When he returned to his lodgings in Vatican City, Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly telephoned his colleague, Monsignor Matthew Neylan of the Secretariat of State. Matt Neylan was a tall, handsome fellow, dark as a gypsy, with a crooked, satiric grin and a loose athlete’s stride that made women look twice at him and then give him one more glance to fix him in their memories and wonder what he’d look like out of uniform. His title was Segretario di Nunziature di prima classe, which, however awkwardly it translated into English, put him about number twenty in the pecking order. It also gave him access to a great deal of information on a wide range of diplomatic matters. O’Rahilly saluted him with the full brogue and blarney.
‘Matt, me fine boyo! Malachy! I have a question for you.’
‘Then spit it out, Mal. Don’t let it fester in your mouth!’
‘If I were to ask you, very politely, whether you’d dine with me tonight, what would you say?’
‘Well now, that would depend.’
‘On what?’
‘On where we’d eat and who was paying – and what quid I’d be asked for O’Rahilly’s quo!’
‘A three-in-one answer, boyo. We eat at Romolo’s, I pick up the check, and you give me a piece of advice.’
‘Whose car do we take?’
We walk! It’s ten minutes for a one-legged man!’ ‘I’m on my way already. Meet you at the Porta Angelica – oh, and bring cash; they don’t like credit cards.’
Da Romolo, near the Porta Settimiana, had once been the house of la Fornarina, mistress and model to the painter Raphael. However unreliable the legend, the food was good, the wine honest and the service – in age-old Roman style – agreeably impertinent and slapdash. In winter one ate inside, warmed by a fire of olive wood in the old baker’s oven. In spring and summer one dined outside under a canopy of vines. Sometimes a guitarist came, singing folk songs in Neapolitan and Romanaccio. Always there were lovers, old, young and in-between. The clergy came too, in or out of uniform, because they were as much a fixture in the Roman scene as the lovers and the wandering musicians and the jostling purse-snatchers in the alleys of Trastevere.
In true Roman style, O’Rahilly kept his question until after the pasta and the first litre of wine.
‘Tell me now, Matt, do you remember a fellow called Lorenzo de Rosa at the Greg?’
‘I do. Handsome as Lucifer. Had a phenomenal memory. He could recite pages of Dante at a stretch! As I remember, he was laicised a few years ago.’
‘He wasn’t. He skipped the formalities and got himself married under the civil code.’
‘Well, at least he had sense enough to cut clean!’
‘He didn’t. That was his problem. He’s been trying to tidy the whole mess. Naturally enough, nobody’s been very co-operative.’
‘So?’
‘So last night his wife died in the Salviati clinic, leaving him with two young children.’ ‘That’s tough.’
‘Tougher than you know, Matt. I was at the clinic tonight to see our lord and master. De Rosa was just coming out. We spoke. The poor devil’s near crazed with grief. He said – and I quote: “I can’t wait to spit on your master’s grave!”’
‘Well. I’ve heard the same thought expressed by others – more civilly, of course.’
‘It’s not a laughing matter, Matt.’
‘And did I say it was? What’s bothering you, Mal?’
‘I can’t make up my mind whether he’s a threat to the Holy Father or not. If he is, then I’ve got to do something about it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Call our security people. Have them make contact with the Carabinieri and arrange some surveillance on de Rosa.’
‘They won’t only put him under surveillance, Mal. They’ll roast him on a spit, just to frighten him off. That’s pretty rough for a man with two kids and a wife hardly cold in the ground.’
‘That’s why I’m asking your opinion, Matt. What should I do?’
‘Let’s be legal first of all. He uttered a malediction, not a menace. It was a word spoken in private to a priest. So he didn’t commit a crime; but if it suited them, the security boys could make it look like one at the drop of a hat. More than that, your report and their embellishments would go on his dossier – and they’d be there till doomsday. All the other circumstances of his life would be read in the light of that single denunciation. That’s the way the system is designed. It’s a hell of a burden to lay on an innocent man!’
‘I know. I know. But take the worst scenario: the man is really a nut-case, bent on vengeance for an injustice done to him and to the woman he loved. One summer day he goes to a public audience in St Peter’s Square and shoots the Pope. How will I feel then?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Matt Neylan innocently. ‘How has the Man been treating you lately?’
Malachy O’Rahilly laughed.
‘Not so well that I’d give him a good-conduct medal. Not so badly that I’d want to see him bumped off. You’d have to agree there’s that risk.’
‘I don’t have to agree anything of the kind. You met de Rosa. I didn’t. Besides, if you wanted to eliminate every possible threat to your Sacred Person, you’d have to make pre-emptive arrests up and down the peninsula. Personally, I’d be inclined to ignore the whole thing.’
‘I’m the man’s secretary, for God’s sake! I’ve got a certain special duty to him.’
‘Wait a minute! There may be a simple way to handle this, with no extra grief to anyone. Let me think it through while you order another bottle of wine. Make it a decent red this time. This house Frascati is so thin you could keep goldfish in it.’
While Malachy O’Rahilly went through his little fandango over the wine, Matt Neylan sponged up the last sauce from his pasta and then delivered his verdict.
‘There’s a fellow who works for our security people here in Vatican City. His name is Baldassare Cotta. He owes me a favour because I recommended his son for a clerk’s job in the Post Office. He used to be an investigator for the Guardia di Finanza and I know he moonlights for a private detective agency in town. I could ask him to check out de Rosa and give me a report. It would cost you round about a hundred thousand lire. Can you touch the petty cash for that much?’
‘Wouldn’t he do it for love?’
‘He would, but then he’d have the arm on me for another favour. Come on, Mal! How much is the Bishop of Rome worth?’
‘It depends on where you’re sitting,’ said Malachy O’Rahilly with a grin. ‘But it’s a good idea. I’ll underwrite it from somewhere. You’re a good man, Matt. They’ll make you a bishop yet.’
‘I won’t be around that long, Mal.’
Malachy O’Rahilly gave him a swift, appraising look.
‘I do believe you’re serious.’
‘Dead serious.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’m thinking of giving the game away, just walking out, like our friend de Rosa.’
‘To get married?’
‘Hell no! Just to get out! I’m the wrong man in the wrong place, Mal. I’ve known it for a long time. It’s only lately I’ve put together enough courage to admit it!’
‘Matt, tell me honestly, is there a woman in it?’
‘It might be easier if there were – but no. And it isn’t the other thing either.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘After the steak, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to choke in the middle of my own valediction.’ ‘You’re taking this very lightly.’
‘I’ve had a long time to think about it, Mal. I’m very calm. I know exactly what Luther meant when he said, “Here I stand, I can do no other”. All I’m trying to figure is how to make the move with as little upset as possible … Here’s the steak now, and the wine. Let’s enjoy ’em. There’ll be plenty of time to talk afterwards.’
The Florentine steak was tender. The wine was soft and full-bodied and for a man facing a drastic change in his life and his career, Matt Neylan was singularly relaxed. Malachy O’Rahilly was forced to contain his own curiosity until the meat dishes had been cleared away and the waiter had consented to leave them in peace to consider dessert. Even then, Neylan took a roundabout route to deliver the news.
‘Where to begin? That’s a problem in itself, you see. Now, it’s all so simple and matter-of-fact that I can hardly believe the agonies I put myself through. You and I, Mal, had the same career, chapter and verse: school with the Brothers in Dublin, seminary at Maynooth, then Rome and the Greg. We paced it out together: Philosophy, Biblical Studies, Theology – Dogmatic, Moral and Pastoral – Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Exegetics and History. We could put together a thesis, defend it, turn it inside out like a dirty sock and make it into heresy for the next debate in the Aula. Rome was right for us, we were right for Rome. We were the bright boys, Mal. We came from the most orthodox Catholic country in the world. We just had to run up the ladder, and we did, you to the Papal Household, me to the Secretariat of State, attaché first class … The only thing we missed was the thing that we swore brought us into the priesthood in the first place: pastoral service, the care of the people, Mal! We didn’t do any of that worth a tinker’s curse! We became career clerics, old-time court abbes from the monarchies of Europe. I’m not a priest, Mal. I’m a goddam diplomat – a good one, too, who could hold his own in any embassy in the world – but I could have been that anyway, without forswearing women and marriage and family life.’
‘So now we come to it!’ said Malachy O’Rahilly. ‘I knew we would, sooner or later. You’re lonely, you’re tired of a solitary bed, bored with bachelor company. No discredit in that, boyo. It comes with the territory. You’re riding through the badlands just now!’
‘Wrong, Mal! Wrong, wrong. Rome’s the easiest place in the world to come to terms with the flesh and the devil. You know damn well you can sleep two in a bed here for twenty years, with nobody any the wiser! The point – the real, needle-sharp point, old friend – is that I’m not a believer any more.’
‘Would you call that one back to me, please?’ O’Rahilly was very quiet. ‘I want to be sure I’ve heard aright.’
‘You heard me, Mal.’ Neylan was calm as a lecturer at the blackboard. ‘Whatever it is that makes for faith – the grace, the gift, the disposition, the need – I don’t have it. It’s gone. And the strange thing is I’m not troubled at all. I’m not like poor Lorenzo de Rosa, fighting for justice inside a community to which he’s still bound, heart and soul, then despairing because he doesn’t get it. I don’t belong in the community because I don’t believe any longer in the ideas and the dogmas that underpin it …’
‘But you’re still part of it, Matt.’
‘By courtesy only. My courtesy!’ Matt Neylan shrugged. ‘I’m doing everyone a favour by not making a scandal, carrying on the job until I can arrange a tidy exit. Which will probably take the form of a quiet chat with Cardinal Agostini early next week, a very polite note of resignation and presto! I’m gone like a snowflake.’
‘But they won’t let you go like that, Matt. You know the whole rigmarole: voluntary suspension a sacris, application for a dispensation …’
‘It doesn’t apply.’ Matt Neylan explained patiently. ‘The rigmarole only works when you believe in it. What have they got to bind me with except moral sanctions? And those don’t apply, because I don’t subscribe any longer to the codex. They don’t have the Inquisition any more. The Papal States don’t exist. The Vatican sbirri can’t come and arrest me at midnight. So, I leave in my own time and in my own way.’
‘You’ll go gladly, by the sound of it.’ O’Rahilly’s tone was sour.
‘No, Mal. There’s a sadness in it – a misty, grey kind of sadness. I’ve lost or mislaid a large part of my life. They say that an amputee can be haunted by the ghost of a missing limb; but the haunting stops after a while.’
‘What will you do for a living?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. My mother died last year. She left me a smallholding in County Cork. And last week, on the strength of my experience of Vatican diplomacy, I signed a two-book contract with a New York publisher for better money than I’ve ever dreamed of. So I have no financial worries, and the chance to enjoy my life.’
‘And no conscience problems either?’
‘The only problem I’ve got, Mal – and it’s too early to know how adjust to it – is how I’ll cope with living in neutral gear, without the creed and the codex.’
‘You may find it harder than you think.’
‘It’s hard already.’ Matt Neylan grinned at him across the table. ‘Right now! Between thee and me! You’re inside the Communion of Saints. I’m outside it. You’re a believer. I’m a miscredente, an infidel. We look the same, because we wear the uniform of a pair of ship’s officers on the Barque of Peter. But you’re still carrying the pilot. I’ve dropped him and I’m steering my own ship; which is a lonely and perilous thing to do in shoal waters.’
‘Where are you thinking of living afterwards? The Vatican won’t want you hanging around Rome. They can make things quite uncomfortable if they want, as you well know.’
‘The thought hadn’t entered my mind, Mal. I’ll go first to Ireland to settle the legacy and see that the property’s well managed. Then I’ll take myself round the world to see how it looks to a simple tourist with a fresh mind. Wherever I end up, I hope we can still be friends. If we can’t, I’ll understand.’
‘Of course we’ll be friends, man! And to prove it, I’ll let you buy me a very large brandy – which, after this shock, I damn well need!’
‘I’ll join you – and if it makes you any happier, I’ll get you the report on de Rosa for nothing!’
‘That’s big of you, boyo. I’ll see you get credit for it on judgement day!’
For Sergio Salviati, Italian born, a Jew by ancestry and tradition, a Zionist by conviction, surgeon extraordinary to a Roman Pontiff, judgement day had already arrived. A personage, sacred to a billion people on the planet, was committed to his custody and care. Instantly, before a scalpel had been lifted, the sacred personage was under threat – a threat as deadly as any infarct or aneurysm.
It was conveyed by Menachem Avriel, Israeli Ambassador to the Republic, who delivered it over dinner in Salviati’s house.
‘Late this afternoon our intelligence people informed me that an attempt may be made to assassinate the Pontiff while he is at the clinic.’
Salviati weighed the information for a moment and then shrugged.
‘It was always on the cards, I suppose. How good is the information?’
‘Grade A-plus, first hand from a Mossad man working undercover in an Iranian group, the Sword of Islam. He says they’re offering a contract – fifty thousand dollars up front, fifty thousand when the job is done. He doesn’t know yet what takers they’ve had.’
‘Do the Italians know about this – and the Vatican?’
‘Both were informed at six this evening.’
‘Their answers?’
‘Thank you – and we’ll take appropriate action.’
‘They’d better.’ Salviati was terse. ‘It’s out of my hands now. I start scrubbing with the team at six in the morning. I can’t cope with anything else.’
‘Our best judgement – that is to say, Mossad’s best judgement – is that any action will be taken during the convalescent period and that the attempt will be made from inside – by tampering with drugs, medications or life-support systems.’
‘I’ve got nearly a hundred staff at the clinic. They’ve got eight, ten languages between them. I can’t guarantee that one of them isn’t an agent in place. Damn it, I know at least three are agents in place for Mossad!’
Menachem Avriel laughed.
‘Now you can be glad you let me put ’em there! At least they know the routines and can direct the people we’re sending in tomorrow.’
‘And who, pray, will they be?’
‘Oh, didn’t you know? The Agenzia Diplomatica got a call late this afternoon for two extra wardsmaids, two electrical maintenance technicians and two male orderlies. They’ll be reporting for duty at six in the morning. Issachar Rubin will be in charge. You won’t have to worry about a thing – and Mossad will pick up the bill. You can concentrate on your distinguished patient. What’s the prognosis, by the way?’
‘Good. Very good, in fact. The man’s obese and out of condition, but as a boy he was farm-fed and farm-worked. He’s also got a will of iron. That helps him now.’
‘I wonder if it will help us?’
‘To what?’
‘Vatican recognition for the State of Israel.’
‘You’re joking!’ Salviati was suddenly tense and irritable. ‘That’s been a dead duck from day one! No way will they back Israel against the Arab world! No matter what they say officially, by tradition we’re Christ-killers, accursed of God. We have no right to a homeland, because we cast out the Messiah and we in our turn were cast out! Nothing’s changed, believe me. We did better under the Roman Empire than under the popes. It was they who put the yellow star on us, centuries before Hitler. During the war, they buried six million dead in the Great Silence. If Israel were dismembered again, they’d be there, scrabbling for the title-deeds to their Holy Places.’
‘And yet you, my dear Sergio, are going to endow this man with a new lease of life! Why you? Why not remit him to his own?’
‘You know why, my friend! I want him in my debt. I want him to owe me his life. Every time he looks at a Jew I want him to remember that he owes his survival to one and his salvation to another.’ Suddenly aware of his own vehemence, he grinned and spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Menachem, my friend, I’m sorry. I’m always edgy the night before a big operation.’
‘Do you have to spend it alone?’
‘Never, if I can help it. Tove Lundberg will come over later. She’ll spend the night and drive me to the clinic in the morning. She’s good for me – the best thing in my life!’
‘So when are you going to marry her?’
‘I’d do it tomorrow, if she’d have me.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Children. She doesn’t want any more. She’s made sure she can’t have them. She says it’s unfair to ask a man to wear that, even if he’s willing.’
‘She’s wise!’ The Ambassador was suddenly very quiet. ‘You’re lucky to get a good woman on such easy terms. But if you’re thinking of marriage and a family …’
‘I know! I know! Your Leah will find me a nice bright Jewish girl, and you’ll both send us off to Israel for the honeymoon. Forget it!’
‘I’ll move it up in the calendar, but I won’t forget it. Where’s Tove now?’
‘She’s entertaining James Morrison, our visiting surgeon.’
‘Question: does she know about the Agenzia Diplomática, and your other connections?’
‘She knows my sympathies are with Israel. She knows the people you send me to be entertained. For the rest, she doesn’t ask questions and I don’t volunteer answers.’
‘Good! The Agenzia is very important to us, as you know. It’s one of the best ideas I’ve had in my life …’
Menachem Avriel spoke no more than the truth. Long before his first diplomatic appointment, when he was still a field agent for Mossad, he had proposed the notion of a chain of employment agencies, one in each diplomatic capital, which could offer casual labour – cooks, waiters, chambermaids, nannies, nurses, chauffeurs – to diplomats on station and business families serving overseas terms. Every applicant for listing on the agency’s books was screened, bonded and paid the highest rate the traffic would bear. Local employment regulations were meticulously observed. Taxes were paid. Records were accurate. The clientele expanded by recommendation. Israeli agents, male and female, were filtered into the lists and Mossad had eyes and ears at every diplomatic party and business entertainment. Sergio Salviati himself kept places open on his roster for casual staff from the Agenzia, and if he ever had misgivings about the double role he was playing, he buried it under an avalanche of bitter folk-memories: the decrees of mediaeval popes that foreshadowed the Nuremberg laws of Hitler in 1935, the infamies of ghetto existence, the Black Sabbath of 1943, the massacre of the Ardeatine Caves.
There were moments when he felt that he could be riven asunder by the forces thrusting out from the centre of himself – the monomania that made him a great surgeon and a medical reformer, the fierce attachment of every Latin to his paese, his home-place, the tug of ten thousand years of tribal tradition, the nostalgia of psalmodies that had become the voice of his own secret heart: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.’
‘I should be going,’ said Menachem Avriel. ‘You need an early night. Thanks for the dinner.’
‘Thank you for the warning.’
‘Try not to let it worry you.’
‘It won’t. I work with life in my hands and death looking over my shoulder. I can’t afford any distractions.’
‘Time was,’ said Menachem Avriel drily, ‘when a Jew was forbidden to give medical aid to a Christian – and a Christian doctor had to convert the Jew before he could offer treatment.’
It was then, for the first time, that Sergio Salviati revealed the torment that was tearing him apart.
‘We’ve learned well, haven’t we, Menachem? Israel has come of age. We’ve got our own ghettoes now, our own inquisition, our own brutalities; and our own special scapegoats, the Palestinians! That’s the worst thing the goyim have done to us. They’ve taught us to corrupt ourselves!’
In her own apartment on the other side of the courtyard, Tove Lundberg was explaining Salviati to his English colleague.
‘He is like a kaleidoscope, changing every moment. He is so various that it seems he is twenty men, and you wonder how you can cope with so many – or even how he copes with himself. Then suddenly he is clear and simple as water. That is how you will see him tomorrow morning in the theatre. He will be absolutely controlled. He will not say an unnecessary word, or make a redundant gesture. I have heard the nurses say they have never seen anyone so careful with human tissue. He handles it like gossamer.’
‘He has respect.’ James Morrison savoured the last of his wine. ‘That’s the mark of a great healer. It shows. And how’s his touch for other things?’
‘Careful always. Very gentle most of the time. But there are lots of angers in him that I wish he could spare himself. I never understood until I came to Italy how deep is the prejudice against Jews – even against the native born with long ancestries in the land. Sergio told me that he decided very early that the best way for him to cope with it was by studying its roots and causes. He can talk for hours on the subject. He quotes passages from Doctors of the Church, from papal encyclicals and decretals, from archival documents. It’s a sad and sorry tale, especially when you think that the ghetto here in Rome was abolished and the Jewish people enfranchised by royal decree only in 1870.
‘In spite of soothing noises and half-hearted verbal amends, the Vatican has never repudiated its anti-semitic stance. It has never recognised the right and title of the Jewish people to a traditional homeland … These things trouble Sergio. They help him, too, because they drive him to excellence, to make himself a kind of banner-bearer for his people … Yet the other part of him is a Renaissance man, seeing all, trying desperately to understand and pardon all.’
‘You love him very much, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So … ?’
‘So sometimes I think I love him too well for my own good. One thing I’m sure of, marriage would be the wrong move for both of us.’
‘Because he’s Jewish and you’re not?’
‘No. It’s because …’ She hesitated a long time over the words as if testing each one for the load it must bear. ‘It’s because I’ve arrived at my own standing place. I know who I am, where I am, what I need, what I can have. Sergio is still travelling, still searching, because he will go much further and stand much higher than I could even dream. A moment will come when he will need someone else. I’ll be excess baggage … I want to make that moment as simple as possible, for him and for me.’
‘I wonder …’ James Morrison poured himself another glass of wine. ‘I wonder if you really know how much you mean to him?’
‘I do, believe me. But there are limits to what I can provide. I’ve spent so much love and care on Britte, there is so much more that I shall have to spend, that there’s none left for another child. I haven’t grudged any of it; but my capital is used up … I am almost at the end of my breeding time – so that special part of my passion for a man is gone. I’m a good lover and Sergio needs that because, as you well know, James, surgeons spend so much of their lives thinking about other people’s bodies, they sometimes forget the one beside them in bed. On top of all that, I’m a Dane. Marriage Italian style or Jewish style isn’t for me. Does that answer your question?’
‘It does, thank you. It also raises another one. How do you read our distinguished patient?’
‘I rather like him. I didn’t at first. I saw every objectionable feature that sixty years of clerical education, professional celibacy and bachelor selfishness can produce in a man – not to mention the greed for power that seems to afflict some elderly bachelors. He’s ugly, he’s cross-grained, he can be quite rude. But as we talked I caught glimpses of someone else, a man who might have been. You will laugh at this, I know, but I was reminded of the old fairy story of the Beauty and the Beast … remember? If only the Princess could summon up courage to kiss the Beast, he would turn into a handsome prince.’
James Morrison threw back his head and laughed happily.
‘I love it! You didn’t try, did you?’
‘Of course not. But tonight, on my way home, I called in to see him. It was a few minutes after nine. They had just given him the sedatives to settle him for the night. He was drowsy and relaxed but he recognised me. There was a lock of hair hanging down into his eyes. Without thinking, I brushed it away. He took my hand and held it for the briefest of moments. Then he said, so simply I almost wept: “My mother used to do that. She used to pretend it was my guardian angel, brushing me with her wings.”’
‘Is that what he said, “her wings”?’
‘Yes. Suddenly I saw a little, lonely boy with a girl-angel for a ghostly playmate. Sad, isn’t it?’
‘But for that one small moment, joyful. You’re quite a woman, Tove Lundberg, quite a woman! Now, I’m going to bed, before I make a fool of myself.’
In the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, the lights burned late. The Cardinal Secretary of State had summoned into conference the senior officials of his Secretariat and those of the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church. These two bodies between them dealt with all the external relations of Vatican City State and, at the same time, held together the complex and sometimes conflicting interests within the body of the Church. In the daily conduct of Curial affairs they were a kitchen cabinet; tonight, with the safety of the Pontiff at stake, they were a very cool and quite ruthless council of war.
Agostini, the Secretary of State, summed up the situation.
‘I accept the Israeli information as authentic. I accept, with considerable relief, that Mossad undercover agents will be working with normal staff around the intensive care unit and, later, on the ward occupied by His Holiness. This is an irregular and unofficial intervention, so we can take no formal notice of it. We rely upon the forces of the Republic of Italy – especially the Nucleo Centrale Anti-Terrorismo, who are at this moment reinforcing the perimeter protection of the clinic and will be placing plainclothes guards at strategic points within the building itself. This is about as much as we can do for the physical security of the Pontiff during his illness. However, a hurried check this evening with our diplomatic contacts indicates that things may not be quite so simple as they seem. Our colleague Anwar El Hachem has something to say on the Arab-Israeli aspect of the matter.’
El Hachem, a Maronite from Lebanon, delivered his report.
‘Sword of Islam is a small splinter group of Iranians from Lebanon, operating in Rome itself. They are not associated with the mainstream of Palestinian opinion, but are known to be able to touch large funds. Even as we speak, Italian security agents are pulling some of them in for questioning. Embassy representatives of Saudi Arabia and the North African republics, as well as the Emirates, disclaim all knowledge of the threat and offer full co-operation against what they see as a free-booting operation which can only do them harm. One or two of them raised the question as to whether the Israelis were setting up the whole thing as a provocative gesture. But I found little support for this view.’
‘Thank you, Anwar.’ The Secretary continued. ‘Is there any doubt at all that the contract offer of $100,000 was made by Sword of Islam?’
‘None at all. But the man who made it is now in hiding.’
‘The Americans know nothing.’ Agostini hurried through the list. ‘The Russians disclaim all knowledge but are happy to exchange news if they get any. The French are referring back to Paris. What about the British?’
The British were the territory of the Right Reverend Hunterson, titular Archbishop of Sirte, a senior Vatican servant for many years. His report was brief but specific.
‘The British Embassy said tut-tut how distressing, promised to look into it and came back about nine with the same information as Anwar, that Sword of Islam is a shop-front title for an Iranian-backed group out of Lebanon. They do have money in the quantities suggested. They do finance hostage-taking and murder. In this instance, His Holiness presents a prominent target-of-opportunity.’
‘Which he wouldn’t be,’ said the Substitute Secretary tartly, ‘if we’d gone to Salvator Mundi or Gemelli. We have only ourselves to blame for exposing him to a hostile environment.’
‘It’s not the ground that’s hostile.’ Agostini was testy. ‘It’s the terrorists. I doubt we could provide as good security elsewhere. But it does raise one important issue. His Holiness talked of spending his convalescence outside Vatican territory, in a private villa perhaps. I don’t think we can permit that.’
‘Can we stop it?’ This from a German member of the Council. ‘Our master does not take kindly to opposition.’
‘I’m sure,’ said the Secretary of State, ‘the Republic has very good reason not to want him killed on its own soil. His Holiness, Italian born, has very good reason not to embarrass the Republic. Leave that discussion to me.’
‘How soon can we get him home?’
‘If all goes well, ten to fourteen days.’
‘Let’s make it ten. We could move a team of nursing sisters into Castel Gandolfo. I could talk to the Mother General of the Little Company of Mary. She could even fly in some of her best people from abroad.’
‘As I remember,’ said Archbishop Hunterson, ‘most nursing orders are hard put to service the hospitals they have. Most now depend on lay staff. Quite frankly, I don’t understand the hurry. So long as security can be maintained, I’d leave him at the Villa Diana.’
‘The Curia proposes,’ said Agostini, with tart humour, ‘but the Pontiff disposes – even from his sickbed! Let me see what notions I can plant in his head while he’s still amenable.’
It was at this precise moment in the discussion that Monsignor Malachy O’Rahilly presented himself, in response to a beeper summons from the central communications office. He was flustered and breathless and slightly – only slightly – befuddled from the white wine and the red and the strong brandies he had taken to help him through Matt Neylan’s defection from the Faith.
Neylan, too, was summoned because he was a first-class Secretary of Nunziatures and his work was to edit the news and spread it around his bailiwick. They bowed to the assembled prelates, took their seats in silence and listened respectfully while Agostini first admonished them to secrecy and then walked them through the outline of threats and remedies.
Monsignor Matt Neylan had no comment to make. His functions were predetermined. His punctual performance was taken for granted.
O’Rahilly, on the other hand, with drink taken, was inclined to be voluble. As a personal assistant to the Pontiff and the bearer of a Papal commission as to the conduct of his office, his address to Agostini tended to be more emphatic than discreet.
‘I already have a list of those to be given access to His Holiness at the clinic. In the circumstances, should they not be supplied with a special card of admission? After all, the security people cannot be expected to recognise faces, and a soutane or a Roman collar readily disguises a terrorist. I could have the entire set printed and distributed within half a day.’
‘A good idea, Monsignore.’ Agostini nodded approval. ‘If you will put the matter in hand with the printers first thing in the morning. My office will be responsible for distribution – against signatures always.’
‘It will be done, Eminence.’ Wildly elated by the commendation – rare and precious in Curial circles – O’Rahilly decided to push his luck a little further. ‘I talked with His Holiness earlier this evening and he asked me to make special enquiries into the case of one Lorenzo de Rosa, formerly a priest of this diocese whose wife – that is to say, under the civil code – died in the Salviati clinic yesterday. Apparently de Rosa had made repeated but unsuccessful bids to be laicised canonically and have his marriage validated, but …’
‘Monsignore!’ The Secretary of State was cool. ‘It would seem this matter is neither relevant to our present concerns nor opportune in the context …’
‘Oh, but it is, Eminence!’
O’Rahilly with the bit between his teeth would have put a Derby runner to shame. In the midst of a frozen silence, he described to the assembly his personal encounter with de Rosa and his later discussion with Monsignor Matt Neylan as to whether or not the threat should be taken seriously.
‘… Matt Neylan here was of the opinion, which I shared, that the poor fellow was simply overwhelmed with grief and that to expose him to interrogation and harassment by security forces would be a great and unnecessary cruelty. However, after what we’ve just heard, I have to ask myself – and to ask Your Eminences – whether certain precautions, at least, should not be taken.’
‘They most certainly should!’ The Substitute Secretary was in no doubt about it. His name was Mikhaelovic and he was a Jugoslav already preconditioned to security procedures. ‘The safety of the Holy Father is of paramount concern.’
‘That is, at best, a dubious proposition.’ Matt Neylan was suddenly a hostile presence in the small assembly. ‘With great respect, I submit that to badger and bedevil this grieving man with police inquiries would be an unconscionable cruelty. The Holy Father himself is concerned that, even before his bereavement, de Rosa may have received less than Christian justice and charity. Besides, what Monsignor O’Rahilly has omitted to mention is that I have already instituted a private inquiry into de Rosa’s circumstances.’
‘And by so doing have exceeded your authority.’ Cardinal Mikhaelovic did not take kindly to correction. ‘The very least precaution we can take is to denounce this man to the security people. They are the experts. We are not.’
‘My point precisely, Eminence.’ Neylan was studiously formal. ‘The anti-terrorist troops are not bound by the normal rules of police procedure. Accidents happen during their interrogations. People have their limbs broken. They fall out of windows. I would remind you also that there are two young children involved.’
‘Illegitimate offspring of a renegade priest!’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sweet sake! What kind of a priest are you?’
The blasphemy shocked them all. Agostini’s rebuke was icy.
‘You forget yourself, Monsignore. You have made your case. We shall give it careful consideration. I shall see you in my office at ten tomorrow morning. You are excused.’
‘But Your Eminence is not excused – none of you is excused – the duty of common compassion! I bid Your Excellencies good night!’
He bowed himself out of the meeting and hurried back to his small apartment in the Palace of the Mint. He was blazing with anger: at Mal O’Rahilly who couldn’t keep his big Irish gob shut, but had to make a great fellow of himself with a bunch of elderly eminences and excellencies; at the eminences and excellencies themselves, because they symbolised everything that, year by year, had alienated him from the Church and made a mockery of the charity which was radical to its existence.
They were mandarins, all of them, old-fashioned imperial Kuan, who wore bright clothes and buttoned headgear, and had their own esoteric language and disdained all argument with the common herd. They were not pastors, ardent in the care of souls. They were not apostles, zealous for the spread of the godspell. They were officials, administrators, committee men, as privileged and protected as any of their counterparts in Whitehall, in Moscow, or the Quai d’Orsay.
To them a man like Lorenzo de Rosa was a non-person, excommunicated, committed with a shrug to the Divine Mercy, but excluded for ever from any compassionate intervention by the human Assembly – unless it were earned by penitential humiliation and a winter vigil at Canossa. He knew exactly what would happen to de Rosa. They would delate him to the Security Services. A quartet of heavies would pick him up at his apartment, take him down town, hand the children to a police matron for custody, then bounce him off the walls for two or three hours. After that they would make him sign a deposition he would be too groggy to read. It would all be quite impersonal. They wouldn’t mean any real harm. It was standard procedure, to get the facts quickly before a bomb went off, and to discourage any counteraction from an innocent suspect – but then, under the old inquisitorial system, no one was innocent until proven so in court.
And what of himself, Matt Neylan? The quiet exit he had planned for himself was impossible now. The unsayable had been said. There was no way to recall the words – and all because Mal O’Rahilly couldn’t hold his liquor and had to go trailing his coat-tails at a crisis conference of the biggest big shots in the Holy Roman Church! But wasn’t that the way of it, the whole conditioning process that produced a perfect Roman clerical clone? The trigger-words in the formula had never changed since Trent – hierarchy and obedience. The effect they produced on simple priest or lordly bishop was always the same. They stood with eyes downcast, tugging their forelocks, as if listening to thunders from the Mountain of Revelation.
Well, tonight was one time too many for Matt Neylan. Tomorrow he would pack and go, without regret, without a by-your-leave. The day after, they would name him a renegade like de Rosa and strike his name out of the book of the Elect and commit him with something just short of contempt to the God who made him.
He reached for the Rome telephone directory and ran his finger down the list of folk called de Rosa. There were six entries with the initial L. He began dialling them in sequence, trusting that a mention of the Salviati clinic would bring forth an identifying response. He hoped the man would be sane enough to accept a warning from a one-time colleague. It would be nice to set Brother Fox well on his way to a safe earth, before the hounds began baying in his tracks.
Over the compound of Salviati’s house, the new summer moon rode high in a sea of stars. In the shadows of the garden a nightingale began to sing. The light and the music made an antique magic in the vaulted chamber where Salviati slept and Tove Lundberg, propped on her elbow, hovered over him like a protecting goddess.
Their loving had followed their familiar pattern: a long, tender prelude, a sudden transition to play, a swift leap to the high plateau of passion, a series of fierce orgasms, a languid recall of fading pleasures, then Sergio’s sudden lapse into sleep, his classic features youthful and unlined against the pillow, the muscles of his shoulders and breast frozen into marble in the moonglow. Tove Lundberg always lay wakeful afterwards, wondering that so wild a storm could be followed by so magical a calm.
Of herself she had no clear image; but the role she was expected to play on these crisis nights was one she knew by heart. She was the servant of his body, the perfect hetaera, pouring herself out on him, asking nothing but to serve him. The why of it for him was buried deep in his unconscious and she had no desire to lug it out into the light. Sergio Salviati was the perennial alien. He had become a prince by conquest. He needed the spoils to attest his victories – the gold, the jewels, the slave girls, and the respect of the mighty in the land.
The why for her was different, and she could confront it without shame. As mother, she had delivered defective offspring; she had no wish to repeat the experience. As lover, she delivered perfect pleasure and while time might diminish her charm or her capacities as a bed-mate, it could only increase her stature and influence as a professional comrade. Best of all was Sergio’s own acknowledgement: ‘You are the one wholly calm place in my life. You are like a deep pool in the middle of a forest and every time I come to you I am refreshed and renewed. But you never ask me for anything. Why?’
‘Because,’ she told him, ‘I need nothing but what I have: work I can do well, a place where my Britte can grow to be an independent and talented woman, a man I trust and admire and love.’
‘How much do you love me, Tove Lundberg?’ ‘As much as you want, Sergio Salviati. As much as you will let me.’
‘Why don’t you ask how much I love you?’
‘Because I know already …’
‘Do you know that I am always afraid?’
‘Of what I am afraid?’
‘That one day, at some bad moment, the healing magic will fail you, you will misread the signs, lose the master touch. But it will not happen. I promise you.’
‘Are you never afraid?’
‘Only in a special way.’
‘What way?’
‘I am afraid of needing anything so much that someone could hurt me by taking it away.’
And, she might have added, she came of old Nordic seafaring stock, whose women waited on windswept dunes and cared not whether their men were drunk, sober or scarred from brawling, just so that, one more time, they had escaped the grey widow-maker.
In the small, dark hours before the false dawn, Leo the Pontiff began rolling his head from side to side on the pillow and muttering restlessly. His gullet was thick with mucus and his brow clammy with night-sweat. The night nurse shifted him in the bed, sponged his face and moistened his lips with water. He responded drowsily.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry to be a trouble. I was having a bad dream.’
‘You’re out of it now. Close your eyes and go back to sleep.’
For a brief, confused moment he was tempted to tell her the dream, but he dared not. It had risen like a new moon from the darkest places of childhood memory; and it shed a pitiless light upon a hidden hollow in his adult conscience.
At school there was a boy, older and bigger, who bullied him continually. One day he confronted his tormentor and asked why he did such cruel things. The answer still echoed in his memory: ‘Because you’re standing in my light; you’re taking away my sun.’ How could he, he asked, since he was so much smaller and younger. To which the bully answered: ‘Even a mushroom throws a shadow. If it falls on my boot, I kick it to pieces.’
It was a rough but lasting lesson in the usances of power. A man who stood against the sun became a dark shadow, faceless and threatening. Yet the shadow was surrounded by light, like a halo or the corona of an eclipse. So the shadow-man assumed the numen of a sacred person. To challenge him was a sacrilege, a most damnable crime.
So, in the last hours before they drugged him and wheeled him off to the operating theatre, Ludovico Gadda, Leo XIV, Vicar of Christ, Supreme Pastor of the Universal Church, understood how, in learning from the bully, he had himself been tipped into tyranny.
In defiance of biblical injunction, of historic custom, of discontent among clergy and faithful, he had appointed as senior archbishops, in Europe and the Americas, men of his own choosing, hard-line conservators, stubborn defenders of bastions long overpassed, deaf and blind to every plea for change. They were called the Pope’s men, the praetorian guard in the Army of the Elect. They were the echoes of his own voice, drowning out the murmurs of discontented clerics, of the faceless crowd outside the sanctuaries.
It had been a harsh encounter and a heady victory. Even as he remembered it, his face hardened into the old raptor look. Dissenting clerics had been silenced by a double threat: suspension from their functions and the appointment of a special apostolic administrator. As for the people, when their shepherds were silenced they, too, were struck dumb. They had no voice in the assembly. Their only free utterance was outside it, among the heretics and the infidel.
It was the childhood nightmare which shamed Leo the Pontiff into admitting the harm he had done. It was the shadow of the surgeon’s knife which reminded him that he might never have the chance to repair it. As the first cocks crowed from the farmlands of the Villa Diana, he closed his eyes, turned his face to the wall and made his last desperate prayer.
‘If my presence hides the light of Yours, O God, remove me! Strike me out of the book of the living. But if you leave me here, give me, I beg You, eyes to see, and heart to feel, the lonely terrors of your children!’