Dominus

by Tom Fox

  “But his degree of influence on the Pope is unhealthy,” the third man interjected. “We know nothing of this man’s pedigree, his background. He could be anybody!”

  “Precisely so, my friend.” The group’s leader leaned forward. “We do not know, nor does anybody else. And that is exactly what we will play to our advantage.”

  The leader’s interlocutor clearly didn’t understand the advantage being spoken of, or the ultimate purposes to which the Fraternity’s head was referring. He blurted out simply, “He could be a charlatan! An idiot!”

  “It is not that he could be,” the leader answered, more sharply now, “but that he almost certainly is. Don’t you see it? Whether this man is malicious or simply inept, his background is going to be the cause of scandal when it’s finally discovered. I’ve already spoken with our friend outside. She’s—” He caught himself. “They’re as interested as we are.”

  There was a moment of new tension in the musky room at the leader’s slip of the tongue. Mention of her was as unwelcome as any subject that could be broached in their company. No man liked to be reminded of the fact that his safety, his reputation and his future resided in the controlling hands of another. Yet for almost every soul in the room, that was the case.

  That particular shiver passed—unwanted but familiar. The present circumstances still demanded a response. Fidgety collar seemed only more confused by the leader’s words, but not everyone was lingering without comprehension.

  “Christ, you think like a prophet!” The fat man’s voice broke the silence with sudden emphasis. He leaned forward as far as his body mass would allow, one chin folding over the next as he craned his neck toward the leader, a look close to admiration in his eyes.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” the skinny man with the collar demanded.

  “He’s talking about using this stranger to allow us to do what we could never do ourselves,” the fat man answered. “No more attempts to limit the Pope’s power. No more efforts at influencing conclaves and eliminating opposing voices. He’s talking about taking our fraternity’s aims to their highest level.”

  The fat man turned until he was staring straight into the skinny man’s confused eyes.

  “He’s talking about dethroning a Vicar of Christ.”

  14

  Rome: 8:14 p.m.

  Alexander left Marcus Crossler’s house a little over two hours after he’d first discovered the professor’s body, stepping into the dusk of an early Roman evening as the first street lamps started to flicker into life. He’d debated staying longer, but there was little he could contribute to the officers’ labors, and the subtle clues that they’d rather be without him had been growing less and less refined as the evening wore on. When he’d finally notified them that he’d be leaving, he was shown the front door with more energy than he would have liked.

  An hour later, he was at his kitchen table, cigarette in hand and a reheated plate of two-day-old pasta steaming on the Formica top, waiting for him to finish his low-brow aperitif. The small apartment block on Via Varese, his home since he had left the priesthood four years ago, was situated conveniently close to the paper’s offices in a pleasant enough quarter of Rome. The redbrick structure was modern, going back no further than the 1960s, which for Rome was essentially yesterday. It wasn’t as quaint as a parish vicarage or as grandiose as a curial apartment, but when faith dies, certain perks go with it.

  Alexander swallowed hard. He’d been through enough trauma today. He didn’t need to reminisce about the most difficult choice of his life.

  The pasta steamed beneath a blanket of melted cheese. Alexander was not a man without a healthy appetite, and as far as he was concerned, the more cholesterol there was dripping over a dish, the better. But this evening he realized as he stared at the plate of food, its vapors swirling into interlocking folds with the plumes from his cigarette, that he had no appetite. The lifeless expression on Professor Crossler’s face stared back at him from every surface. It was there on the countertops, on the table, in the bubbling lumps of browned cheese.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and walked to the refrigerator, pulled open the door and retrieved a beer. Whether a drink was any more suitable a post-trauma option he didn’t know, but it was worth a try.

  He moved back to the table, uncapped bottle in hand. As he took a long first sip, the icy draft bubbled its way down his throat, soothing more than just his tongue. He closed his eyes, praying that Crossler’s face wouldn’t be there behind his eyelids, looking back at him. But even the thought evoked the memory, the scents, the bile . . .

  He forced open his eyes before the sensations could grow stronger. He needed distraction—to put his mind to work. He leaned forward and set down the bottle, plotting a way to begin. Facts. Data. The skeleton of a story yet to be written. These were the things to battle his preoccupation.

  He reached into his leather satchel and withdrew his laptop. Cracking it open, he shoved his dinner plate out of the way as it powered up. Front and center of the screen was his Twitter timeline, the means by which he’d discovered Crossler, hovering where he’d left it as he’d departed the office before heading to the man’s home. He’d been monitoring the main hashtags for gossip over the stranger’s appearance in the Vatican, and as the wireless connection in his flat now came online anew, the status bar at the top of the refreshing window switched from “15 unread messages” to “2,340 unread messages.”

  So it hasn’t been a slow evening for the hype.

  The messages on display were the last he’d read before powering down: a series of exchanges between hundreds of concerned citizens, faithful believers and honest skeptics. In the midst, @DrMCrossler292 had interjected his thoughts at routine intervals—always sounding authoritative and keen to insist that any hype about a divine origin to the visitor was “a traditional religious response to the unknown.” The responses he’d received had varied from those who believed him to those who had reacted with anger and vitriol. But it was Crossler’s calm insistence that he could prove his claims, despite the heated responses of others, that had made him stand out.

  Suddenly Alexander leaned forward, an idea ticking to life in his mind. Twitter called its display a timeline, and there might be something useful in that fact.

  He clicked the bar to reveal the thousands of newer messages above, and started to read forward in the chronology. He was less interested in what was being said and more interested in the time stamps that headed each comment. He scrolled speedily upward until he reached the times that mattered, slowing as he reached the messages—hundreds of them—stamped with 2:40 p.m., about the time he’d phoned Crossler. He took note of their flow more closely. @DrMCrossler292’s contributions became less frequent, then stopped for a span of nearly fifteen minutes. That’s it, a definitive connection to our exchange. The lapse in contributions indicated, so far as he could tell, that the professor had kept on tweeting, a little less fervently, as their phone conversation had begun, but then had stopped altogether as that conversation deepened. Alexander remembered the energy the other man had exuded over the line, suddenly feeling the grotesquery of his death in his stomach again.

  He slid his fingers over the computer’s trackpad and advanced through the timeline yet further. Precisely seventeen minutes after Crossler’s account had gone silent, about the time their call would have concluded, he re-emerged online with a new vigor, tweeting at almost five-minute intervals for the next forty-five. Have made contact with the press; will show you all what I mean! at 3:22 p.m., followed by a long string of exchanges with individuals who alternately believed he was full of hot air, or a voice of reason about to enter into a fraudulent and overly hyped debate.

  Then, at 4:06 p.m., Marcus Crossler had posted his last tweet: Someone at the door. A bit early. Hold tight, my friends. The truth will come out. Back soon.

  He’d never come back. That was the last activity on the Twitter account of Dr. Marcus Crossler of the Sapienza Uni
versity of Rome.

  It had been posted precisely sixty-five minutes before Alexander had arrived at his house.

  Over the next half-hour, Alexander continued to scrutinize his timeline. There was something here, he knew it. Evidence mixed into the time stamps of Crossler’s messages—evidence of a connection between the man’s agreeing to talk to him and his death a few hours later.

  But he knew he needed much more than vague 140-character implications. “Circumstantial” was the title given to this kind of evidence, for a reason. There could, in theory, be any number of reasons for Crossler’s silence.

  He scrolled backward through the screen. He’d already found the terminus of Crosser’s online activity, but it suddenly struck him that he hadn’t yet looked in the other direction. He now scrolled toward earlier time stamps, seeking the moment that Crossler had begun his activity. The chronology went back for hours, to midday and then late morning, the professor active throughout. It was becoming clear that Crossler had gone to the internet almost as soon as he’d heard of the event at the basilica, which couldn’t have been much after it had taken place.

  Finally Alexander located the man’s first post of the morning, at 8:49 a.m.: Have just heard about something going on at St. Peter’s. Any news?

  A series of responses passed along links to newly emerging video clips, and Alexander watched the phrase-burst history of the beginning of the hype.

  In the midst of it, something caught his eye. Dr. Crossler had entered into the public debate with a flare, but he’d not in fact been the lone credentialed voice Alexander had previously thought him to be. He’d had a counterpart. Alexander grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down the second man’s name from his Twitter profile: Professor Salvatore Tosi. It wasn’t a name he’d heard before, but that hardly surprised him. Rome was full of universities, each full of professors. Academics were like snow from heaven: they came in droves and required a hell of a lot of shoveling to get them out of your way.

  But this interlocutor spoke with the same kind of conviction as Crossler, and he’d started in just as fast. What the public was seeing, he announced, was a fraud. And not a peaceful, innocent scam. People would be hurt by this, there would be ramifications, and so on. Tosi posted fervently and quickly, though, like Crossler, he never said specifically what it was that stood behind his claims that he could prove all that he was saying. I need to speak to the relevant officials, he tweeted at 9:18 a.m., while the stranger would still have been seated in St. Peter’s.

  Alexander advanced forward through the timeline, straining to see what Tosi’s next contribution had been. Perhaps the man had noted whom he’d spoken to, or what response he’d received.

  But there was no follow-up to the comment. In fact there were no further posts at all by Salvatore Tosi. At 9:18 a.m., the first man claiming to have proof that the morning’s happenings in the Vatican were a fraud had gone silent.

  Later, at 4:06 p.m., the second, Marcus Crossler, had fallen just as silent.

  Suddenly Alexander’s stomach tightened into a knot. He was willing to stake his journalistic nose on the disturbing suspicion that spun its way out of these facts. Salvatore Tosi, whoever he was and wherever he lived, was just as dead as Marcus Crossler.

  He stood up abruptly and walked to the wireless phone that sat on his kitchen counter. The temptation to dial the police station was almost overwhelming—it was the normal, obvious thing to do. But the shove-off he’d been given earlier in the evening was firm: no theories, no help, thank you very much. The man in charge had dismissed Alexander’s immediate observations outright, and those had the benefit of being based on a direct, physical connection. How much more spitefully was he likely to reject a theory built off social media references on the internet?

  But Alexander had discovered something that his gut felt was concrete. Real.

  The story had managed to attract his attention when it had just been about a man appearing at the Vatican and the strange effect he’d had on the pontiff. But if his only contact was dead, another quite possibly just as coldly murdered and the police persistent in calling it ‘routine,’ he wasn’t going to be put off that easily.

  He would simply have to go about things another way.

  As uncomfortable as it was going to be, he had to make a different call.

  He clutched the phone in his hands, took another swill of his beer and swallowed hard. By the time the bottle was back on the table, he was already dialing. He lit a new cigarette as the line began to ring. He was going to need it.

  15

  The Apostolic Palace: 8:30 p.m.

  Pope Gregory XVII sat quietly in his study. This was not the official private office of the pontiff, which ironically was only marginally less public a working space than his ceremonial cabinet. This was his true, personal sanctuary at the edge of the upper floor of the Apostolic Palace. It had formerly been a sitting room in the pontifical residence, light and airy despite being paneled in cherry and frescoed overhead by one of the great masters. Gregory had taken to it immediately. He’d had the room repurposed only a few weeks into his pontificate, and it had fast become his favored private retreat.

  And the man who sat on the far side of the room, gazing serenely out over the manicured gardens beyond, had needed no invitation. The Pope was intent on making the stranger feel as at home here as he possibly could. Because his being here was a sign. And the Pope had needed a sign.

  The work of Catholicism’s senior bishop was unlike any other he could have imagined in his life. Not in its scope or responsibilities, all of which he’d been aware of for years, long before he was ever handed the fisherman’s ring or invested in the pallium. These had not surprised him, though he’d dreaded them—especially the spiritual weight of the authority that came with them. Gone were the days when he had superiors who could help carry the burden of his cross. Gone, too, were the days even of having peers in any real sense. With the pontificate came a deep isolation: the sense of being profoundly, inconsolably alone.

  But sorrowful as it might be, this had not been a surprise. The higher Gregory had ascended in office, the lonelier his work had become. It was the way of things. He was used to it.

  What he hadn’t expected, what he could never have foreseen back in the days of his youth, as an eager seminarian or a first-year assistant priest sent out to serve the flock, was the degree of corruption that existed in what was now his institution. How could he have supposed, a man of faith and sincere belief, that there would be so much darkness in the palace of light? Or so much within the bosom of Mother Church that reminded him more of a fussy, fighting sibling than the sturdy arms of a parent?

  It had been a surprise, but even this had come long before his pontificate. He had spent his ministry fighting that corruption, pouring his soul into the righteousness of the work. He’d first targeted the sex scandals exposed when he was bishop of the diocese of Novara in the far north of Italy. He’d not responded with the gentle moving-priests-around or retiring-them-into-silence tactics that had been exercised elsewhere in the Church. Those tainted with this corruption had been sacked, and Gregory had pushed for criminal convictions as well as spiritual sanctions. The sword of excommunication was meant to be wielded at times like these, and he’d wielded it aggressively.

  It was then that he had begun to ascend the ranks. In a world tired of evil, his aggressive work to battle the darkness within the Church had pushed him ever more into the public eye. He had come to be known as “the purifying prelate” long before he was styled “the purifying pontiff.”

  But somehow, pontiff he had become, and the only way Gregory was able to come to terms with this was to see in it God’s affirmation of this necessary work. So he’d redoubled his efforts since he’d taken the white cassock. In the past months, he’d managed to introduce wide-ranging investigations of almost every major institution of the Church in every territory around the world. He’d even managed to sack two corrupt bishops and a cardinal from the
ir positions in the curia—no small feat, even for a pope. The curia was a force to be reckoned with, never in any pontiff’s pocket. But holy work had to be done.

  All of which had made Pope Gregory enemies as well as friends. Perhaps that was as it should be. If everyone hated him, it might be a sign that he was ill suited to the Church’s highest ministry. On the other hand, if everyone loved him, he would surely fall prey to pride and arrogance. In the middle, perhaps there was the possibility of doing good, even attaining salvation himself.

  And then, amongst all this, the stranger had come.

  Gregory had every reason to be suspicious, he was well aware of that. He knew nothing, absolutely nothing, of this man. Advisers were whispering in his ear that “a traitor in blue jeans” had infiltrated the Vatican. Members of his security retinue were concerned the man could be a terrorist. One of the older archbishops was positively certain he was the Antichrist. And why couldn’t any one of these men—men the Pope had always trusted—be right? There could be fraud taking place right under his nose. Deception of a sort he couldn’t even imagine.

  And yet, and yet . . .

  Were not the events of the past twenty-four hours a sign of comfort? Was not the Lord deigning to provide solace to his weary vicar in the midst of his trials? Pope Gregory gazed across his desk at the man who sat so serenely at the far side of his office. In his presence, questions seemed to slip away, and all that was left was a profound peace, a certainty of good and holiness. It was as if the Pope’s heart, so traumatized by the sinfulness of the world and his own flock, was made whole in this man’s presence, just as miraculously as his back had been made straight.

  Headquarters of Global Capital Italia: 8:32 p.m.

  In her office on the top floor of the Global Capital Italia headquarters, Caterina Amato felt a tingle of anticipation shudder down her spine as she reached for the intercom button at the corner of her desk telephone.