Paola went out to the hallway. Fowler was waiting for her, sitting on a wooden bench and staring at the wall. As soon as he saw her, he stood up.
“I—”
“It’s OK.”
“It’s not OK. I know what you are going through and you cannot be in good shape.”
“I am definitely not in good shape. But for Christ’s sake, I’m not about to fall in your arms a second time like some damsel reeling from the pain. Let’s leave that for the movies.”
She was taking off at a clip when Troi appeared in the hallway.
“Dicanti, we have got to talk. I’m very worried about you.”
“You too? What a novelty. Sorry I don’t have time for a chat.”
Troi stepped in her path. Dicanti’s head came up to her boss’s chest.
“I don’t understand you, Dicanti. I’m taking you off the case. There’s too much at stake now.”
Paola looked up. She stared into his eyes and spoke very, very slowly, her voice cold and controlled.
“Listen to me, Carlo, really listen, because I’m only going to say it once. I am going to capture the guy who did this to Pontiero. Neither you nor anyone else has any say in the matter. Did I make that clear enough?”
“What doesn’t seem to be clear is who’s in charge here, Dicanti.”
“Maybe so. But what I know clearly is what I have to do. So please, out of my way.”
Troi opened his mouth to say something but stepped aside instead. Paola stormed off toward the exit.
Fowler laughed.
“What is so amusing, Padre?”
“You, of course. You don’t fool me. You didn’t consider taking her off the case for a second, did you?”
The director of UACV put on a show of being shocked.
“Paola’s a strong, independent woman who runs the risk of losing her balance. All the anger she’s feeling can be focused, channeled.”
“Words, words, words. I don’t hear the truth.”
“OK, I can see that. I fear for her. I’m nervous about her. I needed to know that she has the strength to keep going. Any other answer than the one she gave me, I throw her off the case straightaway. We’re not up against somebody who plays by the rules.”
“Now you’re leveling with me.”
Fowler intuited that behind the cynical politician and administrator there lurked a human being. The priest saw what kind of man Troi was at that hour, at dawn when his clothes were wrinkled and his soul rubbed raw by the death of one of his subordinates. Maybe Troi spent a good deal of time on self-promotion, but he had almost always covered Paola’s back. And he was still very attracted to her, that was obvious.
“Fowler, I have a favor to ask you.”
“No.”
“What do you mean by that?” Troi was bewildered.
“You don’t have to ask me. I’ll take care of the dottoressa, in spite of herself. For better or worse, there are only three of us on this case. Fabio Dante, Dicanti, and myself. We’ll have to make a united front.”
UACV HEADQUARTERS
Via Lamarmora, 3 Thursday, April 7, 2005, 8:15 A.M.
“Don’t trust Fowler, Dicanti. He’s a killer.”
Paola looked up from the Karosky dossier with puffy eyes. She’d only had a few hours’ sleep before returning to her desk at daybreak. She was not in the habit of doing things this way: Paola liked to enjoy a long breakfast followed by a stroll to work, ready to soldier on well into the night. Pontiero had pestered her about that. “You are letting the glorious Roman morning pass you by,” he’d say, and here she was at her desk now, not exactly enjoying the morning as she paid respects to her friend in her own fashion. Yet from where she sat the dawn was particularly beautiful: the sun slithering over the Roman hills at a leisurely pace, the rays of sunlight lingering on each building and cornice, saluting the art and beauty of the Eternal City. Each of the day’s shapes and colors made its appearance with such delicacy it seemed to be knocking at the door to ask permission to enter. Yet who should walk into Dicanti’s office without asking, with an unnerving accusation on his lips, but Fabio Dante. The deputy inspector turned up half an hour before agreed upon. With a manila envelope in his hand and a mouth full of serpents.
“Dante, have you been drinking?”
“Nothing of the sort. I’m telling you he’s a killer. Remember I told you not to trust him? His name set off an alarm in my head. A memory lodged at the back of my brain, something I knew before. So I did a little investigation of your supposed military man.”
Paola sipped a cup of nearly cold coffee. She was intrigued.
“And he isn’t in the military?”
“Of course he is. A military chaplain. But he’s not serving in the Air Force. He’s in the CIA.”
“The CIA? You must be joking.”
“No, Dicanti. Your Fowler is not a man to be taken lightly. Listen to me: He was born in 1951, into a wealthy family. His father owned a pharmaceutical company, or something like it. He studied psychology at Princeton. He finished school at twenty years old, magna cum laude.”
“Magna cum laude. The highest ranking. So he lied to me. He told me he wasn’t an especially brilliant student.”
“He lied to you about that and about many other things. He didn’t pick up his university degree. It seems he had serious disagreements with his father and enlisted in 1971. A volunteer smack in the middle of the Vietnam War. Five months of basic training in Virginia and ten months in Vietnam, with the rank of lieutenant.”
“Wasn’t he a little young for a lieutenant?”
“Are you joking? A volunteer with a university degree? They certainly planned on making him a general. I don’t know what was going on in his head in those years, but he chose not to return to the United States after the war. He studied in a seminary in West Germany, and was ordained as a priest in 1977. Later on, he left traces of his presence everywhere: Cambodia, Afghanistan, Romania. We know that he went to China for a visit but then hightailed it out of there at full speed.”
“None of which proves he was a CIA agent.”
“Dicanti, it’s all here.” While he was talking, Dante started showing Paola photographs, most of them in black-and-white. In them she saw a curiously young Fowler progressively losing hair as the pictures came nearer to the present day: Fowler sitting on top of a pile of sandbags, surrounded by soldiers, wearing lieutenant’s stripes; Fowler in a hospital with a smiling soldier; Fowler on the day of his ordination, receiving the sacrament in Rome from none other than Paul VI; Fowler on an enormous runway, planes in the background, dressed in his clergyman’s garb, surrounded by younger soldiers. . . .
“This is from when?”
Dante consulted his notes.
“1977. After his ordination Fowler returned to Germany, to the air base at Spangdahlem. As a military chaplain.”
“As his later history bears out.”
“Almost—but not in every respect. A report which shouldn’t be in the file, but is, says that ‘John Anthony Fowler, son of Marcus and Daphne Fowler, lieutenant in the United States Air Force, received a raise in rank and salary after successfully completing field training in counterespionage techniques.’ In East Germany. Right in the middle of the Cold War.”
Paola shrugged. She still couldn’t picture it.
“Wait, Dicanti, that’s not the end of it. As I said before, he traveled extensively. In 1983 he disappeared for several months. The last person who knows something about him is a priest in Virginia.”
Paola began to lose heart. A military man who disappears for several months in Virginia has but one place to go: CIA headquarters in Langley.
“Go on, Dante.”
“In 1984 Fowler turns up, briefly, in Boston. His mother and father are killed in a car accident in July. He attends the deposition of the will, where he instructs the lawyers to divide all his money and possessions among various charities. He signs the necessary papers and takes off. According to his lawyer, the sum total f
rom his parents’ properties and the pharmaceutical company was in excess of eighty million dollars.”
Dicanti exhaled an inarticulate, out-of-tune whistle of pure astonishment.
“A fair pile of money, and even more in 1984.”
“Well, he gave everything away. A pity you didn’t know him back then, eh, Dicanti?”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Nothing, nothing. All right then, to finish off the craziness, Fowler takes off for Mexico and from there to Honduras. He is named chaplain of the military base at El Aguacate, now with the rank of major. And that’s where he becomes a killer.”
Paola looked at the next group of photographs and froze. Rows of human bodies in dusty common graves. Workers with pitchforks and face masks that only slightly hid the horror on their faces. Disinterred bodies, rotting in the sun. Men, women, and children.
“Good Lord, what is this?”
“How much do you know about history? I’m terrible myself. I had to poke around the Internet to learn about the whole damned thing. It seems that in Nicaragua the Sandinistas had a revolution. The counterrevolution, called the Nicaraguan Contras, wanted to put a right wing government back in power. Ronald Reagan’s government supported the rebel guerrillas under the table, guerrillas who in many cases seemed more worthy of being called terrorists. And can you guess who was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras during that time?”
Paola was starting to connect the dots at full speed.
“John Negroponte.”
“First prize for the beauty with the black hair! Founder of the El Aguacate air base, on that very same border with Nicaragua, the training base for thousands of Contra guerrillas. According to The Washington Post, El Aguacate was “a clandestine center for detention and torture, more like a concentration camp than a military base in a democratic country.” Those lovely, graphic photos I showed you were taken ten years ago. There were men, women, and children in those unmarked graves. And it is believed that there are still an indeterminate number of bodies, as many as three hundred, buried out in the mountains.”
“Jesus, this is terrible beyond belief.” Nevertheless, the photos didn’t stop Paola from giving Fowler the benefit of the doubt. “It doesn’t prove anything.”
“He was there. He was the chaplain at a torture camp, for God’s sake! Who do you think attended the people who were shot before they died? How could he not be in the picture?”
Dicanti looked at him without saying a word.
“All right, Ispettore, you want more? Here is the material from the envelope. A report from the Sant’Uffizio, the Holy Office. In 1993 he was called to Rome to testify regarding the assassination of thirty-two nuns seven years earlier. They had fled from Nicaragua and ended up at El Aguacate. They were raped, taken for a ride in a helicopter, and then ka-blam! You’ve got a nun pancake. In the process he also testified about twelve Catholic missionaries who had disappeared. The root of the accusation was that he knew about everything that was going on but never protested those flagrant cases of the violation of human rights. In which case, he was as guilty as if he himself had piloted the helicopter. Something which, by the way, he does in fact know how to do.”
“And how did the Holy Office decide?”
“Well, there wasn’t sufficient proof to charge him. He got off by the skin of his teeth and left the CIA of his own free will, I’m pretty certain. For a while he was at loose ends, and then he turned up at the Saint Matthew Institute.”
Paola spent a good while looking at the pictures.
“Dante, I am going to ask you a very serious question. As a citizen of the Vatican, would you say that the Holy Office is a careless institution?”
“No.”
“Could it be said that it maintains its independence?”
Dante nodded reluctantly. He now saw where Paola was headed.
“Taking all that into account, the most rigorous institution in the Vatican has been unable to find proof of Fowler’s guilt, and you come into my office shouting that he’s a killer, advising me not to trust him in the slightest?”
Dante leapt to his feet, furious. He leaned on Dicanti’s desk.
“You listen to me, my pretty little girl. Don’t think for an instant I don’t see the way you’re looking at that phony priest. Because of an unfortunate twist of fate we’re obliged to hunt for a fucking monster under his orders, and I don’t want you thinking with your skirts. You have already lost one coworker, and I don’t want that American covering my back when we are face-to-face with Karosky. Then you’ll see how he reacts. From all appearances, he is very loyal to his country and he’s liable to take a fellow American’s side when it comes down to it.”
Paola stood up and, without losing her composure, smacked Dante in the face twice. Whap. Whap. Two slaps, absolutely on target, the kind that set the ears ringing. Dante stood there, so completely surprised and humiliated he had no clue how to react. He was transfixed, his mouth hanging open and his cheeks on fire.
“It’s your turn to listen to me, Dante. If the three of us are joined at the hip for this fucking investigation it’s because your Church doesn’t want any light shining on a monster, a man who raped children and who was then castrated in one of its secret backwaters, a man who is now killing cardinals only ten days before they elect the next big shot. That and that alone is the reason why Pontiero is dead. I remind you that it was your people who came to ask our help. It seems that your organization functions stupendously well when it has to get its hands on information about a priest working in a Third World jungle, but it doesn’t quite measure up when it comes to controlling a sexual delinquent who relapses dozens of times over the course of ten years, in full view of his superiors, in a democratic country. Since that’s the case, drag your pathetic mug out of here before I start to think that your problem is that you’re jealous of Fowler. And don’t come back until you’re ready to work on a team. Capisci?”
Dante recovered his composure long enough to take a deep breath and spin around. Fowler walked into the office at exactly the same moment, and the deputy inspector let out his frustration by flinging the photographs in his hand at the priest’s face. Dante was so furious he slipped away without even remembering to slam the door.