Lazarus Read online

  The Pontiff’s reaction was strange. For an instant he seemed very close to tears, then his face hardened into that familiar, implacable predator’s mask. His tone was harsh, accusatory and pitilessly formal.

  ‘It seems to us, Eminence, that, however worthy this enterprise, you have paid us small compliment by concealing it for so long. We deprecate, as you know, any and all aspects of luxury in the lives of our brother bishops. But all this aside, it seems you have been guilty of certain presumptions touching our office as Vicar of Christ. We are not so ill informed or so deaf to palace gossip as people sometimes believe. We are aware, for instance, that Dr Salviati is Jewish by race and Zionist in sympathy; that his trusted counsellor, the Signora Lundberg, is an unwed mother, and that there is talk of a liaison between them. Since neither is of our Faith, their private morals are no concern of ours. But that you should have formed this … this quite fictional relationship with her child and, by inference, with her, that you should have concealed it for so long and then attempted to draw us into it, for however good a reason … This we find quite intolerable and highly dangerous to us and to our office.’

  Anton Drexel had heard, in his time, some classic tirades from Leo XIV, but this one topped them all. All the man’s fears, frustrations and angers had been poured into it, all the buried rages of the ploughboy who had climbed and clawed his way up to be a prince. Now, having vented it in such fury, he waited, tense and hostile, for the counter attack. Instead, Drexel replied with calm formality.

  ‘Your Holiness makes it clear that I have a case to answer. Now is not the time to do it. Let me say only that if I have offended Your Holiness I am deeply sorry. I was offering what I believed to be a kindness and a service. But we should not part like this, in anger. Can we not pray together, like brothers?’

  The Pontiff said nothing, but reached for his spectacles and his breviary. Drexel opened his book and recited the opening versicle: ‘Munda cor meum … Cleanse my heart, O Lord, that my lips may announce your praises …’ Soon the rhythm of the ancient psalms took hold of them, soothing them like waves on a friendly sea. After a while the Pontiff’s taut face began to relax, and the hostility died out of his dark eyes. When he read the words ‘Yea, though I walk in the valley of death, His rod and His staff shall comfort me …’his voice faltered and he began to weep quietly. It was Drexel now who carried the burden of the recitation, while his hand closed over that of his master and held it in a firm and comforting grip.

  When the last Amen had been spoken, Drexel put a stole around his neck and gave the Pontiff communion, then sat silently while he made his thanksgiving. No words but prayers had been spoken between them for nearly forty minutes. Drexel began repacking his briefcase. Then, as protocol prescribed, he begged leave to go.

  ‘Please!’ It was a poignant appeal from a high, proud man. ‘Please stay awhile! I’m sorry for what I said. You understand me better than anyone else. You always have. That’s why I fight you. You will not leave me any illusions.’

  ‘Do you know why?’ Drexel was gentle with him, but he would not yield an inch.

  ‘I would like to hear it from you.’

  ‘Because we cannot afford illusions any more. The people of God cry out for the bread of life. We are feeding them stones.’

  ‘And you think I have been doing that?’

  ‘Ask yourself the question, Holiness.’

  ‘I have – every day, every night for months now. I am asking it tonight, before they wheel me out and freeze me and split me like a carcase of beef and put my life into syncope … I know things must change and I must be the catalyst of change. But how, Anton? I am only what I am. I cannot crawl back into my mother’s womb and be born again.’

  ‘I am told,’ said Drexel slowly, ‘by those who have undergone this operation, that it’s the nearest one can come to being reborn. Salviati and Tove Lundberg tell me the same thing. It’s a new lease on life – and, perforce, a new kind of life. So the question for me, the question for the Church, is what use you’re going to make of the new gift.’

  ‘And you have a prescription for me, Anton!’

  ‘No. You already know the prescription. It’s repeated over and over again in Scripture. “My little children, love one another … Above all, have a constant mutual charity among yourselves …” The question is how you will interpret the revelation, how you will respond to it in the future.’

  ‘How have I done so until now?’

  ‘The old Roman way! Legislation, admonition, fiat! We are the custodians of truth, the censors of morals, the only authentic interpreters of revelation. We are the binders and the loosers, the heralds of good tidings. Make straight the way of the Lord! Prepare the paths before Him!’

  ‘And you don’t agree with that?’

  ‘No. I don’t. I have been fifty-five years a priest in the Roman rite. I was trained in the system and to the system. I kept my priestly vows and I lived according to the canons. I have served four pontiffs – two as a member of the Sacred College. Your Holiness will bear witness that though I disagreed often and openly, I bowed always in obedience to the magisterium!’

  ‘You did, Anton, and I respected you for it. But now you say we have failed, that I have failed.’

  ‘All the evidence says we have.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because you and I, all of us, Curia and hierarchy alike, are the nearly perfect products of our Roman system. We never fought it. We marched with it every step of the way. We cauterised our emotions, hardened our hearts, made ourselves eunuchs for the love of God! – how I’ve come to hate that phrase! – and somewhere along the way, very early I think, we lost the simple art of loving. If you come to think about it, we’re very selfish people, we bachelor priests. We’re the true biblical Pharisees. We bind heavy and insupportable burdens on men’s backs and we ourselves lift no finger to ease them! So, the people turn away; not to strange gods, as we like to think; not to orgies and self-indulgence that they can’t afford; but in search of simplicities which we, the custodians, censors and governors, have obscured from them. They want care and compassion and love and a hand to lead them out of the maze. Does yours? Does mine? I think not. But if an honest, open, brave man sat in the chair of Peter and thought first, last and always of the people, there might be a chance. There just might be!’

  ‘But I am not that man?’

  ‘Today, you are not. But afterwards, given a new lease on life and the grace to use it aright, who knows but that one day Your Holiness may write the great message for which the people hunger and thirst: the message of love, compassion, forgiveness. It’s a call that needs to be sounded loud and clear as Roland’s horn at Roncesvalles …’ He broke off, suddenly aware of his own fervour. ‘In any case, that’s the reason for my invitation to spend part of your healing time with my family. You will see love in action every day. You will see people giving it, taking it, growing in the warmth of it. I can promise it will be spent on you, too, and one day you will be rich enough to return it … You need this time; you need this experience. I see what this office does to you – to any man! It dries the sap out of you, withers you up like a raisin in the sun. Now is your chance of renewal. Take it! Be, for once, generous with Ludovico Gadda who has been a long time away from his home-place!’

  ‘I ask myself,’ said the Pontiff wryly, ‘why I did not make you Preacher to the Pontifical Household.’ Drexel laughed.

  ‘Your Holiness knows very well why. You would have sent me to the stake within a week.’ The next moment he was back to formality. ‘It is long past my bedtime. If Your Holiness will give me leave to go?’

  ‘You have our leave.’

  ‘Once again, I beg forgiveness for my presumption. I hope there is peace between us at last.’

  ‘There is peace, Anton. God knows, there is no time left for quarrels and banalities. I am grateful for your counsel. Perhaps I will come to stay with you; but as you well know, there are other considerations: protocols, palace r
ivalries, old memories of bad times in our history. I cannot ignore these things or override them rashly. However, once I’m through the tunnel, I’ll think about it. Now go home, Anton! Go home to your family and give them my blessing!’

  In the last private time left to him before the arrival of the night nurse, Leo XIV wrote what he knew might be the final entry in his diary. Even if there were to be other entries, they would be written by another Leo, a reconstructed man who had been disconnected from his life source and then set working again like a mechanical toy. So there was a certain brutal urgency in the record.

  ‘I behaved like a country clod. I abused a man who wished me nothing but good. Why? In simple truth, I always have been jealous of Anton Drexel. At eighty, he is much healthier, happier and wiser than I have ever been. To become what I am, Supreme Pastor of the Universal Church, I have worked like a brute every day of my life. Drexel, on the other hand, is a self-indulgent man whose style and talent have brought him, almost without effort, to eminence in the Church.

  ‘In Renaissance times, they would certainly have made him Pope. Like my namesake, Leo X, he would have set out to enjoy the experience. Whatever his imperfections as a cleric, he is the most perfect diplomat. He will always tell the truth, because it is his master, not himself, who must bear the consequences. He will argue a position in the strongest terms; but in the end he will bow to the decision of authority. Rome is a very comfortable and rewarding place for such a man.

  ‘However, tonight it was clear that he was offering me a share in a loving experience which had transformed his life and turned even his self-indulgence to good account. I did not have the courage to tell him how much I envied the intimacy and immediacy of his love for his adopted children, while whatever love I have is diffused and diluted out of existence over a human multitude.

  ‘Nonetheless, I felt that he was still trying to manipulate me, to regulate, however indirectly, what might remain of my life and authority as Supreme Pontiff. Even that I could tolerate, because I need him. My problem is that he has the luxury of being mistaken without too grave a consequence. I am bound by every protocol, aware of every risk. I am power personified, but power inert and in stasis.

  ‘The cold facts are these. My policies have been proven wrong. Change, radical change, is necessary in the governance of the Church at every level. But even if I survive, how can I make the change? It was I who created the climate of rigorism and repression. It was I who recruited the zealots to impose my will. The moment I begin to hint a change, they will rally to circumvent me, by clogging my communications, confusing me with scenarios of scandal and schism, misrepresenting my views and directives.

  ‘I cannot fight that battle alone. Already I have been warned that I shall be vulnerable for some time, emotionally fragile, subject to sudden threatening depressions. If I am already a casualty, how can I mount a campaign which may well tum into a civil war?

  ‘It is an enormous risk; but if I am not fit to take it, then I am not fit to govern. I shall have to consider the question of abdication – and that, too, is fraught with other risks for the Church.

  ‘Even as I write these words, I am caught up in a memory of my schooldays. My history master was trying to explain to us the Pax Romana, the period of calm and prosperity throughout the Empire under Augustus. He explained it thus: “So long as the legions were on the march, so long as the roads they trod were maintained and extended, the peace would last, trade would flourish, the Empire would endure. But the day they pitched the last camp, threw up the last earthworks and palisades and retired behind them as garrison troops, the Pax Romana was finished, the Empire was finished, the barbarians were on the move towards the heart of Rome.”

  ‘As I sit here now, writing these lines to distract myself from tomorrow, I imagine that last commander of that last castra on the outer marches. I see him making his night rounds, checking the guard-posts, while beyond the ditch and the palisades and the cleared ground, men in animal masks made their war dance and invoked the old baleful gods of woodland, water and fire.

  ‘There was no retreat for him. There is no retreat for me. I hear the night nurse trundling her little trolley down the corridor. She will come to me last of all. She will check my vital signs, pulse, temperature, blood pressure. She will ask whether I have passed water and whether my bowels have moved. Then, please God, she will give me a pill that will send me to sleep until dawn. Strange, is it not, that I who have always been a restless man, should now court so sedulously that sleep which is the brother of death. Or perhaps not so strange, perhaps this is the last mysterious mercy, that God makes us ready for death before death is quite ready for us.

  ‘It is time to finish now, put down the pen and lock away the book. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. More than sufficient are the fears and angers and the shame I feel for Ludovico Gadda, the ugly man who lives inside my skin … Forgive him his trespasses, O Lord, as he forgives those who have trespassed against him. Lead him not into trial he cannot endure and deliver him from evil – Amen.’

  Five

  When he returned to his lodgings in Vatican City, Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly telephoned his colleague, Monsignor Matthew Neylan of the Secretariat of State. Matt Neylan was a tall, handsome fellow, dark as a gypsy, with a crooked, satiric grin and a loose athlete’s stride that made women look twice at him and then give him one more glance to fix him in their memories and wonder what he’d look like out of uniform. His title was Segretario di Nunziature di prima classe, which, however awkwardly it translated into English, put him about number twenty in the pecking order. It also gave him access to a great deal of information on a wide range of diplomatic matters. O’Rahilly saluted him with the full brogue and blarney.

  ‘Matt, me fine boyo! Malachy! I have a question for you.’

  ‘Then spit it out, Mal. Don’t let it fester in your mouth!’

  ‘If I were to ask you, very politely, whether you’d dine with me tonight, what would you say?’

  ‘Well now, that would depend.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On where we’d eat and who was paying – and what quid I’d be asked for O’Rahilly’s quo!’

  ‘A three-in-one answer, boyo. We eat at Romolo’s, I pick up the check, and you give me a piece of advice.’

  ‘Whose car do we take?’

  We walk! It’s ten minutes for a one-legged man!’ ‘I’m on my way already. Meet you at the Porta Angelica – oh, and bring cash; they don’t like credit cards.’

  ‘That’s my careful friend!’

  Da Romolo, near the Porta Settimiana, had once been the house of la Fornarina, mistress and model to the painter Raphael. However unreliable the legend, the food was good, the wine honest and the service – in age-old Roman style – agreeably impertinent and slapdash. In winter one ate inside, warmed by a fire of olive wood in the old baker’s oven. In spring and summer one dined outside under a canopy of vines. Sometimes a guitarist came, singing folk songs in Neapolitan and Romanaccio. Always there were lovers, old, young and in-between. The clergy came too, in or out of uniform, because they were as much a fixture in the Roman scene as the lovers and the wandering musicians and the jostling purse-snatchers in the alleys of Trastevere.

  In true Roman style, O’Rahilly kept his question until after the pasta and the first litre of wine.

  ‘Tell me now, Matt, do you remember a fellow called Lorenzo de Rosa at the Greg?’

  ‘I do. Handsome as Lucifer. Had a phenomenal memory. He could recite pages of Dante at a stretch! As I remember, he was laicised a few years ago.’

  ‘He wasn’t. He skipped the formalities and got himself married under the civil code.’

  ‘Well, at least he had sense enough to cut clean!’

  ‘He didn’t. That was his problem. He’s been trying to tidy the whole mess. Naturally enough, nobody’s been very co-operative.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So last night his wife died in the Salviati clinic, leaving
him with two young children.’ ‘That’s tough.’

  ‘Tougher than you know, Matt. I was at the clinic tonight to see our lord and master. De Rosa was just coming out. We spoke. The poor devil’s near crazed with grief. He said – and I quote: “I can’t wait to spit on your master’s grave!”’

  ‘Well. I’ve heard the same thought expressed by others – more civilly, of course.’

  ‘It’s not a laughing matter, Matt.’

  ‘And did I say it was? What’s bothering you, Mal?’

  ‘I can’t make up my mind whether he’s a threat to the Holy Father or not. If he is, then I’ve got to do something about it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Call our security people. Have them make contact with the Carabinieri and arrange some surveillance on de Rosa.’

  ‘They won’t only put him under surveillance, Mal. They’ll roast him on a spit, just to frighten him off. That’s pretty rough for a man with two kids and a wife hardly cold in the ground.’

  ‘That’s why I’m asking your opinion, Matt. What should I do?’

  ‘Let’s be legal first of all. He uttered a malediction, not a menace. It was a word spoken in private to a priest. So he didn’t commit a crime; but if it suited them, the security boys could make it look like one at the drop of a hat. More than that, your report and their embellishments would go on his dossier – and they’d be there till doomsday. All the other circumstances of his life would be read in the light of that single denunciation. That’s the way the system is designed. It’s a hell of a burden to lay on an innocent man!’

  ‘I know. I know. But take the worst scenario: the man is really a nut-case, bent on vengeance for an injustice done to him and to the woman he loved. One summer day he goes to a public audience in St Peter’s Square and shoots the Pope. How will I feel then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Matt Neylan innocently. ‘How has the Man been treating you lately?’