Gospel, page 31
Silence. Then a knock on O’Hanrahan’s door.
“That’s him,” Lucy breathed.
Another knock. Then a loud, impolite series of knocks, to rouse the dead. Angry knocks. Lucy felt a chill run up her spine. Then they heard whoever-it-was fiddling with the lock to O’Hanrahan’s suite.
“What’s he doing?” whispered Lucy.
“Trying to break into my room.”
“Where’s your briefcase?”
“In the hotel safe, thank God. I didn’t get it out for our sightseeing spree this morning—”
They heard a crunch. He had jimmied the lock and was in O’Hanrahan’s room now, two doors away. O’Hanrahan pressed himself to the door, trying to hear. He heard a lamp break. Then a bottle. Lucy put her hand to her mouth, shaking her head … that man was tearing O’Hanrahan’s room apart. More noises, then a pause. O’Hanrahan stroked his chin pensively; he seemed to Lucy abnormally calm.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“He won’t find the gospel and he’ll probably go away.”
They heard the door close.
Lucy mouthed: “Well?”
O’Hanrahan shrugged.
Then there were more footsteps, slow deliberate ones. Coming toward them. Toward Lucy’s room. He was right outside. Then the stranger walked on a little further and paused.
Silence.
“Is he gone?” Lucy said out loud.
O’Hanrahan blanched, turned and sssshed her in sign language—he may have heard that, his eyes told her.
Footsteps, this time back toward Lucy’s room. He stopped outside Lucy’s door. O’Hanrahan heard the squeak of his shoes.
Knock knock.
Lucy was biting her fingernail until it bled, and O’Hanrahan took a few steps back from the door, and then pulled Lucy closer to him as they stood next to the story-high Italian clothes cabinet. She looked around for a phone to call for help but, as in many continental rooms, there was none.
Knock knock again.
Neither of them breathed, frozen there in the corner of the hotel room. Lucy closed her eyes.
Then the man began to jimmy the lock, something like a screwdriver was stuck in the keyhole and he started wrenching it, shaking the doorknob—
O’Hanrahan whispered: “Aiuto is help, stupro is rape. When he breaks in, you scream your lungs out.” Lucy began to whimper. “Do it,” he hissed with unmistakable firmness, as he hid behind the dresser, out of view from the doorway.
Lucy stepped toward the door.
SMASH! The door sprang open: the swarthy man looked up and stared in surprise at Lucy. A momentary freeze. He took a step toward her and she knew somehow he intended to put a hand over her mouth—
“STUPRO! AIUTO AIUTO! STUPRO!” And then she let out a bloodcurdling scream for good measure.
He looked quickly around the room, for whatever it was he was after, then he angrily fixed Lucy with a savage glance, one that promised revenge. Then he fled to the exit at the end of the hall.
“AIUTO! STUPRO!”
“No, darling, it’s ah-ee-OO-toh, put some stress on the u,” said O’Hanrahan, stepping from behind the cabinet, reverting to language teacher. “You can stop now, Miss Dantan.”
O’Hanrahan left her room to see what had become of his own.
A panting chambermaid arrived: “Cosa sta succedendo?” Then she saw the broken lock. “No no no … mamma mia … É ferita? You American?”
Lucy joined the professor in his room—it was a mess all right. Lamp broken, clothes everywhere, cologne bottle smashed, O’Hanrahan’s Herald Tribune scattered about. This burglar wanted to register his unhappiness with not finding what he was looking for. Then O’Hanrahan went into the bathroom:
“Damn that guy!”
“What is it?” asked Lucy, still trembling. The maid, right behind Lucy, noticed the jimmied lock of O’Hanrahan’s room as well. “Mi dispiace, signore … Maria…” she muttered, astonished, before scurrying to tell someone downstairs.
“Damn that lousy two-bit hood to hell!”
“My God, sir, what is it?”
O’Hanrahan thundered, “He broke my bottle of homebrew grappa—I have been after that stuff for centuries, centuries, Luce. He did it out of spite, too! Smashed all over my bathroom floor—”
“You’re upset about that? This guy wants to kill us and you’re worried about your grappa?”
O’Hanrahan was calm again. “He doesn’t want to kill us, he wants the Gospel of Matthias. Someone has hired him to steal the scroll from us, maybe the Ignatians—they’re pissed off at us, I’m sure. Whoever it is,” pondered O’Hanrahan, “doesn’t know we don’t have it.”
Lucy’s heart stopped beating so fast and she began to breathe normally. “I didn’t bargain on this,” she said. “I didn’t bargain on … what are you laughing about?”
“Heh heh heh,” he went on with his forced laugh, picking up some of his clothes only to scatter them for a bigger mess.
“Do you mind telling me what’s so funny about this?”
“Nothing’s funny. But there’s something very reassuring…” He paused to turn his suitcase upside down and dump out the rest of its contents. “… in having someone be this interested in what we’re after. Interested enough to hire a hood to steal it.” O’Hanrahan laughed some more, in jubilant spirits. “And Lucy, brava! Brava!” He unexpectedly took her by her sunburned shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. “What lungs!”
“Is this what I have to expect if I keep traveling with you?”
“Heh heh,” he said, delighted by the whole incident, “it’ll get worse, I suspect.” Lucy was out of her depth and looked it. “Aw, c’mon,” O’Hanrahan added, “this is sort of fun, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t expect that we’d be pursued by hoods, Dr. O’Hanrahan. I think I better go home.”
“Now what have I been telling you?”
She looked at the floor. “You’ve been telling me to go home all along, and now I see your point, sir. I’ll go quietly. I guess you better take me to the airport.”
O’Hanrahan almost agreed but he stopped short. He was aware of standing there, open-mouthed, drawing a blank. Damn it, he’d gotten used to his one-woman audience.
(Ask her to stay with you, then.)
Oh I can’t, he thought, not after all my rant.
(Again, Patrick, you pay the price of pride. There are things that We have set in motion—get on with it!)
O’Hanrahan busied himself by trying to break a cheap vase on his nighttable left unsmashed by the burglar. And he thought: It’s a shame Lucy’s leaving, since frankly I could help that girl. She’s a Roman Catholic disaster in the making, a future Beatrice. O’Hanrahan could see it all in perfect focus: she would marry the first Bridgeport lout who would have her, a loser whom she would romantically devote her life to correcting, and then when it became apparent this no-count mick was a rube for life, she would enter into the oldest and most ancient conventual order for the Irish female: the nagging malcontent, made miserable by marriage, made morally superior by the all-embittering One True and Holy Roman Catholic Church—
“Sir?” Lucy demanded, still waiting for an answer.
“I’m not taking you to the goddam airport,” he snapped. “Go get a cab,” he added, as he dumped out his shaving kit on the floor.
“Dr. O’Hanrahan,” asked Lucy, matching his calm, “why are you messing up your room even more?”
“Stay tuned.”
In a moment the hotel manager appeared, a thin bald man with a humorously thick mustache: “Signore, my apologies! I cannot believe!” He looked around and assessed the room, the broken lock, muttered something in Italian Lucy gathered had to do with the soon-to-be-fired desk clerk. “I can’t believe thees happened in the Hotel Davide!”
O’Hanrahan in a mock rage lashed out at the man: how dare the establishment let a criminal up to rob the guests! Just wait until Fodor and Frommer and the New York Times Travel Magazine, which he worked for, heard about this! Where are the carabinieri? Of course, this hotel is liable for everything that was stolen …
“The carabinieri, signore?”
No hotelier wants the carabinieri around or the Frommer guide informed, so O’Hanrahan was led to the manager’s office for a soothing glass of Amaro and to discuss this regrettable incident, this regrettable incident that surely the two of them could come to some form of—how do you say?—understanding about, no?
Lucy went to her room to relax and recover from all the excitement, and lay down on the bed until she felt calm. She propped a chair before her now-unlockable door.
“Rise and shine,” said O’Hanrahan, in what seemed a moment later.
She must have napped. Lucy looked at the window and it was dark outside. “What’s going on?” she asked, as O’Hanrahan shoved the chair out of his way.
To avert the publicity and keep himself out of court, the hotel manager had replaced O’Hanrahan’s bottle of grappa with a fine brand purchased by his secretary, as they negotiated, and the stolen money—
“What stolen money?”
“The extra cash I told him I keep in my shaving kit. He was more than happy to reimburse me.”
Lucy sat up on the bed. “I was feeling sorry for myself, but now I see I should feel sorry for the manager. You just … just invented that so you could steal money from the poor man?”
“Poor man? With what this clip joint charges? Besides, I expropriated this money for you, Miss Dantan. For traveling expenses. We can’t put everything on the credit card.”
She stood up and began packing her things, shoving the unwritten postcards into her handbag. “I don’t want your ill-gotten money. Although, I’ll take it if it’ll help me to the airport.”
“But you’re not going to get a flight to America tonight.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s not late.”
“It is for Florence’s airport. You could get to London maybe, spend the night in a lounge chair and get something to the U.S. in the morning.”
Lucy hurled her handbag into her suitcase. “Whatever it takes to get me out of the black market.”
“How are you going to pay for your ticket?”
“Your credit card,” she said hopefully.
“I’m not going thirty miles out to the airport so you can pay with my credit card, nor am I giving it to you. I’m going to Assisi on the eleven P.M. locale, and I’m not going to miss it.”
Lucy’s eyes flashed frustrated anger. “Then how am I supposed to get out of here? I’m not staying here with some goon breaking into my room every five minutes!”
“They don’t care about you, it’s me they want, and only because they think I’ve got the scroll here.” By here, O’Hanrahan meant the satchel he was now holding tightly.
Lucy sat on the bed, not sure what to do. Hitting O’Hanrahan was among the options, kicking the old goat as hard as she could in the shins.
(Patrick, you could bring some comfort to this situation.)
“Lucy,” he said begrudgingly, “this scroll may be a 5th-Century pseudo-gospel, it may be a medieval fake, it may be half a dozen things. But the Ignatians went to great lengths to get it, and now the Franciscans have gone to great lengths to steal it, and Mordechai Hersch and Hebrew University have spent forty years and a ton of money to track it down, and now we know someone else wants it, and good God, we’ve got a University of Chicago credit card so they want it too. Doesn’t it suggest we’re on to something?”
Lucy still didn’t say anything.
“You know, honey, if you want to stay and work with me, you can, I suppose. Maybe … maybe you don’t want to stay, I don’t guess I blame you. You’re not happy, you’re not well. You’re complaining all the time, you hate me—”
“I am happy, I don’t complain all the time, Dr. O’Hanrahan, and … and I don’t hate you. But can you understand that this cloak-and-dagger stuff is sort of scary?”
He shrugged. A shared silence. O’Hanrahan took a step or two away toward the hallway, and Lucy called out: “Wait!”
He stuck his head back in the room, this white-haired, red-faced, beaming old wreck of a man with irresistible eyes. “Yessssss?”
“Is there an airport in Assisi?”
“Not really.”
“Where do we go after Assisi?”
“Rome and the Vatican libraries, I suspect, if we get the scroll.”
“Always wanted to see Rome.”
“The Whore of Babylon,” said O’Hanrahan gravely.
So a cab was called for the back entrance to the hotel, in the event the criminal element was waiting for them out front. Amid the scrapings and apologies and extreme unctuousness of the manager, they left in a huff, wound through a maze of alleys, and claimed their cab a block away.
“The train station’s just right over there,” Lucy pointed out.
“We’re taking the long route to see if anyone’s interested in following us,” said O’Hanrahan, putting his suitcase in the back. “We won’t have a very good night’s sleep if some thug follows us onto the train.”
Lucy slid down onto the backseat. “I still don’t know about this…”
O’Hanrahan hopped onto the backseat as well. “You’ll like Rome, I promise.”
The driver: “Rome, yeys! It is a byootiful ceety, no?”
“Bellissima,” said O’Hanrahan. “Santa Croce, per favore, signore.”
And then the cab recklessly took off, rattling across the cobblestones of dirty, overcrowded, touristy, unfriendly, arrogant, philistine Florence, the greatest city in the world, darting at an unsafe speed through the old quarter to Santa Croce. O’Hanrahan steadily gazed out the back, but so far no sign of followers, no hope for a chase scene. Upon arriving at Piazza Santa Croce, O’Hanrahan explained to the driver that his daughter wanted a last look at the church, and redirected him to the train station.
“Santa Croce ees very byootiful, yeys?” said the taxi man.
“Yes, very byootiful,” said Lucy, before sinking lower in the seat, thoroughly ill at ease. “I guess my mother wouldn’t forgive me if I got to Italy and didn’t get the pope’s blessing,” she said.
“Yeys,” said the driver. “Jahn Pool Two, ey?”
Said the professor, “You don’t wanna miss that guy’s act. He does a mean mass, I hear. Get your mother some kitsch souvenirs, some plastic crucifices.” O’Hanrahan’s coinage of the plural with the second syllable accented made Lucy laugh. She nudged O’Hanrahan the next second, prompting him to notice the glove-compartment shrine of the taxi: John Paul’s picture, a small nativity scene, a crucifix, the ubiquitous Mary, and hanging from the rearview mirror, numerous medallions and a crucifix. A rosary was suspended from the meter.
“Rome’s so full of shuck,” said O’Hanrahan, “that you can get your mother a piece of the True Cross.”
“She’d like that.”
“Isn’t it interesting, it’s always a piece of the True Cross, and not merely a piece of the Cross. There were so many fakes around, even the Church had to insist on it.” Lucy rose up a bit and looked over at O’Hanrahan, looked at his face as he was off on another ramble: “Santa Croce del Gerusalemme, one of the Seven Pilgrimage Churches of Rome, built by Constantine’s mother in 327, fresh from her Cross-finding mission to Jerusalem. I have this mental picture of Constantine sending his mother as far away as possible to get her out of his hair…” O’Hanrahan stretched in the seat, a slight yawn, relaxed and philosophical.
“You may get on a plane in Rome, Miss Dantan, but remember I said this. Thinking Christians, scholars like yourself and even old heathen reprobates like me, have a challenge this century. Some of what we know of Christianity is garbage, some is certainly true. Some of the quotes in the New Testament of Paul and Jesus are the work of an overzealous Early Church, some quotes are accurate. Some doctrines of Christianity have the essence of divinity, other practices are corrupt, rotten, and certainly evil. We search, you and I,” and here he put a hand on her shoulder, “scholars and wise men and wise women, we search through the toothpicks and the splinters and the driftwood and counterfeit kindling, because somewhere out there, some day, we may hold before us a piece of the True Cross.”
They were at the station.
O’Hanrahan bade Lucy linger in the ladies’ restroom while he bought two tickets, waiting in the interminable lines. While waiting, the professor surveyed the populace: everyone looked kosher, scantily clad teenage tourists, a carpet of backpacks, kids too cheap or out too late to find a hotel, intending to camp on the station floor. O’Hanrahan returned to the ladies’ toilet and Lucy anxiously peered around the doorway: “Is the coast clear, Dr. O’Hanrahan?”
“What’s the password?” hissed the professor.
Lucy emerged anxiously. “I’m scared and you think this is funny. Give me my ticket.”
He gave it to her, before launching into an imitation of some raspy spy-movie hero: “If I don’t make it, Lucy … you’ll tell headquarters that Little Miss Muffet will have her hand in the cookie jar at ten o’clock singing ‘There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.’”
Then Lucy dug her fingernails into O’Hanrahan’s arm: “Oh my God…”
“What?”
Lucy pulled her companion behind a newspaper stall, ducking down. “That man there…” she whispered, “in the tacky suit.”
O’Hanrahan, not ducking, scanned the terminal. “This is Italy, Luce, you’ll have to give me a little more to go on.”
Lucy hit him in the elbow, annoyed. “The tall man, blondish. Pink-checked jacket. Yellow pants, a bolo tie.”
O’Hanrahan observed him, reading a paper. “So?”
“That’s the guy who drove away after the safe at the Crown was robbed! The guy with the German car.”
