With the door closed, Ranieri briefed the pope and O’Toole. They spoke in Italian. After many years in Rome, O’Toole was comfortable in the language. He even spoke with the “sh-sh” accent of the Roman street. O’Toole could see that Ranieri was choosing his words carefully.
The monsignor repeated himself. “Manning is dead. Shot in his cathedral at the start of a funeral for un pezzo grosso.” Mario gestured with his hands, stretching his arms wide to indicate just how big a pezzo Frank Sullivan had been. He used the Italian term for a VIP, “one of the big pieces.” It reflects the Italian presumption that life is a giant jigsaw puzzle, and some people are bigger pieces than others.
Ranieri continued, “We don’t know who or why, but this might be part of a pattern. There is a whole ‘sacco’ of cardinals dead under strange circumstances lately.”
The pope reached for a decanter of water on the desk. “Madonna Santa,” he said, “What in God’s name is happening?”
Ranieri reminded the pope and the cardinal of all the deaths of cardinals in the past year or so. Deaths among the cardinals were not surprising, the priest pointed out. All of them were old, after all. Forty of the 150 cardinals were over eighty. But five had died unexpectedly at a relatively young age or from violent causes or under suspicious circumstances. Now Manning was dead, obviously a murder.
Ranieri ticked off the list of deaths from memory.
“Cardinal Alfonse Lohrman of Santiago, Chile, died in a Chilean clinic where he had gone for a routine operation.
“Only three months ago Cardinal Ignacio Garcia of Guadalajara was killed in a shoot-out at Monterrey airport, where he was attending a meeting of Mexican bishops. The police speculated that he was caught in a fight between rival drug cartels, but no one else was killed in that incident.
“Then there was Cardinal Modesto Rondo, the Archbishop of Manila, who died in a car accident on one of Manila’s expressways.
“Cardinal Patrice Musaku from Kinshasa in the Congo died in a fire, when his retirement home burned to the ground.
“Cardinal Antonio deCapo, from Milan, died strangely from food poisoning at a restaurant in Milano Centro.
“And now Manning in New York, shot between the eyes in broad daylight.”
Ranieri put his index finger to his forehead to indicate more dramatically where Manning was shot.
“The police are investigating these deaths in each country,” said Ranieri. “But nobody has tied all of this together, at least not yet.”
He paused for emphasis.
Pope Thomas took a pill from a little pillbox in his pocket and popped it into his mouth, washing it down with water. “Why would somebody do this? How could they do this? Maybe your imagination is just running away with you, Mario. Maybe these were accidents. Maybe the food was bad. Maybe this is a fantasy.”
The three men sat in silence for a moment. Then Ranieri spoke up. “No, Holiness, this is no fantasy. There is a pattern here.”
“Madonna Santa,” said the pope again. “This is evil.”
The pope turned to O’Toole. “What do you think, Michael? With Manning’s death, the American authorities will be involved. Maybe you have some amici in America who can help us?”
In Italy, everything is accomplished through the “friend network.” A useful man is a man who has many friends. O’Toole was a useful man. He was legendary in the Vatican for his extensive friend network. It came naturally to him. He just imitated the Irish politicians of Boston. His network included a great many lawyers, judges, and government officials in the United States, mostly contacts from O’Toole’s service as the chaplain to the Knights of Malta.
“Maybe I can find an auxiliaro from the knights,” O’Toole volunteered. The pope nodded. “Do it. We need somebody who knows what is sotto acqua.” The pope used the Napolitano expression for the “black market,” the things “under water.”
Pope Thomas added, “If these deaths are connected, somebody has real power. We need to know who and why.”
O’Toole nodded. He was frightened and fascinated at the same time. Frightened, because someone might be killing cardinals like himself. Thrilled, because he was entrusted with the gravest task of his career.
“I will give this to you, Michael, as a special portfolio. You are my plenipotentiary.” The pope waved his hand vaguely in the air to indicate that O’Toole had his full authority.
“Now I don’t feel so well,” said the pope. “If you will excuse me, I will go for a riposo.”
Ranieri and O’Toole stood as the pope shuffled out.
Poisoning, burning, and shootings of cardinals, thought O’Toole. “We haven’t seen this since the Borgias.”
O’Toole and Ranieri looked at each other for a moment.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Monsignor, once I figure out whom to contact in the States.”
“Va bene,” said Ranieri.
They left the study.
As he headed for the back stairs out of the papal apartments, O’Toole thought of the historical irony. Some people wanted to take the Church back to the sixteenth century. With all this murderous intrigue, maybe they’d actually done it.
O’Toole felt a little weak as he made his way down five flights of stairs to the street-level back door of the Belvedere Palace.
As he reached the street, he had a moment of fear and wondered, should I hire a bodyguard?
3
THE DINNER
CARDINAL O’TOOLE’S BLACK ITALIAN LOAFERS MADE A clip-clop sound on the steps as he descended the back stairs from the papal apartment. Could I be next? he thought, as he pushed open the unmarked door that led to a narrow cobblestone street in Vatican City. O’Toole turned right to walk toward the Porta Sant’Anna, the business entrance of the Vatican. He hugged the high stone wall on his right side as he walked, to avoid getting hit by the cars speeding past him toward the Vatican gate. Sidewalks had not existed when that little street was built. Neither had cars.
The wall to his right was part of a fortification built in the eleventh century as a defense against the Saracen invaders of Rome. At the end of the wall was a massive round tower where papal guards could have poured down boiling oil on approaching enemies. O’Toole knew that stone tower as a financial fortress, the home of the Vatican Bank.
The solidity of the tower gave a false impression about the bank. It made people think it held a lot of money. Actually, the Vatican bank is only a mid-level financial institution, the size of a bank headquartered in a small Midwestern city.
O’Toole didn’t give the bank a moment’s thought as he walked past. He was intent on getting home, unnoticed. That evening he had an appointment for dinner with old friends who were in town for a few days. Maybe, he thought, I can share this news with them. They might have some idea about what to do.
O’Toole clip-clopped a hundred yards or so down the cobblestone road toward an ornate iron gate that led out of the Vatican. On his left was the Vatican visitors’ office, where people registered to enter the working parts of the Vatican. As O’Toole approached the gate, two young Swiss guards snapped to attention as the cardinal passed, clicking their heels in military fashion and saluting. Simultaneously they addressed O’Toole by his title, “Eminenza.”
Ordinarily, O’Toole loved the attention he got from the guards. Who wouldn’t? Power and prestige are a sex substitute for clerics. These little marks of respect make up for a lot of what is lacking in the life of a celibate male. It may be small compensation for a lonely life, but it usually gave O’Toole an ego rush to be greeted with a title of Italian nobility. Today, however, he was less eager to call attention to himself as a cardinal.
Being a cardinal had been O’Toole’s boyhood fantasy. When he was twelve years old, he had played priest in the basement of his parents’ home in Salem, Massachusetts. He dressed up in vestments and made his friends kneel down for communion. Even then, he knew that an American could probably never be elected pope, so he contented himself with the fantasy of
becoming the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston.
In O’Toole’s boyhood world, the most powerful man in Boston was Cardinal Richard Cushing. Massachusetts politicians catered to him. They called him “Number One.” Cushing’s nasal voice came into the O’Toole home every Sunday night when his family turned on the radio and knelt down in the living room to say the rosary with the cardinal.
O’Toole never got the nod to be Archbishop of Boston, but he got the next best thing. He became a cardinal in Rome. Every now and then he had to remind himself that this dentist’s son was a “prince” of the church. The fact that Jesus warned against loving titles of respect and places of honor at banquets did not dampen O’Toole’s enthusiasm for the honors of aristocracy. He flattered himself into thinking that his office had not corrupted him. In his moments of self-criticism, he took comfort in the thought: I am far from the worst.
As he passed through the gate, O’Toole stepped across the invisible line between Vatican City State and the Republic of Italy. It is the most inconspicuous international border in the world. He was now on the Via Angelica, a busy Roman street lined with souvenir shops, tacky restaurants, and religious goods vendors.
Two blocks away from Saint Anne’s Gate, on the edge of a rabbit warren of narrow streets called the Borgo Pio, he emerged into the small square, Piazza Leonina, named for Pope Leo XIII.
O’Toole’s apartment was on two upper floors of a building that faced that little square. It was not an elegant location, but it was very convenient. He could walk to most places he wanted to go in and around the Vatican.
Tourists know Piazza Leonina as the last stop on the number 64 bus route that runs from Rome’s main railroad station, Stazione Termini, to the Vatican. Every ten minutes another 64 bus arrives in the square, carrying an endless flow of tourists to the Vatican. Route 64 is also where Roman pickpockets ride back and forth, emptying tourists’ wallets, backpacks, and purses. When O’Toole was a student in Rome, he would have ridden the buses. Today, as a cardinal, he wouldn’t even consider setting foot on a bus, especially the 64 buses.
O’Toole’s building was four floors tall and ran the length of the Piazza Leonina. The ground floor held some shops, including a travel agency and a cell phone store that flanked either side of the apartment house entrance.
Just above the entrance to the apartment house, an Egyptian flag flew from a pole bolted to the wall at a forty-five-degree angle. The entire second floor of the building was occupied by the Egyptian Embassy to the Holy See.
The cardinal’s quarters occupied the third and fourth floors of the building. Actually, his apartment was the spacious third floor. The much smaller fourth floor was occupied by the three Mexican nuns who served as his housekeepers.
Apart from the diplomatic flag over the entrance, O’Toole’s apartment house was a fairly typical Roman Renaissance-style palazzo. It was constructed in the 1950s in a gray stone in what the Romans call “fascist style,” boxy and barren with enormous doors. Evidently Benito Mussolini had been partial to this design.
The second and third floors were the most elegant, with high ceilings and large rooms. They were called the piano nobili, literally the floors of the nobles. In Renaissance Rome, these middle floors would have been occupied by the noble families.
The top floors, with lower ceilings and smaller rooms, were reserved for servants. Roman nobility did not want to be at street level, where they would have the smell of horses and the danger of thieves. And they did not want to have to climb stairs to the top of the building in hot weather. That was for the servants. The middle floors were just right.
Twentieth-century palazzos had made the accommodation to modernity by the addition of elevators. Cardinal O’Toole reached his apartment in a tiny stainless steel elevator that he entered just off the lobby. Usually the elevator made him feel claustrophobic, but today it made him feel safe. He was glad to be encased in a bulletproof metal box. At least there no one could shoot him.
When the elevator doors opened, O’Toole saw Sister Emilia, one of three Mexican sisters of St. Joseph who served as his housekeepers, standing at his apartment door. The sisters were perpetually cheerful and reliably discreet. He nodded to her with a perfunctory Buona sera and handed her his hat. She responded, “Buona sera, Eminenza.”
The cardinal moved quickly to his bedroom down a long corridor of tan-colored marble. O’Toole wanted to change quickly out of his cardinal’s cassock and into a black clerical suit. He was in a hurry to meet three priests for dinner—all old friends from Boston and his seminary days. He was anxious to see them after the disturbing news about Manning. Perhaps, he thought, I can confide in them “under the seal.” When priests want something to remain secret, they use the reference to the seal of confession.
On his way down the corridor, the cardinal passed his private chapel. It adjoined his bedroom. The chapel was small, the size of a large walk-in closet. It had a small altar for private Masses, but O’Toole rarely used it. It didn’t make any sense to him. It was like talking to himself. He preferred saying Mass for some convent, or at least for the nuns in his apartment.
The cardinal paused in the chapel. Despite his hurry to change, he felt the need of a moment of peace and prayer. O’Toole sat down in the chair facing the altar and flipped through his breviary, the priest’s prayer book. Even in his long career of ambition, he kept the custom of daily Mass and morning and evening prayer. A ribbon marked the page for Monday evening prayer. Absentmindedly, he read the psalms for the evening. After forty years of practice, the words were so familiar that he didn’t really need the book. But when he got to Psalm 15, the second psalm for the night, he paused.
Lord, who shall be admitted to your tent,
Who shall dwell on your holy mountain?
He who acts without fault;
He who acts with justice and speaks the truth from his heart …
Maybe, thought the cardinal, we are being punished for our sins. It was not the sort of thought he entertained often. He always had thought of himself as one of the good guys. But if people were shooting cardinals right in their own cathedrals, there had to be a reason.
After his prayer, O’Toole stepped next door to his bedroom and changed quickly into the suit that Sister Emilia had laid out. After he put on his silk-lined suit coat, he draped his pectoral cross around his neck and dropped the crucifix neatly into the breast pocket. The gold chain of the cross was still showing. To those sensitive to ecclesiastical vesture, the chain showed that he was no ordinary priest. He was a bishop. After so many years as a bishop, it was hard for him not to have some sign of his office on his person. Cardinals spent so much of their lives rising to the top, they really did want people to notice.
The ancient part of the city of Rome is fairly compact. It was a short walk from O’Toole’s apartment in the Borgo Pio to the restaurant on the other side of the Tiber River in the most ancient part of the city. O’Toole was headed for La Pentola, a discreet little restaurant near the river that was a favorite of high-ranking clerics.
At the front door of the restaurant, O’Toole suddenly remembered that a cardinal had died in La Pentola, in the very room where he was going to meet his friends.
According to legend, the Archbishop of Chicago, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, was dining at La Pentola in 1958 when he died of a heart attack in the private dining room at the back. Stritch had been out to dinner with several priest friends from Chicago. Just after the pasta was served, the Chicago cardinal turned as red as the sash on his cassock and suddenly slumped over face-first into a steaming dish of spaghetti alla carbonara. He was dead when his face hit the noodles, probably from an aneurysm.
His companions, streetwise Chicago priests, realized that a dead cardinal would trigger a major investigation by Italian authorities. Better, they reasoned, that Stritch should have died in the Vatican, where the Church was the authority and they could control the investigation. That way there would be no civil investigation and no delay in get
ting the cardinal’s body home to Chicago.
So, two burly monsignors from the South Side grabbed Cardinal Stritch under his armpits and hustled his corpse into a waiting taxi for the short ride up to the Gianicolo Hill to the North American College. The college was legally Vatican territory, even though the seminary grounds are outside the Vatican City walls.
Once back at the college, the priests stripped the cardinal naked and put his body in warm water in the giant bathtub in the sixth-floor infirmary of the seminary. The warm water made the time of death difficult to determine. A cooperative doctor was summoned, who pronounced the cardinal dead of a heart attack on Vatican soil. The freight office of TWA was immediately summoned. The body was shipped home for a massive funeral, no questions asked.
O’Toole chuckled to himself. The only priests craftier than Boston priests were Chicago priests, he thought. Jesus said his followers should be as “cunning as serpents and gentle as doves.” Chicago priests got the first part, anyway, he thought, as he pulled open the oak and glass door with a brass handle.
Despite the morbid legend, La Pentola remained popular with clerics. When he entered the restaurant, a waiter escorted O’Toole to the back, where four men in their mid-sixties were already seated around a large circular table in the legendary “Stritch room.” They were nearly done with their first drink. Three of the men wore Roman collars, and the fourth had on a necktie. They all stood as the cardinal entered. O’Toole went around the table greeting them.
The first man he came to was Jim Kelleher, S.J., a Jesuit from Boston and a boyhood friend of O’Toole’s from Salem. “Good to see you, old man,” said Kelleher. They had the easy familiarity of friends who shared a long history. They had grown up in the same parish, Immaculate Conception. As kids they had ridden their bikes together down Hawthorne Boulevard, past the Salem Witch Trial memorial to the waterfront.
Strange Gods Page 3
