“The ship is ready. With one week to go before we depart, the crew has been sequestered aboard her. No one not already checked by Interpol and the Swiss Guards is allowed anywhere near her.”
“She’s provisioned, then?” asked Albani.
“With everything from champagne to dog food for the bomb-sniffing dogs that sail with us.”
“Dominic, you’ve done a remarkable job. This meeting is as much a testament to your organizational skills as to the need for world understanding.”
Peretti demurred. “I will gladly fade into the background if we can get just one person to stop killing in the name of religion.”
“We will, my friend,” the pope said with unwavering faith. “How about the items we are returning to the other faiths? Are they at the ship yet?”
“Everything has been put aboard the Sea Empress already. The response we’ve gotten has been tremendous, I might add.”
“I thought it would. John Paul’s Mea Culpa in March of 2000 was a first step. The church should have made such a formal apology to the world decades ago. Some of the atrocities carried out under our banner were unspeakable. The Inquisition, crusades, pogroms, and our failure to counter fascism are just the most notable. Saying we are sorry was not enough. I thought it necessary to give back something tangible and what better than the thousands of religious texts and artifacts belonging to other faiths that the Vatican has accumulated over the centuries? These items should have been returned long ago.”
“Has there been a final count of items we are returning?” Albani asked Peretti. “I need to know for my speech to the assembly.”
Cardinal Peretti rifled through one of the batches of papers he’d brought to the meeting. “Seven thousand eight hundred books, mostly Jewish texts and torahs that we hid during the war, Islamic writings that were captured during the Crusades, and Eastern Orthodox material that we’ve held on to since the Council of Chalcedon in 451.”
“That’s it?” The pope’s eyes widened at such a low figure.
“You gave us only six months to prepare.” It was fact, not complaint. “There are two million books in the Vatican library as well as 150,000 manuscripts. This doesn’t include the seventy-five kilometers of documents in the archives. We’ve only begun to comb through to find material that belongs to others.”
“I’m sorry.” Leo smiled. “Forgive me. What else is being given back to the proper owners?”
“Five hundred icons that belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church. They will decide what particular group gets what. There are also forty statues, about two hundred paintings and a great many religious pieces such as candlesticks, menorahs, ornamental crosses, and reliquaries. In all, we’ve shipped eleven containers to the docks in Belgium. I’ve already drawn up a manifest of what goes to whom, and we’ve kept some of the more symbolic pieces separate so you can give them out directly.”
“And you say that the world’s interest in this step is high?”
“Despite the best efforts of our press office, many journalists are focusing on the restoration more than the synod, which by the way we can’t seem to dissuade them from calling the Universal Convocation.”
“It is our synod, but it is also a universal gathering,” the pope countered. “I actually prefer the title they’ve bestowed on the gathering. A synod smacks of secrecy. What we want is an openness that has never been seen before. This meeting is not about religion. It is about people and how to get them to improve relations with each other.”
Albani, who would be leading the synod, picked up the thread. “Modernism is dividing the world into fanatics or secularists. Evangelism has become such a bitter battle that many religious leaders have lost sight of why we spread our various beliefs. Souls have become a commodity, no different from oil futures or stock shares.”
Suddenly the pope laughed aloud, and it took him a moment to recover. “I’m sorry, Albani. In my head I heard a radio announcer quoting religions like a stock ticker.” He deepened his voice. “In today’s trading, Catholicism is up two points, Judaism up a quarter, and Buddhism down an eighth.” He laughed again before the reality of his joke hit him. He became subdued once more. “We have to put an end to this way of thinking. I hate to think what will happen if we don’t. Politics and race breed fanaticism on their own. The world does not need its religious leaders adding fuel to such an incendiary mixture.”
MUNICH, GERMANY
Anika Klein spent her morning packing for her trip. She was leaving tomorrow, Monday, to spend a few days in Iceland before the rest of the team assembled for the ship to Greenland. Her domestic chores took her longer than expected but still she went for a run after lunch and returned to her apartment an hour and a half later.
After a long shower, she spent thirty grudging minutes in front of the mirror attending to beauty details she’d put off for too long. Her eyebrows were particularly bothersome since they hadn’t been tweezed in three months. The ritual left her eyes swimming in tears. She purposely kept her glossy black hair trimmed almost like a man’s, with short bangs and just a little length at her neck. A dollop of gel and a quick slash with a brush was all it took to tame it.
Her face was angular, with large, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a sharp chin. Her mouth was wide, luxurious. Except on dates, she’d learned to not wear lipstick because of the distraction her pout caused. Her ears were tiny, with a total of nine rings, five in one, and four in the other. Anika was thirty-six years old but had the style of someone half that age. And she could get away with it. Studying her reflection closely, she decided she could maintain the ruse for a few more years. Because she’d rarely allowed herself to tan, her skin, which would eventually give her away, had yet to show lines.
She gave her reflection a smile. It was only then that her face lost the intensity she showed to the outside world. Her smile made Anika look like a teenager. Her ex-husband had often compared her beauty to Audrey Hepburn’s. She’d done little to dissuade him of that opinion.
Normally she wore all black in a pseudogothic look that hadn’t yet gone out of fashion in Europe. For today, she was meeting someone for her grandfather, so she threw on a bright but modest skirt, a creamy silk blouse, and flats. She was comfortable enough with her height to wear heels only when necessary.
In the kitchen on her way out of her apartment, she grabbed a liter bottle of water from the fridge and a container of oily kalamata olives. She had chewing gum in her car for her breath later. Her purse was a small leather backpack. Anika tossed the water inside, fished the keys to her battered Volkswagen Golf from the bottom, and popped a handful of the rich olives into her mouth. Her car was in the garage under her building; it started after a mere five attempts.
The town of Ismaning was only about a half hour from her apartment, which worked well for her grandfather. Had this Otto Schroeder he’d asked her to speak with lived any farther from Munich, she would have postponed the interview until after her trip to Greenland. Opa Jacob had insisted that she visit him before heading north, but he treated everything about his work as a matter of urgency.