God's Spy

by Juan Gomez-jurado

  “So all right, how do we know Karosky sent this message?” Fowler was studying the script of the person who had written the address. He held the envelope up, his arms slightly extended. Paola suspected his sight was a little blurry close-up and that he must wear glasses to read fine print. She wondered how he would look with them on.

  “This is his handwriting, that much is clear. And the macabre joke of putting Pontiero’s name on the envelope, that’s Karosky.”

  Paola took the envelope out of Fowler’s hands, placing it on top of the large table that took up most of the space in the room, a sheet of glass for a surface, lit from below. Spread over the top of the table were the envelope’s contents, in transparent plastic bags. Troi pointed at the first one.

  “His fingerprints are on the note. Take a look at it, Dicanti.” Paola lifted the plastic bag with the note written in Italian and gave it a close look. Looking through the plastic, she read the message out loud.

  Paola recoiled in a mixture of anger and horror. She tried to hold back the tears, forcing them to stay inside. She would never cry in front of Troi. Maybe in front of Fowler but not Troi. In front of him, never.

  “Padre Fowler?”

  “Mark, chapter 9, verse 48. ‘Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ “

  “Hell.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fucking bastard.”

  “There is no mention of his having to flee the scene a few hours before. The disc was cut this morning. No wait, yesterday morning, according to the dates on the disc’s files.”

  “Do we know the model of the camera or the computer it was burned on?”

  “With the program he used, those details aren’t recorded on the disc. No series numbers, no codes, nothing that could help us identify the operating equipment.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Two partials, both Karosky’s. But I didn’t need them to know that. Seeing the content would have been enough.”

  “So what are you waiting for? Put the DVD in, Troi.”

  “Padre Fowler, could you excuse us for a minute?”

  The priest instinctively understood the situation. He looked Paola in the eyes. She made a dismissive gesture, telling him that everything was OK.

  “Why not. Coffee for three, Dicanti?”

  “Two spoonfuls of sugar in mine, please.”

  Troi waited for Fowler to exit the room before grabbing Paola’s hand. His fleshy, slightly moist hand repulsed her. How many times had she sighed, wanting those hands to touch her again? She had hated him just as much for his nasty attitude and his indifference. Now not even a spark from the fire was left between them. It had been snuffed out in a vast sea of green just a few minutes before. All she had was her pride, something she had in abundance. And she definitely was not about to give in to his emotional blackmail. She withdrew her hand and Troi let his drop.

  “Paola, I just want to warn you. What you are about to see is going to hit you very hard.”

  Dicanti made a hard, humorless smile in Troi’s direction and crossed her arms. She wanted to keep her hands as far from him as possible. Just in case.

  “All of a sudden you are talking to me with the tu again? I’m very used to looking at dead bodies, Carlo.”

  “Not of your friends.”

  The smile that trembled on Paola’s lips was as fleeting as a leaf in the wind, but her spirit never wavered.

  “Let’s see the video, Direttore Troi.”

  “That’s the way you want it to be? It could be something very different.”

  “I am not a little doll you can treat any way you like. You rejected me because it was dangerous for your career. You preferred to return to your wife and your comfortable misery. I have my own misery now, thanks.”

  “Why now, Paola? Why now, after all this time?”

  “Because I wasn’t strong enough before. But now I am.”

  Troi ran his hand through his hair. He was getting the picture.

  “You will never have anything with him, Paola. Even though he is what you want.”

  “You might be right. But that’s my decision. You made yours some time ago. At this point, I’d rather give in to Dante’s obscene leers.”

  Troi looked like he’d swallowed something distasteful. Paola relished seeing him look so uncomfortable; her angry outburst had penetrated her boss’s ego. She had been a little hard on him, but he deserved it for the many months he had treated his conquest like a piece of shit.

  “As you wish, Dottoressa Dicanti. I will go back to being the ironic boss, and you the pretty novelist.”

  “Believe me, Carlo. It’s for the best.”

  Troi smiled sadly, like a child who had just lost his mother’s breast.

  “All right then. Let’s see the disc.”

  As if he had a sixth sense, Fowler came in with a tray of something that could pass for coffee for someone who had never in their life tasted the real thing.

  “Here you go. Venom from the caffeine machine. May I make the supposition that the meeting is about to get under way again?”

  “It is indeed, Padre,” Troi responded. Fowler observed them closely, unobtrusively. Troi seemed the sadder of the two, but there was something in his voice. Relief? Paola was obviously stronger, less insecure.

  The director pulled on a pair of latex gloves and removed the disc from its sleeve. Technicians from the laboratory had rolled a small table in from the conference room. Sitting on top was a twenty-seven-inch TV and a cheap DVD player. Troi wanted to watch the film there because the walls in the conference room were glass, and anyone walking down the hallway would get a good look at Karosky’s film. By then rumors about the case Troi and Dicanti were working on had circulated around the building, even though none of them came close to the truth. Not by a long shot.

  The disc began to play. The filmed material started immediately, without titles or anything like it. The style was utterly crude; the camera was jumping about hysterically and the lighting was atrocious. Troi turned the brightness on the TV almost all the way up.

  “Good evening, souls of this world.”

  Paola cringed when she heard Karosky’s voice, the same voice that had tormented her over the phone after Pontiero was murdered. Nothing was visible on-screen.

  “This film depicts the process by which I am going to eliminate the holiest men in the Church from the face of the earth, fulfilling my labors in the shadows. My name is Victor Karosky, a renegade priest of the Roman religion.Over the course of many years I abused children, protected by the stupidityand connivance of my senile superiors. For these good deeds I have been chosen by Lucifer himself for the stated task, at exactly the moment in which our enemy the Carpenter selects his chosen one on this ball of mud.”

  The screen changed from complete darkness to a series of shadows. A man appeared, soaked in blood, his head dropped onto his chest, tied up to what looked to be the columns in the crypt at Santa Maria in Traspontina. Dicanti just barely recognized him as Cardinal Portini, the first victim, the one whose dead body she had never seen because the Vigilanza had it cremated. Portini uttered a few quiet groans. Karosky was only visible in the tip of a knife which poked the flesh of the cardinal’s left arm.

  “This is Cardinal Portini, who is too exhausted to protest. Portini did more than his share of good in the world, which is why my master detests his stinking flesh. Now you will see how I put an end to his miserable existence.”

  The knife was pressed against the cardinal’s throat. Karosky then slit it with a single cut. The screen went black again, and then a new picture appeared, with a new victim tied up in the same place. It was Robayra, who looked extremely afraid.

  “This is Cardinal Robayra, quaking with fear. He carried a great light within him. That light will now return to its Creator.”

  This time Paola had to look away. The camera showed the knife as it emptied Robayra’s eye sockets. A single drop of blood spotted the camera lens. It was the most hor
rible spectacle Dicanti had ever contemplated, and she felt that her stomach was one image away from heaving everything up. And then the film had a new subject, the one thing she feared most.

  “This is Detective Pontiero, one of the followers of the Fisherman. They put him on my trail, but he was powerless against the Prince of Darkness. The detective is now beginning to bleed slowly.”

  Pontiero looked straight into the camera, but his face wasn’t his. His teeth were set, but the life in his eyes had not yet been extinguished. The knife slit his throat agonizingly slowly. Paola looked away.

  “This is Cardinal Cardoso, friend to the disinherited of the world, the bedbugs, and the parasites. His love was as repugnant to my Master as the stinking entrails of a goat. He too has died.”

  There was something wrong. In place of the filmed images, they were looking at photographs of Cardinal Cardoso on his deathbed. Three photos in all, all of them lusterless green. The blood was unnaturally dark. The three photos were on the screen for fifteen seconds, five seconds each.

  “Now I am going to kill another saintly man, the most saintly of all. People will try to stop me, but they will end up exactly the same as those you have seen die before your very eyes. The cowardly Church has hidden it from you, but it can no longer continue to do so. Good night, souls of this world.”

  The DVD was nothing more than static now and Troi switched it off. Paola had turned white. Fowler clenched his teeth, furious. The three sat there for a few minutes without saying a word. They had to gather their wits after enduring that blood-soaked brutality. Paola, the one most affected by the disc, was nevertheless the first one to speak.

  “The photographs. Why photographs? Why not video?”

  “Because he couldn’t,” Fowler said. “Because cameras do not work in Saint Martha’s, nothing ‘more complex than a light bulb works in there.’ I’m quoting Dante.”

  “And Karosky knew it.”

  “What did they say to me about that little game of diabolic possession?”

  Dicanti once again had the feeling something did not fit. The video struck her as coming from very different directions. She needed a good night of sleep and rest in a quiet place where she could think. Karosky’s words, the clues left on the corpses—all of it had a connecting thread. When she found it, she could unravel the ball. Until then, she was short on time.

  Of course, my good night of sleep has just been blown to shit, she thought to herself.

  “Karosky’s crazed histrionics about the devil are not what bother me,” Troi interjected, anticipating Paola’s thoughts. “The most serious thing is that he’s challenging us to stop him before he finishes off another cardinal. And time is flying.”

  “What can we do?” Fowler asked. “He didn’t show any signs of life during John Paul’s funeral. The cardinals are more protected than ever. Saint Martha’s is sealed up tight, as is the Vatican.”

  Dicanti bit her lip. She was tired of playing by some psychopath’s rules. Because now Karosky had committed a new error: he had left a trail that they could follow.

  “Who brought this to our offices?”

  “I’ve put two new guys in charge of following the trail. It arrived by messenger service. Tevere Express was the agency, a local company that operates in the Vatican. We haven’t managed to get hold of the guy in charge of that route but the cameras on the exterior of the building took a picture of him driving up on his bike. The license plate is registered under the name of Giuseppe Bastina, forty-three years old. He lives in Castro Pretorio, on Via Palestro. Number 31.”

  “No phone?”

  “Motor Vehicles has no number for him, and there’s no listing at Information.”

  “Maybe it’s under his wife’s name,” Fowler said.

  “Maybe. But for now that’s our best piece of evidence, which means we ought to take a walk. Coming, Padre?”

  “After you, Dottoressa.”

  BASTINA FAMILY RESIDENCE

  Via Palestro, 31 Saturday, April 9, 2005, 2:02 A.M.

  “Giuseppe Bastina?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” Giuseppe Bastina cut a curious figure, standing in the doorway in his underwear, a nine-month-old baby in his arms. It wasn’t at all strange that a doorbell at that hour had woken the kid up.

  “I’m Ispettore Paola Dicanti and this is Padre Fowler. Don’t stress out; you’re not in any trouble and nothing has happened to anyone in your family. We just want to ask you a few urgent questions.”

  They stood in the foyer of a modest but well-kept apartment. Someone had put out a doormat with a smiling frog, who welcomed visitors to the house. Paola hazarded a guess the welcome did not extend to them, and she was right: Bastina was fairly disturbed by their presence.

  “No way this can wait till the morning? The baby has to eat and sleep at certain times; we’re trying to keep her on schedule.”

  Paola shook her head.

  “This will only take a moment. You made a delivery this afternoon, right? An envelope. To Via Lamarmora. Bring anything to mind?”

  “Sure, I remember that. What do you think? I remember all my trips,” Bastina said, touching the side of his forehead with his right index finger. His left arm was still full of the baby, who had, for the moment at least, calmed down.

  “Could you tell us where you picked up this envelope? It’s very important; it has to do with an investigation into a series of murders.”

  “They called the agency, just like always. They asked me to swing by the Vatican post office, that I would find some envelopes on the desk in the lobby.”

  Paola was taken aback.

  “More than one envelope?”

  “Yeah, there were twelve. The client asked us to deliver the first ten envelopes to the Vatican pressroom. Then one to the Corpo di Vigilanza, and the last one to you.”

  “Nobody handed you the envelopes? You just picked them up?” Fowler was irritated by the man.

  “At that time of day no one is at the post office. They leave the outside door open until nine, for anyone who wants to drop letters in the international box.”

  “And how did they pay?”

  “They left a small envelope on top of the others. The small one had three hundred and seventy Euros, three sixty for the rush service and a ten-Euro tip.”

  Paola was losing it now. She looked at the ceiling in a gesture of hopelessness. Karosky had thought of everything. Another fucking dead-end street.

  “So you didn’t see anybody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “What do you think I did? I made the run to the pressroom and then delivered the envelope to the Vigilanza.”

  “Who was supposed to receive the envelopes at the pressroom?”

  “They were addressed to different journalists. Foreigners.”

  “And you handed them out to their recipients?”

  “What’s with all the questions? I take my job seriously. I hope all this isn’t because I screwed up. I need the work, I really do, so please. My kid has to eat and my wife has another biscuit in the oven.”

  “Look, this has nothing to do with you, but it’s no joke either. Tell us what happened and we’ll leave. If not, I will see to it that every traffic cop in Rome can recite your career from memory. OK, Mr. Bastina?”

  Bastina was cornered, and the baby started to wail, frightened just by Paola’s tone.

  “All right, already. Don’t talk like that, you’ll scare the kid. What kind of heartless person are you?”

  Dicanti was very tired and irritable. She hadn’t wanted to speak to the guy like that, in his own house, but the investigation had brought her nothing but obstacles.

  “I’m sorry. So please, help us out here. It’s life or death at this point. Take my word for it.”

  The messenger backed off a bit too. With his free hand he scratched the stubble on his chin and gently rocked the baby in his arm. Little by little the baby calmed down and stopped crying.

&nbs
p; “I gave the envelopes to the lady in charge of the pressroom, OK? The doors to the room were already closed, and to deliver them by hand I would have had to wait a full hour. Special deliveries have to be taken care of within the hour following pickup or they don’t pay. I’ve had a few problems on the job lately, you follow? Anyone finds out I did this, I lose the job.”

  “Nobody is going to find out from us, Mr. Bastina. Trust me.”

  Bastina looked at her and nodded.

  “I’ll try to believe it.”

  “You know the name of the woman in charge?”

  “No, I don’t. She was wearing an ID card with the Vatican coat of arms and a blue band on top. It said Press. ”

  Fowler stepped a few feet into the hallway with Paola and started whispering in her ear again. She tried to concentrate on his words and not on the way his nearness made her feel. It wasn’t easy.

  “The card this guy is describing doesn’t belong to someone who works for the Vatican. It’s a press pass. The discs never arrived at their destinations. Do you know how I know?”

  Paola tried to think like a journalist for a second. She pictured herself receiving an envelope while she was sitting in the middle of the pressroom, surrounded by all her rivals in the media.

  “They never arrived at their destinations because if they had, their content would at this instant be splashed over every newspaper and television in the world. If all of those envelopes had arrived at the same time, the journalists would have had everything they needed sitting in their laps. They would have corralled the Vatican spokesman right then and there.”

  “Definitely. Karosky tried to send a message of his own to the press, but it backfired on him, thanks to the fact that this guy was in a big hurry and someone obviously didn’t trouble their conscience before swiping the envelopes. Unless I am very wrong, this woman opened one of the envelopes and then took all of them. Why should she share this nice piece of luck that fell out of the sky?”