Strange Gods

by Peter J. Daly

  On his way over, Nate began to wonder about O’Toole’s safety. Six cardinals may have already been killed, and now Monsignor Ackerman? I should get him some security, thought Nate. Maybe even have his food and mail screened.

  The cardinal’s housekeeper buzzed Nate into the apartment house lobby. He took the creaky elevator up to the third floor, and the nun let him in. Not much security here, Nate thought.

  O’Toole was sitting in an easy chair in his study, staring at the wall.

  He looked at Nate. Without greeting him, he said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Nate, “but I think we’d better get you some protection from now on. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for all the cardinals to get some protection.”

  “OK,” said O’Toole, “whatever you think.” He didn’t seem to care very much. He seemed preoccupied. “But what about Matt? What happened to him?”

  Nate thought the cardinal was asking about how Ackerman died. Actually, he was wondering more about how Ackerman had lived.

  Nate realized the cardinal wanted to talk. O’Toole gestured for him to sit in the overstuffed chair across from him.

  “All the American priests in Rome pretty much know each other,” began O’Toole. “I used to see the monsignor at the Thanksgiving dinner up at the NAC and at our Fourth of July barbecues. I saw him change over the years. I knew he was in trouble. But you know how it is. We’re all busy. I thought he’d pull himself together.” Nate wasn’t sure just how much O’Toole knew about Ackerman, but then the cardinal continued. “There were rumors about him hanging out in gay bars and staying out late, but he was always at his desk in the morning. I guess that’s all I really cared about, him getting his work done.”

  “Unfortunately, there was more to it than that, Your Eminence. He was acting as a messenger for the Camorra. He may have been involved in fingering targets for the Mafia.”

  The cardinal looked at Nate. His mind was somewhere else. Nate wondered if O’Toole had even heard what he was saying.

  “I should have been a better priest to him. I was the senior guy among the Americans here in Rome. I should have been there for him.”

  Nate wanted to be consoling. “Well, you did what you could.”

  “No, I didn’t,” O’Toole said dismissively. “I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen these young guys come here full of idealism and end up drinking themselves to death. We let them die. We even help it along.”

  Nate raised an eyebrow, curious. “What do you mean?”

  “A priest I know from back home—Father Jack McClendon—told us a story once when I was in the seminary. It always stayed with me.”

  O’Toole looked out the window, ruminating.

  “Back in 1946, I think, LIFE magazine ran a story about some foxes. It’s a true story, I guess. I used it once in a homily.

  “Seems like there were these foxes living in the woods outside some town in Ohio. They ate mostly mice and crickets. Sometimes, they also ate a chicken or some quail. This made the people of the town mad. So, one Saturday they organized a foxhunt. They got maybe six hundred men, women, and children with sticks. They formed a big circle, a mile across. Somebody shot a gun as a signal. Then they started walking through the woods and fields, yelling and baying to frighten the foxes out of their holes. As the circle closed in on them, the foxes ran back and forth. They were frightened.”

  O’Toole paused, and Nate could see the story affected him. “So, what happened?” asked Nate.

  O’Toole said, “It’s almost hard to believe.” There was a catch in his voice. “Sometimes, a fox would have the guts to snarl back, but it would be killed on the spot. Some foxes stopped in their anguish and even tried to lick the hands of their tormentors. They wanted to stop the killing. But the townspeople had no mercy. They killed the affectionate foxes, too. They just smashed them with their sticks. The photos showed the foxes standing there with their wounded and dying friends. The foxes had more compassion than the people. Finally, as the circle grew smaller and smaller, the few remaining foxes went to the center of the circle and just lay down. They just gave up. They didn’t know what else to do. But the townsfolk knew what to do. They killed them. They hit the dying and wounded until they were dead. They even taught the children how to do it.”

  Tears were running down the cardinal’s face.

  This is about more than Ackerman, thought Nate.

  O’Toole got up and walked to the sitting room window, looking out toward the Vatican. “We have our own foxhunts in the Church,” he continued. “We call them inquisitions or inquiries. We persecute people who disagree with us. We frighten them into doing what we want. We call them horrible names like heretic or apostate. We say they are intrinsically disordered. We say they are immoral. We say they are defective—all because they disagree with us. We have the power, so we crush them by humiliating them. That’s what we do to our own people. People like Ackerman. We crush them.”

  O’Toole gestured out the window toward his left. “Look out over these rooftops. Not even a mile from here, we burned Bruno at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori. We accused Galileo of heresy and put him under house arrest in a tower on the other side of the Vatican. We silenced him, but we knew he was right, so we let him continue his research. We’ve silenced some of our own greatest philosophers and theologians. Look at how we treated Chardin, John Courtney Murray, and even Charlie Curran.” Nate had no idea who those people were.

  The cardinal finished his thought. “We launched the Crusades from St. Peter’s with the mandate to kill tens of thousands of people we labeled as infidels. Who the hell do we think we are?”

  The cardinal suddenly fell quiet.

  Nate was at a loss for words. The silence consumed him, forcing him to seek comfort in sound wherever he could find it.

  He exhaled slowly and focused on the clock in the hall ticking. He turned his head. Traffic was picking up in the square outside.

  21

  AVANTI A DIO

  ROME WAS WAKING UP TO ANOTHER DAY.

  The news of Ackerman’s death ricocheted around the city and the world. “The Vatican in Disarray” was the headline on CNN International. People were enthralled.

  Sitting on his rooftop terrace, Cardinal Luciano Crepi picked up his copy of Il Messaggero, the Roman newspaper, from a silver tray that had carried his breakfast. He scanned the headlines. He dropped his morning cappuccino to the floor when he saw the headline of Ackerman’s death. Immediately, the cardinal knew that his life, too, was over.

  Crepi loved luxury. All his life, he had surrounded himself with things of beauty. As the governor of Vatican City, he was, in effect, the landlord. As the landlord, he could live just about anywhere in the Vatican. He made an apartment for himself on the top floor of the Palace of the Governor of Vatican City. Originally that building had been built in the 1930s to be a Franciscan seminary; the Governatorato is one of the more modern buildings in the Vatican. It is much photographed by tourists standing at the dome of St. Peter’s, because the driveway in front has a papal crest made out of hedges and flowers.

  The top floor of the palace boasts a giant rooftop terrace. On the terrace is a loggia, or covered porch, with dramatic arches rising twenty feet above the roof. The loggia is topped by a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. Cardinal Crepi loved the loggia, but he had nothing in common with the poor man of Assisi.

  That rooftop terrace was marvelous for receptions. It had one of the most dramatic views in Rome. Cardinal Crepi liked to take his breakfast on the roof in nice weather. It allowed him to sit at the table and see all of Vatican City, master of all he surveyed.

  Luciano Crepi was, above all, a realist. He knew that if Monsignor Ackerman was dead, probably at the hand of the Camorra, then his own death was probably not far off. He had outlived his usefulness to the Mafia, and now he was a liability.

  With the dramatic murder of Cardinal Manning in New York, in plain view, no one seemed safe. It was only a matter
of time until the trail of blood led to his door.

  The cardinal resolved not to wait. If he were to die soon, he wanted to die on his own terms. Certainly he did not wish to be stuffed ignominiously into a tufa niche in the catacombs below the Via Salaria, like some slaughtered animal.

  Crepi put down his newspaper on the silver tray and stood up with deliberation. He reached inside his cassock pocket for his mobile phone and called his office. “I’m not coming in this morning,” he said. “I will be working in my apartment. Please see to it that I am not disturbed.”

  “Va bene, Eminenza,” the receptionist said.

  His movements were calm and deliberate now.

  Crossing the giant terrace, he walked down one flight of stairs to his apartments. The walls of the corridors were covered with Flemish tapestries of hunting scenes.

  Before going to his bedroom, he walked into his large reception room. With a single tap to his smartphone, the quintessential Roman opera, Puccini’s Tosca, filled the apartment. It was his favorite opera.

  He turned the volume up as loud as it would go. The music drifted outside, serenading the gardeners as they clipped the hedges around the papal seal, which was created by thousands of multicolored flowers.

  He opened the doors of his cedar closets and began to lay out his choir robes, all custom made for him by Gammarelli, the papal tailors.

  He dressed himself in his choir cassock made entirely of scarlet watered silk, with silk piping and buttons.

  Around his waist he put a silk fascia, a wide sash that was supposed to be a symbol of his devotion to Christ. As Jesus said to Peter, “Someone would fasten his belt and take him where he would not go.” The scarlet fascia, by custom, is worn only during the sede vacante, the vacancy of the papacy.

  Over all this, he draped a delicate lace surplice that covered him from his shoulders to his knees.

  Around his neck he placed, with a reverence usually reserved for a royal coronation, a jeweled pectoral cross that had once belonged to Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, the most notoriously bad pope in Roman history.

  On his head he placed a red silk zucchetto, a skullcap that looks like a yarmulke. Over that, he put a red silk hat called a biretta. It was supposed to recall a shepherd’s cap, though no shepherd ever wore anything remotely like that. It has three little peaks or “horns” to grab during ceremonies.

  His hat had been presented to him by the pope when he was made a cardinal. It was a sign that he would defend the papacy, “even to the shedding of blood.”

  Around his shoulders, he draped a thirty-foot-long cape, made of scarlet watered silk, called a cappa magna. Originally, it was designed to cover a horse’s ass when the cardinals rode a horse in procession. The long train would have been carried by a servant in procession; now, he double-draped it over his own arm.

  With the strains of the opera still playing, he wandered around his apartment, caressing all the things he had accumulated in a lifetime of clerical prominence. There were ivory animals made from illegal elephant tusks. He touched the photos taken with popes, kings, presidents, and diplomats who had passed through the Vatican.

  He opened the cabinet of his collection of writing pens and antique napkin rings. All useless things, but things of beauty, covered with jewels and fine gold.

  He stroked all the tapestries and paintings on the walls.

  He took a crystal tumbler down from a mirrored cabinet in his dining room and poured a glass of Benedictine brandy. As the opera was coming to its third act, he walked over to an oak chest at the end of his study and lifted out a polished wooden box. Inside was a pearl-handled revolver, said to have belonged to Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. Crepi was a fascist, politically, and secretly admired Mussolini. He slowly loaded the gun.

  He took the elevator back up to the rooftop terrace. The strains of the opera could be heard through the open windows. Tosca’s lover had now been shot by the firing squad. Just as the music came to the point where Tosca threw herself off the parapet of the church of San Andrea Della Valle, Luciano Cardinal Crepi stood up on the parapet of the Palace of the Governor of Vatican City. He looked out one more time at the great dome of St. Peter’s, which was itself a reminder of the corruption of the papacy, financed through the sale of indulgences.

  Crepi looked around at his kingdom here on earth. He waited for Tosca to start singing the final aria. “O Scarpia, Avanti a Dio!” “O Scarpia, we meet before God!” Then, just at the moment in the opera when she hurls herself over the edge, Cardinal Crepi, governor general of Vatican City, raised the pistol gently to his temple and blew his brains out.

  The gun flew out of his hands and fell into the bushes near the building. His body fell with the same drama as Tosca’s. His great red cappa magna made a delicate silk streamer like in a Chinese opera. It billowed out in the wind as his body fell the ninety feet to the ground below. The cardinal landed in the driveway, just beyond the papal seal.

  Tourists standing at the base of the dome of St. Peter’s thought it was some sort of dramatic show. They snapped pictures as Crepi fell, considering themselves lucky to have caught such an unusual and colorful event.

  When his body hit the pavement of the driveway below, Cardinal Crepi bounced a few inches from the impact. Then, he lay motionless in a slowly growing pool of his own blood. The Vatican gardeners, who were clipping bushes around the driveway hedges, came running.

  Cardinal Luciano Crepi departed this world on his own terms.

  22

  UN BEL’ CANTO

  THREE HOURS LATER, CARDINAL JULIO SALAZAR WAS JUST about to sit down to his midday pranzo when the telephone rang. It was Monsignor Donato calling. The cardinal’s housekeeper called him to the phone. “The monsignor sounds molto agitato.”

  “Your Eminence, horrible news. Cardinal Crepi is dead.”

  “O Dio,” gasped Salazar. “Perche?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” said Donato, “a suicide, possibly. He fell from the terrace of the Governatorato, but there was a bullet in his head. No gun has been found yet, so we don’t know who shot him, or if he shot himself.”

  “O Dio, O Dio,” Cardinal Salazar kept repeating. “What is happening to us?” Julio Salazar, always an emotional man, became hysterical.

  Donato had his own worries. “First Ackerman, now Crepi. Perhaps it is our associates from the bank,” he said. Donato did not dare to refer to the Camorra on the telephone, but Salazar knew whom he meant. “We have to disappear. We might be next,” said Donato.

  He hung up without saying good-bye.

  Julio was frozen with fear. He stood motionless in his living room, the telephone receiver still to his ear. He thought, the Camorra killed Ackerman and Crepi. There is nowhere to hide. They have contacts everywhere.

  Salazar began pacing back and forth like a caged animal. He went out onto his terrace overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Then he realized that was a bad idea. If the mob were after him, a sniper could be anywhere. He hurried back inside and pulled the drapes closed.

  The best thing, he thought, is to call Franco. He knows me. He will tell me what is going on.

  Don Franco Virgilio, a capo in the Di Lauro clan, the most vicious of the Naples Mafia, was Cardinal Salazar’s contact at the Camorra. He was known as a jovial man and a ruthless killer. His hand shaking badly, Salazar fumbled with his Rolodex. At last, he located the number.

  “Don Franco Virgilio, per favore,” he said when someone answered. “Tell him it’s Cardinal Julio Salazar.”

  Virgilio always took Salazar’s calls. People always answer the phone calls of those who have made them money.

  “I am very sorry, Your Eminence, Don Franco is not available to talk to you. But tell us where you are, and he will get back to you. Can I tell him where you are?”

  Salazar got the picture. Suddenly, he was persona non grata. He certainly was not going to tell the mob where he was.

  “Is there a message for Don Franco?” she asked.

&
nbsp; “No. Non importa. Arrivederci,” said Salazar. He hung up before they had a chance to ask any more questions. Now, he was really panicked. Virgilio had never refused his calls before. This was a very bad sign.

  Salazar knew he could not stay at his apartment. Virgilio could have someone outside his building in a matter of minutes, if he was next on the Mafia hit list.

  Salazar was in a panic, trying to figure out what to do. He knew he needed protection, and he needed it fast.

  Like a child looking for monsters, the aging Colombian cardinal peered out between the drapes of his balcony window, toward the dome of St. Peter’s. For so long he had felt safe in the shadow of that dome, but now he felt exposed.

  Below his apartment balcony, in the Piazza San Pietro, across the street, crowds of tourists were gathering. Television news trucks were setting up their huge satellite dishes, in anticipation of the papal funeral.

  The city of Rome always kept police stationed just outside the entrance to St. Peter’s Square. There was always some problem, with thousands of tourists coming and going. A couple of police cars and an armored police van were routinely parked at the end of Bernini’s colonnade. Practically every morning, Salazar greeted those policemen as he walked to his office in the Vatican.

  Salazar had an idea. He knew an inspector with the city police. He fumbled again with his Rolodex, found the number and, giving in to his panic, pleaded with the policeman as soon as he came on the line.

  “Inspector, I’m in trouble. I need your help. Please, help me.” Salazar was almost sobbing. “Send the armored car from the piazza over to my apartment.”

  “Wait a minute. Slow down, Your Eminence. What is the problem? Why the armored car?” asked the inspector.

  “I need protection. I’m next. You know about Cardinal Crepi. You know about the monsignor dead in the catacombs. I think I’m next, you understand. I’m next!”

  The inspector was cautious. “OK, I’ll send a police car to pick you up.”