Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  home. And the Holy Father will have won a major public relations success. He will be able to say that he has sown the seeds of Muslim-Christian unity, wiping out centuries of mutual distrust and bigotry in forty-eight hours. Whatever the fundamentalists on either side will say, he will have made a gesture for peace. Since Gorbachev came to power, the value of such gestures in international affairs has become very great.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘You said there were two things.’

  Assefa hesitated.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Two things. The second is this. At ten o’clock tomorrow morning, a special papal audience will be held in the Apostolic Palace, in the Sala Clementina. All the high-ranking delegates will be there, along with the Irish and Egyptian presidents and members of the Curia who will not be present at the actual conference. But the highlight of the audience will be an event which His Holiness hopes will win the hearts of men and women throughout the world.’

  He paused and closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘After he has greeted the dignitaries and seated them round the chamber, the Pope will welcome a party of orphans selected from every country of Europe and the Middle East, but chiefly from Italy and Egypt. Christian children and Muslim children, the hope of a new generation.’

  Assefa looked at the others one by one.

  ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’ he whispered. ‘Tomorrow morning, the Pope will give his blessing to over one hundred children.’

  No one said a word. From the street below, a faint sound of feet and voices and engines rose up to them, a thousand miles away, empty, without meaning. Assefa’s final words seemed to echo and re-echo around the little room, filling it until there was space for nothing else.

  Dermot O’Malley broke the silence. He sat in his chair without moving, listening to the echo wipe away the world outside.

  ‘ “And it came to pass,”’ he said in a flat voice from which all emotion had gone,’ “that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon.” ‘

  But Patrick did not hear him. He sat rigid in his chair, staring ahead as though he saw something there in the dying afternoon light, a television screen, red and blue lights flashing, a child’s face stained with blood, small teeth on bloodless lips, dead eyes, bodies like dolls, scattered across a patterned marble floor.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  They were on the terrace at the rear of the apartment. O’Malley had gone with Assefa to the Vatican. Roberto was on his way to deliver sealed letters to several members of the government and the judiciary. There seemed to be nothing for either Patrick or Francesca to do but wait.

  The last light had almost faded from the sky. Directly opposite, in the grey dome of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, a pair of kestrels were nesting. As they flew back and forth, their wings caught fire in a strip of sunlight that lay slantwise across the back of the dome.

  ‘That’s the male,’ said Patrick, pointing as one of the birds hovered briefly before darting away in search of fresh building material. ‘The one with blue wings.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francesca. The birds set her on edge. She had never been that free, to wing effortlessly in unencumbered air, to turn feathers into light, to be the hunter, not the hunted. ‘They come here every year,’ she said. ‘They build a nest and hatch their chicks and fly away again.’

  She wished she could just flap a pair of wings and fly away with a kestrel’s ease, away from Rome, from Italy, from the past.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he asked. ‘How did you come to follow me in Venice, the night I visited your father?’

  She smiled. Not her old smile, he thought. That had gone forever. But another very much like it, wry, enigmatic - not in the manner of the Gioconda, but darker, as though it were not a smile at all but a mask embellishing fear. Fear, great sadness, longings that had grown stale and useless - motifs for an entire life. He thought of masks: the white alabaster masks in Claudio Surian’s workshop, the coloured mask on his dead face, the bautas worn by the figures in his dreams, the high, elaborate costumes he and Francesca had worn at the carnival the year before she died and did not die - an entire city cloaked and veiled and sworn to silence.

  ‘Your arrival in Italy did not go unnoticed by the Brotherhood,’ she said. ‘They lost you in Rome and put out an alert to all their members. That was how we came to hear that you were here. At first I thought it was some sort of trap for me, but I couldn’t understand how you could have become involved. And then we found out who Father Makonnen was and realized it made some sense after all.

  ‘Anyway, I guessed you would go to Venice. The rest was easy. There were two places you could not avoid - my tomb on San Michele and the Palazzo Contarini. Brother Antonio told Dermot you had been on San Michele, and ...’

  ‘He knows?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Only a little. He’s an old friend of Dermot’s, they used to be in Rome together. Dermot once told him a little, asked for help. Since all burials in Venice take place on San Michele, he’s been able to trace back many of the Dead for us, and through them their families. We’ve uncovered some very useful information that way.’

  She looked out towards the dome again. The light had gone completely now, leaving the sky a dark shade of purple, like a heavy bruise. The kestrels were gone. A sound of moving traffic rose up from the city below, like a caged beast circling.

  ‘So you were there that night waiting?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I was in the calle outside. I didn’t expect you to catch sight of me in the mist, much less know who I was. I’d no idea then that you had found a photograph, that you guessed I might still be alive.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have tried to speak to me?’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘No, of course not. For all I knew, you thought I was dead. I still had no idea of the nature of your involvement. From your point of view, my sudden appearance might have been a terrible shock. From mine, there was a very real danger that you could lead them to me.’

  ‘But you took me to the hospital.’

  ‘Of course. When you called my name, I realized you must know or guess that I was alive. Then you collapsed. I couldn’t just leave you there.’

  Her hand lay unmoving on the terrace railing. His rested beside it, close, yet not touching. Once, holding hands had been the simplest of gestures. But here, tonight, with a grave and a score of years between them, it would have seemed almost a sacrilege.

  ‘I had Roberto follow you when you left the hospital,’ she continued. ‘Did you know there was a policeman waiting for you?’

  ‘Yes. Was he ... ?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Matteo Maglione. He’s their chief man in the Venice carabinieri. He made a mistake going to the hospital himself. Roberto recognized him and realized that you might try getting out the back way. He followed you to Porto Marghera.

  ‘You made your own mistake, of course, when you started asking questions on Burano, trying to find someone to take you to San Vitale. They were on to you straight away. Fortunately, we were just behind them. Too late to save the old fisherman; but at least we got you both off. You took a great risk going there.’

  ‘You did as much,’ he said.

  She shrugged.

  ‘I’ve grown used to it. I don’t expect to live forever.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

  They went to the kitchen and made coffee. They needed something to do, something to distract them from the tension of waiting. Above all, there was an unspoken agreement between them not to enter into a discussion of what had happened twenty years ago. For Patrick, grief was beginning to slide into outrage at what had, in the final analysis, been nothing more nor less than a betrayal. If Francesca had left him for another man, his life might never have been as damaged as it had been by her supposed death.

  She may
have been resurrected, but nothing that happened now could give life back to the years he had wasted grieving for her. Nor, he thought, could anything give new life to the love she had destroyed. Perhaps she had been blameless, the victim of pressures she was powerless to resist. But he was in no position to judge. With a shock, he realized that he had already started to resent the fact that she was still alive. So much of his life had been built around her death, so much of him had been buried with her empty coffin, that he wondered if he could find the energy to fill the void her return had left.

  He told her what he could of his life after leaving university, omitting all references to his state of mind. In consequence, all he said was curiously grey and barren, a numb recitation of facts, as though compiled by an agency about someone else. He said little of his work with the CIA, and simply concentrated on places he had been and people he had known.

  He said a little of the women he had pursued in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to mitigate his grief after her supposed death. But in speaking of them he made no reference to the grief that had underpinned each of his relationships and, in the end, turned them sour. Without intending to do so, he made himself sound callous, his feelings shallow.

  There had been an attempt at marriage, five years after Francesca. Unable to admit his continuing need for her, he had inflicted a merciless destruction on the relationship, day after day, night after night, until it had grown pale and sick beyond help. He and his wife had stayed together less than a year.

  He talked at length about Ruth. Since leaving Ireland, he had thought of her constantly. The image of her body, pale on a grey shore, haunted him. He understood now why her father had killed her or had her killed, that she had been his necessary sacrifice. Patrick had never loved her as he had once loved Francesca, but until now he had not found the courage to admit it. Since Francesca’s return, Ruth’s ghost had already begun to fade.

  Francesca listened in silence. For over twenty years, her own imagination had tormented her with this. How long had he grieved? A year? Two years? She had pictured him in bed with other women, with a wife and children, always happy, all memory of her buried. It gave her no satisfaction now to learn that he had never known the happiness her imagination had so freely granted him.

  Strangely, she gave little in return. For the most part, she talked about fraternita - how she had come to hear about it, the help they had given her, the work she had done for them in return. Even if Passover had not happened, she told him, they would eventually have taken their expanding file on the Brotherhood to the State Prosecutor.

  ‘Do you remember P2?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  The P2 scandal had broken in 1981. Fifteen years earlier, a man called Licio Gelli had organized a Masonic Lodge called Raggruppamento Gelli Propaganda Due - P2 for short. By various means, he succeeded in getting some of the most powerful men in the country to join. Members of the Cabinet, several former Prime Ministers, top Civil Servants, almost two hundred senior military men, bankers, magistrates, university professors.

  In 1980 one of Gelli’s close friends, a banker named Michele Sindona, was under investigation for fraud. Gelli got mixed up in the case, his villa was raided, and papers were found, including the P2 membership files. It turned into the biggest political crisis in Italy since the war. The Prime Minister resigned and the government collapsed.

  ‘Roberto used to talk a lot about the P2 affair,’ she said. ‘He’d studied it in detail and thought our best plan would be to expose the Brotherhood in the same way. But we had to be in an unassailable position first. We couldn’t afford to go public while there were still powerful Brotherhood members unknown to us. The authorities had been lucky with P2: the lists they found at Gelli’s villa contained almost one thousand names, the entire membership of the lodge. Short of a miracle, we have no way of obtaining a list like that for the Brotherhood. As far as I know, none exists.’

  She paused and rubbed her forehead as though the tension was giving her a headache.

  ‘We have our own files, of course. They’re stored in duplicate copies in three separate bank vaults, and Roberto has a master set on computer disks that are kept in a secure location. We’re guessing a little, but we think our list is nearly complete. What we have been looking for over the past two years is hard evidence of the Brotherhood’s activities. All we need is enough to convince one or two people in the right positions that a series of synchronized raids would be justified: the rest of our evidence would turn up then.

  Tour friend Eamonn De Faoite worked for us. He started out translating some things from Aramaic, then he branched out for himself, tracking down the Brotherhood in Ireland. There have always been links. They’ve had members in Ireland for hundreds of years. That’s why I was sent to Trinity to study.’

  Patrick thought suddenly of the first of his hallucinations, when he had imagined Francesca speaking Irish in an eighteenth-century room in Dublin. Had an ancestor of hers lived there once?

  Francesca continued.

  ‘It wasn’t intended originally that I should be one of the Dead. That privilege had been reserved for my older brother, Umberto. But ... Umberto really was killed in an accident, and I had to take his place. They didn’t tell me until I got to Venice. I tried to... contact you, I...’ She closed her eyes, the pain of the memory returning. ‘They stopped me. I had to leave at once, I had to go to Egypt.’

  She paused.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about this. Not yet.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  She took several deep breaths.

  ‘Eamonn ... I was talking about Eamonn. He was the first to stumble across references to Passover.’ She paused. ‘You say he sent papers to Balzarin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. Yes, that makes sense. He told us he had information, but that it was incomplete. I think he mentioned that he had a possible source for more. I remember now that he said Balzarin had approached him, hinting that he knew something about the Brotherhood. We had nothing on Balzarin here. I think maybe Eamonn gave his file on the Brotherhood to him in an attempt to find out more about Passover.’

  ‘What about this man Father O’Malley has taken Assefa to see? This cardinal. Can he be relied on?’

  ‘Dermot says he can. Good God, Patrick, we never meant it to be rushed like this. Roberto wanted us to take our time, to muster our forces, get all the ammunition we could, approach several people in positions of influence simultaneously. He was patient, in spite of...’

  She stopped and stood up abruptly. For a moment, she stood staring at the door, as though uncertain, then she walked into the next room. Patrick followed her, uncomprehending. She was standing by the window.

  ‘They’re late,’ she said. ‘Roberto said he’d ring as soon as he’d delivered the letters. I’m worried.’

  ‘It’s still early,’ Patrick said. ‘Just gone eight.’ But he was worried too. Roberto should have been in touch.

  ‘I’m going to ring his apartment,’ Francesca said. There was a door beside her, leading to the study. Patrick followed her inside. As he stepped through the door, she switched on the lights. For a second, Patrick noticed nothing, then, all at once, he realized. He had been in this room before. Not since his arrival at the apartment with Francesca. Before that.

  On one wall a print of Moreau’s ‘Salome’, lit by a single spotlight. Beside it a well-filled bookcase. In the corner a small television set, its screen blank.

  This was the room of his vision, the room he had dreamed about in his last nightmare in Venice.

  FORTY-NINE

  As they drove to the Vatican, Assefa tried to pray, but his thoughts were too jumbled to fashion even the simplest of supplications. They hurried through familiar streets grown unfamiliar. Nothing seemed quite real or habitual. Everything had changed subtly: the streets, the shops, the cafes, the people. Rome had become a film set, a pastiche of a city, its inhabitants mere extras in a bad movie. He c
ould not believe that here, somewhere in these streets, there were men and women preparing such a monstrous slaughter.

  O’Malley had made several phone calls before setting off. He was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to speak to the right people, but he had to take great care that what he said was not reported to anyone connected to the Brotherhood, least of all Cardinal Fazzini or any of the other members of the Curia known to be members. O’Malley knew that this was scarcely the moment to go lobbing accusations against cardinals. Fazzini was closely involved in the preparations for tomorrow’s ceremony. To leave the Secretary of State and his department out of discussions about security would be a major breach of etiquette.

  The priest hoped he could persuade a small handful of individuals to take personal responsibility for whatever had to be done. Fortunately, he believed he had identified the right people.

  Colonel Hans Meyer, the commander of the Swiss Guard, had immediate responsibility for Vatican security. Those of his men not actually carrying out ceremonial duties tomorrow would be armed with Uzis instead of halberds. It was vital for them to be ready to react to an attack from whatever quarter it might be launched. O’Malley was confident that Meyer and his men could be trusted completely. From several sources he had confirmed that the Brotherhood had never been able to infiltrate the Swiss Guard.

  True, the old Noble Guards, Palatine Guards and Papal Gendarmerie had harboured several Brothers in every generation, but they had been abolished by Paul VI in 1970 and, as far as O’Malley had been able to ascertain, had bequeathed no legacy of that corruption to the Swiss. Meyer himself had been born and bred in Lucerne, an area seemingly free of Brotherhood influence. He could be trusted.