 The Gemini Contenders first edition cover. | |
| Author | Robert Ludlum |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime novel |
| Publisher | Dial Press |
Publication date | 1976 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 438 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | 0-385-27273-1 |
| OCLC | 316213902 |
The Gemini Contenders is a 1976 novel by Robert Ludlum.
At the start of World War II a train departs from Salonika and heads for the Italian Alps, carrying a mysterious cargo. Over the next four decades, various members of the wealthy Italian Fontini-Cristi family, and a small brotherhood of priests with the name Xenope, struggle to locate and control the deadly secret cargo.
In 1939, Savarone Fontini-Cristi is the padrone of an immensely wealthy and powerful Italian family. At this time, the Order of Xenope, a remote Greek monastic brotherhood, possesses ancient religious manuscripts, some of which, if authentic, are considered to be of enough significance to shatter the Christian religion. The Order of Xenope knows that the Nazis and Italian Fascists are seeking these long-rumored documents so must hide them. Because of his stature as a man of unsurpassed integrity, the Order entrusts the custody of these holiest of relics to Fontini-Cristi. Savarone schedules the circuitous shipment by train from Salonika, through Yugoslavia and Italy, and finally into the Alps. If the contents of the shipment are discovered at any time, the consequences are explosive.
Though extremely wealthy, Savarone Fontini-Cristi has grown to abhor the Fascist regime of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. He actively supports the partigiani, the disorganized Communist opposition to Il Duce. Savarone's involvement with the train from Salonika becomes known to the powerful Roman Catholic Cardinal, Donatti, who must have the hidden documents at any cost.
Incorrectly believing that Savarone has shared the secret location of the vault containing the documents with his first-born son, 36-year-old playboy Vittorio, Cardinal Donatti orders the execution of the entire Fontini-Cristi family at the family compound Campo di Fiori, just outside Milan. The family's massacre by an execution squad, consisting of German soldiers overseen by Donatti, is secretly witnessed by Vittorio, who can hardly believe the horror - father, mother, brothers, wives, children - all murdered in front of his eyes.
To Vittorio Fontini-Cristi's surprise, the British take extraordinary steps to evacuate Vittorio from Italy, expecting that he will tell them of the vault's location. Unfortunately for them, he doesn't know anything about the train from Salonika or its contents.
The British take advantage of Vittorio's business skills during World War II, establishing a covert network of displaced European professionals, whose purpose is to discreetly sabotage the business processes of the German war machine: Shipping fiascos and printing mistakes, resulting in mild chaos in the back office of the war effort. The British decided to anglicize his name to Victor Fontine. Throughout the war, periodic incidents arise related to the hidden documents that put Victor's life, and the life of Jane, his new-found bride, in danger. In June 1942, in the midst of a German bombing related to the vault, Jane gives birth to twins, whom she calls her Geminis. Victor vows that, immediately after the war, he will put the mystery of Salonika behind him, and convince his pursuers that he knows nothing about it.
At the war's end, he returns to Campo di Fiori, site of the execution grounds, where he hopes to end his involvement with the documents. After barely escaping with his life, he is met at the gates by five zealous priests, including the despised Cardinal Donatti. Proclaiming for the hundredth time that his father never told him about the train, Donatti orders Victor to be tortured until he confesses. Since Victor knows nothing, the priests torture him by breaking every single bone in his body, finally administering the last rites, and leaving him to die.
Having barely survived the torture, Victor sells all of his holdings in Italy and establishes an extremely successful post-war consulting business in America. His twin sons, Adrian and Andrew, have grown up with privilege, with Adrian attending Princeton and Harvard Law, while Andrew, a West Point graduate, is a Major in the Vietnam War.
The sons are on opposite sides of the Vietnam war, but Andrew has grown into a sociopathic man, for whom the end justifies the means. Adrian is on the verge of exposing some of the crimes that his brother, and his cabal of elite officers, have committed.
At the same time, Victor is alarmed to learn that the train from Salonika has leaped through the past 30 years in the form of one of the zealous priests, who vows that Victor knows where the documents are and that he will force Victor to tell him. Remembering comments and gestures by his murdered father, the 70-year-old Victor travels back to Campo de' Fiori, and discovers key clues to the vault's location. The priest observes Victor's discovery, and attempts to pick up the torture where it was left off back in 1945. Badly injured, Victor returns to America to charge his Geminis with the responsibility of locating the hidden documents, realizing only that the sons have grown apart, but not that Andrew should not have such crucial information to be used for ill purposes.
Killing anyone who gets in his way, Andrew pursues the Salonika documents, leaving Adrian far behind. Adrian knows his brother's nature, and that he cannot be allowed to have the documents that could cause the collapse of Christianity, and the worldwide chaos that would ensue.
In Champoluc a little town in the Aosta Valley, Adrian catches up with the murderous Andrew just as Andrew discovers the vault. In a monumental struggle, Adrian righteously triumphs over his evil twin brother, leaving Adrian to have the documents interpreted and to decide what to do with them.
A parchment was taken from a Roman prison cell in the year 65 A.D. It is a letter supposedly written by a prisoner named Simon Bethsaida, renamed 'Peter' by Jesus Christ. In the letter, the author claims that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, but instead another prisoner was substituted. Jesus allegedly committed suicide three days after the incident.
Pope Alexander III, born Roland, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 7 September 1159 until his death. A native of Siena, Alexander became pope after a contested election, but had to spend much of his pontificate outside Rome while several rivals, supported by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, claimed the papacy. Alexander rejected Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos' offer to end the East–West Schism, sanctioned the Northern Crusades, and held the Third Council of the Lateran. The city of Alessandria in Piedmont is named after him.
Pope Adrian VI, born Adriaan Florensz Boeyens, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 9 January 1522 until his death on 14 September 1523. The only Dutchman to become pope, he was the last non-Italian pope until Polish John Paul II 455 years later.
The Roman Inquisition, formally the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, was a system of tribunals developed by the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church, during the second half of the 16th century, responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes relating to religious doctrine or alternative religious doctrine or alternative religious beliefs. In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, it was one of three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition along with the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition.
Victor Amadeus I was the Duke of Savoy from 1630 to 1637. He was also known as the Lion of Susa.
Victor Emmanuel II was King of Sardinia from 1849 until 17 March 1861, when he assumed the title of King of Italy and became the first king of a united Italy since the 6th century, a title he held until his death in 1878. Borrowing from the old Latin title Pater Patriae of the Roman emperors, the Italians gave him the epithet of Father of the Fatherland.
Prince Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy, Prince of Naples is the only son of Umberto II, the last King of Italy, and his wife Marie-José of Belgium. Vittorio Emanuele also uses the title Duke of Savoy and claims the headship of the House of Savoy. These claims were disputed by supporters of his third cousin, Prince Aimone, 6th Duke of Aosta.
Stigmata is a 1999 American supernatural horror film directed by Rupert Wainwright and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was written by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage. Its story follows an atheist hairdresser from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who is afflicted with stigmata after acquiring a rosary formerly owned by a deceased Italian priest who himself had suffered from the phenomenon. It stars Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Pryce, Nia Long, and Rade Šerbedžija.
The Palazzo della Cancelleria is a Renaissance palace in Rome, Italy, situated between the present Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and the Campo de' Fiori, in the rione of Parione. It was built 1489–1513 by Baccio Pontelli and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder as a palace for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, and is regarded as the earliest Renaissance palace in Rome. The Palazzo houses the Papal Chancellery, is an extraterritorial property of the Holy See, and is designated as a World Heritage Site.
Paulo Evaristo Arns OFM was a Brazilian prelate of the Catholic Church, who was made a Cardinal and the Archbishop of São Paulo by Pope Paul VI, and later became Cardinal Protopriest of the Roman Catholic Church. His ministry began with a quiet twenty-year academic career, but when charged with responsibility for the Sao Paulo Archdiocese he proved a relentless opponent of Brazil's military dictatorship and its use of torture as well as an advocate for the poor and a vocal defender of liberation theology. In his later years he openly criticized the way Pope John Paul II governed the Catholic Church through the Roman Curia and questioned his teaching on priestly celibacy and other issues.
Palazzo Braschi[paˈlat.tso ˈbras.ki] is a large Neoclassical palace in Rome, Italy and is located between the Piazza Navona, the Campo de' Fiori, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and the Piazza di Pasquino. It presently houses the Museo di Roma, the "museum of Rome", covering the history of the city in the period from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.
Omero Antonutti was an Italian actor and voice actor.
Alain (II) de Coëtivy was a prelate from a Breton noble family. He was bishop of Avignon, Uzès, Nîmes and of Dol, titular cardinal of Santa Prassede, then cardinal-bishop of Palestrina and cardinal-bishop of Sabina. Many sources mention him as the Cardinal of Avignon.
Century is a New York Times best-selling novel, written by Fred Mustard Stewart and published in 1981. The story follows four generations of an Italian-American family with settings in both America and Italy. Most of the events that take place in the novel, take place in actual American and Italian history. Readers are witnesses to the rise of Benito Mussolini, the Prohibition period, Black Tuesday, World War I, World War II, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, and the gradual formation of the motion picture industry in Hollywood. The novel spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.
The Last Chance is a 1945 Swiss war film directed by Leopold Lindtberg. It was entered into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prize of the Festival. The film was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
Mussolini and I is a 1985 made-for-television docudrama film directed by Alberto Negrin. It chronicles the strained relationship between Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, based on Ciano's diaries. Made in English as an Italian-French-German-Swiss-Spanish-US co-production, with Bob Hoskins, Anthony Hopkins and Susan Sarandon in the leading roles, it first aired on Rai Uno on 15 April 1985 in a 130-minute version. On 8 September 1985, it premiered in the USA on HBO in an extended four-hour version.
Italy–Spain relations refers to interstate relations between Italy and Spain. Both countries established diplomatic relations some time after the unification of Italy in 1860.
Bruno Mussolini was the son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Mussolini's wife Rachele, the nephew of Arnaldo Mussolini, and also the grandson of Alessandro Mussolini and Rosa Mussolini. He was an experienced pilot who died in a flying accident.
Victor Rietti was an Italian-born actor and director who became known through his work in television, especially through the many live television productions of the Italian play To Live in Peace during the 1950s. He was knighted by the Italian government.
Carlo Vittorio Amedeo Delle Lanze (1712–1784) was an Italian clergyman, a Roman Catholic cardinal. In his youth, Delle Lanze was supposed to be close to Jansenism, but in his late life he was a supporter of Jesuit and part of the zelanti.
The fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, also known in Italy as 25 Luglio, came as a result of parallel plots led respectively by Count Dino Grandi and King Victor Emmanuel III during the spring and summer of 1943, culminating with a successful vote of no confidence against the Prime Minister Benito Mussolini at the meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism on 24–25 July 1943. As a result, a new government was established, putting an end to the 21 years of Fascist rule in the Kingdom of Italy, and Mussolini was placed under arrest.