Lazarus Read online

  Nicol Peters waited a long moment before he offered a dry comment.

  ‘At least you’re at the beginning of a new world, not at the end of it. And it’s not all that new either. It’s the same place lots of us inhabit who have never been conditioned or gifted with the massive certainties of Christianity. We have to make do with what we get – the fleeting light, the passing storm, enough love to temper the tears of things, the rare glimpse of reason in a mad world. So don’t be too dismayed, matey! It’s a big club you’ve joined – and even Christians believe that God was a founding member!’

  While the Pontiff, cold and cyanosed, festooned with tubes and electrodes, was being settled in the Intensive Care Unit, Sergio Salviati took coffee with James Morrison and wrote his first communiqué to the Vatican.

  ‘His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV, today underwent elective bypass surgery, following a short history of angina pectoris. The operation, in which three saphenous vein grafts were inserted into the coronary circulation, was performed at the International Clinic under the direction of Professor Sergio Salviati, assisted by Mr James Morrison of the London College of Surgeons, with the Papal Physician, Professor Carlo Massenzio, in attendance. The procedures were successfully completed in two hours and fifty minutes. His Holiness is now in the Intensive Care Unit, in a stable and satisfactory condition. Professor Salviati and the attending physician anticipate an uncomplicated convalescence and are optimistic about the long-term prognosis.’

  He signed the document with a flourish and handed it to his secretary.

  ‘Please send two facsimile copies to the Vatican, the first to the Secretary of State personally, the second to the Sala Stampa. Then type the following text which our switchboard operators will use verbatim to respond to all inquiries about the Pontiff. Text begins: “The operation on His Holiness has been successfully completed. His Holiness is still in Intensive Care. For further details, apply to the Sala Stampa, Vatican City, which will issue all future bulletins.”’

  ‘Anything else, Professor?’

  ‘Yes. Please ask the Chief of Hospital Staff and the two senior security officers to meet me here in thirty minutes. That’s all for the moment.’

  When the secretary had left, James Morrison offered enthusiastic praise.

  ‘Full marks, Sergio! You’ve built a great team. I’ve never worked with a better one.’

  ‘My thanks to you, James. I was grateful to have you with me. This was a rough one for me.’

  ‘The old buzzard should be grateful he fell into your hands!’

  Salviati threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘He is an old buzzard, isn’t he? That great beak, those hooded, hostile eyes. But he’s a tough bird. There’s probably another decade in him after this.’

  ‘It’s a moot point, of course, whether the world or the Church will thank you for that.’

  ‘True, James! Very true! But at least we’ve honoured the Hippocratic oath.’

  ‘I wonder if he’ll offer you a Vatican decoration.’

  ‘To a Jew? I very much doubt it. I wouldn’t accept it. I couldn’t. Anyway, it’s much too early to talk about success, let alone rewards. We still have to keep him alive until the end of his convalescence.’

  ‘Are you that worried about the assassination threat?’

  ‘You’re damn right I’m worried! No one goes in or out of the Intensive Care Unit without an identity check. No drugs are dispensed to this patient except from sealed bottles by nominated personnel. Even the goddamned scrub women are searched, and the garbage collectors!’

  ‘But I notice you and Tove still drive back and forth to the clinic without a bodyguard. Is that wise?’

  ‘We’re not the target.’

  ‘You could be a secondary one.’

  ‘James, if I thought about all the dangers of this job, I’d lock myself in a padded cell … To change the subject, what are your plans now?’

  ‘I’ll take a leisurely run up north to see my Italian relatives, then I’ll head back to London.’

  ‘How do you want to be paid?’

  ‘Swiss francs in Zurich, if that’s possible.’

  ‘Since the money will come from the Vatican, everything is possible. When will you leave?’

  ‘Two days, three maybe. The British Ambassador has bidden me to dinner. He’d like to make some capital out of my presence – for which I don’t blame him, because I’ll be eating my own tax money. But before I leave I’d like to entertain you and Tove. You pick the place. I’ll pick up the bill.’

  ‘It’s a date. Do you want to stroll along with me and take a quick look at our patient? He should be settled by now. And that Irish monsignor, his secretary, insists on a personal word …’

  Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly was tired and low-spirited. The fine glow of liquor and righteousness which had sustained him at the Secretariat meeting had subsided into the grey ashes of remorse. He had driven to the clinic just as the Pontiff was being wheeled in for surgery and he had spent three long hours wandering the grounds under the vigilant eyes of armed men.

  Even before Salviati’s communiqué had been issued, he had telephoned the Secretary of State to tell him that the operation had been successful. His Eminence had returned the compliment with a brief summary of the de Rosa affair and an admonition that none of the newspaper reports – which were bound to be lurid – should be communicated to His Holiness until he was well on the road to recovery. O’Rahilly read the order as a reproof for his indiscretions, and wished there were someone like Matt Neylan to whom he could make a fraternal confession.

  So, when he stood by the Pontiff’s bedside with Salviati and Morrison, he felt flustered and uncomfortable. His first remark was a banality.

  ‘The poor man looks so … so vulnerable.’

  Morrison reassured him cheerfully.

  ‘He’s in great shape. The whole procedure was a copybook exercise. There’s nothing to be done now except monitor the screen and change his drips. He won’t be halfway lucid for another day and a half. If I were you, I’d go home and let Professor Salviati’s people look after him.’

  ‘You’re right, of course.’ O’Rahilly still felt the need to patch up his dignity. ‘I wondered if I should walk through the security arrangements with you, Professor Salviati; just so I can reassure the Secretary of State and the Curia.’

  ‘Not possible, Monsignore!’ Salviati was curt. ‘Security is not your business, or mine. We should leave it to the professionals!’

  ‘I thought only that …’

  ‘Enough, please! We are all tired. I don’t tell you how to write the Pope’s letters. Don’t tell me how to run my clinic. Please, Monsignore! Please!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Malachy O’Rahilly was chastened but not silenced. ‘I had a bad night, too. I’m sure the security is first class. I couldn’t move twenty yards in the garden without looking down a gun-barrel. When may His Holiness have visitors?’

  ‘Any time. But he won’t begin to make sense for at least thirty-six hours. Even then, his attention span will be limited and his emotions barely under control. Just warn your people not to expect too much and to keep their visits short.’

  ‘Be sure I’ll do that. There’s just one thing you should know …’

  ‘Yes?’

  And that was all the prompting Malachy O’Rahilly needed to blurt out the story of de Rosa’s suicide, the murder of his children and the macabre obsequies he had prepared in his house.

  Morrison and Salviati heard him out in silence; then Salviati led the way out of the Intensive Care Unit and into the corridor. He was deeply shocked, but his comment was studiously restrained.

  ‘What can I say? It’s a tragic mess and a sad waste of human lives.’

  ‘We are anxious,’ – Malachy O’Rahilly was happy to have the spotlight again – ‘we are most anxious that His Holiness should be spared this news, at least until he is strong enough to cope with it.’

  Salviati dismissed the notion with a shr
ug.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t hear it from our staff, Monsignore.’

  To which James Morrison added a tart reminder.

  ‘And he’s not going to be able to hold, let alone focus on, a newspaper for days yet.’

  ‘So you should look to your own gossips, Monsignore.’ Salviati was already on the move towards the elevators. ‘You must excuse us now. We’ve had a busy morning; and it isn’t over yet.’

  Anton Drexel, too, was having a busy morning; but a much more relaxing one. He had risen early, made his morning meditation, said Mass in the tiny villa chapel with his cellar master for acolyte and those of his household and the colonia who wished to attend. He had breakfasted on coffee and home-baked rolls and honey from his own hives. Now, dressed in workman’s clothes, with a big straw hat on his white head and a basket on his arm, he was making the rounds of the garden plots, cutting fresh artichokes, pulling lettuce and radishes, picking red tomatoes and white peaches and the big yellow persimmons that the local folk called ‘kaki’.

  His companion was a skinny, shambling boy with a hydrocephalic skull, who knelt among the bean rows, clutching a tape-recorder into which from time to time he murmured some runic words of his own. Later, Drexel knew, the sounds would be transcribed into the written record of a Mendelian experiment on the hybridisation of fave, the broad beans which flourished in the friable soil of the foothills. The boy, Tonino, was only in his fifteenth year, but already, under the tutelage of a botanist from the University of Rome, he was deep into the principles of plant genetics.

  Verbal communication with Tonino was difficult, as it was with many of the children in the colonia, but Drexel had developed a technique of patient listening and a language of smiles and gestures and approving caresses, which somehow seemed to suffice these small, maimed geniuses whose intellectual reach, he knew, was light years further than his own.

  As he went about the simple, satisfying landsman’s tasks, Drexel pondered the paradoxes, human and divine, which presented themselves to him every precious day of his Indian summer. He saw himself very clearly as a hinge-man of a Church in crisis, a man whose time was running out, who must soon stand for judgement on what he had done and left undone.

  His prime talent had always been that of a navigator. He knew that you couldn’t sail into the eye of the wind or buck the seas head-on. You had to haul off and tack, take the big waves on the shoulder, run for shelter sometimes and always be content to arrive in God’s time.

  He had always refused to involve himself in the battles of the theologians, being content to accept life as a mystery, and Revelation as a torch-light by which to explore it. For him, faith was the gift that made mystery acceptable, while hope made it endurable and love brought joy even in the cloud of unknowing. He had no belief at all in the efficacy of Romanità, the ancient Roman habit of prescribing a juridical solution to every human dilemma, and then stamping every solution with a sacred character under the seal of the magisterium.

  His method of dealing with Romanità – and of salving his own conscience – had always been the same. He made his protest, plainly but in strictest protocol, he pleaded his cause without passion, then submitted in silence to the verdict of the Pontiff or the curial majority. Had he been challenged to justify such conformity – and not even the Pontiff wanted a head-on collision with Anton Drexel! – he would have answered with reasonable truth that open conflict would avail nothing for him or for the Church, and that while he was happy to resign and become a country curate, he saw no virtue in abdication, and even less in rebellion. In his official life he followed the motto of Gregory the Great: ‘Omnia videre, multa dissumulare, pauca corrigere.’ See all, keep a lot to yourself and correct a few things!

  But in his private, intimate life at the villa, with the children, their parents and teachers, he no longer had the luxury or the protection of protocol and obedience. In a very special sense, he was the patriarch of the family, the shepherd of the tiny flock, to whom everyone looked for guidance and decision. He could no longer gloss over the patent facts of a tooth and claw creation, and the random nature of human tragedy. He could no longer signify personal assent to the prohibition of artificial birth control, or affirm that every marriage formally contracted in the Church was, of its nature, Christian, made in heaven, and therefore indissoluble. He was no longer prepared to pronounce a final ethical judgement on the duty of a surgeon faced with a monster birth, or the conscience of a woman desperate to terminate a pregnancy in order to prevent one. He was angered when theologians and philosophers were silenced or censured for their attempts to enlarge the understanding of the Church. He fought a long war of attrition against the secrecies and injustices of the inquisitorial system, which still survived in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He found himself insisting more and more upon the liberty of enlightened conscience and the constant need of every human creature for compassion, charity and forgiveness.

  It was to this that he sought to persuade his friends in the senior hierarchy and ultimately the Pontiff, if and when he came to spend time with the children in the colonia. It was for this that he offered his daily Mass and his nightly prayers. It was for this that he sought to prepare mind and spirit by his musings in the summer garden. Even his harvest of the summer fruits made a text for his discourse to the children and their teachers, gathered on the lawn for morning coffee.

  ‘You see, there is an order even in what presents itself to us as cataclysm. Lake Nemi up there was once an active volcano. This land was once covered with ash and pumice and black lava. Now it is sweet and fertile. We did not see the change happen. If we had seen it, we would not have understood what was happening. We would have tried to explain the phenomenon by myths and symbols … Even now, with all our knowledge of the past, we still find it hard to disentangle the historical facts from the myths, because the myths themselves are a part of history … This is why we must never be afraid to speculate – and never, never be afraid of those who urge us to contemplate the seemingly impossible, to examine ancient formulae for new meanings. Believe me, we are more readily betrayed by our certainties than by our doubts and curiosities. I believe that half the heresies and schisms would never have happened if Christians had been willing to listen to each other in patience and charity, and not tried to turn the Divine mysteries into geometric theorems which could be taught with compass and set-squares … Listen now, my friends, to what the Fathers of Vatican Council II have said about our dangerous certainties: “If the influence of events or of the times has led to deficiencies in conduct, in Church discipline, or even in the formulation of doctrine (which must be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself) these should be appropriately rectified at the proper moment.” But what am I truly trying to say with all these words? I am an old man. I hold to the old Apostolic faith. Jesus is the Lord, the Son of the Living God. He took flesh. He suffered and died for our salvation and on the third day God raised him up again. Everything I see in this garden is a symbol of that birth and death and resurrection … Every truth that has ever been taught within the Church flows from it. Every evil that has ever been done in the Church has been a contradiction of that saving event … So do not ask me to judge you, my children, my family. Just permit me to love you, as God loves us all …’

  The talk ended as informally as it had begun. Drexel moved over to the big trestle table, where one of the women offered him coffee and a sweet biscuit. It was then that he became aware of Tove Lundberg standing a few paces away with James Morrison in attendance. Tove Lundberg presented him to Drexel. Morrison paid him a sober compliment.

  ‘I’ve been deaf to sermons for a good many years, Eminence. That one moved me deeply.’

  Tove Lundberg explained their presence.

  ‘Sergio wanted you to know personally that the surgery was successful … And I thought James should see what you are doing here for Britte and the others.’

  ‘That was kind.’ Drexel felt as if a great
load had been lifted from his shoulders. ‘I presume, Mr Morrison, that means there were no unforeseen consequences – stroke, brain damage, that sort of thing?’

  ‘None that we can see or foresee at this moment.’

  ‘Thank God! And you clever gentlemen, too!’

  We did, however, get some sad news.’ Tove Lundberg told him of the de Rosa affair as reported by Monsignor O’Rahilly. Drexel was suddenly grim.

  ‘Shocking! Absolutely disgraceful that a tragedy like this could be permitted to happen! I shall take it up with the dicasteries concerned and with the Holy Father when he is sufficiently recovered.’ He turned to James Morrison. ‘Bureaucrats are the accursed of God, Mr Morrison. They record everything and understand nothing. They invent a spurious mathematic by which every human factor is reduced to zero …’ To Tove Lundberg he said more calmly: ‘I imagine Professor Salviati was very upset.’

  ‘More than he would confess, even to me. He hates the waste of human beings. Besides, the clinic is like an armed camp just now and that’s a reminder of another kind of waste.’

  ‘Come!’ said Anton Drexel abruptly. ‘Let’s be grateful for a while. I ‘II walk you round the villa and the vineyards – and after that, Mr Morrison, you shall taste some of the best wine that’s been grown in these parts for a long time. I call it Fontamore, and it drinks better than Frascati. I’m very proud of it …’

  Sergio Salviati’s conference with the security men lasted nearly an hour. It dealt, for the most part, with the details of personnel control: a roll-call of each oncoming shift, a check of hospital identity cards against personal documents like passports and drivers’ licences, access to drug cabinets and surgical instruments, routes and times by which certain key people might enter sensitive areas, the mobile surveillance of strategic points inside and outside the building. So far, it was agreed, all staff within the compound had been accounted for and were about their normal business. Visitors could be dealt with without too much fuss. Tradesmen would be met by armed guards and the goods they delivered screened and hand searched before they passed into the storerooms. So far, so good. The security men assured the Professor that he could sleep as soundly and as safely as if he were in the crypt of St Peter’s itself.