by David Hewson
“So you escaped?” he asked.
The line went quiet. It had been a direct question, an understandable one in the circumstances. Perhaps she was wondering whether it was personal or professional. He was unsure himself. Nic Costa considered where she would go in the circumstances, and cursed his curiosity: He wished, automatically, that he had arranged to have her followed.
“Call again, Nic. If you like,” she said, and was gone.
12
The man wore a black suit and dark glasses. He was muscular and probably middle-aged, though he wore such heavy clothing, in spite of the heat, it was difficult to tell from what was on show. For the life of him, Gallo could not figure out his accent. Southern? Sicilian maybe? He didn’t want to try. There was something serious about him, something that said you just did your job, did it well, got your money, then walked away.
The car struggled through the traffic out to the motorway which led to Fiumicino airport and the coast. He had jazz playing on the music system: Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter’s sax wailing like a banshee. Gallo knew Ostia well. He’d taken many parties around the old port area and the ruins of the imperial town.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Who are who?” the man in the black suit grunted.
“The people I’m supposed to entertain.”
“Visiting college professors. Not archaeologists themselves, but people with an interest. I hope you know what you’re talking about.”
“No problem.”
The car turned off the motorway early. Gallo was puzzled.
“Aren’t we going to the town?”
“Not first. There’s another area that got cut off from the meander by a flood hundreds of years back. The Fiume Morto. The dead river. You know it?”
“No.” Gallo felt his good mood start to wane. No one ever went to the dead river except hardened diggers. It was just mud and mosquitoes. “You might have told me.”
The black glasses looked at him. “I heard you were a clever guy. You can make things up if you want. What does it matter? It’s all show business. Don’t worry. It won’t take long. After that we go to the town. Then you run on autopilot, huh?”
“Yeah, right.” Gallo scanned the flat land of the Tiber estuary. The stink of the marshes came in with the air-conditioning. It was chemical, lifeless and made the back of his throat turn dry and start to ache. There was nothing ahead, not a bus, not even a car. Gallo looked at the man again. He was wearing black leather gloves. Odd in the heat.
The driver turned to him again. “You’ve heard of Tertullian?”
Gallo laughed dryly. “Oh, wow. What a sweetheart that guy was. Really full of joy and light. What was that wonderful line about women? ’Tu es ianua diaboli.’ You’re the doorway of the Devil. Boy, do the feminists love that one. What a twisted dude.”
The man at the wheel was watching him and, in spite of the sunglasses, Jay Gallo could tell there was something severe about him, something cold and immovable.
“I was thinking,” the man said, “of another saying.”
“What?”
“ ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ ”
Gallo turned to look at the man. Maybe he wasn’t as old as he first thought. He moved with the ease of someone about his own age. The glasses, the clothes seemed to be there to age him.
The travel business, Jay Gallo thought. What a way to earn a living. The mention of Tertullian had put Gallo in full flow. It was rare he got a chance to display his erudition with someone who might begin to appreciate it.
“These early Christians. You know what puzzles me? How did anybody sign up for this thing? What was the point?”
“You mean why did Tertullian call for people to be martyrs?”
“No! Why did the poor suckers take him at his word? Why die just for some . . . idea?”
The dark glasses thought about that. “You’ve seen the Caravaggio in Santa Maria del Popolo? St. Peter’s Crucifixion?”
Gallo knew the church as well as he wished. It was a minor star in the galaxy of Roman sights. A chapel by Raphael, a touch of Borgia history and two famous Caravaggios, all in the perfect Renaissance piazza the tourists loved because it sat at the end of the tawdry shopping street, the Via Corso.
“Yeah.” He recalled a striking large canvas of the saint about to be crucified upside down. The cross was being pushed and pulled upright by three largely unseen workers who could have come straight out of any sixteenth-century tavern. Peter stared at the nail running through his left palm with a determination, almost pride, which Gallo never could understand.
“That tells you everything. Peter’s executioners believe they’re raising the means of his cruel death. In truth, with each inch they build higher the foundations of the Church, as the saint clearly realizes.”
Gallo waved a hand as if to say this was obvious. “Yes, yes. He’s a martyr . . .”
“Furthermore,” the man continued, “he’s bathed in the light of Grace, which even shines on his murderers. He goes to his death out of duty, and happily because he knows there is a better life awaiting him in Paradise. This is a transformation he seeks. He knows he goes to Heaven.”
“Crazy . . .” Gallo grunted, shaking his head.
The dark glasses stared at the empty horizon ahead.
Gallo smiled and thought of another Caravaggio, in the Borghese, and the story behind it, one that always went down well with the Americans. “Anyway, Caravaggio didn’t believe that crap himself. Look how he paints himself as the severed head of Goliath. When he did that, my friend, he was under sentence of death himself, for murdering a man during a game of tennis. He painted his own head there to acknowledge the Pope’s hold over him and beg forgiveness. He had good, practical reasons to be scared. And he was. You don’t see him expecting salvation there. Just the grave. And oblivion.”
“You’re a cultured man,” the driver said, to Gallo’s obvious satisfaction. “What happened to the painter?”
“He got his pardon. Then died on the way back to Rome. Ironic, huh?”
“Possibly. Or apt. Perhaps that was his punishment.”
But Jay Gallo wasn’t listening. There was something he had to say, something important. “And here’s another irony. Tertullian didn’t even take his own advice. He was no martyr. He died in his bed at a hundred and two or something. Hypocrite.”
Then he remembered the Vatican license plate on the car and added quickly, “Not that I know the first damn thing about religion, of course.”
“Just history.”
“That’s right.”
Jay Gallo looked around. They had parked by the low muddy waters of the river. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Or anything to look at either. All the usual places to visit were a good half mile or two away. He wished there was somewhere he could buy a beer or a good coffee with grappa in it. He wished the place didn’t stink so badly of chemicals and pollution.
“They’ll be here soon,” the man said, seeming to read his thoughts. The jazz album came to an end. He hit the button on the radio, removed the CD and carefully put it away in a case he kept on the dashboard. It was an odd action. For some reason it made Gallo think the car wasn’t his at all. “We can still continue our interesting talk while we wait, can’t we? You’re right about Caravaggio, I think. He did have good, practical reasons to be afraid. But you shouldn’t exclude him, or Tertullian, or any of us, you and me, from being agents of God’s will. That would be presumptuous, surely, even for one who knows nothing about religion?”
“Really?”
“You don’t think God uses only those who believe in Him as His instruments? What about Pilate? What about Herod?”
It was only then that Jay Gallo considered his position seriously. He was sitting by a remote stretch of the Tiber with a man he didn’t know, waiting for a tour group who wanted to see . . . what exactly? There wasn’t a single archaeological artifact in the vicinity as far as he was aware. Maybe they’d
turn out to be bird-watchers instead.
Maybe they were reviving that long-lost art form, the snuff movie.
He looked at the man in the seat next to him. If it came to it, Gallo thought, they were evenly matched. The man was stockier but older, maybe, and he gave him something in height. What was more, Jay Gallo had been in plenty of barroom brawls over the years. He knew how to look after himself.
“Are you jerking me around?” he asked the man in the dark glasses.
“Mr. Gallo?”
“Is this some kind of a joke?”
The man thought about it. “ ‘The blood of the martyrs . . .’ Does that sound like some kind of joke?”
Gallo swore under his breath. The man was starting to annoy him. “Why do you keep saying that crap? What the fu—”
A black fist, hard as iron, came out at him, flying fast, and caught him full in the eye. Jay Gallo’s head snapped back, his vision tunneled into blackness at the edges. There was little pain; more an absence of sensation. Then, in the limited focus he possessed, something darted at him again. The solid leather shape connected with his nose, there was the sound and the sensation of bone breaking. A warm, salty trickle of blood began to run down his throat.
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 ourselve
s 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?”