Despite these victories, I am suffering an apprehension. The pattern of shadows that have surrounded me for many years has suddenly changed. In my work, and in the life of the gyroscope, there is a vague disequilibrium—nuances, odd silences—so subtle as to be nearly microscopic. Remember my intuition? You may add to it a vibration on the antennae I thought I had lost.
Why have you not responded? Did you receive my note? It was coded in our usual manner and conveyed the news that a major breakthrough has occurred. Without much effort, they could interpret my meaning. They might even make that poor woman crack. She might crack on her own and tell them everything.
No matter what happens to me, he cannot escape justice. I have made several copies of the material that relates to the case. The dossiers are stacked here in front of me, and I will have Marco deliver them personally when I see him in Milan on the second of January. One to my lawyer, several to the legal powers of Italy. I will send others by courier to the UN and to the secretary of the Europarliament. Copies will go to the leading newspapers of the West. They can hardly ignore an indictment of this caliber, considering that I am one of the highest jurists in the world. (Yes, it is true, I am still proud—but no longer bitter.) In the unlikely event that these many copies are intercepted, I have placed one in the hands of her whose heart is pierced by a sword, where the sparrow builds her nest and the swallow finds her home. She guards it well.
Please come to Foligno. I am here until New Year’s Day. After that, Milan, and then on to The Hague. Marco is in love at last and has begged my permission to spend the holiday with his beloved. My Gianna is with the family of her prince. It is the first time I shall be alone here. And yet I am not alone. I feel Stefano very close. On Christmas Day, I will go down to the chapel of Blessed Angela, a local saint, a wife, mother, and widow, and hear Mass for the first time in twenty years. Oh, do not hope for too much from me, Lawyer Elijah. I am not prompted to such rash devotion by the faith you want from me. Though, perhaps it is a kind of faith, a return to the beginnings to see if what was lost may again be found. In solitude, in exile, we come to know what cannot otherwise be known; we remember what we saw and see it for the first time.
Dare I tell you that there were moments when the charade of our romantic notes blurred, and I began to feel in earnest the words I wrote to you, as if they were my own, as if we were what we pretended to be? I know you will tell me not to say such things to you. You will say that your heart cannot bear it. Good, I will say no more on that. But just this once I will tell you that your heart can bear it. And needs to bear it! Love bursts forth from the springs of the heart as raw material. It takes many shapes. It asks us to go forth and die, over and over again. It always asks this terrible price. It wants our life—all of it. Then gives it back again.
You need never fear me. Nor should you fear your own heart. You are a father without a child. I am a child without a father. Let us be this kind of love for each other. It is no less a love than what has come to Gianna and Marco. The form of it changes, and the season, and the harvest. But it is love.
Well, my father-friend, the hour is indeed late. I am so weary. I am so happy. We have beat him, Elijah. We have won. I have swum in dark waters and survived. And yet I sense it is not yet over. Large shadows are moving beneath me in the abyss, though on the surface there is hardly a ripple.
I will ask Marco to drive down to Rome and deliver this to you personally.
(Signed) Anna
Here the computer script ended. Below it, handwritten in a hurried scrawl:
O God. They are here.
* * *
Elijah read and reread the letter. He felt like weeping, then crying out in rage. He leapt to his feet then sat down again helplessly.
Should he go to the police? But what could they do? Was this single letter sufficient to connect the President to her disappearance? The name Architetto would mean nothing to them. It was obvious that all the evidence had been confiscated by whoever had savaged the house and taken Anna.
He trudged downhill to the car and tried to reverse it out of the lane, but the tires spun and dug into the half-frozen mud. No amount of pushing or praying would dislodge it.
“Why, my Lord?” he cried. “Why?”
The snow fell down heavier. The cold was increasing, and he wore only his light raincoat. If he tried walking to the town, he might lose his way and freeze to death. In the surrounding hills there were no other lights as far as the eye could see. He went back to the house.
He dragged a mattress into the kitchen and spread it in front of the stove. He stoked the fire and lay down.
He saw how it must have been. She had just completed printing out her letter to him when she felt rather than saw the arrival of the captors. Perhaps there were lights below on the lane, and she heard the faint clang of the crow-bar on the electronic lock, bending back the metal catch. There might have been men coming up on foot, silently, while the others opened the gate in order for the vehicle to drive through. She must have known somehow that this was the moment she had dreaded and hoped to avoid. She wrote, “O God. They are here,” at the bottom of the letter, then calmly folded it—she never did anything in haste. Then she walked to her grandparents’ bedroom and slipped the paper into the pocket behind the image of the Sacred Heart. They must have been at the doors by then, hammering for entrance at front and back, smashing the glass. She had a few seconds to scribble the final message, Beneath Nonno’s heart, on a scrap of violet paper and throw it behind the stove, as the doors splintered and they poured in.
He tossed and turned and prayed throughout the darkest hours of his life, an eternal stretch of desolation rivaled only by the final days of the ghetto and his cross-country flight from Warsaw as a boy.
In the middle of the night he heard voices. He sat bolt upright, straining to hear what they were saying, but it was only the wind whispering, She guards it well; she guards it well.
The first light arrived, a baleful gray smear on the eastern summit above the farm. He boiled a cup of hot water, and it drove the chill from his bones. He read the letter again. In the hands of her whose heart is pierced by a sword, where the sparrow builds her nest and the swallow finds her home.
The words leapt off the page.
She guards it well; she guards it well.
He found the footpath that led up the mountain through the devastated vineyard. He slipped repeatedly on the snow-covered trail. His feet were soon soaked, and he bled from shins and elbows, where he had struck the stones. The beating of his heart became irregular and his chest ached. He pushed himself onward, gasping for oxygen, and the sharp whistle of his breath became a cry, mingled deliriously with prayers and Anna’s name and inarticulate protests. He clawed his way up inch by inch, tugging on thorn bushes and roots, branches and stones. His hands were chapped and bleeding. He was scrambling on hands and knees when he finally came to the top.
The statue stood there at the crest, reposed beneath her blanket of white, infinitely peaceful in her grotto. Cups of snow filled the nests the sparrows had built around her.
He fell to his knees at her feet and grabbed onto her waist. The statue rocked and nearly fell, but he righted it.
He sat in the snow, panting and groaning. He ached from head to foot and for a time could not make his body obey. He lay his head against the chipped paint of the pedestal and prayed. The prayer was little more than a cry of anguish, but he recognized that it was a current of genuine communication, reaching out across the abyss of the long dark age in which he had been born, across space and dimensions, through barrier after impossible barrier, to the throne of grace.
“Help us, O help of Christians, help us, Mother”, he cried, And then a word came in return. It had no origin in human psychology or biology, had no other source than the springs flowing from the throne he had believed to be so distant.
I am here.
Warmth filled his body. Light filled his mind. A stillness which was part of that ori
ginal stillness before the first word of creation, was reborn in him. He looked up at the statue and saw in its crudely painted face a reflection of man’s hunger for his eternal home. He saw heaven reach down and touch this poor piece of plaster and reshape it in the forms that exist beyond the blind groping of man. Love was upon the face, and love was within it.
Do not be afraid, little one, she said. I am with you. Love is with until the final consummation.
The current of heat now flowed through him like clear, warm water, containing hidden delights, cleansing his wounds, bathing his soul. His body, one massive sack of pain, was also soothed and reinvigorated, though its aches did not cease.
She guards it well, she guards it well, said the wind.
Then he knew.
He stood up and embraced the statue, and tilted it at an angle toward the rear of the grotto, where it came to rest against the stone. In an exposed cavity beneath her feet, he found a plastic bag. He removed it and tilted the statue back upon its base, recovering the hole.
The bag was sealed against moisture. He tore open the top and withdrew its contents: documents, transcripts, cassette tapes, a detailed history of the case in Anna’s handwriting, descriptions of plots and subplots, names, dates. There was more. Much, much more.
He made as if to go back down the mountain, but stopped and looked back at the statue. A pathetic, lifeless madonna, devoid of artistic sense, and yet a symbol through which the Mother had come. It was her way, of course, for she had been a small poor maiden of Nazareth. Images of her were crowned in cathedrals throughout the world, icons painted by saints and statues carved by geniuses. She was loved and glorified through these mighty works, and through them she drew souls to glorify her Son, the One to whom she always and everywhere pointed. And yet she did not spurn the lowliest images, for they too were signs lifted up in the darkness of history, without false glory or human pride of accomplishment, words made from the clay of the earth and painted with pigments wrung from the earth by gnarled hands that toiled in the earth and hoped for Paradise.
Little one, my son. Fear nothing. The beast that impersonates a lamb approaches the sanctuary in order to destroy it and to take the throne of Jesus, the true Lamb of God. He will succeed for a time in obscuring the light of heaven in many places.
“Holy Mother. What am I to do? Is everything lost?”
When the enemy thinks he has won everything, that is the moment he will be defeated. Before the end there will be much suffering. You are to be a witness for Christ. You are to be a sign. Fear nothing. Speak only what He shall give you to say, and it shall be for the salvation of many souls.
“How shall I save Anna?”
You cannot save her. Pray for her soul. I am with her.
“Where shall I go?”
Pray to the Holy Spirit, and He will guide you.
The anointing within his spirit faded steadily, and he was left alone, a man standing on a mountain. It was Christmas Day.
* * *
The mud ruts were still frozen when he reached the car. He started the engine, put the gears in reverse, and backed it out easily. The pavement on the road was bare. He drove down to the valley and south to the highway. Every so often he turned and looked at the package of material on the seat beside him. His heart contracted repeatedly, and he prayed for Anna over and over until the words became a torrent of confused pleading.
He passed several petrol stations, all of them closed, but at Terni he found one open. He went into the bathroom and washed up while the attendant, an adolescent wearing headphones, cavorting to soundless music, filled the tank. In the deserted grocery attached to the station he saw his own face and Anna’s staring at him from the front page of a newspaper. In an instant his eyes took in the words, missing and lovers. He did not waste time reading the rest. He took the paper to the counter and paid for it.
The attendant punched numbers into the cash register. Elijah turned his face away from him, but he need not have bothered, for the boy paid him no attention. He took Elijah’s money and threw some coins back onto the counter.
“Buon Natale!” he drawled mechanically as Elijah went out the door.
“Buon Natale!”
From Terni he went southwest until he neared the turn onto the Rome-Florence highway. He pulled over to the shoulder and read the front page of the newspaper. It reported that a justice of the World Court had disappeared, and the police were investigating. Criminal involvement had not been ruled out, but there was strong suspicion of a domestic homicide. Certain letters had come to the attention of the state prosecutor, indicating the involvement of a Roman Catholic cleric, also missing, with whom the jurist had been involved. There was much to support the police theory that she had been trying to extricate herself from the compromising relationship, and that the cleric, a one-time envoy of the Vatican, had liquidated her in a failed attempt to avoid scandal. A wide-ranging sweep of Italy’s major cities was underway. The article gave the names of both parties involved.
Elijah sat frozen at the wheel. He considered turning north to Milan, where he might be able to track down Gianna and Marco and learn from them any news of Anna. Would they believe him? They might, especially if he showed them the documentation. But what if their residences were under surveillance? No, it was impossible.
Obviously, he could not return to the college in Rome, for that would be closely watched. Where to then?
He closed his eyes and invoked the Holy Spirit. Interiorly he heard the word, Roma. He gunned the engine, turned onto the southbound lane, and drove for the eternal city.
* * *
He reached a northern suburb by midday. At a public phone booth he called Stato’s apartment.
A woman answered.
Elijah asked for the cardinal.
The woman’s voice hesitated. “I regret, Signore, he’s had a heart attack. He’s been taken to the Gemelli.”
“Who is speaking, please?”
“This is his sister Margaretta. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No. No, thank you. I will go to him at the hospital.”
“I don’t think they’ll let you see him. He’s in intensive care.”
“Was it very bad?”
“He’s had a scare. The doctor says it’s a warning.” Her voice trailed off and she hung up.
He got back into the car and fumbled in the glove compartment. He found sunglasses—the porter wore them, rain or shine—and put them on. He drove across the city and parked several blocks from the hospital. He walked the rest of the way, avoiding people’s glances, hoping that no one would notice the suspicious rips in his clothing and the spatters of mud. He arrived at the main entrance without incident, but stopped himself from entering just in time. Two policemen stood by the reception desk, talking to a nurse. He stepped back and walked quickly down the block and around to the back of the building. There he found the service entrance through which he had entered the hospital months before in his attempt to see Billy Stangsby.
Five minutes later he was on the floor of the ICU, in a janitor’s room. He cleaned his clothing with a rag, combed his hair and straightened his coat. Assuming a confident expression, he strolled along the corridor and went through the double doors of the unit, not knowing what would greet him on the other side. An alarm bell was ringing. Nurses were scurrying away down the hall toward a flashing light, pushing a machine. A list of patients’ names at the deserted desk informed him of the cardinal’s room number. He was inside the private room in seconds, breathing hard. He closed the door.
Stato was sleeping. His color was bad. Wires trailed from his body in all directions. Elijah stared, afraid to wake him.
“Who’s there?” the cardinal said in a hoarse voice.
“Father Schäfer”, Elijah whispered.
“Schäfer!” the cardinal said. “Come closer. I can hardly see you.”
Elijah approached the bed. “Are you in pain, Eminence?”
“It hurts.”
&nb
sp; “I’m in serious trouble.”
“I know. I saw this morning’s paper.”
“I need your help.”
“How can I do anything? I have been flattened!” he groaned. “I needed so much to be strong.”
“Please, try to help me. I could be arrested at any moment.”
“Why? Why? Why is this happening to us?” The cardinal twisted his head back and forth. He looked years older, and his face was slack, beaten. His eyes blurred then refocused on Elijah.
“I have evidence that will destroy the President’s career. He is a liar and a murderer.” He held up the package of documents. “It’s all here.”
The cardinal’s face brightened. The old fire welled up in his eyes for an instant, and he screwed his brows together and set his mouth in a straight line.
“Is it true?”
“It is true. We are close to defeating him, but it is not yet accomplished. I must put this information into the hands where it will be most effective. Whom should I bring it to?”
“I don’t know. I’m so tired. . . . Maybe my friend the judge from Brescia. Wait, go to Dottrina. The Cardinal Prefect is the one. Oh no, I forgot! He’s in New York, trying to settle a dispute between the American bishops. If I could have just a few minutes of strength, just a few more. I could make a phone call. You must take it to the Holy Father. He’ll know what to do.”
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