The Quest: A Novel

his eyes to preserve his night vision, and drifted off into a restless sleep.

Chapter 4
    T hey took turns sitting up with the sleeping priest, listening for signs of death and sounds of danger.
    At about three in the morning, Purcell woke Vivian and informed her that the priest was awake and wanted to speak.
    She wondered if Purcell had woken the priest, and she said to him, “Let him rest.”
    “He wants to speak, Vivian.”
    She looked at Father Armano, who was awake and did seem to want to speak. She shook Mercado’s shoulder and informed him, “Father Armano is awake.”
    Mercado moved toward the priest and knelt beside him. “How are you feeling, Father?”
    “There is a burning in my belly. I need water.”
    “No. It is a wound of the stomach. You cannot have water.”
    Vivian said, “Give him a little, Henry. He’ll die of dehydration otherwise, won’t he?”
    Mercado turned to Purcell in the darkness. “Frank?”
    “She’s right.”
    Vivian gave him a half canteen cup of water. The old priest spit up most of it, and Purcell saw it was tinged with red.
    Purcell said, “It’s going to be close. Talk to him, Henry.”
    “Yes, all right. Father, do you want to—?”
    “Yes, I will continue.” He took a deep breath and said, “In Rome… the cardinal… the relic…” He thought awhile, then spoke slowly. “So he told us to go with Il Duce’s army. Go to Ethiopia, he said. There will be war in Ethiopia soon. And then he warned us—the black monastery was guarded by monks of the old believers. They had a military order… like the Knights of Malta, or the Templars.The cardinal did not know all there was to know of this. But he knew they would guard this relic with their lives. That much he knew.”
    Vivian translated for Purcell, who asked, “How can he remember this after forty years?”
    Mercado replied, “He has thought of little else in that prison.”
    Purcell nodded, but said, “Still… he may be hallucinating or his memory has played tricks on him.”
    Vivian replied, “He sounds rational to me.”
    Mercado said to the priest, “Please go on, Father.”
    Father Armano nodded vigorously, as though he knew he was in a race with death, and he needed to unburden himself of this secret that burned in him like the fire in his stomach.
    He said, “The cardinal told us to go carefully, to go only with soldiers, and if we should find this black monastery, go into it. Avoid bloodshed if you can, he told us. But you must move quickly, he said, because the monks would spirit the relic away through underground passages if they thought they were being overpowered. He spoke as if he knew something of this.” Father Armano needed more water, and Purcell took the canteen and poured it slowly around his lips as Vivian translated.
    The priest asked to be propped up so they sat him against the wall in the corner. He began talking without prompting. “So, a bold priest asked, ‘How will we know what to look for and what to do when we enter the monastery?’ And the cardinal said, ‘The words of His Holiness are in the envelope, and if you should ever arrive at your destination, you will open the envelope and you will know all.’ ”
    Father Armano paused, and a faraway look came into his eyes. At first Purcell thought he was dying, but the priest smiled and continued. “Then something happened which I will never forget. His Holiness himself came into the small room where we sat with the cardinal. He spoke with the cardinal and we could hear him address the cardinal by his Christian name. He called him Eugenio. So now the cardinal with no name had a name we could use in our heads when we thought of him. But we could not call him Eugenio, could we?” The priest asked for some time to rest.
    Mercado seemed to be thinking, and Purcell asked him, “Do you know who this Cardinal Eugenio could be?”
    “No…”
    Purcell asked, “How many cardinals would there be living in Rome at that time? And how many do you think were named Eugenio?”
    Mercado replied, “I wasn’t a believer in those days and cared not at all for cardinals… but there was one who was secretary of state for Pius XI… Eugenio Pacelli.”
    “Sounds familiar for some reason.”
    “He assumed another name in 1939. Pius XII.”
    “That sounds more familiar.”
    Vivian pondered this information. “But we don’t know for sure…”
    “No,” said Mercado. “We’ll have to go to the Italian Library when we get back to