not be.
With the help of his companions, the cardinal dropped down into the chamber. He landed unsteadily on his feet, almost falling over. He faced the bas-relief around the sarcophagus chiseled into clusters of grapes and garlands of flowers. He shined his flashlight on the lid. At the top, an artisan had sculpted a horseman lancing a foe on foot. His eyes skipped along the grooved Latin letters accentuated with red paint.
HERE LIES MARCUS LOLLIANUS CALLINICUS, DEVOTED FATHER OF FATHERS AMONG THE CONGREGATIONS OF MITHRAS, AGE 45, FIRST CENTURION OF THE XXII PRIMIGENIA, A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF THE MINT, SON OF TITUS, AND FRIEND OF PAUL OF TARSUS, THE CHRIST MESSENGER, CLOSEST TO ME EVEN IN DEATH.
It shall not be.
Clambering out of the crypt, the cardinal feared it was too late. “Do you understand the meaning of this Latin?” he asked the Japanese assistant.
“Not understand.” The assistant smiled.
“Good. You must leave us,” the cardinal said, his scarlet cassock spattered with mud. “At once, immediately.” He clapped his hands when the assistant hesitated.
After the assistant fled, the cardinal bullied the prefect to accompany him back into the crypt. Their feet sinking into the mud, they slid away the sarcophagus lid, which squealed with the grinding of stone on stone, just enough for the cardinal to glimpse inside.
Shining through the murk, his flashlight illuminated a skeleton clothed in fragments of purple cloth shot through with gold thread. A faded red miter headdress lay above cranial bones. At the top of a disintegrated spinal column, a gold medallion hung down between the shoulder blades. The medallion depicted Mithras stabbing the bull for mankind’s benefit. The cardinal removed medallion and miter.
They skidded and screeched the lid back into place.
“Not a word of this above.” The cardinal wrapped the medallion and miter in his cloak. “Do you understand?”
“I understand more than you think.”
“This is a scandal,” the cardinal said, heaping mud with bare hands over the Latin inscription. “Why don’t you help me?”
“I don’t want to ruin my gloves.”
“Take them off.”
“Too many germs in the mud.”
“You need a psychiatrist.” Dripping mud, the cardinal reburied the inscription.
Before they reentered the upper world, the cardinal cornered the prefect. “You will have the slab smashed. The simple and trusted workmen the Japanese assistant used will cart away the fragments as an archaeological find needing reassembly. You will have them taken to a workshop I know for reassembly . . . where I predict they will disappear because of presumed theft.”
“The medallion and the miter?”
“Melt down the medallion. Burn the miter.”
“Don’t make me do this. I revere the past.” The prefect’s breath grew labored. “The past is immutable . . . like a prehistoric insect in amber . . . like God.”
“If you so adore the past, don’t do what I command.” Furbone raised a clenched fist. “You will become past prefect of the secret archives.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Nicole Garvey leaned against the railing of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi next to Fisher after her jog around the Piazza Navona. The piazza glistened in the straw-yellow sunlight of early morning. Street vendors hawking their wares to the tourist horde did not yet mar the stillness. Some graffiti punk had soured her jogger’s high by spray-painting “Return Me to Egypt” on the obelisk rising up in the center of her favorite fountain in Rome. “Why did you want to meet?”
The Mithras Conspiracy Page 24
