The Last Pope (34 page)

 

“ ‘Killed by a group of soldiers and several bishops and priests who were shooting bullets and arrows at him,’” Sarah repeated to herself. “What other secrets was the Church hiding, replaced by lies proclaimed as absolute truths?” she mumbled.

“Are you okay?”

Rafael’s question pulled her out of her ruminations. He’d just come out of the bathroom, dressed after his shower.

“Yes, fine. Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m leaving. My mission is finished.”

The comment struck Sarah like a splash of cold water.

“You’re going?”

“I’m sorry for all I put you through. You should know I did it all for your benefit.”

“You’re going . . . where?” Her surprise and disappointment were quite evident.

“To save more souls in difficult situations,” he said jokingly.

Sarah got up and went to him.

“What about us?”

“Us?” Rafael was confused by her question. Sarah’s face got closer and closer to his. Her soft perfume started to reach him.

“Us . . . what about us? When are we going to see each other again?” she asked, gazing intently into his eyes. “Why don’t you stay a few more days?”

Rafael was visibly nervous, something that didn’t square with his usual self-assurance.

“I already told you that none of this ever happened, Sarah. Understand?”

She got a bit closer, without fear, without any shyness.

“Aren’t you going to stay with me?” she whispered to him. “You could rest, I’d keep you company.”

Their lips almost touched, but he stepped back at the last moment.

“No. I can’t. I really must leave now. I have to take these papers and return them to the Vatican. They will decide there what they want to do with them.”

Sarah got the impression he wanted to leave as soon as possible, as if he were fleeing from the devil, not from her.

“If this is because of my father—”

“No,” Rafael said. “It has nothing to do with your father.”

“Then?”

Rafael took the papers and walked to the door.

“It’s a life choice.” And he opened the door to leave.

“Wait,” Sarah held him back. “At least, tell me your real name.”

He looked at her for the last time.

“But, Sarah, what did I tell you when we met? My name is Rafael.”

Those were the last words they exchanged.

64

DEATH OF A PRIEST FEBRUARY 19, 2006

Time was running out. Lying on his deathbed, Archbishop Marcinkus knew that his real problems were about to begin when the time came to render accounts to the God he now feared so much, the one he had so often disregarded. “God’s banker” pictured himself showing the Almighty the account books of income and expenses, debits and deposits, the details of specific frauds committed, in an attempt to convince Him of the need to diversify investments and launder the money received from organized crime. His feverish state and the anguish of dying made him see God as the president of a board of directors, a CEO incapable of recognizing that everything his servant had done throughout his eighty-four years had been for the good of the enterprise.

Many thought that Paul Marcinkus, the old archbishop of Chicago, had been too isolated from the world in a remote parish in Illinois, and though he in fact had stepped aside, he had never intended to give up his power, and still remained in the service of the Catholic Church, in the diocese of Phoenix.

But the Sun City was very far from the center of the world, very far from Rome, and very far from God. Ever since the Italian judges charged him with the Banco Ambrosiano embezzlement, he couldn’t shed the anguish this had caused him, and that, in turn, had weakened his heart. He was afraid his old friends suspected him of having ratted them out to the police and the court, because vengeance could be extreme.

With his gaze fixed on the whiteness of the ceiling, Marcinkus could see himself as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Calvi, Sindona, Gelli, and himself, sent by God to put the world in order.

Marcinkus remembered Roberto Calvi’s horrible fate. He himself had barely managed to stay solvent after the bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano. And this depended on bribes and blackmail.

“What was that woman’s name?” Marcinkus asked himself out loud.

Graziella Corrocher was her name, and she was the one who had informed on Calvi before jumping out the window of her office and smashing herself on the pavement.

When the Milan judges sent him to the Lodi jail, he told them more than he should have: “The Banco Ambrosiano isn’t mine. I’m only in someone else’s service. I can’t tell you any more.” Friends don’t forgive indiscretions, and if Calvi was able to gain conditional freedom, it was only by betraying family and friends.

Hounded and desperate, Calvi fled from Italy and hid in various locations until he was found. Unfortunately the Mafia got to him before the police did. It was probably Gelli’s men or Sindona’s. On June 18, 1982, they put some bricks and $15,000 for services rendered in his pockets. Then they tied a rope around his neck and dropped him under the Blackfriars Bridge in London. The police reported that poor Roberto had committed suicide.

Morons! You don’t understand anything! Marcinkus thought. Poor Roberto.

In contrast, Michele Sindona got what he deserved. The old man used to be proud of his deals, but he was incapable of keeping a bank going. The Franklin Bank collapsed, and he lost his project with the Banca Privata Italiana to the Genovese family. He said he had studied law, but his beginnings were rooted in the fruit business, hence his nickname, the Lemon Man. At the time, he asked the Sicilians for help, and thanks to them he prospered. He went around—oh, so stupidly—bragging that he controlled the Milan stock market. In the United States he made an alliance with the Inzerillos and the Gambinos, who were even bigger scoundrels than the Genovese. With their help, he managed to get rich and to make deals with the Holy See, that is, with Marcinkus and Calvi. “Only an idiot could have people call him Master of the Universe,” Marcinkus had once said. In the midsixties, when his finances and those of the Vatican collapsed, Sindona asked Calvi for help, but by then Sindona couldn’t do much. Sindona felt besieged both in the United States and in Italy, where the charges and accusations against him were endless. So he put pressure on Calvi to save his empire with Banco Ambrosiano funds, but this Catholic bank and its holding company were already under the scrutiny of the judicial authorities. Marcinkus and Calvi claimed they didn’t know the Sicilian, and abandoned him to his own luck. In a desperate attempt to avoid jail, Sindona ordered the murder of a Milanese judge who presided over the cases connected with their dirty dealings, but this last stupidity only served to add one more crime to his long list. He was arrested in the United States, and the Italian government asked for his extradition. Sindona had made few friends but incurred many debts along the way, and he paid for them all on March 23, 1986.

“Would you like hemlock with your coffee, Michele?” Marcinkus asked sarcastically in the solitude of his bedroom, attempting to smile for the last time.

Jail isn’t a good refuge for those with a lot of outstanding debt. So Michele Sindona ended his days with the taste of hemlock in his throat.

As for the boss of the P2, Marcinkus couldn’t help but feel pity. Licio Gelli had more fantasies than brains, and as much taste for conspiracies as for money. Only a poor devil could think of making a list of the names and professions of all his sympathizers, Marcinkus thought. In 1981 the list of Masons came to light. The old archbishop of Chicago smiled, thinking of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy. When the house of cards collapsed, the Masons threw Gelli out, and the Italian judges accused him of acquiring and revealing state secrets, of slander against the judges writing the summary of his charges of conspiracy, and of fraudulent bankruptcy. Gelli spent the last years of his life between courts and jails. The old politician served his home detention at his villa in Arezzo, waiting for death. The poor devil had hundreds of gold ingots hidden in flowerpots, and they were discovered. How many months of life still lay ahead for him?

“Time runs out for everyone, old Gelli.” Marcinkus sighed.

There was no more time to reveal secrets or give explanations.

Everything had come to an end.

65

Sarah often thought she would never again lead a normal life. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Now she stood in Saint Peter’s Square, on a day like any other, attending Sunday Mass said by Pope Benedict XVI. Her parents, Raul and Elizabeth, accompanied her. Three months had gone by since she had gotten rid of J.C. and his agents. Her father had totally recovered from the wounds inflicted on him in New York.

Sarah had gone through so much in order to get to this peaceful Sunday morning. She couldn’t stop her thoughts from wandering to the chain of events leading to that day. She still had some doubts. Why was Valdemar Firenzi searching for those documents? Had he been hunting for a long time, or was it the opening of the trial that drove him to start the search? The eventual discovery of his body in the Tiber River in Rome only confirmed her worst fears, leaving those questions unanswered.

Sarah had a much clearer picture of other parts of the story. The night that poor John Paul I had been killed, the accomplices of his executioner hid the documents the pontiff was holding in his hands, and later gave them to the man she knew as J.C. After the conclave that elected John Paul II, he managed to introduce the documents into the Vatican Secret Archives. Monsignor Firenzi found the new papal dispositions and the third secret, and, aware of their tremendous value, he entrusted them to his friend Father Marius Ferris.

The orders were quite clear: save them and wait. Ferris sent him the key to the locker where he had hidden the papers, but things got even more complicated. Firenzi, who was beginning to sense that someone was following him, ordered two double portraits with the fixed image of Benedict XVI, and behind it, that of Marius Ferris, which would appear when black light was aimed at the photo. And he sent them to his most trusted men, Felipe Aragón in Madrid and Pablo Rincón in Buenos Aires.

To the average person, they would look like the images of the pope and of an unknown old man, but those two men knew Marius Ferris. Firenzi knew that he needed to say no more. They could contact his friend in New York, who was authorized to reveal the secret location of the documents. There were three men in on the secret. Firenzi’s plan was a good one, because when the men from the P2 started chasing the papers, there was a vital time lapse before they could gather all the necessary clues.

Firenzi, however, had made a mistake entrusting the finding of the papers to his intimate friend, Bishop Francesco Cossega, unaware that Cossega was also a member of the organization. And since Firenzi had continued his search in the Secret Archives, the truth about Cossega was revealed the night he discovered the list and saw the name of his friend in the second column of the first page.

Firenzi was astonished that his friend had never said anything about being a member of the P2, so he began a series of moves in order to protect the documents; he knew that when the investigation into the death of John Paul I was reopened, the importance of these papers would be decisive.

He put the key in an envelope together with the list and a simple code, and he sent it all to Sarah, hoping that her father would understand it. He could not possibly have guessed that she was then vacationing in Portugal, and that it would be some time before she opened the envelope. When she finally did, Firenzi was already dead. She was quite lucky to have avoided the same fate in London.

It was hard for Sarah to understand why Firenzi felt such an urgent need to keep the papers hidden. Basically, he was doing the same as J.C., hiding the evidence instead of destroying it. In fact, the location and custody of the documents were the only changes. But Marius Ferris had explained to her how everything had happened that fateful day in New York, on the night when they’d all been so close to death.

“At first your godfather didn’t want to do anything. Just keep the papers in a safe place. He wanted to guard them himself, or give them to someone he could really trust.”