Lazarus Page 14

  His next caller was less comforting: a lean, sallow, cold-eyed fellow in the white jacket of a male nurse. He was one of the Mossad men in permanent residence at the clinic, an elusive figure whom everybody recognised, who was on hand for every emergency, yet whose name never appeared on any regular roster. His first words were cryptic:

  ‘Grants and scholarships.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘You give a certain number to non-Italians. How are they allotted?’

  ‘On the basis of merit and recommendation. We accept only candidates with full nursing certificates from their countries of origin and references from their consulates or embassies in Rome. We offer them two years of specialised training in cardiac theatre and post-operative practice. The scholarships are advertised in the consulates and in professional journals in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Trucial Oman, Israel, Kenya and Malta. We supply board, lodging, uniforms, training and health care. The candidates or the country which sponsors them must come up with the rest. It works pretty well. We get staff eager to learn, the sponsoring countries get trained personnel capable of passing on their education. End of story …’

  ‘Are any security checks made on applicants?’

  ‘You know there are. They have to apply for visas and student sojourn permits. The Italians run their own vetting system. Your people do any unofficial check for me. So there shouldn’t be any surprises.’

  ‘There shouldn’t be; but this time we’ve got a nasty one. Recognise her?’

  He tossed on the desk a small, passport-size photograph of a young woman. Salviati knew her instantly.

  ‘Miriam Latif. She’s been here a year now. She comes from Lebanon. She’s working in the haematology unit. And she’s damned good. What the hell could you possibly have on her?’

  ‘She has a boyfriend.’

  ‘Most girls do – and Miriam’s a very pretty one.’

  ‘The boyfriend is one Omar Asnan, designated a merchant from Tehran. He trades in tobacco, hides, spot oil and pharmaceutical opium. He also disposes of large quantities of ready cash and has a string of girlfriends, some of them even prettier than Miriam Latif. He is also a known paymaster of the Sword of Islam group.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the least we can say is that he has a friend, an ally, a possible assassin, in place in the clinic … And if you think of it, the haematology unit is a very useful place to have her.’

  Sergio Salviati shook his head.

  ‘I don’t buy it. The girl’s been here for twelve months. The Pontiff’s operation was decided only a few days ago. The assassination threat is a matter that arose in response to the opportunity.’

  ‘And why,’ asked the Mossad man patiently, ‘why else do you have people in place, under deep cover, as sleepers – except to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities? Why the hell do you think I’m here? Think of all the famous or politically important people who pass through the clinic. This is a stage simply waiting for a drama to happen … And Miriam Latif could be the leading lady in a tragedy.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about her?’

  ‘Watch her. Put one of our magic rings around her, so that she can’t even go to the toilet unless we know about it. There’s not much time. How long before your patient is discharged?’

  ‘Barring complications, ten days, fourteen at the outside.’

  ‘So, don’t you see, they have to move fast. But now that we’re alerted, we can move faster.’ ‘Do the Italians know this?’

  ‘No. And we don’t intend to tell ’em. We’ll do whatever is necessary. One thing you have to remember. If the girl fails to show up for work, I want you to make a big song and dance about it – question the staff, inform the police, call her embassy, all that!’

  ‘And I don’t ask why you want it done like that?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Mossad man. ‘You are a very wise monkey, who hears no evil, sees no evil, speaks no evil.’

  ‘But you could be wrong about Miriam Latif.’

  ‘We hope we are, Professor. None of us wants to have blood on the sidewalk! None of us wants reprisal for a lost agent.’

  Sergio Salviati felt himself suddenly drowning in the black waters of fear and self-loathing. Here he was, a healer, netted like a tunny in a labyrinthine trap, waiting helplessly for murder to happen. The message he had been given was clear as daylight. In the game of terror, the slaughter was serial; you kill mine, I kill yours. Now there was a new twist to the sport – make the killing but put the blame on someone else: a hit-and-run motorist, a vengeful lover, an addict in search of a fix. And so long as the blood didn’t splash on his own doorstep, Sergio Salviati would be silent lest even worse things should befall.

  Then, because it was nearly midday, he walked to the Intensive Care Unit to take a look at the cause of all his problems, Leo XIV, Pontifex Maximus. All the signs said that he was doing well; his breathing was regular, the atrial fibrillations were within normal limits, his kidneys were functioning and his body temperature was rising slowly. Salviati smiled sourly and made a silent apostrophe to his patient: ‘You are a terrible old man! I give you life and what do you give to me? Nothing but grief and death … Morrison was right. You’re a bird of ill-omen … Yet – God help me! – I’m still committed to keeping you alive!’

  Seven

  The first drugged confusions were over: the long unstable hours when he drifted between sleep and waking, the half-seen procession of Vatican visitors murmuring solicitous courtesies, the broken nights when his thorax hurt abominably and he had to ring for the nurse to move him in the bed and give him a pill to ease him back into sleep. But neither the confusions nor the pain could mask the wonder of the prime event: he had been taken apart like a watch and put together again; he had survived. It was exactly as Salviati had promised. He was like Lazarus stepping out of the tomb to stand, blinking and uncertain, in the sunlight.

  Now, every day was a new gift, every unsteady step a new adventure, every word spoken a fresh experience of human contact. At moments the newness was so poignant that he felt like a boy again, waking to that first flush of spring when all the blossom trees in Mirandola seemed to burst into flame at once. He wanted to share the experience with everyone: the staff, Malachy O’Rahilly, the cardinals who came like courtiers to kiss hands and congratulate him.

  The strange thing was that when he tried to express to Salviati both the wonder and his gratitude for it, his words seemed suddenly arid and inadequate. Salviati was courteous and encouraging; but when he had gone, Leo the Pontiff felt that a most important event had slipped past him, never to be celebrated again.

  This sense of loss plunged him, without warning, into a black depression and a prolonged fit of weeping which shamed him into a deeper gloom. Then Tove Lundberg appeared and sat by his bedside to hold his hand and coax him out of the dark valley and on to the sunlit slopes again. He did not withdraw from her touch but surrendered to it gratefully, knowing, however vaguely, that he needed every possible handhold to anchor him to sanity. She used her own handkerchief to wipe away his tears and chided him gently:

  ‘You must not be ashamed. This is the way it goes with everybody – high elation, then despair, a huge swing of the pendulum. You have just been subjected to an enormous invasion. Salviati says that the body weeps for what has been done to it. He says something else, too. We all believe we are immortal and invulnerable. Then something happens and the illusion of immortality is shattered for ever. We weep then for our lost illusions. Even so, the tears are part of the healing process. So let them. How … My father used to remind us that Jesus wept for love and for loss, just like the rest of us …’

  ‘I know that. Why, then, am I so unprepared and inadequate?’

  ‘Because …’ Tove Lundberg pieced out her answer with great care, ‘because to this moment you have always been able to dictate the terms of your life. In all the world there is no one who sits higher or more securely, because you are elected for life and
no one can gainsay you. All your titles affirm, beyond question, that you are the man in control. Your whole character urges you to hold that control.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You know so. But now you are no longer master of yourself or of events. When my father was in his last illness he used to quote us a passage from the Gospel of John. It is, I believe, part of Christ’s Commission to Peter … How does it go? “When you were young, you used to buckle on your belt and go wherever you wanted.

  Leo the Pontiff gave her the rest of the text as if it were a response in choir.

  ‘But when you are old, you will hold out your hands and another will gird you and lead you where you do not want to go …” For a man like me, that’s a hard lesson to learn.’

  ‘How can you teach it, if you haven’t learnt it?’

  A ghost of a smile twitched at the corners of his bloodless lips. He said softly: ‘Now there’s a change! The Pope is taught sound doctrine by a heretic – and a woman at that!’

  ‘You’d probably be a whole lot wiser if you listened to both the heretics and the women!’ Her laugh took the sting out of the reproof. ‘I must go now. I have three more patients to see before lunch. Tomorrow, we’ll walk in the garden. We’ll take a wheelchair so that you can rest when you feel tired.’

  ‘I’d like that. Thank you.’

  As a parting gesture she sprinkled cologne on a facecloth and dabbed it on his forehead and his cheeks. The gesture moved him to an unfamiliar emotion. The only woman who had ever soothed him like that was his mother. Tove Lundberg ran her fingertips over his cheek.

  ‘You’re stubbled as a wheat field. I’ll send someone in to give you a shave. We can’t have the Pope looking scrubby for all his important visitors.’

  ‘Please, before you go …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The day I came in a woman died here. The name escapes me, but her husband used to be a priest. I asked my secretary to make enquiries about him and his family. So far he hasn’t given me any information. Can you help me?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ The tiny hesitation seemed to escape him. ‘There are certain rules about confidentiality; but I’ll see what I can do. Until tomorrow then.’

  ‘Until tomorrow. And thank you, signora.’

  ‘Please, would Your Holiness do me a favour?’

  ‘Anything in my power.’

  ‘Then call me simply Tove. I am not married, though I do have a child. So I am hardly a signorina either.’

  ‘Why,’ he asked her gently, ‘why have you found it necessary to tell me this?’

  ‘Because if I do not, others will. If I am to help you, you must be able to trust me and not be scandalised by what I am or do.’

  ‘I am grateful to you. And I already know who and what you are from Cardinal Drexel.’

  ‘Of course! I should have remembered. Britte calls him Nonno Anton even now. He is very important in both our lives.’

  ‘As you are in mine at this moment.’ He took her hands in his own and held them for a long moment, then he reached up and signed a cross on her forehead with his thumb.

  ‘Peter’s blessing for Tove Lundberg. It is not any different from your father’s.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She hesitated a moment and then posed the diffident question. ‘Some day you must explain to me why the Roman Church will not permit its priests to marry. My father was a good man and a good pastor. My mother was his helpmeet in the Church and with the people … Why should a priest be forbidden te marry, to love like other men … ?’

  ‘That’s a big question,’ said Leo the Pontiff. ‘Bigger than I could possibly answer now. But certainly we can talk about it another time … For the present, just let me tell you I am glad and grateful for what you are doing for me. I need this help in a way you may never understand. I shall pray for your well-being and that of your daughter … Now, please send me the barber and have nurse bring me fresh pyjamas. A scrubby Pope indeed! Intolerable!’

  The small tenderness she had shown him, and the rush of emotion it had produced in him, lent all the more emphasis to her question about celibate clergy and his own unanswered enquiry about Lorenzo de Rosa. This cluster of small incidents was simply a micro-image of problems which had bedevilled him for a long time and had plagued the Church for more than fifteen hundred years.

  The discipline of enforced clerical celibacy in the Roman communion had proved at best questionable, at worst a creeping disaster for the community of the faithful. The attempt to equate celibacy, the unmarried state, with chastity, the avoidance of unlawful sexual intercourse, was doomed to failure and productive of a whole crop of ills, not least an official hypocrisy and a harvest of tragedies among the clergy themselves. Forbidden to marry, some found relief in secret liaisons, others in homosexual practice or, more commonly, in alcohol. Not infrequently, a promising career ended in mental breakdown.

  In the mid-sixties, after the Second Vatican Council, discipline had been relaxed to permit those in distress to quit the priesthood and marry validly. There had been a sudden rush for dispensations. Tens of thousands left the ministry. New vocations slowed to a trickle. The sad truth had been revealed, that this was no happy band of brothers, joyful in the service of the Lord, but a lonely ministry of lonely men facing an old age lonelier yet.

  Thenceforward every attempt to drown the problem in a flood of pious rhetoric had failed miserably. His own rigorist policy – ‘few but good, and for none an easy exit’ – had seemed at first to succeed, with a small crop of Spartan zealots coming up each year for ordination. But even he, Leo XIV, Hammer of God, had to admit in his secret heart that the remedy was a placebo. It looked good, tasted good, but did nothing for the health of the Mystical Body. There were too few shepherds for the vast flock. The zealots – in whom he recognised his younger self – were out of touch with reality. The threadbare theology that backed a face-saving legislation was no excuse for depriving the people of the saving word.

  What he could or should do about it was another matter entirely. He had – at least to this moment – no intention of going down in history as the first Pope in a thousand years to legalise a married clergy. Whatever the morals of such a move, the economics of it opened a new chapter of horrors. Meantime, the personal tragedies proliferated; the faithful gave tolerance and affection to their pastors, young and old, and made their own provisions to keep the sacred fire of the Word alive. There was nothing he could do but wait and pray for light in his own puzzled mind, and strength for his still shaky limbs.

  The barber came, a new one this time, sallow and saturnine, wielding an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, who shaved him clean as a billiard ball and uttered no more than a dozen words in the process. A nurse brought him fresh pyjamas and then walked him to the shower and helped him scrub himself, because his chest and back still hurt. He was no longer humiliated or even displeased by his dependence; but he was beginning at least to make a comparison between his own circumstance and that of any ageing cleric, forced to depend upon the ministrations of women, from whom he had been exiled by decree all his life. Finally, shaved, dressed and lighter in spirit, he walked back to his room, seated himself in his chair and waited for visitors to arrive.

  The first, as usual, was Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly, who brought with him a roster of those who had applied to call on His Holiness to pay respect and to keep themselves and their business under Pontifical notice. They had always recognised in him an old-fashioned Italian traditionalist and this was the old-fashioned way of papal business: protocol, propriety, compliment and courtesy.

  With his master restored to him, Malachy O’Rahilly was himself renewed, bubbling with busy good humour.

  ‘And are they treating you well, Holiness? Is there anything you need? Any delicacy to tempt your fancy? I’ll have it here for you in an hour. You know that.’

  ‘I know it, Malachy. Thank you. But there’s nothing I need. Who’s on your list for today?’

  ‘Four people only. I�
��m holding the numbers down because once they see that bright look in your eye they’ll all be wanting to talk business – and that’s verboten! First on the list is the Secretary of State. He has to see you. Then there’s Cardinal Clemens from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He’s still jumping up and down about the Tübingen Petition. There’s more and more discussion in the Press and on television. His Eminence wants your consent to take immediate disciplinary action against the theologians who signed the document … You know his arguments, it’s a direct challenge to Papal authority, it calls in question your own right to appoint bishops to local churches …’

  ‘I know the arguments.’ The familiar predator look transformed him instantly into an adversary. ‘I told Clemens very plainly that we should take time to reflect before we answer. We need light, not heat, in this matter. Very well. I’ll see him at four-thirty. Fifteen minutes. No longer. If he runs on, you come in and get rid of him. Who’s next?’

  ‘Cardinal Frantisek, Congregation for the Bishops. That’s a courtesy call on behalf of the hierarchy. It will be brief. His Eminence is a model of tact.’

  ‘Would we had more like him, Malachy! Five-fifteen?’

  ‘Finally, Cardinal Drexel. He’s spending the day in Rome; he asks if he may call on you between seven and eight, on his way home. I’m to telephone his office if you agree.’