Vatican Vendetta: A thrilling battle of power and politics

by Peter Watson

  David lay on the beach and gazed out to sea. The sand was burnished like barley and clean, the sea was as blue as a kingfisher and clean, the air was clean. He tried to imagine what the horizon would look like when a sixty foot wave was approaching.

  He was in the South Pacific, the Marquesas Isles. He was licking his wounds. After his disastrous lunch with Ned, and the abortive phone call to Rome, he had decided to bring his holiday forward by a few days. He’d had enough of London, of Europe, for the time being. Ned was spending the first part of his holiday with Sarah and Michael Greener; David would see him later. So there had been nothing to keep him in London. The major sales of the season were over and there was nothing he couldn’t put off or that Sally Middleton couldn’t cope with. He had chosen the Marquesas Isles partly to get away completely, but also to look at the rescue work being done in the wake of the tidal wave. He had brought his camera and had taken a few rolls of film from which something would be selected for Hamilton’s annual report.

  It was amazing how quickly things got back to normal. Atuona, where he now was, had been the most sheltered when the wave had swamped the islands. It was on the island furthest from the sea-bed volcano and faced south-east, away from the direction of the wave. It wasn’t exactly the most popular spot for a holiday just then, but that suited David. The weather was fantastic, the rum had the right kind of kick and he had a biography of Paul Gauguin to keep him company. Atuona was where the great painter had died and it interested David to see the place. Gauguin had given up being a stockbroker to become a painter and the South Seas had always attracted him. At the moment David felt the same way.

  Even on holiday, however, David couldn’t resist the English-language newspapers when he saw them: he scanned them eagerly for any news of the actions of the Holy Father. The best news came from Sicily where, as a result of money promised by the Vizzini Fund, the police had found the quality of their information about the Mafia dramatically improved. No trials had taken place yet – it was too soon – but a number of arrests had been made and these rather pointedly coincided with a drop in crimes of violence and extortion on the island. It was also rumoured that several Mafia gangsters who had not yet been informed against had nonetheless taken the precaution of leaving Sicily. The Pope’s imaginative foray against the mob was hailed as a success, and the Caravaggio had not even been sold yet.

  The Holy Father’s prestige was enhanced by two other developments. Fillimore, at the Frick Collection in New York, had taken a leaf out of Hamilton’s book, and when the Raphael was put on show at the gallery it was as a special exhibit with its own entrance fee – this fee being sent to the Foligno disaster fund. It was a perfect piece of marketing psychology and lines even longer than in St. James’s Square snaked along 70th Street and round the corner into Fifth Avenue. Pope Thomas’s popularity also increased when a survey by IIRS, the Italian Institute for Statistical Research, revealed that attendances at mass were up, not just in Italy but worldwide, as were the revenues from St Peter’s Pence. The interest in the Catholic Church generated by the sale of Vatican Old Masters and the compassion epitomized by Thomas’s initiatives, were drawing people back to worship, especially young people so that Thomas was now seen not only as a good businessmen but also as a charismatic leader. Even the US President was moved to remark, speaking from his summer retreat at Anchor Bay, Lake St Clair, near Detroit, that Pope Thomas’s crusade was ‘as inspiring, as effective and as American as the Declaration of Independence – or the FBI’.

  David wondered if even Massoni had been won round by now. Or was he still ‘plotting’ as Elizabeth Lisle had put it that day at L’Eau Vive? He found himself thinking quite a bit about Elizabeth Lisle. It was strange. Their meetings together had always been very professional, impersonal, efficient, almost formal. He had never thought about her at all, except as the Pope’s press secretary, until that afternoon in the taxi, on his way to Rome airport. He hadn’t thought about her again until the day he put Ned on the train for Hamble and had been feeling so low. Why then had he been so surprised, and let down, when a man had answered the phone at her apartment? Instinctively, David had hung up without speaking.

  David knew himself. She wouldn’t have drifted into his mind, he wouldn’t be having this conversation with himself, if something wasn’t going on beneath the surface of his consciousness. He tried to think what Elizabeth Lisle looked like (and why did he still refer to her by her full name?). She was tall, with long brown hair and, as he recalled, apart from her neck her best feature was her mouth, wide and attractively sensuous. More Renoir than Rubens, he told himself. But why was he thinking like this? Her job put her off limits, she had never shown any personal interest in him, she almost certainly had a man and he, David, was a beached Catholic, married but not married, soon to be divorced but not divorced. Not an attractive proposition for anybody. Forget it, he told himself.

  He stuck out his holiday. Two weeks on the beach by himself. He finished the Gauguin biography and turned to a mass of material he had brought with him on Leonardo’s life. There was little in it of use to him except a short item referring to some unusual pigments which the master used.

  Back in London he patched things up with Ned. They had both recovered their equilibrium. Ned had been on a barge with his mother and Michael Greener, exploring the Canal du Midi in France, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He was therefore happy to spend the rest of the school holidays in Britain with his father, making a slow, gentle tour of West Country antique shops, spotting fakes.

  Occasionally Ned would relapse into private, puzzling silences but David learned to ride them out. At the end of their ten days, when he put the boy into the taxi taking him back to his mother, before the new term at Hamble, they shook hands gravely. David was half-amused, half-disturbed by this. He assumed Ned had seen men in France greet each other in that way, but between the two of them it seemed sadly distancing.

  When he returned to the office he was soon swept up in the flow of things. The Caravaggio sale was now less than two months away. Also, it looked as if two large country houses were coming on to the market and, with luck and some skill on David’s part, Hamilton’s would be selling the contents. This meant a trip to Derbyshire and to Scotland. To Argyll.

  From David’s point of view, his Argyll trip was by far the more interesting. The house belonged to the descendants of one of the great Glaswegian shipping barons, a man enlightened enough to have collected Italian art on a massive scale. No one else in the family had taken much interest in the family heirlooms with the result that, now they had to sell, no one had much idea what was there. David was able to assure them that there was some very saleable art indeed, including some wonderful drawings, which he would have to research, and a painting in the style of Salvator Rosa. There were also a number of diaries and papers in different hands. These he took back to London, where he asked the manuscripts department to look at them. But first he negotiated with the trustees of the estate in Argyll to guarantee them a minimum sum from the sale. This had now become standard procedure – the Pope had been right. David didn’t like it but he had no choice; if he didn’t do it his rivals would. He was able to say that the painting would fetch £100,000, the drawings much the same and the rest of the contents – furniture, papers, porcelain, tapestries – perhaps £800,000. The trustees were delighted and the contract was signed.

  He returned to London. One of the calls received while he had been in Scotland was from Elizabeth Lisle. She was the first person he called back.

  ‘There you are,’ she said when she heard his voice. ‘Mr Elusive.’

  It was a warmer greeting than he had been expecting. He had forgotten how deep her voice was. He told her about his summer, the Marquesas Isles trip, his photographs of the relief work. She sounded eager to see them. She had taken time off while the Holy Father had gone to his summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo and had visited her parents in Louisiana. But she really wanted to talk about business.<
br />
  ‘How’s the Caravaggio sale coming along?’

  ‘Fine – and I’ve had an idea.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes. Everything is shaping up nicely. There’s plenty of publicity but – quite frankly – if I know anything about newspapers we’re not going to get the same build-up as we did with the Raphael and the Gauguin sale. Newspaper readers get jaded very easily. It would be nice if we could pull something new out of the bag.’

  ‘And your idea is . . .?’

  ‘I think we should hold the sale in the Vatican.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Are you alive? What do you think?’

  ‘Not for the first time, Mr Colwyn, you have completely astonished me. I don’t know what I think. It’s either a brilliant idea or it’s an idiotic one. I’m not sure there aren’t rules against carrying on a business venture inside the City State. There’d be opposition from certain people in the curia. And it seems safer to have the auction in the saleroom, as in a normal –’

  ‘But this –’

  ‘But this isn’t a normal sale, I know. And it’s not a normal business venture either, I know that, too.’ She paused, thinking. David could hear her drumming her fingers. ‘Anyway – I haven’t the foggiest idea what the Holy Father will think. There’s no point in me trying to second-guess him.’

  ‘But we need to know fairly quickly –’

  She cut him off again. ‘I’m seeing him tonight. It’s one of our dinners in his private apartments. I’ll talk to him then. If I know him, he’ll have an instinctive reaction. I’ll probably be able to call you tomorrow with his reply.’

  ‘That’s good. Tell His Holiness that I’m sure the art world will leap at the chance to attend the sale. It’ll be historic. The press coverage will be enormous and obviously that will translate into a higher price for the painting. So do what you can. I’m right in this case, believe me. I understand if you have reservations, but I am right.’

  ‘Yeees – I’m beginning to see the possibilities myself. I’ll call you tomorrow. Now, will you send those South Sea photographs, please? I know the Holy Father would love to see them. There might be an official use I can put them to.’

  Now it was David’s turn to hesitate. He improvised. ‘I can post them, certainly. But . . . but I’m coming to Rome myself next week, to spend a couple of days in the Vatican archive. I’m trying to sort out this Leonardo mystery, as I think I told you. Perhaps I could deliver them personally – and show them to you over dinner.’

  He shouldn’t have asked. It was out of place. Not forward exactly, or familiar. More . . . well, he assumed too much. All this he thought as he waited for her reply. The line seemed dead. He was about to speak again when she said, ‘I’m not sure what my schedule is next week. But call me when you have arrived in Rome and we’ll see.’

  *

  The Holy Father approved David’s idea. He agreed that it would make the occasion special, would attract the right kind of publicity and was sufficiently different from the ‘Madonna’ sale to attract attention right up until the day of the auction itself. There was nothing in canon law, he said, which forbade this kind of transaction. After all, the Vatican museums and galleries sold catalogues and postcards, they charged for entry, the Vatican bookshop charged for the books it sold, there was a money changer in the museums and a supermarket in the Vatican itself. But the masterstroke, in David’s eyes, was the Pope’s suggestion that the sale actually be held in the Vatican picture gallery in the very room where the Caravaggio hung.

  After some thought David decided to make less of the catalogue this time around. He remembered how a minority of the board had been against the sale because of its Mafia implications, and he thought it wise not to stress this aspect. He didn’t want to frighten anyone away from the sale. What Hamilton’s would produce therefore was more a brochure than a catalogue, containing an article about the history of the painting and a short account of the work under way in Sicily, paid for by the funds that had been advanced. And they would include photographs David had taken himself in the Marquesas Isles – to show what the previous sale of Vatican pictures had achieved.

  With the Caravaggio sale under control, the Argyll sale signed up and one of his colleagues busy with the house in Derbyshire, David felt able to take his two days in Rome as planned. Though the Hassler was his favourite hotel, he stayed this time at the Giulio Cesare, a much more modest establishment on the other bank of the Tiber but from where he could walk to the Vatican archive each morning keeping only to tree-lined boulevards. Almost the first person he saw at the archive was Diego Giunta, hunched over a pile of papers. David assumed Giunta was working on his biography of Pius XIII, more a scholar these days than an archivist.

  The beauty, and the problem, of working in the Vatican archive was its filing system. Some documents were filed according to modern systems but many weren’t. David got nowhere following up the other reports from the papal nuncio at Urbino. There was not a single mention of Leonardo. Where to turn next? Leonardo had been described by the nuncio not as an artist but as an engineer. David therefore turned to the chaotic files which referred to civil engineering feats of the time – not court or religious projects, since they were all known, but buildings like hospitals, which were not always linked to the Church, irrigation techniques, and designs for new medical instruments. On his second day he was lucky. He came across a mention of a hospital ordered to be built by the Duke of Urbino. The date was January 1482 and the document included a reference to a design for a medical magnifying glass, offered by one ‘Leond°, newly arrived from Rimini’.

  So the great man had been at Rimini at the end of 1481! This was new information, but not yet what David was looking for. The family who had governed Rimini at the time were the Malatesta, fairly despotic, if memory served him. The papacy had eventually overrun Rimini, just as it had incorporated Urbino. So some of the Malatesta papers would be here in Rome, but others might be in Rimini itself. David had run out of time, however. He had to get back to London. Rimini would have to wait.

  He thought a small celebration would be in order, however, especially as Elizabeth Lisle had consented to have dinner with him on his last night in Rome. She had been her usual self when he had called the day before. ‘It’ll have to be late, supper rather than dinner, but, yes, I am free. I shall look forward to it.’ She was a tantalizing mixture of the reserved and the cordial.

  She had suggested they meet at Gina’s, her local trattoria, near where she lived on the Via dei Banchi Vecchi. The cafe turned out to be half bar, half restaurant, half inside, half outside, half a television-watching place for the neighbourhood and half a telephone answering service. Gina herself was there, small, fat, round and made up as red as a mullet. She fussed over Elizabeth Lisle as if she had been her own daughter.

  There was no menu, simply a prolonged conversation between the two women. David was content with that. ‘We’re having porcini,’ said Elizabeth Lisle. ‘The most delicately flavoured mushrooms in the world. With tagliatelle.’

  ‘Perfect. I’m glad you ordered – but don’t forget I’m paying. I want to celebrate.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He told her about his day in the archives.

  ‘That’s marvellous.’ She looked at him slyly. ‘But does it really matter if you prove which Leonardo is authentic and which is fake? If even the experts find it difficult to tell them apart then surely the one is as good as the other?’

  ‘No,’ said David firmly. This was an old, familiar argument. ‘Scholarship is important for its own sake. The more we can know about an artist, the better we can appreciate him – or her. If I identify the real Leonardo, it has to make a difference. Knowing the true from the false always does. In life and in art. We must believe that.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’ She had her hair down tonight. Because the sun had bleached it David counted at least three browns – whisky, walnut, wheat.

  ‘Look at it this way.
People have a lazy attitude to painting. They expect to like a picture straight away. If they don’t, they assume they never will. These days people don’t seem interested in trying to understand what a painter was after, what he was trying to do. I blame the impressionists. They produced pretty pictures which have an immediate appeal and that’s all that people want these days. Yet that’s not how it is with the other arts. Think of music or opera. Few people like opera to start with. Only with increasing association, increasing knowledge, do they find their appetite being whetted. Then their passions grow. It’s the same with pictures.’ He leaned across the table towards her. ‘If I do identify the real Leonardo, it will change the way we look at it, and at the other painting. The different features in the two works will take on a different significance. They will inevitably refine our understanding of both the works and the man who made them.’

  ‘Hmm. I hadn’t thought of it like that. You make scholarship sound exciting. I like that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have enjoyed being in the archive yesterday. I sat next to Giunta. Do you still think he and Massoni are “plotting” against Thomas?’

  Her face clouded. Instinctively, she fingered the cross at her neck. ‘Massoni! Bah! Do you know what he did, after the announcement of the Caravaggio sale? He’d been invited to address the American clergy here in Rome who have a dining club at the Villa Stritch, where most of them live. He attacked what he called “American values” – putting a monetary figure on everything. And he said it was a mistake to tangle with the Mafia.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, I think it backfired with a lot of the Americans, of course, but his speech was leaked to the Rome papers, and they were much more sympathetic. It means the split between him and Thomas is out in the open now. It hasn’t blown up yet, but it might at any moment.’

  ‘But isn’t the Vizzini Fund proving very effective?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s beginning to look like a mistake for Thomas to have appointed Massoni as his Secretary of State. You can’t have a powerful organization if it’s split at the top.’