“Welcome to our country,” the official said, extending his hand.
“It is my pleasure to be here,” the cardinal replied, noting that this communist atheist didn’t kiss his ring, as was the usual protocol. Well, Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general were not exactly welcome in the People’s Republic of China, were they? But if the PRC expected to live in the civilized world, then they’d have to accept representation with the Holy See, and that was that. And besides, he’d go to work on these people, and, who knew, maybe he could convert one or two. Stranger things had happened, and the Roman Catholic Church had handled more formidable enemies than this one.
With a wave and a small escort group, the demi-minister conducted his distinguished visitor through the concourse toward the place where the official car and escort waited.
“How was your flight?” the underling asked.
“Lengthy but not unpleasant” was the expected reply. Diplomats had to act as though they loved flying, though even the flight crews found journeys of this length tiresome. It was his job to observe the new ambassador of the Vatican, to see how he acted, how he looked out the car’s windows, even, which, in this case, was not unlike all the other first-time diplomats who came to Beijing. They looked out at the differences. The shapes of the buildings were new and different to them, the color of the bricks, and how the brickwork looked close up and at a distance, the way in which things that were essentially the same became fascinating because of differences that were actually microscopic when viewed objectively.
It took a total of twenty-eight minutes to arrive at the residence/embassy. It was an old building, dating back to the turn of the previous century, and had been the largish home of an American Methodist missionary— evidently one who liked his American comforts, the official thought— and had passed through several incarnations, including, he’d learned the previous day, that of a bordello in the diplomatic quarter in the 1920s and ’30s, because diplomats liked their comforts as well. Ethnic Chinese, he wondered, or Russian women who’d always claimed to be of the Czarist nobility, or so he’d heard. After all, Westerners enjoyed fucking noblewomen for some reason or other, as if their body parts were different somehow. He’d heard that one, too, at the office, from one of the archivists who kept track of such things at the Ministry. Chairman Mao’s personal habits were not recorded, but his lifelong love for deflowering twelve-year-olds was well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Every national leader had something odd and distasteful about him, the young official knew. Great men had great aberrations.
The car pulled up to the old wooden frame house, where a uniformed policeman opened the door for the visiting Italian, and even saluted, earning himself a nod from the man wearing the ruby-red skullcap.
Waiting on the porch was yet another foreigner, Monsignor Franz Schepke, whose diplomatic status was that of DCM, or deputy chief of mission, which usually meant the person who was really in charge of things while the ambassador— mainly a man chosen for political reasons— reigned in the main office. They didn’t know if that were the case here yet.
Schepke looked as German as his ancestry was, tall and spare with gray-blue eyes that revealed nothing at all, and a wonderful language gift that had mastered not only the complex Chinese language, but also the local dialect and accent as well. Over the phone this foreigner could pass for a party member, much to the surprise of local officials who were not in the least accustomed to foreigners who could even speak the language properly, much less master it.
The German national, the Chinese official saw, kissed his superior’s ring. Then the Italian shook his hand and embraced the younger churchman. They probably knew each other. Cardinal DiMilo then led Schepke to the escort and introduced them— they’d met many times before, of course, and that made the senior churchman appear just a little backward to the local official. In due course, the luggage was loaded into the residence/embassy building, and the Chinese official got back in the official car for the ride to the Foreign Ministry, where he’d make his contact report. The Papal Nuncio was past his prime, he’d write, a pleasant enough old chap, perhaps, but no great intellect. A fairly typical Western ambassador, in other words.
No sooner had they gotten inside than Schepke tapped his right ear and gestured around the building.
“Everywhere?” the cardinal asked.
‘Ja, doch,” Monsignor Schepke replied in his native German, then shifted to Greek. Not modern, but Attic Greek, that spoken by Aristotle, similar to but different from the modern version of that language, a language perpetuated only by a handful of scholars at Oxford and a few more Western universities. “Welcome, Eminence.”
“Even airplanes can take too long. Why can we not travel by ship? It would be a much gentler way to getting from point to point.”
“The curse of progress,” the German priest offered weakly. The Rome-Beijing flight was only forty minutes longer than the one between Rome and New York, after all, but Renato was a man from a different and more patient age.
“My escort. What can you tell me of him?”
“His name is Qian. He’s forty, married, one son. He will be our point of contact with the Foreign Ministry. Bright, well educated, but a dedicated communist, son of another such man,” Schepke said, speaking rapidly in the language learned long before in seminary. He and his boss knew that this exchange would probably be recorded, and would then drive linguists in the Foreign Ministry to madness. Well, it was not their fault that such people were illiterate, was it?
“And the building is fully wired, then?” DiMilo asked, heading over to a tray with a bottle of red wine on it.
“We must assume so,” Schepke confirmed with a nod, while the cardinal poured a glass. “I could have the building swept, but finding reliable people here is not easy, and…” And those able to do a proper sweep would then use the opportunity to plant their own bugs for whatever country they worked for— America, Britain, France, Israel, all were interested in what the Vatican knew.
The Vatican, located in central Rome, is technically an independent country, hence Cardinal DiMilo’s diplomatic status even in a country where religious convictions were frowned upon at best, and stamped into the earth at worst. Renato Cardinal DiMilo had been a priest for just over forty years, most of which time had been spent in the Vatican’s foreign service. His language skills were not unknown within the confines of his own service, but rare even there, and damned rare in the outside world, where men and women took a great deal of time to learn languages. But DiMilo picked them up easily— so much so that it surprised him that others were unable to do so as well. In addition to being a priest, in addition to being a diplomat, DiMilo was also an intelligence officer— all ambassadors are supposed to be, but he was much more so than most. One of his jobs was to keep the Vatican— therefore the Pope— informed of what was happening in the world, so that the Vatican— therefore the Pope— could take action, or at least use influence in the proper direction.
DiMilo knew the current Pope quite well. They’d been friends for years before his election to the chair of the Pontifex Maximus (“maximus” in this context meaning “chief,” and “pontifex” meaning “bridge-builder,” as a cleric was supposed to be the bridge between men and their God). DiMilo had served the Vatican in this capacity in seven countries. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, he’d specialized in Eastern European countries, where he’d learned to debate the merits of communism with its strongest adherents, mostly to their discomfort and his own amusement. Here would be different, the cardinal thought. It wasn’t just the Marxist beliefs. This was a very different culture. Confucius had defined the place of a Chinese citizen two millennia before, and that place was different from what Western culture taught. There was a place for the teachings of Christ here, of course, as there was everywhere. But the local soil was not as fertile for Christianity as it was elsewhere. Local citizens who sought out Christian missionaries would do so out of curiosity, and once exposed to the gospel would find Christian beliefs more curious still, since they were so different from the nation’s more ancient teachings. Even the more “normal” beliefs that were in keeping, more or less, with Chinese traditions, like the Eastern Spiritualist movement known as Falun Gong, had been ruthlessly, if not viciously, repressed. Cardinal DiMilo told himself that he’d come to one of the few remaining pagan nations, and one in which martyrdom was still a possibility for the lucky or luckless, depending on one’s point of view. He sipped his wine, trying to decide what time his body thought it was, as opposed to what time is was by his watch. In either case, the wine tasted good, reminding him as it did of his home, a place which he’d never truly left, even in Moscow or Prague. Beijing, though— Beijing might be a challenge .