by Walter Ellis
As news reached the Curia of Caravaggio’s flight from the city, Cardinal Battista discussed developments with his fellow Muslim, Fra’Luis de Fonseca, now a chevalier of the Knights of Malta, who for the second time that year was visiting Rome from Valletta. The Knight was puzzled that Caravaggio had managed to get away. Battista scowled. ‘We picked the wrong people,’ he said, referring to Ranuccio and his brothers.
‘So it would seem. When choosing an assassin, Your Eminence, it is generally wise to exclude those who are reckless or who have an interest in the result.’
This cold analysis did nothing to improve the cardinal’s temper. ‘Let us hope you do not repeat the error, my friend. For I am informed that the fellow has long held ambitions to join your order and become a Knight. He believes apparently that membership will instil discipline into his life and give some structure to his faith.’
‘If you are right,’ Fonseca replied, ‘then his life is forfeit, for he will find me ready and waiting.’
Battista nodded, then glanced towards the window. ‘The sun is about to set,’ he said, ‘We should pray.’
18*
Conclave minus 10
The Swiss Guard sentry, in his dark blue uniform and beret, offered Maya a crisp salute and a shy smile as she approached the Cancello di Sant’Anna, the main commercial gateway into the Vatican. It was coming up to six o’clock in the evening and a steady stream of cars was crawling towards the exit. The gate itself, overlooked by stone eagles dating from the pontificate of Pius XI, was heavily shielded and reinforced, and though it might not have been evident to visitors, the sentries on duty were heavily armed. To Maya’s left as she crossed the invisible line that separated Rome from the sovereign territory of the Holy See stood the guards’ barracks. Her parents’ apartment was on the second floor. But she didn’t go left. Instead, she turned immediately right, off the narrow pavement into the church of Sant’Anna, to which Caravaggio’s Madonna dei Palafrenierni was taken after its removal from St Peter’s, before it was bought by the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Borghere. She liked to sit in the church for a few minutes each day, and on this day in particular she needed time to think.
The previous night, after an afternoon spent walking from the Piazza Navona, by way of the Caravaggios in the French Church and drinks in some bar she had never heard of called the Scholars’ Lounge, she had gone back with Dempsey to his apartment, where they had made love for two solid hours before falling asleep, exhausted, in each other’s arms. It was the first time they had had sex together, which still surprised her. But where in the past the pleasure had been mainly physical, mixed, if she was honest, with the thrill of conquest, this time there had been an intensity that she had never previously experienced. It had made her cry. Maybe this was how you discovered love: not in an accumulated awareness of shared likes and dislikes, or the realization that you appreciated the other person’s sense of humour – which was how the women’s magazines liked to present it – but rather, as in the great nineteenth-century novels, like a burst of lightning or a sudden epiphany, in which your life and awareness of everything was heightened and transformed. When she woke up, hours later, she was surprised at first to find a man’s arm resting on the small of her back, just above the crease of her buttocks. Then it all flooded back. Dempsey was still asleep but Maya’s mouth was dry as a bone. She was desperate for a glass of water, followed by a coffee. She also wanted him to wake up so that she could tell him what she was feeling. It was like in that old movie, When Harry Met Sally: when you realized you wanted to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you wanted the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. But she knew it wouldn’t be easy. Drawing back the sheets, she saw for the first time in the light of day how terrible his scars were. He had told her on their second date about what happened to him in Iraq and she was fully prepared to be shocked. Yet the truth was that in candlelight, after two bottles of wine, several pints of Guinness and any number of grappas, she had hardly noticed. If anything, the ridges on his back had only added to the excitement.
But now, looking down, she was able to appreciate how close he had come to losing his life and now painful, and lonely, it must have been for him in that isolation ward in Marseille. As carefully and gently as she could, so as not to waken him, she replaced the sheet over his damaged flesh and went to prepare some breakfast.
She was not a good Catholic. Her tastes at school and university had run much more to boys, loud music and basement bars than priests and Mass. But today, sitting on her pew in the church, lit by the lanterns above set into the eight-sided dome, she found herself offering a small prayer.
Sant’Anna was more than a tourist attraction. It was the parish church of the Vatican. And when a loudspeaker informed those present that the next Mass, due to start in three minutes, would be conducted in French, Maya rose to go. Back outside in the street, a bespectacled Guard – from the village of Küssnacht, she seemed to recall – halted the stream of traffic heading towards the gate so that she could cross over to the barracks. Over his right shoulder rose the tower of Nicholas V, and then the massive bulk of the Apostolic Palace itself.
‘Guete Obe, Christian,’ she said, greeting him in Schweizerdeutsch, the almost impenetrable dialect of German spoken in the north and centre of Switzerland.
‘Guete Obe, Fräulein,’ he replied, blushing. He was, she realized, no more than twenty-one.
Maya had fallen in love with the barracks almost the moment she first set foot inside. The earliest portion of the building dated from 1492, when the Pope was Alexander VI, the notorious Rodrigo Borgia. But most construction had taken place during the reign of Julius II, the Warrior Pope, under whom the Guard became a permanent feature of Vatican life. Behind the front office, somewhat incongruously, was the dry-cleaner’s, specializing in the maintenance of the Guards’ elaborate costumes. Beyond that again was the refectory, its walls decorated with frescoes glorying mighty deeds with sword and halberd. The Armory was another favourite. This was where the steel helmets, two-handled swords and halberds carried in pontifical processions were stored, along with the Corps’ colours and drums. Upstairs were the dormitories, and beyond these again the officers’ quarters, including the spacious apartment of the Commandant and his family.
The sergeant at the desk was from Unterwalden, one of the original cantons of the Swiss Confederation. ‘Guete Obe, Fräulein Studer,’ he said.
‘Good evening, Sergeant Weibel. Is my father home?’
‘I believe so. I saw the colonel head upstairs twenty minutes ago.’
‘In uniform or out?’
The question elicited a rare smile. ‘He was wearing a suit, Fräulein. I think he had just come back from a meeting at the Governorate.’
‘A busy week ahead. Lots to prepare for.’
‘Most definitely. But the election of a new pope is always a time for celebration, is it not?’
‘A chance to polish up your breastplates.’
‘Ja, ja. Of course. But also our 226s.’
The Swiss-made P226 Elite semi-automatic handgun, with its beavertail grip and short reset trigger, had become the standard issue of the Swiss Guard, which these days also trained with assault rifles and Heckler & Koch machine pistols. ‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘But let’s hope the conclave doesn’t end in a shoot-out.’
The sergeant, a two-time pistol-shooting champion in the Swiss army, shrugged. ‘You know our motto, Fräulein: Acriter et Fideliter – Honour and Fidelity. These days, we must be prepared for anything.’
Upstairs in the apartment, as Frau Studer prepared supper, the colonel was reading his paper while keeping half an eye on the evening news in German. Maya went into the kitchen to say hello to her mother, then returned to the living room, where, for the third time that week, she turned down the air conditioning before taking a seat on the sofa next to her father.
‘You must have got home very late last night,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
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‘Actually, I stayed at a friend’s house.’
‘Have I met her?’
‘Him, father. He’s a “him”.’
‘Aah!’
Studer sighed. He knew better than to seek to impose his religious views on his daughter. At least, he reasoned, her overnight stays were few and far between, which was as much as any father could hope for these days.
Berlin, according to ZDF, had elected a new mayor, and for the first time his deputy would be of Turkish origin. She nodded in approval. That was progress, and long overdue. In Strasbourg, the European Parliament was acting to reduce national vetos in respect of the EU budget. Did that mean more democracy, or less? She wasn’t sure. The president of the United States, on a visit to Beijing, had confirmed that China would take the lead in the development of the next generation of short-haul jets by the jointly owned Boeing Corporation. In another development, an historic church in Würzburg had been deconsecrated and would shortly re-open as a mosque.
The world had changed so profoundly in the years since she was a child that the Europe and the Switzerland in which her parents grew up seemed almost as remote to Maya as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today’s Europe was thoroughly cosmopolitan and multi-cultural, governed increasingly from Brussels by the democratic equivalent of diktat. Switzerland continued to be an anomaly, on the margins of the EU. But with close to 40 per cent of its population now of Middle Eastern, African or East European descent, it could no longer claim to be the land of William Tell. Two of her father’s Halberdiers were ethnic Africans; five members of the national parliament were Muslim, and another a Hindu. As the old ways faded, it was to be expected that there would be a reaction by traditionalists to changes that seemed to cut across the very definition of Swiss-ness. Older people – but some younger people, too – were concerned especially about the huge increase in the country’s Muslim population, which had led not only to the widespread wearing of the hijab and a surge in Muslim-only schools, but also to demands for Muslim cantons, with sharia law.
Behind the high walls of the Holy See, none of this was visible. As commandant of the Swiss Guard, the colonel, like all of his predecessors, dating back to 1506, was considered a member of the ‘pontifical family’, holding the rank of a Chamberlain of His Holiness. Yet the Guardia Svizzera Pontifica was much more than a papal adornment. With his one hundred officers and men – the Hundertschweizer – Studer was responsible not only for ceremonial duties but for every aspect of papal security, which, ever since the attempted assassination by a deranged Turk of Pope John Paul II, included intelligence, crowd control and electronic surveillance.
These days, the Guards only wore their breastplates and steel helmets on solemn occasions. Their red, blue and yellow ‘gala’ uniforms, designed not by Michelangelo, but by a gifted commandant in 1914, were still very much in evidence, and remained a firm favourite with tourists. But in the twenty-first century, proficiency with small arms, keen eyesight and the ability to spot a potential threat, whether an individual or among a multitude, were what marked out the finest recruits.
Not that the Guards either looked or acted like a SWAT team. Life in the centuries-old barracks had a strict but seductive rhythm, not unlike that of a monastery. The Guardsmen, who normally served two to three years, were not only professional soldiers, but also practising Catholics, who viewed their calling as a great honour. Maya’s father regarded his own role as a rare privilege rather than a distinction. It was not that he lacked an ego or sense of self-esteem. It was more that as an army officer, then a director of the family bank, he had commanded respect for thirty years. This time round, virtue was its own reward.
As they watched the news, an item came on about the return of the heart of the late Cardinal Rüttgers to his cathedral in Freiburg. The cardinal’s sister was distraught. Her brother, she told an earnest young interviewer, had been in perfect health when he left for Rome. She couldn’t understand what happened to him. How could it be God’s will that a man of just fifty-one, newly elected to lead Germany’s Catholics, should have died so suddenly? And why, she wanted to know, had the Church prevented the return of his body to his family and homeland? She had written to Cardinal Bosani, the Camerlengo, to request his body for burial next to his parents. But Bosani said no, he must be interred in Rome. No explanation was given. There hadn’t even been a post-mortem. All they had been sent was her brother’s heart, filled with formaldehyde, ‘like a pickled peach’.
At the mention of Bosani’s name, Colonel Studer looked up from his well-thumbed copy of the Neue Züricher Zeitung. Maya noticed him twitching.
‘What’s the matter, father?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It is nothing.’
‘You don’t like Bosani, do you?’
He placed the newspaper next to him on the sofa, keeping half an eye on the television screen. ‘It’s got nothing to do with liking. He’s a hard man, but we live in hard times. I just wish that poor woman had been able to take her brother’s body back with her to Germany.’
‘I’d have thought she’d be proud of the send-off they gave him. Wasn’t there a funeral Mass in the Vatican? Didn’t Bosani himself preside?’
The colonel, relaxed for the evening in an open-necked shirt and chinos, curled his lip. ‘Oh there was a Mass all right, but the Camerlengo seemed merely to be going through the motions. He has a lot on his mind at the moment, of course. The conclave is just around the corner. But I still thought it could have been better done.’
‘Did you know Rüttgers?’
Her father made a face. ‘I wouldn’t say I knew him. But we’d run into one another every now and then. The first time, about three months ago, I noticed him talking to one of my guardsmen, which strictly speaking is not permitted when they’re on duty. But the young man seemed so uplifted by the conversation that I couldn’t bring myself to reproach him. Instead, I spoke with the cardinal himself, who told me he had been pleased by my appointment and asked after my family, you included.’
This surprised Maya. ‘He knew about me?’
‘And your brother. He grew up just over the frontier from us in Schaffhausen, near Singen. He even had a Swiss cousin, from Steckborn, married to a watchmaker. He told me he used to attend Mass at the Münster at least once a month when he was a teenager.’
‘So he would have passed our house on the way to the church.’
‘That’s what he told me.’
‘Interesting. How did he seem the last time you met him?’
‘That would have been shortly before he died. He was on his way into the Camerlengo’s office. Evidently, the two of them had a difference of opinion. He looked really downcast, as if something terrible had happened. I asked him if he was all right. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well, I thought. But he said he felt fine – never fitter. It was just that he wasn’t looking forward to the process of electing a new pope. “But Your Eminence,” I said, “it is surely a great honour to be able to choose Christ’s Vicar on Earth.” He looked at me, with a look that I won’t forget. He looked sad, but pained as well. “My dear Colonel,” he said, “you have no idea how desperate things have become. The Church these days is hardly even Christian anymore. It’s as if it has been infiltrated by outsiders pursuing their own agendas.”’
‘Did you ask him what he meant by this?’ Maya asked, astonished by Rüttgers’ candour.
‘No,’ the colonel replied. ‘It wasn’t my business to ask. After all, no one was suggesting a crime had been committed. I just wished him well and told him I would pray for him. He blessed me and went on his way. Three days later he was dead.’
‘But that’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard of such a thing.’
‘I agree. And when I heard a couple of days ago that he had been buried in a sealed casket in the Teutonic Cemetery, without any proper ceremony, I thought, well, that’s it – they’ve washed their hands of him.’
Maya was silent for a moment. On the television screen, the p
ictures were now showing a huge demonstration in Tehran demanding the destruction of the state of Israel and recognition of Islamic sovereignty across the region. Relations between Muslims and the West seemed to be deteriorating with each passing day.
She turned back to her father. ‘Do you think Bosani was sorry when Rüttgers died?’
‘Sorry? I really can’t say. Priests deal with issues of life and death on a daily basis. To them dying is just a means of exchange. To ask Bosani if he mourned the death of a fellow cardinal would be like asking a banker if he thought a rise in interest rates meant the end of capitalism. What I do know is that he kept us well away from the body and then raced through the funeral process. I have no doubt that he felt Christian charity at the loss of a brother-in-Christ, but when I watched him as they carried the body out of St Peter’s Basilica towards its final resting place, I can’t pretend that he looked anything other than relieved.’
19*
Conclave minus 9
The south clock of St Peter’s had just begun striking twelve as Dempsey bounded up the steps of the Jesuit headquarters on the Borgo Santo Spirito. He had intended to report to his uncle the previous night on what he’d found in the Secret Archive. Instead, he’d met up with Maya and they had spent the entire evening together, ending up in bed at his flat. It had been a tremendous emotional as well as physical outpouring and the result was that today he felt like a new man. By comparison, he decided, sorting out the apostolic succession would be no trouble at all. It was just a matter of who made the first move.