“Yes. I see.”
Sharon’s voice was sharp. “Do you? Do you see all the consequences?” Her eyes were both hard and desperate. “The assassins wouldn’t just come for him, or you: they’d come for all of us. And I’m not sure we have enough forces to protect us all, even if we’re bunkered in behind these walls.
“But if your uncle decides to go on a walkabout, I’d have to split those already insufficient forces. One part would remain on defense here until we could be safely extracted, while another would travel with your uncle as bodyguards and escorts. But if we split our forces that way, I’m pretty we’re just enabling the assassins to kill both groups, not just one. On the other hand, how can I not send an escort with your uncle? I can’t let a pope just wander out my front door without providing any help other than a full canteen and our best wishes.”
Barberini frowned. “Yes, that is a thorny problem indeed.”
Ruy leaned forward. “And will you help us with it, Your Eminence? That we might know what plans we need to make in order to save as many of our lives as possible?”
Barberini thought: there would be no use approaching the topic obliquely with his uncle. The pope was too shrewd and subtle not to immediately detect the real reason behind such an inquiry. So it would have to be made directly, and Urban VIII might be annoyed that Antonio was trying to use their familial bond to access what was, currently, privileged information. But given what was at stake, that was just too bad; the time had finally come for him to Vitelleschi strode into the room. He nodded to the three of them; if he detected anything conspiratorial in their close huddle, he gave no indications of it. As the others filed in behind the father-general, he raised his hands in the fashion they had all come to recognize as the call to order. “Are we gathered, then?”
“We are all here, Father-General,” replied Sharon, sitting down.
“Excellent. Then we shall begin…”
Mario Bianchi worked the handle of the flintlock pistol nervously in his palm, earning a sharp glance from the Marine corporal who had furnished him with the weapon. Mario crept to the edge of the shallow hilltop pit and looked into the darkness. “Corporal, I am worried about Private Cavendish. He has been gone for-”
“Hsst. Quiet, now, Bianchi. It takes a man a minute or two to investigate night sounds. But I think I hear him coming back, just there on our flank.”
The corporal, who had turned to listen more closely, jerked, his head seemingly slapped sideways. As the larger man fell, Mario saw the fletching of a cross-bow bolt protruding from his head only an inch above his ear.
Mario gasped, scuttled backward; a simple porter like his father before him, he had no experience, no training, that would make his first reaction anything other than one of abject terror.
And so his rapid recoil from the site of the corporal’s death brought him handily within the descending loop of Linguanti’s garrote.
Wadding made his final bow and took his seat. Ruy and Sharon exchanged long glances; the Irishman had merely recapped his arguments, but that had been disturbing enough. “You’re right,” she said. “He didn’t score any knockouts, but he might win on points.”
Ruy raised an eyebrow at her boxing metaphor. “I think I understand your idiom, my heart. However, what I found most distressing was Cardinal Mazzare’s silence.”
Sharon nodded. Yeah, why didn’t Larry say anything? Granted, the Irishman hadn’t spun any new rhetorical wheels, but maybe he had enough traction with the old ones to Larry Mazzare rose. As if he had heard her silent questions, he answered them: “I suspect that everyone in this room-and perhaps Cardinal Wadding most of all-must have wondered at my silence this past half hour. Partly, I did not want to interrupt my colleague unless he raised a new issue-but he did not. However, I also did not want to tax my audience, knowing that I would finish on a note as new and provocative as Cardinal Waddings’ were old and familiar.”
Ruy and Sharon exchanged raised-eyebrow looks. “Uh oh,” she whispered, “he’s doing it again: playing for all the marbles.”
Ruy nodded. “Yes; he is indeed swinging for the ramparts.”
“Fences,” corrected Sharon. “He’s swinging for the fences.”
“Did I not just say so?”
“No, you said ‘ramparts.’”
“Oh, let us not quibble over that. Surely, mine is the superior phrasing: how can there be any courage, any heroism, in swinging at a fence?”
“Well, why is it heroism when one of your countrymen charges at a windmill?”
“Dearest, that is entirely different! In that situation-”
“Hush, Ruy: listen.”
Mazzare’s voice was very low as he began. “I have been thinking about grace, Your Eminences, about living in a Christ-like manner, as our Savior exhorts us to do. I have also been giving much thought to Cardinal Wadding’s recounting of the ways in which possibly- possibly — the Church could be compromised if it accepts the aid of Gustav Adolf, whether directly or by proxy. And it is well that we have considered this, for if my colleague’s reservations were wholly without merit, they would have been dismissed by now.”
Barberini stopped writing and looked up, eyes wide. Vitelleschi’s eyebrows had lowered. One of the pope’s had risen. Only Wadding showed no response-other than a sudden rigidity in his unchanged posture and expression. Sharon studied him more closely: was the former Franciscan merely extremely attentive, or did she detect a hint of anxiety, as well?
“But, then,” continued Mazzare, “I wondered: if we must follow Christ’s example to attain grace, then must we not also consider the possibility that rejecting the aid of the USE might be an equal, or even greater, departure from behaving in a Christ-like manner?”
For the first time in the proceedings, a hint of a frown appeared on Urban’s face.
“As I promised at the outset,” said Mazzare with a smile, “I am suggesting a new-and provocative- perspective. But it comes to us from the life of Christ, himself. Specifically, it arises from his parable of the Good Samaritan.”
Mazzare’s voice seemed to expand. “We all know the parable: of a man-a Jew-fallen among thieves and left for dead. And we know of the priest who passed him by, and then the official of the temple who also ignored him, even though the stricken man was of their own faith. Instead, the person who stopped to help this dying Jew, the person who bound his wounds and tended to him at his own expense, was his enemy: he was a Samaritan, a group which was ‘hated by the Jews.’”
“You would put Christ in the role of a beaten Jew who had no power to resist?” Wadding’s voice had a slight edge in it.
“Well, that was not my point, Your Eminence, but yes, why not? What was Christ, as he limped to Golgotha, scourged and bent beneath the cross, but a beaten Jew who could not resist? The constraints upon his action were not those of physical limitation, of course, but of the requisite fulfillment of prophesy. But that difference is hardly significant, I think.”
Vitelleschi’s beard seemed to quiver in either anger or eagerness: Sharon could not tell which. “Well, if the parallel between the Church and the beaten Jew was not your primary point, Cardinal Mazzare, then please make your point clear to us all.”
“I shall, Father-General. My point is this: I began reflecting upon this parable and asking, so who acted with grace? The Samaritan. And how did he show his grace? By choosing to help his foe.
“But then I saw that there was another, subtler lesson to be found in the parable, a lesson about the extraordinary grace of God himself. For it was by God’s will that the beaten Jew came to be lying on the road in the path of the Samaritan, who then had a choice: to act in a Christ-like manner or not. If it were not for God placing that beaten enemy in the Samaritan’s path, he would have had no chance to tangibly overcome the pettinesses, the selfishnesses, the fears that reside in all of us. Because of God, the Samaritan had the opportunity to exercise and embody the grace to which we followers of Christ aspire.”
Mazzare paused, looked at all of his auditors. “So tell me: is it not hubris-the sin of pride-to declare that a Catholic priest, a church, even a pontiff may only play the part of the Good Samaritan, but never the beaten Jew? If we refuse to acknowledge that, just like the beaten Jew and the scourged Christ, we might benefit from the charity of others, we are refusing to embrace the humility that Christ himself displayed. And in so doing, we deprive other men of the possibility of demonstrating their grace, by refusing to let them help us even as the Good Samaritan helped the Jew who despised him.”
