Bass Reeves Chronicles II: The Crimson Chapter

The Bass Reeves Chronicles II The Crimson Chapter A Novel SapioX MG Preface There is a passage in the old records of the Vatican that most modern scholars have chosen to forget. It sits in a locked wing of the Archive under a Latin heading that translates, roughly, to Of Wounds That Do Not Close. The passage speaks of a war that has never officially ended, waged in cellars and cathedrals and forgotten roads, between things the Church cannot admit to seeing and men and women it cannot admit to sending. The first Bass Reeves Chronicle told the story of a lawman who refused to die and a woman whose curse would not let him. It ended with a truce, or something close to it, and the reader may have closed the book believing that Bass had earned his rest. He had not. The old marshal has learned, over a very long life, that rest is a rumor and peace is a house built on sand. What follows takes place in the year 2007, in the summer of a century that has already forgotten most of its dead. Bass Reeves is alone. His friends are buried. His hunger has grown quiet in the way that starving things grow quiet, which is not the same as being gone. He is waiting for something, though he could not tell you what. The Church, in one of its quieter corners, has decided he has waited long enough. ---SapioX MG, April 2026 Interlude: The Chair That Fell Vatican City, thirty years earlier. September, 1978. He had been Pope for thirty-three days. Albino Luciani had taken the name John Paul the First because he had wanted to honor two men and had not felt entitled to the name of either alone. He had said as much to the College. He had said it with the small self-deprecating smile that had been his ordinary expression since childhood, and the College had smiled back, and he had thought, briefly, This is going to be all right. It had not been all right. He had spent his thirty-three days learning what was in the drawer. The drawer was in the desk of the office he had inherited, a heavy walnut desk that had been used by three of his predecessors, and inside the drawer, under a false bottom he had discovered accidentally when he had reached too far back for a paperclip, there had been a file. The file had been thin. The file had contained the names of forty-three men and women who worked in the Vatican Bank, in the Congregation for Bishops, in the Curia, and in one particular private wing whose name was not, and had not been for a hundred years, written down anywhere in the ordinary registries. The file had contained the sums of money that had moved between certain accounts in Milan and certain accounts in the Bahamas. The file had contained the dates on which certain young priests had been reassigned, briefly, to certain rural parishes, and the dates on which those priests had subsequently died in road accidents, sudden illnesses, or, in one case, a fall from a bell tower. The file had contained a summary at the top, in a hand he did not recognize, which read: Held in trust for the incoming pontiff. Do what you can. The Chapter is beyond me. God be with you. G.M. He had not known who G.M. was. He had had suspicions. He had spent thirty-three days assembling the courage to act on what he had found. He had gone through each of the forty-three names. He had prayed over each. He had drafted, in his own hand, the reassignments he intended to announce at the consistory scheduled for the twenty-ninth. On the evening of the twenty-eighth, he had returned to his rooms at half past nine. He had spoken with his private secretary about the schedule for the following morning. He had drunk a small glass of chamomile tea. He had opened his breviary to compline. He had felt, at some point in the evening, that he was not alone in his rooms. He had looked up from the breviary. He had seen, standing at the window, a figure. He had thought, at first, that it was the curtain moving in a draft. He had corrected himself. The window was closed. The figure was tall. The figure had wings. The wings were not open (they were folded, in a way that suggested extreme patience) and the figure was not looking at him. It was looking out the window, west, toward a distant hill. Luciani had said, quietly, in the peasant Italian of his childhood, Chi sei tu, amico mio? Who are you, my friend? The figure had not turned. The figure had said, in a voice that was not quite a voice, Sleep now. It will be quick. I have come to be here when it happens. That is all I can do. I am not ready. I know. There is work. I know. The file. It will be found again. Not soon. Later. There will be others. You are the first. I have come because you are the first, and because you were a good man, and because your fear should not be the last thing you feel. Sleep, Albino. I am here. He had wanted to argue. He had wanted to say a great many things. He had felt, instead, a great tiredness come over him. He had felt his hand loosen around the breviary. He had felt the small tea cup slip off the arm of the chair and had not heard it break. He had thought, at the very last, So this is what it is. He had died. At sunrise, when his secretary had found him, the breviary had been in his lap, opened to the office of readings. The tea cup had been on the floor beside the chair, broken cleanly in two. There had been no other person in the room. The window had been closed and locked from the inside. The door had been locked from the inside also, though the secretary had been given a key at some point in the night by someone he could not, afterward, remember. That detail would not appear in any of the official inquiries. The forty-three names in the file were, over the following six years, promoted, protected, promoted again, or in seven cases quietly retired to comfortable positions in Latin America. The file itself was retrieved from the walnut desk within eleven hours of Luciani's death by a man who signed his name in the visitors' log only with initials. The Chapter went on. It changed its name, twice, over the next thirty years. It changed its leadership four times. It grew rich. It grew quiet. It kept the file that had killed the man who tried to expose it. By 2007, the file lived in a fireproof cabinet in the private residence of Cardinal Umberto Vasco, three floors above his own office, in a room to which only he had the key. He read it, sometimes, in the evenings, the way another man might read a much-loved book. He was very fond of it. It contained his own name in the addenda, which had been made in a hand he recognized, once he had learned to look. His own hand. Added, without his conscious memory of adding it, on the night in the small chapel when he had said yes. He had, since then, added seventeen more names. The Chapter's work was, on the whole, going well. Prologue: The Bishop's Bargain Rome, six months earlier. Cardinal Umberto Vasco walked to the private chapel at half past two in the morning because he had not slept in nine days. He had told his aides it was insomnia. He had told his confessor it was doubt. In truth it was neither. It was a voice. The voice had first come to him in a hospital in Milan, where he had gone to bless a dying industrialist whose family had endowed three abbeys and one seminary. The industrialist was ninety-one years old and no longer conscious, but his eyes had opened as Vasco laid the oil across his forehead, and out of the industrialist's mouth had come a language Vasco did not recognize. Vasco had continued the rite. When he finished, the eyes had closed and the man had died, and Vasco had stood at the bedside for a very long time. The voice had followed him back to Rome. At first he had thought it was his own conscience, sharpened by fatigue. It asked reasonable questions. Why did the Church tolerate rot in its own ranks. Why did the Chapter, the private wing to which Vasco had been elevated at fifty-two, keep secrets that would have destroyed lesser men. Why did faith so often look, from the inside, like paperwork. Then the questions had grown less reasonable. Why did he not act. Why did he not take what he deserved. Why did he serve a God who let a good man die in a hospital bed while his daughters fought over the estate downstairs. The chapel was small. It had been built in the sixteenth century as a private space for a pope who suffered from a nervous condition and could not bear to pray with witnesses. It contained a stone altar, a wooden crucifix black with age, and one narrow window that looked out onto an interior courtyard. Vasco lit the candles himself. He knelt. "I am listening," he said aloud. The voice, when it answered, was not a voice. It was the memory of a voice, the way you remember a song your mother sang to you before you had language. It came from behind the altar, from inside the crucifix, from the marrow of his own bones. You have listened for a long time, it said. You are ready to speak. "What am I to say."