A Season for the Dead (9 page)

13

The official quarters of Cardinal Michael Denney overlooked the Cortile di San Damaso, the sprawling private courtyard hidden from the outside world by the curving western wall of St. Peter’s Square. The Vatican had not been built as a residence. Denney’s apartment was one of only two hundred or so created within the palace walls. On the far side of the square lay the residency of the Swiss Guard. In his own block, senior Vatican officials jostled for position to get the best view of the open space. His neighbors included some of the most powerful figures in the Holy See. The camerlengo, the Pope’s chamberlain, who would oversee the interregnum in the event of the pontiff’s death, was some way down the hall. They rarely spoke these days. Denney was aware he had become persona non grata, a prisoner in a glittering cell. Sometimes he spent hours staring at the reflection of the paintings, the Murano chandeliers and the wall-length ormolu mirrors, waiting for the most menial of civil servants to return his call. All this must, he knew, change. A man could go mad in these circumstances.

The agents of that change were now assembled around the walnut dining table that sat by the long, eighteenth-century windows looking out onto the courtyard. It had taken him many weeks to persuade these three men to come to Rome and sit down together. Among them they represented a powerful trinity of interests which could, with a little persuasion and the right inducements, resurrect something from the shattered shell of the Banca Lombardia and with it a little of Michael Denney’s reputation. Sufficient, he hoped, to allow him to return home and live out the rest of his life in dignified obscurity.

Two of the men present he thought he could handle. Robert Aitcheson, the sour-faced American lawyer who oversaw corporate affairs for the bank from his base in the Bahamas, had as much reason as Denney to clear this thing up. The Feds were already on Aitcheson’s back, chasing up a hot money scam that came to light in the wake of the currency-laundering investigations introduced after September 11. Aitcheson needed to get out of the heat. Arturo Crespi was in the same boat. Crespi was a diminutive pen-pushing banker who oversaw the movement of capital in and out of the web of funds that underpinned the bank. The Finance Ministry was asking too many questions of him already. Ostensibly, he was the bank president, although in everything he deferred to Denney, who had assembled the prolix network of offshore trusts piece by piece over the years from what had once been a legitimate, onshore financial enterprise. Crespi was weak and respectable. It suited Denney at the time. He had been instructed to get an above-average return on the money under his care. There had, he believed, been little choice, and, when they began, little in the way of legal obstruction either.

The third man stood by the window, peering down into the courtyard, sniffing from a summer cold. Emilio Neri was over six feet tall, a giant of a man in his mid-sixties, now beginning to run to flab. He had gray, lifeless eyes, a long, jutting jaw and a head of perfectly groomed silver hair. Today, as always, he wore an expensive suit: thin, pale-colored silk which now showed damp patches under the arms. He rarely smiled. He spoke only when he had something to say. Neri was, from outward appearances, a successful Roman entrepreneur. He owned a palatial penthouse in the Via Giulia, a pretty young wife, three country houses and an apartment in New York. His name adorned the board of the Fenice Opera House in Venice, where he helped raise funds for its rebuilding, and any number of charitable organizations working with the Catholic poor.

Only once had his image as a man beyond reproach been questioned. It was in the mid-1970s when a radical press untouched by conventional party politics had existed in the city. A scurrilous reporter on a short-lived underground rag had published a portrait of Neri culled from police gossip. It was a story many recognized but few wished to acknowledge. The article told of his upbringing in Sicily as the son of a local Mafia don, his apprenticeship in the racketeering world of black-market tobacco and prostitution and his eventual emergence as a key liaison figure in the continuing dialogue between corrupt government, Church officials and the criminal state that lived then, as now, beneath the mundane façade of Italian society. The article had accused Neri of nothing criminal. In a way, it was intended as a tribute to the man, who had genuinely come to be something of an art lover, was seen at all the right exhibitions, was always there, in his private box, at the opera and the ballet.

Three weeks after the magazine appeared its author was found in a car parked in a lane near Fiumicino airport. His eyes had been put out, probably by a man’s thumbs. His tongue had been ripped from his mouth. Every finger and both thumbs had been severed at the first socket with a knife. He survived, blind, dumb and unable, or unwilling, to try to communicate. The street gossip, which Denney later discovered was entirely accurate, claimed that Neri had performed his revenge personally in a warehouse he owned on the perimeter of the airport. He’d then, in front of the tortured journalist, changed into evening dress and flown by private plane to Venice to see Pavarotti in a new production of
Turandot,
after which he had attended the first-night party as an honored guest.

Denney, once he had come to know the man, wondered why he’d gone to all that trouble. Emilio Neri could have sucked the life out of another human being just by looking at him. Still, the papers wrote only about Neri’s charitable activities after that.

Denney watched Neri’s big back at the window, wondering what was going through his head. There was just one thing Neri wanted now: the return of the money he had placed in Denney’s hands. If that happened, they would, once again, be on the best of terms.

The door into the room opened. Brendan Hanrahan walked in carrying a tray with coffee on it. Throwing a mint into his mouth, Neri turned to stare at him.

“Don’t they provide you with servants anymore, Michael?” Neri asked.

“Just helping out,” Hanrahan interjected. “This is a private meeting, gentlemen. None of you wants to advertise your presence, I imagine.”

“As if anything’s secret in this place these days,” Neri sniffed. He cast a glance out of the window and then at Denney. “I’m amazed you still have one of the best views in the place. The Church is going soft.”

“Shall we get down to business, gentlemen?” Aitcheson complained. “I want to be on the ten o’clock plane out of here.”

“Agreed,” Crespi said.

Neri sat down at the table opposite the little banker, grinning at him. “Have you managed to replace that clerk of yours yet, Crespi? The one who talked himself to death.”

The little banker went white. “My people are trustworthy. Every one of them. I stake my word on it.”

“You’re staking more than that, my friend,” Neri said. “Enough. You know my position. You know my responsibilities. You people talk. Tell me why we’re here.”

“To get ourselves out of a hole,” Hanrahan said, and passed around copies of a single printed page.

Neri scanned the document. “Doesn’t say here when I get my money back.”

“Emilio,” Denney replied with as much pleasantry as he could muster. “I can’t work magic. We all want our money back. We can all get it, I think. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere. We have to rebuild.”

Aitcheson hadn’t been listening. His eyes were fixed on the paper. “There’s this much money still left? Why didn’t I hear of this before?”

Crespi threw up his hands. “We’ve been liquidating assets for eighteen months. Quietly. Privately. Sometimes . . . We didn’t know if we’d get paid. I didn’t want to raise anyone’s hopes unnecessarily. This is all very complex, gentlemen. We had so many accounts. In so many places. I couldn’t tell you about all of them, my friend. I would have bored you rigid. And for what? You wanted to know what the return was. Not where it was coming from.” He stole a glance at Neri. “That was all anyone wanted. It’s one reason we’re in this mess in the first place.”

Neri now seemed interested in the paper. “Who else knows about this money? Where is it exactly?”

“No one outside this room.” Hanrahan looked Neri in the face. “No offense but we’ve been too lax with our secrets already. Where it is, that’s my business.”

Some $3 billion had been seized by the United States authorities alone, on the basis of tax evasion and money laundering. It infuriated Denney. Had that remained undiscovered, he could have weathered the storm. Crespi’s feverish bid to liquidate what assets he could find and shift the funds into new, undiscovered accounts had, at least, offered him a lifeline. If only Aitcheson and Neri could be persuaded to grasp this.

“So we’re not paupers,” Neri said. “I walk into this room thinking this was money down the drain. Now you tell me there’s, what, sixty, seventy million dollars out there we can lay our hands on. How did this come about?”

“You don’t want to know,” Hanrahan said with a scowl.

“We have,” added Denney, “worked very hard. We’ve had to persuade people, induce them, get them to see our point of view. It’s not been easy.”

Neri sniffed into his hand. “I heard you’d been spending a lot of money. The price of a Rome whore’s gone up ten percent in the last six months, Michael. Was that your doing?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“And none of this for yourself? To get you safe passage out of this place, back to America?”

Denney’s hand stole across the table and gripped Neri’s arm. The large man stared balefully back.

“Emilio,” Michael Denney said, “I did this for us. We can be back in business. We can put some new people in place. Let them talk to the banking authorities. Let them run the risks. We just stay behind the scenes and pull the strings, as we should have done all along. This has been a learning experience for all of us. We come out of it stronger. Richer. More powerful. And in the end, yes, I can walk out of here. I can go back to America a free man because we’ll have a whole new field of people in our debt.”

Neri smiled and looked at Aitcheson. “You hear this? We’re building a new bank. And all it takes is sixty, seventy million dollars.”

“Not enough,” Aitcheson grumbled. “You know that.”

They hadn’t said no. They were interested. Denney could feel it. They had the light of greed in their eyes. “So we raise more. We still have the contacts. They still have the need. Lombardia wasn’t brought down by us. We were the victims of the markets and laws that didn’t even exist when we first went into business. We wipe the slate clean, we start again, we stay one step ahead of the pack.”

Denney paused, to give what came next some theatrical effect. “It requires some investment on our own part. Personally I’ll throw every last cent I have into the pot. That’s a lot of money. All my money. Whatever you want to come in with, that’s your decision. We know this business, gentlemen. We’re extremely good at it. The best. We’re needed out there.”

Neri laughed, a big deep sound, and clapped Denney on the shoulder. “You mean this, Michael? We’re back in business. What a salesman. What a guy.”

“We’re back in business,” Denney repeated.

Hanrahan’s phone rang. He answered it. His face went dark. Then he made an excuse and left the room.

“What do you think?” Denney asked the three men, unable to stop himself stealing a glance out of the window, thinking of the world beyond.

14

There were two possibilities, Nic Costa decided. Falcone would either love the idea, or he would just go plain crazy—unless there were results. Given results, the severe, overdressed man he called inspector would, Nic thought, forgive almost anything.

The queue to the museum was still about fifty yards long though the place would close in an hour. Costa used his police card to work his way to the front, then put it discreetly away and paid for a ticket at the desk. He walked to the library, waved the police card at the bored attendant on the door and entered the Reading Room without waiting to be stopped.

The hard yellow light of the late afternoon streamed in from the courtyard onto a sea of empty desks. The place had a sharp antiseptic smell. Someone had been cleaning up. Costa went first to the old desk where, the day before, Hugh Fairchild’s skin had sat like the involuntary castoff from some giant lizard. He was aware that the attendant was on the phone already. The man’s low voice echoed across the spotless, vacant interior. Only one book remained out. It sat on a desk three along from the one Sara Farnese had occupied. He looked at it: something incomprehensible in medieval script. This was a place for a certain kind of human being and it was closing now, going to rest for the weekend.

Costa walked through the aisles, examining everything. Sure enough, the library was littered with security cameras: tiny dull eyes glinting back at him from discreet metal housings on the ceiling, in corners, attached to windows. He was no academic but he understood why they were there. The library was priceless. The only way to get access was by obtaining special permission, something even a long-term lecturer like Stefano Rinaldi had seemed to find difficult. This was a priceless store of irreplaceable treasures and one that loaned them to a grateful, privileged few to hold in their hands, to touch, admire and then return. The risks required great care. Every entrance into the room, every loan, every moment a work was in the hands of a reader, all these occurrences would be recorded, day in, day out. Whoever kept the tapes these cameras made would know what Stefano Rinaldi looked like, how he’d behaved, probably from the moment he’d entered the library itself on the floor above.

Was this why the man whispered? Or was there someone he feared in the room?

Either way, the cameras surely held the key. Still, Falcone’s question kept coming back:
Why?
Logically, because Rinaldi wanted to set Sara the task of saving his wife, and feared this would be impossible if someone, either in the room or with access to the tape, witnessed what he was attempting. Could he have left his wife, Mary, standing on the chair in the tower, knowing that if she stumbled she would hang herself? Was it possible that somewhere between Tiber Island and the Vatican he changed his mind and decided to beg Sara to rescue her? This was extending the craziness theory too far. Nor did it provide a link between Rinaldi’s supposed actions and his whispered instructions to Sara. Had he changed his mind, Rinaldi could have returned himself and removed Mary from the noose. Costa began to understand Falcone’s doubts. The rudimentary logic which reduced these events to some simple act of bloody revenge began to unravel when one thought about the details. There was only a single possibility that could explain everything, and it was one Costa found deeply disturbing.

What if Rinaldi was not the lone murderer but an accomplice in concert with another? Or even a victim himself? What if he had come to the Vatican desperate because someone else was in the tower, someone who had entrapped him, his wife and the unfortunate Fairchild? Someone who had used Rinaldi’s debts to arrange that initial meeting, murdered the Englishman in front of their eyes, strung up Mary Rinaldi and told her husband that she would be dead unless he sent Sara Farnese back there immediately?

Someone who sent the man out on this mission with Hugh Fairchild’s skin in a supermarket bag, demanding he spread it out on the desk, say these crazy words, knowing, surely, that the armed guards would think they had some homicidal madman in their midst?

And one more thing too. Someone who, as far as Stefano Rinaldi was concerned, would know whether all these conditions had been met. Either because he had an accomplice there, or access somehowto the tapes
even before Rinaldi could return
. Costa rejected this last thought. It could only be practical if someone in the Vatican was in direct contact with the man in the tower. This was surely a conspiracy too far. No, the conditions that were set—the gun, the bag with Fairchild’s skin inside, the repeated and crazy declamations—were invitations to the armed guards of the Vatican to intervene with all possible force because of the nature of the threat they perceived. That must have been the intention—to ensure Rinaldi, and perhaps Sara Farnese too, died here in the library.

It was a hypothesis Nic Costa was reluctant to embrace. His years in the police force had taught him that simple solutions were usually the correct ones. The tapes were the key, Costa repeated to himself, then felt a firm hand grip his shoulder. He turned and, as he had expected all along, found himself looking into the cold, rheumy eyes of the man called Hanrahan, still dressed in the same black suit, still with a crucifix in his lapel.

Costa smiled pleasantly. These were different circumstances. He could think more about this curious man who now stood in front of him, blocking his way to the door, not angry, more jaded, even curious perhaps.

“This is tiresome,” Hanrahan said. “Don’t you know anything of the protocols that govern how we’re supposed to work?”

The voice was thick, rough-edged and familiar somehow. Then Nic Costa remembered. Nic had briefly played for the force rugby team, before deciding that the more solitary sport of running suited him better. There had been an Irishman who coached the team for a while. He spoke like this. He even had the same kind of coarse features.

“I realized I forgot to give you my details,” Costa said. He took out his wallet and handed Hanrahan the official police card. Then he pointed at his face and the broken nose. “You’re a player, right? On the field. Rugby.”

Hanrahan read the card, then put it in his pocket. “When I was young. When I thought there was nothing in the world that could harm me.”

“I used to play a little too.”

Hanrahan eyed him, skeptical.

“Fly half,” Costa said. “Pretty good, even if I say so myself.”

“Falcone told me you ran. He said it was one of your talents.”

Costa nodded.

“In fact,” the Irishman continued, “I think he said it was your only talent.”

“Sounds like Falcone.”

“I can imagine you running, Mr. Costa. I imagine you excel. But at some stage you have to turn and fight too. How good are you at that?”

Costa laughed. “Probably not so hot, to be honest. It’s a question of size.”

“No, it isn’t.” Hanrahan said it firmly. “What do you want?”

“A look at the tape.” Costa nodded at the ceiling. “You must have our dead professor covered from the moment he walked into the library. I’d like to see.”

Hanrahan shook his head as if amazed. “Who do you think you are?”

“Just a cop trying to understand why three people are dead. Who do you think you are?”

Hanrahan thought about this, then pulled out his own card. “I’m a consultant here, Mr. Costa. I advise on security matters. I have no power to give you your tape—”

“Then introduce me to someone who has.”

“Why?”

Costa was starting to feel exasperated. “Don’t you think you’re under any obligation to help us crack this thing? Three people dead, Hanrahan. I know none of them are Vatican citizens, but even so . . .”

The Irishman waved a half angry hand at him. “Don’t give me that crap, son. When you deal with us, you deal with another country. This isn’t police work, it’s diplomacy.” The sharp, liquid eyes narrowed. “If I talk to the person who can give you that tape, what do you have to offer in return?”

Costa knew what Luca Rossi would say if he were here.
Never do deals with these people. Never even think you can broker some kind of covenant because there’s always a caveat, a get-out you never know about until it’s too late.

But Rossi was somewhere else, contemplating his dinner with Crazy Teresa. All the information he needed was here, locked inside this tiny country that just happened to live behind its own high walls in the heart of Rome. If he didn’t cut some kind of deal it might never see the light of day.

Besides, some small, quiet voice told him, there was an opportunity here. A moment when you could throw a stone in a pool and wait to see the patterns the ripple would make once the stone hit the surface. Sometimes you had to take chances.

Nic Costa pulled out his notebook and copied the phone number he’d found on Stefano Rinaldi’s computer that morning. He gave it to Hanrahan, who stared at the page with a stony expression.

“Someone from here, someone in the office of a person called Cardinal Denney, was in contact with Rinaldi by phone.”

Hanrahan seemed genuinely surprised. “Do you know why?”

“Maybe I should ask Cardinal Denney.”

Hanrahan laughed, a big, hearty laugh, one that, had it lasted, might have brought tears to his eyes.

The Irishman’s hand slapped his shoulder, hard.

“You’re a funny man, Mr. Costa,” he said. “I just haven’t the heart to call Falcone again. Not this time. Now just do me a favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Get the fuck out of here. And go sign this thing off whatever way you want. We both know what happened. Some crazy, personal tragedy to do with a rather fine-looking young woman with lax personal morals. Don’t turn over stones for the sake of it. Sometimes those little creatures underneath can bite.”