The Lost Catacomb (38 page)
Just thinking of him was comforting.
She realized how much she'd started to
depend on him emotionally.
He would
help her.
She could count on
it.
She knew he would care.
Nicola had finally relaxed somewhat now that she was en route
to Italy again.
Only one more
hour, and she would be landing at Fiumicino Airport.
Bruno would be waiting for her, and she
would tell him everything.
She had been remarkably restrained in their phone
conversation earlier that day, mentioning only that her grandmother was much
better and would probably recover fully, that a private nurse had been engaged,
and that Elena had insisted that she return to Rome.
Nicola had then added, in as calm a
voice as she could manage, that she had something very important to tell him,
something that she would prefer not to discuss over the phone, that would
require research of a different sort than their current work entailed.
Bruno had tried to convince her to explain, but she'd been
adamant.
Keeping her tone light,
but insistent, she told him that it would be better if she explained in person
and that his curiosity would be satisfied shortly, certainly within the next
ten hours.
Her head was still spinning from the knowledge that her great
grandparents had been direct victims of Fascist oppression and that because her
biological grandfather had been Jewish, he'd been murdered through the
machinations of a jealous rival, a rival whose religious vows, not to mention
his cold personality
—
assuming
he was the same Mauro Rostoni
—
would
have precluded all hope of a favorable response from Elena.
Or from any other young woman for that
matter.
And as for Grandpa Tom
—
how was she going to deal with the fact that
Grandpa Tom wasn
’
t
even her real grandfather?
She had
loved him so much and now it was as if she had to divide this love, or should
divide this love, with her other grandfather
—
a grandfather whose face she had never seen,
whose photograph didn
’
t
exist, who had died when he was so much younger than she was now.
She found it difficult, in fact, to think of Niccol
ò
as her actual
grandfather.
He had been too young,
barely on the threshold of adulthood.
He was more like a younger brother, perhaps, someone with whom she
shared a close bond of blood and that she wished she could have protected from
pain.
Poor, poor Niccol
ò—
to die so
brutally, so gratuitously, just to satisfy the unrequited lust and anger of a
vindictive neighbor whom Elena had spurned.
Nicola felt almost physically ill just
thinking about it.
And as ill as she felt thinking about Niccol
ò
, she also felt badly
for Grandpa Tom.
Nicola had known
that her mother, Julia, was an only child, and not because Tom and Elena had
wanted it that way.
Two years
after Julia had been born, Elena had lost a set of twins in her sixth month of
pregnancy, and a year and a half after that she'd had a stillbirth in her third
trimester.
She had been so
devastated by these losses, one after the other, that she was afraid to
conceive ever again.
Nowadays, of course, there were obstetricians who specialized
in dealing with high-risk pregnancies.
There were diagnostic tests that could detect almost any kind of anomaly
imaginable, whether it was placental insufficiency, gestational diabetes,
antibody incompatibility, or some sort of genetic pathology.
Premature babies could be
sustained outside the womb until they could breathe and eat on their own.
Part of the tragedy in all of this, Nicola realized, was that
Tom had never had a biological child of his own, though he had loved Julia as
if she were truly his.
He had
been as crushed as Elena had been when Nicola
’
s parents had been killed in the car accident.
What great strength her grandmother had had
—
still had, in
fact
—
to have
lost her lover, her parents, her brother, three babies, and then her only
surviving child.
And yet she'd gone
on with her life, pushing the pain aside, and devoting herself to Tom and her
only granddaughter.
Now Nicola was
all that Elena had left, and yet here she was, cheerfully sending her back to
Italy despite her own serious illness.
In fact, Elena had insisted that Nicola return to Rome to
complete her analysis of the crypt since she would be hospitalized anyway,
under observation, for at least another week.
Nicola had realized that perhaps
it was for the best.
Despite her
feelings of guilt about leaving her grandmother with a private nurse, she knew
that, under the best of circumstances, she was no good at hiding her emotions.
That even if she were to avoid
discussing Cardinal Rostoni with Elena, there were too many questions about her
grandmother
’
s life
in Italy that, were they in fact asked, would upset Elena at this critical
time, possibly undoing the delicate equilibrium of her recovery.
Moreover, Nicola understood that
perhaps Elena had finally disclosed the details of her past precisely because
she'd thought it was time to make the equivalent of a deathbed confession while
she still could, despite her disclaimers and protests to the contrary.
The surname
“
Rostoni
”
was not terribly
common in Italy, and in truth, Nicola had never even heard of it before she had
been contacted by the Pontifical Commission.
Certainly none of her Italian-American
acquaintances in Connecticut or New York had last names that even vaguely
resembled it.
And so Nicola
had to consider that it was entirely possible that a young priest, with that
surname, who had been affiliated with the Vatican in the 1940
’
s
—
especially
someone as vicious and manipulative as Niccol
ò’
s murderer must have been
—
could have risen, over the years, to a
position of tremendous power in the Curia.
Certainly
that
Rostoni had been an accomplice to murder, if not
an actual murderer in fact.
Nicola hoped desperately that Bruno would be able to help her
cut through all the notorious Italian red tape and bureaucracy so that she
could find out something definitive about her family.
There had to be records somewhere
—
deportation
lists, hospital archives, prison files, parish registers
—
something that could provide even a slender
thread of concrete information about the fate of her relatives.
In the remaining hours before her flight, Nicola had tried as
best she could to speak to her grandmother only about the arrangements that
would take effect after Elena
’
s
release from Mount Sinai.
Nicola
had interviewed a young Filipino nurse and arranged for her to stay with Elena
at the hospital and then move in with her for at least a month.
Elena had objected at first, both to the
unnecessary cost and the temporary loss of her privacy, but Nicola had
insisted.
“
Please,
Nonna
,
”
she'd
begged.
“
It
’
s
the only way I can even think of returning to Rome.
Please do this for me.
Otherwise I
’
ll have to stay in New York, despite your wishes.
”
“
Okay,
cara
,
”
Elena
relented.
“
But just for a month.
And I don
’
t want you to pay for it.
You know that Grandpa Tom left me very
well provided for, and I have no plans to take it with me when the time comes,
”
she added with a spark
of her usual wry sense of humor,
“
however
soon that might be.
”
Stretching her legs, Nicola yawned lazily and sat up, pulling
the sheet on Bruno
’
s
bed up to her neck.
The room was
air-conditioned, and she was feeling a bit chilly.
Her flight had arrived on time, and
Bruno had taken her straight back to his apartment, where she had finally told
him
—
in an
emotional blur of words and tears
—
what
Elena had revealed about her family
’
s
past and Nicola
’
s
own, newly discovered Jewish roots.
They had made love twice, with an uncharacteristic passion bordering on
desperation
—
at
least on Nicola
’
s
part
—
and
then promptly fallen asleep.
Now, as she nestled back into Bruno
’
s arms, the mellow afterglow of the past few hours
having soothed her raw nerves, she tried to think more clearly about the
implications of her grandmother
’
s
confession.
There was so much to
do, and yet she hardly knew where to begin.
First of all, she would wait a day or
two before returning to work on the frescoes.
And she would definitely not set foot
anywhere near the Vatican, or at least try not to, until she had more precise
information
—
if
in fact there was any way to obtain it
—
about
Cardinal Rostoni
’
s
personal history.
Unfortunately, her grandmother had provided few details that
could help Nicola locate Elena
’
s
old neighborhood, where perhaps parish or local municipal records might yield
some useful preliminary evidence.
She would also need to find some way to access archival material that
could tell her where Rostoni had been ordained and whether there was any other
Rostoni who had taken holy orders around that time.
But of course she would have to do it
far from the Vatican and its Secret Archives.
Her grandmother
’
s
maiden name was far more common than
“
Rostoni.
”
But even if she were to find that
a Conti family had resided in the same neighborhood as a Rostoni family had,
back in the 1940
’
s,
it didn
’
t
necessarily mean that these were the specific people in question.
It was possible, once again, that
she would have no recourse but to turn to Father Benedetto to see what he could
find out about the Cardinal
’
s
background.
This time, however, the secret she would be confiding was far
more dangerous than before.
This
was not merely a matter of a pilfered manuscript that could later be returned,
or the discovery of a murdered pope and his possible link to lost, legendary
treasures, the historical significance of which could set off shock waves,
temporary though they might be, within Catholic and Jewish circles.
This was something that had the
potential to link one of the most powerful men in the Curia to Fascist
activities during World War II and to the murder, or complicity in the murder,
of innocent people.
And this might only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg,
Nicola reflected.
Who knew what
else might be uncovered as the deepest layers of Vatican history during the war
were excavated down to their most secret foundations?
With the issue of Pius XII
’
s potential
canonization under scrutiny, in the shadow of a plethora of uncomfortable
details regarding his relationship with Germany during his tenure there as
papal nuncio and his later failure to rescue the Jews of Rome, a revelation of
this sort could be regarded in some quarters as a threat that would need to be
suppressed, forcefully and with utter finality.
The damage that could be sustained to
Pius
’
case, were
it to emerge that Cardinal Rostoni
—
his
one-time confidant and assistant
—
had
Fascist links, would be incalculable.
And if it transpired that Rostoni had actually been
responsible for the murder of her relatives, who knew what he was capable of doing
to protect himself from scandal, what lengths he would go to to silence those
who had exposed his carefully buried past?
She and Bruno would need to be very cautious indeed.
Another thought troubled her as well, though she had no
rational basis for it. Before she had been made privy to the terrible details
of her grandmother
’
s
past, the possibility of someone spying on her and Bruno would never have
occurred to Nicola, not even in her wildest, most far-fetched fantasies.
She would never even have entertained
the prospect a week earlier, before Elena had been hospitalized and Nicola
’
s entire world
—
her whole
identity
—
had
been turned upside down.
But now she remembered her strange sense of uneasiness in the
vine-covered caf
é
near
the Ardeatine Caves, when the German tourist seemed to be observing her and
Bruno with perhaps more than casual interest.
She remembered Bruno
’
s remark about the
break-in at his campus office.
And
she recalled the strange motorcyclist who
’
d parked his Vespa and watched her from the other
side of the Via Nomentana as she waited for Bruno to take her to services at
the Tempio.
She began to wonder if
she was becoming as paranoid as a beleaguered heroine in some international
thriller, or if, perhaps, her suspicions were actually justified.
Even if the Cardinal were the same Mauro Rostoni who had
engineered the murder of Niccol
ò
and destroyed Elena
’
s
family, he couldn
’
t
possibly know who she really was, Nicola kept reminding herself.
She herself had only just found
out who she really was and what had happened to her relatives during World War
II.
Surely Rostoni posed no
physical threat or danger to her.
And as for the discovery of the ancient manuscript and the
shocking implications of its contents, even if it proved necessary to share
this aspect of their findings with Rostoni, there could be nothing there to
taint him personally, Nicola was convinced
—
nothing that could possibly push him to
discredit her or Bruno.
If the Temple treasures were, by some twist of fate, still in
the hands of the Church, it had nothing to do with Rostoni.
The artifacts, if indeed they still
existed, would have been buried centuries ago in some hidden vault and been
long forgotten.
There could be no
possible connection between them and the Cardinal.
She was certain of it.
True, their rediscovery, should it come to that, would have
the potential to embarrass the Church, but surely no one could attach blame to
anyone currently in a position of power in the Curia.
Even Father Benedetto, who had immediately
understood the broader ramifications of the narrative in the scroll, had been
shocked by the mere possibility of the existence of the treasures.
Surely he was simply exercising due
caution when he had warned Bruno and Nicola to keep their theories and
conjectures to themselves for the time being.
“
Bruno,
”
Nicola whispered
gently, nudging him out of his sleep and dotting his face and neck with soft
kisses,
“
we need
to talk.
”
“
Again?
”
he asked, rubbing his
eyes and stifling a yawn.
“
I thought we
’
d talked enough
already.
”
“
No,
silly,
”
she
replied affectionately, as she laid her head on his chest and snuggled
closer.
“
I mean about something else.
About how we
’
re going to figure out everything we need to know
about the Cardinal.
I
’
ve been thinking about
nothing else since I woke up.
”
Bruno yawned again and stretched.
“
Okay,
but first I think we both need a healthy dose of caffeine to get those little
gray cells in good working order.
At least I do.
Why don
’
t you go into the
shower while I make coffee?
I
’
ll join you in a
minute.
“
And
dibs on the sheet,
”
he
added with a wink, yanking it off the bed.
He wrapped it around his waist and padded off into the kitchen.