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 Settimio 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.