The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “Pronto.”

  “Anatoly?” Traeger asked.

  “Eh?”

  Traeger hung up. He had not reached Anatoly’s cell phone. A public phone? Were they still working? Thanks to satellites, communication through cell phones was the one sure way left during this tumultuous upheaval.

  Lev, the portiere, was apparently expecting him. He was an unshaven man whose eyes would not meet Traeger’s. He let Traeger in without a word and pointed him to the stairway.

  “Is he up there?”

  Lev shrugged.

  By the time Traeger got up the final staircase and was facing the door to the roof he was huffing and puffing. He paused to catch his breath. He was not as young as he used to be, no doubt of that. But who was? He pushed the door open and went out onto the roof. Immediately his eyes were drawn to the great dome of Saint Peter’s to his left. It was so close that he felt that he could reach out and touch it. He looked around the roof, but there was no sign of Anatoly. Traeger crossed to the ledge and sat. Anatoly must have watched him enter the building and would be waiting to make sure he was really alone.

  Traeger shook a cigarette from his package and lit up. A low animal roar lifted from the streets below. He could not see Saint Peter’s Square but knew that, as it had been for days, it was filled with an angry chanting crowd. They had been calling for the pope to show himself at the window, as he did for the Angelus on Sundays. What would they do if they knew that the pope was not in the Vatican?

  He finished his cigarette, checked his watch, and waited. Half an hour went by, and still he waited. Had something gone wrong? When he moved his arm, he could feel the printout in his inner pocket. He looked at the buildings higher up on the hill. Would Anatoly have observed him come onto the roof from a vantage point up there before coming to join him?

  After an hour and two more cigarettes, impatience grew. And then he felt the vibration of his phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Later.” Anatoly.

  “Later than what?”

  No reply.

  “When?”

  But the connection was broken. He returned the cell phone to his pocket and went angrily to the doorway. Going down all those stairs was easier than coming up them, but he was now in a foul mood. When he got to the ground floor, there was no sign of Lev. Seminarians were moving up and down the hallway.

  He tried to see the exchange through Anatoly’s eyes. Anatoly would know the value of the document he had, how desperately it was wanted by the Vatican. How tempting it would be to overpower him, repossess their stolen property, to hell with any exchange. Grudgingly, he approved of Anatoly’s caution.

  Since he was so close, he decided to visit Heather.

  II

  Sub specie aeternitatis.

  Heather Adams was told by Father John Burke that Laura had called, anxious about her. She wanted to send a plane to bring Heather home.

  “Has Vincent contacted you, Father?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t want to just go off and leave him.”

  The difficulty lay in knowing how long Traeger meant to stay in Rome. Returning to the States presented difficulties for him, of course. After all, he had been a hunted man when they flew off together in the Empedocles plane. The truth was that Heather was looking for an excuse to prolong her stay.

  At the convent, she followed the routine of the nuns, the office in chapel, Mass, periods of silence, but also the usual housekeeping chores, laundry, keeping everything spotless. For several hours in the afternoon, they sat in the common room, sewing, painting, reading, the happy babble a contrast to the bracketing silences. How innocent they all seemed, how untouched by the world. Did they realize what was going on just outside the Vatican walls, in Rome, in cities throughout the world? In college, Heather had seen a performance of Bernanos’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, set in a convent during the time when the French Revolution turned bloodiest and the decision was made to stamp out religion. All those nuns were eventually guillotined and Heather remembered the singing as they mounted the scaffold, going out of sight of the audience, the number of voices diminishing until there was only one singer. Then silence. What a dreadful thought that these happy, holy women faced a similar fate.

  The seed of Heather’s conversion had been planted by that play.

  In the convent, the point of life was brought into brilliant focus. Our few years on earth are given us so that we might prepare for eternity. Yet most lives are passed in distraction, in busyness, in fretting and worrying about things of only passing importance. It is as if most lives are lived in order to obscure the point of it all, to become forgetful that all our joys and sorrows here must end in death. Once, in a philosophy class, the professor had asked them what they thought of death. As little as possible, would have been the honest answer. And then he had asked whether, in the light of all the advances in medicine, they thought a cure for death would be forthcoming. Most of the students had thought so! As if mortality were a flaw that could be remedied by medicine. Postponed, surely, and made more tolerable, but eradicated? And Heather realized that she, too, had some such thought, insofar as she thought of it at all. These cheerful nuns with whom she was staying lived their lives sub specie aeternitatis. Once, she might have thought it morbid to have the constant reminder that this is a vale of tears, that we are meant for something incredibly greater, union with God himself. Heather came to dread the thought that she must eventually leave this community and go back to her old life. She thought of her oratory and it seemed such a poor substitute for the routine of the convent.

  Was that a temptation? She scarcely dared think that she had a vocation to the religious life. Her job at Empedocles awaited her, with all the time-consuming tasks that made up her day.

  In the convent library she found a book, Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, the memoirs of the surviving seer of Fatima, after she had become a nun, a Carmelite. Interleafed with the printed pages were facsimiles of the original document, in Sister Lucia’s handwriting. Reading the book, Heather realized how weird it was that the handwritten document recounting the so-called secrets of Fatima had ended up in Empedocles, brought there by Father Brendan Crowe. It must have been to get possession of that document that the man who had broken into the guest residence had killed the Irish priest, and then, surprised, fled without the thing he had come for. Heather had taken it home for safekeeping in her oratory and later gave it to Vincent Traeger. He had put it in the safe in his office. His secretary had been murdered, the safe broken into, and the document stolen. Where was it now?

  Most horrifying of all was the forged document that Gabriel Faust had bought with millions of dollars of Mr. Hannan’s money and that Father Trepanier had made public, using it as a weapon in his strange crusade. As a result, the world had erupted in such a way that Heather was reminded of the madness that had swirled around the Paris convent that provided the scene for Dialogues of the Carmelites.

  Later that day, in chapel, the Mother Superior had come to Heather and whispered that she had a visitor. Heather left the chapel with reluctance. The Mother Superior had asked her earlier to speak to a reporter who wanted to do a story on the convent, Angela di Piperno. Heather could see that the young woman regarded the contemplative life the nuns led with fascinated dread.

  “Are you a postulant?” she asked Heather.

  “Good heavens, no. I’m just a guest.”

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  The young woman’s question had so surprised Heather that she obliged.

  Now Vincent Traeger was waiting for her in the visiting parlor.

  “You’ve shaved off your beard.”

  “It looked too much like a disguise, Heather. Father Burke tells me that his sister Laura thinks you should get out of here and go home.”

  “Will you go, too?”

  He paused. “There is something I have to do first.”

  “The third secret?”

  “Yes.”
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br />   “I can wait.”

  He thought about it. “You’re safe here, in any case.”

  Vincent told her that he had made arrangements to exchange a report he had written for the authentic document.

  “You know who has it?” Heather asked.

  “He contacted me.”

  “Who is it?”

  He looked away, as if trying to think of a way to say it. “A killer. A former Soviet agent.”

  “A killer.”

  He nodded. “He killed Father Crowe, for one. Beatrice, my secretary, for another.”

  “Good Lord. Vincent, you must be careful!”

  “I am dealing with a careful man.”

  “What on earth does he want that document for?”

  “It is what I have that he wants. We will trade.”

  “And then we can go home?”

  “Things should settle down once it can be shown that the passage Father Trepanier made public is a forgery.”

  He did not sound very hopeful of that result, at least as an immediate consequence of allowing representatives of those who had been enraged by what Father Trepanier had made public to compare it with the original document.

  “When will you make the exchange?” she asked.

  “I’m waiting to hear.”

  “God bless you, Vincent.”

  He seemed startled by the sentiment. Heather was a bit surprised herself that she had uttered it. It was a phrase that lost its meaning by repetition, like “good-bye.” She had some inkling of how Vincent had spent his life, from their conversations while she was putting him up in her house. Was the man he was to meet his counterpart? Had Vincent, too, killed?

  She went with him to the door and watched him go down the pathway toward the basilica. One had no sense in Saint Peter’s Square that the Vatican was indeed a hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, but within the walls the steep paths, the long ascent from the Domus Sanctae Marthae, made that inescapable.

  Heather remained outside, using her cell phone to call Laura. It was still morning in New Hampshire.

  “Is it as bad as it seems on television, Heather?” Laura asked.

  “They’ve put me in a convent inside the Vatican where all is peace and quiet.”

  “Heather, Mr. Hannan is very anxious about you. He feels responsible for letting you go there.”

  “He mustn’t worry, Laura. I am perfectly all right.”

  “And Vincent Traeger?”

  “He just left here.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s staying in the convent, too?”

  “Hardly.”

  There were voices in the background. Laura talked away from the phone. Then she said, “Mr. Hannan wants to speak to you.”

  And then she heard the authoritative voice of Ignatius Hannan. “Heather, I want you back here.”

  “In just a little while.”

  “What’s the delay?” he demanded.

  She decided that she could tell him something of what Vincent had told her. There was silence in New Hampshire, as he seemed to be digesting this.

  “I’m coming over,” he said.

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “It wasn’t wise to send you there. Of course I had no idea what was about to happen. And I feel responsible for that.”

  “You’re not responsible.”

  Now he was talking away from the phone. When he was back, he said, “We’ll be on our way in hours.”

  “We?”

  “Laura and I. Probably Ray as well. See you soon.”

  Heather put away her phone and went back inside, intent on enjoying what was left of her stay.

  III

  “A busman’s holiday.”

  Chekovsky stood before a painting by Paul Klee with his head tipped to one side as if sunk in aesthetic meditation. The man beside him studied the museum catalog.

  “Childish,” Chekovsky grunted.

  “Not quite.”

  Chekovsky considered the response, a small smile on his lips. Ambiguous. Not quite as good or not quite as bad, take your pick. He moved slowly past other paintings that seemed intended to frustrate one’s expectations of art. Perhaps that was a definition of modernity.

  In the brightly lit cafeteria, he sat at a little circular table with a marble top and wrought iron legs, facing a wall that was a mirror. In a residence, such a mirror would have the function of increasing the apparent size of a room. Here its function was more difficult to discern. Given the setting, the Borghese Gardens just beyond, a windowed wall would have made more sense.

  But it was because of the mirror that Chekovsky liked the cafeteria as a meeting place. His contact came into the museum restaurant, still holding the catalog, and came clattering among the tables toward him. Not that he joined him. He took the table next to Chekovsky’s, the backs of their chairs not quite touching.

  “A busman’s holiday.” Chekovsky had spent his earliest years as a diplomat in the consulate in Birmingham, Alabama. It had always been his practice, wherever he was assigned, to move beyond competence in the native tongue into the richer colloquial world.

  “Meaning?”

  But before Chekovsky could give himself the pleasure of a pedantic explanation, Remi Pouvoir was interrupted by the waiter who posed for himself in the mirror. The waiter turned his head to one side, then the other; he shifted his feet. Ignoring Pouvoir, he also took his order. He glided to Chekovsky.

  “Signore?”

  “Cappucio.”

  “Bé.”

  Pouvoir had ordered tea and made a ceremony out of pouring it, squeezing lemon into the brew, and adding several packets of sugar. He tasted it with a connoisseur’s expression. The verdict seemed to be that it was passable. And then he reported.

  Chekovsky felt a bit like the waiter while he listened, posing in the mirror, trying out expressions, not missing a word. Were such precautions necessary anymore? They were when one was dealing with a maverick like Anatoly. The man was a throw-back, an anachronism. God knows what he might do. What possible use could that assassination report be to an idiot like that?

  “Traeger has it?”

  “There will be an exchange,” Remi Pouvoir said, as if addressing his raised cup.

  Chekovsky already knew this, from Lev. A plurality of sources was an elementary precaution. What Lev did not know was when the exchange would take place. There had been a trial meeting, with Traeger showing up at the North American College and cooling his heels on the rooftop for an hour before answering his cell phone and leaving. Did Anatoly suspect that the rooftop was under observation? The cryptic phone message had been picked up. “Later.” There would have been no need for Lev to lock the rooftop door once the two men met.

  “Traeger got the report from Rodriguez?”

  Pouvoir reflected on this, in the mirror. His shoulders moved. “Presumably.”

  “The report is no longer in the archives?”

  “No.”

  So the exchange would be of two stolen documents. Traeger would obtain the famous third secret, and Anatoly would have the assassination report he lusted for. The former agent’s quixotic purpose was to prove that the KGB had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of John Paul II. What would he do when he learned that was not true? Well, he would not have the report long enough to study it.

  “You would have saved all concerned a good deal of trouble if you had delivered it to me.” Chekovsky tried not to sound petulant.

  In this lovely setting, high above the Piazza del Popolo, the dome of Saint Peter’s visible in the hazy distance, it was possible to ignore the angry mobs raging through the streets of the city below. Pouvoir had assured him that the passage made public by Jean-Jacques Trepanier was a fake. A fake so obvious only a fool would have been taken in by it. But it was the message, the longed-for message from heaven, that explained the credulity of Trepanier. What he and others had been agitating to see was apparently the foretelling of what was now going on in the streets of Rome, Par
is, and Baghdad, the jihad now seeming to have the sanction of the Mother of God’s prophecy.

  “I thought he was one of yours,” Remi Pouvoir said.

  “No longer.”

  “You might have told me.”

  Pouvoir had provided the information Anatoly had needed in order to move like a scythe through the Apostolic Palace, slaying cardinals as he went. The rampage had been pure terror, without rational purpose. And the bloodbath had been hushed up by the Vatican, making it even more purposeless. As purposeless as his chiding Remi Pouvoir and being chided in return.

  When Chekovsky had been importuning Cardinal Maguire, seeking the release to his government of everything in the archives concerning the assassination attempt, he had not yet known that Pouvoir was their man within the walls. For decades he had been dormant, unused, an insurance policy against they knew not what. It had been so easy to imagine that such a mole, forgotten for so long, would have lost the youthful zeal that had made him apt for so prolonged and uneventful an assignment. The breakup of the USSR could have been taken to write finis to any loyalty he was supposed to have. For a time, Chekovsky had thought Brendan Crowe might be the mole.

  He almost missed now those sophistic exchanges with Maguire and Crowe. However frustrating, they had taken place on the far side of events, when gaining possession of that assassination file had seemed a diplomatic possibility. Oh, how he had dreamt of feeding it all to the flames once he had it. Whether or not his personal fears were borne out by the reports.

  Chekovsky licked the cream of the cappuccino from his lips, then patted them with the absurdly small paper napkin. The waiter approached, watching himself in the mirror, and dropped the conto on the table. He dealt another to Pouvoir, with a flick of the wrist. The waiter was an ass, and doubly so because of the mirror. Chekovsky pushed back his chair. It made an unnerving screech. He did not rise.

  The fat little priest who had taken a table near the entrance seemed to be making a point of not noticing Chekovsky. Or was it Pouvoir he pretended not to notice? The ambassador glanced at Pouvoir’s reflection. Of course it had occurred to him that the little archivist had turned double agent, working with Rodriguez and Vatican security. Whatever his own anxiety to get and destroy those assassination reports, the anxiety of the Vatican to get back its Fatima file had a more global importance. Did they seriously think that they could call in the imams and pore over the documents, the false and the authentic, and then the rioting in the streets would stop? Well, Chekovsky thought with smug satisfaction, he would gain possession of both files.