Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  *

  The Stradella Singers always performed by candlelight and the soft ochre flames lit the intent faces of the performers as Gareth lifted his hands to shape the opening of the Miserere. ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, after Thy great goodness . . .’

  As the hushed notes began to fill the echoing vaults of the college chapel, I was suddenly reminded of everything I had lost in turning my back on the Stradella Singers. And I felt tears pricking at my eyes as if I was hearing them sing for the very first time.

  I had sat here countless times in the last years, listening to St Alphege’s college choir, even rehearsing and conducting them in the new editions I had spent my days transcribing, bringing obscure treasures of the baroque repertoire to fresh audiences. But the excitement had gone from music-making for me, and every exquisite phrase and elaborate cadence only served to remind me of what I had lost.

  ‘Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.’

  But this was like walking through a cleansing shower of rain that was gently washing over me, rinsing away all the accumulated bitterness that had poisoned my outlook on life.

  ‘Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Wanda’s soprano, piercingly clear and pure, soared above the other singers as the Stradella Singers interpreted the version notated by the young Mozart – and never performed in that way outside the Vatican since the days of the last castrati.

  ‘Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou that art the God of my health: and my tongue shall sing of Thy righteousness.’ In my excitement and confusion, I had forgotten all about dinner. Having slipped in late at the back of the packed chapel, I found myself behind some undergraduates, one or two still wearing their gowns from formal hall, although one must have been from another college, as he was wearing an unfamiliar gown with a hood . . .

  I blinked in the candlelight, trying to focus and as I did, he must have sensed he was being watched, for he turned his head towards me. I felt my breath stop as his intense, grey-eyed gaze caught mine for a moment with the faintest hint of a smile . . .

  . . . the voice and appearance of an angel . . . one would think that one of Botticelli or Perugino’s heavenly choir had stepped down from one of the frescoes . . .

  I blinked again as the voices swelled to a climax and a stifling feeling of panic rose in my throat.

  ‘No!’ I heard myself shouting as if from a long way off. ‘Stop the performance – or someone’s going to die!’ And then the music and the tremulous candlelight seemed to fuse into one and I felt myself falling forward into an endless spiral of white noise.

  *

  ‘James? Can you hear me?’

  Someone was calling my name. I opened my eyes to find myself dazzled by bright fluorescent lights overhead. I tried to raise my head and sit up – and found that I was attached to a drip and several electrical machines that were whirring and bleeping away.

  ‘You gave us quite a scare there, old man.’ Gareth was grinning down at me. ‘Shouting like that – and then passing out.’

  ‘I’m . . . sorry, Gareth . . .’

  ‘Babbling about seeing ghosts. The Mozart connection. Made great publicity for us. The dailies lapped it up.’

  A nurse was checking the machines. ‘Only a few minutes, now. Dr Martagon needs his rest.’

  ‘Got to dash anyway – a plane to catch,’ Gareth said. My hand shot out and gripped his sleeve.

  ‘He was there,’ I said. ‘Amadeo Vitali. Allegri’s choirboy. You must have read the Vatican dossier. Every time that version is performed, he’ll claim another sacrifice.’

  ‘Looks like you took the fall for us this time, James. A near thing, the medics said. An undetected heart problem. Time for that sabbatical, maybe?’ He placed a newspaper on the bedside table. ‘We’re off to do that Vatican concert now.’

  ‘I think not,’ said a quiet voice, subtly accented. We both looked up to see that a silver-haired man had appeared in the doorway; elegantly dressed in a smartly tailored suit of charcoal grey, he had the distinguished air of a barrister or a diplomat.

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry?’ Gareth said in an arrogant tone that offered no hint of apology.

  The stranger took a card from a silver card holder and handed it to Gareth.

  ‘Dr Pietro Gennaro, librarian, Vatican Library,’ Gareth read aloud.

  ‘I won’t ask how you came by the illegal copy of the “other” Miserere,’ said Dr Gennaro in a voice as creamily smooth as pannacotta, ‘but I’m afraid I must ask you to return it to me, along with all other transcriptions, vocal parts,’ and his gaze rested on me, ‘and any other documentary evidence that you may have acquired.’

  ‘Now wait just a moment, Dr Gennaro—’ began Gareth and even in my mildly sedated state I could tell that he was seriously rattled.

  ‘If all the material is returned to me today, the Vatican is prepared to overlook this transgression. But if you withhold anything, even the smallest scrap, I’m afraid that we will not hesitate to press charges. You and your singers will never work professionally again.’

  ‘You’re threatening us?’

  ‘I believe that you’re in no position to object,’ said Dr Gennaro, ‘especially as we have evidence that you bribed one of our younger officials to make the illegal photocopies. He has – as you can imagine – been removed from his post. There is a good reason that certain texts that we watch over must never be released. You, in particular, Dr Martagon,’ and he turned to me again, ‘must realise the sense of what I’m saying.’

  I did. ‘Take my keys, Gareth,’ I said, ashamed at how weak I sounded, ‘and give Dr Gennaro what he’s come here to collect.’

  Gareth opened his mouth and for a moment I feared he was going to object. Surely he must understand that he could not win against the will of the Vatican.

  ‘We are still looking forward to the concert that you’ll be giving in Vatican City,’ added Dr Gennaro. ‘I remember that superb soprano from your last visit. Your wife Wanda, I believe? She made those high Cs in the Miserere sound quite effortless.’

  Gareth still did not react.

  ‘I mean, of course, in the version that you will be using. The standard version.’

  ‘Very well,’ Gareth said at length. He did not look at me as he led the way out of the room. ‘You’d better come with me, Dr Gennaro. I’ll give you the materials.’

  And they were gone.

  I lay back, my strength exhausted. A fragment of melody was playing in my mind and I found myself humming the notes softly, wondering what it could be. Words, familiar words from Psalm 51, attached themselves to the plangent phrases, and at last I realised their provenance. I had last heard them in the chapel, sung by candlelight, as the Stradella Singers performed the forgotten, forbidden abbellimenti written to commemorate a boy with the face of an angel . . . and brought back from the silence of centuries thanks to the extraordinary talents of another boy musician who shared his name: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  But lo, Thou requirest truth in the inward parts: and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly. A strange sense of contentment filled me. Perhaps I would apply for that sabbatical as Gareth had suggested . . . and go to Rome to seek out more of the musical mysteries hidden away for so long in the vaults of the Vatican.

  Ω

  According to the most recent annotation to the Miserere file in the Vaults, Dr James Martagon visited Rome in September 1970 as part of a combined convalescence and sabbatical from his college at the University of Cambridge. He visited the Vatican Library, and met up again with Dr Pietro Gennaro, who was pleased to see how much he had recovered his health. Dr Gennaro suggested that he write his own account of the events leading up to the concert in St Alphege’s Chapel in February 1970, which would then be archived alongside the other documents concerning Allegri’s Miserere.

  He also showed James, from the Miserere file, the original note which Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife on 14 April 1770:

  You have often
heard of the famous Miserere in Rome, which is so greatly prized that the performers are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a single part of it, copy it or give it to anyone. But we have it already. Wolfgang has written it down and we would have sent it to Salzburg in this letter, if it were not necessary for us to be there to perform it. But the manner of performance contributes more to its effect than the composition itself. Moreover, as it is one of the secrets of Rome, we do not wish to let it fall into other hands.

  Although the index to the file lists Mozart’s transcription of the Miserere, the score was removed from the file by Dr Gennaro before our researchers were allowed to take the file from the Archives.

  1975

  This report is about abuse, and how the Church has dealt with the issue for decades, by hushing it up and by making the problem, quite literally, go away.

  It is an account of one man’s dedicated search, not through the closed Archives at the Vatican – ‘the Vaults’ – but through the bureaucracy of records in the Vatican Library and the many curial departments available to a Church employee, a former detective now working as an investigator within the Church.

  It details how even with his professional skills, even with official doors open to him, it took doggedness and determination over years to track down the few leads to what he was searching for, and to pull these disparate pieces of information together to make up a picture.

  We have to thank the anonymous writer for his work, and for his personal report – but without Pope John Paul’s opening of the Vaults, where we found it, this too would have remained hidden.

  The Island of Lost Priests

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I could only find three direct references to the Island of Lost Priests in the Vatican’s records, and only one mentions the island by that rather subjective – and, as I later learned, rather apt – nickname.

  The other two references are buried in financial and property files. One reference is a line-item in a centuries-old budget; the other is simply a map of the various properties owned by the Church.

  Taken together, they form a slight trail to a secret and a conundrum, a forgotten history of a time everyone wants to forget, and a moment of opportunity which was, unsurprisingly, squandered.

  *

  I’m considered something strange in the modern era. I’m an American who converted to Catholicism – not because I married into the faith, but because I wanted to become a Catholic. I officially converted in my twenties, but for all intents and purposes, I became a believer in my early teens.

  I love an ordered way to do things. I adore the patterns and the liturgy. I adore knowing what to expect in a service and what I’m supposed to do.

  I first encountered the Church because of Father Joseph O’Malley. June, 1950. I can’t remember the exact date, but it had to be mid-month, because my dad, a teacher, had the summer off.

  I knew even then that things would only get worse. That false hope that so many kids had when life went sideways forever and ever – it wasn’t for me. Maybe I was morbid, or maybe, even at age twelve, I was a realist.

  Back then, Brooklyn was the centre of my world. My mother had died in a terrible car accident on New Year’s Eve, and my dad wanted to die too. He didn’t have the courage to off himself; he spent the next ten years carving away at himself with cigarettes and alcohol when a gun would’ve been so much quicker.

  By the time his body left – in a gutter not too far from my childhood home, riddled with cancer, and skeletal from malnutrition – the man I knew before the accident had been dead for years.

  That day, twenty-five years ago, I sat on the steps of a neighbourhood bar and waited for the right moment to pull my dad out of it and try to get him home. The air was so humid it felt alive – or maybe that was the stench of day-old vomit, cigarettes and alcohol that oozed up from the edge of the alley off to my right.

  I was worried about dinner. The twenty I’d cadged from my dad’s wallet the day school ended had lasted me nearly two weeks. I bought groceries and cooked as best I could for a kid who’d never cracked a cookbook before January. I didn’t know budgeting, and I didn’t know how to shop, but I was learning.

  But the money was out except for three dollars, and I was wondering if I should feed myself somehow – get a slice, maybe – or try to stretch the money even farther. I was wearing fading pants that were too short because I’d hit a growth spurt, and a too-tight shirt that had been too big the summer before.

  Father Joe walked past that bar every day on his way to the church around the corner. I’d seen him before, but hadn’t met his gaze.

  He was hard to miss. He was broad-shouldered and tall; thick black hair that glistened in the sun. His skin was bronzed because he spent as much time outside as he possibly could.

  He wore a collar but in the warm weather he was in shirtsleeves, even though it was frowned on by the diocese. He was one of those young priests who made the Church look cool, rather than one of the old judgemental guys, the ones who led the Catholic school attached to the church.

  I never once felt that Father Joe disapproved of anything I said or did, which, looking back on everything now, was probably what drew me to him. Too many other people were trying to tell me what to do. They were worried about me, but back then, worry didn’t translate into action.

  That day, Father Joe sat down beside me. He didn’t even brush off the concrete step like I had done. He just plunked down bringing with him the scent of pipe tobacco with a faint hint of Aqua Velva.

  ‘Hot,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not looking at him. I didn’t want to be rude, but I didn’t want to be bothered either.

  ‘We’re having a barbecue. We got dogs and buns and potato salad and lots of cookies, more than we can eat. You hungry?’

  Was the Pope Catholic? I wanted to snap at him, then looked at his collar. It wasn’t the appropriate thing to say.

  I glanced at the bar, heard my dad’s laugh inside, knew it might be hours yet before he came out. I’d been thinking of how to use that three dollars because I knew I had time to buy what few groceries I could, take them to our apartment, and come back here before he noticed I was missing.

  But thinking about that slice had me confused. Then I realised: I wasn’t trading a dollar of our hoard to fill my stomach. I was going to be able to fill up for free.

  Still, I was a Brooklyn kid, so I asked, ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘You gotta be quiet when we say grace,’ Father Joe said.

  ‘That’s it?’ I asked, not believing him.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, and kept to his word.

  *

  The church had barbecues off and on all summer, usually preceded by a softball game where Father Donnelly pitched and Father Bill played catcher. No boy got to have those prime spots, no matter how good he was. Father Donnelly had been called up to the Dodgers for one fine day thirty years ago, and still dined out on that. Father Donnelly still had the touch, although he must’ve been pushing sixty.

  Father Bill was the same age as Father Joe, a priest who didn’t mind getting dirty, who rarely wore his robes, but always wore his collar, a man with a twinkle in his eye and – as he used to say – a song in his heart. That song was usually Sinatra, even though, by 1950, the entire world thought Sinatra was passé.

  By the Fourth of July, I was playing in the softball games. By the first of August, I’d show up for morning Mass before my dad woke up, not because I liked the service so much, but there was always coffee and doughnuts after.

  Most of that summer, I ate at the church, and no one seemed to care that I didn’t actually belong.

  Two weeks before public school started, Father Joe sat beside me at one of the informal barbecues.

  ‘We have an opening at school,’ he said. ‘We’re authorised to take in two kids per class from the community. You interested?’

  I’d heard horrid stories about Catholic school. The nuns were mea
n. You had to wear a uniform. Everything was regulated.

  But I also knew that the Catholic kids got better grades. No one pulled a knife in their school, and even better, the school was only a block from my apartment. I didn’t have to walk far, and I didn’t have to go through some of Brooklyn’s worst neighbourhoods.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  Father Joe smiled and clapped me on the back, and that was that.

  Different times. We didn’t tell my dad. He never filled out the forms. My dad taught at the high school, not the junior high, so we always went off in different directions anyway. He had no idea where I was or what I did.

  He didn’t even notice the uniform until halfway through the year. He stared at it, then looked at me, and said, ‘How long’s this been going on?’

  ‘Since September,’ I said, then added quickly before he could argue, ‘I’m getting straight As.’

  He closed his eyes, sighed, and ran a hand over his face. The capillaries under his skin were already breaking, even then. Later, I looked at photographs to confirm the memory, and saw the red nose, the bleary eyes, even before Mom died.

  She hadn’t been driving that night; he had. But, as the cops said, everyone was drunk on New Year’s Eve. And it’d gotten written up as the other driver’s fault.

  He didn’t argue with me that day, didn’t tell me I had to quit, didn’t say I was getting indoctrinated, which is what he used to say about the kids pouring out of the school before Mom died. He just shook his head and left, and sometimes, when I’m not paying close attention to my memory, I think that was the last time I ever saw him.

  Maybe it was. Not physically, but mentally. Maybe my dad just gave up that day. He’d lost every fight that mattered to him.

  Or maybe, he’d already given up, and my defection to a religious school that kicked his school’s butt at every academic competition in the city simply confirmed how out of control his life was.