by James Becker
‘You must be my confessor, Antonio, and what I have to tell you is for your ears alone,’ he muttered. ‘Please ask the others to leave the room.’
Morini nodded. Like every other Roman Catholic priest, he fully appreciated the sanctity of the confessional.
‘The Father would like me to take his confession,’ he said, turning to Gregory. ‘Can you and the Sister please give us a few minutes alone?’
When the door closed behind Gregory and the nun, Morini again turned to face the old man, and knelt down beside the bed so that his head was as close as possible to Gianni’s.
‘We are quite alone now, my old friend – just you and me and the heavenly Father. I will gladly hear your confession and grant absolution.’
Gianni nodded, the movement of his head barely perceptible.
But what he said next was not at all what Morini had expected.
Gianni clutched the younger man’s hand with a grip that was surprisingly firm and began to speak in a low and weak voice.
‘I am not confessing my sins, Antonio. I attended to that matter regarding my departure from this world some two weeks ago. I didn’t believe I could commit any important sins just by lying here, except perhaps being guilty of sloth.’
Morini smiled at the feeble joke.
‘So how can I help you?’ he asked.
‘What I have to tell you is a confession of sorts, I suppose, but it is far from personal, and involves my professional position here in the Vatican hierarchy, a position that you now occupy. I have some important information to impart to you, and you must solemnly swear never to share what I have to say with anyone else, inside or outside the Vatican.’
Gianni sank backwards onto his pillow. The effort of speaking at all was clearly taking its toll on his ravaged body.
Morini stared at him, wondering if the opiates – or even the disease itself – had deranged the old man, if he was hearing drug-or pain-induced ramblings with no basis whatsoever in fact. But Gianni neither looked nor sounded as if that were the case. His voice was weak and slightly slurred, but his eyes were bright with intelligence.
‘What information?’
‘First you must swear never to reveal what I’m about to tell you.’
Morini shook his head in slight irritation, then did as the old man asked.
‘I swear by Almighty God that I will tell no one anything I learn in this room. I would never breach the secrets of the confessional under any circumstances, and I will accord whatever you tell me here exactly the same status.’
‘Good. How long have you been here, in the holy city?’
Morini looked slightly taken aback at the question.
‘Just under twenty years,’ he replied. ‘Why?’
‘I arrived here in the mid-seventies, and I became Prefect at the end of the nineties. Even now I still remember having an interview, a very similar interview to this one, in fact, with my predecessor. Who also, if I recall correctly, had contracted a form of cancer. Perhaps the disease is one of the risks of this particular job.’
Gianni paused for breath, and perhaps to order his thoughts before he continued.
‘I have a good idea what you’re thinking at this precise moment, because when I was in your position I, too, wondered if my predecessor as Prefect was deluded or suffering from some kind of mental instability in addition to his other infirmities. But he wasn’t, and neither am I.
‘I’m quite sure, Antonio, that you know most of the history of the Vatican and of the Church that we both serve, but there is one incident that took place almost half a century ago that only received a limited amount of publicity at the time, and that has been virtually forgotten about today. You’ve probably never even heard of it, but it was perhaps the most dangerous event ever to take place here in the Holy See.’
‘Dangerous? Dangerous to whom?’
The old man’s grip tightened on Morini’s hand.
‘To everyone. To the very foundations of our Church, and to the faith espoused by countless millions of followers of our true religion around the world.’
Morini felt a sudden chill run through his body. Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it.
‘You’d better tell me exactly what you mean,’ he said.
What the old man had to say didn’t take long. But the implications of what he said were shattering.
4
‘Dear God,’ Morini murmured when Gianni finished speaking ‘Dear God, save us all.’
And then Morini fell silent, as his mind processed the information he had just been given. Finally, he began questioning the dying man.
‘But why did they put it there? Why didn’t they lock it away somewhere in the archives? Or even destroy it?’
Gianni shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I suppose the fear was that wherever it was hidden in the archives there was always a chance that some researcher might stumble over it one day. Destroying it was not really an option. You know as well as I do that the Vatican hardly ever destroys anything. I suppose putting it inside another exhibit in a glass case, in a part of the Holy See to which public access was never granted, and choosing a display case that would never be opened except under the tightest supervision and only then by senior Vatican officials, was seen as the safest alternative.’
‘Which we now know wasn’t safe at all,’ Morini retorted. Then he asked the obvious question. ‘Does anybody else know about this?’
‘The Prefect of the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum at the time we are talking about obviously knew what had happened, and he conveyed that information to the Holy Father. In return, he was ordered to reveal the facts to nobody except his immediate successor in charge of the archive. I was the third Prefect to bear the weight of this information and this responsibility, and you are now the fourth.’
‘And his Holiness? Does he know about this?’
Gianni nodded slightly.
‘Since that date, every pope has been made aware of it, and keeping each pontiff informed is one of your duties. If our present Holy Father should succumb while you are in the post, you will be required to explain the situation to the new occupant of the throne of St Peter. It is likely that you will be summoned to a private audience with his Holiness over the next few weeks to discuss this, once I am no longer here. But nobody else, nobody at all, inside or outside the Vatican, must ever learn what you now know.’
Morini nodded, his mind still reeling.
Then Gianni’s grip tightened on the younger man’s arm.
‘But you do understand, Antonio?’ he asked, his voice beseeching. ‘You do understand what must be done, what the Holy Father has instructed is to be carried out if the unthinkable happens?’
Morini nodded again.
‘You need have no concerns about that, my old friend. I know where my duty lies, and the importance of the Mother Church. You can rest assured that I will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that it will never, ever, see the light of day.’
‘And the other measures that I explained to you?’ Gianni insisted.
‘They are unpleasant,’ Morini said, choosing his words carefully, ‘but in the circumstances I am certain that they would be entirely justified. Those, too, I will arrange to carry out if it ever becomes necessary to do so.’
5
London
Present day
‘I don’t know what it is about that woman,’ Angela Lewis said, ‘but I find her incredibly irritating.’
She and her former husband, Chris Bronson, were relaxing in the lounge of her flat in Ealing, watching the large LED television that she’d purchased the previous day, and which Bronson had then spent hours installing after they’d got it back to the flat. For the last thirty minutes they’d been watching a popular antiques programme.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Bronson replied. ‘She’s always got this smug-git expression on her face and you can just tell that she thinks she’s absolutely wonderful. It’s a pity, because apart from her I
really enjoy the show. But I suppose for you this antique stuff all feels a bit amateur?’
‘Not exactly. The world of antiques is simply enormous, and there’s no such thing as an expert on everything. I know my way around ceramics, obviously, because that’s what I do all the time, but every time I watch this’ – she raised one elegant bare leg from the footstool and pointed it at the television screen – ‘I learn something new, something outside my particular specialization.’
‘And I suppose like everybody else you keep hoping that some hideous vase or something you pick up for a few pence at a car-boot sale actually turns out to be some long-lost priceless relic from the Ming Dynasty so that you can retire on the proceeds,’ Bronson suggested.
Angela glanced at him, a smile playing over her lips.
‘There are a couple of problems with that scenario,’ she said. ‘First, the chances of a Ming vase – or any other really valuable antique – turning up at a boot sale are vanishingly small. And second, I’ve never been to a car-boot sale, and I’ve no intention of going, so if your idea of a dirty weekend is tramping around a muddy field in the rain wearing wellington boots and looking at stalls covered in overpriced twentieth-century souvenirs from Brighton and Blackpool, you’ll be going by yourself.’
‘Actually,’ Bronson said, ‘my idea of a dirty weekend is a lot less like that and rather more like the one we’ve just spent.’
‘Installing television sets?’ Angela laughed.
‘I was thinking more about what we got up to after I’d lugged the box up the stairs and got the thing working.’
‘Well, I thought you deserved a lie-down after all your efforts. That’s the only reason that happened.’
‘Of course, of course. In fact, I feel as if I could do with another lie-down right now. Unless you’ve got any better ideas, that is.’
Angela stood up from the sofa and looked at Bronson, running a hand through her shoulder-length blonde hair. Yet again he was struck by her resemblance to a mid-thirties Michele Pfeiffer, especially her mouth, though her eyes were green rather than blue. Bronson still entertained occasional fantasies about seeing her in a Catwoman outfit, but the time had never seemed quite right to suggest it.
‘We’ll have to eat something at some point, I suppose,’ Angela said, ‘but right now I’m not really that hungry. Maybe if I took a bit of exercise that would give me more of an appetite.’
Then she turned round and walked over towards the hallway that led to the bedroom, her hips swinging under her short skirt.
‘That works for me,’ Bronson said, standing up quickly to follow her.
Forty minutes later, having comprehensively unmade the bed and done their best to exhaust each other, Bronson and Angela lay side by side, propped up on pillows and each sipping from a glass of red wine.
Angela seemed somewhat distracted, which was unlike her.
‘Is everything OK? Are you busy at the museum at the moment?’
Angela shook her head. ‘Not really. Well, in a way, yes. I mean, there’s nothing much of any interest going on there at the moment, but we’re actually pretty busy. To be perfectly honest, I’ll be quite glad when the next two weeks are over.’
‘Why?’
‘You know I enjoy my work, but about ten days ago I had another two boxes of potsherds delivered to me, and for whatever reason the powers that be have decided that they needed results quickly. I presume there’s some exhibition coming up and they want to put some of the reassembled vessels on display. The trouble is that all the shards of pottery seem to be about the same size and almost exactly the same colour, so trying to achieve anything meaningful is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle when you have no idea what the finished picture is supposed to look like.’
‘That must be incredibly frustrating,’ Bronson said.
‘It is. It’s frustrating and boring and important and urgent all at the same time, which is a pretty unpleasant combination. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow morning at all. Which is why I want to make the most of today,’ she added, snuggling up close to him.
6
Cairo
The present Khan el-Khalili souk dates from 1380, but it had been known as a Turkish bazaar for decades before that date. The name itself is something of a misnomer, because khan translates as a ‘caravanserai’, rather than a bazaar or market, and is a reference to the stopping place for traders and their camel trains that grew up on that site in the fourteenth century. In those days, Cairo was one of the most important merchant towns anywhere on the old Silk Road, and the Khan el-Khalili area was where most of the trading in the city took place.
In the latter part of that century, the Sultan Barquq began his madrassa in Bayn al-Qasrayn, sparking a rebuilding programme, one phase of which resulted in the establishment of the souk. It’s changed very little over the centuries. It’s still Cairo’s main souk, a maze of narrow streets, twisting alleyways, tiny shops, street traders, mediaeval arches and bizarre architecture, mosques and madrassas. The sights, sounds and smells – especially the smells of the spices – would be familiar to anyone who had ever visited a Middle Eastern bazaar: in fact today it is visited by almost as many tourists as locals. Visitors walk in a daze, staring about them at the astonishing range of goods for sale, at the antiques and antiquities, carpets and kilims, lamps, gold, silver, jewellery, alabaster ornaments, pottery, shisha pipes, cloth and textiles, clothing and anything and everything else.
On a particularly stuffy day, while pale and sweating visitors ambled through the streets and alleys of the souk, a local dealer slipped silently and efficiently through the crowds. He dealt in antiques and collectables – a term that covered almost everything – and knew that many of the objects he saw on the stalls, being touted to passing tourists as genuine ancient relics, were probably significantly younger than he was, and in some cases might have been made as recently as the previous day.
Anum Husani visited the souk almost daily, trying to seek out the genuine goods, the occasional real bargains, and any attractive items of whatever age that he could sell through his shop. He knew most of the stallholders, and was in his turn known by them. He knew what he was looking for, and was used to getting what he wanted at a price which he felt was fair, even if the negotiations involved prolonged haggling and more than one visit to the seller.
As was indicated by his first name, Anum Husani was the fifth child in his family. The son of comparatively wealthy parents, he had been born and brought up in the city. His second name – which followed tradition in that it was his father’s first name – meant ‘handsome’, which proved the optimism of his parents, if nothing else, because his face was dominated by a large, curved and blade-like nose, and under his scrubby beard his cheeks were marked by a rash of old acne scars. His eyes were perhaps his best feature, their piercing blue hinting at an interesting genetic mix somewhere among his forebears, and clear intelligence shining from them.
As was his habit, Husani paused for a few minutes at one of the many tiny cafés deep inside the souk and drank thick black coffee from a cup little bigger than a thimble. He was about to continue his searching when a trader he recognized approached him, smiled a welcome and then sat down.
They exchanged greetings and discussed friends, family and acquaintances for some minutes, before the trader finally worked his way round to the matter he wanted to talk about.
‘I have something that might interest you,’ Mahmoud began.
‘I’m interested in lots of things,’ Husani replied vaguely, gesturing at a number of items he had already purchased at various stalls in the souk. A few old pottery vessels and a couple of pieces of jewellery lay on the small circular table in front of him. ‘What have you got?’
‘You’ve heard about the building work going on over at al-Jizah?’ the trader asked.
Husani shook his head.
‘They were demolishing a couple of buildings,’ Mahmoud explained, ‘and a large battered metal case turned up in the
rubble. Nobody had seen the object before the demolition started, and I think it’s possible that it might have been hidden under the floorboards of one of the rooms, or possibly secreted within a wall.’
Mahmoud paused for a moment and looked keenly at his companion.
Husani’s interest and attention were obvious, and he gestured for the trader to continue his story.
‘One of the workmen forced it open, obviously hoping that there was something of value inside it, but all it contained were papers, so he tossed it away. Another one of the men working there is known to me and thought I might be interested in the case itself, even if there was nothing worth selling inside it, so he picked it up and brought it to me.’
Husani shook his head and picked up one of the pieces of jewellery he had purchased that morning, his attention already wandering.
‘I have no particular interest in metal cases, my friend,’ he pointed out.
Mahmoud nodded.
‘I know that,’ he replied, ‘and in fact I have already sold it to a tourist, who of course paid far more than it was really worth. But I also examined the papers that were inside it, and I think you might like to see those.’
Husani shook his head again.
‘I mostly deal in relics and artefacts,’ he said, dropping the necklace on the table and lifting up an old pottery lamp, ‘things like this. Documents, even very old documents, have little value for me. They are usually difficult to sell, and are also quite fragile.’
‘But you have sold parchments and scrolls in the past?’
‘Parchments only occasionally, but scrolls, yes, because they are decorative and the tourists like them, even the modern fakes. But you said the box contained papers. Did you mean that they were scrolls?’
‘Not scrolls, no, but there was one piece of thick paper that looks very old, and I didn’t recognize the writing on it. That is the object I thought you might be interested in seeing.’
Husani nodded slowly. Mahmoud was a competent market trader, but a generally unsophisticated and uneducated man, and what he was describing as ‘thick paper’ might be parchment or vellum, either of which could suggest considerable age. On the other hand, it could also be simply a sheet of thin cardboard. But whatever it was, Husani guessed it was probably worth his while to take a look.
