The Third Revelation Read online

  “A dreadful business, Brendan,” the primate said in a low voice. He was the only mourner who knew how Maguire had died.

  “We have here no lasting city, Your Eminence,” he said. The unctuous words were out before he could stop them.

  A bow of the head. “No, indeed. At least you do not. When do you return to Rome?”

  Did the cardinal imagine for Brendan a clerical future like that of the man they were burying?

  “Almost immediately.”

  “Is your mother still with us?”

  “Gone to God, Your Eminence.” How trippingly on the tongue such phrases came. Both his parents were dead, and he felt no inclination to linger with his cousins.

  “You must keep me informed.” Again, the primate’s voice had lowered.

  Brendan had said he would, and the following day he boarded an Aer Lingus flight to Rome, wondering what he was flying back to. Father John Burke came to Fiumicino to meet his plane, and on the drive into the city Crowe told the younger priest of Maguire’s funeral. John Burke, like the mourners in Ennis, thought Maguire had died of natural causes. At the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Burke insisted on carrying Crowe’s bag, and they rose in the silent elevator.

  “You must be exhausted, Brendan.”

  “Sit down, sit down. I brought some Jameson’s.”

  He poured them each a dollop and sat back in his chair. It came almost as a surprise to realize how tired he was.

  “Did he have a history of heart failure, Brendan?”

  Crowe looked at young Father John Burke when he asked the question. John had Irish ancestors, of course, but to Crowe he seemed a generic American. Most of the Irish in the world lived anywhere but in Ireland, but it was difficult for Crowe to think of them as the genuine article.

  “He was killed, John.”

  “What?”

  “Stabbed in the chest.”

  Burke reacted as to a macabre joke, studying Crowe’s face.

  “But L’Osservatore Romano said . . .” He stopped. “My God.”

  “There were four murders in all that day.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Well, it’s not an article of faith. Simply a fact.”

  Crowe felt that he was corrupting youth by divulging this, but there was something faintly distasteful as well as attractive in the American priest’s naïveté. Burke was young, but he had been in Rome long enough for disillusion to set in. All those days in Ireland Crowe had been suppressing these terrible facts. Now that he had raised the subject with John Burke, he could hardly just dismiss it. He told his young friend almost all he knew.

  “But what is being done?”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I simply do not understand why, or how, such things can be kept secret.”

  “Perhaps they won’t be. After all, I’m telling you.”

  Crowe made no mention of the talk he’d had with Traeger before he had left for Ireland. That clerical jurist’s training stood him in good stead once again when John asked what was being done. An investigation, secret, needless to say, was in the works. And Crowe couldn’t wait until it started. He figured that most of the history of the modern world had gone on in secret. If the attempt on the life of a pope had not called forth the real explanation of what had happened back then, it was doubtful that these recent murders would.

  “Were you here in the Vatican then?” Traeger had asked him when the attempt on Pope John Paul II came up in their first conversation about the recent rash of murders.

  “No. I was a student.” How old did Traeger think he was?

  “Where?”

  “In Rome.”

  “Ah. Now about the strange priest who came out of the elevator when you saw the Russian ambassador off. How did Chekovsky act when he saw him?”

  “I don’t think he noticed him.”

  “What nationality was he?”

  “Chekovsky?”

  Traeger never smiled. Just waited.

  “He wasn’t a Turk.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “That was a later judgment, of course. At the time, he was just a strange priest.”

  “In the sense that you didn’t know him?”

  “That, too.”

  “I suppose what you sensed was that he wasn’t a priest at all.”

  “Perhaps,” Crowe conceded.

  “You had never seen him before?”

  “I said he was a stranger.”

  Traeger seemed about to correct this, but he let it go. He pointed out that the killer’s actions, which had been minutely tracked and timed, indicated that the Vatican was not strange to him.

  “The question is, who is the mole?” Traeger mused.

  “The mole?”

  “His accomplice. Someone in the Vatican must have briefed him. He knew where to go, and he knew his victims would be where they were.”

  Not precisely true, Traeger’s assumption. Any basic travel guidebook sold on the streets of Rome would give a map of the Vatican and its palaces. Anyone might have learned of the layout of the Vatican without an accomplice. It was the fact that his victims had been where they were when he came that justified Traeger’s little leap of logic.

  “The personnel records here are not terribly informative.”

  “I’ve never seen them,” Traeger said. “How did you come to work in the Vatican?”

  “Cardinal Maguire asked for me.”

  “You were both from County Clare.”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you known him before coming to Rome?”

  “No. I was living in the Irish College when he visited there, as he often did.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Near Saint John Lateran.”

  “Isn’t that where Tony Blair stayed when he came to Rome?”

  “In one of the cottages on the grounds,” Crowe said. “There are several.”

  Traeger took some papers from a briefcase, then leaned the case against his chair. “Let us go over your colleagues here in the library.”

  It was an uncomfortable exercise. As Traeger said the names and asked the questions, Brendan wondered if it was possible that any of these priests or laymen had aided the killer. Then he imagined them being interrogated by Traeger about himself. And he remembered Chekovsky’s question. Is it you, or must we wait for another? He should have told Traeger of that, but he hadn’t. Why? In the hope that these questions would end, that interest would die. That Traeger would fly off to another assignment. But Brendan knew that that would not happen anytime soon.

  Traeger’s interrogations resumed the day after Brendan returned to Rome.

  “We must construct the face of the strange priest,” Traeger said.

  The method Traeger used on the first attempt was crude. He had a dozen sheets of paper on which portions of a face were drawn. The portions were put together in various ways. Each time, Traeger watched Brendan for any sign of recognition. The face they ended with looked only very vaguely like the strange priest who had come out of the elevator. The face they later constructed by means of the more sophisticated program on Traeger’s laptop wasn’t much closer.

  “Weren’t there any fingerprints?” Brendan asked. “On the knife, on the gun found in the armoire, on the windowsill?”

  “Oh yes,” Traeger said.

  “Well?”

  “The cooperation we would need to check them has not been forthcoming.”

  “Russia?” Brendan asked. “Are they stonewalling?” An image of Chekovsky flickered in his memory.

  “Yes.” From his brusque tone it was clear that Traeger preferred to ask the questions. What a strange task was his. Brendan was almost curious about what led a man into this line of work. Why would a man want to be a secret agent? Traeger was obviously intelligent, and educated. Well read, too. He had known that Somerset Maugham had written a spy novel.

  Finally Brendan couldn’t stand it any longer. “Why did you become a spy?” he asked.

/>   “Things were simpler then,” Traeger said after a long pause. “It was a game played by gentlemen.”

  “And now?”

  “It stopped being a game long ago.”

  It did not help, as Brendan had half hoped it would, to tell John Burke some of this. When the younger priest began to connect the recent murders to the Fatima apparitions, Brendan suggested they have a beer in the basement bar of the Domus. In the States there are Civil War buffs; in Ireland, those who brood over the Troubles. But interest in Fatima knew no national boundaries. There was Guinness in cans, which Brendan regarded as an abomination. Better Nastro Azzurro, he said, than that.

  “My sister is in town,” John said. “I’ll be seeing her tomorrow. I’ve told you about Ignatius Hannan.”

  Crowe smiled. “I want to hear more about your plutocrat countryman.”

  III

  “It’s a bit like the Pentagon.”

  Is there a more beautiful spot on earth? Laura Burke asked herself just before she walked out of the courtyard of the Hotel Columbus on the Via della Conciliazione into Roman traffic.

  A car zipping along the street running parallel to the Via della Conciliazione nearly flattened her when she stepped off the curb.

  And are there crazier drivers anywhere else in the world? She felt a powerful and uncharacteristic impulse to give a digital salute to the car. However good it might feel, it wouldn’t do a bit of good. And it would have been out of character. She and Ray had been sitting in the courtyard of the hotel, near the fountain, reading the Herald Tribune, when she looked at her watch and got to her feet.

  “I’d better get going, Ray.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to come along?”

  She put her hand on Ray’s shoulder. “Better not.”

  He thought about it, then nodded. “Don’t forget to ask him.”

  It took a moment before she understood.

  “The paintings,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  The noise and traffic on the Via della Conciliazione, and the heat, came as a shocking contrast to the cool and secluded peace of the hotel courtyard from which she had just come. There were taxis, tourist buses, hundreds of pedestrians flowing to and from Saint Peter’s Square. Pilgrims come from the four corners of the earth to visit the churches and pray, to feel closer to God here where the Vicar of Christ on earth dwelt in the little city-state familiar to television viewers throughout the world.

  She headed toward the piazza that was embraced by the massive Bernini Arcade and the enormous size of the basilica, its massive dome seeming to lift her off her feet, causing her to stop. Jostled by the eager pilgrims, Laura suddenly felt like a hypocrite among them. She had just left her lover at the hotel and was now hurrying to meet her brother, Father John Burke, for lunch at the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lived, inside the Vatican walls. What would John, a Catholic priest from tip to toe, think of the life she was leading if he knew of it?

  No need to wonder. In thoughtful moments she would pass the same judgment on herself.

  Calling it love didn’t seem to help.

  But it had changed her world. For a long, long time, work had been the focus of her life.

  Ignatius Hannan, her boss, was a billionaire computer maven. Hannan’s net worth could scarcely be calculated, even by one of the computers on which his fortune was based. Laura was called Hannan’s “administrative assistant.” It was a dream job, as long as you liked late hours, incredible pressure, impossible demands, and being on call 24-7. But she’d always believed it was worth a certain amount of suffering to work for a true genius.

  Ray Sinclair, Hannan’s right-hand man, had been important to Laura first as a colleague, then as a lover. It didn’t change the job. But it changed Laura.

  Hannan hadn’t even given the growing relationship between his two closest associates a passing thought. He had other interests. Bigger interests. And neither she nor Ray could get him to think of anything else.

  Hannan had dropped out of Boston College in his sophomore year. Already his electronic wizardry and Midas touch had manifested themselves. By the time he was in his midtwenties he had hired Ray, his former classmate, to oversee operations, lest he be robbed by his employees. Hannan himself was more than a match for his competitors. Laura managed his day, made sure his plane was ready at the Manchester airport in New Hampshire so that they could take off at an hour’s notice, was in effect his factotum. The pace of the business had seemed to spin the three of them out of reach of the religion in which they had been raised.

  Now, in his early thirties, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Ignatius Hannan had got religion again. He’d returned to the Catholicism of his youth, but this time with an almost obsessive focus. He had become what his enemies called a “ferocious Catholic.” He even wanted to change the name of the company from Empedocles to Sedes Sapientiae.

  The board had balked.

  “What’s it mean?” they’d asked Hannan.

  “Seat of Wisdom.”

  Blank looks were rampant around the table. The businessmen in the room hadn’t a clue what the words meant, much less why Hannan wanted to use them.

  Laura said, “It’s one of the titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

  The members of the board observed a moment of stunned silence. Then they all began talking at once. After the general hubbub had died down, the voice of reason finally got a word in.

  Ray said, “Nate, it would cause no end of problems.” He began to outline them, from the loss of name recognition to the expense of a campaign to establish the new image, to the difficulty of changing everything in the company from logos to stationery. Long before Ray was through, Hannan put up his hand.

  “All right, all right.”

  He gave up the idea of a name change. He settled for having a replica of the grotto at Lourdes erected behind the administration building.

  Ray had once said that Nate was a eunuch for the kingdom of mammon’s sake, his ascetic, frantically paced life carrying him from one financial triumph to another. He seemed completely unaware that there were such things as women in the world.

  “An occupational hazard,” Laura said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ray said. They’d been lovers for two years by then.

  At the time, she and Ray had been enjoying a rare respite from the demands of their positions, off to Vermont to see the autumn leaves. They stopped at a small inn for dinner and then decided to stay. Ray went to the desk, and it was only when they went upstairs that she realized he had not taken a separate room for her.

  “Okay?” They stood at the door of the room, and suddenly she felt the inevitability of what they were doing. It was as if they had to prove that they were flesh and blood, unlike Hannan. They both knew all the reasons why this should not be happening, but the rules and prohibitions seemed faded and remote, dead as autumn leaves. She took the key and opened the door and they went in.

  And so it had started. Perhaps at the beginning she had imagined that it was all a prelude to marriage, but the stolen moments seemed all there was likely to be. What made it acceptable was that the two of them agonized about it, apologizing to one another, the whole affair the better because they felt so bad about it. But mainly neither of them gave any sustained thought to the nature of their relationship. Times together were oases of stolen peace.

  The twinkle in his eye now made it clear that, unlike Hannan, he was no ascetic.

  “No time for that. I’ve got too much on my plate to even think about it,” Laura went on. “You know, sometimes I feel we’re both married to Nate.”

  “Hey, I’m not that kind of fella.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He knew what she meant. They were, each in their different ways, footnotes to the life of Ignatius Hannan, at his beck and call. They were paid astronomical salaries for the privilege. And it was a privilege. There was something predestined about Nate’s success, and the rising tide of his fortune lifted all
boats, and none higher than theirs. Nate seemed unaware of their relationship.

  “You make me feel guilty,” he had said to Laura.

  “It’s a woman’s role.”

  “No, I mean it. This is no life for a woman.”

  This was after he returned to the religion of his fathers and decided that business was no career for a woman.

  “Read Chesterton. What’s Wrong With the World,” he urged.

  “What is?”

  “Read the book.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  He looked surprised. “I couldn’t get along without you.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls you can’t get along without.”

  It was as if he had to process a joke in order to recognize it as one. “You’re the exception to the rule.”

  Laura emerged from the colonnade in front of the Libreria Ancora and dashed across the road to the square. The heat was relentless, and the square was a maze of wooden barriers to direct the passage of pilgrims. She looked up at the window from which the Holy Father gave his Angelus address on Sundays at noon, that remote figure in white the symbol of all the moral values she seemed to be flouting.

  She hurried to the shade of the Bernini Arcade and followed the great curved walkway bordered by enormous pillars to the point where she could leave it and enter by the gate to the left of the basilica. John had been ordained in Saint Peter’s three years before, and Laura had come with her parents for the occasion. As if he had fulfilled his purpose in life, his son a priest, her father died a month after their return to the States. Her mother went into swift decline and was now in a nursing home in a Boston suburb. Nate assumed the expense.

  “Think of it as a fringe benefit.”

  She could have kissed him. John would have insisted on sharing the expense with her, and he couldn’t afford it. His Vatican salary was a pittance. He had room and board, but even so. She told Nate how grateful John would be.

  “Have him say a Mass for me.”

  Nate liked the thought that her brother was a priest. Well, she liked it, too, as if it were a kind of insurance policy. That was when she told Nate that her brother could be of help in his grand new project. He’d agreed and sent her off to Rome. She was surprised and unequivocally delighted when Ray said he would accompany her.