Vatican Vendetta: A thrilling battle of power and politics

by Peter Watson

  ‘If you change too fast, people get hurt. You provoke a backlash.’

  ‘Whatever pace you change at, it’ll be too fast for somebody. You’re looking at it from the wrong side, Mr Colwyn. You can’t impose changes that people don’t want. You have to feel your way, test out what can and cannot be done. You have to start with the things you can do, so people see that change actually does happen. Then they get used to the idea that such things are possible. Look at my own appointment. The old school hated it at first; now they are beginning to get used to it. More important, the outside world is getting used to the idea of a woman with some authority in the Vatican. This is why the picture sales are so important, why you are so crucial to us. They attract attention to the Vatican, to the Holy Father’s policies. And they make a difference. I’ve already hinted to you that changes are in the offing concerning birth control, divorce, re-marriage. But Thomas is feeling his way. There has to be change, but change that people want, that they feel is fair, just, and necessary. Then it will happen and stick. If all that works, then the pace will increase and yes, maybe we shall see a Holy Mother one day.’ She paused. ‘Leadership consists of knowing what pace of change will keep the imagination of your supporters without provoking your enemies.’

  David gathered a forkful of lettuce. ‘Does Thomas act all by himself? That must be dangerous.’

  ‘He does and he doesn’t. Technically he is an absolute monarch, so he could function like a medieval king if he wanted to. But he has the curia, his Secretary of State – and a kitchen cabinet.’

  ‘Which consists of whom?’

  ‘You’re looking at one of them. On certain evenings, when the Holy Father keeps his diary free of any official functions, I dine with him and his two private secretaries, O’Rourke and a man you haven’t met. We throw around ideas. I chip in and say what I think a woman’s reaction would be to this or that. O’Rourke is tuned into the Vatican and the curia; he gives their reaction. The other man isn’t a cleric, he’s a businessman from a well-known Mexican family. Thomas met him on his travels. His role is to give the non-western view of things.’

  ‘Is that enough?’

  ‘Enough people? Perhaps not. But a leader needs around him individuals he can trust – speak of the devil,’ she said suddenly, changing her tone. She fingered the cross on her necklace and looked down.

  David turned to see Ottavio Massoni leaving the restaurant. He had been lunching further inside, where they had been unable to see him. It struck David that Massoni’s bone-tight skin looked as though it had been vacuum wrapped over his hairless skull. He was followed by a man David knew all too well, Diego Giunta, a prickly Spanish prelate who ran the Secret Archive in the Vatican. The two men didn’t see them and were soon gone. David turned back to face Elizabeth Lisle. ‘What is it? You’ve gone rigid as a rifle.’

  ‘I know. I can’t help it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t trust that man. I sometimes think he’s the only enemy Thomas has. Every time Thomas has a success the scowl on Massoni’s face seems to get wider, blacker. I think he wants the Church to be feared, not liked.’

  ‘Maybe he would say “respected”.’

  ‘Maybe he would. I know better. After all, it was Massoni’s people who gave me such a hard time when I started. They still do, some of them. It’s extraordinary: they venerate the Virgin Mother yet they don’t appear to like women.’ She started on her salad. ‘Not this woman anyway.’ Her brown eyes gleamed.

  ‘Is he close to Giunta?’

  ‘He’s an old friend from the Gregorian University. Besides running the archive, Giunta is writing the official biography of the last Pope, Pius XIII. I’ll bet they’re up to no good, plotting away. You know, I sometimes wish I had a training in eavesdropping. There are so many people I’d like to bug.’

  ‘You’re amazing. No, paranoid. If they’re old friends why can’t they just be enjoying their lunch, like us? What do you mean, plotting? Plotting what?’

  ‘Yes, I am paranoid where Massoni is concerned. I think Thomas is starting to feel that way, too. It all went so well to begin with. The Holy Father and the Secretary of State are so different and yet they really did seem to unite the Church. But the sale of the pictures caused a rift. Massoni was against the sale – you must have picked that up the first time you came here. Having lost that first battle he was rather hoping, I think, that the auction would fail. When it didn’t, that made him even more bitter.’ She lowered her voice again. ‘He doesn’t even know about this new scheme – the Caravaggio, I mean. If it works –’ she managed a smile ‘– and I’m sure it will, it will make Thomas even more popular. Massoni will be livid.’

  David let it rest. He changed the subject. He told Elizabeth Lisle about Caravaggio, the fact that though he was a great painter he had once killed a man during a fight in Rome and had spent a lot of his life on the run. She talked a little more about the Mississippi. She explained her fascination with gadgets.

  ‘Pa was an inventor. Not professionally. But being a liquor distiller he was always trying to produce a better still. He had a collection of old ones – and other inventions. There’s a place in Louisiana, very famous, called Fort Humbug. Back in the Civil War the locals were afraid of being attacked by some general or other so they hollowed out some tree trunks and painted them black to make it seem as though they had more cannon than they really did. Pa had one of those as well.’

  She finished her salad and wiped her plate with some bread, a very European gesture, David thought. ‘Pa was always making toys for my brother and me. There was supposed to be a sacred lake near us – sacred to the Indians, that is. Except it was just their way of keeping everybody else away so they could keep all the good fish to themselves. Pa invented a special fishing rod so we could take fish well back from the bank and not be seen.’ She smiled wryly. ‘That was wrong of us, I suppose, but Pa knew that doing anything secretly only adds to the fun.’ She sighed. ‘And it was fun.’

  After lunch, they walked together in the hot sun towards the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, where David could catch a taxi to the airport. A small Fiat was the first available cab that came his way. David was always amazed at how small Italian taxis could be. He shook hands with Elizabeth Lisle and repeated his promise to have the money in Rome by the next day. She refused a lift, saying she wanted to walk back to her office. He watched her from a distance as she strode along the Corso, towards the river and the Via della Conciliazione. Her bearing was upright but not entirely self-assured. Only when he was in the taxi, folded up and speeding along the autostrade towards Fiumicino Airport, did he reflect that she may have refused him because, for once, she had revealed some of her feelings to him. For the first time it occurred to David that, although Elizabeth Lisle was in a position of power and although she regularly dined with the Holy Father, deep inside herself, she was possibly very lonely.

  *

  The announcement about the Caravaggio sale came from the Vatican later in the week – which turned out to be just as well from David’s point of view.

  When he got back to London, he found there was serious opposition this time from his fellow board-members. A minority, but a sizeable one, led by Averne, took the view that the sale was potentially very risky, that the Mafia should not be tampered with. They argued that the mob had a long memory, was vindictive and that Hamilton’s was an easy target, with offices in New York where the Mafia was very strong. The divisions in the board room were quite bitter. However, the Earl of Afton produced a telling argument in support of David, saying that it would look very bad if it got out that Hamilton’s had backed down because it was scared of the Mafia. David won the final vote: 11 to 5.

  The Vatican announcement, however, went well. The day before the sale was announced, Elizabeth Lisle, working closely with Sirianni, the mayor of Foligno, presented to the press the architectural plans for the new cathedral to be built in the town. As a gesture it was a perfect symbol of what the Holy Father
stood for: rapid, imaginative action. Furthermore, on the same day and entirely coincidentally, the newspapers carried stories of the completion of the 500th house built in the Marquesas Isles since the tidal wave and funded by the Gauguin money. They weren’t large stories but coming on top of everything else it showed that the Pope’s plans really did work. The Catholic Church was making things happen.

  But the main reason the announcement was such a success when it came was the revelation of the Pope’s plans for spending the money raised. David now knew that the shape of those plans had been worked out with Elizabeth Lisle and the Holy Father’s secretaries at their private dinners in the papal apartments. Three uses were planned for the cash. In the first place compensation was to be paid to the families who had suffered at the hands of the gunman. Second, a number of social projects were announced, not just for the Mussomeli region but all over Sicily. Clinics were to be built, training schemes set up, grants made to help small businesses. There would be no large capital expenditure but what was done would help to create the new jobs which Mussomeli, and Sicily, so desperately needed. And in each case the project would be named after one of the murdered children.

  But the most combative use of the money, the use which caught the world’s attention and signalled the fact that Thomas brought to the problems of Sicily the same inspiration he had brought to the problems of Foligno and the Marquesas Isles, was the Vizzini Fund. Since Fr Vizzini had died fighting the Mafia, Thomas decided that his memorial would continue the same work. Two hundred million lire – or some $100,000 – was promised to anyone who offered information leading to the conviction of any Mafia figure of a serious crime: extortion, major theft, assault, murder, violence of any kind.

  There were those, of course, who said it wouldn’t work, that the Mafia would soon enough appropriate the fund money for its own ends. But Thomas had set up the fund with care. The sums offered were large enough to be truly tempting and the money was to be paid out in secret wherever the informant wished. Since the Vatican was a state in its own right, there were no exchange control problems. The Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Ligorio, added his own touch. He said that if people were frightened to go to the police with information, they could use the confessional. That had been how Vizzini got his information: the technique had an honourable precedent. Information flooded in.

  *

  ‘Now, look at the edge of this picture, look at the grain of the panel it’s painted on.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, that’s a very important grain to recognize, Ned. It’s mahogany and mahogany panels were not used as panels for paintings until the mid eighteenth century. Now look at what’s written on the frame.’

  ‘Pierre Mignard (1612–95).’

  ‘Can’t be,’ said David with a smile. ‘The picture is at least forty years later. Put it in the book.’

  Ned kept an account of the fakes they found on their jaunts around antique shops and this was the second they had found today. He was pleased: he was due to give a lecture on fakes at school.

  It was Ned’s last weekend out from Hamble before the summer holidays and it was marked with a large ‘N’, for Ned, in David’s diary. David and Ned were on what they called their Number Two tour of London’s art and antique shops. Number One was the West End, Number Three the Portobello Road, Number Four Camden Passage. Number Two was Kensington and Chelsea. This meant they could lunch at Il Quirinale, an Italian restaurant just off the Fulham Road, which reminded David of Rome. By rights, he should have been there now, working in the Vatican’s Secret Archives. But his son came first.

  They made for the restaurant where David had reserved a table. David naturally hoped Ned would get the same pleasure from the arts as he did. But it was early days yet. The only aspect of the art world that seemed to interest the boy was the ‘underside’ – fakes and forgeries. Still, that was something. It involved being able to distinguish the good stuff from the bad. Their fake-spotting tours had become great days out, enjoyed enormously by both of them. David looked at Ned across the lunch table at II Quirinale. The boy was thirteen, exactly the age of Thomas when he had tackled that horror movie. How times changed. David couldn’t imagine a film that would send Ned out of the cinema, in tears. ‘Are you shaving yet, Ned?’

  ‘No, Dad. I don’t go to nightclubs or take drugs either. Do you mind? I’ll have a glass of wine if you want me to be more grown-up.’

  ‘Good god, no,’ said David smiling. ‘And you’ll have a coca cola, like you always do.’

  He gazed at Ned as the boy studied the menu. By no stretch of the imagination could he be called classically good-looking but he had a charm, a sense of humour that was rare in adults, let alone thirteen year olds. ‘What will you have?’

  ‘If you’re paying, Dad, I’ll have a main course to start with, followed by two puds. Say veal chop followed by trifle followed by zabaglione.’

  ‘You’re sure that’s enough?’

  ‘You’re nervous, Dad. That means, sooner or later, you’re going to get heavy. If you’re going to get heavy, I need some weight, too.’

  ‘What do you mean: nervous? How do you know?’

  ‘You keep nibbling the inside of your cheek. It makes you look like a cross between our cook at school and a camel. I know the signs.’

  David paused. It could be avoided no longer. ‘Well, it’s true. I am nervous. Your mother has mentioned the divorce? And that she wants to remarry? We have to talk about it, Ned. I want to know what you think.’

  ‘Try longer sentences, Dad. Maybe it’ll relax you.’

  ‘Ned! Don’t be flippant! This is serious.’

  No sooner had he said the words than David wished he could have taken them back. The boy was crying. Too late, he realized that in this conversation his son was ahead of him.

  ‘Ned, I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to shout. I don’t want you to be upset by all this – but . . . but I don’t know what else I can do.’ He passed Ned his handkerchief. Boys never had such things.

  A waiter appeared, tactfully ignoring Ned. David ordered, pretending the trifle was for him, the zabaglione for his son.

  Ned wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He handed back the handkerchief.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ned. For the divorce, I mean. It hurts, but . . .’ He couldn’t think how to finish the sentence.

  ‘Lots of people at school have divorced parents.’

  ‘Ned! Forget other people! Divorce is different for everybody. It’s not just a final break, though that’s bad enough, I know. But now your mother wants to get remarried . . . that means more changes.’

  Ned was crying again but David had to finish. ‘While people are separated, all sorts of things go on below the surface, but people rarely talk. Your mother and I never did, and perhaps that was a mistake. I hoped – maybe you hoped – that Sarah and I would get back together again. But that’s not going to happen –’

  That was as far as he got. Ned, still crying, slipped out of his seat and bolted for the door, almost crashing into a waiter as he went. David left money on the table and followed. Outside, the sunshine was painfully bright and cheerful. Ned was walking slowly away from the restaurant, close in against the shops that lined the pavement. His body shivered with sobs.

  David caught up and put his arm around him. After a moment, he said: ‘Look on the good side. You’ll get three sets of birthday presents and three sets of Christmas presents.’

  ‘Oh Dad, that’s like having shirts with three arms, or playing football with three goals.’

  David would have laughed, except that he was nearly in tears himself. They reached the Fulham Road. ‘Do you want to go on with our tour?’

  Ned shook his head.

  ‘Rather be back at school, by yourself?’

  ‘Do you mind, Dad? Just this once?’

  ‘Like me to drive you?’

  ‘I’d prefer the train.’

  David hailed a taxi and accompanied his son to Waterloo Station
. They had to wait twenty minutes before the next train to Hamble. It was a silent, painful vigil. When the train left, David watched it go but Ned never looked back.

  At Pelham Crescent, David sat in his study as the day began to sink across the gardens. He didn’t cry, he just stared at the reddening sun. He had never felt so wasted, so blank, so lonely. He wanted to telephone someone, but no one in particular. There was no one in the firm he was close to; it was easier to do his job if he kept his distance from colleagues. Most of his friends were friends of Sarah’s, too, and he couldn’t face their inevitable questions or their concern. The two close friends he had kept up with since university were both away on holiday, he knew that. Then he found himself thinking of Elizabeth Lisle. Could he call her? He had mentioned his marriage to her once before, so she would understand his mood. She had been a little forthcoming about herself too, the last time they had met, when he had listened to her problems. He had sensed that she was a solitary person, also. And she didn’t know Sarah so there wouldn’t be any of the questions he dreaded from their London friends.

  He glanced at his watch. In Rome it was nearly five o’clock – she’d still be at her office. But why should he call her up, out of the blue? he asked himself. She would think it very odd. Even as he thought this, however, he was looking up her number in his book. He dialled, but it was the Vatican switchboard operator who answered. Signorina Lisle was not in her office, she said. She was ill and was at home. Nothing serious, said the operator, but the signorina was having a couple of days off to recover. She gave David the home number and he didn’t hesitate to call. Maybe she needed cheering up as much as he did. The call went through and, a thousand miles away, he heard the phone ring once, twice, three times. When it was answered he had been prepared for Elizabeth Lisle’s illness to have made her sound different. What he hadn’t expected was that the voice which answered would be a man’s.

  Chapter Four