The Last Cato (42 page)

The blue line that had guided our steps all night was lost on Vassilis Konstantinou, the cross street that split off from Sofias and continued directly to the Olympic stadium. We ran down the avenue that ended at Plateia Syntagmatos, the enormous esplanade of the Greek Parliament, on the same corner as our hotel. We flew by it without stopping. Kapnikarea was located in the middle of Ermou Street. It was 6:03.

My lungs and heart exploded; the pain in my side was killing me. All that kept me going was my following the faithful nocturnal darkness in the sky, that black covering that wasn’t lit up by a single ray of sunshine. There was still hope. But just as I entered the crosswalk on Ermou Street, the muscles in my right leg decided for themselves that my running was over and I had to stop. A sharp jab stopped me cold. I put my hand on the painful spot and moaned. Farag whipped around. Without uttering a single word, he understood what was happening. He came back, put his left arm under my shoulders, and helped me up. With our next ragged breath, we started running again, this time together. I took a step with my good leg, then leaned all my weight on him when I had to use the bad one. We swung from side to side like a ship in a storm, but we didn’t stop. My watch read 6:05. Just three hundred meters to go. At the end of Ermou, a small Byzantine church, half buried in the ground, appeared like a strange, unimaginable apparition, out of the center of a narrow traffic circle.

Two hundred meters. I could hear Farag’s labored breathing. My good leg started to resent our last-ditch effort. One hundred fifty meters. 6:07. We moved slower and slower. We were spent. A hundred and twenty meters. With a rough push, Farag hoisted me up again and grabbed me tighter, holding steady my hand draped around his neck. One hundred meters. 6:08.

“Ottavia, you have to put up with the pain,” he jabbered, out of air. Seas of sweat ran down his face and neck. “Please keep going.”

Kapnikarea offered us a view of its left-side stone walls. We were so close! We could see the small cupolas covered with red tiles, crowned by small crosses. I couldn’t breathe or run. It was torture.

“Ottavia, the sun!”

I didn’t even look up. The soft blue tinting of the dark sky said it all. Those three words were the spur I needed to find a granule of strength. A chill went through me, and at the same time, I felt such hatred for the sun for failing me. I breathed deep and hurled myself toward the church. Sometimes in life, blind stubbornness, cussedness, or pride takes over and forces us to throw ourselves unchecked toward that single goal that overshadows everything else. That imprudent response must have a lot to do with survival instinct, because we acted as if our life depended on it.

Sure, I was in pain and my body was like a limp rag. But the thought of the rising sun was stuck in my mind, and I simply couldn’t act prudently. More important than my physical problems was my duty to cross Kapnikarea’s threshold.

So, I threw myself into running as I hadn’t run all that night. Farag was right next to me. We ran down the stairs to the church and came to the charming portico that sheltered the door. Above it an impressive Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin and Child twinkled in the dim light from the grounded streetlights. Overhead a heaven of golden mosaics outlined a Constantine chrismon.

“Shall we knock?” I asked weakly, putting my hands on my waist and bending over so I could breathe.

“What do
you
think?” Farag exclaimed. I heard the first of his furious seven blows against the weathered wood. With the last of his blows, the hinges creaked softly and the door opened.

A young Orthodox clergyman, with a long, shaggy black beard, appeared. His brow furrowed, a stern look on his face, he said something in modern Greek that we didn’t understand. Seeing our baffled faces, he repeated it in English.

“The church doesn’t open until eight.”

“We know, Father, but we need to enter. We must purify our souls bending down before God as humble supplicants.”

I gave Farag an admiring look. How did he remember to use the words from the prayer in Jerusalem? The young clergyman examined us from head to toe. Our bedraggled condition seemed to move him.

“In that case, come in. Kapnikarea is all yours.”

I wasn’t fooled. That young man in the soutane was a Staurofilax. Farag read my thoughts.

“By chance, Father…,” I asked wiping the sweat off my face with my sleeve, “have you seen our friend around here, a runner like us, very tall, with blond hair?”

The curate seemed to think it over. He was such a good actor you wouldn’t know he was a Staurofilax. But he didn’t fool me.

“No,” he answered after thinking it over a while. “I don’t recall anyone matching that description. But come in please. Don’t stand there in the street.”

From that moment, we were at his mercy.

The church was charming, one of those rare wonders which both time and civilization respect. Hundreds of thin, yellow tapers burned at the back and to the right of the church, allowing light to glimmer onto the iconostasis.

“I’ll leave you alone to pray,” he said, distractedly, as he turned to throw the latch and seal the door. We were prisoners. “Please call if you need anything.”

What could we possibly need? He barely finished speaking those kind words when a hard blow to the back of my head made me stagger and collapse on the floor. That’s all I remember. I was just sorry I didn’t get to see Kapnikarea better.

I
opened my eyes under the glacial glare of several white neon tubes and tried to move my head. I sensed someone at my side. An excruciating pain stopped me. A woman’s voice mumbled some incomprehensible words, and I lost consciousness again. Some time later I awoke again, and several people dressed in white were leaning over my bed, examining me meticulously, raising my limp eyelids, taking my pulse, and gently moving my neck. In the fog, I realized a very thin tube ran from my arm to a plastic bag filled with a transparent liquid, hanging from a metal pole. I fell back to sleep. After several more hours, I regained consciousness and had a better grasp of reality. My dosage of drugs must have been high, because I felt no pain, although I did feel nauseous.

Seated on some green plastic chairs pushed back to the wall, two strangers observed me, mortified. When they saw my eyelids flutter, they jumped to their feet and approached the head of my bed.

“Sister Salina?” one of them asked in Italian. When I fixed my gaze on him, I saw he was dressed in a soutane and wore a cleric’s collar. “I’m Father Cardini, Ferrucci Cardini, from the Vatican embassy. My companion is His Eminence from the archimandrite, secretary of the Permanent Synod of the Church of Greece. How do you feel?”

“Like someone hit me on the head with a mallet, Father. How are my friends, Professor Boswell and Captain Glauser-Röist?”

“Don’t worry, they’re fine. They’re in the next rooms. We just saw them, and they too are regaining consciousness.”

“Where am I?”

“The
nosokomio
George Gennimatas.”

“The what?”

“The Athens general hospital, Sister. Some sailors found you and your companions late yesterday afternoon on a pier at the port and took you to the nearest hospital. When the emergency room personnel saw your Vatican diplomatic credentials, they contacted us.”

A tall, dark-haired doctor with a huge Turkish moustache ripped back the plastic curtain and approached my bed. As he took my pulse and examined my eyes and tongue, he directed his questions to His Eminence from the archimandrite, Theologos Apostolidis, who then spoke to me in English.

“Dr. Kalogeropoulous wishes to know how you’re feeling.”

“Fine. I’m fine,” I answered, trying to get up. I no longer had the drip bag hooked to my arm.

The Greek doctor said something else. Then Father Cardini and the archimandrite Apostolidis turned their faces to the wall. The doctor pulled back the blanket that covered me. All that clothed me was a horrible, short, light salmon-colored gown that left my legs exposed. I wasn’t surprised to see my feet bandaged, but I was surprised to find bandages on my thighs.

“What happened?” I asked. Father Cardini repeated my question in Greek. The doctor gave a long-winded answer.

“Dr. Kalogeropoulos says you and your companions have some very strange wounds. He says they were packed with an herbal chlorophyll substance they can’t identify. He asks if you know how you got the wounds. They discovered some other older wounds like them on your arms.”

“Tell him I don’t know anything. I’d like to see them, Father.”

At my request, the doctor very carefully pulled back the bandages. Then, with the two chastised priests turned to the wall and me in an untied hospital gown, he left the room. The situation was so tense I didn’t dare say a word. Fortunately Dr. Kalogeropoulos returned with a mirror. By flexing my legs, I could see the tattoos. There they were: a decussate cross on the upper part of my right thigh and a Greek cross on my left thigh. Jerusalem and Athens engraved on my body forever. I should have felt proud; but, my curiosity satisfied, all I wanted was to see Farag. When I saw my face in the mirror, I was astonished. Not only did I have sunken eyes and pale skin; wrapped around my head was a voluminous amount of bandage resembled a Muslim turban. Seeing my surprise, Dr. Kalogeropoulos fired off another string of words.

“The doctor says,” Father Cardini related, “that your friends were also hit with a blunt object and have significant contusions on their skulls. Tests show you also consumed alkaloids. He wants to know what substances you ingested.”

“Does this doctor think we’re drug addicts or something?”

Father Cardini wasn’t joking.

“Tell the doctor we didn’t take anything and we don’t know anything, Father. He can ask all he likes, but we can’t say anything more. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see my companions.”

That said, I sat on the edge of the bed and lowered my legs to the floor. The bandages on my feet made lovely slippers. When he saw me get out of bed, the doctor tried to restrain me, but I resisted with all my might. I needed to see my friends.

“Father Cardini, please, will you be so kind as to tell the doctor that I want my clothes and inform him that I’m going to take this bandage off my head?”

The Catholic priest translated my words, which was then followed by some rapid, agitated dialogue.

“That’s not possible, Sister. Dr. Kalogeropoulos says you have not recovered yet. You could suffer a relapse.”

“Tell Dr. Kalogeropoulos that I am perfectly fine. Father, do you know how important our work is?”

“I have an idea, Sister.”

“Then tell him to give me my clothes. Now!”

That produced another exchange of irritated words. The doctor stormed out of my room. Soon a young nurse entered the room and left a plastic bag at the foot of my bed, without saying a word. Then she came over and started to free my head from the gauze turban. I felt a huge relief when she took it off, as if those strips of gauze had been holding my head prisoner. I ran my fingers through my hair to aerate it and felt a large bump on the top of my head.

I hadn’t finished getting dressed when I heard some knocks on the metal door frame. I hurried to change, and pulled back the curtain when I was ready. Farag and the captain, decked out in matching short blue robes that covered their short hospital gowns, looked at me in surprise from under their own respective turbans.

“How come you’re dressed and we’re still in these getups?” asked Farag.

“You two don’t know how to push your weight around,” I replied, laughing. I was so happy to see him again. My heart was racing. “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re perfectly fine, but these people insist on treating us like little boys.”

“Do you want to see this, Doctor?” Glauser-Röist asked, holding out the familiar folded, thick paper from the Staurofilakes. I took it with a smile and opened it. This time there was only one word:
Αποστολειον (Apostoleion).

“We start again, right?” I asked.

“As soon as we get out of here,” murmured the Rock, casting a grim look around the room.

“Well, then, that will be tomorrow,” warned Farag, putting his hands in the pockets of his robe. “It’s eleven o’clock at night. I don’t think they’ll discharge us at this hour.”

“Eleven o’clock?” I exclaimed. We had been unconscious all day.

“Let’s sign the voluntary release form or whatever they call it in this country,” the captain fumed, and headed for the nurses’ station.

I took advantage of his absence to look freely at Farag. There were dark circles under his eyes too. His beard was starting to grow down his neck, which made him look like an odd, blond desert nomad. Thinking back to the night before, I felt as though I had a secret only he and I shared. Still, Farag didn’t seem to remember a thing; the look on his face was of sympathetic indifference. I was perplexed and worried. Had I dreamed it all?

I didn’t get him to talk to me all night, not even when we left the hospital and got into the car sent by the Vatican embassy. (His Eminence Theologos Apostolidis bade us farewell amicably at the door of the George Gennimatas Hospital and left in his own car.) Farag only spoke to the captain or Father Cardini, and when his eyes met mine, they skipped past me, as if I were invisible. If he was trying to make me suffer, he was doing a good job, but I wasn’t going to let that destroy me. I shrouded myself in silence until we got to the hotel. Back in my room, I couldn’t sit comfortably, on account of my tattoos. I prayed stretched out on the bed until I surrendered to sleep at around three in the morning. Anguished, I begged God to help me, to return to me the certainty of my religious vocation, the peaceful stability of my former life. I wanted to take refuge in his love until I found the peace I needed. I slept well, but my last thought then and my first thought when I woke up were of Farag.