Forty minutes later
The Capital City Club is the last remnant of what once was the heart of Atlanta’s business, financial and legal communities before flight farther north abandoned the central city streets to winos, beggars and the rare tourist unfortunate enough to lose their way between the Georgia Aquarium and the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District. Housed in downtown’s sole remaining private clubhouse, a veranda-fronted, tree-flanked, four-story anachronism, it squats between towering skyscrapers. Even though an epidemic of political correctness has made the club no longer the exclusive domain of white, Anglo-Saxon males, a near-life-size portrait of Robert E. Lee is the first thing a visitor sees upon entering the foyer.
Lang entered the dining room, glanced around and spotted Father Francis Narumba seated at a table with a view of Peachtree Street. A native of one of West Africa’s less desirable countries, the priest had been educated in an American college and seminary and assigned to one of Atlanta’s parishes with a rapidly growing African population. He had been Lang’s sister’s priest after she had inexplicably not only joined the Catholic Church but a congregation where English was a second language. Lang was not particularly religious but he and Francis had become fast friends in the years after her death.
Men in clerical collars were not uncommon guests at the downtown club, but they were more frequently seen exchanging them for golf shirts in the locker rooms of the club’s two courses outside the city limits.
Francis stood, the flash of a white smile splitting his face. “How was Venice? Incudi reddere.”
Francis, like Lang, was a victim of a liberal-arts education. Latin had been an obvious language choice for one planning to enter the priesthood. Lang had no explanation as to why he had chosen the dead tongue. The end result was that the two friends exchanged Latin aphorisms on a regular basis.
“I have indeed returned to the anvil,” Lang said, sitting and shaking out the linen napkin. “To start with, I just had a visit from the Reverend Bishop Groom. You’ve been reading about him in the paper?”
Francis wrinkled his nose as though it detected an open sewer. “I have indeed. The fact he has come to see you tells me he’s in the trouble that he richly deserves… How many of his parishioners claim he seduced them?”
Lang signaled to the waitress. “If seduction were a crime, we would be building high-rise jails instead of condos. It’s the fact he’s using his church as a tax dodge that has the U.S. attorney’s boxer shorts in a wad. Vectigalia nervi sunt rei publicae. ”
Francis took the menu proffered by the waitress. “Cicero was right: taxes are the sinews of the state. But I could forgive chiseling on taxes.”
“You’re in the forgiveness business, remember?”
Francis ignored him. “It’s using the church’s money for vacation homes, fancy cars, that sort of thing.”
“Obviously the Cathedral of the Holy Savior doesn’t require a vow of poverty,” Lang observed pointedly. “Divitiae virum faciunt.”
The waitress was hovering. Both men ordered large shrimp salads.
Francis watched her retreat toward the kitchen. “Riches may make the man, but think of the good that man could do if he shared some of them with people like those guys.” He nodded to the window where two shabbily dressed men were panhandling passersby.
“So they could buy a better brand of wine by the pint?”
Francis’s reply was a snort. “You can be quite difficult, you know.”
“Be thankful this is one of my better days. I can also be impossible.”
Francis shook his head. “OK. Moving past our disagreement on social and economic issues, I repeat: how was Venice?”
“You wouldn’t believe what happened.”
“Try me.”
Lang waited for their salads to be placed in front of them before beginning his adventures.
When he finished speaking, Francis was silent for a moment, thinking. “I read about the theft of the relics from Saint Mark’s in Venice. I should have known if there was trouble within a hundred miles, you’d be involved in it somehow.”
“Dessert, gentlemen? We have some freshly made peppermint ice-cream cake.” The waitress was hovering again.
Lang looked up. “My spiritual advisor here will no doubt take whatever you offer. He gets only bread and water in his monastic cell.”
Francis rolled his eyes. “And you?”
“As a normal human being whose natural aging process has produced a metabolism that manufactures a hundred calories for each one consumed…”
Francis looked up at the bewildered young woman. “He means, no thank you. As for me, yes indeed, I will have the peppermint ice-cream cake. And add a dollop of whipped cream, could you, please?”
A few minutes later, Lang watched Francis dig into a concoction that would have stilled the most demanding sweet tooth. “How is it I bust my ass working out and put on a pound if I even look at sweets and you never gain weight, yet you eat anything that isn’t nailed down? Can you pray off calories?”
“ ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’ First Psalm. For you heretics, there isn’t a lot of hope.”
Lang sipped a cup of coffee as Francis used the edge of his fork to scrape the last of the confection from his plate. “You can have seconds, y’know.”
Francis looked up, not quite successful in hiding a smile. “I couldn’t do that to you.” He seemed to think a moment. “Back to that excitement in Venice. You know, there’s a good chance what was taken weren’t Saint Mark’s bones at all.”
Lang was debating if the extra caffeine in another cup of coffee would make him jumpy all afternoon. “Really? And whose bones might they be?”
Just then the waitress handed Lang the check for signature and member number. He scribbled both.
Lang gave his friend a look that said he knew his leg was being pulled. “OK, I’ll bite, even if I see another of those ‘who’s buried in Grant’s tomb’ jokes. Who’s buried in Saint Mark’s?”
Francis lifted his arm, checking his watch. “I’d tell you but you’d want an explanation, and I have a meeting with the bishop. Gurt was kind enough to invite me for dinner Friday night. I’ll explain then.”
Both men got up from the table, Francis reaching to shake Lang’s hand. “Thanks for the lunch. I’m a little embarrassed I can’t pick up my share of the tab here.”
Lang grinned. “Why? In all the time we’ve tossed a coin for the check, I don’t recall you ever losing. Sooner or later you will. This way, I’m spared the suspense of guessing when.”
Outside, wind was chasing trash down the sidewalk between canyon walls of glass and steel. Lang had left his overcoat at the office and was glad his walk back to work would be less than a block. Everyone else on the street seemed to share his hurry to get out of the wintry blast.
He stopped long enough to wave as Francis drove out of the parking lot in the parish’s aged Toyota, crossed Peachtree and disappeared down the ridge, the spine of which forms Atlanta’s most famous street. Turning back toward his office, he stopped. Across the street was one pedestrian who was in no hurry. His coat collar turned up concealing most of the face, the man seemed to be staring at Lang. Perhaps suddenly realizing he had been noticed, he hurried into the revolving door of a nearby hotel.
Lang’s first impulse was to follow. He took a couple of steps and stopped. Overactive imagination? Had the stranger been looking at him or simply taking in what meager sights the city had to offer? He looked around, spotting no one who showed any particular interest in him, not even a street bum. Still, ingrained paranoia wouldn’t let go, a paranoia that had saved his life more than once.
Once he was back in his office, Sara was waiting for him with another stack of messages. He soon forgot the man on the street.
Beijing Olympic Tower
267 Beisihuan Zhonglu
Haidian, Beijing
The day before
Less than a week after the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics, the space occupied in the new sixteen-story building by the committee that had organized and operated the games was vacated. The colorful posters and
