The Deliverance of Evil (46 page)

Corvu made a few calculations. “Now we know that Elisa did indeed leave at six thirty, as her time card showed. And no one has a rock-solid alibi. In the space of an hour and a half, someone she knew could have led her away to a secluded place, attacked her, tortured her, and killed her, then tied weights around her and thrown her in the Tiber and still gotten back in time for the game.”

Balistreri listened.

Corvu went on. “Then there are the letters.” The gears of his analytical mind were hard at work. “I’ve thought about it for the last few hours. Hagi was determined to let us know that we have to consider the letter A as well, the initial of his wife Alina. He wants her included among the victims. And that there’s still a letter missing. Now, if we accept for a moment that this isn’t a red herring—”

“Only for a moment,” said Piccolo, not entirely convinced.

“That’s fine, Corvu. We’ll accept it for a moment. Let’s say there’s a message in those letters. What is it?” Balistreri asked.

“What’s the most obvious meaning a series of letters could have?” Corvu asked.

Mastroianni said, “The name of the killer. That’s what it would be in a detective novel.”

Corvu wasn’t laughing.

Piccolo voiced an objection. “I don’t follow, Graziano. We already know who the killer is: it’s Hagi.”

“Except he didn’t kill Elisa Sordi. He knows all the details of the case, but he says he didn’t do it. And I don’t see why he would lie; one extra murder isn’t going to change anything. Besides, the man is dying.”

“Keep going, Corvu,” Balistreri said.

“Hagi says the last letter is missing, the one that will be carved on Fiorella Romani. I think it’ll be an L.”

Balistreri studied him.

Too simple. Or too complex.

“What do the letters mean?” Mastroianni asked. “

“Why on earth would Hagi go to all this trouble?” Balistreri asked.

“To suggest a solution for us. Because he knows who the perpetrator is, and he wants us to find the proof so we can nail him before he succumbs to cancer.”

“But Corvu, if he knew who it was already, he’d have killed them,” Mastroianni objected.

Piccolo the psychologist intervened. “Unless Hagi prefers to think of them locked in a cell for the rest of their lives—a worse revenge than a pistol shot. Hagi’s suffered all his life for Alina’s death. An eye for an eye.”

Balistreri came to a decision. “Notify the prosecutor and the judge. Today’s Saturday, so he’ll be out on his boat at Ostia. Go and pick him up—we’ll see if you’re right. But before that I want you to arrange another meeting with Cardinal Alessandrini.”

. . . .

Halfway through the afternoon he spoke to Floris, the chief of police, to bring him up to date.

“Cardinal Alessandrini will refuse to be questioned, Balistreri, and the treaty between Italy and the Vatican is clear: we can’t force him.”

“Leave it to me. It’ll be an informal chat. I don’t think he’ll refuse.”

“Do you really think the cardinal is connected to all of this?”

“Yes. It all started in 1982. Hagi thinks the person who killed Elisa caused his problems with Alina. Of course, he may simply be trying to frame an innocent person, but that’s a risk we have to take.”

“We’ll never figure out what happened in 1982—it’s too long ago,” Floris objected.

“Agreed. My priority is not to find Elisa Sordi’s killer but to save Fiorella Romani if she’s alive. Elisa Sordi is just the key to making Hagi tell us where Fiorella is.”

“Pasquali’s funeral is Monday afternoon, forty-eight hours away, and the government and the city council are concerned that if we don’t solve this case by then, the press will crucify us. That doesn’t concern me, Balistreri, but I am anxious to save that young girl’s life.”

. . . .

Linda was looking at the dome of St. Peter’s in the midafternoon light. There were so many things she could have told him, but in the end none of them would have changed reality. He wasn’t the one she needed. He had been, at one time. But not anymore.

Now she needed someone who could play for everything, someone who could bet it all on one hand. A different kind of man.

. . . .

At five o’clock on that sweltering afternoon, Balistreri arrived in St. Peter’s Square, which was packed with priests, nuns, and tourists. The assistant had said Cardinal Alessandrini would be waiting for him in his private study. Even Corvu’s contacts probably wouldn’t have gotten him back into the Vatican, but the kidnapping of Fiorella Romani had thrown the gates wide open.

He followed the assistant along the silence of the wide marble corridors, with their huge religious frescos. He found Alessandrini in gray pants, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, sitting at his desk buried under a mountain of paperwork. This time he greeted him without a smile and came to the point straight away.

“Captain Balistreri, I’m afraid you were right about Hagi. He seemed to me the type with a moral code that didn’t entertain the deaths of young women. Evidently I was wrong.”

Balistreri made no comment. He had no more time or patience for useless digressions. He had chosen a route toward the truth, impassable but necessary.

“I’m here for two reasons, Your Eminence, one professional and one private although closely connected. I’d like to begin with the private one.”

Alessandrini was quick to catch on. “Why exactly do you want to confess to me, Captain Balistreri?”

“You’re the best equipped to judge whether my penitence is enough. Besides, there’s a second private reason, which I’d prefer to talk about during confession.”

Alessandrini took his Cardinal’s cassock from a coatrack nearby and put it on. “We can go into a private chapel.”

Balistreri followed Alessandrini down a short corridor. The chapel was very small. It was dark and cool and smelled of incense. There were a few pews, an altar, a confessional. Alessandrini entered the booth and closed the door. Balistreri knelt and put his face to the grate. He could see the cardinal’s profile.

“I’m listening. Please go ahead.” In the darkness of the confessional, the cardinal’s voice seemed different, both closer and farther away.

“I haven’t made confession for more than forty years, since the priests wanted me to serve as an altar boy when I was in middle school.”

“Don’t worry; the Lord has no deadlines.”

“In forty years, I’ve committed a great many sins. But some are worse than others.”

“You don’t have to tell me all of them. The ones that trouble you the most will do—the sins that have brought you here today.”

Balistreri began to tell his untold story. He’d gone over it thousands of times in his own head, but he’d never spoken the words aloud before.

“I lived in Tripoli, Libya, as a child. I had a friend, a very good friend. And there was a girl I loved.”

For the first time, he told someone else the story that had shaped his whole life and, in doing so, he moved slowly toward a different and deeper level of understanding. His guilt was serious, but even more serious was the way he had chosen to atone for it: a progressive renunciation of life, a self-inflicted penitence, the equivalent of millions of Our Fathers and Hail Marys.

Alessandrini listened to the story in absolute silence.

“Would you grant me absolution, Eminence?”

He knew the reply, even before he heard it. “Do you repent, my son?”

A strict Catholic education. An overbearing, obsessive father. An adolescent incapable of being what his father wanted and who, in order to run away from his lack of success, went in the exact opposite direction, mimicking the heroes of the films he’d loved as a child. Honor, courage, loyalty.

“Eminence, my continual repentance and the need for salvation and forgiveness haven’t done anything for me except help me die a living death.”

The cardinal’s voice was a whisper. “My son, if you want God’s forgiveness you must allow God to be your judge; you cannot be the judge of religion.”

Fundamentally, that was what he had wanted to hear; that was where his adolescent rebellion had started. And he was coming back to it, to the one really great disagreement with his brother, Alberto, that had continued through the years. The only serious disagreement they’d ever had.

Nietzsche. Mamma. It’s not that today’s Christians believe in loving thy neighbor that stops them from turning on us. It’s the impotence of loving thy neighbor that stops them.

Balistreri stood up from the kneeler.

“Eminence, if there’s a penance I can pay, I’ll pay it here on this earth, whatever its nature. But it’ll be neither you nor God who decides.”

Alessandrini sighed and stepped out of the confessional. They were standing facing each other. Now they were two adversaries and, finally, equally armed.

“There’s one more thing, Your Eminence. The professional reason I’m here.”

Alessandrini sighed.

“Do you want to talk to me about Elisa Sordi?”

“I do, Your Eminence. I want to talk about an evening in July 1982 when I wanted to watch a soccer game in peace.”

“You were a young man, Balistreri. You wouldn’t make those same mistakes today.”

“All these years I thought it was impossible to find the killer among the crowd, so I tried to silence my conscience. I buried Elisa Sordi in a corner of my memory.”

“And now that’s no longer the case?”

“Eminence, as you know, before his arrest Marius Hagi kidnapped Fiorella Romani. This morning I went to Lecce and spoke to Gina Giansanti.”

During the long silence that followed, Balistreri realized he was finally succeeding in controlling the anger he felt toward Alessandrini and turning it into positive energy. There was no doubt the Cardinal had performed good works for a great many people and a little evil for a few. Whatever reason he had in 1982 for asking Gina Giansanti to lie, it was unacceptable and had caused other deaths. No earthly justice would absolve him, and no God, either. But now what was needed was the truth. The truth that Hagi was demanding in order to free Fiorella Romani.

The cardinal kneeled in a pew. Balistreri let him pray undisturbed. He was a little light-headed from the smell of incense, on edge from tension and lack of sleep, shattered by Angelo and Linda’s betrayal and by disgust for what he had done to her himself the night before. But it was pulling back from that deranged state that had brought him back to life to seek the truth.

Alessandrini finished and motioned to him to come over. Balistreri knelt beside him.

“Gina Giansanti is not to blame. I asked her to say she’d seen Elisa Sordi leave at eight o’clock that evening. I called her in India and told her what to say. She had no interest in protecting Manfredi, but I swore to her that he hadn’t killed Elisa Sordi. I said the same to Ulla, poor soul. Unfortunately, Gina came back too late to save her.”

“I knew that, Eminence. What I don’t know is why.”

Alessandrini was plainly suffering. “To save an innocent man, Balistreri. I wanted to correct the mistakes that earthly justice was about to make. Manfredi was innocent. I knew this, and I know it to this day with absolute certainty.”

“Then you should have said so to the police. Here on earth we live in a secular and sovereign state. You should have given us the proof you had, rather than distorting the truth.”

“I couldn’t. I was bound by the confidentiality of the confessional. I couldn’t share what I’d learned.”

“The murder was committed in Italy, not the Vatican. I could have you arrested, Your Eminence.”

They both knew he could not, not even if Alessandrini had confessed to having done away with Elisa and all the other women himself. But the prelate had a more valid reason to speak out than Balistreri’s useless threats, and that was the life of Fiorella Romani.

“From six forty five to seven forty five on that day Manfredi wasn’t at the gym, nor was he murdering Elisa Sordi. But I couldn’t tell you that, and I decided to save him from those unjust accusations by means of Gina Giansanti’s lie.”

“Eminence, if you want to save Fiorella Romani, I have to know what really happened.”

Alessandrini, too, had been haunted for twenty-four years. And now, as both a Christian and a man, he would be haunted for many more if Fiorella died.

He said, “Ulla was very religious, but that went against the count’s principles. Unbeknownst to him, she came to me to confess almost every day.”

“Even after Elisa’s death?”

Alessandrini nodded. “The afternoon of the World Cup final, before the game started, something terrible happened while the count was out at his party meeting. After lunch, Ulla had gone to her room to sleep. She was very upset, so she took a sleeping pill and slept soundly. Around , she was awakened by loud noises from Manfredi’s room. She could hear him in there, shrieking like an animal. She opened the door and found Manfredi covered in blood. There were cuts all over his body. The count came home right then and told Ulla to leave, but she stayed and listened from the other side of the door.”

“What did she hear?”

Alessandrini ignored the question. “After twenty minutes, the count called her. He’d given Manfredi a sedative to calm him down and had tended to his cuts, which weren’t deep. He ordered Ulla not to tell a soul what had happened, for the sake of Manfredi’s future. Then they all left together. He went to see the minister, and Ulla went shopping. Manfredi left on his bike. The count had ordered him to go to the gym as usual.”

Balistreri was trying to put his jumbled thoughts in order. “When did Ulla tell you these things?”

“That same evening, before the final. While the count was changing before he went to see the minister, Ulla managed to persuade Manfredi not to go to the gym and to come with her to the Vatican instead so that he could speak to me. Ulla called me while you were in my apartment and Angelo Dioguardi was on the terrace, checking Elisa’s work.”

Balistreri remembered the call. He remembered, too, that right after that the cardinal had left in a hurry. “Did Ulla and Manfredi come to see you in the Vatican?”

“Yes, they came to see me without the count’s knowledge. He’d forbidden Ulla to involve Manfredi in anything that had to do with the Church. They arrived a little after six thirty on Manfredi’s bike. I was waiting for them in a taxi outside a side entrance, and we went to my private study.”