Angelina glowered at Ben, fury and confusion blending within her into a mixture she couldn’t grasp.
‘What is that supposed to mean, you were “forewarned”?’ Her tone telegraphed her incredulity. ‘These words you’ve written here – “river”, “darkness”, “fog”, “fire” – shit, Ben, they’re the key words from the tablet!’ Her pitch ascended as her anger unfolded. ‘There’s no way you could know that, Ben! Not unless you’ve seen a hell of a lot more of this tablet than you let on before!’ With her free hand she reached down and swiped up one of the printouts she’d made downstairs, shaking it accusingly at him.
Ben’s face looked as if it might burst in a befuddled mixture of surprise, shame, anxiety and shock. He walked slowly to the centre of the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Until you and I were in the bunker a few hours ago, I’d only ever seen the first four lines, just as I said when we were with the Guards.’
‘Bullshit!’ Angelina shot back. ‘These words, these phrases, they’re not contained in the opening. They’re spaced out through the contents.’
‘I told you, I was—’
‘Yes, forewarned! I don’t buy it, Ben. You’ve either seen this text before, and for some reason you’re hiding that fact from me, or you were involved in . . . in . . .’
‘Angelina—’
‘In producing it.’ Her features widened as the accusation emerged from her throat, the full meaning of her own words only gradually occurring to her. ‘Of course,’ she finally added, sinking back down into the swivel chair before the desk, her voice suddenly barely more than a whisper, ‘Cardinal Forte and Major Heinrich said they suspected the tablet could have been forged. My God, Ben, you?’ Her eyes were bewildered orbs as they peered deep into him. ‘Forging ancient artefacts?’
‘Angelina, I’m—’
‘No, no, of course,’ she said, speaking to herself as her gaze wandered into the distance, ‘it makes sense. Who else could forge a text in Akkadian, apart from an Akkadian scholar?’ Her eyes snapped back to his, fierce with the sudden awareness of betrayal. The Swiss Guard had it right from the first. ‘As was pointed out to us today, Ben, there are only two of us in Italy.’
‘Angelina, I haven’t forged anything!’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Her words were flat, emotionless. ‘It’s the only explanation.’
‘You seem to be forgetting, I was shot at today, too!’
It was the one thing Ben could have said that could truly give Angelina pause. She sat silent, her face still accusing, but her features involuntarily softened as she considered what it meant.
He has a point. Had it not been for Angelina yanking him out of the way of one shot in particular, Ben wouldn’t be here to protest his innocence.
‘Then how, Ben,’ she asked, a pleading now ripping through her voice, ‘how can you explain knowing what that tablet says, if you aren’t somehow caught up in it?’
Ben rubbed his palms over his terrycloth-covered thighs. His nervousness was ripe.
‘There’s something you don’t know about me,’ he finally confessed.
‘Of that I’m bloody well certain!’ Angelina snorted. Ben held up an open palm, his eyes pinched closed, signalling he wanted her to keep silent until he could get the truth off his chest.
‘You know about my academic life,’ he continued, ‘my scholarship, the sorts of things one professor learns about another.’
She said nothing. Of course she knew Ben’s background. It was nothing short of professional idiocy to walk into an interview without knowing personal data on the people who would be interviewing you, and Angelina had researched every member of the Vatican Secret Archives’ staff before she’d gone in for her disappointing interview eighteen months earlier.
‘But there’s more to me than just a fixation on history and antiquity,’ Ben said. ‘I love it, I really do. But I’m also . . . I’m also . . .’
Anticipation of how Ben might finish the sentence was an acid churning at Angelina’s insides. A crook? A fraud? Christ, what could it be? A committed, practised liar?
The only words Angelina truly did not expect were those that next came out of Ben’s mouth.
‘I’m also a . . . deeply religious man.’
She stared at him in utter disbelief. The wind of her accusations had gone from Angelina’s proverbial sails, replaced by sheer confusion.
‘You’re a religious man.’ She repeated the words slowly. Then, with increased vigour, ‘What the bloody hell has that got to do with anything?’
‘It has everything to do with our present circumstances,’ Ben answered. He firmed up his posture, attempting to bring a backbone of resolve into the discussion. ‘If you’ll let me explain, I’ll tell you how.’
Angelina took the subtle reprimand and said nothing more.
‘I grew up religious,’ Ben continued, what sounded like a familiar story taking up its first refrains, ‘a good Catholic, like just about everyone else in this country. And I went to church, just like everyone else. Mass on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. Confirmation, first Holy Communion, Sunday school. All the norms.’
Angelina noticed that the last word, ‘norms’, bore a tinge of resentment along with it.
‘For my parents, this was normal, as for their parents it had been normal. And as for me, well, it became just that. Normal.’ The resentment again. ‘And nothing more.’
‘Ben, I don’t see what this has to do with—’
‘But it never really did it for me,’ he continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘The scripted services, aesthetically beautiful as they were. The formalised ritual. The career clerics looking for the next leg up the religiously corporate ladder.’
Angelina watched as Ben’s face flushed with the memories. This was clearly territory that touched him deeply, and the pain was visible in his eyes.
‘By the time I’d found my way into the academic world, wonderfully detached from the nonsense of modern life, I’d grown completely disillusioned with it – with my religious background. I stopped going to Mass. I stopped saying my prayers, forgot about my rosary. And it didn’t bother me, leaving those things behind. They were never really . . . me.’ He hesitated, gazing not so much at Angelina as through her.
‘But something else gradually overtook me. Something I hadn’t been expecting. A longing. A desire, somewhere inside of me. I can’t explain it, Angelina. A desire for something more. God, I loved my work – I still do. It drives me. But as much as I gave myself to it, as much as I ascended through one scholarly circle to the next, I still felt this emptiness inside.’
An unease began to grow in Angelina’s stomach. There was an emotional intimacy to Ben’s self-confessed religiosity that went beyond stolen glances of bare flesh and muscle. He was laying open his interior world. It felt – uncomfortable.
But it was also beginning to grow redolent of so much religious-speak she’d heard before. Heard, and never liked.
‘I was craving something,’ Ben continued, ‘even though I wasn’t sure what it was. Something that would breathe a little life into me. And then, one afternoon,’ his posture opened up as Ben’s tone suddenly shifted, ‘I was walking through the Quartiere Prenestino-Labicano and I chanced upon an unassuming red-brick building. I don’t know what drew me in. It could only have been divine providence.’
Angelina groaned, failing to keep her innate revulsion from showing. Divine providence. It was a phrase she didn’t expect and didn’t want to hear from a respected academic.
‘I walked into the Church of St Paul of the Cross that day, and my whole world changed.’ Ben’s features brightened with the memory. ‘I’d never heard of the Catholic Charismatic Movement, never even really known about charismatic movements at all except by hearsay, but that afternoon I found a faith utterly unlike anything I’d experienced before.’
It was Angelina’s turn to straighten her posture, suddenly having more to focus on than just generic religious sentiment.
‘The Church of St Paul of the Cross?’
Ben nodded, his features still beaming, but Angelina’s stomach squeezed again. A memory surfaced quickly, and it set her on edge.
The video she’d partially watched online downstairs, of the zealous young man reciting prophecy into a camera and predicting that plagues would befall the city – he’d been affiliated with the Charismatic Catholic Church of St Paul of the Cross. She’d only heard of them a few times before – a Pentecostal-style subset of Catholicism that believed in personal inspiration, charismatic revival and all sorts of other things Angelina couldn’t stomach. They’d never been much liked by mainstream Catholics, either; and that, at least, Angelina could understand.
‘Ben, this is absurdity. That group is insane!’
He shook his head, as if accustomed to this response to the nature of his faith.
‘Reality can appear insane to those who don’t understand it,’ he answered. ‘Our church is unusual, I’ll give you that. Especially in this day and age, and in this context.’ He motioned around them, signalling beyond the hotel walls to the ancient religious formality of the city in which they lived. ‘But what I discovered there, was a religion that is alive, Angelina. Not dead words, but a living faith.’
‘Enough, Ben!’ She cut him off in frustration. ‘I know the spiel. I’ve heard it from a hundred religious fanatics before.’
‘You’re not a believer, then, I take it?’ The question was asked without any hint of accusation.
‘I’m a firm believer in sanity over nonsense,’ Angelina answered. She normally wasn’t so hostile to those who believed in one religion or another, was usually more objective and reserved, but at this moment her emotions were frayed. ‘I’m a believer in what can actually be known, as opposed to what must be blindly believed.’
Ben stared into her. ‘Some things can be known that go beyond what you might be able to explain.’
Angelina shook her head. ‘This group, Ben . . . Charisma? Prophecy? I expected more of you. You’re a scholar, a rational man! You know enough about history to know that religions come and go with the cultures that invent them – hardly someone I’d have expected to be an adherent to a faith that spoon-feeds you “revelations” and tells you you can talk to God.’
‘It isn’t like that,’ he answered. ‘But . . .’ His voice dropped off.
‘But what?’
‘Because of everything that’s happening, it’s important that you understand what it is, even if you don’t accept it.’
There was no chance of Angelina accepting anything that approximated what she knew of charismatic Christianity, but she wanted to know how this group was related to the tablet and the series of circumstances overtaking them.
‘I’m not the right person to explain,’ Ben finally added. ‘It’s better that you see for yourself.’ Then, looking straight into her eyes, ‘It’s better that you talk to Father Alberto.’
Their conversation went on for a further twenty minutes before they reached a point where Angelina had no more questions that Ben could answer sufficiently, and he had no more to share than he felt he could without her seeing for herself the church to which he belonged, and learning how it was connected to the prophecies befalling them all.
Angelina, worn out and dispirited by the whole conversation, agreed to go and meet the priest at the head of Ben’s church. Both of them, however, knew they couldn’t make a move until morning came. The church was closed, transit at night was slow, and if nothing else their clothes wouldn’t be ready before dawn, and travelling through the city in hotel bathrobes was hardly a realistic option.
Beyond that, they were both exhausted. The day had more than depleted even their adrenaline-spiked energy reserves, and their conversation had drained their emotions. They needed rest, and they were in the right place to get it.
‘I’ll take the right side of the bed, if you don’t mind,’ Angelina announced once they’d decided it was time to stop talking and sleep. She lifted up the thick duvet and slid underneath. Ben once again looked uncomfortable with the sleeping arrangement, but exhaustion beat down any protests. Saying nothing, he slipped beneath the covers of the other side of the bed. They both continued to wear the thick bathrobes, neither having any other options.
And so they lay, in a hotel room neither of them could afford, robed beneath the covers at the conclusion of a day of gunfire, kidnap and plagues, hoping that sleep would come and tomorrow would bring something different.