William Kienzle - Shadow of Death

“Look out!” Cox snapped.

Lennon was forced to literally jump to get out of the path of about fifteen nuns, swiftly advancing in close order drill, heads down and single-mindedly taking the shortest route between two points.

“Whatinhell was that?” asked Cox.

“I don’t know their religious order,” Irene smiled, “but those are Italian nuns.”

“How do you know?”

“Partly intuition. Plus there aren’t that many national groups that still have nuns dressed from head to toe in yards and yards of wool. And the Italian nuns have a habit of staying close to each other like that contingent.”

“Like an army of red ants,” Lennon commented. She was not all that happy at having been nearly run over.

The trio approached one of the officials who was scanning tickets, then sending people off in various directions. Irene flashed her gold ticket and was directed to the left. She was closely followed by Lennon and Cox, neither of whom so much as glanced at the official. No word was said, so they blithely continued on their way. Soon, following the crowd, they entered the right transept, off to one side from the main altar and to the right of the Chair of the Confession. Excellent. Pound for pound, the best seats in the house.

But the seats were going like hotcakes. With the exception of the first few rows, which were reserved for visiting dignitaries, it was first come first served. Fortunately, there were several chairs together in the third from the last row. Irene, Lennon, and Cox immediately staked their claim.

“I wonder where we’d be if we’d used our blue tickets,” mused Lennon.

“Somewhere out there.” Cox indicated the nave of the basilica where sawhorses had been placed to segregate and contain the crowd.

As Cox looked into the main section of the basilica, his attention was captured by something out of the ordinary in the second section from the front. Several officials were moving the crowd aside to allow a woman carrying a baby to stand at the very edge of the middle aisle. He pointed this maneuver out to Lennon. Neither could fathom what it signified.

Lennon looked at her watch. “It’s 9:30! This thing was supposed to start at nine! And there’s no sign it’s about to start anytime in the near future.”

Irene patted her hand. “Dear, tardiness is Continental. But in Italy, it’s an art form. Maybe you’ve read in the past that there has been a good deal of rancor, insults, and even bottle-throwing on Christmas day at the Cave of the Incarnation in Bethlehem. It’s because each of the Christian sects has its appointed hour to celebrate its Christmas liturgy there. The Italians are always late starting and late finishing. Sometimes that becomes the final straw for the Armenian Christians. And then the bottles fly.”

“Sure,” Cox affirmed, “you remember, honey, the other day when we were lunching with those Italian journalists at the cafe on the Via Veneto. We had to file our regular stories. That guy, what was his name, Valentine, kept saying, ‘One more glass of wine.’ We tried to tell him we had deadlines. As a journalist he certainly should have been able to understand that. Remember what he told us? ‘If there’s any story out there that’s really big, it will find you!’”

Perhaps it was a combination of the long delay in starting this ceremony, combined with a periodic fluttering of the curtain covering the entrance through which the procession would come. But every so often, with greater frequency as time passed, the crowd would come alive. Someone would shout, “He’s coming!” and the cry would be picked up by others. Only to die away in disappointment.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lennon noticed unusual movement. Two of those small Italian nuns were inching their way down the steps toward the front row. For some reason, she could not take her eyes off them.

All these false starts were beginning to get on Cox’s nerves. He had been jumpy anyway since yesterday’s turmoil. It happened every time and any time he worked on a hot story as he was with this Gattari killing. He just couldn’t come down quickly from his high. The adrenalin just continued to pump. This—working on a breaking story or uncovering an investigative story—was mother’s milk to him. He could not believe that the death of Gattari was the end of it. There had to be more. And the sequel could come from anywhere. He had to be ready for it. And he was. His restless eyes roamed the basilica. With each false start, with each mistaken cry of anticipation, Cox’s heartbeat accelerated. If only something—anything—would happen.

“Look! Down there!”

Cox’s concentration was so intense that Lennon’s screech almost catapulted him out of his chair. Neither Cox nor Irene immediately identified what Lennon wanted them to see even though she was pointing.

“Down there! The front row!”

Cox sighted down to the front row directly before them. He saw figure after figure of uniformed or grandly attired people. Heads of state, ambassadors, royalty, and other Very Important Persons. Then, in the midst of the august assemblage, he saw it: the sore thumb. Two, actually.

“How’d they get in there?” Cox exclaimed.

“Oh, my dear!” Irene spotted the two little Italian nuns sitting composedly among the VIPs.

“I’ve been watching them inch down to the first row,” Lennon explained. “They moved in just behind the first row. Behind the very seats they’re in now. When that last false alarm was sounded, the two men sitting there stood and stepped to the railing to see if the Pope was really coming. Now, I’m not kidding, those two crazy nuns vaulted over the backs of the chairs and sat in them! When the two men turned back to their seats, they found them taken. You could see it written all over their faces: What could they do—throw two sweet little old nuns out?”

By now, Cox and Irene focused on the two very dignified, lavishly bemedaled gentlemen shrugging and making their way out of the front row and moving up the aisle toward the rear of the section.

The three onlookers had a good laugh.

Suddenly, “This is it!” Cox heard himself exclaim, though he didn’t quite know why.

In any case, there was no doubt the procession had indeed commenced. The noise began as with the previous false alarms. But instead of slowly dying out as had the earlier cheers, this one surged and swelled to a mighty roar.

Cries of “Viva il Papa!” rose from the throats of everyone, including those who did not understand Italian, as well as those who did not even know what they were yelling. As the Pope passed, borne aloft in his sedia gestatoria, flashbulbs and strobe lights exploded throughout the scene, creating the appearance of bolt after bolt of lightning crackling within the basilica.

Pope Leo XIV all the while beamed an ear-to-ear grin as his chair gracefully swayed from right to left, left to right, right hand tracing benedictions over the crowd, then alternating that gesture with a scooping motion of both hands. They were playing his song. And it went, “Viva il Papa!”

It was virtually impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. Even Joe Cox, nonpracticing unbeliever that he was, found himself on his feet applauding and popping in an occasional “Viva!”

Then without warning, the Pope’s chair stopped while the procession of functionaries and prelates moved on toward the altar without him.

“Look!” cried Cox, with a note of triumph, “the woman with the baby! The woman with the baby! The Pope is kissing the baby! It’s the Designated Baby!”

That was it. The woman whom Cox had earlier spied being moved to the edge of the middle aisle had lifted her child toward the pontiff. As if by prearrangement, the chair porters had halted before the exact spot where the woman stood. The Pope reached down and took her baby. He kissed the child and returned it to the mother.