The Fifth Gospel: A Novel

by Ian Caldwell

In the 1950s, a strip of land between the Vatican Museums and my apartment building was excavated to build a covered lot for the pope’s own cars. A few feet down, workmen discovered the corpse of a Roman emperor’s secretary with his pen and inkpot. His grave became our autopark, home to the Vatican car mechanics and papal car service. The place is constructed like a bomb shelter, dark and low-slung, with plantings of trees on its roof. The only way inside is through hangar doors that are unlocked for a few seconds when a car comes in or out. The sun hasn’t set, but the street is so sunken that the landscape is shadowy. Motor oil bleeds out from under the door, shining like chrome under an electric light.

  “Help you, Father?” says the man who answers my knock at the door.

  He wears the uniform of a Vatican driver: black trousers, white shirt, black tie.

  “I’m looking for Signor Nardi,” I say.

  He rubs the back of his neck as if I’ve caught him at a busy time. As if the prelates who call for rides in these cars aren’t all heading to bed now as late afternoon slips into evening. The night shift here seems to exist only for the morbid emergencies of clerical old age.

  “Sorry, Father,” he says. “Could you come back later?”

  “It’s important. Please ask him to come out.”

  He glances over his shoulder. I wonder if he has a visitor. Girlfriends sometimes visit these drivers on the night shift.

  “Hold tight. I’ll see if he’s here.”

  A moment passes. The door reopens, and out comes Gianni Nardi.

  “Alex?”

  The last time I saw Gianni was more than a year ago. My old friend has gained weight. His shirt is wrinkled and his hair is too long. We clamp hands on each other and trade kisses on the cheek, holding on longer than we should, because as the distance has grown, so has the enthusiasm of our greetings. Someday we will be the greatest of strangers.

  “What’s the occasion?” he says, looking around as if to locate the parade on the streets. Alex Andreou, coming to see me. He has always made this kind of thing funny.

  “Can we talk somewhere private?” I say.

  “You got it. Follow me.”

  And when he doesn’t even ask why, I already have my first answer. Gianni must’ve heard about Simon.

  We climb a set of stairs to the tree-lined terrace of the autopark roof.

  “Listen,” he says before I can get a word in, “I’m sorry, Alex. I should’ve called. How are you and Peter holding up?”

  “Fine. How’d you hear the news?”

  “Are you kidding? The gendarmes won’t leave us alone.” He points a finger downward, indicating the cavernous parking lot underneath us. “I’ve got three of them in my garage right now asking questions.”

  So that’s why I wasn’t allowed inside. “Questions about what?”

  “About some Alfa they towed back from Castel Gandolfo. It’s in their impound lot.”

  Ugo drove an Alfa Romeo.

  “Gianni,” I say, “I need your help.”

  * * *

  WE WERE BEST FRIENDS growing up. This building is where we cemented our friendship. One summer we heard a rumor that when the autopark was built, the workmen discovered a whole necropolis under there, tunnel upon tunnel of ancient Roman tombs. This meant we villagers were living on top of a cemetery, over the dead bodies of the pagans who once vowed Christians would never replace them. Gianni and I needed to see it with our own eyes.

  Getting down to those tunnels wasn’t hard. A sewer will take you almost anywhere. But one night we shimmied through a whole maze of stone passageways until we found ourselves at a new metal grate. The grate led to a utility closet. And the utility closet opened inside the autopark, right next to the papal limousine.

  Driving age in Italy was eighteen years old. We were thirteen. And the keys to eighty luxury automobiles were hanging from a board on the wall. One year earlier, my father had taught Simon how to drive in our old Fiat 500. That summer, I taught myself in an armored Mercedes 500 custom-fitted with a papal throne in the backseat.

  Right off, I wanted to invite girls down with us. Gianni said no. I wanted to hide in a car trunk and hitch a ride with John Paul. Gianni said no. Don’t get greedy, he said when I wanted to drive a limo into the gardens. You always want too much. That was my first taste of the real Gianni. For years afterward, he would end up making a religion of not getting greedy. Of not wanting too much. After graduation, I went off to college, but Gianni said he was going to become a surfer. He went to Santa Marinella the way the blind go to Lourdes. A year later, his father found him work as a sampietrino. But there are a lot of inches in Saint Peter’s, and the sampietrini have to clean all of them. So when Gianni lost interest in scraping gum off walls and buffing marble floors with the riding machine, he thought hard about what he really wanted in life. And he decided to become a driver for the car service.

  It couldn’t have been an accident that he ended up here. When he thought back to a time when life had really felt big, I doubt there was anything that came close to our summer in the autopark. And ever since he made that choice, just the sight of Gianni has made me wonder if any of us Vatican boys, other than Simon, has really ever had the guts to experience the world outside these walls.

  “They took Simon into house arrest,” I tell him. “The Swiss Guards saw his car enter the palace complex. I need to find out where it went.”

  The Swiss may not know. But the driver of that car can tell me.

  “Alex,” Gianni says, “we’re under orders not to talk about that.”

  This is what I was afraid of. Egger was telling us the same thing: he was under a gag order.

  “Can you tell me anything?” I say.

  Gianni lowers his voice. “It’s been pretty weird around here since that man was killed. We’re not supposed to talk about anything.” He smiles that old mischievous smile. “So all of this stays between us.”

  I nod.

  “Last night, a call came down for a pickup. I don’t know who the request came from, but our dispatcher sent my friend Mario to cover it. Mario ended up driving to your uncle’s palace to pick up Simon.”

  “Where did he drop my brother off ?”

  “At the elevator.”

  “What elevator?”

  “The elevator.”

  The papal palace is so old that it has few modern amenities. Gianni must mean the ancient elevator in the courtyard of the Secretariat, originally built to operate on water power. This is the one presidents and prime ministers use when they visit.

  But when I ask, he shakes his head. On the dust of the ground, he draws a large square with the toe of his shoe. “Damasus Courtyard.”

  He means the courtyard in front of the Secretariat. I nod.

  He adds a smaller square, just beside the first. “Palace of Nicholas the Fifth.”

  This is the final branch of the palace, the one that famously overlooks Saint Peter’s Square.

  He scrapes a line to connect the boxes. “Between them is an opening. An archway through the ground floor here. In the archway is a hidden door leading to the private elevator. That’s where Mario’s car dropped Simon off. Do you understand now?”

  I do. This explains everything. I wonder how Simon can ever have allowed himself to be put under house arrest there. I wonder if he even knew where they were going to take him.

  “What’s wrong?” Gianni asks.

  The Palace of Nicholas V has four floors. The ground floor, as in many Renaissance palaces, was designed for servants or horses. The top two floors belong to the Holy Father, who would’ve had no reason to cover his tracks if he’d wanted Simon under house arrest. The only remaining floor is the private residence of the Cardinal Secretary of State.

  “Gian,” I murmur, putting my head in my hands, “they took him to Boia’s apartments.”

  * * *


  THIS IS A GIANT setback. No one will be able to reach Simon there. Not even Lucio. When Simon submitted to house arrest, surely he assumed the order came from the vicar’s office, not from his own boss.

  “What about afterward?” I say. “Has Mario taken Simon anywhere else?”

  He shakes his head slowly. “Al, as far as I know, no driver’s seen Simon since. If he went anywhere else, it was on foot.”

  But that part of the palace is crawling with Swiss Guards. If Simon was escorted elsewhere, Leo would’ve heard about it.

  “I don’t get it,” Gianni says, half to himself. “Why would they take him there?”

  I tell him I don’t know. But I can imagine an answer. House arrest would be the perfect pretext for ensuring that Simon couldn’t return to the museum to erase the damning part of Ugo’s exhibit: 1204.

  “Any other strange calls?” I ask.

  Gianni smiles thinly. “How long do you have?” He lowers his voice. “The day that man was killed—I’ve never seen anything like it. Five o’clock in the morning, I get a call at home. They want me to work a new shift, noon to eight. I tell them I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at two o’clock. Heck, I just got off my last shift five hours ago. They tell me to cancel the appointment. Lo and behold, when I arrive, we’re all there. Every single one of us got the same call.”

  “Why?”

  “The dispatcher only tells us that someone at the palace needs cars running shuttles. According to the schedule, we’re supposed to be doing short trips to an event in the gardens. But suddenly there’s a change of venue. Now two junior guys will stay back to cover the regular calls, while the rest of us run pickups to Castel Gandolfo completely off the books.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “No clocking in or out. No pickup logs. On paper they wanted this to look like any other day.”

  The sky looms, vertiginously high. This sounds like what Corporal Egger said about the Swiss Guard’s checkpoint sheets—cars coming and going with no paper trail. The unknowns are beginning to grow.

  “It gets stranger,” he says. “They tell us we can’t step out of our cars except to open doors for our pickups. We can’t greet anyone by name. And we’re supposed to drive them forty-five minutes each way without saying a word.”

  “Why?”

  “Because these guys apparently don’t speak Italian, don’t know Rome, and don’t like small talk.”

  “Who were they?”

  He pulls at an imaginary beard on his chin, then points to me. “Priests. Like you.”

  My pulse quickens. The Orthodox priests Simon invited to the exhibit.

  “How many of them?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty?”

  I can only stare at him. My father invited nine Orthodox priests to Turin for the radiocarbon announcement. Four came.

  Gianni nods.

  “Can you tell me exactly how they were dressed? Were they wearing crosses?”

  The details could pinpoint where they came from. The family tree of Orthodoxy splits between Greeks and Slavs. Slavic priests wear crosses around their necks, but Greeks aren’t allowed to.

  “My pickup definitely wore a cross,” Gianni says.

  That suggests a priest from the Slavic tradition, including Serbia and Romania.

  Gianni adds, “On his hat.”

  I’m taken by surprise. “Are you sure?”

  Gianni squeezes his fingers together. “Just a small thing. Fingernail size.”

  This is the sign of a decorated Slavic bishop. Or even a metropolitan, the second-highest of all Eastern ranks. These are Orthodox royalty, outranked only by the ancient brother-bishops of the pope, the patriarchs.

  “Did some of them wear chains around their necks?” I ask. “With little paintings in them?”

  Gianni nods. “Like an amulet with the Madonna in it? Sure, one of my pickups wore that.”

  Then he was right about the little crosses. These medallions are another sign of an Orthodox bishop. I try to hide my amazement. For a bishop to have accepted Simon’s invitation is a coup. I can’t believe my brother was able to broker this.

  And yet the more successful his diplomacy was, the more devastating it makes Ugo’s discovery about 1204. I fear I’m beginning to see the outlines of the prosecution’s case.

  “Go back,” I say. “You said they relocated the meeting to Castel Gandolfo. Where was it originally supposed to be?”

  “In the gardens.”

  “Where in the gardens?”

  If I’m right, then everything is starting to converge.

  “The Casina,” he says.

  This is it. Ugo’s letter was about a meeting at the Casina. They must be the same: the meeting at Castel Gandolfo was the one Ugo and Simon had discussed weeks earlier, in which Ugo was slated to deliver the keynote address about his discovery. The site may have been changed at the last minute, but the gathering had been planned long in advance.

  “Were all the passengers who rode to Castel Gandolfo priests?” I ask.

  Gianni nods.

  So Diego’s calendar was right: this had nothing to do with a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The academy’s scientists would’ve been laymen. This event seems to have revolved entirely around the Orthodox.

  Still, that doesn’t explain why the location was changed.

  “Can’t the Casina hold twenty or thirty people?” I say.

  “Definitely.”

  So the size of the crowd can’t have been the reason. And in a country overrun with grand meeting halls, why choose a new location forty-five minutes away? The only advantage of Castel Gandolfo was the privacy.

  “Why were you told not to keep records?” I ask. “Was someone in particular not supposed to find out about this?”

  This strikes me as an extreme precaution. Almost no one would’ve known those records existed, let alone would’ve had the power to flush them out to track down the location of the meeting.

  Gianni slices a hand through the air over his head. The answer is above his pay grade. But the timeline nags at me. As I try to arrange the dates in my mind, it seems to me that Michael was attacked around the same time Ugo wrote that letter. And everything since then—the secret transport of the Shroud, the furtive change of meeting place, the total silence Simon adopted even before he was accused of Ugo’s murder—could be a reaction to Michael’s attack. What happened to Michael might’ve been a warning sign that word of Simon’s outreach was leaking. And in that vein, I can’t help remembering that Mignatto said Simon’s phone was tapped. If there was a leak, I wonder if it started there: Ugo and Simon discussing the Casina meeting too openly.

  My silence seems to make Gianni nervous. “So,” he says, popping a mint, “is Simon going to be okay?”

  He catches me unprepared. “Of course. You know he didn’t murder anyone.”

  He nods. “Not in a thousand years. I told the other drivers he would’ve put himself in the way of that bullet if he could’ve.”

  I’m relieved to hear him say it. At least someone in this country remembers the real Simon. We both watched my brother fight in the boxing pit, so Gianni knows what he’s capable of, but also knows where he draws his lines.

  “So,” I say, steering the conversation away from Simon, “tell me about the Alfa they brought back from Castel Gandolfo.”

  “Something must’ve happened out there. The gendarmes were asking the mechanics about some problem with the driver’s seat.”

  Mignatto wouldn’t approve of what I’m about to say, but I say it anyway. “Could you go down and have a look? Anything you can find out would help.”

  “The Alfa’s not here. It’s in another garage that they turned into an impound lot.”

  Even Ugo’s car is being hidden away. I’m beginning to feel that Castel Gandolf
o is a black box. Fighting the accusations against Simon will be impossible without knowing what happened on that hillside.

  “I’ll ask around,” Gianni volunteers. “I’m sure one of the other drivers has been in that lot since they put the Alfa there.”

  But I can’t afford to have Gianni ask around. And I can’t settle for seeing things through other men’s eyes.

  “Gian,” I say, “I need to ask an even bigger favor. I’ve got to see it myself.”

  He stares as if I must be kidding.

  “Please,” I say.

  “It could get me canned.”

  I look him in the eye. “I know.”

  I wait for him to ask for something. A favor. A promise. A handout from Uncle Lucio.

  But I’ve misjudged him. He empties his last mint into his palm and stares at it. “Damn,” he says. “Simon could lose his collar, and here I’m worried about my bullshit job.” He hurls the mint into the darkness, then rises and tucks in his shirt. “Stay here. When you see me pull up, get in.”

  CHAPTER 23

  WHEN HE’S OUT of sight, I hurriedly call Mignatto.

  “Monsignor, I found out where Simon is. They took him to Boia’s apartments.”

  “Damn it,” he growls. “They’re closing ranks. Cardinal Boia’s secretary called me an hour ago to say we won’t be getting Father Black’s personnel file.”

  “Father Black’s?”

  “To see what the Secretariat concluded about the attack against him.”

  As I scan the darkness for a sign of Gianni and his car, I hear Mignatto breathing into the phone. I wonder again why Simon accepted house arrest. Whether it was to protect the secrecy of his Castel Gandolfo meeting or to protect Peter and me. Maybe, after what happened to Michael, he wouldn’t have made a distinction between the two.

  “Your brother is on the list to testify tomorrow morning,” Mignatto says finally, “after the character witnesses.”

  “Can you file a protest with the court to get him released?”

  “It wouldn’t change anything.”

  “So what do we do?”