Luis Rocha - Papal decree

‘There weren’t four. There were six,’ said a voice that had just entered the room.

‘Thompson. Welcome,’ Barry greeted him. ‘Have a seat.’

Thompson pulled out the chair across from Barry and sat down.

‘Six dead? What are you telling me?’ Barry asked.

Thompson threw a bunch of papers on the table. Transcripts, texts, and photos covered the surface.

‘Ernesto Aragones, Spanish priest, assassinated with a shot to the back of the head on Sunday in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.’

The others began to look at the papers.

‘This morning they killed a priest inside the Vatican.’

‘A what?’ Barry was scandalized. ‘What the hell is going on? Who was he?’

‘The curator of the Relics Room. Don’t ask me what it means.’

‘What’s the connection between all these people?’ Aris asked again.

‘Yaman Zafer, Sigfried Hammal, Aragones, and the priest today, Ursino, were part of what was called the Five Gentlemen,’ Thompson replied.

‘And the others?’

‘The others were Jesuits. According to what I was able to squeeze out of the Italian. The acolyte killed the priest to silence him, then committed suicide.’

Barry shook his head. ‘Who are we fighting with, folks?’

‘They don’t know themselves, from what I could find out,’ Thompson suggested.

‘Okay,’ Barry said thoughtfully. ‘Now we have something to work with. This Ben Isaac. Could he be Rafael’s target?’

‘He could be,’ Aris commented.

‘We need to find out what that agreement covers, and what Jesus has to do with all this.’ Barry thought rapidly, trying to sketch out a preliminary strategy.

‘I can try to pry out a little more, but I don’t think the Italian knew much to begin with,’ Thompson suggested, always practical.

‘Sam, did you book a flight to Rome?’

‘Of course. It leaves at five in the afternoon from Gatwick and arrives in time for supper.’

Barry was pleased. As director of the Agency for the European theater, he had a fleet of vehicles at his disposal. A Learjet 85, two Bell helicopters, several cars. He usually chose to fly commercial when his schedule permitted. His rule was not to waste taxpayer dollars, long before any president recommended the cost cutting.

‘Something is bothering me,’ Barry added.

Everyone looked at him, waiting for him to finish.

‘You mentioned Five Gentlemen, right?’ he asked Sam.

‘Yes.’

‘Four have died. There’s a pattern. Someone is out to kill these Gentlemen.’

He let the implication sink in.

‘There’s one left,’ Aris said. ‘Could it be Ben Isaac?’

‘We’ll have to set up a security perimeter in that case,’ Barry ordered.

‘No, Ben Isaac is very well protected. He doesn’t need our protection. They have a good security system, some former and current Mossad agents,’ Sam explained. ‘He’s not the fifth Gentleman.’

‘Who is, then? And why do they call them “Gentlemen”?’ Barry asked.

‘Because they had a gentlemen’s agreement of silence among them,’ Thompson explained.

‘The question is this,’ Barry advised, getting up. ‘They’ve assassinated four of the five, so someone is in danger. Find out who the fifth Gentleman is.’

‘Uh… we know,’ Sam said timidly.

‘Then spit it out, Sam. That person’s life is in danger.’

‘The fifth Gentleman is Joseph Ratzinger… the pope himself.’

Ben Isaac had a maxim he’d used for a long time in life, especially in business: everything has a price. An object, a jewel, a house, a business, a man, everything could be bought and sold. All you needed was capital, and Ben Isaac had more than enough money. But tonight the Israeli banker would learn a lesson that would strike down that maxim. There are people no amount of money can buy, even if all the coffers in the world are emptied. Ben Isaac had dealt with such a person only once before in his life, and it had not gone well. He felt lost, disoriented, and could think of nothing but his son, tied to a chair, mistreated, bloody, and beaten. Just the idea made him shiver, heartsick, and panic flooded his veins. He remembered Magda, his daughter, dead in the womb, and how he had not been there when she died. Some deal or some excavation, something more important, had required his attention at the time.

Myriam, alone in London so often, watching the rain fall or freeze, or the weak sun rising, without her husband. A day or two, a week. A phone call from Tel Aviv, another from Amman, an unexpected negotiation in Turin, a meeting in Bern, a meeting with the excavation team, who knows when and where, another with the team in a university in the States, to deepen his knowledge of something excavated, no big deal, he’d be back as soon as possible, a kiss.

Myriam never lacked money, not a penny to buy anything she wanted. Ben made sure of that. Myriam sometimes thought that for him money was a more sacred bond than the one by which God united them. On bad days she wished Ben weren’t so successful, that he’d fail, and on the worst days, that he’d go bankrupt.

Their daughter, Magda, died on November 8, 1960. His hands were trembling when he called the house from hundreds of miles away to say he’d be home that night. He finally had an agreement in his pocket that Myriam never suspected or would suspect.

Myriam didn’t answer that phone call or the others that followed insistently. Ben would find her in a hospital bed at St. Bart’s, sound asleep from the strong sedatives prescribed by the staff doctors. She remained that way for several days and nights, without regaining consciousness, breathing quietly, her face as white as a corpse. The doctor on call explained nothing to Ben Isaac, deferring to his superiors. It was not his place to say what was happening to the patient; her own doctor had left this instruction.

The young, prestigious banker, used to doing and undoing, ordering and contradicting both his subordinates and heads of state who clamored for the money he had and they didn’t, waited by the bed for her personal physician to deign to appear.

‘Myriam tried to commit suicide,’ was the doctor’s greeting. ‘I can’t stay. I’m getting married,’ he explained.

Ben Isaac was unable to say anything. He couldn’t even make a gesture. He stared silently at the doctor, subdued, disgusted, with a three days’ growth of beard.

‘She didn’t eat for days and filled her stomach with barbiturates. She repented and called an ambulance. While she was waiting for the paramedics, she was probably anxious and inattentive, and she tripped on the stairs and fell. When she arrived here, she was crying out… for Magda.’

Tears ran down the face of young Ben Isaac, the multimillionaire whose wife was so unhappy to want to kill herself and the daughter she carried in her womb.

‘I’m very sorry, but we weren’t able to save Magda.’

Ben Isaac covered his face in his hands and trembled with a smothered wail. Sorrow exploded in his chest and punished him with blows of agony and disgust.

‘When are you going to stop sedating her?’ he managed to ask.

‘Myriam isn’t under sedation now,’ the doctor informed him.

‘But she’s still sleeping!’

The doctor sighed and leaned toward Ben Isaac. ‘Myriam will wake up when she understands… when she feels ready. Help her. She’s going to need it.’

The doctor murmured ‘Good luck’ before leaving the couple in the cold hospital room, on his way to church to a ceremony that would seal a sacred compact, not necessarily infallible, even if marriage were not a human invention.

It took seven days for Myriam to wake up, and when she did, it was as if he were not there at all. She didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to his encouragement or questions, excuses or promises, or love. Ben Isaac would not hear her voice for the next nine years. The absences that he’d curtailed resumed, but it didn’t bother Myriam, who was involved with her garden, her friends, her book club, exhibits, tea parties, the theater, the culture that London offered, faithfully, without fail. She didn’t share any of this with Ben. It was as if she were living two lives and were two women, Ben’s wife when he was home and Ben’s wife when he was absent.