Ackerman seemed flattered to be seen as a source. A glass of wine also loosened his tongue. “Well, they were all papabile,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Nate, mystified by all this Italian on his first day in Italy.
“Papabile are men capable of becoming pope,” said Ackerman with a sort of patronizing tone. “They are, or were, all eligible to be pope. Italians love to speculate on who might be pope.” Ackerman lowered his voice. “It’s no secret that the Holy Father is old and frail. It’s just a matter of time, maybe only a few weeks. Then there will be a conclave and one of them will be elected. These six guys would be on anybody’s short list.”
“Is there anybody else who might be on the short list?” asked Nate, wondering who else might be in danger.
“Sure,” said Ackerman. “You mentioned one of them this morning: Cardinal O’Toole. He would be a likely candidate.”
Ackerman broke a breadstick artfully into three pieces. “That’s a sign that you will return to Rome,” he said to Nate. “In my case, it probably means that I’ll never leave.”
The monsignor got back to the topic. “O’Toole could be elected if there weren’t so much resistance to an American. He is certainly conservative enough for the current climate. I’d say he’s one of the most conservative.”
“What else do these guys have in common besides being candidates to be pope?”
“Well,” replied the priest, getting more puffed up as he spoke, “they share the Vatican Bank connection. Three of the six who died were on the board, including the cardinals from New York, Santiago, and Milan.”
“How many cardinals serve on the board of the Vatican Bank?” asked Nate.
“Six, at present,” said Ackerman.
“Who are the others?”
“Well, there is the cardinal from London and two guys here in Rome, Cardinals Crepi and Salazar. They are very involved in the bank. The guy from London never attends the meetings, I’m told. There is a complete list in the Vatican directory I included in your box.”
Nate was making notes. “Who are Crepi and Salazar?” he asked.
“Luciano Crepi is the governor of Vatican City. He runs the day-to-day stuff at the Vatican. Julio Salazar is the prefect of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher. They own this hotel.” Nate could tell Ackerman loved possessing insider information.
“They own this hotel?” said Nate, a bit surprised.
“Yeah,” said Ackerman. “They own lots of stuff. Salazar has his own financial empire. Crepi has the Vatican machinery. They are peas in a pod, those two. Always together, been pals for years.” Now the good monsignor was descending into Vatican gossip, but this could be useful.
“Anything else common to the deceased cardinals?” asked Nate.
Ackerman thought for a second. “They are all Roman trained. They all have contacts here and a history here. That’s good and bad. They have a Roman pedigree, which is helpful if you want to be pope. They all have friends here. But of course, they also all have enemies.”
Nate raised an eyebrow at the mention of enemies. He poured Ackerman a second glass of wine from the bottle by the table and urged him on. “Are there rivalries in the Church?” Nate asked with feigned innocence.
“It’s a brood of vipers,” said the monsignor through a mouthful of bread. “Especially when the pope is weakening, then the venom comes out. Nobody is deader than a dead pope. The Romans have a saying, ‘Il Papa è morto, fai un altro.’”
“Which means?” said Nate, a bit irritated with the Italian again.
“The pope is dead; make another one.” Ackerman slapped the table, pleased with his irreverence, and took a sip of his wine. “People are making moves now for the inevitable. When the pope dies, things change. But then again, nothing really changes.”
Their food arrived at the table, and they dived into the pasta. Nate noted that they didn’t say a blessing. Ackerman talked as he ate.
“There are two groups here in Rome who are nervous about the pope’s death—the people who will lose their jobs when he dies, and the people who will get new jobs when he dies. They are opposite sides of the same coin.”
“What changes threaten people in the Vatican?” asked Nate. Ackerman leaned in closer. He clearly loved being the expert.
“Well, things have been going on for a long time over here. People like stability. It’s human nature. They also like their own little sinecures.
“Take the Vatican Bank. As things go, it is not such a big bank by world standards. Not such a big part of the Vatican either. But,” he said, pointing a finger upward for emphasis, “the bank is very important to a few people. It gives them a good life and lots of access to ready cash.”
Nate was intrigued that Ackerman mentioned the bank so much without prompting. It was obviously on the priest’s mind.
“Tell me about the bank,” said Nate, flipping his notebook to a clean page. Ackerman looked around to see if anyone was listening. He lowered his voice, apparently as a precaution against discovery, and cleared his throat like he was going to give a speech. “Over the years,” he began, “the bank has been at the center of major scandals.
“Back in the 1980s, a big scandal took down the bank director, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus from Chicago.
“Marcinkus got the bank involved in doing a lot of favors for a guy named Roberto Calvi, who was the president of the largest bank in Milan, the Banco Ambrosiano. Eventually Calvi’s dead body was found hanging from a rope under Blackfriars Bridge in London, where he had gone to beg London bankers for a loan. It was probably the Mafia who did it.” Ackerman was warming to his tale of the bank. It was a well-known scandal. Tracy had even mentioned it. But Nate found this insider’s version quite interesting.
The waiter came over to pour more water into their glasses. Ackerman seemed irritated by his intrusion and paused until the waiter stepped away.
“The Calvi scandal cost the Vatican millions. Calvi’s bank folded in Milano. The creditors there sued the Church, because it had induced them to do business with Calvi. Eventually, it was reported in the press here that the Church paid out 244 million dollars to settle with the creditors, including the Mafia.”
“Where did they get the money to pay out such a big settlement?” asked Nate.
“The Vatican didn’t have that much cash,” answered Ackerman. “We have art but not much in the way of liquid assets.
“Most people think they got the money from Opus Dei, which has real deep pockets. It’s also said that the Soldados de Cristo kicked in some of the money.”
Nate had also heard the rumor about Opus Dei having given the bulk of the money for the settlement, but he had not heard the Soldados mentioned in connection with the bank before.
“Why would Opus Dei pay out so much money to save the bank?” asked Nate.
“They didn’t do it to save the bank,” answered Ackerman with a hint of condescension. “They did it to save the Holy See from embarrassment, and they wanted something in return.
“They wanted independence from all bishops. And they got it. Immediately after the giant payout was made in Switzerland, Rome recognized Opus Dei as an independent diocese, called a personal prelature. It is the only one in the world. It has no territory, just people in its jurisdiction. They got what the bank has—no supervision.”
Ackerman nodded as if to drive home the point. “It may surprise you, Mr. Condon, but even in the Church, money talks.”
Ackerman was not done with his tale of the bank. Nate signaled for some more wine. The monsignor continued.
“Then in the 1990s the bank was again implicated in several bribery scandals. One witness claimed that he laundered fifty million dollars through the bank every year. He used it to bribe Italian politicians.
“Recently you probably heard about Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an accountant who was working for a Vatican foundation, who got arrested attempting to launder money through the Vatican Bank. He was doing some favors for friends in Na
ples by flying sacks of euros into Italy from Switzerland. It was valued at more than twenty-six million dollars. He ran the cash through the Vatican Bank and cleaned it up by running it through charities he controlled in Naples. Nunzio took a tip for himself, of course,” said Ackerman.
Nate remembered Tracy talking about this, but he was surprised that a Vatican monsignor would speak so openly about such bald-faced corruption.
“Nunzio got caught, but there might be others,” said Ackerman, sotto voce. He chuckled to himself for a moment, enjoying his scandal history.
“There have even been some humorous moments,” he said. “This past year, the ATMs run by the Vatican Bank were shut off by the German bank that managed them, because the Vatican was not cooperating with international money laundering regulations.
“You see, Mr. Condon, the bank is fertile ground for scandal here in Rome, but it’s not all bad.
“Sometimes the Vatican Bank is used to accomplish a political purpose, like when the Vatican funneled money to aid Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s. Every now and then it does a favor for some government trying to ransom someone in some part of the world.”
“Who runs the bank day to day?” asked Nate, trying to make Ackerman focus a little more on his investigation.
“Well, there is the board of directors composed of cardinals, but they are all busy men who live a long way off. Cardinal Crepi is the real boss of the bank, and Monsignor Donato Renzi is his right-hand man.
“According to the organizational chart, Donato works for the lay director, but in the Vatican, when there is a contest between a suit and a cassock, the cassock wins.”
Ackerman smiled broadly, delighted for the moment that he was on the winning team in Vatican politics because of his rank.
“It is said that Donato can escort anybody he wants right past the director’s office and up the stairs to the vault with sacks of cash.”
The waiter came over again to pour more water into their glasses. Ackerman glared at him at this second intrusion.
“Who is the biggest beneficiary of the bank?” asked Nate.
“The depositors, for one,” said Ackerman. “It’s like having a Cayman Islands bank right here in Europe. The employees and the directors also benefit. They get good pay and sometimes a little piece of the action.”
Nate got the picture and wanted to shift the topic. “How would you characterize the dead cardinals? Were they conservative?”
“You don’t get to be a cardinal unless you are conservative,” said Ackerman, breaking apart another breadstick. “That is partly what makes them papabile, but that’s only the first test. They also have to be acceptable to us here in the curia. The Vatican bureaucracy doesn’t like outsiders. The most acceptable candidate to us here is someone from the inside, like the diplomatic corps or one of the departments here. It’s OK if the new pope has a couple of years in a diocese, but two years in pastoral work is the limit. That’s all Benedict XVI had. We don’t want our popes tainted by pastoral concern. We don’t really want them having the smell of the sheep. Pope Thomas has had a little too much of that odor for curia taste.”
Nate was shocked. “I thought they were supposed to be pastors. Isn’t that the whole idea?”
Ackerman let out a guffaw. “That is a lovely idea, Nate. Lovely, but completely naïve. Most popes have never spent a single day in a parish.”
Somehow it had never occurred to Nate that popes and cardinals could get to a place where they never directly served the people. He had thought that all priests served in parishes at some time during their career. Not so, he was discovering. He recalled the receiving line at the Nunciature in Washington. The common thread there seemed to have been who was secretary to whom.
Nate refocused. “What are the factions here in Vatican bureaucracy?”
“Well, of course,” said Ackerman, “there are more than three thousand people working in the Vatican. Most just do their jobs. I suppose the curators in the museum or archivists in the library don’t care much about Vatican politics. It doesn’t matter to them who’s in charge.
“But people like me, in jobs like mine,” he continued, “we certainly have factions. We have enemies and friends, because we decide who gets to be bishop and who gets to run the Church.”
“What factions exist?” Nate asked again.
“Two big factions,” said Ackerman, pushing his plate away. “In shorthand, I suppose you could call them the ‘liberals’ and the ‘soldados.’” The liberals don’t really count for anything. We put them in peace and justice stuff and ignore them. They can do dialogue with other religions and stuff like that, which nobody here really cares about.”
“Who are the soldados?” asked Nate.
“The Soldados de Cristo? You’ve never heard of them?” Ackerman was incredulous.
“Vaguely, I think,” said Nate, remembering Peggy Tracy and Brigid’s alarm after seeing Peggy at the hotel in Washington. For a group he had never even heard of a week ago, they certainly were popping up everywhere.
“The Soldados are basically just one of the many players on the right. They are a Mexican order rapidly going global, at least until the current pope put their founder under house arrest. They have lots of money and lots of people. They’re quasi-military, sort of like the Jesuits in their early days. Everywhere they go, conspiracy theories and strange rumors abound.”
Nate was intrigued. “What sort of rumors?”
“Rumors of sexual impropriety,” said Ackerman. “And rumors of financial corruption. That’s why Pope Thomas put their founder, Marcel Marcelino, under house arrest. Seems like he’s well acquainted with the seven capital sins, especially lust and greed.”
“Who would know about these Soldados?” asked Nate. This seemed like something he should follow up on.
“A friend of mine knows a lot about them,” said Ackerman. “Actually, he has been assigned by the pope to babysit the Soldados’ founder and to manage the order. They are kind of in receivership, sort of like the Jesuits were a few years back.”
“Marcelino is being held here at the Vatican under lock and key. That’s the closest thing to a prison sentence that he’s likely ever to get.”
Ackerman took out a pen and pad from his jacket pocket and wrote a name and phone number on a piece of paper. He handed it to Nate. “Here, call this guy, Monsignor Henry Rodriguez. He knows all about the Soldados. It would be worth your while.”
Nate put the paper into his leather folder.
“Henry—really, it’s Enrico Rodriguez,” said Ackerman. “He’s Mexican American. He’s the perfect guy to look into them. He speaks idiomatic Spanish, with a Mexican accent, and he looks like Mario Lopez. He probably would have been a good candidate for the Soldados himself, except for one thing. He’s sane.” Ackerman and Nate chuckled together. Nate was surprised by the priest’s candor.
“Henry told me once that he thinks that their lay group, Miles Cristi, is dangerous. They are like a group of automatons. They all talk alike, look alike, and think alike. It is scary, actually. Kind of like a religious version of The Stepford Wives. If there is one radical and scary group in the Church, it’s them.” Ackerman seemed sincere.
“I thought Opus Dei was the radical and scary group in the Church,” said Nate, wanting to show his knowledge.
“Oh, not anymore. Opus Dei is yesterday’s news,” answered Ackerman dismissively. “The Da Vinci Code neutered them by ridicule and exposure. But now the Soldados and the Miles are more nefarious. I suppose, really, nothing changes from century to century. The characters are basically the same, just the names change.”
Just then, the waiter came over to clear the plates. He had been watching them from a nearby serving station. With so few patrons in the dining room, they had a lot of attention from the waiter. He spilled a glass of water right into Ackerman’s lap.
“Che stupido,” said Ackerman, irritated. The waiter immediately started drying up the table and daubing the priest with a napki
n. He slapped at the man’s hand, saying, “Basta cosi.”
The waiter did not respond like the usual obsequious Italian servant. He looked Ackerman directly in the eye and spoke only one soft syllable, more like a groan, really. “Oma.” Ackerman’s eyes got big.
A chill ran down Nate’s spine. He recognized the word, oma, the slang contraction for omerta, a Sicilian word for “silence.” It was both an admonition and a warning. The code of omerta is the Mafia’s code of silence. Violating it meant death. Ackerman had just been warned to shut his mouth.
There was a change in Ackerman’s demeanor. The loquacious cleric went abruptly silent. He finished his espresso and, politely but quickly, took his leave.
“Buona sera,” said Ackerman, dropping his napkin on the table. “Don’t forget to call Henry. He will be a big help to you.” The priest got up and walked out of the dining room. Nate watched him go, a bit surprised at the sudden departure.
“Oma,” Nate said to himself.
Jet lag overcoming him again, Nate went upstairs and collapsed into the giant bed in the room that had once been Cardinal della Rovere’s bedchamber, under the fresco depicting the cardinal riding a chariot into the heavens. Probably the only way that the cardinal would ever get there.
10
SOLDADOS DE CRISTO
THE MORNING AFTER HIS DINNER WITH ACKERMAN, NATE called Rodriguez and asked for an appointment. He explained the commission he had from the Holy See and made sure to drop O’Toole’s name to open the door. Nate was discovering that everything in the hierarchy of the Church is the network of connections.
“Sure,” said the American monsignor. “Come on over now. Anything for an investigation sponsored by the Holy Father. After all, we are sort of in the same business.”
“What business is that?” asked Nate.
“Fighting the bad guys,” said Rodriguez.
Monsignor Rodriguez’s office was located within the Vatican Secretary of State, in the Apostolic Palace, very near the papal apartments. It is the most elegant and storied part of the Vatican.
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