Hilferty pushed two Alitalia tickets over on the bar.
How would they know? Delaney thought. And how much do they know? “What brings them into this?” he asked.
“Oh please,” Hilferty said. “I should be asking you this stuff. You’re lucky I’m CSIS, and not with some other fucking organization, Francis, or it would be cigarette burns until you come clean. It might come to that yet.”
Hilferty was manic, knowing clearly that this operation was out of his hands, possibly out of con trol altogether and heading for the abyss. Delaney could see that in the way he munched his way through too many pistachios and picked labels off bottles of beer. This was not going to look good on a résumé.
“Walesa ask them to come in?” Delaney asked. He was determined to get what he could from Hilferty. He was guessing that Walesa’s people felt they could no longer trust their own secret service and may have called in some people they did trust in the Vatican. Maybe. On the other hand, an indiscreet priest in Montreal might have captured the Vatican’s attention as well. Or a murdered priest.
“If he did, and I knew, I wouldn’t tell you, Francis,” Hilferty said. “Who says Walesa’s a player anyway? Just who’s asking who for help on this one is no longer very clear. Let’s just leave it at that. The Vatican’s interested, and my people know they’re interested, and when the Vatican says jump, the Dominion of Canada, apparently, asks how high.” Bits of beer label continued to fall from his fingers. “Let me tell you this, hotshot,” Hilferty continued. “This is now very much the big time. You get it? There’s now a lot more riding on this than you can imagine and we don’t want any fuck-ups. If it were up to me I’d deport your ass back to Canada and get on with the job at hand. But we’re stuck with you and that Polish shrink, and that’s that. So no more bullshit, you get it? The Vatican intelligence people do not like to fuck around.They’re like the goddamn Mossad. A little less money, maybe a little bit less, and a lot fewer toys, but they’ve got a thousand or so years of experience and God and the Pope on their side. That’s two big backers to the Israelis’ one.”
Hilferty drank the rest of his beer and pushed the bill over to Delaney — at this point still only passive aggressive.
“We’ll have a car out front tomorrow morning,” Hilferty said. “Better bring your gun. Our gun. And not in your carry-on.” He walked out, muttering darkly. “Fucking amateurs.”
Delaney wondered again if Hilferty’s handlers back home knew he was in the habit of arming journalists with very large handguns, and overseas at that. Journalists who had made it very clear they were freelancers and on nobody’s staff. The gun, clearly, was Hilferty’s accident insurance policy: Canadians in general and now this worried spy in particular being the biggest buyers of insurance in the Western world.
Hilferty had also been agitated a few days before that, on the night Zbigniew died. When Delaney and Natalia had come back to the Méridien, he and Stoufflet were watching out for them from the lobby bar.
“We better have a little talk, Francis,” Hilferty said. “Right now.”
Natalia looked bad. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tired. She said nothing and tried to go around them but Stoufflet moved to block her way. As he did he locked his eyes on Delaney, enjoying the little testosterone dance, inviting him to be offended by the move.
“S’il vous plaît, madame,” Stoufflet said. “Stay with us for a little instant, would you please?”
Delaney decided that Stoufflet had no redeeming qualities.
“Let the lady go up,” he said. “She wants to go up to her room.”
“Ah, oui? A little early, non? In Paris?”
“Hilferty,” Delaney said, “I’ve had a very trying day; we have all had a trying day. Now get that French asshole out of Natalia’s way or we’ll have a scene right here in the lobby.”
Natalia looked up gratefully at Delaney, ignoring, this time, the psychosocial implications of his behaviour.
“Let her go up, Jean,” Hilferty said. “We can speak to her later if we need to.”
“Don’t count on that,” Delaney said.
Natalia went into the open elevator without saying anything at all. They all watched as the doors slid silently closed and then they went into the bar for spy talk.
“Look Francis, we’re going to have to get a few things straightened out right now,” Hilferty said. “We’ve got one dead old guy over there in Belleville and one dead fireman and people are very soon going to go apeshit on both sides of the Atlantic. Now are you going to brief us on what’s going on here, or what?”
“No. I don’t think so, John. This is private business at the moment.”
Delaney saw a smile creep onto Stoufflet’s face. He’s just hoping for a chance to play the heavy, Delaney thought. As we’re on his turf.
“Are you working with us on this thing anymore or not?” Hilferty asked. “I never was,” Delaney said.
“Bullshit. I say you fucking were, and I say you are right now. Don’t push me too far, Francis. I can mess you up pretty bad back in Canada now, you know that. Our friend from the Quai here can find a weapon on you, and maybe there’s some CSIS cash still back in your apartment in Montreal. That wouldn’t look too good for a distinguished journalist, now would it?”
“I don’t think it would look too good for a CSIS agent to be found to be on a covert operation overseas either,” Delaney said. “Or attempting to coerce journalists who are on an investigative assignment.”
“No one will buy that, Delaney,” Hilferty said.
“Let’s see then, shall we? I have a bit of a way with words, and some very indulgent editors.”
Hilferty looked over at Stoufflet, who now had gone Gallic impassive. The Frenchman motioned for the bartender to come over to serve them drinks.
“Cinquante-et-un,” Stoufflet said. “Un double.For you, mes amis?”
“Johnnie Walker Black. Double,” Hilferty said.
“I’m not staying,” Delaney said.
“You fucking are,” Hilferty said. “Bring him a beer.”
When the drinks had come, Hilferty said: “Well, we’ve got ourselves a little situation here, Jean. How would your people want us to play this one, do you think? We’ve now got what we like to call back in the frozen wastes of Canada a reluctant operative. Thought he was onside but now he’s way, way offside. Probably has some information we would find very helpful indeed and refuses to give it to us. We’ve got some poor fireman dead, and the police asking your people a couple of questions I would expect. We’ve got some dead Polish émigré, and a little bonfire in his garden, which Francis over here probably knows a bit about as well. I asked Monsieur Delaney for some help, Jean, and now that things are getting interesting, he is refusing to cooperate. What do you make of all that?”
“Cherchez la femme, mon ami,” Stoufflet said.
“Forget this piece of shit. We talk to the girl.” There was the eye contact again.
“Not a bad idea,” Hilferty said. “Although she did look a little upset tonight already. Lost a friend of the family, we understand, Francis. Sorry to hear about that.”
“Look, you guys can play spy games all night, if you like, but the fact of the matter is I’m not interested in this particular scenario anymore,” Delaney said. “I very much doubt you’ve got the balls to try to force me to do anything just at the moment, John, and if you do I’ll play this so big in the media back home you’ll be looking for work twenty-four hours later. So why don’t we all finish our drinks and go on about our business.”
“We’ll be on you like a fucking rash, every minute, Francis. You’ve got no room to manoeuvre. What’s the point?”
“That’s now my business only, John. Let’s just see how it all plays out, shall we?”
“We’ll be on you like a rash,” Hilferty said.
“Fine. But tell your friend over here t
o be particularly careful to stay out of my way. And Natalia’s way. Could you do that for me, John?”
Delaney was surprised at the intensity of his anger and the adrenalin rush. It had been a day of intense feelings all around. He left them then sitting at the bar, nursing their options.
Natalia hadn’t seemed terribly surprised when Delaney told her they had been summoned to the Vatican. Now that she had seen how these things worked and had seen that people were willing to kill for whatever it was they were all seeking, nothing much appeared to surprise her anymore. It wasn’t clear to Delaney whether her beloved Jung, apparently to be trusted for insights into all sorts of complex human situations, had prepared her adequately for this sort of thing. Perhaps he had. Whatever the case, Natalia seemed to be willing to just ride it out now, wherever the darker psychic energies of others took them.
Of course she blamed herself, or herself and Delaney in equal parts perhaps, for Zbigniew’s death. She argued that they should not have gone to him so overtly, without giving him more warning or a chance to say no or a way to meet more surreptitiously. And she blamed herself for taking too long to get back to the old man’s apartment the night he was murdered, to warn him of the dangers and to take away the papers he had ended up dying for.
It was all Delaney could do to talk her out of going along to the Paris morgue to volunteer information to the police, to try, somehow, to set things right for the old man. Going to the funeral, if there was to be a funeral, was also out of the question. It was too late for any of that, he had insisted, and eventually Natalia let the desire to do penance drop.
“We were too busy drinking wine and eating dinners in a bistro to care enough that he might be in danger,” she had said repeatedly in the first hours. That line had stopped coming so often now, Delaney noted. Then again, not many lines of any sort were coming just at the moment.
The Alitalia jet was at cruising altitude now, droning steadily southeast from Paris toward Rome. Delaney looked over at Natalia again. This time she looked up at him and made eye contact. A small improvement, a psychologist might say. The eyes were not the same as they were before they had left Montreal. But they told him she was more determined than ever to see this thing through. For the sake of two old Polish gentlemen at least. Their immediate worry was how much of Zbigniew’s cache of letters had survived. Hilferty had been cagey on that, trying as best he could to draw them out. All Hilferty would say was that there had been “a little bonfire.” Delaney had no idea whether CSIS even knew about any letters or whether the French police had salvaged some from the apartment. They would have to assume the worst, Delaney decided: that at least some papers had been taken by the people who had broken into the apartment. How many, and which ones, were of course the more important questions.
Another question, which he and Natalia talked through endlessly in the couple of days they had spent in Paris waiting for the right time to make a next move, or waiting for the inspiration for a next move, was who might have done the killing and who else knew about it.
Delaney was still leaning toward UOP, but he was less sure this sort of action would have been ordered by Walesa himself or even by his own office. If a small CSIS operation could go badly out of control, so, quite easily, could a small Polish operation. And, as the Americans in particular could attest from bitter experience, operatives often go far beyond their brief in the heat of the moment, or when things get more interesting or more lucrative for them in their own right. As for the Vatican, Delaney was not naïve enough to think that side would take the soft option either, depending on what was at stake.
He had Natalia tell him once more, and then again, exactly what Zbigniew had told her the day he died and what the letters indicated was in the secret Polish cache still somewhere in Quebec. And then he came no closer to even an educated guess about the content or the value of the cache or about what those seeking it would want it for.
Money? Probably a fair bit of money, or something convertible to money. But which of the possible players would need it that bad? Walesa, possibly, to finance his faltering election campaign? Or maybe a nice little retirement fund for himself? Walesa’s own people, just out of greed? His security service people, for similar reasons? Polish Communists, or former Communists as they now liked to be called? Maybe the Vatican? Not penniless by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe very interested in keeping whatever it was out of the hands of those in Poland who needed it more than they did.
Or maybe, and this was the thought that troubled Delaney most, maybe everyone was desperately seeking this so-called treasure without knowing quite what it was at all.
“Zbigniew said it probably has everything that motivates people,” Natalia said as they made the final approach to Rome. “Money, power, and symbolism.”
“What if it’s none of the above?” Delaney said.
“Then it is still a symbol. Then the joke is on us,” Natalia said with a dark laugh. “Then the joke’s on us.”
This thought seemed to cheer her in some way. She gave another little manic laugh. Delaney wondered if she really was all right.
“You know, I’ve never been to Rome,” she said suddenly. “Jungians have a thing about Rome.”
“How do you mean?”
“Jung himself never even made it to Rome. He was probably the best psychologist of religion ever. He travelled all over the world to speak to holy people and see sacred sites, but he could never get himself to Rome. Every time he went to the Zurich train station to buy a ticket he’d have an anxiety attack and faint dead away. He said the archetypal intensity of the place was just too much for his psyche to deal with.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said. “The stress was just too much for him, poor dear.”
This sent Natalia into another short burst of dark laughter.
The other obvious problem they now faced was how to do anything at all in Rome or anywhere else without CSIS and possibly several other intelligence services on to their every move. Hilferty was nowhere obvious at Fiumicino airport, but that didn’t mean his people, and others, were not there. As Delaney and Natalia came out through the customs area, a dark-suited man with a chauffeur’s cap stepped forward without hesitation and called out to them by name. They were known here, apparently. Hilferty had told them to expect a ride.
The accent was Italian, but their man did not look much like a chauffeur to Delaney.
“I am to bring you to your hotel,” the man said. He didn’t offer them a name. He picked up their small bags and walked fast to the curb outside, where a large black Lancia was idling. The driver looked quickly, expertly, from side to side as he shepherded them into the car and Delaney saw him give a sign to someone standing by another Lancia nearby.
Another dark-suited man in sunglasses was waiting in the front passenger seat of the car Delaney and Natalia were to ride in. This man only nodded, and he didn’t bother talking at all.
The two cars pulled off together. This made for a very secure ride through Roman traffic to the hotel Delaney had chosen. Hilferty had wanted to book them in somewhere approved, but Delaney had insisted on making the choice: the Hotel Roma near the Spanish Steps. He had been there many times and now, more than ever, he wanted at least the semblance of familiar turf.
It was to be a late-afternoon meeting, or so the handwritten message on Vatican stationery told them after they checked in, with one Monsignor Rafael Fiorentino, Prefect of the Pontifical Household. It would be in the papal apartments themselves. A car was to come for them at four o’clock. If he had had any doubts, Delaney knew now that the Vatican was seeing this as very serious business indeed. But CSIS was still nowhere in evidence. Delaney wondered at what point Hilferty and Company would make their presence felt, if they were going to be allowed to have any presence here at all.
Natalia did not want to go out, even though it was wonderfully warm and sunny, as af
ternoons in Rome in early March can be. The weather was much warmer than in Paris and the streets around the hotel were full of well-dressed people enjoying the spring. Instead of going out, they ordered a room service lunch and ate together on the balcony of Natalia’s room, which overlooked an elegant inner courtyard with fountains and gravel paths. It was still adjoining rooms for them on this trip. Delaney allowed himself, briefly, to wonder how much longer that might last.
They talked quietly about what was in store for them, squinting at each other in the bright sunlight on the balcony. Neither wanted to drink wine with lunch, to the surprise of the room service clerk: Delaney because he wanted to have wits about him for the meeting that was to come; Natalia for some complex penitent reasons of her own. But in the sunlight and the spring air even a bottle of mineral water in brilliant crystal glasses seemed a small celebration.
Delaney had thought, briefly, about contacting an American journalist he knew to be working at the local AP office, to check things out, to find out at least a little bit about Monsignor Fiorentino if he could. But he realized that his old ways of doing things, his constant checking in and checking out, his briefings and debriefings and scanning of clippings, were not useful anymore. Not on this assignment in any case. So he just let things flow, sipping his mineral water in the Roman sunlight and willing, as perhaps never before in his life, to simply see where things led. His reactions would look after themselves. They would have to.
The telephone in Delaney’s room rang precisely at four o’clock. The car was downstairs. Same driver, different car. No second man in the front seat this time, but another car for back-up, as before. The desk clerks looked keenly interested. Was it so obvious that they were being ferried around Rome by agents, that they were on the way to the Vatican for a meeting with the Papal Prefect?
The Mazovia Legacy Page 19