The Last Cato Read online

  “Let’s keep going, Ottavia.”

  The last Cato, curiously number LXXVII on the list, began his chronicle with a beautiful prayer of thanks: The brotherhood had rescued the True Cross in 1219.

  “They got it back!” I exclaimed, delighted. I’d completely forgotten that the Staurofilakes were the bad guys.

  “That was obvious, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I don’t know why…,” I responded, offended.

  “Well, because the True Cross disappeared! Or don’t you remember history? No one ever found out what became of it.”

  Farag was right, of course. The truth is I was exhausted; my brain seemed to be nothing but neuron juice. The True Cross mysteriously disappeared between the Fifth and the last Crusade, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Cato LXXVII narrated it, of course, from a very different point of view. According to him, the emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II, besieged the port of Damietta, in the Nile Delta. Sultan al-Kamil offered to give back the True Cross if the Christians left Egypt. Shortly before that, following great dangers and difficulties, the Staurofilax Dionysius of Dara, one of the five brothers who thirty-two years before had infiltrated Saladin’s army, was named treasurer by the sultan. He was so assimilated to his role as an important Mameluke diplomat that, on the night he showed up at Nikephoros Panteugeno’s humble hut holding a large package in his hands, Nikephoros didn’t even recognize him. Both prostrated themselves before the relic of the Cross and cried tears of joy, and then departed to search for the three missing brothers. At first light, the five Staurofilakes, in disguise, set off on foot for the Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai, where they hid until Cato LXXVII arrived with a jubilant group of brothers. Cato LXXVII wrote his happy chronicle, at the end of which he announced that the Brotherhood of the Staurofilakes was going to retreat forever to the earthly paradise, which the other brothers had finally found.

  “But he doesn’t say where!” I protested, turning over the sheet of paper in my hands.

  “I think we must read to the end.”

  “He’s not going to say, you’ll see.”

  Surely enough, Cato LXXVII did not say where the earthly paradise was. He only mentioned that it was in a very distant country and that with preparations for the long journey already completed, he had to bring his story to a close because they were leaving immediately. They left the codex in the care of the monks of Saint Catherine’s, where it remained for nine centuries, and he announced the history of the brotherhood would cease to be written there. “My successors will continue in our new refuge. There we will protect what little the evil of men has left of the Holy Cross. Our fate is sealed. May God protect us.”

  “And that’s it,” I said, disheartened, letting the paper fall from my hands.

  Like two statues of salt, Farag and I were mute and immobile for a good long time, incapable of believing that everything had ended and that we didn’t know much more than when we started. Wherever the Staurofilakes’ happy earthly paradise was, there too were the Ligna Crucis stolen from the Christian churches. Aside from the satisfaction of having information on the thieves, we had no other joy.

  Several months of investigation, all the resources of the Classified Archives and the Vatican Library, hours and hours closed up in the Hypogeum with all the staff working diligently. All that for nothing.

  I sighed deeply. My head flopped over and my chin rested on my chest. My tired vertebrae cracked like trampled glass.

  Ever since this whole story had started, I hadn’t managed to get a good night’s sleep. If it wasn’t the insomnia, it was every little sound I heard in the Domus room (the little refrigerator, the creaking of the wood, the clock on the wall, the wind hitting the blinds); it was the never-ending and exhausting dreams that kept me awake. They weren’t quite nightmares, but oftentimes I was truly afraid, like that night when I dreamed that I was walking down an enormous avenue under construction filled with dangerous holes that I had to avoid by crossing weak planks of wood or by hanging from a rope.

  After the frustrating and anticlimactic end of our work, and our not knowing what had happened to the captain, Farag and I went to the Domus, had supper, and retired to our rooms with a leaden, disheartened look wrought deeply in our faces. We were disappointed, and although Farag tried to comfort me by telling me that as soon as we rested, we’d feel up to extracting what we needed from the Catos’ history, I got into bed deeply discouraged.

  I felt like I was dangling from a rope, with an abyss beneath my feet, when the sound of my telephone made me bolt up in bed and open my eyes in the dark. I didn’t know where I was or what that roar was or how to stop my heart from leaping out of my mouth, but I was wide awake, with my senses completely alert. When I was able to react and locate myself in space and time, I swatted at the light switch and answered the telephone.

  “Yes?” I grunted.

  “Doctor?”

  “Captain? My God! Do you know what time it is?” I focused desperately on the clock on the opposite wall.

  “Three-thirty,” answered Glauser-Röist, unperturbed.

  “Three-thirty in the morning, Captain!”

  “Professor Boswell will be down in five minutes. I’m in the Domus meeting room. I beg you to hurry, Doctor. How long will it take you to get ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To go to the Hypogeum.”

  “The Hypogeum? Now?”

  “Are you coming or not?” The captain was losing his patience.

  “I’m coming! I’m coming! Give me five minutes.”

  I walked to the bathroom and turned on the lights. A blast of cold fluorescent light struck my eyes. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, passed the brush through my matted hair and returned to my room. I quickly put on a black skirt and a heavy beige wool cardigan. I grabbed my jacket and purse and went into the hall, still stunned by a surreal sense, as if I had gone directly from the scaffolds of the road in my dreams to the elevator in the Domus.

  Farag and Glauser-Röist were waiting for me in the enormous and brightly lit vestibule, speaking in anxious whispers. Farag, half asleep, smoothed down the locks of matted hair with a nervous gesture, whereas the captain was impeccable and looked surprisingly fresh and clear-eyed for such an early hour.

  “Let’s go,” he barked as soon as he saw me, and started off in the direction of the street without checking if we were following him.

  The Vatican is the smallest state in the world, but if you cross a good bit of it on foot, at almost four in the morning, in the cold and through its silence, it seems like a nonstop road trip across the United States. We passed some black limousines with their Se Cristo Videsse license plates; their headlights fleetingly shone upon us and were soon lost down side streets of the City.

  “Where are those cardinals going at this hour?” I asked, surprised.

  “They’re not going anywhere,” Glauser-Röist answered dryly.

  “They’re coming back.

  And if I were you, I wouldn’t ask where they’ve been. You won’t like the answer.”

  I closed my mouth as if it had been sown shut and told myself that, in the end, the captain was right. The depraved lives of the cardinals of the Curia were certainly unruly and indecorous; but then again, they were the ones who had to live with their consciences.

  “Aren’t they worried about scandal?” Farag wanted to know, in spite of the captain’s sharp tone. “What would happen if some newspaper told all?”

  Glauser-Röist kept walking in silence for a few moments. “That’s my job,” he spit out finally. “To prevent the Vatican’s dirty laundry from coming to light. The church is holy, but some of its members can be very sinful.”

  The professor and I looked at each other and kept our lips glued shut until we got to the Hypogeum. The captain had the keys to all the doors of the Classified Archives, and watching him go from place to place, you could tell it wasn’t the first night he’d come to these of
fices alone.

  We finally entered my lab, which no longer resembled anything like the tidy office it had been a few months ago. A heavy book lying on my desk caught my eye. I was drawn to it like a magnet, but Glauser-Röist was fast and got the book before me. He grabbed it with his huge hands, his hulking body not letting me see it.

  “Doctor, Professor…,” began the Rock. We rushed to take a seat so we could pay attention. “I have in my hands a book, a type of travel guide that will take us to earthly paradise.”

  “Don’t tell me the Staurofilakes published a Baedeker!” * I commented sarcastically. The captain struck me down with a look.

  “Something like that,” he replied, turning to show us the title page.

  For an instant, Farag and I were in complete shock, unable to utter a single word.

  “The Divine Comedy by Dante?” I queried. Either the captain was making fun of us or he’d gone completely mad.

  “Yes indeed, the Divine Comedy,” he replied.

  “Dante Alighieri?” Farag was more surprised than I, if that were possible.

  “Is there any other Divine Comedy, Professor?” argued Glauser-Röist.

  “It’s…,” babbled Farag, incredulous. “Captain, that doesn’t make much sense.” He gave a little laugh, as if he’d just heard a joke. “Come on, Kaspar, quit pulling our legs!”

  Glauser-Röist sat down at my desk and opened the book to a page marked with a red sticky note.

  “Purgatory,” he recited like a diligent schoolboy. “Canto I, lines thirty-one and beyond. Dante arrives with his guide Virgil at the gates of Purgatory and says:

  “I saw near me an ancient man, alone,

  whose face commanded all the reverence

  that any son could offer to his sire.

  “Long-flowing was his beard and streaked with white,

  as was his hair, which in two tresses fell

  to rest upon his chest on either side.

  “The rays of light from those four sacred stars

  struck with such radiance upon his face,

  it was as if the sun were shining there.”

  The captain looked at us expectantly.

  “Very nice, sure,” commented Farag.

  “Truly poetic,” I agreed, dripping with cynicism.

  “Don’t you see?” Glauser-Röist said, exasperated.

  “Well, what do you want us to see?” I exclaimed.

  “The old man! Don’t you recognize him?” Before our astonished eyes and our look of total incomprehension, the captain sighed, resigned, and adopted the air of a patient elementary-school teacher. “Virgil forces Dante to prostrate himself before the old man, and the old man asks who they are. Then Virgil tells him that, on a petition from Jesus Christ and Beatrice (Dante’s dead beloved), he is showing Dante the kingdom of the underworld.”

  He skipped a page and read again:

  “Already I have shown him all the Damned;

  I want to show him now the souls of those

  who purge themselves of guilt in your domain.

  “May it please you to welcome him—he goes

  in search of freedom, and how dear that is,

  the man who gives up life for it well knows.

  “You know, you found death sweet in Utica

  for freedom’s sake; there you put off that robe

  which will be radiant on that Great Day.”

  “Utica! Cato of Utica!” I cried. “The old man is Cato of Utica!”

  “Finally! That was what I wanted you to figure out!” explained Glauser-Röist. “Cato of Utica, who is the namesake for the archimandrites of the Staurofilakes brotherhood, is the guardian of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Don’t you think that means something? As you know, the Divine Comedy is composed of three parts: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each one was published separately. Observe the coincidences in the text by the last Cato and Dante’s text in Purgatory.” He turned pages back and forth, and searched my desk for the transcript of the last folio of the Iyasus Codex. “In line eighty-two, Virgil says to Cato, ‘Allow us to go through your seven realms,’ so that Dante should purge himself of the seven deadly sins, one in each circle or cornice of the mountain of Purgatory: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust,” he enumerated. Then he grabbed up the copy of the folio and read: “The expiation of the Seven Deadly Sins will take place in the seven cities that boast the terrible distinction of being known to practice them perversely: Rome, for its pride; Ravenna, for its envy; Jerusalem, for its wrath; Athens, for its sloth; Constantinople, for its greed; Alexandria for its gluttony; and Antioch, for its lust. In each of these cities, as if it were an earthly purgatory, they will suffer their faults in order to enter in the secret place we Staurofilakes will call the earthly paradise.”

  “And does the Mountain in Dante’s Purgatory have at its peak earthly paradise?” asked Farag, intrigued.

  “That’s right,” confirmed Glauser-Röist. “The second part of the Divine Comedy ends when Dante purifies himself of the Seven Deadly Sins and arrives at the earthly paradise. From there he can now reach the heavenly paradise, which is the third and last part of the Divine Comedy. Now, listen to what the guardian angel at the door of Purgatory tells Dante when he begs him to let him pass:

  “Then with his sword he traced upon my brow

  The scars of seven P’s. ‘Once entered here,

  Be sure you cleanse away these wounds,’ he said.”*

  “Seven P’s—one for each deadly sin!” the captain continued. “Do you understand? Dante will be free of them, one by one, as soon as he expiates his sins in the seven cornices of purgatory. The Staurofilakes marked the aspiring Staurofilakes with seven crosses, one for each deadly sin overcome in the seven cities.”

  I didn’t know what to think. Could Dante have been a Staurofilax? It sounded absurd. I had the feeling we were sailing on stormy seas. Could it be that we were simply tired and lacked perspective?

  “Captain, how can you be so sure?” I said, unable to hide the doubt in my voice.

  “Look, Doctor, I know this work like the back of my hand. I studied it in depth at the university. I guarantee that Dante’s Purgatory is the Baedeker guide, as you put it, that will lead us to the Staurofilakes and the stolen Ligna Crucis.”

  “But how can you be so sure?” I insisted stubbornly. “It could all just be a simple coincidence. All the material Dante used in the Divine Comedy is a part of medieval Christian mythology.”

  “Do you recall that in the middle of the eleventh century various groups of Staurofilakes departed from Jerusalem bound for the main Christian cities in the East and West?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you recall that those groups made contact with the Catharists, the Fede Santa, the Massenie du Saint Graal, the Minnesanger, or the Fidei d’Amore, just to mention some of the Christian organizations?”

  “I recall that too.”

  “Well, let me tell you that from a very young age, Dante Alighieri was part of the Fidei d’Amore, and he came to occupy a very prominent position in the Fede Santa.”

  “Are you serious?” stammered Farag, blinking. “Dante Alighieri?”

  “Why do you think people don’t understand a thing when they read the Divine Comedy? They think it’s a beautiful yet extremely long poem loaded with metaphors students always interpret as allegories for the Holy Catholic Church, the Sacraments, or some crazy thing like that. Everyone thinks that Beatrice, his beloved Beatrice, who died at the age of twenty, was the daughter of Folco Portinari. However, that’s not true, and that’s why people don’t understand what the poet is saying, because they critique it from a mistaken perspective. Beatrice Portinari isn’t the Beatrice Dante refers to, and the Catholic Church isn’t the protagonist of the work. The Divine Comedy has to be read in code.”

  He walked away from my desk and took out a piece of meticulously folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Did you know that each one of the three parts of
the Divine Comedy has exactly thirty-three cantos? Did you know that each one of those cantos has exactly 115 or 160 lines, the sum of whose digits is seven? Do you think that’s merely a coincidence in a work of such magnitude as the Divine Comedy? Did you know that the three parts, Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, end with the exact same word, stars? This is but a small part of the mystery contained in this colossal work. I could mention dozens of examples, but we would be here forever.”

  Farag and I looked at each other, stupefied. It never would have occurred to me that the pinnacle of Italian literature, one I abhorred in high school because it was required reading, could also be a compendium of esoteric wisdom. Or was it?

  “Captain, are you telling us that the Divine Comedy is a type of guide book to initiation into the Staurofilakes?”

  “No, Doctor, I’m not saying it is that type of book. I am saying it is THE book. Without any doubt. Do you want me to prove it to you?”

  “Yes, I do,” exclaimed Farag, clearly frustrated.

  The captain picked up the book he’d left on the table and opened it to a section he’d already marked.

  “Canto IX of the Inferno, lines sixty-one through sixty-three:

  “Men of sound intellect and probity,

  Weigh with good understanding what lies hidden

  Behind the veil of my strange allegory!”

  “Is that it?” I asked, disappointed.

  “Observe, Doctor, that these lines are found in the ninth canto—nine being a number of great importance for Dante. According to all his writings, Beatrice is the number nine; and nine, in medieval numerical symbolism, represents wisdom, supreme knowledge, and the science that explains the world beyond faith. What’s more, this mysterious affirmation is found in lines sixty-one through sixty-three of the canto. Add the digits of those numbers—six plus one is seven, six plus three is nine. Remember that in Dante, nothing is by chance, not even a comma. Inferno has nine circles where the souls of those condemned are lodged according to their sins, Purgatory has seven cornices, and Paradise again has nine circles… Seven and nine, don’t you get it? But I promised I would prove it to you, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”