The Quest: A Novel

encounter, in case they or their notebooks fell into the wrong hands, and Purcell wasn’t sure Vivian should be taking pictures, but he said nothing. She said, “We can show these to his family.” She added, “They may want to bring the body home.”
    Purcell didn’t think that after forty years there was anyone in Berini who would want to do that. But it was possible, and nice of Vivian to think of it.
    Mercado looked at the grave, then said to his companions, “I somehow feel that we killed him with our prodding… and all that water…”
    Purcell replied, “He was a dead man when we found him, Henry.” He added, “We did what he wanted us to do. We listened to him.” He reminded Mercado, “He wanted us to let his people know what happened to him. And we’ll do that.”
    Vivian sat on a stone garden bench and stared at the grave. She said, “He also wanted us to know about the black monastery… and the Grail. He wanted us to go to Rome… the Vatican, and tell them that Father Giuseppe Armano had found what they sent him to find.”
    Purcell glanced at Mercado and he was sure they were both thinking the same thing: They weren’t going to break this story to the Vatican. At least not now. In fact, Father Armano himself had suggested that the Grail was safe where it was, meaning leave it there.
    Mercado sat beside Vivian, looked around at the crumbling faux-Roman spa, and said, “This is a fitting place to bury him.” He asked, “Well, what do we think about what Father Armano said?”
    No one replied, and Mercado prompted, “About the black monastery… and the Holy Grail?”
    Purcell lit a cigarette. “Well… I think his story was basically true… I mean about the cardinal, the pope, his war experiences, and the monastery. But he sort of lost me with the Lance of Longinus dripping blood into the Holy Grail.”
    Mercado thought a moment, then nodded and said, “I’m supposed to be the believer, but… you know, in the Gulag, there was a prisoner who said he’d been sent there for trying to kill Stalin. But he was actually there for pilfering state property—twenty years. But you see, he needed a crime big enough to fit the sentence, instead of the other way around.”
    No one responded, so Mercado continued. “We don’t know what Father Armano did to spend forty years in a cell. But I think he convinced himself that he was there because he’d seen what he wasn’t supposed to see.”
    Vivian said, “But his story was so full of
detail
.”
    Mercado said to her, “Vivian, if you had forty years to work on a story, you would get the details down quite well.” He added, “He wasn’t actually lying to us. He had just deluded himself to the point where it became truth in his own mind.”
    Purcell wiped his face with his sleeve. The sun was a brutal yellow now. He asked Mercado, “Where do you think the story became delusional?”
    Mercado shrugged, then replied, “Maybe after the Lake Tana part. Maybe he had been captured by the Ethiopian army and they put him in jail as a prisoner of war.”
    Purcell asked, “But why lock him up for forty years? The war with the Italians ended within a year.”
    Again Mercado shrugged and replied, “I don’t know… the local ras, Prince Theodore, had captured an Italian enemy… a priest who they didn’t want to kill… so they threw him in jail and forgot about him.”
    Purcell pointed out, “But when the Italians won the war, the prince would have given Father Armano to them to curry favor, or for a price. Instead, they kept him locked in solitary confinement for four decades. Why?”
    Mercado conceded, “I suppose it is possible that Father Armano did find and enter this black monastery, and maybe the monks did kill the Italian soldiers who were with Father Armano, and that’s why the monks handed him over to the Ethiopian prince and had him put away for life—so he couldn’t reveal what they’d done, or reveal the location of the monastery.” He added, “They silenced a witness without killing him. Yes, I can see that happening if the witness was a priest.”
    Purcell suggested, “So maybe what the priest said is all true—except for the part about the Holy Grail and the lance dripping blood.”
    Mercado replied, “That’s very possible.”
    Purcell asked, “So should we look for this black monastery?”
    “It would be a dangerous undertaking,” said Mercado.
    “But,” said Purcell, “worth the risk if we’re actually