Suddenly a series of short, loud train whistle bursts rocked the station. Kind ignored it. Dropped the machine pistol toward Harry’s knee caps.
“Danny!” Harry yelled. “What’s the word?—What’s the word, Danny?”
Harry’s eyes swung to Thomas Kind. “I know my brother better than he thinks.” Harry kept his eyes on the terrorist. “What is it, Danny?—the word!” He yelled again, his voice bouncing in a thousand echoes off the empty station’s stone walls.
“OORAH!”
Suddenly Danny appeared from behind a partition near the back, his wheelchair in deep shadow. Harry saw him push off with both hands. Disappearing into a circle of ultra-bright sunlight streaming through the high windows.
“OORAH!” Harry yelled back. “OORAH!”
“OORAH!”
“OORAH!”
Kind saw nothing but blinding light in front of him! Then Harry began walking toward him.
“OORAH! OORAH!” he chanted, his eyes fixed on the terrorist. “OORAH! OORAH!”
Suddenly Kind swung the machine pistol at Harry. At the same time Danny rolled forward in the wheelchair. There seemed to be flame in his lap.
“OOOO RAHHHHHH!”
Danny’s Celtic yell thundered off the hardness of the marbled walls, and the wheelchair moved into view.
“NOW!” Harry yelled.
Kind swung the machine pistol toward Danny, just as he hurled the last of the beer bottles. One. And then two. And they crashed flaming at Thomas Kind’s feet.
For the briefest moment Thomas Kind felt the jump of the machine pistol in his hand and then he couldn’t see. Fire was everywhere. Turning, he started to run. But to run he had to breathe, and without realizing, he inhaled the burning sear, sucking the flames deep, igniting his lungs. There was pain like nothing he’d ever experienced. There was no air to breathe either in or out, not even to scream. All he knew was that he was on fire and he was running. And then time itself began to slow. He could see the outdoors. The sky above him. The looming open gate in the Vatican wall. Curiously and despite the terrible pain that now seemed to exist in every part of him, he felt a deep peace. Never mind what he had done with his life or what he had become; for Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind, the disease that had ultimately usurped his soul was being terminated. That the cost was enormous didn’t matter, in a matter of moments he would be free.
THE TRAIN WHISTLE still sounding, Scala and Castelletti ran down the track. The gunshots, the train whistle with no train appearing. The hell with it, they were going in. Then they stopped. A man on fire was running through the open gates coming down the tracks toward them.
The policemen watched as the man ran on. Another ten feet, fifteen. Then he slowed, stumbled a few feet more and collapsed on the tracks. He was no more than a hundred feet into Italy.
162
HARRY HEARD THE MASSIVE IRON GATES THUD closed in the wall behind. In front of him an ambulance pulled in through a sea of blue-shirted, heavily armed Swiss Guards and drove rapidly onto the dock beside the station. Backing up, it stopped next to the work engine. Then the paramedics and the doctor with them rushed to where Elena knelt with Hercules. In no time they had inserted an IV and moved him onto a stretcher; and then the dwarf was lifted up, put in the ambulance, and it was gone, driving off through the army of Vatican soldiers.
Watching it go, Harry felt as if some part of him were leaving with it. Finally he turned away only to find Danny watching him from his wheelchair. The look in Danny’s eyes told him he knew they had been seeing the same thing; the déjà vu of someone they cared for deeply, put into an ambulance and driven away as they stood helplessly by and watched. It had been twenty-five years since that terrible Sunday when their sister’s body had been taken from the icy pond, put blanket-wrapped into the ambulance by the fire chief, and driven away in the shivering semidarkness. The only differences now were that quarter century and that they were in Rome, not Maine, and that Hercules was still alive.
Suddenly Harry realized in the confusion that he had forgotten Elena. Turning, he saw her standing alone, her back to the work engine, watching them both, all but unaware of the force of soldiers around them. It was as if she understood something of great significance was going on between the brothers and was hesitant, even afraid, to intrude. In that moment she became the dearest person he had ever known in his life.
Automatically, and without the slightest conscious thought, he went to her. And in front of Danny and the mass of faceless blue shirts surrounding them, he kissed her—gently and with all the love and tenderness he had.
163
THAT AFTERNOON AND INTO EVENING HARRY and Elena and Danny sat in a small private waiting room at the Hospital of St. John. Harry held Elena’s hand, while his mind danced everywhere. Mainly, he tried not to think. The men he’d killed, or the men others had killed. Eaton, even Thomas Kind. The worst was Adrianna. The first night they’d been together he’d sensed she was afraid to die. Yet everything she did, every story she covered, seemed to be about death in one way or another, from the war in Croatia to the refugees escaping the bloody civil wars in Africa, to the business right here and the story of the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome. What had she said to him? Something like if she’d had children she never would have been able to do what she did. Who knew?—maybe that was what she really wanted but simply didn’t know how to make it work, a home, children, and her job. She couldn’t have all three, so she chose the one that seemed to give her the most out of life, and probably it had. Until it killed her.
JUST BEFORE THE DINNER HOUR, and dressed in civilian clothes, Cardinal Marsciano joined them. An hour later, Roscani came, pale and in a wheelchair, brought from his room in another wing of the hospital by an orderly.
At five minutes to ten the waiting room door opened and a surgeon, still in his surgical scrubs, entered.
“He will be all right,” he said in Italian. “Hercules will live…”
There was no need for translation. Harry knew right away.
“Grazie, “he said getting up. “Grazie.”
“Prego.” Glancing around the room, the surgeon said he would have more information later, then nodding, turned and left, the door closing behind him.
The collective silence that followed was vast and deep, touching each one of them. That the dwarf from the sewers would recover was a bright and joyful note in a long, twisted, and painful journey they had all shared, no matter how disparately. That it was over, for the most part, was something that had yet to sink in. Yet it was over, the tidying up already well under way.
In a blink Farel had personally taken over and become a one-man damage control, as much to protect himself as the Holy See. In a matter of hours the chief of the Vatican police had called a press briefing that was broadcast live on Italian state television. In it he announced that late this morning the infamous South American terrorist Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind had instigated a bold and murderous fire-bombing rampage inside the Vatican in a presumed attempt to reach the pope himself. In the process, he had shot to death World News Network correspondent Adrianna Hall and Rome CIA station chief James Eaton, who had been nearby and gone to her aid. Meanwhile, in an attempt to protect the Holy Father, the Vatican’s beloved secretariat of state, Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, had suffered a massive heart attack and died. Farel closed the briefing with a terse pronouncement that Thomas Kind had become the only suspect in the murders of the cardinal vicar of Rome and the Italian police detective Gianni Pio and in the bombing of the Assisi bus; and, finally, that he had been killed when a firebomb exploded as he was trying to ignite it. No mention at all was made about Roscani’s presence inside Vatican territory.
ROSCANI LOOKED AROUND the room. He had left his own hospital room and come there personally to inform the Addisons and Elena Voso about Farel’s press announcement and tell them that no charges would be made against them. Marsciano’s presence had been a surprise, and for a short time he hoped that he might find a way to get
the prelate to talk to him privately about what had really happened concerning the murders of both the cardinal vicar of Rome and Palestrina, the employment of Thomas Kind, and the horror in China. But the cardinal had squashed that ambition quickly with a simple apology—saying that he was sorry but because of the circumstances, questions regarding the state of the Holy See would be addressed only through official Vatican channels. It meant that what Marsciano really knew he was not about to disclose to anyone, now or ever. And, having no choice, Roscani accepted it and turned back to the others.
What surprised him was that though he could have left then, he didn’t. Tired as Roscani was from his ordeal, he had stayed, waiting with the rest for word of Hercules’ condition. It was more than something he felt he should do, it was something he wanted to do. Maybe it was because he felt he was as much a part of it all as they were. Or maybe he just wanted to be with them because in some crazy way Hercules had gotten to him, and he cared as much as they did. In the exhausted, confused state they were all in, who the hell knew about anything? At least he’d given up smoking, and that had to be good for something.
Pushed in his chair by the orderly, Roscani went to each of them, taking their hands, saying if there was anything he could do to please call on him. Then he said goodnight. But he wasn’t quite done; purposely he made Harry the last and asked him to come to the door with him.
“Why?” Harry tensed.
“Please,” Roscani said. “It’s a personal thing…”
With a glance at Danny and Elena, Harry took a breath and went with him. At the door they stopped.
“The video they made of you,” Roscani said, “after Pio was killed.”
“What about it?”
“At the end—whoever made it cut something out. A last word or phrase. I tried to figure out what it was. I even had a lip-reading expert look at it. She couldn’t get it either…. Do you remember what you said?”
Harry nodded. “Yes…”
“What was it?”
“I’d been tortured, it took me that long to realize what was going on. I wanted help, I called out a name.”
Roscani was as much in the dark as ever. “Whose name did you call?”
Harry hesitated. “Yours.”
“Mine?”
“You were the only person I knew who could help.”
Slowly Roscani grinned.
So did Harry.
Epilogue
Bath, Maine.
THE PACT HAD BEEN TO LEAVE AND NEVER come back. But two days after the state funeral for Cardinal Palestrina, Harry and Danny did come back. With Harry manning the carry-ons and Danny hobbling on crutches—flying to New York and then Portland, Maine, and driving up from there on a bright summer day.
Elena had gone home to be with her parents and tell them of her plans to leave the convent and then to go to Siena and request dispensation of her vows, and afterward to join Harry in Los Angeles.
Harry drove the rented Chevy through the familiar towns of Freeport and Brunswick and finally into Bath. The old neighborhood had changed little, if at all, the white clapboard houses and faded shingle cottages brilliant in the July sunshine, the big elm and oak trees flush with summer growth as stately and timeless as ever. Passing Bath Iron Works, the ship-building yard where their father had worked and died, they drove slowly south in the direction of Boothbay Harbor, then veering off Route 209, Harry took the fork onto High Street and shortly afterward a right onto Cemetery Road.
The family plot was on a grassy knoll on a hill overlooking the distant bay. It was as they both remembered, well tended, quiet, and peaceful with the chirp of birds in the nearby trees the only sound. Their father had bought the parcel with savings just after Madeline was born, knowing there would be no more children. The plot was for five, and three rested there now. Madeline, their father, and their mother, who had stipulated in her will that she be buried not with her new husband but with Madeline and the father of her children. The last two plots were for Harry and Danny if they chose.
Before, it would have been unthinkable for either brother to consider being buried there. But things had changed, as the two of them had. And who knew what life was yet to bring? It was lovely and tranquil, and in a way the idea was comforting and brought things full circle.
They left it like that, tender and up in the air, discussed but not discussed, in the way siblings talk of such things.
A day later Danny flew out of Boston for Rome and Harry for Los Angeles, their lives sadder, richer, wiser, and immeasurably changed. Together they had ventured into a nightmare and managed to come out of it alive. In the process they had collected a crazy, improbable, ragtag little band that included a nun, a crippled dwarf, and three exceptional Italian policemen and had become a team, working together for the first time since boyhood.
Heroes?—Maybe…. They had saved Marsciano’s life and prevented further untold thousands of innocent deaths in China…. But there was the other side of it, too, the horror they had not been able to stop. And for that there would always be sorrow and emptiness and heartache. Yet it was over and in the past, and there was nothing they could do to change it. What they had to do now was try to pick things up somewhere where they had left off. Each with his own extended family—Danny with Cardinal Marsciano and the Church, Harry with the madness that was Hollywood, appended hugely by an entirely new and fantastic core that was Elena. And each with the all-so-real cognizance that he had a brother again.
AT THREE-THIRTY in the afternoon, Friday, July seventeenth, Giacomo Pecci, Pope Leo XIV, ensconced under heavy guard at his summer refuge at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills near Rome, was informed of the violent happenings inside the Vatican walls, culminating with the death of Umberto Palestrina.
At six-thirty that same evening, nearly eight hours after he had left by helicopter, the Holy Father returned by car to the Vatican. By seven, he had gathered his closest advisers for a prayer mass for the dead.
On Sunday, at noon, the bells of Rome tolled in mourning for Cardinal Palestrina. And on the following Wednesday a massive state funeral was held for him inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Among the thousands in attendance was the newly appointed secretariat of state for the Holy See, Cardinal Nicola Marsciano.
At six o’clock that same evening Cardinal Marsciano met privately with Cardinal Joseph Matadi and Monsignor Fabio Capizzi. Immediately afterward he went to pray with the Holy Father in his private chapel, and later the two dined alone in the papal apartments. What was said there or transpired between them is not known.
TEN DAYS LATER, on Monday, July twenty-seventh, Hercules had recovered sufficiently to be released from the hospital of St. John and sent to a private rehabilitation center to recuperate.
Three days after that, murder charges against him were quietly dropped. A month later he was released from the rehabilitation center and given a job and a small apartment in Montepulciano in Tuscany, where he lives today as an overseer of an olive grove owned by Elena Voso’s family.
IN SEPTEMBER, Gruppo Cardinale ranking prosecutor Marcello Taglia officially announced that the late terrorist Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind was the assassin of Rosario Parma, cardinal vicar of Rome, and that he had acted alone, with the participation of no other groups or governments. With that announcement the Italian government formally disbanded Gruppo Cardinale and closed its investigation.
The Vatican maintained total silence.
On October first, exactly two weeks after prosecutor Taglia’s formal announcement, Capo del Ufficio Centrale Vigilanza Jacov Farel took his first holiday in five years. While trying to cross the border between Italy and Austria in his private car he was arrested and charged with complicity in the murder of the Italian policeman Ispettore Capo Gianni Pio. Today, he awaits trial for that murder.
The Vatican remains without comment.
There Was OneOther Thing—
Los Angeles. August 5.
IN THE MIDST OF A RIOTOUS WORKLOAD AFTER his return??
?including hammering out a contract for a sequel to Dog on the Moon—and innumerable hour-long conversations with Elena in Italy as she prepared in body and soul to move to Los Angeles, Harry was increasingly troubled by the memories of a conversation he’d had with Danny on the drive from Maine back to Boston.
It had begun with Harry thinking about unanswered questions. And in light of his restored relationship with his brother and because of what they had experienced together and the secrets they still shared, he felt it completely natural to ask Danny to help him clarify a few things.
HARRY: You called me early Friday morning Rome time and left word on my answering machine that you were scared and didn’t know what to do. “God help me!” you said.
DANNY: Right.
HARRY: I assume it was because you had just heard Marsciano’s confession and were horrified by it and by what the repercussions might be.
DANNY: Yes.
HARRY: What if I had been home and had answered the phone?
Would you have told me about the confession?
DANNY: I was a mess, I don’t know what I would have told you. That I had heard a confession, maybe. Not what was in it.
HARRY: But you didn’t get me, so you left word and a few hours later you were on a bus to Assisi. Why Assisi? There was hardly a church inhabitable after the earthquakes.
(It was here Harry remembered Danny’s beginning to get uncomfortable with his questions.)
DANNY: It didn’t make any difference. It was a terrible time, the bus was going and Assisi was my solace. It always had been…. What are you getting at?
HARRY: That maybe it wasn’t just solace, that maybe you were going there for another reason.
DANNY: Like what?
HARRY: Like to meet someone.
DANNY: Who?
HARRY: Eaton.
DANNY: Eaton?—Why would I be going all the way to Assisi to see Eaton?