High above the crowds that were gathered along the water’s edge, from a window looking down on the whole of Rome from a unique, ivory height, Cardinal Giotto Forte stared out across the dazzling cityscape. It never ceased to thrill him, this strange world into which he had been drawn as he had ascended the ranks from seminarian to priest, to Monsignor serving in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and eventually to the rank of bishop and archbishop. When, some years later, the Pope had informed him that he’d been selected as a prince of the Church and would be incardinated the following March, Giotto’s chest had swelled with pride. Of course, pride was nominally a vice. He was supposed to aim for humility. But how could a man who, since he’d first decided that the desire within his teenage bones was a calling from God and dedicated his life to the Holy Mother Church, not feel a little pride at being handed the crimson fascia and zucchetto of a cardinal?
These days, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, he had one of the nicest offices in the Vatican, with one of the finest views in the whole of the city. It was a fact that had been confirmed for him by none other than the Supreme Pontiff himself, who on a visit to Cardinal Giotto’s offices, shortly after the latter’s investiture, had opened the patio doors and gazed out over the city with an audible intake of delighted breath. ‘My dear Giotto,’ the Pope had said, with all the cheerful humour in his voice for which the current pontiff was known, ‘this is the finest view in all of Rome. And that,’ he’d added, turning towards the Cardinal with a wink to his eye, ‘that’s infallible.’
Giotto Forte smiled at the memory. The Pope was a good man, humble yet strong, able to govern well without losing his humour or simplicity of character. Giotto could only hope that his own life of service to the Church would leave him equally as good a person.
He stepped away from the window, and with the motion his smile fell. The business of the afternoon had been far less inspiring than his memories.
He did not enjoy being reprimanded by his fellow members of the Curia. It was unpleasant, as well as worrying, whenever it happened to occur. A man could ascend to great heights, but the threshold back to the very bottom was one over which many men had fallen. Usually without much notice.
Should he really have informed them earlier about the dossier his office had received a fortnight ago? Had declining to bring it before them really been a mistake?
One of the responsibilities of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, apart from the obvious and well-known role it played in investigating individuals proposed for canonisation by the Church, was the gathering of information on the unusual and out-of-the-ordinary in Catholic life, both within Vatican City and across the Roman Catholic world, which tended to be viewed in conjunction with manifestations of particular holiness and came under the same scrutiny. In this role they were often thought of as the Church’s ‘miracle investigators’, and there was more mythology about their work than just about any other sector of Catholic administration.
Investigating miracles had an obvious public appeal, but Giotto’s teams did more than simply deal with the miraculous. It was his same office that responded to more or less any event or episode that strayed outside the customary flow of the Church’s life. If new congregations with a particular social agenda, following particularly notable leaders, began to appear – such as the rebellious ‘Liberation Theology’ devotees had done in South America in the fifties and sixties – it was Giotto’s offices that would first explore the trend, often in conjunction with his former colleagues in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. If rumours came in that, following a particularly ‘inspiring’ individual’s influence, a whole nation’s Catholics were converting to bagpipe Masses with jazz liturgical dance, it would be Giotto’s office, again, that would look into it. Not that a bagpipe Mass sounds so bad, the Cardinal murmured to himself. His Perugian name notwithstanding, he had Scottish ancestry on his mother’s side, and had always liked the pipes.
It was this scope to his work that had brought the file in question to Cardinal Giotto’s attention. A clay tablet had been unearthed a month ago. It had been of no interest to anyone in the Vatican, beyond perhaps a few scholars. It was written in Akkadian, which as best as Giotto could remember from seminary was a language of the Ancient Near East that had only tangential connections to Christian patrimony.
Yet something about the tablet’s find had disturbed him. Not the bulk of its text, which he had to admit he hadn’t read, but one passage in particular. At the front, the initial lines, which he’d sent away for translation, had predicted of the tablet’s discoverer that ‘his terrible death shall come most swiftly’.
And the man who had discovered it was dead. His death, moreover, had come swiftly, and it had been terrible.
An acidic bubble churned in Giotto Forte’s stomach. Outside, police sirens sounded, as they so often did in the city, though at this moment they seemed designed to emphasise his angst.
He’d been right to contact the Swiss Guard. Surely. The discovery of an artefact on Church property that was linked to a death – they had every right and reason to know about it.
But such a crime, if it even was a crime, hardly warranted the involvement of higher-ups in the Curia more broadly. Old things were regularly dug up in Rome. And people died, even gruesomely. Life went on.
Besides, how seriously could a tablet of old predictions and prophecies really be?
It was a question that had sounded far more compelling prior to this morning. Prior to the infallibly perfect view from his office changing.
Because after the prediction of its discoverer’s death, the first ‘plague’ the tablet described was that the river would flow red.
And that prediction, like the curse upon its finder, had inexplicably come true.