“It’s only a matter of time until the police around the world realize these deaths might be connected. If there is some sort of conspiracy, we need to know before it gets into the press and the courts.”
Like any good salesman, O’Toole moved quickly to the close. Nate knew it was coming. “Are you interested in helping the Church find out who did it?”
Nate thought it clever the way the cardinal phrased his question. O’Toole knew that a Knight of Malta could say no to an individual but would have a hard time saying no to the Church.
Nate paused for only a moment. This was a unique case and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It didn’t even occur to him to consult Brigid. He answered immediately, “Of course, Your Eminence. I’m at your disposal.”
O’Toole turned to Tracy. Nate was struck at how much the cardinal and the spy looked alike. They were both flush-faced Boston Irishmen. Their build could be seen in any bar in Southie or police precinct in Boston. “Bill has already done a little research on possible suspects. He can fill you in, so you can start immediately.”
Tracy nodded. “I’ve used a few of my contacts to put together a background dossier. Maybe we could meet tomorrow to go over what we know so far.”
O’Toole turned back to Nate. “And maybe some of your friends at the FBI could help us as well. We need all the help we can get.”
Nate nodded.
“This will be your full-time job for now,” said Tracy to Nate. “I can help you with intelligence sources, but this will be your investigation. Take it where it leads. Could be as tough as going after the mob.” Then Tracy added, “Maybe it actually is going after the mob. But you’ve done it before.”
Nate smiled at the reference to his past triumphs in New York. Certainly Manning’s murder was executed with the precision of a mob hit.
“I have clients, of course,” said Nate. “I’ll have to give them notice.”
“Short notice,” said Tracy. “I will square it with your partners. We can arrange leave for you. I can tell them this involves national security. Any group powerful enough to kill six cardinals is probably a group the US government should know about.
“You can stay in touch with your clients by phone, but you have to get going on this now.” Tracy was pushing hard. Nate assumed that Bill was just anxious to be a loyal son of the Church. Unlike Nate, Bill was of the generation that gave nearly blind obedience.
A side door, leading to a hallway, opened, and Monsignor Petrini entered the sitting room. He cleared his throat. “It’s time for the prayer service for Cardinal Manning,” he said.
O’Toole acknowledged the monsignor with a quick nod and then leaned in for his close. “So, gentlemen, we’re in agreement?” The two Irishmen nodded. Then the cardinal stood and headed for the large reception room, followed by Condon and Tracy.
As they entered the reception, the ladies broke off their conversation with Father Murphy and rejoined their husbands.
The cardinal joined the other clerics by a little podium set up at one end of the room. The Tracys and the Condons joined a large semicircle of laypeople standing behind the clerics. Nate stood on the fringe. He liked to observe from the rear.
The nuncio, Archbishop Cappelletti, came to the microphone, tapped it twice, and cleared his throat.
“As you know, we have suffered a terrible loss this past week in the Church. We are grieved for the loss of our dear brother, Cardinal Manning, from New York.” He spoke in a heavy Italian accent. His voice trembled in a moment of genuine sorrow. “We thought we should remember him this evening with a brief prayer for the repose of his soul.”
The nuncio made the sign of the cross and began to pray, quoting from St. Paul:
Praise be the God and father
Our Lord Jesus Christ,
the father of all mercy and the God
of all consolation.
Just as the archbishop said the word “consolation,” a woman let out a piercing scream, like Una O’Connor in one of those old Frankenstein movies. The guests in the reception room turned toward the scream. One of the nuns who worked at the Nunciature was standing near the windows that faced out onto Massachusetts Avenue. She pointed out the window, screaming, “O Dio, O Dio.”
* * *
People rushed to the windows. Brigid got there before Nate. She could see thick black smoke and flames rising. The guests let out a collective gasp.
Below, on the sidewalk, the man with the sandwich board was on fire. He must have doused himself with gasoline from a large bottle that stood nearby. He was screaming and running. Then he threw himself on the ground, still burning, trying to extinguish the flames by rolling on the concrete.
He was shouting something, but his words were not clear. Finally, they were just screams of agony.
The police came running from across the street, where they were stationed at the vice president’s house. Two EMTs from the ambulance stationed at the gate of the residence came running with a fire extinguisher.
They sprayed him with foam. They ran back to the ambulance and got water-gel fire blankets to extinguish the flames and relieve the pain. But the man was already charred flesh. Looking on from the windows, the Nunciature guests were paralyzed in horror.
Once the man was rolled up in the blanket, the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. As they moved him, the man was still screaming. Then the screaming stopped. They must have given him some kind of painkiller.
Even though there were a dozen priests and another dozen bishops and cardinals, not one of them ran out to anoint the man and give the last rites. That mundane duty, second nature to parish priests, was not the sort of thing that Vatican diplomats and cardinals were prepared to administer. They didn’t even know how.
The memorial service for Cardinal Manning was now completely forgotten. The guests at the Nunciature stood at the window in silence, transfixed by the horror below.
Once the ambulance pulled away, the police rushed into the embassy and up the stairs. “Everybody, please leave quickly!” they ordered.
They ushered the cardinal and archbishops into an interior room for protection. After the Manning assassination, they could take no chances.
The Condons and the Tracys were herded down the stairs along with the other guests. They exited the embassy through the back doors and into formal gardens. Then they all filtered out onto 34th Street.
As they spilled onto the street, Nate asked Tracy, “Do you think this is connected to the cardinal’s death?”
“Who knows?” said Tracy. “I’ll try to find out.”
Traffic had come to a halt all around the embassy, as they cordoned off the crime scene, and police arrived from all directions.
“Nothing is moving around here,” said Nate to Brigid. “We’d better walk up to Wisconsin Avenue to get a taxi.”
The four of them walked up 34th Street to Fulton and cut over to Wisconsin. Just as the Tracys climbed into a cab, Bill looked back at Nate.
“I have a meeting at Georgetown University tomorrow morning. Let’s meet at Milano’s for lunch. I’ll bring what I have so far. Meet me at noon.”
“Fine,” said Nate.
Tracy slammed the taxi door.
Brigid and Nate stood in stunned silence on the street corner.
6
MILANO’S
ON SATURDAY MORNING THE WASHINGTON POST WAS delivered to the Condons’ room at the Four Seasons. The front page had a picture of the burned man from the Nunciature, wrapped in a gel blanket and being loaded into an ambulance. The paper said that he had died at the hospital. No family was present, but a priest from the nearby parish of St. Stephen’s was with him, the paper reported. Despite his years of protest, he still got the last rites. The story noted speculations that there may have been a connection between the self-immolation and Manning’s assassination, but offered no evidence.
Nate scanned the paper briefly, then tucked it into his briefcase and left the hotel. It was only a twenty-minute walk through leafy
Georgetown to Milano’s, where he planned to meet Tracy. It was a perfect May morning, bright, clear, and pleasantly warm.
When Nate and Brigid were law students in Washington, they might have gone for the walk together, but now their jobs kept them apart. Brigid stayed in their hotel room working on a presentation for her job at the Federal Reserve. She worked in the Fed’s Criminal Investigation Division. Her expertise was money laundering. The following week her job was taking her to Belgium to coordinate with her counterparts at the European Central Bank.
Nate vividly remembered the first time he saw Brigid. It was finals week at the end of their first semester at Georgetown. He was studying in the law library. Across the main reading room, he saw a beautiful woman emerge from behind a huge pile of Supreme Court reports stacked up on her study carrel. She stretched and yawned. Even in the exhaustion of cramming for exams, she’d been so beautiful. He remembered thinking, I’m going to marry her. Sometimes, people just know. The attraction had never faded, but irritation had crept in after fourteen years of marriage. Religion was a big part of the friction between them.
Now both thirty-nine years old, they were professionally ambitious. After law school, Nate had worked as an FBI agent for five years, then as a US attorney for another six. For the past three years he had concentrated on making money, working for Baker and Black, the world’s largest law firm. In pursuit of mammon, he had switched sides. Now he worked on criminal defense for big shots.
A typical Catholic couple of an earlier generation would have been parents to at least three children after fourteen years of marriage. But like most American women, Brigid was on the pill. She didn’t really care about the Church’s disapproval. In fact, it never really occurred to either her or Nate that there was any problem with using birth control. The Vatican prohibition was a dead letter. They paid no attention to it.
Truth be told, even the Church didn’t care all that much. Priests never brought it up in confession. It was hardly ever mentioned at the pulpit. The only people who cared about their use of birth control were Nate’s and Brigid’s parents. They wanted grandchildren.
Nate left the Four Seasons, crossing M Street. He then walked up 29th and weaved his way through Georgetown’s side streets.
Car tires made a muffled rumble on the cobblestones. The brick sidewalks were picturesque, if uneven.
Tracy had picked Milano’s as a meeting place. The New York Times called the restaurant “the closest thing to a celebrity palace to be found in Washington.” In polarized Washington, it was one of the few bipartisan places. Both Republicans and Democrats enjoyed spending other people’s money on pricey lunches.
When Nate reached the restaurant, an early lunch crowd had filled most of the sidewalk tables, so he went inside. Tracy was already at a table in the back corner. Like a Mafia don, he sat with his back to the wall and his face to the street. He waved Nate over to the table.
“My meeting at Georgetown ended mercifully early,” he said. “I got a jump start on lunch. Here, have some bruschetta.”
They ordered salads, veal medallions, and mineral water. The lunch of the weight-conscious.
Tracy pulled a thick folder from his battered leather briefcase and placed it on the table between them.
Nate observed that really powerful men often had really beat-up old briefcases. It was a mark of their experience. Like an old steamer trunk, covered with travel stickers, it said they were well traveled.
On the cover of the leatherette folder was the eight-pointed cross of the Knights of Malta. Nate took note of the symbol. Was Tracy better connected in the Church or in the State? Tracy had obviously assembled a lot of material. It was amazing what a few phone calls from a really powerful man could do in only four days.
“Did the agency do this or the Knights of Malta?” asked Nate.
“I’m retired from the agency,” said Tracy, “but I still have connections. However, the knights are better sources when it comes to the Church.” He grabbed a piece of bread. “You’ll find out what a labyrinth the Church is. Makes the Kremlin look transparent.” Tracy laughed, more of a snort, really. The laugh was infectious, so Nate laughed too.
Tracy was proud of being a Knight of Malta. For more than 250 years the knights had ruled the tiny island of Malta, a fortress smack in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a hotbed of intrigue. They got the island from the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1530 after they lost to the Turks in Rhodes. The knights paid a strange rent for their island—one trained falcon each year to the Austrian emperor. Hence, the famous “Maltese falcon.”
When the knights lost their island to Napoleon, their “country” was reduced to a couple of buildings in central Rome. But they punched way above their geographic weight, because all their members were well connected. Their network was unsurpassed, at least in the Church. Just the sort of group a retired spy like Tracy should belong to.
As he flipped through the stack of papers in the file, Tracy said, “The Church has some real enemies. Not all of them are nonviolent. And not all of them are outside the Church.”
Nate noticed the reference to internal enemies.
He found the paper he was looking for. Bill looked at ease, as if he were back in his old career, giving an intelligence briefing.
“So, who’s at the top of the enemies list?” said Nate, breaking a breadstick. The waiter delivered their mineral waters and salads. They paused the conversation for a moment. When the waiter left, they resumed.
“Well, there could be state actors. Israel is upset with the Vatican. They think it tilts toward the Palestinians. Rumors have been swirling around for months that the Vatican is thinking of recognizing the Palestinians as a separate state. Israel wants the next pope to be more pro-Israel. They would love to see our friend O’Toole as the pope. They probably think that an American would lean their way.”
Tracy popped another piece of bread in his mouth.
“Israel needs Catholic tourists in the Holy Land, but it does not want a Vatican Embassy in Ramallah.” Tracy pulled a two-page brief out of the leatherette folder. “Mossad has been known to play dirty, but I don’t think they are dirty enough to kill bishops. Besides, for them, the Catholic Church is just a sideshow. The people they are really worried about are in Iran and Syria.”
Tracy continued his briefing.
“Next on the list of suspects is organized crime. That’s home turf for you. The Vatican Bank is basically unregulated. Since nobody is watching, it would be a great way to move funny money around the world.”
“How big is the bank?” asked Nate.
“Small, really. Like a regional bank in the States. Its real power is prestige and independence. People like the cachet of doing business with the Holy See. Just think of our Knights of Malta pals,” said Tracy.
“Second, it is virtually unregulated. For all intents and purposes there are no bank regulators. It’s useful because you can move money with practically no one looking.
“Maybe your wife could look into the bank’s operations through her contacts at the Fed,” said Tracy. He had obviously researched Brigid, too.
“Wouldn’t the most obvious bad guys be inside the Church?” said Nate. “People who are really angry at the hierarchy?”
“Yeah,” said Tracy. “Top of that list should be the victims of pedophilia. They have the motivation to kill some bishops.” Tracy pulled out another list from the folder on the table.
“Here is a list of victim advocacy groups. There is a splinter group called the Avengers. They broke off from SNAP a few years ago. They vowed vengeance on any bishop who transferred pedophile priests around to avoid prosecution. They also blamed Manning for stuff he did when he was Archbishop of Milwaukee.”
Tracy used the acronym SNAP for Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. He was obviously familiar with the players in Church politics.
“Were other dead cardinals on their list, besides Manning?” asked Nate.
“No,�
� said Tracy. “Only Manning. They are focused exclusively on the United States, so they probably would not care about the Philippines or Chile.”
“My father left the Church over child abuse,” said Nate. “Remember Tommy Fitzpatrick? He killed himself because of it. Victims have a strong motive to kill, even if they don’t have the means.”
Tracy nodded.
“Back in Charlestown a child molester would have been a dead man. We would have had an extrajudicial procedure.” Tracy made a motion with his finger across his neck. “Maybe that would be true elsewhere. Their families have reasons to be angry, especially if some bishop turned a blind eye to molesters.”
The waiter delivered plates of tiny medallions of veal, with dollops of pureed potatoes. Nobody gets fat eating in really expensive restaurants like Milano’s. If Tracy were anything like Nate, he would probably go home and eat a bowl of cereal to fill up.
“Who else is on the list?” asked Nate.
“Radical feminists,” said Tracy. “They are angry about abortion, birth control, the all-male priesthood, and divorce. Take your pick. There is a long list of lefty liberals who think they have plenty of reasons to pull a trigger.”
The phrase lefty liberals struck Nate as inapt. Tracy was thinking American politics, not Church politics.
“After the feminists, I suppose the gays would have reason to kill a few bishops, especially in New York,” continued Tracy. “There are radical gay groups that are filled with rage at the Church. Here is some of their literature.” Tracy put down comic books depicting bishops and priests in gay bars.
“Manning was strongly opposed to gay marriage. He threatened to excommunicate the governor of New York if he signed the bill, but nothing ever came of that threat. He once did an exorcism of the New York legislature. Dramatic stuff. I think they deserved it.”
Nate was beginning to wonder if Tracy had his own agenda.
“I don’t think gay groups would go after the Church,” said Nate. “They think religion is irrelevant. I’m not sure the Washington Blade could even name a single Catholic bishop. Besides, gays are doing well in the courts and at the ballot box. They don’t really worry about the Church.”
Strange Gods Page 7
