A Season for the Dead (19 page)

32

The apartment they gave him was on the third floor of a poky residential building adjoining the Vatican Library. It was unfit for a junior clerk, let alone a cardinal. That it was available at all was significant. Accommodation did not just materialize out of thin air in the Vatican. This was a preordained punishment by the state, one that must have been planned weeks, if not months, before. The perfidy of Neri and Aitcheson was just part of the act. Perhaps Neri had worked together with someone on the political side. There was no way of knowing. Only one plain fact consoled Michael Denney: They could never abandon him altogether. If he was handed over to the Italian police he could incriminate any number of men in Europe and America. Three Italian cabinet ministers were deeply in his debt. The European Commission was full of his placements. He counted Lloyds’s names and members of the New York Stock Exchange among those who had, in the good times, been the grateful recipients of any number of generous gestures, from the provision of company for the night to a well-placed inside tip. These were all items he would willingly have traded over the past few months as he attempted to buy safe passage out of the Vatican by any number of different means. It was a disappointment that he had failed, but the power of these weapons remained undiminished. He was grateful too that he had declined Neri’s whispered hints that the mob could find a way out for him. With hindsight, placing himself in the hands of Neri’s friends could have proved the most dangerous option of all.

Now they would all wait, hoping he would die of boredom perhaps, or take a gun and put it to his temple, solving the problem for everybody. It was a poor reward for a lifetime’s service. Nevertheless, Denney was a practical man. He could appreciate their logic. Trying to rebuild a new Banca Lombardia from the ashes was a desperate venture and one which, in all honesty, was more designed to elicit his own freedom than enrich anyone he could persuade to come along for the ride.

Denney had known the risks and the costs from the beginning. Thirty years ago he had changed, from being a loyal and caring servant of the Church to an agent of the Vatican state, part diplomat, part financier. The three-cornered red biretta of his position soon began to gather dust in the closet. Someone had to do this, he reasoned. The Church was a family, but the Vatican was a nation. Denney knew from the start that it needed to be defended. Over the years, as he became more worldly, he came to appreciate too that the city-state needed to safeguard its interests, to accrue wealth, and, in the final analysis, to deal with the Devil when necessary. He had come to believe that there was no room for sentiment or misplaced ethics. He never once asked himself whether the young Michael Denney would have thought otherwise. Secular matters transformed him into a secular man. He was not reckless. When he guided Banca Lombardia by pulling Crespi’s strings, he had never directed money straight into the coffers of crooks. There was always a circuitous route, one which allowed him to feign ignorance of the ultimate destination. That, at least, was the idea. Now he knew better.

He had become a material man. He had taken up the reins of commerce and come to understand that there were, on occasion, gray areas between what was legitimate and what was not. He had discovered too another side to himself, that his spare, ascetic looks turned the heads of women who, from time to time, offered relief from the stresses of his chosen career.

If, in the end, the venture was a success, any peccadilloes would soon be forgotten. When the numbers turned wrong, when scapegoats were sought, it was different. Had three key investments—two in Latin America and one with Russian partners in Spain—delivered the profits he expected, Cardinal Michael Denney knew he would now be a fêted member of the Vatican hierarchy, expecting further promotion. But the numbers were already looking sour on the day he watched, shell-shocked, as those two planes plummeted into the World Trade Center. The risks were cruelly balanced in the worst possible directions: technology, which was already suffering; some emerging East European economies; and the supposed safe haven of reinsurance. The markets and the stuttering global economy cheated him of his prize. The small fish down the food chain began to complain. Lombardia was forced to suspend trading. Then the police and, eventually, the FBI began to take an interest, started to peer through the complex entanglement of financial records—shell companies, obscure trust funds, phony bank accounts—that stretched around the world.

There were rumors about his personal life. No one regarded him as a priest anymore, but the office of cardinal still belonged to the Church. The hint of affairs and the certain knowledge that he loved wine and fine restaurants were matters which bore little weight in the good times. When excuses were sought, they became ammunition in his downfall. Once, he received invitations to some of the most elite dining rooms in Rome, where he was a welcome guest who would not always return to his own bed at the end of the evening. Once, he was on first-name terms with the finance ministers of several western nations. A nod from Denney, an expression of interest, could breathe life into a venture struggling to raise capital. He had power and influence and reputation. Then, in a brief year it was gone, accompanied by a whirlwind of vile rumor. Now he was a friendless prisoner trapped inside the tiny, close community of the Vatican, knowing his life would be in jeopardy if he stepped beyond its walls. From this point on, it would be a struggle to get even the smallest favor—a meal sent in from a restaurant, a few cleaning trucks to sweep away the media mob from outside a friend’s door.

The apartment had a single bedroom, a tiny living room, and a bathroom with a rusty cubicle shower. An ancient gas hot plate stood in the corner of the main room, perched above a miniature fridge. The place overlooked a dead, gray courtyard full of trash bins. The air-conditioning rattled and wheezed in the cruel August heat and still did little to ameliorate the temperature. Without asking, they had moved in some of his possessions: clothes, books, a handful of paintings. Perhaps Hanrahan hoped it would deaden the blow. The oil canvases seemed out of place inside these meager quarters. Denney, who had once loved art, thought he might never look at them again. He was sixty-two and in reasonable health, though mentally he increasingly found himself prone to fits of doubt and depression. He should have known what was coming. No one, that week, had addressed him as “Your Eminence,” an honor to which he was still entitled. No one but Brendan Hanrahan, and Denney found little comfort in that.

Denney knew the stocky Irishman only too well. Hanrahan belonged in prison as much as any of them. Somehow he possessed the skill and foresight to see the storm clouds gathering long before Denney had—and failed to pass the message on. Hanrahan was a survivor and, in a way, still loyal to an extent, perhaps for the most basic, selfish reasons. It was in his interest to see that Michael Denney remained out of the hands of the police. That doubtless explained his request for a private meeting.

“Maybe.” Denney was a slender, fit man with not an ounce of flab. Now his once handsome face was lined by worry and age. He wore a gray suit with no ecclesiastical trappings. He had long ago given up hope of resuming a role in the Church in Italy. He would never wear the cloth again until he was free of Europe, anonymous, with a new name, somewhere near home in Boston perhaps, where a man might disappear for a while and learn how to make others forgive. There was no redemption for Denney in the Vatican. If he were to recover himself, that would have to occur elsewhere, in the close Catholic neighborhoods of his youth.

Denney looked at his watch. A few minutes later there was a knock on his door.

Punctual as ever, Hanrahan let himself in and bowed. “Your Eminence.”

“I don’t know why you bother with that, Brendan. No one else does anymore.”

“That says more about them than it does about you.”

“Well, Brendan. These are interesting times. Is there news?”

His visitor sat down in the chair opposite the sofa. From outside the window came the noise of drilling. One of the workmen had told Denney why. They were improving these modest apartments, one by one. The work, and the racket, would go on for months.

“The woman politician,” Hanrahan said. “Vaccarini. The one who voted for you on the committee. She’s been murdered.”

Denney’s face fell. He looked grief-stricken. “Good God, man. What are the police doing?”

“Looking for him. He tried to murder one of theirs. Then he killed her. At his home. The house we gave him, if you recall.”

The Cardinal was aghast. “Who?”

“Please,” Hanrahan said harshly. “If I’m to help, we must be frank with each other. There can be no mistake anymore. I warned you. I said—”

“I know what you said!”

Hanrahan waited for him to recover his composure.

“I’m sorry,” Denney groaned after a while. “You’re absolutely certain of this?”

“It has to be. The police are in the place. Fosse is gone. They’ve no idea where. Neither have I. Do you?”

Denney leaned forward and folded his hands on his lap, rocking rhythmically on his chair—a habit he had more and more these days and one which emphasized his age. “Of course not. Where can he be, for God’s sake? He’s not a man of the world, is he?”

Hanrahan considered his reply. “I wouldn’t say that. I took a very good look at Fosse’s file. He did many interesting things before he worked here. He was attached to the Italian Olympic squad for a while and seems to have been a proficient athlete. He was chaplain to the National Theater in Palermo and even persuaded them to let him appear in a Pirandello play while he was there. Not bad for a farm boy from Sicily.”

“So what?” Denney demanded.

“So he sounds pretty resourceful to me. Educated beyond his standing too. And he seems to have a very clear idea of what he wants, what his plan is.”

Denney knew where this was leading. “Which winds up with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

Hanrahan frowned. He looked around the apartment, as if he were noting how humble, how undesirable, it was. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“Why would he want to kill me, Brendan? Aren’t there enough people with that in mind already? Do you have any reason for Fosse’s interest in the matter?”

Hanrahan slid a pack of cigars out of his pocket and lit one, letting the stink waft over into Denney’s face. “Something to do with the Farnese woman, perhaps? I don’t expect you to give me details of your own personal life, but I see the logs. I know who comes and goes in this building. Fosse has a grudge. He is, I think, a little like a tinderbox. It takes very little to spark the flames and when they’re alight, well . . .”

Hanrahan waited for a response. None came.

“This is not, Your Eminence, a complete surprise now, is it? There was plenty of trouble before. He’s got quite a history. That matter here which necessitated his removal from your staff. What was it exactly? I was away at the time and the records are unclear.”

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps.”

“He was overfond of the wrong kind of women. He was warned many times. He ignored those warnings. It’s not an uncommon fault.”

Hanrahan frowned. “So we rewarded him with a rather fine home and a new job. Even though he did, I believe, threaten you publicly at the time. Your dismissal of him was, I hear, rather fierce.”

Denney rocked from side to side. “I lost my temper. I’d put my trust in the young fool. He betrayed it. So he was upset at losing his post? He never mentioned Sara Farnese to me. Fosse was a troubled priest deserving of sympathy. I’ve no idea why he’s behaving like this now.”

Hanrahan stared at his fingernails in silence.

“Do you think he could get in here?” Denney asked. “Don’t we pay you people for protection to save us from that kind of trouble?”

“Of course you do. And you get it. But Fosse is . . . different somehow. He’s not an ordinary priest. He’s not an ordinary murderer either. He has reasons, motivations, I can’t begin to understand. Or rather, ones which I lack the information to clarify.”

Hanrahan paused to give his revelation some weight. He had only just rung off the phone with Falcone and even he was shocked by some of the detail. “He beheaded Alicia Vaccarini. Quite extraordinary. I know for a fact he’s seen files on everyone connected with your . . . ventures too. Names, addresses. Details of meetings. There were photographs in that place of his. Extraordinary photographs. You have to wonder about their purpose.”

Denney’s sallow face turned the color of granite. “Why are you telling me this? Do you think I scare that easily?”

“No. But I think you need to know what kind of game we’re in now. What we’re up against. You’ve fallen from grace, Michael, and what’s done is done. You can never go back. That charade you played yesterday can never be repeated.”

Denney cast him an accusing glare. “And you knew all along it wouldn’t work?”

“I hoped against hope. One does in these circumstances. I try to help, Michael.”

“Then get me safe passage out of here. Fix it and I’ll go.”