Before sitting down again, Neal looked toward the corner. Rorty, his photographer, touched the tips of thumb and index finger. Of course there was no assurance that the footage would be used. Neal wasn’t sure he wanted his performance shown on the network news at home.
“That was a good question,” Pescatore said to him when the press conference was over. He seemed serious.
Neal shrugged. Pescatore’s next remark was more typical, a criticism.
“You might have mentioned young Buffoni, the secretary’s secretary.”
The description made the priest sound like Jeeves, a gentleman’s gentleman. “Did you ever play the slots?”
Pescatore backed away, as if his honor had been questioned. Neal shouted after him, “Take two if you can get them. You don’t need three to win.”
Pescatore, who had a wife in an apartment on Monti Parioli and a mistress in another in EUR, reacted with alarm. He bowled his way out of the press room, looking back at Neal as if fearful of some further outrage.
“What’s with the guinea?” Rorty asked. The cameraman’s snobbishness had caused him to overlook Neal’s origins.
“A guinea is a shilling more than a pound.”
“Shillings are obsolete.”
“So is calling Italians guineas.”
They parted on the sidewalk outside the building, which was located on the Via della Conciliazione, the thoroughfare now clogged with buses, taxis, other vehicles. The walk swarmed with sweaty tourists. Rorty looked about him with disdain. Rorty would be off to a shower, and then, dressed the part, the means of his livelihood stashed, he would hang around the lobby of the Grand Hotel hoping to be picked up. Someone had told him he looked like George Clooney, and he could usually be found in places where affluent, unspoken-for ladies were looking for diversion. Neal was sure that someone must have meant Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Vatican correspondents were an odd group: the Europeans, militant secularists; the Asians, inscrutable; those from the third world pretending innocence and naïveté. Among the so-called first world representatives, there was a preponderance of laicized priests with a chip on their shoulder or lapsed Catholics of various kinds, mostly those whose doctrinal difficulties had emerged from their irregular personal lives. There were also writers from Catholic news services, a few columnists famous in the pages of diocesan papers. Neal Admirari did and did not fit in with this group, a hesitation felt on all sides. Who among them had won so important an honor as the Pulitzer? Alas, that had been years ago, but Neal still lived in the large hope of repeating his feat by coming up with a scoop that would reinvigorate his career. What else did he have? His long-term affair with Lulu van Ackeren had finally run its course and she had married a man five years her junior. Neal had felt betrayed.
“Neal, if I wanted a career as a waiter, I could have taken a job in a restaurant.”
“Okay, we’ll get married.”
“Go to hell.”
“I mean it.”
“A civil wedding?” she hissed. “Or have you found some priest who will overlook my previous marriage?”
Among the impediments to a sacramental marriage, having a valid previous marriage where the former spouse was still living was a bar to a Church-sanctioned union. He had tried to convince Lulu that it was only a matter of time until she could find a way to get her previous marriage annulled.
“When?” she asked. “A century? Two centuries?”
The cynic he thought he was would long since have made Lulu the wife of his heart by whatever ceremony she chose. Before Lulu, he had been a marauding bee, avid for the nectar of many and various flowers. Serial fornication, or adultery, as the priests might call it; whatever they called it, he knew it was sinful. Periodically, Neal had gone to confession and was dealt a new hand. But he had soon returned to the same game as before. But Lulu had been different. He had loved her exclusively for five years. Only after he realized he was in love with her, that he wanted to marry her, had she mentioned her first marriage.
She tried to load it all on him, but Lulu was Catholic, too. She knew Neal Admirari didn’t make up the rules. She accepted those rules herself. It added a zestful dash of tragedy to their affair. The star-crossed lovers, forever prevented from plighting their troth before a minister of God. During all that time Lulu had honed her role, knowing she could count on Neal’s adherence to Church law, safe to suggest that she would settle for one of those chapels in Las Vegas. Casamentos. He told Lulu it meant casements. The ladder into the pits.
And she had married Martinelli.
Martinelli!
“He’s Italian?” Neal asked.
“Only on his parents’ side.”
“Have you become a widow?”
“For the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” She had actually gotten an annulment of her first marriage.
Neal had stared at her in disbelief. The big impediment was no more. And she had married Martinelli.
That was the unkindest cut of all. Neal volunteered for the Rome post when his predecessor was arrested for currency speculation and had to be spirited out of the country. Rome was either the end or the new beginning of his career. Pescatore’s praise came back to him. Were these simultaneous deaths his ticket out of impending oblivion?
He beat out a fat couple for a free table, ordered a birra alla spina, and called Donna Quando, the contact he had inherited with the job.
“Tell me about Buffoni.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“I was thinking of Sabatini’s.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
IV
“Better well hung than ill wed.”
Gabriel Faust had a dream, a dream that had been considerably scaled down over the years.
Once he would have imagined ending in a villa near Florence, filled with art works, a magnificent library, with scholars from around the world coming to him for consultation. I Tatti as it had been, that is, and himself the Bernard Berenson of the day. But many things had conspired to alter the dream.
What had happened to Europe? What had happened to Italy? What had happened to Florence? He had read the inflammatory trilogy by Oriana Fallaci, the famous Florentine journalist’s enraged indictment of the Italian government’s capitulation to the demands of the Muslims who had poured into the country and were now intent on redefining it as a caliphate. Their contemptuous desecration of the baptistery in Florence seemed a sign of things to come. It was appalling. And he could accept for himself Fallaci’s self-description—a Catholic atheist. No, Italy was no longer the land of his dreams. Not Florence. Not even Sicily. Sardinia, perhaps, or Corsica? But either would have been a poor second best. And now he had come to Corfu and had to erase one more island as the possible candidate for the land of his dreams.
Where can one hide in the modern world? That had become the question that haunted him. Possible answers to the question had to be dismissed one by one, but he could not entirely abandon his dream. Somewhere his Shangri-la must still be awaiting him.
The problem, however, was not so much location as his personal status. However much, in the privacy of his own mind, he rehearsed the role of art mentor to the Western world—his wealth an incidental accompaniment perhaps, but wealth indeed, if not beyond the dreams of avarice, certainly exceeding the limits of immoderate appetite—an arctic honesty came over him. The role eluded him because he did not fit the role.
A corner had been turned when he entered into alliance with the incredible Inagaki; one that had made him the agent of the talented Japanese, not to say his pimp. Faust no longer sought the modest commissions that had kept him afloat. He no longer bothered applying for grants—the getting of them was child’s play but being awarded them left him treading financial water. None of his research projects had come anywhere near the vast promise he had expressed in understated form in order to receive the pittance that seemed only to provide more time for witnessing the dying of his dream. His last major grant had been from the NEA
when he had failed to emerge from Renaissance into modern art, classifying Delacroix as modern. His last commission had been the cataloguing of the impressive if modest collection that Zelda Lewis had inherited and added to in a small way. It was her purchase of the bogus Delacroix that had been Gabriel Faust’s Rubicon. In the cold light of wakeful early morning, or when too drunk to kid himself, he knew he had entered the world of art fraud. Inagaki was indefatigable and incurious about the commissions Faust got him. But then the Japanese, who could paint anything at least as well as the original he copied, exhibited no curiosity as to the way Faust marketed his wares. Inagaki could always plausibly claim not to know that Faust sold his copies as originals. Those who bought and marketed the copies were no more deluded about what they were than Faust himself. He had entered a network of crooks, and he was one of them.
It was in a hotel in Corfu, where Faust had planned to stay just overnight, that, in the morning, he let the ship go on to Greece without him. His midday breakfast was a cup of thick, strong coffee and a local pastry. From the window of his hotel dining room he looked out at the sea that had known a thousand shipwrecks and still rolled on in blithe indifference to the hopes and dreams of men. It seemed particularly disdainful of the dreams of Gabriel Faust, sliding into the shore and curling back on itself. He had arrived at a moment of sober truth. It was there, in the all-but-deserted dining room, that he heard, though he was on the wrong coast for the allusion, the thin, seductive siren call of Zelda Lewis.
He remembered her home, he remembered her collection, he remembered the warmth with which they had sinned together. His thoughts began to travel along unfamiliar lines. Was Zelda Lewis the destiny toward which he had been headed all along?
He waited for the thought to depress him, but the more he entertained it, the more gently attractive it became. Her estate, her wealth, could be his equivalent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Pacific final resting place. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. He put through a call to Zelda, collect.
It was morning in New Hampshire and Zelda took the call while still abed. Her softly seductive voice seemed to emerge from the world of dreams. Where was he calling from?
“Corfu.”
“You needn’t be nasty.”
He located it for her and her tone altered, as if she were sitting up in bed and propping the pillows behind her. She had never been to Corfu.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it before.”
“It’s still largely unspoiled,” he lied. “Prince Philip, the queen’s consort, was born here. You would love it.”
“Is that an invitation?” Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver, in this case the telephone receiver.
“You mustn’t raise my hopes, Zelda.”
“Darling, are you serious? Would you like me to join you there?”
“You must have a hundred better things to do.”
“How long do you plan to stay?”
“That’s up to the doctor.”
“The doctor! What’s wrong?”
“Physically, nothing. But he insists that I need complete rest for an indefinite period. I will not bore you with the story of how hard I’ve been working.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Zelda, I’m always alone.”
“Oh, that sounds so sad,” she cried and, after a moment, added, “I know exactly how you feel.”
“Come then, and we’ll be lonely together.”
She came, arriving three days later, taking a flight from Rome to Brindisi, and then coming by boat to Corfu. She could have flown in but couldn’t face the prospect.
“It looked like a hang glider.”
“Better well hung than ill wed.”
She took him in her arms. “You say the most unusual things of any man I’ve ever known. That’s a quotation, isn’t it?”
“Kierkegaard,” he said, keeping it simple. “You look marvelous.”
And she did. While he waited for her, he had steeled himself for disappointment, remembering the discrepancy in their ages. It had been over a year since he had seen her last, but she looked younger than he felt. She had stepped back to examine him.
“You don’t look at all ill.”
“You make me feel that I lured you here under false pretenses.”
They took a cab to the hotel where he had reserved a room for her, on the floor above his. She tried to conceal her surprise.
“This way, we can be lonely together,” he explained.
“Let’s just be together, shall we?”
He canceled her room and they spent the next three hours in bed. Afterward, from where they lay, they had a marvelous view of the sea. In the harbor to the left, the boat she had come on lay anchored. She said dreamily, “And to think that on the flight over I wondered if it was wise for me to do this.”
“It’s certainly not otherwise.”
But she wanted to be serious. It seemed a moment when her Catholic conscience would go to work and fill her with remorse for the good time they had just had. That wasn’t it at all.
“Why are you lonely, Gabriel? Why am I lonely? We’re so good for one another.” And she brought her body against his. He couldn’t agree more.
The next day, they rented a car and drove to a small inn that overlooked an impossibly blue body of water with an island on which an impossibly white chapel with a blue tile roof stood.
“Corfu is a painting,” she cried.
He was about to say he would paint the scene for her. He hadn’t held a brush in years. In any case, she had taken out her digital camera. After the chapel, she took his picture. Later he took hers. One could not get photographs of middle-aged nudes developed, of course.
“Not that you need development, my dear.”
It might have been flattery, but he was feeling the unfamiliar attractions of honesty. Up to a point, of course. The point of the exercise was to make their union permanent. And she was beautiful, earthy and beautiful. He would marry her, if it came to that. In the end, it was she who proposed to him. Her conscience had kicked in, and the idea seemed to be that they were on their honeymoon, anticipating the joys of marriage, but they could make it all right.
“Why have you never married?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
All the priests on Corfu were Orthodox, which would have been all right with him. It turned out that it wasn’t all right with the Orthodox priests, nor with Zelda.
“We must do it right.”
They did it right in Rome, in Santa Susanna, the celebrant a jovial Paulist who regarded rules as subject to interpretation. Gabriel described himself as Catholic, thinking of Oriana Fallaci. When they went to bed in the Hilton it was as man and wife.
“Where will we live?”
“I let the lease on my apartment in Paris go.” And so he had, years ago.
“Where are your things?”
“In storage.” The phrase conveyed much more than met the case.
“I am going to take you home with me,” she said triumphantly. “My trophy husband.”
They flew home first-class and on the flight whispered like lovers, sipping drinks, ignoring the awful movies.
“Now it won’t matter that I never mastered that program you used.”
“Explain.”
She explained. She told him of Vincent Traeger, a colleague of her husband’s. “My first husband,” she added, poking him in the ribs.
“Colleague?”
“Chuck was in the CIA. I told you that.”
If she had, he had forgotten it.
“He loved the Delacroix you got for me.”
V
Brendan Crowe had disappointed him.
Catena spotted Harris exit from the main house into the colonnade and darted into the enclosed garden, tiptoed on the crunchy gravel, and stopped at a coconut palm. He put his hand against it and held his breath. He could hear nothing, but
then his hearing was bad. He prayed that Harris would walk along the colonnade, reenter the building, and be on his way. Of course. It was nonsense to think the man was pursuing him.
“Bishop Catena,” said a voice behind him.
He all but levitated. He turned around. It was only young Quinn.
“What do you want?” Catena was angry at being relieved that it was only Quinn.
“I printed these out for you.” Quinn passed a sheaf of pages, printouts of e-mails.
Catena took them, thanked Quinn, wanted to apologize to the young man for his impatience, but most of all wanted to get away before Harris caught him. Perhaps they were all pessimists, but Harris brought gloomy foreboding to a new level.
Before he himself went inside again he looked back, and through the shrubbery and gaudy flowers he could see the massive Harris standing motionless, eyes closed, before the statue of Our Lady. Catena struck his breast. Mea culpa. He should not assume that Harris was always at his worst.
During the final weeks of Pentecost—there was no nonsense about Ordinary Time at the Confraternity of Pius IX—Catena felt the thrill he had always felt when hearing the prophetic passages chosen for the Gospel readings during that time. The end of the world. The signs by which it would be known. And yet the exact hour can never be known. Not even the angels know that. But God vouchsafed signs to his people, and read them we must, as best we can. Bishop Catena knew that throughout the history of the world, men, and women, had been sure they were living in the end times. The first generation of Christians seemed to think that they would be the only generation, that the end of time and the coming again of Christ were imminent. There were scoundrels who took that to weaken the authority of Scripture and tradition. Surely all it meant was that every age was nearer to the end times. “It is later now than when we first believed,” Paul said. And so it is. For all that, Catena had the mounting certainty that something big, very big, was about to happen.
It had begun with the scythe that had moved through the Vatican, an assassin cutting down two cardinals with the ease of an instrument of God. Of course that didn’t justify what the man had done, murder was murder, but God can turn even evil to good effect.
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