He sighed as he sat behind his desk, the one in the office with a view of St. Peter's Square. Bernini's gently curving colonnades usually gave him a sense of serenity. Today the view was marred by armed German soldiers standing in a crescent exactly one step outside the border of the Holy City. According to Kesselring, the German commander of Italy, they were there for the Pope's protection. Pius knew better; they were his jailers. Worse, they demanded the papers of every person leaving or entering the Vatican. And things got no better. General Wolff, SS commandant of Rome, had let slip, intentionally or not, the fact that kidnapping the Pope for the Vatican's riches was an option being considered in Berlin.
Pius cared little for his own safety, but the secret that had been unearthed below the Vatican was his responsibility. If the inscription was correct, its existence presented a painful dilemma. On one hand, it proved Jesus Christ had walked this earth, potentially silencing two thousand years of skeptics. On the other, the picture of Christ it painted was far different from the humble carpenter's son from Galilee.
He could perhaps eradicate the inscription and remove the relics that both validated the Gospels and made them liars. But where would he put such documents? Certainly not in the secret papal library that was anything but secret to the inner core of church scholarship. He would have to pray for guidance from above.
In the meantime, he must do nothing to force the Germans to act, do nothing although future generations could well revile his failure to condemn Hitler, the Nazis, and the barbarism Europe had not seen in a thousand years. The history of his papacy, even what would be perceived as his legacy, was irrelevant. The Church would survive him. It might not survive what was below the Vatican.
He had hoped he would be revered as the Pope who found the first contemporaneous documentation of Christ's existence. Now he was faced with being seen as collaborator with the Germans.
He had prayed such proof might be found by excavation, that Constantine had left some evidence, some relic of Our Lord, and those prayers had been cruelly answered. What was he to do? Did the Germans know exactly what had been found? If so, Pius despaired of the Church being able to keep the find, let alone its secret.
There was nothing he could do, really, other than pray for-guidance from above. Pray and 'do nothing to provoke the Germans into action.
An ornate Louis XVI clock beside the window indicated that there were a few minutes left before the scheduled meeting. The Pope picked up a stack of papers and began to refresh his memory with a chronology that would not have been conceivable even a year ago.
The Allies had landed in Sicily last July. A few days later, the first bombs had fallen on Rome, damaging a rail staging area in the St. Lorenzo District as well as a medical school and a church. Pius, the first Roman Pope in over two hundred years, had reacted with shock and anger, as had his fellow Romans.
He had proposed that Rome be made an open city, one neither defended nor attacked. After all, the Eternal City should be spared the destruction bombs had created in London and Berlin. It was the last time he had spoken out.
There was a gentle knock at the door. Without waiting for a reply, Fra Sebastiani, Pius's personal assistant, appeared with a tray bearing espresso and four small cups. He set the tray on a table in front of the desk and withdrew. Years of service had acquainted him with His Holiness's moods, and one look at the pontiff's face told him conversation was neither wanted nor needed.
Getting up, Pius filled a cup and returned to his desk and the dismal scenario in front of him.
After the bombing, Pius had spent hours of the night in the lower levels of the Vatican, praying for peace, for Rome. And he had prayed for… He closed his eyes. God had seen fit to grant the latter prayer, the cause of Pius's present distress.
Within days of the air raid, Mussolini had been arrested at his weekly visit with the king. Six weeks later, Eisenhower, the Allied Commander, had announced the capitulation of the Fascist government, and two days after that, the Allies landed on the Italian peninsula.
The Germans had occupied Rome, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Mussolini's government and the flight of King Victor Emanual. Shortly thereafter, over a thousand Jews had been arrested in the ghetto barely a mile from the Vatican. The only remaining true descendants of ancient Rome had been trucked off to the railway for deportation, many of the vehicles actually stopping long enough for guards and drivers to snap photographs of St. Peter's.
Pius had said nothing publicly. He could not. The fate of the Jews was deplorable, unthinkable, but to provoke the planned kidnapping and certain discovery of what the archaeologists had uncovered by opposition would be even worse.
Occasional bombing of Rome continued despite the prior Fascist boast that not even a swallow could fly over the city without permission. The Germans parked their tanks and trucks in the most historic piazzas, their anti-aircraft weapons on the roofs of many of the four hundred-plus churches. They also raided one of the Vatican's extraterritorial properties, a monastery, taking prisoner several Jews as well as men evading the orders for conscriptive labor.
Pius, outraged, sent a mild protest to the German ambassador. His reply was that the Italian Fascists had committed the sacrilege, a fiction the Pope was forced to swallow. He forbade the future use of Church properties for sanctuary to persons evading the Germans, although he suspected his orders were widely ignored.
In March, an SS police company was ambushed in the Via Rasella. Thirty-two Germans died along with two Italian civilians. Within twenty-four hours, by direct order of Hitler, three hundred twenty Italian men and boys were taken to the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome and shot, five at a time. The papal newspaper, widely read as the only non-Fascist source of news, prepared an editorial expressing outrage. Pius changed it to blame the resistance for their attack on the occupiers. It was a bitter cup from which to drink, but the Pope could not risk provocation of the Germans. Not now, not with…
Another knock at the door, this time the meeting. Cardinals Rossi, Pizzardo, and Canali, the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, the entity charged with the security of the Vatican. Pius extended his hand for the kissing of the papal ring. He was still unsure exactly where to begin, but at least he would no longer have to bear the secret alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nimes, France
L'Hopital de Nimes
A week earlier
She had no idea how long she had been here, but this morning was the first she had awakened aware that she was, in fact, here.
In the days (or weeks or months) previous, she had roused to the sound of her own screams more often than not, screams provoked by. the same, unchanging dream. It was so real, she thought she must have experienced it rather than dreamed it.
That, of course, was impossible.
The sun, a brilliant orange light in a cloudless sky, exploded, hurling her out into space like one of those jets of solar gas she remembered seeing somewhere. She seemed to hang motionless in space for a long time before she began to fall, her velocity increasing as she saw an inhospitable earth rushing up to meet her at an impossible speed.
That's when she began to scream, both in the dream and in real life.
Sometimes she thought maybe at least part of the dream was real, the falling to earth part.
Her earliest memory was of aching all over and being partially covered by bits of jagged rock that could have come from another planet, for all she knew. And she didn't know much. For instance, she had no idea where she had come from, what her name was, nor why she was lying on a hillside covered with stone fragments.