‘I’m your wife, a part of you. You can’t keep secrets to yourself.’
Myriam was visibly angry and disillusioned with him. Ben knew she was right, but this was how he was, he kept things to himself. It was an immense effort to bring them there.
The mechanism opened the heavy door with a sigh and, for a few moments, they just looked inside without moving. Myriam took the first step decisively. Sarah followed her, and Ben was the last to enter the room.
Sarah had not imagined such a bare space. Three display cases, nothing more, and cold, unadorned walls. She thought she would find shelves full of other singular things, of lesser significance certainly, but full of sacred relics with many stories to tell. She never thought that the large room would contain only three cases. She joined Myriam, who was examining the parchments displayed under glass. She couldn’t understand a single word written there. Elaborate letters written in an ornate style, unintelligible to her.
‘Can you understand anything, Myriam?’ she dared to ask, as if she were creating an explosion in the awkward silence.
Myriam looked at the small document in the first case and shook her head no.
‘No.’ Myriam looked at Ben Isaac. ‘Is it Latin?’
Her husband affirmed it.
‘I didn’t study Latin, but it looked like it,’ Myriam offered, her eyes fixed on the parchment. ‘Yeshua ben Joseph. And it talks about Jesus in Rome,’ she said, more to herself than the others.
She moved to the second case and frowned. Sarah looked at her but couldn’t tell whether or not Myriam understood what was written there. For Sarah it was impossible. She couldn’t begin to unravel whatever was written there. It was not in the Roman alphabet, like the other one, but in a series of strange letters.
‘What is this? Ancient Hebrew?’ Myriam wanted to know. Her voice seemed worried.
‘Aramaic,’ Ben Isaac answered. He had remained behind, observing his wife.
‘Of course Aramaic.’ Myriam looked at the parchment in a different light. ‘I still don’t understand anything all this time.’
‘Aramaic is similar to ancient Hebrew,’ Ben Isaac explained.
‘Is this the gospel?’ Myriam asked in a halting voice.
Ben did not respond. Silence meant yes.
‘Walk over here next to me,’ Myriam said, more like an order than a request.
Ben approached her step by step, slowly, timidly, as if walking on shaky ground, until he was next to Myriam, who continued looking carefully at the gospel. For a few seconds no one said anything.
‘Read it to me,’ Myriam finally ordered.
‘Myriam,’ Ben sighed, as if it were a painful experience.
Myriam gave him a hard, pained look. ‘Read it.’
Ben hesitated. It troubled him to reveal something only he and a few others knew about. Myriam needed to know what the text said. If that piece of lamb or calfskin was worth more than a human life, than that of their son, their Ben, who had left her heart weeping in such a deep sorrow.
‘Uhh…’ Ben began.
Whether it was divine intervention or the coincidence of fate, a providential ringing of a cell phone interrupted Ben’s reading. It was his own.
‘Excuse me, dear,’ Ben said, moving away a little.
Sarah hugged Myriam. ‘Be calm. Everything is going to work out.’
Ben Isaac took out his phone. Some instruction from the kidnappers. Poor little Ben. He remembered the image of his son tied to a chair, tortured, bloody. He shivered. He looked at the screen and opened the message. He couldn’t wait to read it. His heart began to beat faster suddenly. How can this be possible? Who are these people?
He read the message again in the hope that he had read it wrong, but no. The text was the same.
If you want to see your son alive again, get rid of the journalist.
30
Circumstances.
All of life is an accumulation of unknown and imponderable factors, uncontrollable and totally unforeseen, that can be summarized in that simple and powerful word: circumstances.
Rarely do we think about them or even give them any value, but the fact of turning to the left instead of the right, planning a trip to a certain place and not another, deciding to take one course instead of another, all this, and much more, will completely change the circumstances of everything and everybody.
Rafael was not so given to thinking about circumstances. He evaluated them, whenever necessary, but lost no time thinking about the reason to be in a certain place at a certain time under certain conditions. Whenever he entered a place, he immediately studied all the possible exits. An occupational hazard that could not be called a defect, derived from years of dedication and involvement in dangerous missions in the name of God.
So it wasn’t natural for Rafael to still be troubled about Gunter, who might still be alive if Rafael hadn’t come to ask him for help in clarifying certain evidence of the crime that had sent Yaman Zafer to his Creator. Unlucky circumstances.
If he hadn’t gone to the Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, Gunter would still be alive, along with Maurice. If he hadn’t heard those words that Saint Ignatius had pronounced more than 450 years ago. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. If, if, if… Or if he were not in the habit of speculating about what could have been. Rafael was a man of action and reaction, not reflection. He had to turn the page on Gunter once and for all. Maybe that would only happen when he resolved the situation. He had to clear up that confusion.
‘Gavache has a big problem on his hands,’ Jacopo said, interrupting the priest’s thoughts.
The train was travelling at more than two hundred miles an hour toward the station of St. Pancras International, right in the heart of London. They were now passing through Her Majesty’s land, a few minutes from their destination.
‘Gavache? What about us?’ Rafael answered.
Jacopo let himself mull over the priest’s reply for a few moments while he looked down at the screen of his laptop.
‘How tragic,’ Jacopo lamented. ‘Why would the acolyte have done that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rafael answered. ‘No one kills or is killed for nothing. Something very serious was going to happen.’
‘The boy seemed desperate,’ Jacopo commented, remembering the scene, which was still vivid in his memory. ‘Are we going to help Gavache?’
‘Only insofar as he lets us help solve the murders,’ Rafael deliberated. ‘It’s all very confused.’
‘Yeah, it is. And this change of location to London is extremely strange.’ He typed an address into his computer. ‘William could have been more explicit.’
‘Sometimes it’s better not to know much,’ Rafael replied. ‘And that’s Cardinal William to you.’
Jacopo didn’t acknowledge the remark. He was absorbed in a search for information about the mysterious Ben Isaac.
The car was full of passengers. Executives finalizing presentations for some important meeting, Muslims talking on their cell phones as if they owned the world, tourists, married couples, criminals who resembled executives, lonely travelers, beautiful women, handsome men, some reading erudite books of French philosophy with dazzling or monotonous titles, others reading the best seller of the moment about sacred lies, assassins of popes, and Vatican secrets, crimes to solve, and bits of ancient legend.
‘We have a problem with the Jesuits,’ Rafael finally said.
‘You’re just figuring that out now?’ Jacopo’s sarcasm was obvious.
‘I’m not talking about unfounded suspicions,’ Rafael argued. ‘We saw last night there’s some secret they’re guarding with their lives.’
Jacopo comprehended what Rafael meant. ‘Do you think it’s a secret known by every member?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rafael replied, but Maurice had been the one to pull the trigger, which meant that the lower
