The Gemini Contenders (34 page)

“One man?”

“Yes.”

“Would his name be Enrici Gaetamo?”

“I told you. There are no priests of the Curia here. Please, go inside. Do you need help?”

“No, I can manage.” Victor got out of the car slowly, each movement a struggle, the pain in his eyes receding, the spasm in his back subsiding. He understood. His mind was refocusing itself. He had come to Campo di Fiori for answers. For a confrontation. But he had not expected it to be this way.

He walked up the wide marble steps to the oak door of his childhood. He paused and waited for what he thought was inevitable: a sense of overwhelming sorrow. But it did not come, because there was no life here.

He heard the gunning of the engine behind him and turned. The driver had swung the car out into the curve, and driven past the embankment into the road toward the main gate. Whoever he was, he wanted to be away as rapidly as possible.

As he watched, Victor heard the metallic sound of a latch. He turned again to the huge oak door; it had opened.

The shock was impossible to conceal. Nor did he bother to hide it. The rage inside him welled; his whole body trembled in anger.

The man at the door was a
priest!
Dressed in the black cassock of the church. He was an old man and frail. Had he been otherwise, Fontine might have struck out at him.

Instead he stared at the old man and spoke quietly. “That a priest would be in this house is most painful to me.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” replied the priest in a foreigner’s Italian, his voice thin but firm. “We revered the
padrone
of the Fontini-Cristis. We placed our most precious treasures in his hands.”

Their eyes were locked; neither wavered, but the anger within Victor was slowly replaced with incredulity. “You’re Greek,” he said, barely audible.

“I am, but that’s not relevant. I’m a monk from Constantine. Please. Come in.” The old priest stepped back to allow Victor to pass. He added softly, “Take your time. Let your eyes roam. Little has changed; photographs and inventories were taken of each room. We have maintained everything as it was.”

A mausoleum
.

“So did the Germans.” Fontine walked into the enormous hall. “It’s strange that those who went to such lengths to own Campo di Fiori don’t want to change it.”

“One doesn’t cut a great jewel or deface a worthy painting. There’s nothing strange in that.”

Victor did not reply. Instead, he gripped his cane and walked with difficulty toward the staircase. He stopped in front of the arch that led to the huge drawing room on the left. Everything
was
as it had been. The paintings, the half-tables against the massive walls, the glazed antique mirrors above the tables, the oriental rugs covering the polished floor, the wide staircase, its balustrade glistening.

He looked over through the north arch into the dining room. Twilight shadows fell across the enormous table, now bare, polished, empty, where once the family had sat. He pictured them now; he could hear the chatter and the laughter. Arguments and anecdotes, never-ending talk; dinners were important events at Campo di Fiori.

The figures froze, the voices disappeared. It was time to look away.

Victor turned. The monk gestured at the south arch. “Shall we go into your father’s study?”

He preceded the old man into the drawing room. Involuntarily—for he did not care to activate memories—his eyes fell on the furnishings, suddenly so familiar. Every chair, every lamp, every tapestry and sconce and table was precisely as he remembered it.

Fontine breathed deeply and closed his eyes for a moment. It was macabre. He was passing through a museum that had once been a living part of his existence. In some ways it was the cruelest form of anguish.

He continued on through the door into Savarone’s study; it had never been his, although his life nearly ended in that room. He passed by the doorframe through which a severed, bloody hand had been thrown in the shadows.

If there was anything that startled him it was the desk lamp; and the light that spilled downward over the floor from the green shade. It was
precisely
as it was nearly three decades ago. His memory of it was vivid, for it was the light from the lamp that had washed over the shattered skull of Geoffrey Stone.

“Would you care to sit down?” asked the priest.

“In a minute.”

“May I?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“May I sit at your father’s desk?” said the monk. “I’ve watched your eyes.”

“It’s your house, your desk. I’m a visitor.”

“But not a stranger.”

“Obviously. Am I speaking with a representative of Baricours, Père et Fils?”

The old priest nodded silently. He walked slowly around the desk, pulled out the chair, and lowered his frail body into it. “Don’t blame the lawyer in Milan; he couldn’t have known. Baricours met your conditions, we made sure of it. Baricours is the Order of Xenope.”

“And my enemy,” said Victor quietly. “In 1942 there was an M.I.-Six compound in Oxfordshire. You tried to kill my wife. Many innocent people lost their lives.”

“Decisions were made beyond the control of the Elders. The extremists had their way; we couldn’t stop them. I don’t expect you to accept that.”

“I don’t. How did you know I was in Italy?”

“We are not what we once were, but we still have resources. One in particular keeps his eye on you. Don’t ask me who it is; I won’t tell you. Why did you come back? After thirty years, why did you return to Campo di Fiori?”

“To find a man named Gaetamo,” answered Fontine. “Enrici Gaetamo.”

“Gaetamo lives in the hills of Varese,” said the monk.

“He’s still looking for the train from Salonika. He’s traveled from Edhessa, through the Balkans, across Italy, into the northern mountains. Why have you stayed here all these years?”

“Because the
key
is here,” replied the monk. “A pact was made. In October of 1939, I traveled to Campo di Fiori. It was I who negotiated Savarone Fontini-Cristi’s participation, I who sent a dedicated priest on that train with his brother, an engineer. And demanded their deaths in the name of God.”

Victor stared at the monk. The spill of the lamp illuminated the pale, taut flesh and the sad, dead eyes. Fontine recalled the visitor in his Washington office. “A Greek came to me saying his family served their church once in ways he didn’t understand. Was this priest’s brother the engineer, named Annaxas?”

The old cleric’s head snapped up; the eyes became briefly alive. “Where did you hear that name?”

Fontine looked away, his eyes falling on a painting beneath a Madonna on the wall. A hunting scene, birds being flushed from a thicket by men with guns. Other birds flew above. “We’ll trade information,” he said quietly. “Why did my father agree to work with Xenope?”

“You know the answer. He had only one concern: not to divide the Christian world. The defeat of the fascists was all he cared about.”

“Why was the vault taken from Greece in the first place?”

“The Germans were scavengers and Constantine was marked. That was the information we received from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi commanders stole from museums, tore apart retreats and monasteries. We couldn’t take the chance of leaving it there. Your father engineered the removal. Brilliantly. Donatti was tricked.”

“By the use of a second train,” added Victor. “Mounted and routed identically. Sent three days later.”

“Yes. Word of this second train was leaked to Donatti through the Germans, who had no concept of the significance of the vault from Constantine. They looked for treasures—paintings, sculpture, art objects—not obscure writings they were told were valuable only to scholars. But Donatti, the fanatic, could not resist; the Filioque denials had been rumored for decades. He had to possess them.” The priest of Xenope paused, the memory painful. “The cardinal’s and the German interests coincided. Berlin wanted Savarone Fontini-Cristi’s influence destroyed; Donatti wanted to keep him from that train. At all costs.”

“Why was Donatti involved at all?”

“Again, your father. He knew the Nazis had a powerful friend in the Vatican. He wanted Donatti exposed for what he was. The cardinal could not know about that second train unless the Germans told him. Your father intended to make use of this fact. It was the only price Fontini-Cristi asked of us. As it turned out, that price brought about the executions of Campo di Fiori.”

Victor could hear his father’s voice piercing through the decades.…
He issues edicts to the uninformed and enforces them by fear.… A disgrace to the Vatican
. Savarone knew the enemy, but not the extremes of his monstrousness.

The brace across Fontine’s back was cutting into his flesh. He had been standing too long. He gripped his cane and walked toward the chair in front of the desk. He sat down.

“Do you know what was on that train?” asked the old monk gently.

“Yes. Brevourt told me.”

“Brevourt never knew. He was told part of the truth. Not all of it. What did he tell you?”

Victor was suddenly alarmed. He locked eyes once again with the priest.

“He spoke of the Filioque denials, studies that refuted the divinity of Christ. The most damaging of which was an Aramaic scroll that raised questions as to whether Jesus ever existed at all. The conclusion would appear that he did not.”

“It was never the denials. Never the scroll. It was—
is
—a confession written in its entirety that predates all the other documents.” The priest of Xenope looked away. He raised
his hands; his bony fingers touched the pale skin of his cheek. “The Filioque denials are artifacts for scholars to ponder. As one of them, the Aramaic scroll, was ambiguous, as the scrolls of the Dead Sea were ambiguous when studied fifteen hundred years later. However, thirty years ago at the height of a moral war—if that’s not a contradiction in terms—that scroll’s exposure might have been catastrophic. It was enough for Brevourt.”

Fontine was mesmerized. “What is this confession? I’ve never heard it mentioned.”

The monk returned his eyes to Victor. During the brief silence before he spoke, the old priest conveyed the pain of his immediate decision. “It is everything. It was written on a parchment brought out of a Roman prison in the year sixty-seven. We know the date because the document speaks of the death of Jesus in terms of the Hebrew calendar that places the figure at thirty-four years. It coincides with anthropological scholarship. The parchment was written by a man who wandered blindly; he speaks of Gethsemane and Capernaum, Gennesaret and Corinth, Pontus, Galatia and Cappadocia. The writer can be no one else but Simon of Bethsaida, given the name of Peter by the man he called Christ. What is contained in that parchment is beyond anything in your imagination. It must be found.”

The priest stopped and stared across at Victor.

“And destroyed?” asked Fontine softly.

“Destroyed,” replied the monk. “But not for any reason you might think of. For
nothing
is changed, yet
all
is changed. My vows forbid me to tell you more. We’re old men; we haven’t much time. If you can help, you must. That parchment can alter history. It should have been destroyed centuries ago, but arrogance prevailed. It could plunge a great part of the world into a terrible agony. No one can justify the pain.”

“But you say nothing is changed,” replied Victor, repeating the monk’s words, “yet
all
is changed. One cancels the other; it doesn’t make sense.”

“The confession on that parchment makes sense. In all its anguish. I can tell you no more.”

Fontine held the priest’s eyes. “Did my father know about the parchment? Or was he told only what Brevourt was told?”

“He knew,” said the monk of Xenope. “The Filioque denials
were like your American articles of impeachment, charges for canonical debate. Even the most damaging—as you called it—the Aramaic scroll, was subject to the linguistic interpretations of antiquity. Fontini-Cristi would have perceived these issues; Brevourt did not. But the confession on that parchment is not debatable. It was the single, awesome thing that demanded Fontini-Cristi’s commitment. He understood and accepted it.”

“A confession on a parchment taken out of a Roman prison.” Fontine spoke quietly; the issue was clear. “That’s what the vault of Constantine is all about.”

“Yes.”

Victor let the moment pass. He leaned forward in the chair, his hand on his metal cane. “You said the key is here. But why? Donatti searched—every wall, every floor, every inch of ground. You’ve remained here for twenty-seven years, and still there’s nothing. What’s left for you?”

“Your father’s words, said in this room.”

“What were they?”

“That the markings would be here in Campo di Fiori. Etched for a millennium. That was the phrase he used: ‘etched for a millennium.’ And his son would understand. It was part of his childhood. But his son was told nothing. We came to know that.”

Fontine refused a bed in the great house. He would rest in the stables, in the bed on which he had placed the dead Barzini a lifetime ago.

He wanted to be alone, isolated, and above all, out of the house, away from the dead relics. He had to think, to go back over the horror again and again until he found the missing connection. For it was there now; the pattern existed. What remained missing was the line that completed the design.

Part of his childhood
. No, not there, not yet. Don’t start there; it would come later. Begin with what one knew, one saw, one heard for himself.

He reached the stables and walked through the empty rooms and past the empty stalls. There was no electricity now; the old monk had given him a flashlight. Barzini’s room was as he remembered it. Bare, without ornament; the narrow bed, the worn-out armchair, the simple trunk for his few possessions.

The tack room, too, was as he had seen it last. Bridles and leather straps on the walls. He sat down on a small wooden stirrup bench, exhaling in pain as he did so. He put out the flashlight. The moon shone through the windows. He inhaled deeply and forced his mind back to the horrible night.