Chapter 2
Gregorio sat up with a jerk. He shook his head and looked around frantically, at a loss for where he was. Just as he opened his mouth to blurt something out, he remembered what had happened. He settled back on the confessional’s seat in relief, panting. After a long moment, his breathing slowed down and he sat up again, this time to gently pull the curtain to one side and listen.
Nothing. No sounds. No voices, no footsteps, nothing close by at all. No faces or saints either. He shook his head slowly and with care. A saint? Talking to him? How could that be? Only saints had visions, and Gregorio knew he was a long way from a saint. He was a long way from being even a venerable. He was no virgin girl, he was no ascetic ancient monk, he was no martyr. It must have been a fever dream, or maybe something from the medicine they were giving him for the marsh fever.
But if it was real—could he disobey God? He pondered that while his head slowly swam in circles. He still wasn’t convinced that he’d had a vision, but what he’d been told to do—that was something God would want, he decided. So true vision or fever or medicine dream, he’d try it.
It took a while to muster the strength to rise, but eventually Gregorio stood and slipped out of the confessional, only to stand still and listen again. Still nothing.
He stepped to the side wall and slipped along it until he was beside the doorway to the corridor. Again he stopped, back against the wall, head turned so that his right ear was aimed out. Once more he listened, straining to hear anything. Nothing.
Mustering his courage, Gregorio stuck his head into the corridor to give a quick look each direction, then stepped out when nothing was seen.
Gregorio knew where he was. He knew where he needed to go. The question was, could he get there without running into any of the Spaniard troops? His vision indicated he could, but he felt the doubt in his heart nonetheless. He sighed, and murmured, “Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.”
Lifting the crucifix on his rosary beads, Gregorio kissed it, then made the sign of the cross. He sighed again before whispering, “In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum,” then squared his shoulders and headed back down the corridor toward the cross-corridor Brother Vittorio had brought him down earlier in the day. He needed to retrace some of their steps to get to where he needed to go. As he moved, he prayed a prayer that Vittorio was still among the living. From what the other monk had said about what had been happening, though, that wasn’t necessarily assured.
Gregorio made his way down the corridor, trailing one hand along the plastered wall, partly to remind himself that this was real. His mind was still very occupied with the memories of the vision of Saint Jerome. He believed it had indeed been a vision, but since he’d never had a vision before, nor had he known anyone who had had a vision, there was a little bit of uncertainty. Certainly, he was no saint, or even a venerable. He was a simple monk, who loved books and loved working in the papal library.
There was an outburst of yelling from a cross-corridor ahead, and Gregorio immediately turned into a small hallway that he knew headed toward other hallways that he could use to get to the library. The noise faded away as he continued his way, still trailing a hand on the walls as he turned corner after corner. Once or twice he cut through offices or suites of offices, all empty, most showing some disarray.
As he passed windows, Gregorio noticed the outside light was failing. That worried him. He needed light to be able to do what he needed to do. He hastened his steps, yet still by the time he arrived in the library chambers it was very dim inside.
The fire was out, so obviously it had been some while since the palace servants had come this way. There were no candles lit, so it appeared that no one was in the first chamber. Gregorio listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything.
Could he run to another room, another suite, and find coals? Did he dare waste the time, run the risk? Gregorio stood there, indecisive, wishing for a miracle of light. And that thought led to another thought—actually to a memory—and he moved his way, step by hesitant step in the by now almost fully gathered darkness, moving toward one particular desk in the room. He kept his hands before him to warn him of desks and furniture and corners and such, but he knew generally where the chief custodian’s desk was in the room, and made his way toward it.
He arrived at what he thought was the desk of the assistant librarian, the actual custodian of the library, Orazio Giustiniani, a lay brother in the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. He was responsible for the operation of the library and its collection under the named librarian, Cardinal Antonio Marcello Barberini, called The Elder, because his nephew was also Cardinal Antonio Barberini. The elder Cardinal Antonio was also the younger brother of Pope Urban VIII. Given what Brother Vittorio had told Gregorio earlier, he had to wonder if any of the Barberini family was still alive.
Gregorio’s hands felt across the top of the desk, finding first the stub of a candle, and second a small wooden box. He sighed in relief, then fumbled with the box, eventually raising the lid and removing one of the slim sticks from inside it. Trying to remember what he had seen before, Gregorio closed the lid of the box, then brought the bulbous end of the stick to rest on the bottom of the box, and scraped it across the bottom. There was a rasping sound, then a flame flared up at the end of the stick, biting at his fingers. He edged his fingers farther back on the stick, then held the flame to the wick of the candle stub. In a moment, it caught, and the flame from the wick outshone the light from the guttering match. Gregorio held the match until the flame burned down to the very end of it, then he blew it out, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it to crush the coal. He lifted the candle, and froze.
There on the floor, on the other side of the desk, Gregorio could see two feet sticking out into aisle between the other nearby desks. He crossed himself, and swallowed. He steeled himself, then edged around the corner of the desk and into the aisle, slowly stepping forward until he could see that yes, there was indeed a man lying alongside the front of the desk. Gregorio nudged one of the feet with his own foot. Nothing. No response. No movement. No noise. He bent forward and raised the candle a little higher. The light showed that the head was turned so that the face wasn’t visible, but that wasn’t necessary. He recognized the clothes.
Gregorio crossed himself again, murmuring, “Mater Dei,” as he did so. Before him lay the body of Orazio Giustiniani himself, the custodian of the library, second only to Cardinal Barberini in its order and business. He knelt alongside the body, and moved the arm that hid the face. He felt himself pale when Messer Giustiniani’s face was revealed. There was an expression of outrage on it, frozen in place no doubt by the bullet which had passed through the hole now in the middle of the forehead and lodged somewhere in the brain. Even as he swallowed compulsively, trying to keep his stomach from emptying itself, he noted in his shock that the hole was not much wider than the knuckle of his index finger, so it must have been made by a small pistol rather than one of the great muskets.
He tore his gaze from the custodian’s face and looked down toward the belt. The messer’s keys were missing from their hook on the belt, and he found where someone had cut the thongs of a purse and pulled it away from the body. It was too much to hope for that either would have been left by the Spanish murderers. However, Gregorio was not dismayed by the discovery. He knew something the Spaniards did not.
Gregorio straightened and retraced his steps to the other side of Messer Giustiniani’s desk. Sitting in the chair, he pushed back from the desk, then lowered the candle so he could clearly see the carvings all across the front edge. It was a chain of fishes, each of which contained a Greek letter within its outline.
He ran his finger slowly across the center part of the carving, reading the letters as he did so. His finger stopped on the I fish, then he pushed it, murmuring “Iota” under his breath. Next he tracked three fish to the right, where the letter was X, murmuring “Chi” as he pressed it. Seven fish to the left brought him to Θ. “Theta.” Eleven fish to the right brought him to Y “Upsilon.” Thirteen fish to the left brought him to the final fish, Σ “Sigma.”
Gregorio sighed in relief as he pushed the final button, there was a click, and a small drawer popped open at the left corner of the desk. The seeming random arrangement of letters and buttons had preserved the custodian’s secret from the Spaniards. He reached over to pull it out, then removed the extra set of library keys from the drawer.
He didn’t know who the craftsman was who had built the desk and used the Ichthys word for the code to open the secret drawer, but he was thankful for that man’s skill and sneakiness, and for Messer Giustiniani trusting him enough to show him the secret one afternoon when they were alone in the library. Because of that, he had a chance to fulfill his mission after all.
Gregorio stood again, looked around, then shook his head. Of course he wouldn’t see anything. The room was dark, and the light of a single candle didn’t illuminate much. He moved out from behind the desk, carefully stepped over Messer Giustiniani’s legs, and made his way between the other desks until he reached the other side of the room and passed through an archway into another room, this one with cabinets around the perimeter with several windows separating them, and a couple of large tables in the center. He moved to the right, shielding the small candle flame to keep the wind of his passage from blowing it out, and also to try and keep the light from being obvious to anyone outside the windows.
As he turned the corner of the table to move in front of the cabinets, Gregorio felt his foot catch, and looked down to see another body. He stopped, sighed, crossed himself, and murmured, “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine.” Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord.
Gregorio bent forward. The light of the candle revealed a young man not much younger than he himself was, dressed in plain clothing. The side of his head was crushed in the temple area, probably from a stroke from a musket butt, with some trickles of blood dried on his face. A poor unfortunate, most probably a servant, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shook his head, stepped over him, and moved on to the cabinet he was seeking.
It took several tries with the keys on the ring to find the right one, but in a matter of moments the cabinet was unlocked. Gregorio set the candle inside the cabinet, rubbed his hands on the front of his cassock, then reached out and picked up manuscript MCCIX from its place on the shelf.
He held in his hands the oldest copy of the Word that he had ever seen, or knew of. He trembled at the antiquity of the codex, a thousand years or more old. Gregorio felt sinful at daring to even touch it, much less take it in his hands. It was as if he were profaning it. Almost he put it back, but then the memory of his vision flared up, and he recalled Saint Jerome’s voice telling him, “And He has chosen you for this holy work.” His spine stiffened. He stood straighter, and his grasp firmed. What he had been called to do, he would do.
Gregorio turned to place the manuscript on the table behind him. He needed something to carry it in. He started to head back toward the other room, when he noticed that the body of the servant had a bag over one shoulder. He knelt and pulled the strap of the bag over the body’s head and down the arm. A moment later, it was in his hand. He stood and laid it on the table next to the bible manuscript. It was more than big enough to hold it.
From the weight of the bag, there was something in it. He undid the tie on the flap and folded it back, then reached in to pull out two medium sized codices. Gregorio glanced at them—Latin, not Greek, but possibly something that was either being sent to another office or returned to the library. With everyone else either dead or fled, he had no way of knowing. With a bit of a mischievous grin, he placed them on the shelf where the great codex had been, picking up the inventory card that had laid beside it. If that caused a bit of confusion for the apostate cardinal and his minions in days to come, Gregorio could live with that.
Gregorio took the candle out of the cabinet, closed its door panels, and locked them. Setting the candle on the table, he looked around again. He needed something to wrap the codex in, to cushion it in the bag. He looked down at the servant’s body again. It occurred to him that not only were they of an age, they were also of a size. He ran his hand across his chest, and took off his cassock to wrap it around the codex and stuff it with some care into the bag. Then he turned to the body again.
It took some time to strip the clothes off the servant. Gregorio was thankful the man’s bladder and bowels hadn’t released. The culottes and hose came off easily enough, but getting the shirt and jacket off was more difficult because he was starting to stiffen in rigor mortis. “Sorry,” he muttered to the body as he wrestled with it. “I need these more than you do, my friend.”
Eventually Gregorio had the clothing removed. It didn’t take long to don it himself, despite the odd feeling of putting on a dead man’s clothing. He crossed himself again, picked up the bag and candle, and returned to Messer Giustiniani’s desk in the other room.
Gregorio stared down at the custodian’s body for a long moment. He was extremely saddened by both Messer Giustiniani’s death and by the manner of it. He had enjoyed working with and for the learned master, and to see him so brutally and casually slain made him sick. He knelt beside the body and reached out and traced a cross on the forehead. “Requiescat in pace,” Gregorio said, crossing himself as he did so. “Rest in peace, my friend,” he said in common language.
As he started to straighten, Gregorio noticed the cut purse thongs again, and a thought occurred to him. He knew that Messer Giustiniani carried his money in two purses—an outer one hanging from his belt, and an inner one that he kept in an inside pocket of his jackets and coats. Obviously whoever had shot him had taken the outer purse, but the messere’s clothes were not overly disarrayed. Could the inner purse…
Gregorio steeled himself and thrust his hand under the left side of the jacket. His stomach lurched as he felt around, his hand sliding over the stomach and chest of the messere. After moments of searching, his hand came in contact with the pocket he knew was there, and yes, the purse was in it. A moment later, the purse was inside his own jacket, and Gregorio looked down at the body again. “I’m sorry, Messer Orazo, I am on a work for God, and I need this far more than the wretched Spaniards do.”
At that moment, Gregorio heard the sound of many booted feet coming down the hallway. He started to panic, but felt a moment of coolness cross his forehead. In that moment, he licked his fingers and quenched the candle, then slipped around behind the desk and crawled into the kneehole of it, taking the candle with him. He crouched there, face turned away from the opening, barely breathing.
“This is the place,” a male voice said in polished Roman dialect Italian. “This is where the light was.”
Gregorio shrank in upon himself, trying to be as small as possible as heavy booted feet tromped through the room, knocking against the other desks and podiums. A wisp of smoke from the candle rose up and tickled his nose. He was horrified as the urge to sneeze built up. He reached up and pinched his nostrils shut, opening his mouth wide to breathe as noiselessly as possible. After a moment, the sneeze died away, and he slumped in relief,
“Are you sure this is the right place?” a harsh voice demanded in a heavy Spanish accent.
“Yes, Capitano Alfredo. This is the only room with windows that could be seen from that portico.”
“Huh.”
Before the captain could say anything else, there was the sound of footsteps. “Capitano, there is a naked dead man in the next room over.”
“A-hah,” the captain said. “Someone has started looting already. There are rats in the walls, Father Esteban.”
“Perhaps so,” the cultured voice replied. “Regardless, there is no one here now. We can see to cleaning up in the morning.”
“Indeed. Back to the courtyard, all of you.”
The feet withdrew, the sound of tromping boots fading away.
Gregorio waited until his heartbeat had stopped thundering and his breath was under control again before he crawled out from under the desk. He set the candle down on a nearby desk, and crept to the doorway, where he listened for a long moment before sticking his head around the corner to make sure no one was near. The emptiness of the hall triggered a big sigh, and then he edged out into the hall and began to move down it in the opposite direction from which he and the Spaniards had come. One slow step at a time, he headed toward freedom.
***
The next morning, just after dawn broke, no one paid any notice to a slumping figure in a tattered cloak with a hood as it moved through the gate of the Porta Pia and made its way down the Via Nomentana.