Michelangelo_s Notebook

39

The false priest sat in the dusty basement of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, sorting through the material brought to him by a put-upon volunteer with the martyred expression of someone who carries the weight of the world around on their shoulders. The middle-aged woman had been digging around through the ancient records for hours now and had a different sigh for each string-wrapped bundle of yellowed manila folders.

This wasn’t the unconfirmed fuzzy-logic trail created by an ethereal trip through the data banks imprinted on the servers of a thousand search engines, it was the faded ink-on-paper truth of real history on documents old enough to crumble in your hands. Going through the files, the priest could almost feel the ghosts of a thousand clerks like the one serving him now and hear the echoed clacking of typewriters and the faint earnest scratching of pens. Boring perhaps, but in the end it was easy enough to find the trail of Frederico Botte through the formative years of his life.

The child, whoever he was and whatever his interest to the red-hats in the Holy City, had arrived in New York City on the Gdynia-America Line ship Batory on June 11, 1946, traveling from the Polish city of Gdansk. There was a slip from the Ellis Island Immigration authorities showing that Frederico was seven years old and traveling with his guardian, Fraulein Ilse Kurovsky, a German national. Frederico’s place of birth was listed as La Grazie, Italy, where he had been under the care of the sisters of the convent of San Giovanni All’ Orfenio. There was no birth mother listed in the appropriate space on the registration form but there was a faintly penciled name in the margin: Katerina Annunzio. Although it wasn’t clearly stated, the false priest could read between the lines: Frederico was a bastard, raised by the nuns at the convent, and then given into the care of the German woman with the Polish name.

After arriving in America, it appeared that Frederico had been placed in the care of St. Luke’s Orphanage for two years, then transferred to St. Joseph’s School in Greenwich Village, where he was enrolled as a “scholarship” student. His reports from the school were uniformly excellent, especially in the arts and languages. It was assumed that he would finish at St. Joseph’s and then be enrolled in one of the local seminaries where he would train for the priesthood. However, his records with the parish ended in 1952 when he was adopted by Sergeant and Mrs. Brian Thorpe of Barrow Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. Interestingly, the lawyers who had provided legal services for the private adoption was the firm of Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting, the same ghostly firm of nonexistent people who had established the mysterious Grange Foundation. It was also interesting, although probably coincidental, that the Grange Foundation was now located on St. Luke’s Place-the same name as the orphanage where Frederico Botte had lived, now presumably transformed into plain old Fred Thorpe.

The false priest felt a familiar tightening in his chest. The circle was closing; it was almost the end now. The clerk reappeared, carrying more files. The man from Rome gave the woman his best priestly smile and asked if she had the New York telephone directory around anywhere.

“Which borough?” she said, and sighed once again.