“By all means, go.”
It was not a flattering thought that his absence would mean so little. He telephoned Laura and said he would come. “I’ll look into flights and let you know.”
“Nate will send a plane for you.”
“Good Lord, no.”
A moment of silence. “As you wish. Would it be possible to bring your friend Father Crowe?”
“I doubt he could come.”
“Ask him.”
Apparently working for Ignatius Hannan had convinced her that all wishes could be realized.
To his surprise, Crowe agreed.
“I’ve always wanted to discover America.”
“You already have.”
A blank look.
“Saint Brendan’s voyage.”
John Burke telephoned Laura with the good news. He also changed his mind about the company jet, and one morning the two priests flew off from Ciampino in unimaginable luxury.
V
“Why are you following me?”
Traeger had first suspected that he was being tailed on the Via Veneto. Several times he had become aware of the swarthy little fellow who seemed to keep about thirty yards between them. When Traeger stopped at a newsstand and ignored the girly pictures on display, the little man took a chair at an outdoor café and began to tie his shoelace. Traeger went on and it became clear that the man was staying with him. The only way to handle this was to become the pursuer rather than the pursued.
He stepped into a bar and headed immediately for the men’s room. As he had hoped, there was a door leading outside. He went into the alley, then doubled back, crossed the street, and waited. The man appeared in the door of the bar, then darted inside again. Traeger waited. In a few minutes, the man emerged from the side street, looked up and down, and then gave up. He hailed a cab and Traeger got another. The man got out at the Piazza Cavour. Traeger hopped out of his cab, a miniature camera in his palm. He got two good shots, got back in his cab, and took off.
Three days later Traeger went through the bar of the Caffe Greco into the warren of little rooms beyond; the walls were crowded with engravings of Rome as it once had been, mementoes of the English literati who had frequented the place. Keats had died in a house abutting the Spanish Steps only fifty meters from the café.
A waiter in formal dress studied Traeger as if to decide if he were someone worthy of his obsequiousness. Traeger went past him into one of the smaller inner rooms. At a table for two under a framed account of Lord Byron was the man he had come to see. Traeger sat across from him. The man looked up from his newspaper as if to protest.
“Buon giorno, Antonio.”
“You have mistaken me for someone else,” the man answered in Italian.
“Why have you been following me?”
The waiter came and stood beside the table, haughtily avoiding Traeger’s eyes.
“Un caffe, per favore,” Traeger told him.
The waiter went away, and Anatoly folded his paper, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match and put it into a tray on the table. “I like these ashtrays.” They were saucerlike, white with an orange band, and had, at the bottom, obscured by ashes, “Caffe Greco” in orange letters.
“You could buy it,” Traeger suggested.
“I’ve already stolen one.”
Traeger nodded. The man was a creature of habit. Once Traeger had become aware that he was being tailed, he reversed the process. Every day at midmorning Anatoly came to the Caffe Greco and spent forty-five minutes over his Arabic newspaper. Traeger considered his prey, then reached out and turned the paper over. “Istanbul?”
Anatoly took the paper and put it on his lap. “Why did you call me Antonio?”
“It’s the Italian equivalent of Anatoly. I looked you up.” Bea had taken the request to Dortmund, who still had access to the data banks at Langley. Bea had been with Traeger longer than it would have been polite to mention. She knew of his undercover work for the government, but they didn’t talk about it. It was as if his shadow life was their little secret.
Anatoly sat in silence for half a minute. “Who are you?”
“We were enemies once.”
“Ah.” The eyes narrowed.
“I wrote the agency report on Ali Agca.”
“A pathetic man.”
“Aren’t we all?”
A hint of a smile. “Things are not as they were.”
“Well, one of your guys ended up as premier.”
“Putin!” He made it sound like spitting. “A traitor.”
“It’s a different world. Maybe soon Russia will be admitted to NATO.”
There was almost camaraderie between them. Traeger sensed that Anatoly felt somewhat as he himself did. Decades after fierce battles are fought, survivors of the two sides can get together and enjoy a strange intimacy with others whom they once had done their best to kill. Traeger remembered a reunion of German soldiers he had once stumbled upon at Montecassino years ago. They were with veterans of the Polish outfit that had finally routed them from the monastery, and no one would have known they had once been enemies. It is much the way with old spies, if he and Anatoly were any test.
“I’m retired,” Traeger said, when Anatoly finally put the question.
“And you are in Rome just on holiday?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Exile would describe it better.”
Traeger laughed. He was reminded of Dortmund grousing about old enemies becoming alleged friends. In retrospect, the Cold War had the look of a golden age, when black was black and white was white. The dissolution of the USSR must have seemed like the end of the world to those who had risked their lives for it.
“I have interviewed Chekovsky,” Traeger said. Of course Anatoly would know that. It was when he had left the Russian embassy that Traeger had first become aware that he had acquired a shadow. Anatoly’s face was expressionless. “An adaptable man.”
Anatoly looked at his watch, then hailed the waiter. “I want a drink. Will you join me?”
Traeger joined him. At one o’clock they left and walked a few blocks to the Otello where they had an outside table, under the grape arbor.
“Why are you following me?” Anatoly asked, stirring his pasta with a fork.
“That was my question to you. And you began following me first.”
“What is your connection with the Vatican?”
That, of course, was the question Chekovsky had put to him when he visited the Russian ambassador.
“I am a computer consultant,” Traeger said. “The library and archives need a new system.”
Rodriguez had provided Traeger with the requisite identification when he went to interview the Russian ambassador. Chekovsky was affable and uninformative.
“It was a mere coincidence that I had an appointment that day with the archivist,” the ambassador said.
“Father Crowe?”
Chekovsky’s nose wrinkled. “I had come to know Cardinal Maguire.”
“Did you see him that day?”
Chekovsky ran a hand over the sleeve of his coat. “Briefly.”
“You were at the elevator with Father Crowe when a strange priest emerged.”
Chekofsky thought about it. “I don’t remember.”
“We think he was the assassin.”
Chekovsky sat forward. “Some people who were trained for a certain task cannot unlearn it.”
“Do you have anyone in mind?”
Chekovsky sat back. “Unfortunately, there are dozens.”
“Mr. Ambassador, I have advised that the materials you requested from Cardinal Maguire be turned over to you.”
Chekovsky almost managed to conceal his delight. “Loose ends.”
No doubt Chekovsky was concerned that if those reports on Ali Agca got into the wrong hands they would embarrass the new Russia, not least because of Putin’s past.
Father Crowe had objected to the suggestion, adding, “In any case, I do not h
ave the authority.”
Rodriguez was working on that. How Byzantine were the workings of the Vatican. Elsewhere, such caution would have been attributed to the desire to retain deniability for something done.
Anatoly posed a more serious problem. Could Father Crowe identify Anatoly as the strange priest who had emerged from the elevator when he was saying good-bye to Chekovsky?
CHAPTER THREE
I
“I said a novena.”
In high school Ignatius Hannan had already been a consultant on beta programs for software companies and was always surprised when his suggestions met with such enthusiastic responses, since they all seemed so obvious to him. One day a large car pulled up in front of the Hannan home and Nate answered the doorbell. The visitor was in his thirties and wore jeans, a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it, and sandals. Nate looked past him at the luxury automobile at the curb.
“Is your father in?”
“He’s at work.”
The visitor fished a card from his pocket and handed it to Nate. “Tell him it’s about beta programs.”
“He doesn’t know a thing about them.”
The visitor scratched his beard. “Doesn’t Ignatius Hannan live here?”
“That’s me.”
The visitor looked at the sixteen-year-old for a moment, then grinned. “You?”
“Yes.”
“Can we talk?”
His name was Leopardi and his company was Elektra. “How old would you say I am?”
Nate thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t much older than you when I was hired by Bill Gates. An insufferable man, but a genius. I began to wonder why I was making him rich and went out on my own.”
He told Nate that young though he was, he was Elektra’s best consultant. The upshot was that Leopardi offered him a summer job.
“Where?”
“I’m just outside of Boston.”
“I’d have to ask my parents.”
“Of course.”
His parents couldn’t believe it. Leopardi came back that night, still dressed as before, and Nate’s father was sure the man was some kind of nut. He said as much.
“I suppose I am.” He mentioned what Nate would earn for his summer’s work. It was more than his father earned.
It wasn’t the money that interested Nate, but Leopardi’s description of what he was working on. “This is all confidential, of course.”
“I don’t understand a word of it,” Nate’s father said.
In response to his father’s request, Leopardi took the tablet from Mrs. Hannan and dashed off what he was offering Nate. Handshakes all around and then he was gone.
“It’s all a bunch of bull,” Mr. Hannan said.
“Look at that car,” Mrs. Hannan said, awe in her voice.
“He probably stole it.”
The next morning, a weekday, his mother took him off to Mass and told him to thank God for what was happening. Nate had been an altar boy when he was younger but quit when there began to be altar girls. His parents lamented the changes that were taking place in the Mass, in everything.
“It’s all falling apart,” his father grumbled.
That summer he went to work for Leopardi, staying with an aunt who lived closer to the building that housed Elektra. After the first meeting with several others who dressed as informally as Leopardi, Nate got a pat on the back. “You’re like Christ among the elders in the temple.” That seemed sacrilegious to Nate.
A program he designed that summer still earned him royalties, although he had soon fallen out with Leopardi. He designed a web page and incorporated, with his father president, his mother vice president, himself CEO. For the next several years, consultant fees poured in.
At his parents’ insistence, he enrolled at Boston College, where he was bored with classes and aloof from his classmates, all of whom were a year or two older and seemed to do nothing but drink and talk dirty about girls. The name for the company he would form came to him in a philosophy course. Empedocles. He just liked the sound of the name; what the philosopher had taught was quaint—four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, plus love and strife to keep them active. He stopped going to classes and then dropped out.
“You’ve got to make a living,” his father objected.
“I am making a living.”
The fact was that he was now supporting his parents.
“But what if it doesn’t last?”
“What does?”
The question seemed prophetic. Half a year later, his father, who had been arguing with the television set, stood up, looked around with a surprised expression, and then crashed to the floor. His death aged Nate’s mother overnight. She spent much of her day in church and became worried about the fate of her husband. Her mission in life became his release from Purgatory.
It was wireless access to the Internet that became Nate’s obsession. He developed the hardware, he lobbied cable companies, he rented space on a communications satellite, and for a time it looked as if, like many others, he would suffer from being ahead of the wave. He was overextended, deep in debt, so worried he actually told his mother about it, and then, when disaster seemed to loom, the heavens opened and he was swept to the top of the industry. His mother was not surprised.
“I said a novena.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Of course it worked.”
That was about all Nate did—work—even more so after his mother contracted Alzheimer’s and he placed her in a luxury nursing home. His religious faith might have been one of the memories she lost. There was no big crisis. He always supposed that if he sat down and thought it through it would make complete sense to him. He had no doubts. He just stopped thinking about it, or doing it, always in a whirl now that Empedocles was generating money in astronomical amounts. He hired Ray Sinclair—they had been altar boys together and Ray was vegetating in the personnel office of Boston College. Laura Burke showed up in response to an ad.
“Where did you go to school?” Hannan asked.
“Boston College.”
“Another one? What was your major?”
“Philosophy.”
“Come on.”
“Ask me a question.”
“Who was Empedocles?”
She rattled it off. It was the only philosophical answer he could have judged.
“The town is now called Agrigento.”
She was right. He looked it up. And he noticed the name of the harbor. Porto Empedocle.
“What experience do you have?”
“None.”
“Good.” He liked her manner, he liked her mind, and he liked her honesty. He hired her. As with Ray, it was one of the smartest moves he ever made.
“Is everyone here Catholic?”
He thought about it. “I never took a poll.”
How high is up? With Ray and Laura, Empedocles found new roofs to go through. On his thirtieth birthday Nate thought of what he was worth—a guess; who really knew?—and the number he came up with frightened him. He had a sleepless night. He turned on the television and there was a nun talking away, looking at him as if she knew all about him. He had been about to change channels when she started to talk about the Blessed Virgin. She sounded like his mother. He was fascinated. He watched the channel, EWTN, for hours. He turned it off when sun shone in his windows. He called Laura and told her he wasn’t coming in.
“You’re kidding. I’ve got you booked solid all day.”
“Reschedule everything.”
A pause. “Are you sick?”
“No. Nothing like that. I just want a day off.”
“You are sick.”
He visited his mother, not just popping in, staying a minute, and fleeing, as he had before, but sitting with her and wishing they could have a real talk. But there was no chance of that. Her lunch came and he helped her with it. The shrunken little woman with the bewildered expression seemed a metaphor of the
fragility of life. What did it profit a man if he gained the whole world and suffered the loss of his soul? He hadn’t had a thought like that in years. Suddenly his wealth seemed a curse.
He leaned toward his mother and whispered in her ear. “I’ll be a good boy.”
He tried to imagine she understood him. Did he understand himself? He whispered again. “I’ll go to Mass.” And then he added, “I’ll go to confession.”
The next morning, he went to Mass and watched people going to confession. The boxes he remembered had been replaced by reconciliation rooms in which penitents sat facing the priest and chatting about their sins. When they emerged their expression was not the one he remembered wearing when he came out of the confessional. He remembered the way his parents had griped about what was happening to the Catholic Church. How could you come back to something that wasn’t there anymore?
He flew to Birmingham, Alabama, to Mother Angelica’s church, and waited in line forty-five minutes before he got into a confessional. What followed was more like it.
“Father, it’s been years.”
“Very well. Would you like help in examining your conscience?”
“Please.”
The priest began with sins against the flesh.
“There’s been none of that.”
“Good.” He went down the list of capital sins, and Nate wanted to accuse himself of them all, but it wasn’t until they came to greed that he felt on firm ground. He had been devoting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to making money. “I haven’t been to Sunday Mass since I don’t know when.”
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