Vatican Vendetta Read online

  Vatican Vendetta

  An Art-World Mystery

  Peter Watson

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my mother

  Prologue

  Benedetto stared at his cup. What was happening to it? He had taken coffee in Enzo’s bar every Sunday morning for—oh, eight years at least. He waited there after early mass for his son who sang in the cathedral choir. Then, when the boy arrived, he would have another before going home for breakfast. There was no hurry—Pasqualina, his wife, liked them both out of the house so that, on this one day of the week, she could have a lie-in. The coffee at Enzo’s was always excellent, the best in Foligno. But today … it had tasted fine when Benedetto had taken his first sip. But now, as he looked down at his cup, he noticed what looked like a number of rings on the surface of the thick liquid. As if it was being shaken from below. Odd. He couldn’t feel anything.

  At that moment—8.19, according to the newspapers next day—he did. The black and white marble tiles beneath his feet suddenly began to vibrate, as if there were someone below, trying to drill his way out of hell. Cups and ashtrays were rattling—then suddenly an entire shelf of glasses fell to the floor.

  Benedetto never heard the crash, for the sound was obliterated from across the square as, not fifty yards away, a huge piece of gold and blue masonry slammed on to the piazza stones, destroying the newspaper kiosk and sending showers of fist-sized rocks everywhere, like exploding shrapnel. Dimly, Benedetto recognized those gold and blue colours: at the top of the cathedral, on its main wall, there was a famous mosaic, showing Christ and the pope who had donated it. But that was hardly his main thought now as, along with Enzo and one or two other early-morning coffee drinkers, he cowered at the back of the bar. None of them had been in an earthquake before but they were Italian, so knew what was happening.

  The shaking and the terrible sound of falling masonry went on for several minutes. Before long the front wall of the bar fell outwards—though mercifully the roof didn’t cave in—enabling Benedetto and Enzo to see the appalling damage being done to their town. The arch linking the cathedral to the Palazzo Trinci had completely gone. The north wall of the cathedral, normally a beautiful mixture of pink and white stone put together over eight hundred years, was no more. The main rose window had gone, too—that appeared to have fallen inwards, into the cathedral, taking the roof with it.

  Now, as Benedetto watched, two of the huge columns on the Palazzo Trinci, red as the blood oranges of Italy, fell outwards into the piazza. The sound was worse than thunder, the clouds of red dust making the square like a Second World War battlefield. Still the ground boiled. Sounds of buildings cracking, then smashing on to the pavements of the town could be heard from all around. Finally, to Benedetto and Enzo’s helpless horror, the cupola of the cathedral, a dome as smooth as a skull and the dominant shape on the town’s skyline, caved in. First the south side settled, giving the dome a drunken appearance: then it gave way entirely and disappeared inside what was left of the cathedral. The crash boomed across the town like the pain of an anguished giant.

  At last the shaking stopped and the earth settled back to where it had always been, more or less. Benedetto, Enzo and the others waited for a few minutes. So far they had survived: they had no wish to abandon their haven until they were certain the worst was over.

  It seemed to be. Wiping the dust from his face with a handkerchief, Benedetto stepped forward into the rubble. It was, incongruously, a wonderful day, the sun streaming down as if all were well with the world. He picked his way across the piazza, past the remains of the kiosk, its green wood smashed into a thousand pieces; past the battered hulks of cars; past what he recognized with a groan was the mangled accordion which used to belong to Aldo, the cripple who played in the piazza all day long. His body must be here somewhere, under the stone.

  He aimed for the north door of the cathedral. Of Romanesque origin and flanked by two red stone lions, it was not only the most beautiful feature of the building, but also the strongest. It was still standing, and the wall around it—some of it, anyway—was intact: he could get inside the building from there. By now a fresh crop of sounds was coming from the town, the sounds of suffering—groans from the injured, shrieks from the survivors as they discovered loved ones who had been killed. But Benedetto pressed on.

  The centre of the church was the most inaccessible. This was where the north wall and the rose window had fallen, and then the cupola had crashed down on top of that. The pink bricks, stone runnels and twisted lead from the dome were in some cases piled nine or ten feet high. Benedetto picked his way around all this. He noticed things he recognized—a stone statue of Saint Barnabus, its head broken off, that used to stand in the north transept. Then he saw the remains of the baldacchino, a copy of the one in St Peter’s in Rome and designed by the great Bernini. That meant he was getting close.

  The baldacchino was a kind of canopy, made of bronze, which stood over the high altar and behind which was the organ and the choir. Only now did Benedetto begin pulling away what stones he could. He was wearing his best suit, or what had been his best suit until minutes before. But he paid no heed. He moved two or three stones, then stopped to listen. There was still no shortage of screams from elsewhere in the town, but where he stood the silence was ominous.

  He moved more stones and stopped to listen again. He repeated the process desperately. He discovered his first body after five minutes of searching. It was the Gasparris’ boy, no more than fifteen and still dressed in the lace-edged surplice of the cathedral choir: the boys always stayed behind to gossip after their singing had ended. He laid the boy’s body gently by the edge of the rubble and went back to his digging. The cathedral was by no means the only building destroyed that day in Foligno, but it was the biggest and, at that hour, was the only structure with any number of people in it. So Benedetto was already being joined by others scrabbling in the remains.

  Twice more he encountered bodies before he found what, or rather who, he was looking for. One was the nineteen-year-old corpse of Frederico Sangrilli, son of Vito, the baker. The other was too badly mangled to identify. Benedetto shuddered but laid the three bodies side by side where the rescue teams, or relatives, when they finally caught up with him, could not fail to spot them. Then he went back again to where the choir stalls should have been.

  He came to a piece of fresco first, and recalled that the ceiling of the cathedral in the apse above the altar was decorated in blues, pinks and whites, scenes from the life of St Feliciano, to whom the church was dedicated. The piece Benedetto found showed a winged angel, brandishing a sword with a twisted blade. The colours were spattered with blood and, as he shifted the angel, a bolt went through him: the crumpled body of his own son was revealed beneath. Lorenzo was covered in pale dust but underneath that his head was black and sticky with blood, his legs twisted in awkward and unnatural ways. His eyes were open. As Benedetto scraped the piece of ceiling still further out of the way one of Lorenzo’s arms slipped down and, for a cruel moment, the movement made Benedetto think his boy was still alive. He bent down and shook him.

  ‘Lorenzo! Lorenzo!’

  Nothing. The life had been crushed out of his son just as it had been crushed out of all the other eighteen boys in the choir.

  Benedetto kissed his son, touched the sticky patch at the side of his head and felt the jagged cracks in the boy’s skull. Now the tears started to run. As he pulled at the rubble it seemed as if he would never free the dusty, ungainly body of his dead child. His eyes filled, the tears ran down his cheeks and fell, warm as life, into the dust on his hands as they scratched at the stones. At last the boy’s feet, clad incongruously in running shoes beneath his cassock, were uncovered. At seventeen Lorenzo w
as as tall as his father but had yet to fill out. Still, it took Benedetto a while to sort out his balance. Oblivious to the others who were searching in the debris, he lifted the boy across his shoulder: there was no sign of any rescue team. Slowly, carefully, Benedetto picked his way back across the stones. Shattered wood from the choir stalls mingled with sharp and jagged splinters of stained glass. Once-ornate brass work, twisted hideously, poked up from beneath curved terracotta roof tiles. Flowers—fresh that day—lay scattered over what had once been a marble sarcophagus. Reaching the edge of the rubble, he rested, leaning Lorenzo’s body against the still-standing door arch. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve—dust was caked to his moist cheeks.

  More and more people were coming into the grand piazza now as the town picked itself up and word spread that the cathedral area had been worst hit. Benedetto was watched in silence as others realized he had already found what they most dreaded: a relative dead in the ruins. He mustn’t wait, he told himself. He had to get home. He was just lifting the boy’s body again when he heard the scream. He knew what he would see even as he lifted his gaze: Pasqualina. She was standing outside Enzo’s bar, where the front had fallen in minutes before. She had searched for them first in the bar. She had pulled about her the blue coat Benedetto had given her at Easter. Unbuttoned, it flopped open as she raised her arms in anguish. Lorenzo was—had been—their youngest child, her favourite, her only son. For what seemed like an eternity her screams filled the square.

  Hours later, long after Benedetto and Pasqualina had taken their grief into the privacy of their own home, the mayor of Foligno, Sandro Sirianni, stood with his old friend, Father Umberto Narnucci, on the town football field. It was situated about half a kilometre outside the walls of the old town, on the road to Terni and Rome. Like many towns in Italy, Foligno was ruled by the communists. But Italian communism is like no other, and Father Narnucci was Sirianni’s oldest sparring partner, a good friend since schooldays and still a drinking companion and fellow director of the football team. The mayor had been relieved to learn that Narnucci, who had been scheduled to say the later masses at the cathedral that day, was visiting nearby Assisi at the time of the earthquake, staying with friends at the monastery. Sirianni’s own son who, against his father’s wishes, had once been a chorister in the cathedral, was now, fortunately, miles away at university in Milan.

  It had been a grim day. Both men were exhausted. So far, and it was now six o’clock in the evening, the number of dead was put at 900; 1,500 were seriously injured, roughly 2,000 were homeless—and there were close to 350 people unaccounted for.

  Narnucci had spent the day comforting the bereaved, overseeing the emergency funeral arrangements, finding accommodation for the homeless. Sirianni had, if anything, worked even harder: fixing water supplies that had been broken, finding beds, organizing makeshift electricity links to the much-damaged hospitals, tracking down the owners of shops which sold camping equipment and requisitioning tents. He had had some help from the army locally but there was still no sign of the government rescue teams. The same old story; both men were in despair.

  This was the second time that Sirianni had been out to the football field. The first was to greet Carlo Volpe, the Italian president who had helicoptered in from Rome as soon as news of the earthquake had reached him. He had been to see the damage for himself and had promised aid. This second time was to see off the Pope who was also paying a visit by helicopter. The Holy Father had cancelled all his engagements that day to make his own tour of the town. The new pontiff—he had been in office barely three months—had arrived two hours earlier, inspected the damage, especially the cathedral, comforted the injured in hospital and said mass at a school which had miraculously survived more or less intact and which would now be home for many Folignese for some time.

  As Sirianni and Narnucci waited together the Pope was talking with the local archbishop before boarding his helicopter for the flight back to Rome. It had been a shock at first when, after a long, thirteen-day conclave, the Sacred College of Cardinals had elected an American as pope and in Italy it had not been a popular choice. His age hadn’t helped, either—fifty-nine was young for a Pope, and promised a long era with a foreigner in charge. But Pope Thomas—he had kept his own name as pontiff, only the third holy father in history to do so—spoke fluent Italian, had a weakness for ice cream and, he confessed to an interviewer, old Bugattis. He was rapidly winning the Italian people round.

  There were three helicopters on the field, their drooping blades beginning to rotate. After the attempt to assassinate John-Paul II, the Italian airforce at first kept the Pope’s helicopter under close surveillance by radar, with a squadron in readiness should any attempt be made to intercept the aircraft. More recently a second, ‘shadow’ helicopter had been introduced as simpler, cheaper and more effective. The third helicopter contained the press. Wherever he went nowadays the American Pope was news. The bright arc lights and pushy cameramen of the TV networks were as much a part of the papal entourage as cherubs in a Renaissance painting.

  As His Holiness and the archbishop finished their talk this entourage moved towards Sirianni and Narnucci. Pope Thomas was a tall man anyway but his pure white cassock, bespattered with mud, made him seem all the taller. As he drew near, with that distinctive limp, Narnucci dropped to one knee and kissed the Pontiff’s hand. Across the field the helicopter blades swirled faster, drumming their own wind. It swept through the entourage, and one cameraman, moving backwards and momentarily off-balance, stepped on a young girl of eight or nine who was waiting with a few other children to be blessed by the Pope. She gave a cry of pain and pushed at the man’s leg. The moment soon passed and the young girl was not really hurt anyway, but for Sirianni that minor accident caused something inside him to ignite. He was wound up anyway, and aching from the day’s exertions. The cameraman’s behaviour was too much—and it was typical. He had turned to apologize to the young girl, but briefly—more important work was at hand.

  The Pope was now in front of Sirianni. Thomas, of course, had been alerted by his staff to the fact that the mayor was a communist, so he was under no illusions that the man before him would kneel and kiss his ring. Instead, he held out his hand for Sirianni to shake. The nearest cameraman was no more than ten feet away.

  ‘You look tired, Signor Sirianni. We shall get out of your way. We’ve held you up long enough. There is still much for you to do.’

  The Holy Father’s arm was still extended. Sirianni had not yet grasped it. Thomas tensed, sensing trouble. The camera was trained on them.

  ‘You have our support,’ the Pope went on, careful not to use the word ‘blessing’. ‘Our thoughts will go with you.’ He didn’t say ‘prayers’. ‘We shall give you what help we can. Priests, nurses, drivers. I shall see to it myself.’

  Sirianni still said nothing. The Pope looked quickly at Narnucci, then back to the mayor again. Sensing unease in the Pope, the nearest cameraman intuitively moved closer. Narnucci was staring at his old friend.

  ‘Come,’ said Thomas, taking a step forward to grasp Sirianni’s arm. ‘We have to work togeth—’

  That was as far as he got. In an explosive gesture that would be flashed around the television sets of the world in the next few hours. Sirianni shook off the Pope’s proffered arm and screamed at him:

  ‘Work! Shaking hands isn’t work! Blessing people, doling out comfort isn’t work!’ He glared at the cameramen. ‘Being on television isn’t work!’

  Narnucci tried to calm him but the mayor shook off the priest as well. He turned back to the Pope whose face had paled. ‘Hundreds of us have died here today. Thousands. Those of us who are wretched enough to have survived are homeless, bereaved, our bones and our hearts broken. You promise us priests and prayer—’ He spat into the ground. ‘The President came earlier and left us with promises too. But then he, like you are about to do, went back to his cosy apartment in Rome.’ The mayor screamed louder. ‘Where can we go?’ There were tear
s in his eyes as Sirianni pointed at his watch. ‘Six o’clock! Six o’clock! Nearly ten hours since the shock and still no rescue teams. Not a single blanket, carton of food, not even a tent that we haven’t had to organize for ourselves.’

  The Pope stood very still as Sirianni railed and the cameras recorded every detail. ‘Keep your priests, your prayers and your promises. We need money. Money! Lire, dollars, pounds, francs, gold—we don’t care. Just don’t send us blessings and promises and prayers that make you feel good but leave us as wretched and as helpless as we already are.’

  Breathless, and still weeping, Sirianni stood glaring at the Pope, who towered above him, still silent. Then Sirianni’s face collapsed into sadness, the hatred of the Catholic Church drained from him by the emotions of the day. The breeze from the helicopter blades riffled through his hair as, still sobbing, he turned round and trudged off across the field, back to his ravaged town. Pope Thomas, and the cameras, watched him go.

  PART ONE

  1

  David Colwyn sipped his whisky and water and looked down at the Lombardy plain 25,000 feet below him. The landscape was hazy; motorways and rivers unravelled like different coloured ribbons. At this height, the crowded countryside of Italy looked clean and calm. But David was anything but calm. As chief executive, and chief auctioneer, of one of the world’s oldest salerooms, he travelled a lot. The Carlisle in New York, the Mandarin in Hong Kong, the Beau Rivage in Geneva—these hotels were almost as much home to him as his house in London. Normally, however, he knew his travel plans weeks in advance. The big sales—of Old Masters, impressionist pictures, furniture or jewellery—had their own rhythms which he followed eagerly, year in, year out. But not this trip. This flight to Rome was very last-minute.

  He had planned a fairly uneventful Monday. Morning in the office would be spent going through the preparations for the forthcoming sale of MacIver House, yet another of the British stately homes that was in financial straits and the contents of which were being put on the market. Lunch at Wiltons in Jermyn Street was with the fine arts’ correspondent of the New York Times, who was passing through London. There was nothing much in the afternoon, if you could call a visit to the dentist nothing much, and in the evening he had an excursion to Covent Garden as a guest of Sir Roland Lavery, director of London’s Tate Gallery. He had suspected that Lavery would use the occasion to tell him more about the gallery’s thinking on the new paintings it would be looking to acquire in the coming months. But all that went by the board when his telephone had rung at seven-thirty that morning.