Sarah was still thinking about her father’s story, trying to assess its consequences. Given the choice, she would prefer to keep it all hidden, never to be discovered by anybody.
“Then why did they bring that story out in 2000?”
“Because they had to think of something. And it was better to disappoint expectations than to say that the third secret predicted the murder of a pope by his own men.”
“Of course,” Sarah agreed, still holding on to a thoughtful attitude. “I imagine it can’t be easy to handle a revelation that way.”
“No, it isn’t. That’s why they waited so long before letting it be known. Then they prepared the 2000 event, very carefully staged. The faithful bought the goods, along with the unfaithful, and the case was wrapped up.”
Sarah’s wineglass was still untouched. Rafael’s, in contrast, was already empty.
“Why did those papers come out now? If he was murdered by the Vatican, why did they save those papers, instead of destroying them?”
“First, let’s make something clear. The Vatican, as an institution, had nothing to do with this. A group of men, even hiding beneath a habit or a red cap, do not amount to the whole Church. Today the Vatican continues to have undesirables, just as in 1978. The difference is that they aren’t so influential. Even though the Roman Curia is as conservative as it was then, the P2 doesn’t hold any power over it. It can’t manipulate conclaves or papal decisions. Certainly there are other organizations playing that role now, but we can’t be sure whether they are laundering money and producing false titles.”
“Manipulate conclaves? And the cardinals? And the Holy Ghost?”
“The only Holy Ghost I know is a bank,” her father wisecracked. “Clearly the conclaves are, above all, political events, subject to external influences and manipulations, like any human election. Until the beginning of the conclave, eligible cardinals carry out campaigns intended to produce the greatest possible number of votes. The Curia, supported by powerful organizations, elects its candidate, and when the cardinals enter the conclave, everything is practically decided.”
“Then, it’s all a farce?”
“Theoretically—the Church has various factions. The most conservative, represented by the Curia, and other, more liberal ones. Once one of these factions gains dominance, the other cardinals are pulled to it.”
“They follow the locomotive.”
“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.”
“And that’s what happened in 1978?”
“No. The Curia didn’t succeed in securing the election of Cardinal Siri, their favorite. One faction of non-Italian cardinals gave its support to Albino Luciani. And that sealed his fate.”
Silence again for a moment. The captain then continued.
“In the second conclave in 1978, the ‘three-pope year,’ the Curia didn’t take any chances, and elected someone they would be able to control. It goes without saying that they hit the nail on the head. Not only did the Curia keep him under their control, but as pontiff he managed to establish an excellent relationship with the faithful. He was very useful to them.”
“I didn’t think of John Paul II that way.”
“Nobody does. But it’s difficult to blame him for it. First, because he received a very serious warning in 1981, when Mehmet Ali Aca tried to assassinate him. The original plan wasn’t to give him a scare, but to do away with him entirely. And later, because the Vatican, indirectly, put nearly a billion dollars into the coffers of Solidarity, the Polish labor union in Gdansk that overthrew their communist regime. They did it with funds from the Vatican and from the United States.”
“But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did the people who killed the pope not destroy those papers? That’s what I would have done.”
“Listen,” her father continued, “the pope didn’t die because of the papers in his hand. But someone immediately took care to remove them. That person gave them to the man in charge of the job, who took them out of the Vatican. The order was to destroy the papers, but he never fulfilled it.”
“Why?”
“Good question. Maybe so he could keep them for blackmail. Or even as a kind of ‘life insurance,’ in case the people on top wanted to get rid of him in the future.”
“I see,” Sarah said, nodding. “Then the time has come to explain the murder. Why did they kill the pope?”
“Are you going to drink your port?” Rafael asked unexpectedly, his voice absent for some time. Sarah looked at him.
“No,” she answered, holding out the glass. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks,” Rafael said, instantly taking it.
“I want to know who killed the pope and why,” Sarah continued. “And who is that Firenzi? I need to know how I fit into this whole business.”
“Forgive me for interrupting, Captain, but we should continue this conversation in the car.”
“What car? The one we drove here in?” the young woman asked.
“No, the one I’ve got outside,” her father explained. “How did you think we’d be leaving?”
“I don’t know. With him, anything’s possible,” Sarah answered, looking at Rafael. “But where are we going? Aren’t we safe here?”
“Yes. But very soon Mafra will be crawling with agents, and we can’t run the risk of being surrounded. It’s important to keep some maneuvering room, to stay always a step ahead,” Rafael explained.
“Do you really think they’ll manage to place us in Mafra?”
“Yes. Beyond the slightest doubt.”
48
The pope died because he knew too much,” Raul said, sitting in the passenger seat of the Volvo, looking back at his daughter. Sarah leaned forward in order to hear better. Rafael seemed focused on his driving. She surmised that he already knew the story her father was telling, and was absorbed in his own thoughts.
“Knew too much about what?”
“He knew that important figures in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, including his secretary of state, Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, belonged to Masonic organizations, an offense subject to the automatic penalty of excommunication. He also came to understand that the Institute for Religious Works, the IOR—better known as the Vatican Bank—was directed by a corrupt man who, in collaboration with someone from the Banco Ambrosiano, laundered Mafia money and funds from other not-so-holy enterprises.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Paul Marcinkus, from the Vatican Bank, and Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano. And the key figure, the one who manipulated both of these men, the brains behind the whole black-market money-laundering scheme, Licio Gelli.”
“How is it possible to do something like that?”
“By means of shell companies based in South America and northern Europe, and later by purchasing foreign banks or using subsidiaries of the Banco Ambrosiano in order to bring money in or divert it. A lot of money. When the business prospered, Paul VI nicknamed Calvi ‘God’s banker.’ At some point, they expanded the operation. That is, Gelli began to demand that they launder more money, always through the Vatican and the Ambrosiano. Naturally, it wasn’t long before suspicions were aroused, and despite being brilliant bankers, Calvi and Marcinkus made mistakes. Actually, many mistakes. And it all blew up, in ‘the Vatican Bank scandal,’ shortly after the pope’s death.
“The Banco Ambrosiano,” Raul continued, “fell into the hands of Roberto Calvi, a known member of the P2 Lodge. Gelli, the Grand Master of the lodge, arranged for the Vatican Bank to take more than a twenty percent share of the Ambrosiano, involving it in irregular activities in Europe and America, with parallel, undercover societies for laundering money and other fiscal frauds.”
All of this crashed when the Bank of Italy declared a depletion of billions of dollars, which the Ambrosiano would not be able to cover. In the early eighties, when the investigations started, the Holy See’s tolerance of Calvi and his operatives’ manipulations was discovered, and it was also understood
that the Vatican was willing to participate in the Ambrosiano Bank’s illicit activities. Calvi asked for help from the Vatican Bank, headed by Archbishop Marcinkus, but Marcinkus had enough trouble trying to save his own skin.
Albino Luciani was aware of these manipulations long before he became pope, because, as the patriarch of Venice, he was president of the Catholic Bank of Venice, one of the Holy See’s financial institutions. Later, from the papal throne, he had even greater access to information, which only brought increased danger.
“So they killed the pope because he was about to ruin them,” Sarah concluded.
“Exactly. And he was also planning to expose them publicly. They would all end up in jail. There was so much garbage piled up. For example, the Vatican Bank was intimately linked, through the P2, to the purchase of the Exocet missiles used by Argentina in the Falkland Islands War. Can you imagine all the implications this has?”
“Oh, my God.”
“They even used a Mafia type named Michele Sindona, who brought them large sums of money, serving as a link with Cosa Nostra.”
“Was he part of the group, too?”
“Yes, but Sindona wasn’t involved in the pope’s death, although a lot of people’s blood, including that of some notable magistrates, was on his hands. But at that point he was already up to his neck in other problems.”
“And nobody took care of the other frauds?”
“At some point, various European enforcement agencies and the U.S. Justice Department put two and two together. Even so, it took them a long time to unravel all the threads. But John Paul I, soon after being elected pope, met privately with U.S. Justice Department officials, who updated him on the situation, so that he could take whatever measures he deemed appropriate. John Paul I knew then that there were criminals in the Vatican and that he had to get rid of them. But they overtook him.”
“Were they the ones who killed him?”
“It’s not known. I believe they were morally responsible for the crime, just as guilty as whoever killed him.”
“Who was?”
“Licio Gelli, Roberto Calvi, and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, along with Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot. Of course, someone inside the Vatican had to facilitate the actual killer’s entry, and then destroy all the clues. His Holiness was found dead at four thirty in the morning, and by six in the afternoon his private quarters were already cleaned and sealed, with the key under Villot’s control. And in a little over twelve hours, every vestige of Albino Luciani’s presence in the Apostolic Palace had been erased.”
“That’s efficient.”
“That’s really being in a hurry. At five thirty in the morning the same day, forty-five minutes after the pope was declared dead, the embalmers were already in the Vatican. With all that had to be done, it was suspicious that the Signoracci brothers were there so soon. Especially if we consider that Italian law permits embalming only twenty-four hours after death.”
Sarah shook her head.
“At six in the afternoon that same day, John Paul I was already embalmed. It was a flagrant violation of the law.”
“But what kind of poison would fool the doctors?”
“The pope wasn’t poisoned.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. And no doctor was fooled.”
“Then—”
“Even a moron could see there was something fishy. A simple heart attack would never have made the pope’s enemies act so foolishly or hastily. When Paul VI died, barely a month earlier, the Vatican behaved in a completely different way.”
“And who exactly killed him?”
“Nobody knows his name. But I think he’s the man on our trail.”
“Then he’s got to be connected with the P2.”
“Yes. The one who killed John Paul I was, and is, a member of the P2.”
“And you don’t know his name?”
“Only his initials: J.C.”
“And where do I come into all this?” Sarah asked for the umpteenth time, hoping her father would finally make it clear.
“Where do you come into all this?” the captain repeated out loud, sighing as he tried to arrange his thoughts and make them understandable to others. “Valdemar Firenzi, who’s an old member of the P2, like me, found the famous vanished papers. He spent many years pursuing leads and gathering evidence, and finally, when he had already given up, he found them in the least likely place.”
“Where?”
“In the Vatican’s Secret Archives.”
“How would they end up there?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. You’ll have to ask J.C.,” Raul answered. “After the people connected with the case started to die off, I think he felt more secure. It really wouldn’t have been at all wise for him to keep the papers.”
“Agreed. It doesn’t matter. Firenzi found the documents, and then?”
“A short time earlier, Pietro Saviotti had reopened the case of the death of John Paul I in the District of Rome, and those papers acquired a tremendous importance as evidence. Aware of their value, and of the fact that many people would rather have them disappear, Firenzi decided to take them out of the Vatican and send them to people nobody knew, intending to save them. But since the walls of the Holy See have ears, he felt threatened. So what did he do? He sent a photo of Benedict XVI to Felipe Aragón and to Pablo Rincón, with a message intended to be understood only by them. And something happened, I don’t know what, that made him send the list to you.”
“But why me?”
“Because you’re his goddaughter. Don’t you remember our talking about him when you were little? He moved to Rome a long time ago, that’s why you don’t know him.
“He needed someone that didn’t belong to the organization, and figured that, after seeing my name on the list, you would get in touch with me and I would understand right away. The worst that could happen was that you wouldn’t pay any attention. He wasn’t thinking that he’d be captured. But he was, and somehow they found out about practically everything.”
“And now?”
“Now he must be dead,” her father said, his voice choked up.
Thinking about it, Sarah grew very serious.
“I didn’t remember that I had an Italian godfather.”
“Don’t let the name fool you. Firenzi was of solid Portuguese stock.”
“All the same, he endangered everybody.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth. He stuck his nose into something that was just fine as it was. What did he expect to accomplish?”
“To bring the truth to light.”
“That truth was fine as it was, locked away.”
Rafael looked for something inside the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a sheet of paper and a photo of Benedict XVI.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked.
“What Father Felipe received in Madrid.”
He handed the letter to her. Although she didn’t speak Spanish, the language was so similar to Portugese that she understood nearly everything.
Today, on my seventy-fourth birthday, my past mistakes have caught up with me. Divine irony doesn’t pass unnoticed, and I know that He is the one behind all of this. As life unfolds, it’s difficult to understand the implications and consequences of our decisions and actions. We start from the right principles, having the noblest of dreams, and in time we come up against our own monstrosity, the vile and cruel consequence of what we have done. No matter how much we may spend the rest of our days using good to atone for the bad, completely denying ourselves for the other, the stain remains, always sneaking up behind us, whispering, “You won’t escape, you won’t escape.” Until it ends up fulfilling its promise, as happens today, on my birthday. Before saying good-bye, I want to present you with this letter and the photo of my beloved pope, to whom you’ll know how to apply the tender light of prayer. As for myself, I bid farewell with a confession. Because of my cowardice I let a pope die, and I did nothing to prevent it.
“The Spanish authorities gave this to me when I went to arrange for Felipe’s funeral. My good friend Felipe.”
“And they didn’t find the content strange?”
“They didn’t put two and two together. And luckily, I arrived before anybody from the organization could get hold of the letter. In Buenos Aires that wasn’t possible, and not only did they kill Pablo, but they also took the photo.”
“What’s special about the photo?”
Raul took out a small pocket flashlight with ultraviolet light.
“Come closer.”
Hesitant at first, Sarah moved closer to her father, driven by curiosity. Rafael took an occasional glance, without neglecting his driving. They saw, under the application of the black light, how the face of Benedict XVI disappeared, and there was instead the face of an old man, skillfully traced with thousands of fluorescent filaments.
The Last Pope Page 18