here than in Paris at this time of year. She steadied herself for a second under the wing while she reached back into the cabin to pull out her little leather backpack. Then she took the extended hand of the young porter, who helped her step onto the jetty.
'Baroness von Berg. The baron is waiting for you.'
I'm sure he is, she thought, and nodded with a smile but said nothing as she followed him down the jetty toward the villa. She could see that the Villa Feltrinelli offered everything a couple like her and the baron could want.
She looked out at the lake. If the porter knew who she was, he was saying nothing. That was one thing she had to give Conrad: Even if every member of the staff thought the holy Mother Earth had come for a secret tryst with her lover, and hazarded a guess this was her habit, nobody else would know. As much as she wanted to avoid the appearance of moral failure, this scenario was what it was, and people could think what they wanted.
He led her to the boathouse, which apparently was an even more private suite than those that occupied the main villa. Bravo, Conrad, she thought, and thanked the porter.
'Gianni,' he offered helpfully.
She nodded. 'Like the legendary soccer player Gianni Rivera?'
'Si!' he said, eyes wide. 'I was named after him.'
Serena smiled. These days Rivera was a member of the European Parliament for the Uniti nell'Ulivo party. She followed Canadian hockey more closely than European football, but she knew enough about Rivera to know that he'd been the Wayne Gretzky of soccer in his day, able to instinctively know where the ball was going before it went there. It was an ability she had tried to cultivate in her own arena, where religion and politics squared off.
She switched to fluent Italian for Gianni's benefit: 'We'll need his kind of passing game this year if our team is going to have a shot at the World Cup.'
Gianni nodded enthusiastically as the door to the boathouse opened.
A remarkably gorgeous Conrad stepped out and handed Gianni a wad of Euros. 'Tausend dank,' he said, and waved Gianni away.
Gianni reluctantly walked off to the main villa, glancing back every now and then as if afraid to leave the baroness in the clutches of the barbarian Baron von Berg.
'I think he's in love,' Conrad told her, and looked at her with sparkling eyes. 'We all are.'
Without warning, he kissed her full on the lips. She threw both arms around his neck and kissed him back passionately. She felt him lift her up like a groom his bride and carry her across the threshold into their suite, where he nudged the door shut behind them and set her down.
She was breathless as they stared at each other, each waiting for the other to break the mood with some glib remark to coolly reestablish the uncrossable cosmic chasm that fate had always thrown up between them.
It's always me, she thought. I'm always the one to push him away.
But she didn't want to push him away. She wanted him to do it, prayed to God that he would do it. And Conrad, who could read her soul like one of his glyphless mysteries of antiquity, obliged for her sake and not his.
'Show me yours and I'll show you mine,' he said.
She blinked. 'What?'
He reached up to her neck, his fingers caressing her skin ever so gently. She put her own hand to his. But then he yanked the Dei medallion off her neck, leaving a slight red burn line.
'Conrad!' she yelled, and gripped her throat while he dangled the medallion in front of her face, his eyes on fire.
'So what's Her Holiness of the Roman Catholic Church doing holding the face of Baal between her breasts?' he demanded.
'I know.' She swallowed hard. 'It's not the Tribute Penny of Jesus.'
'No, it's a Shekel of Tyre. Just like one of those thirty goddamn pieces of silver Judas took to betray your Lord and Savior.'
'No, Conrad,' she gasped, trying to catch her breath. 'It is one of the Judas coins.'
30
Conrad looked at Serena across the table outside the boathouse. She was clearly enjoying the lakeside dinner personally prepared for them by Chef Stefano Baiocco: fish soup with tiny squids, Parma ham with prawns and artichoke hearts, Lake Garda white fish called coregone, and homemade tagliolini with pesto. All paired with the most amazing wines.
When all the plates were cleared and the sun had finally set, Conrad sat back and listened to her telling him everything.
According to the New Testament gospels, Judas had sold out Jesus to the ruling religious council of the Jews, the Sanhedrin, for thirty pieces of silver. Those shekels came out of their temple tax coffers. After the Sanhedrin turned Jesus over to the Romans and it was clear that the Romans were going to kill Jesus by crucifixion, Judas was filled with remorse and hanged himself. Before he did, however, he returned to the temple and threw his money at the priests. The priests, recognizing at this point that the shekels were blood money, couldn't deposit them back into the holy temple treasury. So they used the money for charity. They bought some land and turned it into a cemetery for paupers who couldn't afford a proper burial.
'That much I know,' Conrad said. 'Go on.'
According to the tradition of Dominus Dei, Serena told him, the man who sold his land to the Sanhedrin used the thirty pieces of silver to purchase another piece of land. This land he purchased from St. Matthew, the former tax collector and disciple of Jesus who wrote the authoritative gospel account of Judas's coins. The land Matthew sold, moreover, was land that Judas had purchased for himself with money he had stolen from the disciples' slush fund.
Conrad knew that apocryphal traditions were hard to authenticate and too often served the agendas of those who propagated them, so he was suspicious. 'Why would Matthew even want that money?' he asked her. 'What did he do with it?'
'Church tradition doesn't really speculate on what happened to Matthew, but somehow the coins got to Rome,' she told him. 'The Dei were established in the courts of Caesar well before St. Paul arrived in Rome and was beheaded by the emperor Nero. They were the secret Christians among Caesar's staff and praetorian guard that Paul referred to in his last letters from prison before his execution.'
'So they just watched Paul's head roll down the palace steps?' Conrad asked dubiously. 'Nice friends there, Serena. But I guess you have to save your own ass before you save the world. Is that what Jesus said? No, I guess not.'
'I'm not excusing the Dei, Conrad. I'm just telling you their history. Because the Roman emperors established themselves as gods, any Christian who claimed to serve another god faced death. So instead of using the old codes of crosses and fishes, which Rome's imperial intelligence services had cracked, they used the silver shekels to identify themselves to each other.'
'And how long did that work?' Conrad asked.
Serena gave him a funny look. 'For about three hundred years, at which point the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.'
'And completely corrupted by power,' Conrad added. 'At some point these coins stopped being heirlooms passed along after death. They became objects to be possessed by killing their owners in order to move up in the ranks of the Alignment.'
'I don't know when it started, exactly,' she said. 'Maybe with the Knights Templar.'
'What the hell are you doing with these people, Serena? That's what I want to know. Especially after you pledged your undying love to me under the Mall in Washington, D.C., only to ditch me and steal that terrestrial globe.'
She seemed to visibly tense up at the mention of the globe, and Conrad was glad to see it was still a sore point with her, too.
