Students at the American seminary, the North American College, tend to have an elevated opinion of themselves. Some buy into a myth that they are chosen to be ecclesiastical climbers. They even have a name for it—“Alpiners.” Matt Ackerman had been a champion Alpiner.
He had been a bright student, but not a brilliant one. Like everyone else, he’d completed his basic degree in theology. After ordination, he got his bishop’s permission to stay on in Rome to study canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Jesuit university in Rome that Americans simply called “the Greg.”
Ackerman’s good looks and charming manner brought him to the attention of his professors. They recommended him for admission to the Academia, the school for Vatican diplomats. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome. It was widely reported that the archbishop who ran the Academia liked to have some eye candy in each class. That was probably the actual extent of the Vatican’s gay lobby.
For a boy from St. Louis, the diplomatic school was a rarefied atmosphere. Five popes had gone to the Academia. Several more had been professors there. Walking through the silver-plated doors of the Academia chapel seemed to put those students on the Vatican escalator to higher office.
However, Ackerman had problems at the Academia. He was not good in languages. At the Academia, language proficiency is essential. Everyone is expected to speak at least three modern languages: Italian, English, and French. Plus, students need a reading knowledge of Latin. Other European languages are helpful. Increasingly, Asian and African languages are needed, as the center of gravity in the Church shifts to the global south and east.
Despite his academic difficulties, Ackerman would have been fine, if not for his own demons. He was conflicted sexually. He medicated the pain of his self-hatred with alcohol. Afternoons began with Campari and soda at pranzo. In the evenings he had a triple martini before cena. Of course, in Rome every meal includes wine.
Two years after he graduated from the Academia, Ackerman collapsed. His first diplomatic assignment, in Nairobi, was also his last. He washed out of the diplomatic corps on a wave of alcohol.
Recalled to Rome, his career had been derailed. He was sent to dry out at an alcoholic rehab center in Bergamo, Italy.
After more than a decade of living in Rome, he felt himself more a Roman than a Midwesterner. So, he stayed in Rome after rehab, and life in Rome became both his comfort and his company.
Ackerman worked at the Congregation for Bishops, just another one of the hundreds of Vatican bureaucrats. He became one of the gatekeepers to the episcopacy. For the past ten years he had put together background files on men who were candidates to be bishops in the English-speaking world. Even Cardinal O’Toole’s file had to pass the review of Monsignor Matthew Ackerman.
Always the bridesmaid and never the bride, Ackerman could look forward to a couple of decades more of paper shuffling. Then he would be put out to pasture in a parish in Missouri.
Just as Ackerman knew all the secrets of all the episcopal candidates, his own secrets were also known to the Congregation for Bishops. The contents of his own dossier kept his name from ever being seriously considered for bishop.
This made him furious. He knew full well that men who shared the same demons were becoming bishops. The only difference being they’d kept their dossiers clean.
Most days he controlled his rage. Some days he nursed it. But tonight he intended to drown it. That prospect made him quite happy.
Ackerman almost danced down the steps from the Gianicolo Hill to Trastevere. As cars squeezed past in the narrow lanes, he glided into doorways and then back out again. It was the dance of a man who needed a drink and knew where to find one.
For dinner, he was meeting three priests, also in mufti, at the Buccatino d’Oro, the Little Golden Bite. It was a clerical favorite. When Ackerman arrived, he found his dinner companions seated outside at a table perilously close to traffic. Passengers in the passing cars could easily have reached out their windows and taken a breadstick from their table. These Roman priests were so accustomed to the narrow streets, they didn’t even notice.
All three of Ackerman’s friends were bureaucratic gnomes in the Vatican. Truth be told, they all suffered from low-grade depression. Each of them was spending their entire careers in gray little offices, sometimes located in damp Vatican basements. There was nothing glamorous about their work. As with so many people, it was enough to drive them to drink. For them, medication had long since replaced meditation as their preferred path to peace.
“Senta,” shouted Ackerman at the waiter, “whiskey e giacco, senza acqua.” He was ready to drink, and there was no sense in filling half the glass with water.
One of the priests already at the table, a New Yorker named Anthony Barbieri, looked at Ackerman. “Damn it, Matt, slow down. You haven’t even paused to sit down yet.”
“Oh, Tony,” said Ackerman, “I’m just catching up to you.” The two men had always been in competition. Barbieri’s flawless Italian, learned in Brooklyn, gave him a professional edge over Ackerman. Tony could easily have passed for a Roman. He spent his days writing letters in the Vatican Secretary of State’s office in English and Italian.
“What do you hear about the funeral for Manning?” asked Barbieri. “All the cardinals have flown off to New York. We probably all could take the week off and nobody would notice.”
“Where you work, you could take the year off and nobody would notice,” said Ackerman. Most Vatican bureaucrats will probably not die from overwork.
The priest sitting next to Barbieri spoke up in a nasal voice. “Salvatote,” said Teddy Gibson, a skinny beanpole of a guy from Indiana, who worked as a Latinist on official Vatican documents. Gibson had a perpetually worried look on his face. His speech was peppered with Latinisms. He hardly had any living friends. His best friends were Cicero and Pliny and other long-dead ancient Romans. As linguistically challenged as Ackerman had been, Teddy was gifted. He once learned Swahili while sitting in a canon law class taking notes in Italian.
“Oh, can it, Teddy,” barked Ackerman. He was irritated by Gibson’s Latin pretentions. “We are speaking in the vernacular this evening.”
“Scusi,” said Gibson. “Somebody is out of sorts.”
The last to arrive was an Australian, Jim Collins. He came around the corner of the restaurant and pulled up a chair just a few seconds after Ackerman sat down. Collins taught moral theology. He was always happy. Ackerman detested him for his perpetual cheerfulness. Collins slapped them all on the back and greeted them with a “Hello, blokes.” Ackerman did not want to be cheered up. “You damn Aussies are always too fuckin’ happy,” he said.
The waiter knew them all. They didn’t even have to order. He brought the pasta puttanesca, the “whore’s pasta.” It was the house specialty.
Ackerman turned to Barbieri, picking up on his question again. “Nobody is deader than a dead archbishop. Manning is not even in his grave, and people are already calling about his successor. Black is the color of vultures and priests,” said Ackerman, breaking off a piece of bread.
All through dinner the three priests plied Ackerman for information about who might replace Manning in New York. Like in most bureaucracies, gossip is the preferred recreation in the Vatican.
By the time the pasta and wine came, they were throwing out possible names. While Ackerman might have been a little drunk, he wasn’t stupid drunk, at least not yet. He didn’t give away any information. Besides, he didn’t know much beyond the usual speculation.
“One thing is for sure,” said Ackerman. “It’s certainly not going to be any of you assholes. I stand a better chance than any of you. And it certainly isn’t going to be me.”
“You never know,” said Collins hopefully. “You could be on the terna someday.”
“Don’t patronize me,” snapped Ackerman. “Besides, I don’t have the necessary episcopal qualities. To be a bishop you have to be a pusillanimous twit. If you guys work at it, you could make the sho
rt list. You pretty much fit the bill.” They chuckled. They all had a low opinion of their superiors and a not much higher one of themselves.
“There are so few qualified people these days,” he said cynically. “After all, nobody who has more than two years’ pastoral experience is allowed to be a bishop. It’s a damn rule added in the 1917 Code of canon law, I think. ‘Bishops must know next to nothing about pastoral work,’” he said in a mocking voice. “Nobody who has the smell of the sheep can be a shepherd.”
Ackerman was on a roll. “Hell, the three of you would be a perfect terna. I should put your names in for New York. After all, not one of you has actual experience being a priest. Hey, Tony, you don’t believe in God, no matter. You want to be Archbishop of New York?”
“Matt,” said Tony, “you’re drunk.”
“Not yet,” said Ackerman. “But you know that I follow Lillian Hellman’s dicta, ‘I only drink to get drunk.’ It’s the only way I can make sense of my miserable existence.” Clearly, Ackerman was not in a festive mood. A momentary silence descended on the table. Jim Collins tried to cheer things up with some observation about passing tourists. Nobody paid any attention.
Ackerman spoke up again. “They are killing cardinals all over the world. Maybe the Church will finally make some progress when we get rid of some of the detritus of clerical princes.”
There was another awkward silence after this pronouncement. Rumors had been floating around that these cardinals’ deaths might be connected, but this was the first that the three other priests had heard of it from an inside source. They were shocked.
“What do you mean?” said Barbieri. “Who is killing them?”
“Nobody,” said Ackerman, suddenly realizing he had said too much. “I need some air.”
“Matt, we are sitting outside,” said Gibson helpfully, pointing out the air all around them.
“Stai zitto,” snapped Ackerman. “I need to walk.”
“Wait a minute, Matt,” said Barbieri. “What do you mean they are killing cardinals?”
“Well,” said Ackerman, “I overheard Cardinal Visconti tell the cardinal from Napoli that his ass could be next.”
Barbieri said, almost to himself, “This story has legs. What else do you know, Matt?”
“I only know what I hear in the rumor mill,” answered Ackerman. “And you know how accurate that is.”
“No, no, no, Matt. It seems like you know more than you are letting on,” said Barbieri.
Ackerman exhaled. “Like I said, I need some air.” He got up from the table and threw some euros down for the check.
“Don’t you want to stay for dolce?” said Collins.
“No, the dessert I have in mind they don’t serve here. I have nothing else to say to you ass-kissers.”
“Speak for yourself, Matt. You NAC guys are the experts in knowing what to kiss and when,” Gibson shot back.
“It’s time to go,” sighed Ackerman. “This conversation has taken a nasty turn.” Ackerman possessed just enough narcissism to think he was above the nastiness.
He pushed away from the table and stumbled a bit on the cobblestones as he headed down the Via Farmacia. The sun had almost set and the wrought-iron lamps of Trastevere were lit. They made a pinkish glow on the stone building. Romance was in the air. Ackerman could smell it.
He paused at the end of the street for a moment to steady himself on one of the old bollards that were once used to tie up horses. His several drinks had begun to kick in.
Just around the corner from the restaurant, a street magician performed for passing tourists. “Guarda, guarda,” he said, as he pulled a silk handkerchief out of a little child’s ear. That magician had been doing the same tricks somewhere in the neighborhood every night for years. He was something of a local celebrity. Even the local Romani stopped to watch. They loved magic.
Superstition has always been the real religion of the Romans. In the seminary, Ackerman and other seminarians used to play on this superstition of the streets. Roman men believed that if you walked between two priests you would be sterile. Ackerman and a friend often used to trap a guy and make him walk between them. Sometimes, nervous men would run the other way rather than walk between two priests.
Ackerman moved on from the magician and picked up the pace a bit. The conversation with his brethren had made him edgy. He had, perhaps, said too much.
A couple of hundred meters down the narrow street, the lane emptied out into a huge square, the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere. On the square stands the oldest continuously functioning parish church in Rome and the first one ever dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The parish dates back to 300 AD and the Emperor Constantine.
Monsignor Ackerman hardly noticed the old church. It was just part of his familiar landscape. But he couldn’t help but notice a large crowd of young people standing on the church portico and spilling out into the square. The massive front doors of the church were open, and he could hear the end of vespers being sung by the young people inside. The sound of the chanted prayer, mixed with the sound of vendors and street performers, created an odd counterpoint of the sacred and the profane.
Santa Maria in Trastevere was one of the few vital parishes left in central Rome. It was kept alive, not by the clergy, but by the young people Ackerman could hear praying inside. They are social activists who meet in the old convent of San Egidio next door to the Church. These youth dedicate their free time to serving the poor and making peace around the world.
The San Egidio community feeds the hungry in their soup kitchen. It also runs the homeless shelters around Rome and has become the social conscience of the city. They even negotiated peace treaties to end war in places like Ethiopia.
If the gospel of Jesus is still a living presence in the streets of Rome, it is more because of the San Egidio community than the Vatican fortress a mile away.
Matt Ackerman felt a little guilty and jealous as he passed the activist youth. Maybe twenty years before, he had been like them, full of idealism and virtue. But an iron curtain of guilt and loneliness had surrounded his heart. He no longer felt the same enthusiasm he once felt. The monsignor was on a mission, but it had nothing to do with the faith.
Ackerman headed across the Piazza of Santa Maria, past the old apartment building where Gore Vidal spent his declining years, and plunged into the shadows of a dark side street. Once again, he could hear music, this time the driving beat of European techno-pop.
Another group of mostly young people stood in line outside a nondescript steel door marked with a No Parking sticker and the words Lasciare libero questo passagio. Over the door a small neon sign in bright blue script read simply Angelo Azzurro. A neon blue angel hovered over the establishment name.
Outside the door in the little narrow street stood a bouncer with biceps as big as most people’s thighs. He blocked the entrance and screened the patrons. “Si, no, si, si,” he said, culling the sheep from the goats. If you were pretty, or rich, or well known to him, or well connected, you got in. Your chances improved enormously if you tipped.
“Buona sera, Monsignore.” The bouncer nodded to Ackerman as he detached the velvet rope and let him in. Matt Ackerman was a regular.
The doorway led to an ancient stone staircase, wide enough for two people to pass. It curved down twenty feet below the modern street level of Rome, to the ancient subterranean street. Ackerman stumbled a bit on poorly lit, uneven steps as he descended into the cavern-like disco below. Purple black-light tubes running along the stairs seemed to irradiate the teeth, shirts, and white socks of patrons, making them glow in the dark. Deafening techno dance music pulsed up the staircase toward the street.
For the first time that evening, Matt Ackerman relaxed. He was as much at home here as in his office or chapel. He went directly to the bar in the corner. Shafts of light from tiny pinpoint spots illumined the glass ashtrays on the bar. The cut glass ashtrays glimmered with a reflected light that made everyone around the bar look both mysterious and
alluring.
The bartender, Stefano, nodded toward Ackerman and brought him a Jack Daniels with ice. He paused to say hello.
“Ciao, Mateo,” said Stefano. “Come va?”
“Horrible.”
“Why?” said the bartender.
“It is all coming apart,” said Ackerman.
“What’s coming apart?” asked the bartender in Italian. “The Church?”
“No,” said the monsignor. “Me. I’m coming apart. I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.”
Stefano had other customers, but he ignored them for a moment and leaned in to hear Ackerman.
“Ever since Manning got shot, everybody is talking. Even the pope suspects something. They’ve started an investigation in the Vatican. They hired an American investigator. They are looking at everyone.”
Stefano signaled to another bartender to cover the bar for him. Ackerman had already finished his Jack Daniels, so Stefano poured him another shot. “What are you talking about?” asked Stefano.
Ackerman started to slur his words, but he didn’t stop talking. He babbled on, seemingly irrational.
“I can’t keep this ball in the air,” said Ackerman. “They all deserved what they got, you know. But I suppose somebody could follow the money. People will be looking everywhere. They will even be looking here, Stefano.” He pointed with his finger around the bar and then toward the bartender’s face.
“Watch what you are saying,” growled Stefano. “Stai calma.” He leaned back from Ackerman. The monsignor gave him a boozy stare and stumbled to his feet from the barstool.
“I came here for sweets,” said Ackerman. “And I’m going to find some.” He wandered off into the dark recesses of the disco.
The bartender turned toward a mirror-covered door behind the bar and slipped through into the tiny manager’s office.
“Don Franco,” said Stefano to the large man seated at the desk, “abbiamo un problema.”
9
CIAO, ROMA
Strange Gods Page 10
