Blood of the Lamb (15 page)

“You won’t. I’m sending the police.”

“For the book?”

“Stay until they get there to make sure those people don’t leave. If they do, don’t confront them. Just keep tabs on them and call me. If they don’t, then soon as the Carabinieri show up, come here.”

“The Carabinieri? Not the Gendarmerie?”

“Do you know where the nearest taxi stand is?”

“I—”

“If you’re near Santa Maria della Scala, there’s one in Piazza Trilussa. When the police arrive, get in a cab and come here. I’ll be waiting.”

The Cardinal clicked off.

16

Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa sat motionless behind his ornate desk. He’d already instructed Father Ateba to bring Father Kelly in the moment he arrived, and he’d called the Gendarmes and told them to release the hapless clerk. Before any of that he’d called his nephew, Raffaele Orsini. He’d found the young Carabiniere on duty but available to do a favor for his uncle. That meant Raffaele’s partner was probably not around, the anti-clerical detective whose name Lorenzo could never remember—Giulio Aventino, that was it. Julius Caesar of the Aventine Hill, Raffaele called him. How much clearer could it be that the man was from an old Rome family, one that predated possibly the founding, and at least the growth to power, of the Church? And, according to Raffaele, had a chip on his shoulder about it. Detective Julius Caesar; but Lorenzo, even as his lip curled with disgust, realized he was directing his bile at the absent detective in order to avoid focusing on his real and looming problem.

Even allowing for Rome traffic, Thomas would be here in fifteen minutes.

What then?

Lorenzo sighed. Was there really any question? Thomas had indeed been babbling, and Thomas Kelly didn’t babble. Something had badly shaken him up, frightened him—something he didn’t understand. The woman from the Library who’d stolen the book, and the historian who lived in Trastevere: they’d terrified Father Kelly. He’d said they were crazy, but Lorenzo had heard the tiny note of doubt in Thomas’s voice.

There was only one possibility.

They’d told him the truth.

17

Gendarme
Vice Assistente
Luigi Esposito slammed his fist on his desk and clenched his jaw shut. Back home in Naples he’d be cursing a blue streak but in the years since he’d come up to Rome to join the Gendarmerie he’d learned to keep his language clean. Well, no. He’d learned to keep his mouth completely closed on infuriating occasions like this, so he wouldn’t risk filling the security offices of the Holy See with the words the situation called for.

It was bad enough he’d had to go racing through the traffic-choked streets of Rome in the company of two provincial dolts whose entire ambition extended to putting in their years finding tourists’ lost purses and then retiring on their piddling Gendarme pensions. Though at least the chase, as opposed to most of the work Luigi did here, had gotten his blood moving. They’d caught their quarry, too, a pale, sniveling clerk who’d stolen a book from the Vatican Library.

The uniformed idiots Luigi was saddled with laughed uproariously at how stupid he must be, this Argentinian punk, to work at the Library and not even think about the GPS-alarm chip in the book. And when it set off the alarm, to rip it out, stash the book somewhere—and forget he had the chip still on him! Oh, what a
scemo
!

Gritting his teeth, Luigi had thought,
No. You’re the
scemi
. No one’s that dumb, with the possible exceptions of yourselves.
Keeping the chip was clearly a well-thought-out red herring. The clerk had passed the stolen book to a confederate—probably the black-haired woman he’d pretended to be scuffling with—and kept the chip so they’d focus on him while she got away. This suggested to Luigi an organized burglary ring. Perhaps specializing in antique manuscripts, or perhaps just in stealing from the Vatican. Why not? There was wealth here beyond comprehension. Furthermore, as far as Luigi could tell, the possessions of the Vatican were like an iceberg. The ten percent that was visible was impressive enough, but the rest, besides being nine times greater, was hidden in murky waters. If you could get a precious item beyond the walls, there was a good chance no one would miss it. Which didn’t mean it was easy to steal from the Vatican, but it was possible, and probably, if you were a certain kind of crook, irresistibly tempting.

Luigi was a cop, not a crook. Scratching out his childhood on the cobblestones of Naples, he’d dipped a toe in criminal waters. Which of his friends hadn’t? He’d boosted the odd TV, raced off with the occasional dangling purse, run errands for a few local
malavitosi
. But it wasn’t for him. He watched his pal Nino get sent away to reform school, which everyone knew was six kinds of hell; and then his cousin Angelo, at fifteen, was one night advised to leave Naples immediately and plan not to come back. Angelo kissed his tearful mother and didn’t even pack a suitcase. Luigi could see early on that there was toughness and its attendant respect, but no real future, in crime.

There was a future, however, and other advantages, too, on the police. You could be tough and respected, and it was also useful to be smart. Luigi joined the local force, but ran up against a difficulty. His past as a booster and errand-runner wasn’t enough to blackball him. This was Naples, after all; if the police only accepted lily-white recruits there wouldn’t be a dozen cops in the city. But Luigi had been smarter and more enterprising than most
ragazzi
,
reliable, able to think on his feet. Every
malavitoso
in Naples coveted his services. If he’d elected to join one crime family over another the loser would have felt regret and congratulated the chosen. When he turned his back on them all and declared his loyalty to the other side, it stung. The investigation of crime depends on the cultivation of sources and mutual back-scratching; but no matter what Luigi Esposito offered, the word was out. No crook in Naples would talk to him. All doors were shut.

Luigi knew a cobblestone ceiling when he saw one. He began to despair at the vision of a future spent patrolling garbage-strewn alleyways and directing traffic on fume-filled streets.

One day, as he was responding to a purse-snatching on Via Santa Chiara, in the heart of his old neighborhood, inspiration struck. The American tourist’s pocketbook was long gone—when would they learn not to dangle their bags so condescendingly from their fingertips?—but after he made short work of the report he took his hat off and entered the quiet church. Old Father Carmelo was delighted to see Luigi Esposito and to find he’d done so well. By which, given the nature of the parish, the priest meant that Luigi had graduated from high school and wasn’t in jail. Luigi confided his problem to Father Carmelo, who had a word with a seminary mate whose cousin was a bishop, and so on, and Luigi had gone up to Rome.

It was quite an honor, so he was told, to serve on the Gendarmerie. That might be true, but Luigi soon discovered it to be an honor reserved for men like himself: people who knew people. Talent for the job, which Luigi happened to have, was secondary. In one way that was good. Surrounded by dull lumps of coal, a diamond shines all the brighter. Luigi, unsure he was a diamond but demonstrably not as dull as most of his colleagues, rose to the rank of
vice assistente
in an impressively short time.
Vice assistente
was a detective’s title; the problem was that the Gendarmerie had nothing much to detect. The pickpockets of Saint Peter’s Square needed chasing, and the occasional nut who insisted on speaking to the
Papa
—or insisted he
was
the
Papa
—needed to be quietly shooed from the premises. But anything juicy, any criminal activity an investigator could sink his teeth into, ran headfirst into the fact that as far as the Holy See was concerned, silence was golden.
Make It Go Away
was the Gendarme’s first directive. Find out who did whatever it was, and then explain in a soft and calm way that a dossier had been compiled and they’d best get themselves gone and keep quiet, did they understand? They always did, and the investigations of the few real crimes Luigi had come up against had ended as compiled dossiers in his desk. It was enough to turn a cop into a cynic.

Or to make him long for another move. Luigi began to dream of the Carabinieri. For a kid from Naples by way of the Gendarmerie, this was close to an impossible dream, based equally on the Carabinieri’s heavy pro-Rome bias and the fact that Luigi had little to show for his six years on the Gendarmes.

Until today. This could have been it, this could have been big. Luigi could see that this Argentinian, this Jorge Ocampo, was no
scemo
and he hadn’t acted alone. When they caught him he didn’t have the stolen book. But Luigi had him. Luigi began his interrogation and it was only a matter of time before he’d have broken the punk down. That would have led to his confederates. As the detective on the case—as, in fact, the man who’d personally tackled the clerk after his bogus fight with the woman (though the skinny kid was unaccountably strong and it had taken all three Gendarmes to subdue him), Luigi would be in a fine position to make Carabinieri hay while this sun shone.

He was, he thought, not far—a few minutes, half an hour—from pulverizing the kid’s innocent-victim act and getting him to spill it, when his
soprintendente
interrupted him. A call had come from the Cardinal Librarian: it was all a mistake. Nothing had been taken. Nothing was wrong. A faulty alarm system, a chip fallen from a book. A big uproar over zilch. Let the kid go.

Expressing his disappointment and his outrage to the
soprintendente
had gotten Luigi nowhere, not even winning him a sympathetic shrug. “We work for them, Esposito,” had been his boss’s cold reply. “Most of us are grateful for the opportunity to serve.”

Thus it was that the Argentinian, pale and confused but not checking this gift horse’s mouth, scuttled away, and Luigi Esposito smashed his fist on his desk and bottled up the curses that threatened to singe the office’s air. A cardinal! Luigi’s blue Carabinieri uniform torn from his grasp by a cardinal who was no doubt embarrassed by the traffic-disaster chase and the Metro-stop dustup. Not to mention the obvious involvement of Library staff. Like all of them, the Cardinal Librarian only
Wanted It To Go Away
and probably considered a missing book a small price to pay for maintaining dignity and decorum at the Holy See.

Luigi stepped outside. He’d been trying to cut down but this situation called for a smoke. He lit up, pulled deeply, and looked around at the groomed, disciplined, cross-eyed boring perfection of this place.

Maybe it was the change in perspective, or maybe the nicotine jolting his brain, but as he was grinding out the cigarette Luigi had a thought. The Librarian, Cardinal Cossa, wanted the problem to go away
from the Vatican
. If Luigi was right, though, this wasn’t a Vatican crime, as such. It was a burglary ring, a criminal racket, an organized conspiracy, targeting the Vatican but possibly other places, too. Secular places. With at least one member inside the Vatican Library and others outside it. If Luigi could crack this racket, could at a minimum point the secular authorities in the right direction, that could be the feather his cap needed to get him in the Carabinieri’s door.

18