Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 38

He was perhaps fifty and his hair was neatly combed silver-gray. His eyes were blue, but his thin face was deeply tanned-he was handsome, in an aging-patrician way. He wore a black suit with the regulation priest's white collar, but the suit was suspiciously well cut, and I wondered if it came from a design house. He seemed poised, confident, intelligent.

"Well now-" He stretched his long arms. "-welcome to Rome. It's good to meet you, and I hope I can help you with your difficulty."

I thanked him. "Your English is good." It was, with the kind of upper-crust accent so familiar from Noel Coward films that n.o.body in England dares use in public nowadays.

He smiled. "I spent some years studying in a seminary near Oxford. Look, are you in a rush? Would you like to see the church? . . ."

I followed him into the gloom of the Gesu.

A handful of worshipers, old folk, sat patiently in the pews. The church was sumptuously decorated, as many Roman churches are, with a lush Baroque painting on one wall.

But on one high side altar, a human arm was on display.

At first I couldn't quite believe my eyes. I stepped closer. On top of that altar was a reliquary, an elaborate oval casket in gold and crystal, with an angel floating beside it. And inside the casket there was indeed a human arm, intact from the elbow socket down. There were even bits of flesh, black and withered, clinging to the bones.

Claudio was murmuring softly, "Many visitors are struck by the wealth of Roman churches. One looks at every surface, and the eye is greeted by treasure, and dazzled. But they are after all the result of two millennia of dedicated wealth accretion-one can't put it any other way-although today the Vatican is not stupendously rich; it is less wealthy than many of the larger American dioceses, for instance . . . Oh.

I see you have met our hero."

The arm turned out to be a relic of Saint Francis Xavier, who in the sixteenth century had been a Jesuit missionary to India and j.a.pan. He had died of a fever on an island off the coast of China, and had been buried there. The Jesuit general in Rome had ordered the body exhumed and reburied on Goa-and that the right arm be cut off at the elbow, to be enshrined back in Rome.

I shuddered. "The Catholic Church always did major on relics."

"It's all rather primitive, of course. But such things do actualize religion in the popular mind. And besides-" He waved at the gruesome body part. "-aren't we all fascinated by relics, of one kind or another, by physical traces of what went before-even in our own lives? What is your quest now, if not driven by relics of your own past?"

I said, a bit ruefully, "You know, I can tell you're a priest. When I was a kid, the parish priest spun every last sermon out of an a.n.a.logy like that."

He smiled. "Then on his and my behalf, I apologize."

"And besides, I'm just looking for my sister. I never thought of it as a quest."

"What else could it be?"

I glanced around the church. I felt self-conscious with the worshipers present. "You have, um, an office here?"

"No. I'm conducting a project for the Pontifical Inst.i.tute for Christian Archaeology. The Vatican, you know. I work out of an office there. Perhaps you'd be interested in seeing where I actually archaeologize. It's not far from here." He rubbed his hands together. "But first, lunch."

He wouldn't listen to my protests that I had eaten a sandwich in the hotel, and wasn't swayed by the fact that it was already past three. He took me to a small restaurant a few minutes' walk away from the main road, where, he said, we would find the bestcucina romanesca , what the Romans themselves ate.

The waiter was round and smiling, dressed in an implausibly white shirt and bow tie. Although the cooking smells made me salivate, I knew I really wasn't very hungry, so we both settled on soup. It wastagliolini alla baccorola , which is little tubes of pasta stuffed with bacon and cheese and drowned in a hot chicken broth. That and a few bread sticks and a gla.s.s of fruity white wine went down very well, but I knew it was going to make me sleepy later.

The real reason Claudio wanted to buy me lunch soon began to emerge: so he could mess with my head.

"So," Claudio said around his soup, "you seek your sister. But it isn't a quest."

"It's a loose end," I said.

"But if you pull on loose ends your sweater can unravel." He smirked at this sally. "I'm just interested in why you need to find her."

"My father's death. I feel as if the whole thing won't be over until I find Rosa."

"But what will you say to her?"

"h.e.l.l, I don't know-"

"Will you talk about your father?"

"Probably. What else?"

He put down his spoon. He said gently, "You see, I think you'recurious . Perhaps even envious. You want to understand whyshe was sent away, to this opportunity-or to this prison, depending on how it's turned out for her-and why notyou . Isn't that true? But it's really your father you should have spoken to."

"It's a little late for that," I snapped. I had spent too many years breathing Catholic air. I felt deep responses kick in to the gentle prying, the effortless a.s.sumption of moral superiority. "Look-Claudio- why are we having this conversation?"

He steepled his fingers over his soup bowl. "The encounter you are planning could be very painful. I've seen such meetings before-for instance, among long-separated refugees-and, believe me, I know.

And the information I am providing for you is setting up that encounter. I feel I would be avoiding my responsibilities as a human being if I didn't raise that."

"Are you saying you won't give me the contact for the Order?"

"Oh, I've said no such thing." But on the other hand, he wouldn't give me the details, not yet; it seemed I had more intangible barriers to hurdle yet. "What do you know about the Order?"

"Hardly anything. It runs schools, and sells information for family trees."

"What do youthink it is?"

I hesitated. "I think it's some kind of cult. That's why it's so secretive, why Rosa just-disappeared."

"A cult." He thought about the word. "You mean that pejoratively, don't you? What kind of cult, do you suppose?"

I shrugged. "A cult of Mary. That's what the name says."

"You are right, and you are wrong," he said. "The group does have the form of a religious order, but it is an unusual one. The Vatican has had contacts with the Order since its inception. At times of crisis in Rome's long history the Order and the Vatican have even worked together . . .

"It's certainly not a convent: children are born within its confines. Its focus isn't on Mary, in a sense- not just on the mother, you see-but on thefamily . And in that sense it's very Italian, of course. Italians aren't like north Europeans, George. We're a very-umm,local people. In England, young people leave home as soon as they can, for college, or work. Here, people stay at home. The family remains intact.

It's common to have several generations of adults under one roof, or at least living close by. There is a word-campanilismo-the sense of one's loyalty to one's campanile, the bell tower."

"You can't generalize like that about a whole nation."

"Of course not," he said easily. "But I believe you will need to think this way if you wish to understand your sister's situation."

"This is what I'll find in the Order?"

"I'm telling you that the Order is like a family, but a family sixteen centuries deep. These are very close bonds, George. You will find your sister has exchanged one family for another-and she may not want to reverse that exchange."

"I'll take the risk."

He spread those long pianist's fingers on the table. "It's your choice. But first let me show you my archaeological project. No, I insist." He snapped his fingers; the waiter responded immediately.

It turned out his project concerned a small church called San Clemente, some minutes' walk away, on the other side of the Colosseum. As a guest of Claudio's I didn't have to pay any entrance fee. Inside and out the church looked unprepossessing.

"But," said Claudio enthusiastically, "it is one of Rome's best examples of a 'layered' church." By which he meant one building laid down on top of another. He took me down through the layers. It was a fascinating, eerie experience.

"You have an eighteenth-century facade, behind which is this twelfth-century basilica. Here is a rather remarkable mosaic of that period, showing the triumph of the Cross . . . But below all that we have a still earlier church, from the fourth century. I am working with some Dominican monks on the excavation of this layer." Not that anybody was working here today. "And belowthat is a mithraeum." This had probably originally been a town house of the imperial days, dedicated in the first century for use as a temple to the G.o.d Mithras, a secretive cult for men only. There was a faded fresco on one wall. It had been of the wife of an emperor, said Claudio, but retouched later to make it a portrait of the Madonna and Child. "And we believe there are layers yet to be unturned under that as well . . ."

He smiled in the gloom. "Look around you, George. Consider the deep layers of history, the extended and changing usage, of this one small church alone; and consider how little we understand even of this patch of ground. Then remember you are in Rome, where everything is drenched in history, in continuity through change. And then think of the Order. Rather like the Vatican, the Order is woven into this fabric of history and humanity . . ."

I was beginning to form an impression that this smooth clergyman was a lot less forthcoming than his appearance suggested. He was good at eating up time, at deflecting my questions, at probing into my personality, uttering vague forebodings and generating doubt: better at all that bulls.h.i.t than putting himself on the line and taking responsibility todo anything.Maybe that's a quality you need to get along in the Vatican, I thought;the Church hasn't survived two thousand years by being proactive. But it wasn't helping me.

And it was more than that. It was a feeling I'd had when meeting the headmistress, even Gina, even Lou.

Every time I tried to take a step closer to Rosa I felt as if I were pressing against an invisible, intangible barrier, a force field of words and looks and subtle body language. It was as if all these people had been trying to put me off the search-perhaps without even realizing they were doing it.

But I'm a stubborn b.u.g.g.e.r if nothing else, and having come so far I wasn't about to give up. And maybe the wine was making me snappy. I decided to challenge him. "You work for the Order, don't you?"

"I've had some dealings with it."

"You find it recruits," I said rudely. I was guessing, but I hit a mark.

He lost his smile. "If I perceive a person in need, and if through the Order I can meet that need-"

"Will you get me that contact or not?"

He nodded curtly. "Tomorrow," he said. "I'll send it to your hotel."

When I got back to my room I booted up the Internet connection again. I found two more emails from Peter. In the first mail, to my surprise, he said he had booked a flight to Rome. He said he thought I needed help.

"I think we're up against a cult here, George. Some kind of weirdo mother-fixated Marian cult. And it's nearly as old as the church itself. If the Vatican is siphoning funds they're going to stonewall . . . Go back to your tame Jesuit," he wrote. "Maybe he can get me into the Vatican Secret Archives. All Slan(t) ers know that the answers to most of the universe's mysteries are to be found in there . . ." Well, maybe.

I knew that Peter was of course following his own agenda-mine was just incidental to him-and I wondered if there was more to this sudden change of plan.

The second of his emails was more thoughtful.

"We're so short-lived, George. The Empire is buried a long way down, so far down it defeats the capacity of life to measure it. The oldest recorded human lived about one hundred twenty years. So if you go just a little more than a century deep you would find no human who's alive today-and yet you're still just a twentieth of the way back to the emperors.

"No mammal lives longer than humans, no elephant, no dog or horse. Your grandmother's parrot might beat a century. The oldest insects are jewel beetles that die at thirty; the crocodiles might last to sixty.

The oldest land animals of any kind are tortoises-Captain Cook gave one to the king of Tonga that supposedly lived one hundred eighty-eight years-and some mollusks, like the ocean quahog, a thick- sh.e.l.led clam, can last a couple of hundred years. But that's all. So if you go justtwo centuries deep into the abyss you leave behindall the living animals.

"Deeper than that and there are only the plants. In the gardens of the villa of the Emperor Hadrian there is said to be a cypress tree that has lived a thousand years, but even that is only halfway back to Hadrian himself. Oh, there is a great redwood that is said to be seven thousand years old, and living bacteria found in the gut of a frozen mastodon were more than eleven thousand years old-but such wrinklies are rare. Everything else has since died as we do, George, the gra.s.s, the fungi, the bugs; we may as well all be mayflies . . .

"Nothing living survives from the time of the emperors-not even vegetable memories. You are delving in deep time indeed, George. But you mustn't let it frighten you."

A new message came in. From Claudio, it was a telephone number for the Order. In fact, said Claudio's note, it was a direct line for my sister, for Rosa. My heart beat faster.

Chapter 38.

It was in the year 667 that Totila came to Rome. He wore an iron collar around his neck, for he was a criminal who undertook this pilgrimage as expiation.

Totila was a simple man, a farmer from southern Gaul. He had not denied the charge against him, of stealing a little bread to feed his daughters' swollen bellies. His crops had been ruined by floods and banditry, and he had had no choice. That didn't make it any less of a sin, of course. But the bishop had been lenient; his mouthfuls of bread had won him only a flogging, which would probably leave no scars, and the great ch.o.r.e of this journey to the capital of the world.

But in his whole life Totila had never walked more than half a day's journey from the place he had been born. Across Europe, the calm of empire had been replaced by turbulence, and this was not an age for traveling. The journey was itself overwhelming, a jaunt into endless strangeness.

And as he neared Rome itself, when he joined the flood of pilgrims who trampled along the weed- choked road that led to the city, and when he walked through the great arched gateway into the city itself, Totila felt as if his soul would spin out of his body in bewilderment.

Rome was a city of hills, on which great buildings sprawled-palaces and temples, arches and columns.

But even at the center, two centuries after the last of the western emperors, white marble was scorched by fire, many of the buildings lacked roofs, and he could see gra.s.s and weeds thrusting through the pavement, and ivy and vines clinging to crumbling stone. Away from the central area much of the city within the walls was demolished altogether, flattened and burned out, and given over to green. Cattle and goats wandered amid bits of masonry that poked through the gra.s.s.

The many new churches, though, were fine and bright.

He wandered to the Forum area. It was dense with stalls selling food and drink, and many, many Christian tokens and relics. And people were buying. Some must be pilgrims like himself-he saw iron rings around necks and arms, marking out fellow criminals-but others were well dressed and evidently wealthy.

There was a blare of trumpets.

Suddenly he found himself being shoved along by a great swarm of bodies. Confused, scared, he kept his hand over his chest where, inside his tunic, his leather purse dangled on its bit of rope, for he had heard of the criminality of the Romans. He strained to see over the heads of the crowd.

A procession pa.s.sed: a series of swarthy slaves, soldiers stripped to the waist with shield and trumpets, and a gilded sedan chair. In the dense Italian sunlight it was a dazzling, glittering vision, and Totila cast down his eyes.

"You're blessed," a voice whispered in his ear.

He turned, startled, to see a small dark man smiling at him. "Blessed?"

"It's not every pilgrim who gets to see the Emperor himself. After all," the man said dryly, "the great Constans does not grace us with his presence very often, preferring the comforts of Constantinople, where there are no goats nibbling your legs, so I'm told . . ."

These days Rome was once again under the sway of Constantinople, capital of the Empire in the east- much good it did anybody. Constans was staying in one of the old palace buildings on the Palatine, crumbled and roofless though he found it. But the Emperor had brought nothing to the city. On the contrary, he seemed intent on stripping it of such treasures as statues and marbles, and even the gilded bronze tiles on the roof of the Pantheon.

There was a scattering of boos as the Emperor pa.s.sed.

"My name is Felix," the strange man said to Totila. "And you look lost."

"Well . . ."

As the crowd broke up, Felix took Totila's arm. Totila let the man lead him away, lacking any better idea; he had to speak to somebody.

Felix was about forty, simply dressed, but he seemed well fed, calm, composed. He spoke a basic Latin, heavily accented but easy to understand. It was hard to resist his air of command. Totila let Felix buy him a cup of wine and some bread.

Felix eyed Totila's collar. "You are here for a holy purpose," he said solemnly.

"Yes. I-"

Felix held up his hand. "I'm no bishop to hear your sins. I'm your friend, Totila, a friend of all pilgrims.