Septimania Read online

  “There is a certain urgency,” Settimio said. “For you and for many others. Prego.” And with that prego, both Settimio and the man in the sunglasses touched Malory on the elbows—lightly, but with an electricity that began to move Malory’s feet down the corridor.

  “One moment,” Malory shook himself loose and turned back to Louiza’s door. This time it was Tibor who stopped him with a gentle palm to the shoulder.

  “Go,” Tibor said.

  “Let me speak with the doctor.” Malory eased Tibor’s hand away and stepped towards the door. Tibor wouldn’t be budged.

  “I’ll wait here and look after your Louiza. Come later, when you’re finished with your business.” The palm again on Malory’s shoulder. Comfort and assurance. “We will celebrate.”

  “We must hurry,” Settimio said, his childlike eyes icing into something barely warmer than insistence. “The Driver will take you. I will follow.”

  “The Driver? Where?” Malory said again. “I really have only five minutes. Ten minutes maximum.” But Malory felt his feet begin to jog down the corridor, down the staircase with a sense of urgency, the two Italians at his elbows, the confidence of Tibor behind him. Louiza was in good hands—a doctor, a hospital, a new Rumanian friend who owed Malory his life. Perhaps the bank was closing. Perhaps there were papers that he needed to sign by the end of the day. Malory’s Cambridge had effectively been sealed by the death of Mrs. Emery and the dismissal from Trinity College. Whatever Settimio was leading him to in Rome was, of necessity, the key to new beginnings with Louiza and their new baby. Louiza would understand. He would hurry. Determination, Malory whispered to himself. Courage.

  At the entrance to the hospital, the tall man helped Malory straddle the passenger seat of a Vespa. Settimio turned to another motorino by the fountain.

  “I’m sorry,” Malory said. “You must tell me where we’re going. What is so important at this very moment?”

  “All shall be clear,” Settimio said, as he steadied Malory’s elbow on the narrow cushion behind the Driver. “Prepare yourself”—and Settimio started up his own Vespa—“prepare yourself to become a king.”

  King? King! Had he heard Settimio correctly? He wanted to shout, Wait! Or, What! But the Vespa took off beneath him, over the bridge and onto the Lungotevere, leaving all courage and most of his breath behind. King? Organ tuner, yes. Possible father, possibly. But King? Hadn’t he told this man, this Settimio that he only had a few minutes to spare? What had induced him to take Settimio’s hand, to follow these men and leave Louiza when she was on the verge of giving birth? What had persuaded him to climb onto the Driver’s Vespa? What did Malory know of Vespas, how to stop a Vespa, how to jump off a Vespa? What did Malory know of the streets of Rome? What could Malory know about the one-way systems of the future that, in any case, would do little to assuage the panic of any hapless passenger on the back of a motorino speeding down the narrow cobblestones of the Lungaretta, veering off to the right just before the peeling, neglected mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere, past the pasticcerie of the Via del Moro and the smells of lunches just finished and the sounds of dishes drying almost drowned out by the unmuffled hum and denatured smell of the engine? How could Malory know that Settimio, riding ahead of them on an identical machine, was no lunatic but merely serving the function of regal processions in centuries past, going back to the times of Renaissance princes, medieval warlords, Roman emperors, and consuls before them, who first built the streets leading from the Tevere to higher ground, who haggled and bartered and even killed in order to out-dazzle their neighbors with the splendor of the processions that brought them from this place to that. How was Malory to know that Settimio and the Driver and their matched Vespas were the economical evolution of the equine consorts of yore? Indeed, at the speed of the Vespas, which slalomed past the mothers with prams and grandmothers with canes and dodged the traffic spewing from the tunnel beneath the Gianicolo like stuntmen, at such a speed, how was Malory to identify this breakneck, hair-raising, flesh-crawling dash as anything other than the final lap of the race of his own life? How could he have possibly thought that these men, these Italians who had introduced themselves into Malory’s universe only a few minutes before and then motorinoed him off in the opposite direction from where he wanted to be, were leading him to the modest bank account that he hoped might finance his new beginnings? He had whispered prayers over the past few months, usually upon waking and again at that hopeful moment of dusk when just one more ray of sunshine might bring Louiza’s bright face into his vision before darkness fell—prayers that his quest for his Louiza might quickly be done so that he might embark on the project of the rest of unconscious mankind: life.

  Life. Malory wanted life, a life, with the love of a real woman. He had never suspected it would require a gruesome death at the intersection of a speeding Vespa and a piece of Renaissance masonry. Malory saw nothing of St. Peter’s Dome, as the Driver turned the Vespa into the great piazza, nothing of the massive saints waving their stony salutes from atop Bernini’s arcade, nothing of the long avenue of the Via della Conciliazione stretching down to his left. But he knew enough to pray. Malory prayed as they sped past the harlequinade of the Swiss Guard, through the portcullised arch of the Papal Palace. Malory prayed with the last breath in the bellows of his lungs, merely to live. And with that prayer, the Vespa came to a halt at a small wooden door where, already parked and groomed, Settimio stood, ready to escort him inside the Vatican.

  “Bloody hell!” said Malory, who had been known to swear on very few occasions.

  “Mio Principe,” said Settimio, steadying Malory’s elbow as he unwrapped his thighs from the clammy vinyl of the Vespa. The Driver opened the jump box of the motorino and withdrew a small whisk broom and gave Malory a quick brush to remove the most obvious layer of dust. “I’m afraid we haven’t time for much more,” Settimio added. “But you shouldn’t worry, my lord. They don’t stand on ceremony.”

  “Who don’t?” was the question Malory thought to ask, but only much later. Two Swiss Guards presented themselves to Malory with the same hand to the heart and bend to the knee with which Settimio and the Driver had greeted him.

  “No need for concern,” Settimio said. “I shall accompany as far as possible.”

  “Where?” Malory asked. But as his escort moved forward and Malory walked with Settimio half a step back and to the starboard side, Malory’s wit and geography guessed he was somewhere between St. Peter’s and the museums in the few acres of the Vatican City. The corridors down which he trotted within his peculiar committee were lined with plaques and bas-reliefs of crossed-keys and pontifical hats and the kind of adornments that he reckoned stood in for the family snaps and framed posters of Hay Wains in the households of normal families.

  Another rank of the Swiss Guards appeared at the base of a corniced staircase of foot-polished marble, silent, still, eyes forward, except for a single Alpine novice who seemed as curious about Malory as Malory was about the procession and its destination.

  “Settimio?” Malory asked.

  “You look splendid, mio Principe.” Settimio’s answer—although not to any questions at the top of Malory’s mind—cauterized Malory’s anxiety. He would be fine. Louiza would be fine. Settimio—Malory turned and smiled at Settimio. Settimio he could trust. This must be one of the governmental buildings, he thought. What had Antonella said about the Vatican bank? Perhaps this is Immigration and I’m entitled to a Vatican passport as part of my inheritance, which would be cool, but why the rush? And maybe, Malory thought, part of my grandmother’s will provides for servants, and these men, Settimio and this Driver, are my employees. And yet, in that case, shouldn’t I be the one giving them orders, not vice versa? Shouldn’t I be the one telling them to take me back to Louiza, perhaps with a Swiss Guard or two to help me question the red-haired American obstetrician, or whoever he was?

  At the top of the staircase, the Guard turned right and then left with the Windsor-knotted Set
timio and corduroyed Malory in their midst. They marched through a chamber of battle scenes before turning left past burning Troy and a host of other Raphaels. Malory stared up at The School of Athens. There were Aristotle and Plato out for a stroll, there was hemlock-swilling Socrates lying on the stairs and next to him a bewigged friend—could that be Newton? Isaac Newton popping up again today, this time in a Raphael painted over a hundred years before Newton’s birth? A second look was impossible. The phalanx moved forward into another corridor and then stopped. A door opened. The Swiss Guard stood aside.

  “In bocca al lupo,” Settimio said, patting Malory—with the proper fraction of respect—on the shoulders and propelling him across a threshold into the beginning of an explanation.

  There were a hundred of them, men. And Malory knew immediately—it was as impossible not to know as it was impossible to believe—from their scarlet capes and scarlet caps and generally ancient composures, that they were cardinals, well before he looked up at the shadowy figures on the ceiling and realized he was in the Sistine Chapel. There was a moment of awe approaching tranquility—a moment, looking back, that Malory wished he could have prolonged into a minute, an hour, a lifetime of gawking. There was a moment when the splendor of the caps and capes and frescoes and marble made him feel immaculately invisible, shielded and safe in a bottomless curiosity, alone with his corduroy jacket and Kit Bag in the Sistine Chapel without busloads of tourists but with a hundred-odd scarlet-beanied tour guides, each of whom Malory was sure had his own peculiar but culturally stimulating Unified Field Theory, his own cardinal interpretation of the origins of the universe. Instead, Malory felt immediately and literally drenched in a deluge of biblical embarrassment. It was worse than his first day of school. It was worse than his first mass, his first organ concert, and far worse than his first, very recent love-making. It wasn’t that Malory was embarrassed by his lack of familiarity with the frescoes that lined the walls—the story of Moses on one side, the story of Jesus on the other, and the Last Judgment behind him. He had been brought up believing that Moses and Jonah, whose huge portrait peered down on him from the ceiling, were merely Jesus in disguise—that the Savior was waiting until just the right moment to reveal himself. This, after all, was the bread and butter of the sermons he had sat through for decades as he waited to play the organ. No, the embarrassment was at the cardinals. These are cardinals, Malory thought. These are the cardinals. The College of Cardinals, all the cardinals of the world. And they are all looking at me, sweaty and unbathed, smelling of Dominicans and Louiza and hospital, as if they’d been waiting for me, as if they are waiting for me, waiting for me to do something.

  And then the thought entered his head, he didn’t know how, although in the embarrassment of the moment he might have readily voted for divine intervention—the organ! The organ! The organ, of course! Fra Mario had said—what was it?—Forse oggi. Forse oggi, perhaps today. Today the cardinals were going to make the decision, perhaps they had already done so. Today they were going to choose the next pope, and they couldn’t do so—how could they?—without a freshly-tuned organ on which to proclaim their Hosannas and Alleluias. There is a certain urgency, Settimio had said. Little wonder. Forget this business of his grandmother’s inheritance. He was who he was, what he always had been—if not the best, well then, a damned-fine organ tuner. Word had got round, through Fra Mario and Settimio, that he was in town. The Vatican network moved in strange ways, and presto here he was and, lucky for them, he had his Universal Organ Tuner in his pocket, fresh from its triumphal rescue of Tibor. He looked up—the Last Judgment loomed before him. And on the ceiling above, the finger of God touched the finger of Adam just as he had touched that tiny finger through the translucent belly of Louiza an hour before. Malory pulled his Kit Bag snug around his shoulder and turned to look for the organ.

  At the time, he had no idea what that turn meant. He had no idea that the turn, far from being innocent, was the decisive moment in the oggi that Fra Mario had mentioned only a few hours earlier. It was only later that Malory discovered that a key part of his inheritance, along with Settimio and the Driver and the Chapbook with Newton’s declaration of his discovery of the One True Rule, was the rank of cardinal. It was only later that Malory discovered that the honor came with neither church nor notoriety, but with the right to wear the same scarlet cap and cape, although since the title was shrouded in secrecy, Malory was only allowed to wear them in the privacy of his own room and not even in the presence of Settimio or the Driver.

  Much more importantly, Malory had inherited the unique power to cast the deciding vote in a deadlocked conclave. After seven ballots, the papal conclave was still unable to decide on a successor to poor John Paul I. They had called Settimio. Settimio had brought Malory. And Malory’s turn, the turn of the unknowing, untutored Secret Cardinal towards what was, in fact, a perfectly tuned organ, would in the future be known as The Turn and become enshrined in legend and archive of Vatican history. As he turned, Malory found himself looking into the sympathetic face of the Polish cardinal, who had the great good fortune to be standing between Malory and the organ. Malory’s turn, his pivot, his awkward pirouette, his random ecclesiastical spin-the-bottle, chose this Polish Cardinal Wojtyla as the new Bishop of Rome, the soon-to-be John Paul II, as neatly as Louiza had found the Pip.

  Such knowledge only came to Malory gradually. His official work done, Malory’s innocent walk to the organ was gently deflected towards a door in the back of the chapel. Another set of arms, these ones clad in the somber shade of deepest black of the Vatican functionaries, now put in motion the machinery designed to trumpet the announcement of the new pope to the visible world. They led Malory down a marble passageway and around to an ancient lift. Malory stepped forward into the cage and once again turned to find the chosen cardinal, the smiling Pole. The rest of the old men, the cardinals, stayed behind, or, as Malory was to discover later, went directly to the balcony of the basilica overlooking the piazza to await their new pastor.

  The Pole smiled. Malory smiled back but looked over his shoulder, searching for Settimio. Alone, the two men descended through a hole in the floor that gradually became the hole in a cupola of another chapel. The elevator stopped. Another black-clad functionary opened the gate. Together, still smiling, Malory and the Pole walked from the elevator. He knew where he was, he recognized this statue, this Michelangelo, knew this mother, this boy, this dead child cradled in his mother’s arms. He stood for a moment, stripped hopeless with love and memory. The memory of Louiza, the warmth of her body against his as he dashed from basilica to hospital, mixed with a longing for another lap. He imagined a return to a lap and a mother that he must, once upon a time, have known, a beginning when there was no difference between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundane and the miraculous. Malory’s longing for this original enlapment pierced him so thoroughly that he could have wished for death if death were the requirement for such a peace.

  But the functionaries had other plans for him. Two of them brought a cape, a green cape in a color that reminded Malory of that childhood garden in the South of France. Two others reached to remove his corduroy jacket and his Kit Bag. But Malory was not going to be parted from the Pip again and tugged back. It was the struggle of a second. But in that struggle, it wasn’t the Pip, but the book, the Newton Chapbook, the strange diary that Malory had received from his grandmother on that March afternoon in the second pew of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey, that flew from the Kit Bag into the hands of the smiling Pole.

  Gently, the Pole examined the book. Malory wondered what the Pole made of what he read—wondered whether he read Italian? Whether he read English? Did he know enough maths, enough physics, did he know enough history and even religion to realize the importance of Newton’s declaration:

  I have found the One True Rule that guides Mathematics, the One True Rule that guides Science, that guides the Universe. I have found the One True Rule. But the Rule is too weighty to fit on on
e page of this Chapbook.

  Gently the Pole led Malory, in green cape and hiking boots, from the Pietà into the center of the nave of the basilica. And gently the Pole placed one of Malory’s palms upon the Newton Chapbook and raised the other.

  “I’m afraid,” Malory whispered to the Pole.

  “I too,” the Cardinal said. “I am also afraid.”

  “I’m afraid,” Malory continued. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” The Cardinal smiled. Malory felt a moment of calm. “I hope that if I make a mistake, you will correct me.”

  The Polish Cardinal thought for a moment. And then, with a gentle touch on the shoulder, he pressed Malory down onto his knees, onto a purple stone set into the floor of the basilica, into the center of a perfect circle of porphyry.

  It was only later that Malory discovered that the perfect circle of porphyry just inside the entrance to St. Peter’s was the very stone on which, nearly twelve hundred years before, his great-great ancestor, Charlemagne, had knelt before Pope Leo III. It was only later that Malory learned all the various titles that his inheritance, leading from his grandmother back to Charlemagne, and through Charlemagne’s son-in-law back to King David himself, had brought upon him, including Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Jews, and King of Septimania. For now, as he listened to the Polish Cardinal, the man whom he, by his innocent Turn, had crowned Pope John Paul II, as he repeated oaths in several unintelligible languages, one hand on the Chapbook and the other in the air, Malory merely felt that this extraordinary day must, in some way, be a prelude to a new life, with Louiza and her—could it really be their?—baby. Somewhere, he hoped, if not in the vastness of St. Peter’s or the howl of the crowd waiting in the piazza, his mother, his grandmother, and Sir Isaac were watching him.

  “Mazel tov,” the Polish Cardinal said, raising Malory up and kissing him on both cheeks.