“Aerolineas Argentinas.”
She made an effort to give her Madrid accent a passable Argentine stamp. It wasn’t so bad. It was much worse when she had to speak in Italian.
“Buenos días. I am calling you from the archbishop’s office. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“My name is Verona.”
“Verona, this is is Asunción. I am calling to confirm Cardinal Robayra’s return flight to Buenos Aires.”
“On what date?”
“He will be returning on the nineteenth of the coming month.”
“His full name?”
“Emilio Robayra.”
“Please wait while I check.”
Andrea chewed nervously on the ballpoint pen in her hand, checked the condition of her hair in the mirror, threw herself on the bed, and tapped her feet to try to keep herself in check.
“Aló? My coworkers have advised me that you bought an open ticket going only one way. The cardinal has made the trip, which means that you can buy a ticket for the return flight at ten percent off. It’s a special sale in April. Do you have his frequent flyer number handy?”
“One moment, let me check.”
And she hung up, barely keeping a smile from taking over her whole face. But high spirits quickly passed into a euphoric feeling of triumph. Cardinal Robayra had gotten on a plane headed to Rome. But he never showed up anywhere. He could have decided to stay somewhere else. Yet, if that were the case, why did Saint Ambrogio and the cardinal’s office lie to her?
“Either I’m crazy, or there’s a good story here. A brilliant fucking story,” she said to her reflection in the mirror.
Only a few days remained before they would choose the next man to sit on the throne of Saint Peter. And the great candidate of the poor, the advocate of the Third World, the man who openly flirted with Liberation Theology, had disappeared.
DOMUS SANCTAE MARTHAE
Piazza Santa Marta, 1 Thursday, April 7, 2005, 4:14 P.M.
Paola stood at the entrance to the building with a look of surprise on her face. On the far side of the piazza, a long queue of cars waited at a gasoline station. Dante explained to her that, since the Vatican charged no tax, gas prices were 30 percent lower than in Italy. You had to have a special card to fill your tank at one of the city’s seven stations, but even so the long lines were never-ending.
The three of them stood outside waiting while the Swiss Guards who covered the front door of the Domus Sanctae Marthae called the person inside the building to tell them that Paola, Dante, and Fowler would shortly be entering. Paola had a few moments to chew on everything that had happened that morning. Two hours earlier, at UACV headquarters, she had no sooner gotten out of Troi’s clutches than she pulled Dante aside.
“I’d like a word with you.”
Dante ignored the fact that Paola was glaring at him. He followed her to her office.
“I know what you are going to say to me, Dicanti. That we’re together in this. Right?”
“That I already know. And I have also noticed that, like Troi, you call me ispettore and not dottoressa. Because ispettore is a lower rank than supervisor. It doesn’t bother me in the least since your feeling of superiority never actually comes in contact with my doing my job. As in your little performance earlier with the photographs.”
Dante turned red.
“I just wanted to let you know. Nothing personal.”
“You wanted to put me on notice about Fowler? You’ve already done that. Is my position still clear, or must I be even more concrete?”
“I have had enough of your clarity, Ispettore.” He dragged out the word, sounding a bit like a guilty child. Meanwhile one hand rubbed his cheeks. “You knocked the fucking fillings out. What I don’t understand is how you didn’t break a bone in your hand.”
“Nor I, because you have a very hard face.”
“I’m a hard guy in more than one sense of the word.”
“I don’t have the slightest interest. And I hope you don’t forget that.”
“Is that a woman’s no, Ispettore?”
He was making Paola nervous again.
“What is a woman’s no?”
“The kind they spell Y-E-S.”
“It’s the no they spell N-O, Mr. Ballsy Macho.”
“Calm down. No need to get excited, Hot Pants.”
Dicanti silently cursed him. She was falling into Dante’s trap, letting him play with her emotions. But everything was fine. She would adopt a more formal tone, making her disdain impossible to miss. She decided to imitate Troi, since he always came out of these types of confrontations smelling like roses.
“OK, now that we have clarified that, I have to tell you that I’ve spoken with our North American counterpart, Padre Fowler. I have expressed my fears concerning your summation to him. Fowler made some highly convincing arguments, which in my judgment are sufficient for me to trust him. I want to thank you for the trouble you took to dig up the information on Fowler. It’s a point in your favor.”
Dante was surprised by Paola’s cool tone. He had lost the match and he knew it.
“As the person in charge of the investigation, I have to formally ask you if you are ready to give your full support to capturing Victor Karosky.”
“Of course, Ispettore.” Dante spit the words out like red hot nails.
“All that’s left is to ask you why you came back so quickly.”
“I called my superiors to complain but they were no help. They ordered me to rise above personal animosity.”
Paola’s ear pricked up at that last phrase. Fowler denied that Dante had anything against him, but the deputy inspector’s words indicated otherwise. Once before Dicanti had sensed that the two knew each other from some earlier time, in spite of the way they had carried themselves up to now. She decided she would ask Dante directly.
“Did you know Anthony Fowler before?”
“No, Ispettore,” Dante said. His voice was firm, unhesitating.
“His case file showed up very quickly.”
“The Corpo di Vigilanza is very well organized.”
Paola decided to drop it. When she was ready to leave, Dante spoke three very flattering sentences.
“Just one thing. If you ever feel the need to call me to order again, I prefer the slapping method. I really don’t care for formalities.”
Paola asked Dante to show her the building where the cardinals were going to reside. And there they were. The Domus Sanctae Marthae, Saint Martha’s House. Located to the west of the basilica, inside the walls of the Vatican.
From outside, its appearance was austere. Straight, elegant lines, without moldings, adornment, or statues. Compared to the marvels that surrounded it, the Domus stood out no more than a golf ball in a barrel of snow. It would have been difficult for the occasional tourist—and they weren’t allowed into that restricted area of the Vatican in any case—to give the building more than a glance.
But when the authorization arrived and the Swiss Guards let them pass through the entrance, Paola discovered that the inside bore little relation to the exterior. Here was what looked like a fashionable hotel, complete with marble floors and tropical hardwoods. Traces of lilac wafted through the air. While they were waiting in the vestibule, Dicanti looked around. There were paintings on every wall, paintings in which Paola was able to recognize the work of the great Dutch and Italian masters of the sixteenth century. And none of them appeared to be reproductions.
“Holy shit.” Paola was trying to limit her outbursts, but she was astounded. She only pulled it off when she calmed down.
“I know what you are feeling,” Fowler said.
Dicanti recalled that Fowler’s personal circumstances had hardly been pleasant during his stay at the Domus.
“It’s a complete break with respect to the rest of the buildings in the Vatican, at least the ones I’m familiar with. The new and the old.”
“Do you know anything about the history of this res
idence? You probably remember that in 1978 there were two conclaves, one right after the other, two months apart.”
“I was a little girl, but I still have a few pictures in my mind from those days.” For little more than a few seconds Paola let herself sink into the past.
Gelati in Saint Peter’s Square. Mamma and Papa had limón, I had chocolateand strawberries. The pilgrims were singing, there was happiness everywhere.Papa’s hand, strong, with deep grooves. I loved to hold on to his fingers and stroll around while day turned into afternoon. We looked up toward the chimney and we saw the white smoke. Papa lifted me onto his shoulders. His smile was the best thing in the world. I dropped my gelato and I cried, but Papa just laughed again and promised me that he would buy me another one. “Let’s have a cone for the health of the Bishop of Rome,” he said.
“The building was selected during the brief period between the two popes, when the successor to Paul IV, John Paul I, died suddenly thirty-three days after his election. There was a second conclave, the one in which John Paul II was chosen. In those days the cardinals resided in tiny cells near the Sistine Chapel. Lacking conveniences and air-conditioning, the heat of the Roman summer as heavy as lead, a few of the oldest cardinals went through a real calvary. More than one had to seek emergency treatment. Once he had put on the fisherman’s sandals, Wojtyla personally decided that he would leave behind a facility so that when he died, none of this would happen again. The result is this building. Dicanti, are you listening to me?”
Paola emerged from her daydream with a guilty look.
“Sorry, I was thinking about something. Won’t happen again.”
Dante came back. He had gone in first in order to talk to the party responsible for security at the Domus. Paola noticed that he shunned the American priest, possibly just to avoid a confrontation. Both of them were straining to speak to each other in a normal tone, but Paola doubted that Fowler had leveled with her when he suggested the rivalry could be ascribed to Dante’s jealousy. For now, even though the team was holding together with knives out, the best she could do was to maintain the farce and ignore the problem, something that Paola had never been very good at.
Dante returned in the company of a tiny little nun, who was laughing and sweating inside her black habit. Introduced as Sister Helena Tobina, from Poland, she was Saint Martha’s director, and she proceeded to deliver a thorough report of all the changes that had taken place in the building. The changes had been carried out in several stages, the last of them instituted in 2003. They walked up a wide staircase, whose every step was polished to a sheen. The building consisted of floors with large landings and thick carpets, with doors to the individual rooms on both sides.
“There are one hundred and six suites, and twenty-two individual rooms. All of the furniture dates from several centuries ago, and consists of valuable furniture donated by German and Italian families.”
The nun opened the door to one of the rooms. A large one, some two hundred square feet, with parquet floors and a beautiful rug. The bed frame was made of wood, with an exquisite carved headboard. A bureau draped with fabric, a desk, and a bathroom made up the rest of the room.
“This room belongs to one of the six cardinals who has yet to arrive. The other hundred and nine have already taken theirs.”
Dicanti mused that at least two of those who were absent were never going to show up.
“Are the cardinals safe here, Sister Helena?” Paola asked cautiously in response. She was uncertain to what extent the nun was aware of the danger that was hovering around the men in red robes.
“Very safe, my child, very safe. The building has only one entrance, with Swiss Guards on duty twenty-four hours a day. We have ordered the telephones taken out of the individual rooms, and the televisions too.”
Paola found the precautions strange.
“The cardinals are incommunicado during the conclave. No telephones, no mobiles, no radios, no televisions, no magazines, no Internet. No contact whatsoever with the outside world under pain of being excommunicated.” Fowler cleared things up for Paola. “Orders of John Paul II, just before he died.”
“But it won’t be easy to isolate them completely. What do you think, Dante?”
The deputy inspector stuck out his chest. It gave him great pleasure to calculate his organization’s heroic undertakings as if he were carrying them out personally.
“You’ll be happy to know, Ispettore, that we are using the most up-to-date technology in signal inhibitors.”
“I’m not really familiar with spy slang. Mind explaining?”
“We have at our disposal electronic equipment that has created two electromagnetic fields. One here and the other in the Sistine Chapel. In practice, they operate like two invisible umbrellas. Underneath them, no apparatus which requires contact with the outside can function. Neither a directional microphone nor any kind of spy apparatus can work inside the cover. Give your cell phone a try.”
Paola picked it up and saw that it was outside its roaming area. They went outside to the hallway. No signal at all.
“And what about the food?”
“It is prepared here, in our kitchens,” Sister Helena said proudly. “The kitchen staff is made up of ten nuns, who throughout the day perform the different services provided here at Saint Martha’s. At night, the only staff present are the people at the front desk, should some emergency take place. No one else is authorized to set foot inside the Domus, except for the cardinals.”
Paola opened her mouth to ask a question, but it stuck in her throat. Just when she was about to speak, a terrible scream of pain reached them from the floor above.
DOMUS SANCTAE MARTHAE
Piazza Santa Marta, 1 Thursday, April 7, 2005, 4:31 P.M.
Gaining the man’s confidence to get into his room had been easy. The cardinal had plenty of time now to regret that mistake. His regret was being spelled out in painful letters each time Karosky made a new cut on his exposed chest.
“Calm down, Your Eminence. It’s not much longer now.”
The victim fought back with less strength each time. The blood, which was soaking the bedspread and dripping in thick drops onto the Persian rug, carried his strength away with it. Yet he never lost consciousness for a second. He felt every blow Karosky gave him, and every cut.
The cardinal’s chest was the culmination of Karosky’s handiwork. He proudly contemplated what he had written. He held the camera with a firm grip and captured the moment. He couldn’t leave without a remembrance. Sadly, the video camera was not available, but that one-use camera, a mere functional mechanism, served the purpose stupendously. He mocked Cardinal Cardoso as he advanced the film with his thumb.
“Say hi to the camera, Your Eminence. Ah, but you can’t. In a second I am going to remove your tongue. I need your ‘gift for languages.’ ”
Karosky was the only one laughing at his macabre joke. He put the camera down and brought the knife close to the cardinal’s face while he stuck out his own tongue in a mocking gesture. And then he made his first mistake. He started to untie the gag. The man lying on the bed was terrified, but he wasn’t so far gone as the other victims. He pulled together the little strength he had left and let out a loud scream that resounded through the hallways of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.
DOMUS SANCTAE MARTHAE
Piazza Marta, 1 Thursday, April 7, 2005, 4:31 P.M.
Paola reacted immediately when she heard the shout. She gestured to the nun to stay right where she was, and she hit the stairs three at a time, her pistol drawn. Fowler and Dante followed, one step behind. Their thighs nearly cramped with the exertion of climbing so quickly. Arriving on the floor above, they came to a stop. They were disoriented. They stood in the middle of the hallway, doors on both sides.
“Where did it come from?” said Fowler.
“I wish I knew,” said Paola. “Let’s stick together. It could be him, and he’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”
Paola chose the left side, across
from the elevator. She thought she heard a noise in Room 56. Her ear was pressed against the wooden door when Dante motioned to her to move away. The stocky Vatican cop gestured to Fowler, the two of them piled on, and the door gave way easily. The two cops went in, Dante going ahead and Paola covering the sides. Fowler stayed in the doorway, his hands at chest level.
A cardinal was lying on the bed. He was very pale and scared to death but he was in one piece. He eyed the two cops fearfully and lifted his hands.
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
Dante looked over the room and lowered his pistol.
“Where did the noise come from?”
“The next room over, I think,” the man said, pointing with a finger, his hands still raised.
They ran back out to the hallway. Paola stood to one side of Room 57. Dante and Fowler performed the human battering ram a second time. Their shoulders hit the door hard the first time but it didn’t budge. On the second try, it gave way with a tremendous crash.
A cardinal was lying on the bed. He was very pale and very dead, but the room was otherwise empty. Dante crossed the room in two strides and stuck his head in the bathroom. He shook his head no. And then there was another shout.
“Help me! Help me, please!”
All three ran out of the room. At the end of the hallway, next to the elevator, a cardinal lay on the ground, his robes spread in an oval around him. They hurried over. Paola got there first, and she knelt at his side, but the cardinal was already getting up.
“Francis Casey!” Fowler exclaimed when he recognized his compatriot.
“I’m OK, I’m OK. He only pushed me. He ran that way,” the cardinal said as he pointed at a metal door, distinct from the wooden ones to the rooms.
“Stay here with him, Padre.”
“Don’t worry, I’m OK. Catch that impostor,” said the cardinal.