The Lost Pope

by Glenn Cooper

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Fans of Dan Brown and Steve Berry will love this new thriller featuring Cal Donovan, a Harvard theology professor, as he uncovers religious and papal history and plenty of conspiracy when a scrap of papyrus is found from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene that can change the course of Christianity.

Release date: June 6, 2023

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

1 

Northern Oasis, Egypt, 67 CE

Brown was her color and the color of this place.

Her eyes were brown, and though her hair was graying, it still showed streaks of its original bronze. When she was young, her skin was light enough to go pink as a newborn mouse at the blush of love, but the sun had been baking it for over fifty years, rendering it the shade of tiger nuts. Her old linen robe, her second skin, was the same nut-brown even after she washed and beat the cloth.

Her coloration matched the arid land, for it too was brown beyond the green fertility of the oasis. Near to the oasis, the soil was dark as cedar bark, but as one moved away from its spring, the terrain lightened from copper to mustard to the bleached tan of the desert sands. The cluster of houses she came upon were companions of the earth, rising organically from the desert floor, their walls of limestone blocks, rough and tawny.

She arrived by mule when the sun was burning near the horizon and northerly winds were whipping fine sand into the air. One of her fellow travelers knocked on the rough door and stepped aside for her.

An old man showed himself and, in Aramaic, asked who she was.

The woman responded, “I am Mary.”

The man, Isaiah, looked at her hard and said, “My hearing is poor. Did you say Mary?”

She lowered her hood, revealing sunken eyes and cracked lips, and said, “Yes, I am Mary. Mary of Magdala. I seek sanctuary.”

Old eyes widened. “From whom do you flee, My Lady?”

“All of them,” she said. “Christians, Jews, Romans, all wish me dead. I am told this is the house of Leah.”

Isaiah escorted Mary and her three male companions to the largest house and asked them to wait in a dimly lit room of generous proportions. The floor was hard-packed dirt. Wooden bowls were stacked on a long dining table. The shutters had been closed to keep the swirling sands at bay, but fine yellow grit penetrated the gaps, coating the table and benches, and the gusting wind set the candles dancing and flashing.

A woman rushed in from an adjoining room. Mary thought she must have been sleeping because her blinking, foggy eyes searched the chamber before settling on her. This woman was younger than Mary, taller, with finely chiseled, patrician features. She had the look of a lady who once might have draped herself in mantles of silk, but here and now she wore a coarse gown that brushed the tops of bare feet. Mary’s days of vanity were long gone, but this woman, with her unlined, lovely face, made her bitterly feel her years.

The woman bowed deeply and said, “I am Leah. Is it true you are Mary Magdalene?”

“I am.”

Leah cried, “The Blessed Matriarch!” and tears moistened her cheeks.

“I have traveled long and far to meet the deacon Leah,” Mary said, using the honorific Greek word, diakonos. “You are known to the Christian world.”

Leah dropped to the ground and kissed Mary’s feet. “Blessed Lady, your presence in my house is a gift from the Lord.”

Mary pulled her up by the shoulders and gazed tenderly at her face.

“Tell me, why have you come to my house?” Leah asked.

“I am old, and I am weary of running for my life. The Lord knows my days are numbered. I want my story told before I die. I would have you tell it.”

Hearing of visitors, the community of some twenty souls spilled from their houses and peered through the cracks in the shutters until Leah invited them inside. Then, one by one, the adults fell to their knees, and they too kissed Mary’s feet while their children watched in wide-eyed curiosity. After hasty preparations, the visitors were served a simple meal of bread, boiled vegetables, and diluted wine, and apologies flew over the lack of meat. Mary expressed gratitude for the hospitality on offer, but Leah dispatched a lad to buy a goat so they might have a feast on the morrow.

At the communal table, Leah asked Mary to give the blessing.

“This is your house,” Mary said. “The blessing should be yours.”

The travelers were not pressed into conversation, for it was evident they were hungry and weak. Yet, fortified by food and drink, one of Mary’s men, Quintus, a brawny young fellow with long ringlets of golden hair, responded robustly to a boy of ten who could no longer contain his curiosity at the muscular presence.

“Where are you from?” the boy asked.

“Me? I am from Rome. Do you know where that is?”

The boy shook his head.

“The lad was born here,” Leah said. “This place is all he knows.”

“Perhaps you will see it one day, boy,” Quintus said.

A man at Leah’s side sneered across the table. “I can tell by your accent that you do not speak your born tongue. I think maybe you were a Roman soldier,” he said, dipping the last word in poison.

“That is true, brother,” was the cheerful reply. “I was a Praetorian guard who served the emperor. It was three years back when I met Simon Peter and Mary. Mary hated me before she loved me, for I was Simon Peter’s jailer.”

Mary reached out to touch Quintus’s hand lightly. “Oh, how I love him now.”

“When I heard Simon Peter speak of the Christ, he opened my eyes as never before,” Quintus said. “He baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and I abandoned my post. Renouncing my past was easy.” His lips curled into a smile. “Learning Aramaic was hard.”

Leah returned the smile. “Our children were born Christian, but the rest of us are converts, Jews from Jerusalem.”

Mary looked up from her bowl and said, “It was Paul who converted you, was it not?”

“Yes, it was Paul, seventeen years ago. We congregated with him for a time, and when he departed Jerusalem for Antioch, Jacob, my husband, founded our own Christian house. From the beginning we suffered vile persecution at the hands of the authorities, and then one night the Romans took Jacob away and executed him. It fell upon me to lead the house. I persuaded my brethren to leave for Egypt, and we settled here, in this far-flung place, so that we might worship the Lord in peace. For us, it began with Paul. A day does not pass when I do not think of him and pray he is well.”

Sadness fell over Mary’s face like a veil. “Paul is dead, dear lady. Nero beheaded him in Rome, three years after he crucified Simon Peter. We heard this from a Christian traveler who stayed with us in Antioch.”

Her words cast a pall over the room, and the women began to sob, all but Leah, who nodded solemnly and said, “The Lord has surely welcomed Paul to his side in Heaven. We forgive his executioners, and we will pray for their souls.”

When they had eaten their fill, Leah invited Mary to walk with her. Swathed in shawls, they ambled, hand in hand, through a grove of olive trees, the stillness of the cool night broken by cricket song and the occasional bleating of the newly purchased goat.

“It is terrible you had to flee,” Leah said. “My heart aches for you.”

The woman’s empathy touched Mary. “For much of my life, I was so loved and cherished. It has come as a shock to become despised.”

She felt Leah’s hand tighten around hers. “Who despises you, Blessed Lady?”

“First, it was the Romans. After they killed Simon Peter, we feared we too would be taken to Nero’s Circus for the cruel pleasures of the mob. We left Rome hastily for Antioch, where we had dwelled before. We rejoined the Christian community there, and we established our house of prayer among them in the Kerateion, the Jewish district. I am pleased to say we convinced many a Jew to follow the path of Jesus Christ, but therein lay a problem. The rabbis were angered, and we learned that brutes had been pressed into foul service to murder us. And so we fled once again to Galilee, my homeland, where the Jewish and Roman war had subsided.”

“Pilgrims have told us there are many Christians in Israel now,” Leah said.

“That is so, and among them are elders who can remember the days when Jesus walked the Earth, teaching and making miracles. Oh, it was good to be home again. For well nigh a year, we were happy there, and crowds thronged to hear us preach the word of the Lord. Then one dark day, we received an emissary from Rome who caused us to flee once again.”

“Who sent this emissary?”

“The wretch, Linus. Word reached him of the adulations heaped upon our ministry, and his message to me was a terrible one. Cease your ministry or die by the sword. So-called Christians prepared to carry out his orders. We could understand why Romans and Jews wanted us dead, but our fellow brothers in Christ? It was too much to bear.”

“Envy must have darkened Linus’s heart,” Leah said. She squeezed Mary’s hand again. “My poor lady. May I tell you something? You have been my inspiration. Not Simon Peter. Not Paul. You. If not for your life and deeds, I could not have found the strength to establish this house and lead this community. When I was a young woman, I felt my voice stifled by the rabbis and the elders. They wanted us only to keep house and make babies. We could not recite the Torah. We could not worship with men as equals. When I became a Christian, I learned of your life and how precious you were to Jesus and his ministry. Though we never met, it was you who gave me the courage to preach the word of our Lord after they killed my Jacob.”

It had been a good while since Mary felt the flutter of joy in her breast. This warm hand in hers was precious flesh. It had been an arduous journey from Jerusalem across the scorching desert to reach the oasis. Many wanted to follow her, but Mary insisted that families should not be uprooted and sent to an uncertain fate. At her final meal with her flock, she hugged each member and wept with them, and before dawn on the Jewish Sabbath day, she bade farewell to her homeland. Only Quintus and two other stalwarts accompanied her, and truth be told, there was nothing Mary could have said or done to keep the faithful Quintus from her side. Mile after grueling mile, Mary rocked on the swayback of her mule and felt her life force draining, and she was sure that death would come to her in Egypt, the ancient land of pharaohs that Moses had fled. But the melancholy that befell her on the journey was at once washed away by the cold, clean, anointing water that was this woman, Leah.

“You and I are much alike,” Mary said, her voice strengthening. “We have both lost loved ones to the wickedness of Rome. We both had the fortitude to take our places at the head of the table. We are truly sisters in Christ. There is no time to waste. In the morning, I would begin my account of my life in the service of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Leah said, “I will listen in rapt attention, Blessed Matriarch. We have papyrus, and we have ink. Isaiah will be your scribe. He can write in Greek, the language of the world, for Christians everywhere need to know about you and your acts. In the years to come, they will sing the praises of the three pillars of our faith—Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, Simon Peter, the rock upon which the Church was built, and Mary of Magdala, the mother of the Church.” She let go of Mary’s hand and clasped hers together in prayer. “We shall call your story the Gospel of Mary.”

 2 

The present

Although most of the passengers on Delta flight 124 from Boston to Rome were American, Portuguese was the language that ruled the roost that night.

Cal Donovan estimated that three-quarters of his fellow travelers were of Azorean descent. As the plane streaked over the Atlantic, they burst into traditional Azorean folk songs every few minutes, creating an atmosphere more like a soccer match than an international flight. Cal had given up on sleep. Although business class was a little less raucous than economy, the curtains separating the cabins did nothing to dampen the festivities. Not that he minded. He was in a partying mood himself.

It wasn’t every day you were heading to the inauguration of one of your closest friends to become the next pope.

The flight attendants discovered that Cal spoke Italian like a native, and one of them leaned over and said in a husky Milanese accent, “There seems to be a problem with your glass.”

“And what problem would that be?”

“It’s empty. Same again?”

He answered with a smile.

She returned with another Grey Goose on the rocks and declared the problem solved.

“Temporarily,” he replied.

“You had an accident?” she said, pointing at the walking cast poking from under his trouser leg.

“It was a fight, actually. You should have seen the other guy.”

She took it as a joke and went about her business. It wasn’t. The other guy was dead.

Most people with a broken leg gain weight from inactivity. Cal had lost a few pounds, and for the first time since he was a skinny kid in the army, his cheeks were hollowed out. He wasn’t the type to dwell on emotions or blame a poor appetite on stress. He just cinched his belt a notch and got on with things.

If anything, a lighter Cal was even more handsome than his recent cover shot in The Improper Bostonian’s issue on Boston’s most eligible singles. His jawline was sharper, and his dark eyes sunken deeper were even more penetrating. He seemed to have something of the night about him.

The lavatories in business class were occupied, so he headed to the rear, unaware that a priest had left a mid-cabin seat to follow him. When he finished up and unlocked the door, the priest, a portly middle-aged fellow with a toothy grin, was waiting for him in the galley.

“Professor Donovan,” he said.

Cal couldn’t place him. “Yeah, hi, how are you?” he said, hoping the fellow would identify himself.

“You probably don’t remember me. I’m Father Manny Cardoza. We met a few years ago when you gave a lecture in New Bedford on the Portuguese Inquisition. You were there with Cardinal Da Silva—oh my goodness, it’s still so fresh—I mean the Holy Father.”

The best Cal could muster was a vague recollection of a sea of nuns and priests inside an overheated community center. “Oh yes, Father Cardoza, it’s good to see you again. It is fresh, isn’t it?”

Only five days had passed since the cardinal protodeacon had appeared on the Benediction Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, leaned into a microphone, and addressed the massive crowd at St. Peter’s Square. “I announce to you a great joy! We have a pope! The Most Eminent and Reverend Lord, Lord Rodrigo, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Da Silva, who takes to himself the name John the Twenty-Fourth.”

On the second ballot of the conclave—the shortest conclave on record—Cal’s dear friend Rodrigo Da Silva became the two hundred sixty-seventh pope of the Catholic Church, the second born in Portugal, and the first American pope.

“You’re limping. You were injured?”

“I fell in a library. Occupational hazard.”

“At Harvard?”

“No, I was in England. I hadn’t been home for long when the conclave concluded. There aren’t too many things that could’ve gotten me back on a plane. This was one of them.”

“We are so very excited,” the priest said. “Many of my parishioners have hardly slept. I have hardly slept. A son of the Azores is the pope!”

“Looks like you brought most of New Bedford with you to the party.”

“And all the other Portuguese communities. We are overjoyed.”

Cal looked at the floor and mumbled, “Yes, it’s wonderful.”

The priest caught himself and said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Professor. I know you were also close with Pope Celestine. His death—such a tragedy.”

“That it was.”

When the priest returned to his row, his traveling companion, an assistant priest from his parish, asked him, “Who was that?”

“His name is Calvin Donovan. He’s a famous professor of religion at the Harvard Divinity School. He’s going to the inauguration too.”

“How do you know him?”

“We met once. He remembered who I was. I was quite pleased.”

“He knows the Holy Father?” the younger priest asked.

“More than that. They’ve been friends—good friends—since Da Silva was bishop. Donovan was also friendly with Pope Celestine. I think it’s a good thing for our highest clerics to have people outside the Church with whom they can confide. It takes them out of the Vatican bubble.”

“So, then. He’s a pope whisperer.”

“I like that,” Father Cardoza said. “Cal Donovan, pope whisperer.”

Cal reclined his seat and curled his hand around an icy glass. As soon as he closed his eyes, unpleasant things streaked through his mind, the same images that had been plaguing him these past days. An assassin stalking him through the dark passages of an English manor house. The killer’s crumpled body lying beside him on the library floor. Pope Celestine’s waxy body in repose at the Vatican Apostolic Palace. Elisabetta’s heavily bandaged hands.

He extinguished the grim highlight reel by lifting his eyelids and the glass of vodka, his anesthetic of choice.

He blamed himself for the pope’s death. Celestine had been warned about a planned assassination. A hidden document held the key to the plot. Celestine had asked Cal to find it, and he succeeded just as time ran out. His last-second warning may have prevented Celestine from perishing in the fireball that burned Elisabetta’s hands, but it couldn’t stop the heart attack that took his life. The act would go down in history as an assassination attempt, but that was splitting hairs. It was the violent removal of the leader of over a billion Catholics. Cal was a student of the Church, and he knew its brutal history well. As far as he was concerned, you could add the name of Celestine VI to the long list of murdered and martyred popes.

As the plane flew toward the dawn, the folk songs kept coming, and Cal kept drinking.

*  *  *

Cal’s preferred hotel in Rome was the Grand Hotel de la Minerve. He loved the roof terrace overlooking the Pantheon, the elegance of its seventeenth-century architecture, and its long history as a gathering place for visiting artists and intellectuals. And it didn’t escape him that the hotel had a particularly topical connection. It had been built as a mansion for the Fonseca family, Roman aristocrats of Portuguese origin.

Tourists were snapping photos of Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk statue in the piazza outside his window. Cal pulled the curtains, showered, and sank into a blissfully soft bed.

The hotel phone caught him mid-dream. The glowing clock surprised him—he’d been asleep for hours.

“Pronto,” he said.

He heard an exhalation as if the woman had been holding her breath. “Cal,” she said.

“Elisabetta. Hello.”

“I do hope I didn’t wake you. I saw your flight was on time.”

“No, I’m up. It’s good to hear from you. How are you? How are your hands?”

“Better. The skin grafts went well. I only have to wear these little gloves. How is your leg?”

“It’s fine. I only have to wear this little cast.”

Her laughter tickled his ear.

“Emilio and I were wondering if you were free this evening for dinner. We thought Tonnarello, where we went before.”

*  *  *

Rome was magnificent on a late-summer evening such as this—the setting sun drenched the ancient cityscape in mellow, amber light. Cal’s orthopedic surgeon had advised him to take it easy, but it was called a walking cast, so Cal was damned well going to walk. He was itching to get back to his routine of running by the Charles in the morning and sparring with the Harvard Boxing Club—he’d been its faculty advisor for years. Cal had learned to box in the army during his wayward years between high school and buckling to his father’s will by enrolling at Harvard College, where Hiram Donovan was a professor of biblical archaeology. Boxing had always helped Cal blow off steam, and he badly needed to throw some punches right about now.

The low, slanted light managed to make even the muddy Tiber sparkle a little. He crossed it on the Ponte Garibaldi, ignoring his aching shin. The faster he walked, the faster he’d see her again.

He had been in and out of countless relationships in his forty-eight years. He never had to be alone—his looks, his charm, and his glittering academic career guaranteed that. But there was one unobtainable woman, who had captivated him the first time he saw her, and years later, he was still simmering with longing. He wasn’t the first man to wonder how Elisabetta had found her way to nunhood. It wasn’t just her rare beauty—he found her intellect as stimulating. He had been in a relationship for much of the time he knew her, but recently his girlfriend had gotten fed up with his faltering commitment and voted with her feet. Unfettered, Cal found himself falling hard for Elisabetta, but loving her felt like running into a brick wall, and it left him bloody and raw. The last time he saw her was at Pope Celestine’s funeral Mass, and since then she was constantly front of mind. He had been searching for a reason to return to Rome and, perhaps, muster the courage to show his affection when the news of the conclave broke.

He stopped for a moment to rest his throbbing leg and caught sight of his reflection in a shop window. What an idiot, he thought. What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t be in love with a nun.

Elisabetta had grown up on the west bank of the Tiber, and the ancient Tonnarello restaurant in the heart of the Trastevere neighborhood was her family’s favorite. When Cal arrived, he found her alone at a corner table.

A nun’s shapeless habit drives attention to the face, and hers was lovely. When Pope Celestine broke centuries of tradition and named her the first female private papal secretary, the Italian press discovered that her face sent newspapers and magazines flying off their shelves. La Bella Suor, they called her, the beautiful nun. She wore the black-and-white habit of her order, the Augustinian Sisters, Servants of Jesus and Mary. Their garb was somewhat less restrictive than other orders. She did not wear a wimple, so her cheeks and neck were uncovered, and Cal could see them redden when he reached to brush her gloved hand. Her black veil and white cotton cap were set back more than usual, exposing a silky band of black hair. Until then, he had never seen her hair, though he had fantasized about how it might look, flowing over her bare shoulders.

She spoke in Italian. “Cal, it’s wonderful to see you.”

“It’s wonderful to see you too, Eli.”

The day she finally consented to use first names with him was a breakthrough of sorts, or so he had imagined.

“Do you like my little gloves?” she said, wiggling her white fingers. “They’re like my first communion gloves when I was a young girl.”

“I like them a lot. What do you think about my little cast?” he said, pulling up his trouser leg.

“It suits you.” She laughed.

She was treated like royalty here, and the restaurant owner descended on them with a bottle of wine. “Compliments of the house, Sister. Bramito Antinori, from Umbria. It’s a very nice one. May I pour for you and your guest?”

“Thank you, Aldo.”

“How is the new Holy Father?”

“I would say that he is serene.”

“We’ll miss having him here. He came often.”

“Cardinals can eat out,” she said. “Popes not so much.”

“I’ll make his favorites so you can take them back to the Vatican tonight.”

Cal proposed a toast. “To new beginnings,” he said, and they clinked glasses.

“Emilio sends his regrets,” she said. “He had to meet with the chief of the Polizia di Stato to coordinate some aspects of the security operation for the Mass. It’s been nonstop meetings. After what happened—well, we don’t want to lose another pope.”

Elisabetta’s brother, Emilio Celestino, was the inspector general of the Vatican Carabinieri and had been the last pope’s personal bodyguard. Cal had gotten to know him during some tense days in Sicily and found him a decent, honorable man.

“We do not,” he said.

“He does want to see you while you’re here. He talks about you all the time. He’ll call.”

“Has Emilio’s role been clarified?”

“The Holy Father wants him to carry on as before.”

“I think that’s a good decision.”

“Me too, although I’m biased.”

Cal capitalized on the unexpected pleasure of being alone with her to open this chess match of the heart with a gambit he’d been contemplating.

“Has he decided about you?”

“I’ve made the decision myself. He needs his own person as private secretary. I’ve been helping him during the transition, but we haven’t talked about it yet. I plan on asking for my old job back at the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. If that can’t happen, I’ll happily return to teaching. I showed you my old primary school on the Piazza Mastai the last time you were here.”

He wet his mouth with wine, swallowed, and leaned in. “Or—” he said.

“Or what?”

“You could try something different.”

She laughed. “That sounds mysterious.”

“Instead of teaching children, why not teach at a university?”

“Italian universities aren’t very interested in having a nun on their faculty.”

“It’s not so uncommon in America,” he said.

“And what would I teach?” He could tell by the lightness of her tone that she wasn’t taking him seriously.

“You were trained in Roman archaeology. You’re an expert on the catacombs. You had a seat at the table when Celestine divested Vatican art for his charity. You know the Vatican as well as anyone. You shattered its glass ceiling. I can think of a dozen undergraduate courses and graduate seminars you could teach.”

“Okay, I’ll go home tonight, make a curriculum vitae, and mail it off to American universities,” she said with a mocking tone.

“You don’t have to do that. I can get you a position as an adjunct professor at the Harvard Divinity School tomorrow.”

Her smile dissolved, and their eyes met for an uncomfortable moment until she suddenly blinked in relief, looked toward the entrance, and waved.

“Ah, there’s Micaela. When Emilio couldn’t come, I invited her.”

Elisabetta’s sister was a live wire—funny, volatile, opinionated, a woman who lived on the borderland of conventionality and nonconformity. Her spiky, fire-engine-red hair, short skirts, and giant hoop earrings set her miles apart from the other doctors at her hospital.

“Micaela, what a nice surprise,” Cal said, hiding his disappointment at the collapse of an intimate evening. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Lovely to see you too. How’s your leg?”

“It’s coming along.”

The waiter filled her win. . .