VATICAN RAG by Doc Berry
Chapter 1 Gone
“Gone?” Fumigalli asked, his eyes
sweeping the room.
“Gone.” I said, shaking my head.
What the hell, the room was empty.
And nothing is hard to get a grip on.
Lorenzo Fumigalli wiped his glasses
on his sleeve and frowned at me. He was about 45, well set up, big shoulders, a slim
waist, lots of curly black hair, and a well trimmed moustache. his chin
anchoring a handsome Italian mug. “No
one saw them leave?” he said, half question, half assertion. After all, he
commanded the Vatican’s Swiss Guards and the pope’s security detail.
I shrugged, “You’re asking me? This
is where I left them.”
“But how? If no one saw them
leave.” He said it again, as if disbelief required repetition. “There’s no other way out of here, just one
door and the security guards just outside.”
Reality sometimes has a way of
arriving slowly, especially when something or someone is missing. I followed
Fumigalli to the window, and we both looked up and down the four story facade
of the Apostolic Palace. One of the cops from the Vatican’s Corpo della
Gendarmeria posted below looked up inquisitively as we leaned out, and
Fumigalli circled a finger, signaling him to turn back to guard duty. Fumigalli
had already questioned all the papal cops, but I guess nothing requires repeating.
We leaned on the railing and looked
up. Just above on the roof another cop shook his head. No pope up there either.
“When did you leave,” Fumigalli
asked, a hint of suspicion in his voice.
“About two hours ago, around
eleven.” I said, looking at my watch.
“We’ve already questioned all of
the security guards.” he said. “They saw no one except you leave, but we’ll
have to question them again. Rome’s carabinieri are sending a specialist to
examine the walls and floor for hidden panels and passages.”
That surprised me. The Vatican Swiss Guards had no secret panel
or passageway experts. Presumably the Vatican had mapped all of the passages and entryways long ago.
But if so, why would he call in an outside expert? Fresh eyes?
Back in the center of the room, I
stared up at the ceiling, then let my eyes wander around the walls, every
square inch of surface covered with religious art – angels with full
feathered wings, St. Stephen being stoned, John the Baptist waist deep in blue
waters as he baptized a robed figure, Mary hearing the words of a white bird representing
the Holy Ghost, thin lines of cracks running through the fictional figures. The presence of so much aging art made it blur toward a kind of visual equivalent of background noise,
something your eye and mind tuned out because it was everywhere. The only visual relief lay in the hardwood
flooring and the window.
We stood in front of Jimmy’s heavy oak
framed, seven foot tall, funhouse mirrors, four of them freestanding mid-room.
Pope James the First had gone to considerable lengths to keep these elongated
glasses a secret by limiting access to this room. News about a pope checking
himself out in funhouse mirrors would likely set journalists off into wild
speculation. Amid the lavish religious art, the grandeur of the architecture, and the long faces that clergy wore in the
Vatican, the mirrors turned this papal room into kind of a secular
mini-funhouse. Jimmy had told me he checked his papal self out in them several
times a week, a sure cure for narcissistic solemnity.
The mirrors dated back to his days
in Boston rescuing the diocese from bankruptcy caused by multiple pedophilia
scandals. He’d bought them from a carnival that went bankrupt. A long look at
yourself in one or more of these distorting glasses guaranteed genuine comic
relief. He said that beyond the reflection of the surrounding religious art all
distorted out of shape, it was hard not
to stare at your uniquely distorted image.
Moreover, it became impossible to imagine that the reflection of the guy
with the pointy head or the fat face suggested anything authoritative, much
less infallible. Because humility remained an elusive commodity for popes, or in the Vatican ranks generally, Jimmy
systematically made sure he laughed at himself.
Lorenzo Fumigalli, fully outfitted
as Commander of the Corpo della Gendarmeria and the Swiss Guard, now appeared
in one mirror grotesquely shortened, a
squat frog of a human. In the mirror next to him my torso and head
stretched ever thinner to a sharp point at the top. I couldn’t help but smile. Vanity has inevitable visual limits. Each of us at some point is a cartoon.
Two tall men, Pope James the First,
formerly Cardinal James Maloney, and a young Mexican street magician named
Jesus de Jesus, had just vanished, disappeared like two clouds evanescing from
the sky. But the pope’s elongated image lingered there in the funhouse mirror
because his identical twin brother, yours truly, Kevin Maloney, now stood in
front of that mirror. The pope may have
disappeared, but he’d left a doppelganger, me.
Despite feeling considerable pride
in my brother becoming pope, I had slowly begun to realize that my appearance
as his twin carried a number of hazards. Think about it. Aside from Elvis
impersonators, who wants to spend even part of a life being repeatedly mistaken
for an internationally famous figure, much less be taken for the pope, or accused
of being a papal pretender. Worse, I could not ignore the succession of papal
assassination attempts on previous popes. But here I was at Jimmy’s request, and here he
wasn’t.
I had to smile. In tiny blue felt pen letters on the bottom
of the mirror reflecting me as a human spear, I discovered that Jimmy had
written “Nothing matters.” I pointed out the lettering to Fumigalli, who raised
his eyebrows in surprise. We couldn’t tell when Pope James might have written
it, but I knew it was his printing. I had visited this room fairly often with
him, and I had never seen it before.
Despite threats on his life and the
criticism for his changes in Catholic practices, Jimmy had been in great
spirits this morning, and happy during what I saw of his meeting with Jesus de
Jesus, the street magician. They had been laughing and enjoying each other.
Jesus, a charismatic Mexican, had arrived in
response to Jimmy’s request after Jimy and I saw a video of his street magic,
especially his ability to disappear small objects. Jimmy said the Vatican, which claimed to have
a lock on miracles, could probably use a
legitimate magician.
Jimmy and I had had an ongoing back
and forth about the nature of nothing
dating back to when we were kids.
Nothing matters, Nothing’s funny.
Something for nothing. Nothing much. Nothing left. Nothing to do. The Buddha’s great line --
nothing is permanent. It sure was, as nothing kept coming up.
By themselves, Jimmy’s scribbled words
“Nothing matters” could suggest someone
depressed, maybe even thinking of
suicide. But knowing my brother, I told Fumigalli that “Nothing matters” offered us a clue that
Jimmy had left, recognition that his absence would obviously raise a clamor.
And certainly Jimmy would have registered the irony, in celebrating the
obvious. After all, when in recorded
history had a pope just disappeared?
Appearances did matter to Jimmy, as
his papal refusal to wear any church robes demonstrated. Early on in his
papacy, Jimmy asked What Would a Contemporary Jesus Wear? Then he answered his
own rhetorical question and said that Jesus was not a clothes horse, so Pope
James wouldn’t be wearing the rich robes and papal kingdom paraphernalia. We now had a pope saying mass in khaki pants
and blue shirt, sometimes even a blue sweatshirt, and as you’d expect, that set
off worldwide reactions. He repeated a
line from Doubting Tom, who had said, “A clothes horse is always more clothes
than horse.”
Mulling over his disappearance, I
felt a little miffed that he hadn’t let me in on the secret of his getaway. Maybe
he had discovered a threat that required him to duck out, but if he knew of a
threat, he most likely would have warned me about it as well. Maybe the cause
for departure had come up suddenly from Jesus de Jesus.
In the mirror, though, there stood his image, closely
impersonated by your truly. Jimmy would know I’d be conscious of seeing him in my
own image. More, he’d enjoy leaving me
that kind of cryptic, ambiguous two word note. Images aside, with no pope
there, and no Jesus de Jesus, the nothing
they left for us to deal with mattered a hell of a lot.
I repeated to Fumigalli, “Lorenzo,
I think it’s a signal to me that he’s okay. He’s having a laugh here. But
because he’s disappeared, we probably ought to keep this writing to
ourselves. The paparazzi might think it
sounds suicidal.”
“Some laugh!” Fumigalli frowned
deeply. Then a look of exasperation
swept his face as he stood up from his crouch by the mirror. “A pope I’m
supposed to protect goes missing, forcing us turn the entire Vatican inside
out, and he leaves a clue that says ‘Nothing matters. ’”
“He may have written it days ago.”
I announced, but Lorenzo was already walking toward the door, as if to say, “Nothing?
That’s pointless.” [A1]
He stopped by the closed door to
the hall. The room held just the weird mirrors and a single bed, plus an all
but empty closet and the one large window with a door out onto a tiny balcony
overlooking Piazza San Pietro. Fumigalli
turned to me and said, “While I dislike intruding into the pope’s quarters,
we’ll bring in the carabinieri detectives to go over it again. I’ll accompany
them.”
“You’d better remove the mirrors
first. The pope wants them to stay private.” I said.
Fumigalli added: ”Nessuno. Nobody. Popes don’t just
disappear.”
After a pause, I nodded. “One just did, and if you’ll recall
your church history, Jesus of Nazareth also disappeared, Lorenzo. The church
says he went into a tomb, then he escaped and
wandered around randomly, then went
airborne, ascended bodily into heaven, with lots of disciples watching.
This pope, “ I added, “didn’t have a pilot’s license, much less astronaut
ambitions. And only a young guy named Jesus witnessed what the two of them did.”
A sudden disappearance begs for an answer. Otherwise, here
in the place where the church certified and declared miracles, where church
investigators beatified and sainted the lives of ordinary people, the Vatican
chief of security didn’t want to consider what looked like a miracle – the pope
and Jesus vanishing. If the pope could simply vanish, Fumigalli might lose his
job. The church would not like dealing with the biggest missing persons case in
history.
Pope’s were like queen bees. Without a queen, a hive might
collapse. I had more to tell Fumigalli, but not just yet. Why
Jimmy had disappeared held more of my attention than how he had slipped out.
In the next few days, the select Corpo della
Gendarmeria and Rome’s Carabinieri searched every room and closet of every building and
grounds area in the Vatican, marking a map as they went. They made a systematic
sweep, then a comprehensive surprise inventory of who wasn’t there, catching
numerous bureaucrats taking an unofficial day off. They searched every car and again
went over the grounds of the Vatican Gardens. Nothing. They searched the nooks
of St. Peters, the Catacombs, and the Castel San Angelo nearby. More nothing.
But as it turned out later, they overlooked one place.
Next Fumigalli contacted the FBI, Interpol, and invited in
the head detective Iliani Portobello of Rome’s Carabinieri, together
issuing an all points missing persons
bulletin. Portobello, a tall, broad faced, dark haired man of fifty, personally questioned cardinals, bishops, the pope’s personal secretary and his two assistants, janitors,
bodyguards, anyone having contact with or within proximity of the pope. And he questioned me at length. When he
turned up nothing, his investigation shifted to Jesus de Jesus, the Mexican
purveyor of legerdemain now becoming the mystery man.
From a private meeting at the Vatican on a sunny Thursday
morning, October 22, after two hours or less alone together, James the First, a
six foot four, 47 year old man given to wearing khaki pants and a blue
shirt, and Jesus de Jesus, another 6 foot four gentleman in his early thirties wearing jeans and a dark green
shirt, both former outstanding athletes,
were suddenly no longer there. Just plain gone.
Two days later Fumigalli
scheduled a press conference in the big auditorium where the pope usually held
his audiences. Because my presence there as the pope’s twin would raise all
sorts of questions, he asked me to stay home and keep a low profile that day.
Disappearance has a power all its own. When something or somebody goes missing, you
can’t help but question your memory and the evidence of your senses.
Vanished? Dead? Kidnapped? Hiding out? Off on a sudden
secret quest? Presence required elsewhere? Playing a prank? Nobody knew, but
once word went out to the world,
sightings and reports of Pope James the First came by the hundreds every
day, swamping Vatican authorities and Rome’s Carabinieri. Pope James was
sighted in more places than Elvis. In the era of satellite photography, TV
security cameras, sophisticated tracking devices, hand-held phones with cameras, high tech reading tablets
linked to GPS, FACEBOOK and YouTube turning the world into paparazzi patrolling celebrities, the world
remained completely ignorant about where Pope James the First and young Jesus
de Jesus had gone.
Vatican Secretary of
State Calvo Bastardi wanted to put out reward for information leading to
finding and returning the two men, but
the Cardinals in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith voted no. A
reward might encourage other Vatican kidnappings, false demands for ransoms,
and trigger lots of ugly press. Just what the hell was a pope worth anyhow?
It didn’t help at all that Jesus de Jesus, the street magician
from Mexico, had a considerable reputation for his illusions and magic tricks.
The newspapers had carried descriptions of Jesus in front of crowds or hundreds
of witnesses in Mexico, where he disappeared everything from a glass of iced
tea, to a small dog, to a plate full of food, to, well, past that, there were
lots of rumors and even more video footage of unexplainable tricks. As you can
imagine, Il Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, didn’t know what to say,
so it said nothing, and that left the impression that they were probably
covering up something.
Because no living Vatican staff members had ever faced a
missing pope case, the Vatican didn’t have investigators to chase down
leads. Vatican officials had to rely on reciprocity
from various law enforcement and covert government agencies around the world to
find the two. With speculation rife, Internet traffic ran rampant. The Mossad
leaked that witnesses had glimpsed the two holed up in a monastery on the
all-male Mount Athos peninsula in Greece. The CIA leaked that a Russian prison
in the Gulag held the two. Hamas said
that an Islamic Imam had sequestered them in Tehran. The French Surtee had them
in a remote part of Morocco’s desert. None of the sightings of the two tall men
turned up anything other than misinformation, no photos, no fingerprints, no
DNA. I kept my own suspicions to myself. Given the politics of religion, or for
that matter the history of religion, you had to expect disinformation touted as
fact.
The American columnist Andrew Verse, using his syndicated
column Mirabile Dictu , compared the
vanishing to magicians Siegfried and Roy
disappearing an elephant in Las Vegas, then to uber magician David Blaine making a girl’s teeth disappear then
reappear, and finally to David Copperfield making a 747 jetliner disappear.
Jimmy, wherever the hell he was concealed, doubtless loved the comparisons.
Verse added that for generations the Vatican, facing everything from banking
scandals to global pedophilia run rampant, had practiced misdirection, the core
of getting people to believe the impossible, and he described the Vatican
vanishing as “finally a real showcase miracle for the Devil’s Advocate to
explore.”
Theories about the disappearance ranged from kidnapping, to
murder, to a homosexual liaison, to a
romance each had with women who had
lured them off, to a secret papal
mission, to voluntarily abandoning the papacy because of the constant, intense
criticism and threats of assassination James the First received. One wag said
it was the Second Coming somehow botched and transformed into the Second
Going. That made as much sense as
anything, especially with someone named Jesus involved. Some explained the vanishing
as a sudden mental illness, others as an offer the pope couldn’t refuse from
the Cosa Nostra. But whatever the instant and global speculation from news
media, James the First, Jimmy Maloney, the kid from Santa Barbara, the
revolutionary new liberal pope had hightailed it. And with him went a guy named
Jesus, a celebrated and much loved figure out of Mexico. Big news, as often
proves the case, delivered nothing factual other than their absence, and as
Jimmy had reminded us, nothing matters.
Within a week the Pontifical Committee of the Vatican City
State, what passed for the tiny
country’s legislature, tumbled suddenly into chaos via the absence of its leader. The Committee called a consistory of
cardinals to appoint a camerlengo, a cardinal to function as chief operating officer and election chief
until the church either found James the First or elected another pope. The
camerlengo’s name, Calvo Bastardi, the Cardinal from Spoleto, Secretary of
State, 71 years old, and a sophisticated bureaucrat. He was a small man with a
tiny nose, so small that it left his
grizzled face looking, for all of its wrinkles, heavy gray eyebrows, and sagging skin, as if his mother had denied
him that essential appendage. Given his almost noseless mug, Vatican jokers referred
to him as Cyranose or Sansnez.
Sansnez Calvo Bastardi had had some of the edges on him
removed by 22 years as a Vatican functionary, and he had seen enough changes of
regimes to gravitate toward power and move inexorably through the Curia bureaus. Eventually he had come to power as Secretary
of State. Recently Jimmy had moved him to chief of the Congregation for the
Clergy, overseeing the conduct of priests, an office Jimmy had promised he
would close. Now Bastardi would acquire
a very powerful leadership role as camerlengo.
I didn’t trust him., but then I didn’t know much about
Bastardi, and now he wanted to see me daily. Perhaps because I’d been working
as trouble shooter and an insider for Pope James the First, and more likely, because I’d been the one who advocated bringing Jesus de
Jesus to the Vatican. Having vetted Jesus, I had vouched for him. But first, I
think Cyranose wanted to see me because I was the mirror image of the missing
pope.
Who could tell the difference? Maybe I was the actually pope
and it was his brother Kevin who had somehow hidden out with Jesus de Jesus.
I now had far more attention than I wanted. Because the
Maloney twins looked so much alike, Bastardi and some of the clergy initially
argued that, despite me not being a priest, they could cover up Jimmy’s absence
with me somehow suddenly a substitute as pope. Kevin the counterfeit, the look
alike pope would come off the bench and save the game. Not likely.
Appearance was everything for these people. It didn’t matter
to Bastardi that I was an atheist, or that they’d be marketing a stand-in pope.
When that kind of pressure started for me to play Jimmy, I called a conference of
international newspaper and TV reporters and told them about the substitution
scheme that specific cardinals had proposed, and that I’d refused to have any
part in it. The press went wild with the accusation, almost as if an earthquake
had shaken the church. And that made me perhaps the only guy in modern history
to turn down being pope.
Given the uproar, Bastardi didn’t take my refusal very
well. I suspected that he probably
wanted to advance himself into the papacy, but by way of misdirection, he would
give me and concerned clergy signals in the opposite direction. His advanced
age would have raised a barrier, but once elected, his age would no longer
matter. Popes are expected to die on the job, which says something about both
the age at which they usually take office and the stresses on them. Papal retirement is actually allowed by Canon
Law, and the church has lots of ugly history in its struggles
over who will be pope. Via political intrigues Benedict IX was pope three
separate times, but tradition holds that retirement is not an option. My point to Jimmy exactly – why take a job where
death is the expected form of retirement?
Furthermore, in three meetings with him, I privately laid
into Bastardi for how the Vatican was dealing with Jimmy
disappearing, particularly the speed with which Bastardi wanted to replace Pope
James if he didn’t soon reappear. What would the world do if Jimmy returned to
find Catholicism suddenly had two popes?
I thumped the tub hard about Bastardi’s pending possible embarrassment
if he tried to rush a new pope into place.
So I still had my Vatican job trouble shooting, and I told
everyone within earshot that I expected my brother the pope to return. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let me lay out the unusual way we got here, what
led up to the greatest vanishing act of modern times.
