Strange Gods

by Peter J. Daly

  Maria dropped Brigid and Miriam at the curb outside the house and then drove off in search of a parking space. The two women rang the doorbell.

  After thirty seconds or so, they heard some jangling of keys. A man in his sixties opened the door. He had a dinner napkin in his left hand, clearly just coming from the table. He did not look pleased. Brigid saw that he was a robust and fairly handsome man. Oddly, he wore his hair long, pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like some aging hippie.

  “Jab,” he said in Dutch. Then, seeing that Brigid didn’t understand, he switched to English. Belgians think they can easily spot an American.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Brigid spoke up. “Are you Bernard Willebroeck?”

  “Who wants to know?” he said.

  “Sorry,” said Brigid. “I’m Brigid Condon from New York.” She extended her hand to him, but he did not reciprocate.

  Miriam stepped in front of Brigid. To break the ice, she said, “Bernard, it’s me, Miriam.”

  He looked at her with surprise and said in Dutch, “Miriam! What the hell are you doing here? And who is she?” He appeared confused, almost angry.

  “Brigid is a friend of mine from America,” answered Miriam, still in Dutch. “Could we come in?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m eating dinner.”

  “Oh, Bernard, stop being so disagreeable. Give us a few moments of your time,” answered Miriam.

  Raising his voice, he asked, “Why should I?”

  “Because you owe me a favor. When you were in the Congo and your mother was dying, who sat with her?” asked Miriam.

  Bernard’s eyes narrowed. Miriam countered, “Five minutes.”

  Defeated by Miriam’s rebuke, Bernard stepped back and opened the door, speaking to them in English. “Very well, come in,” he said with an exasperated scowl. He made it clear to Brigid that he was feeling manipulated into offering hospitality. “Five minutes, no more.”

  The two women entered the house. Brigid looked around quickly, with a lawyer’s eye for detail. It was an ordinary little home, but the front parlor was not furnished as a sitting room. Instead, it held high-tech office equipment, including two expensive CPUs, scanners, fax machines, and several phones. New Church was obviously doing a lot of communicating with someone. She also noted a fairly large safe against the wall.

  Bernard stood in the office, leaning against a computer desk that held a monitor bigger than any Brigid had ever seen. It appeared to be set up for Skype calls.

  Brigid noticed a lot of vinyl bags with bank logos stacked to one side of the desk. Good for cash deposits, she thought.

  “So, what do you what to know?” said Bernard testily.

  “My husband asked me to come by and visit you,” said Brigid. “He’s doing some work for the Vatican.”

  Bernard raised his eyebrows. “What’s your husband’s name?” he demanded.

  “Nathaniel Condon,” answered Brigid. “Your name and New Church have come up in his research. He read about your group in several reports.”

  Bernard visibly recoiled at the mention of reports. “What reports?” he asked angrily. “The Vatican is doing reports on us?”

  Brigid could see that the meeting was going downhill quickly, so she opted for directness. “Well, the Vatican is looking into groups that have made threats against local churches,” she said.

  He scoffed derisively, “They think I’ve made threats against the local Church? Ha! I’m not the threat. It’s the bishops who are the threat.”

  Miriam interjected firmly, “Bernard, you know your group was in the news this past year about a church burning.”

  “That was investigated,” he shouted. “They found nothing!”

  Brigid began to think that their visit had been a mistake. Bernard’s face was getting red. He clenched and unclenched his fists.

  He almost shouted, “You came all the way from America to investigate something that was in the newspapers? Why didn’t your husband come? Why would the Vatican investigator send his wife?”

  “I was here on business,” answered Brigid. “My husband merely suggested I speak with you while I was here.”

  Brigid could see the interview was going nowhere. She looked around the room quickly to see if she could learn anything else from its furnishings. On the walls of the office someone had taped newspaper articles in various languages. They had markings on them in blue ink. There was one article in English from the International New York Times about Manning’s assassination.

  Bernard’s mood shifted from angry to threatening.

  “This conversation is over,” he said. “That’s all I have to say to you or your husband, whoever he is. And I certainly have nothing to say to the Vatican or even to you, Miriam.” He pointed his finger at the nun. “If you want to talk to me, call my lawyer or come back here with the police.”

  Brigid wanted to delay a few minutes so she could get a better look at the place. She used the classic stall tactic. “May I use the toilet before we leave?” she asked. Miriam looked at her quizzically.

  “Down the hall,” Bernard said with some irritation, unable to refuse her request.

  Brigid crossed the room and went down the hall. She noted two rows of phone jacks on the wall with at least eight lines each. Why would some little organization need sixteen phone lines? she wondered. The phone lines added to her suspicion that New Church was more than just a local church group headed by an angry ex-priest.

  When Brigid came out of the toilet, Miriam was already standing by the front door. Just over the door was a little plaque with a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  “Have you ever been to Mexico?” Miriam asked, pointing to the image of the Virgin.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never been to Mexico. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my dinner is growing cold. Good day, ladies.”

  The two women stepped outside, and Bernard closed the door behind them with a thud.

  As they walked down the street to where Maria was waiting for them in the car, Miriam said to Brigid, “Too bad we didn’t discover what you were looking for.”

  “Who knows?” said Brigid. “Maybe we did.”

  14

  THE MAFIA CONNECTION

  GOOGLE SEARCHES ARE A WONDERFUL THING. THE WHOLE world can be sorted out with a few clicks of the mouse. They have made police work a lot easier. But a good policeman still needs a memory for detail and the ability to make judgments.

  During their dinner at the Columbus Hotel the week before, Monsignor Ackerman had referred to all the dead cardinals as papabile. One hundred twenty cardinals were under the age of eighty. Technically, all of them were eligible to be pope, but only a handful were really papabile, or contenders.

  Sitting at a desk in his borrowed office in a Vatican office building, Nate did a Google search. He entered “papabile cardinals.” He immediately received thousands of results, including some about baseball in St. Louis and some about bird-watching.

  Refining his search a bit, he entered “papabile Roman Catholic cardinals.” He also entered the city names for each of the dead clerics.

  This time there were a few thousand more results. But at the top of the list was a year-old article in Panoramio, the Italian news magazine. It had an amazing number of cross-references with Nate’s entry, including all the city names. He clicked on the article to open it.

  Panoramio is the kind of magazine that Italians love—the perfect balance between gloss and gossip. It has lots of pictures of bikini-clad socialites on the beach at Monte Carlo with salacious tidbits about their private lives. Occasionally, the magazine covers the Church, still with an eye toward scandal. The title of the article Nate had opened was “I Papabili, Quali Sono Loro Oggi?” or “Papabile: Who Are They Today?” The subtitle was about corruption in the Vatican.

  Nate could not read Italian well, but he could certainly make out the names of the cardinals. There were fourteen papabile cardinals listed in the article—all men who had a r
easonable prayer of becoming pope if the election were held soon. O’Toole’s name was on the list. So were all the names of the six dead cardinals. It had been published before any of them had died, a year ago.

  From what Nate could make out, it seemed that all six of the dead cardinals were considered stranieri by the Vatican bureaucracy. Two other cardinals were also considered stranieri by the article, but they were still alive, as far as Nate knew.

  Nate looked up the word straniero/i in his Mondadori Italian-English dictionary. The first meaning was foreigner, but an alternative meaning was outsider.

  Since one of the six dead cardinals, the Archbishop of Milan, was an Italian, Nate figured that the word, as used in the article, could not mean foreigner. Evidently the article considered all the dead cardinals to have been outsiders to the Vatican bureaucracy in some sense. Nate noted that, at least as far as he could tell, while O’Toole was considered papabile, he was not considered straniero by Panoramio.

  Since six of the eight outsider cardinals mentioned in the article were dead, Nate wondered if this might be some sort of hit list. If so, then the two cardinals who were still alive, the Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, and the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, might be next.

  Nate wanted a better understanding of the article.

  He pushed the intercom to call Sandra Orsuto, the secretary he had hired through Monsignor Rodriguez. Orsuto had come to Rome as a student, but after she received her degree she remained because she fell in love with the city. After only a few days, she had established herself as invaluable to Nate.

  “Sandra,” he said, “please come in here for a moment and help me translate this article.” When she entered the room, Nate handed her his printout of the Panoramio article. “What does this mean?” asked Nate, pointing to the term stranieri.

  “The thing that unites the stranieri,” read Sandra, “is a deep suspicion of the Vatican bureaucracy. They all think that it is corrupt and badly in need of a complete housecleaning.”

  “This is good,” said Nate, deeply interested.

  Sandra continued, “The stranieri are not liberals. They are not generally in favor of sweeping changes in the Church, such as an end to celibacy or the ordination of women. However, they all are outspoken critics of the dealings of the Vatican Bank, its secrecy, and its lack of compliance with international banking standards. All the stranieri have been publicly critical of the management of Vatican City itself, and in particular its governor, Cardinal Luciano Crepi. These prelates have broken the unwritten code that dictates that cardinals should always speak well of one another, at least in public. Their criticism is a sign of the weakness of the present pope and the chaos in the Vatican bureaucracy itself.”

  Sandra paused. “Shall I continue?” she asked.

  “Go on,” said Nate.

  “Cardinal Manning of New York,” continued Sandra, “is the strongest of the stranieri. He is the strongest critic of the Vatican Bank. He is also the most significant threat to the Vatican establishment, because he is chaplain to the American group, the Knights of Columbus, which has a seat on the board of the bank and is the largest single supplier of money to Rome. If Cardinal Manning turns off the money fountain, Rome goes dry.” Sandra paused as she concluded the article.

  “Who wrote this article?” Nate asked.

  “Umberto Tochi,” she said. “He is a well-known journalist who writes a lot for Panoramio.”

  “Does he quote anyone as his source for all this information?” asked Nate.

  “Yes,” said Sandra. “He quotes an anonymous monsignor in the Vatican. He calls him only Monsignore Anonimo.”

  “Call the magazine,” said Nate. “See if you can find out who Tochi’s Monsignore Anonimo really is.”

  Sandra left the room. Half an hour later she rang Nate on the office phone. “I talked to Tochi at the magazine,” she said. “He refused to identify his source.”

  “Naturally,” said Nate. “That’s what a good journalist should do.”

  “But,” continued Sandra, “he let slip a little detail. He said, ‘You might know, Sandra, since all you American expats in Rome seem to know each other.’ So it appears that our Monsignore Anonimo is an American.”

  “Good job,” said Nate. “That narrows it down considerably. I think this article gives us a common thread. All of the stranieri were a threat to the Vatican bureaucracy, especially the Vatican Bank.”

  As Nate hung up the phone, he thought to himself, Money and power: the classic combination for corruption. The Church was no exception.

  Nate picked up the phone on his desk and called the only American monsignor in the Vatican bureaucracy he knew, Monsignor Ackerman.

  “Pronto,” said Ackerman, in that strange way Italians have of answering the phone. They always say, “Ready.” What are they ready for?

  “Do you read Panoramio?” asked Nate.

  “Not often,” said Ackerman. “Why do you ask?”

  “There was an article last year in the May issue, listing the papabile. There were eight names on a list of outsider candidates to be pope. Six of them are now dead. The source for the article was a Monsignore Anonimo. Do you know who that might be?”

  “No idea,” said Ackerman. He seemed impatient. “Anyone could speculate on who might be the next pope. It’s one of the favorite indoor sports for Italians.”

  “Well, Panoramio could have just said, ‘anonymous source,’” pressed Nate. “Clearly Umberto Tochi wanted to give the impression that his contact was an insider.”

  “Three thousand people work at the Vatican,” said Ackerman. “Could be any one of them. There must be a hundred American monsignors in Rome alone.” He paused for a second and then asked, “Why are you calling me?”

  Nate raised his eyebrows and tapped the desk with a pencil. He paused for a moment to think. He had not told Ackerman that Tochi had specified the source as an American monsignor. Why had Ackerman made that assumption?

  “Whoever was the source for this article,” continued Nate, “clearly knew a lot about these cardinals. Maybe he had access to their files?”

  “What are you suggesting?” demanded Ackerman angrily, almost in a shout. “Bishops’ files are confidential. I certainly don’t know anything about that article.”

  For the first time, Ackerman was not friendly or flirty. Nate had touched a nerve.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Ackerman. “Ciao.”

  Nate studied the dead receiver in his hand and sensed he was on to something.

  In the files Nate had received from Tracy at their lunch in Georgetown, there had been a dossier on Ackerman. Flipping through the file now, Nate saw Tracy’s handwritten note: “Hangs out at Angelo Azzuro, a mob gay bar.”

  Nate thought for a moment. When people are living a double life, they sometimes let their guard down when they’re drinking. They also might say things at night in a familiar place that they would never say in daylight or to strangers. Perhaps Monsignore Anonimo had been talking to someone at Angelo Azzuro.

  It’s worth a field trip, thought Nate. He searched Angelo Azzuro online. It was within walking distance of the Columbus Hotel, in the Trastevere section of Rome.

  Gay nightlife, the world over, starts late. Being a New Yorker, Nate knew that, so he didn’t even bother getting dressed until after 9:00 p.m. He slipped on a pair of loafers, a pair of jeans, a white linen shirt, and a Giorgio Armani sport coat. He wore no socks. He wanted to attract attention. Looking good was always an asset, but in a gay bar it might get people talking.

  Finding Angelo Azzuro on a tiny side street in Trastevere was a challenge. And at 10:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, there were few other places open. He asked directions from an English-speaking waiter at a café in Piazza Santa Maria. “Straight ahead, two streets, then turn right,” said the waiter. Once he was close, Nate just followed the trickle of men entering a door under a blue neon angel. From fifty paces away you could feel the pulse of the music.

  Nate’s white shirt
glowed under the purple black light on the stairs. He unbuttoned the second button of his shirt as he descended the steps. If he was going to exploit his assets, he might as well go all out.

  At the bottom of the steps, the bouncer unclicked the velvet rope and let him in with a smile. “Buona sera signore. Prego entrare.”

  Nate headed for the bar. Everyone talks to bartenders, so they are almost always good sources of information.

  There were no stools at the bar. Patrons just leaned up against the Lucite-topped counter. The lighting cast everyone around the bar in a flattering aura.

  The bartender was a muscular Italian from what seemed to be a Sylvester Stallone look-alike contest. He nodded at Nate as a sign that he was ready to take his order.

  “Do you speak English?” asked Nate.

  “Yes, a little,” smiled the bartender, extending his hand across the bar to shake hands. “I’m Stefano. What would you like?” His smile became a grin, fully aware of the double entendre of his question.

  “You mean to drink?” asked Nate. He knew how to play the game. He was from New York, after all. The verbal volley was fun.

  “To drink for now,” said the bartender. “Afterward, who knows?” Another smile flashed across the glowing bar.

  “Whiskey and water with ice,” said Nate. The bartender served it up in a heavy crystal glass, not the usual cheap bar glass. Nate had already achieved favored-client status.

  He took a sip and leaned against the bar for a while, surveying the crowd. A young man came over and stood at Nate’s right hand.

  “Do many Americans come to this bar?” Nate asked the bartender.

  “Yes,” said Stefano. “Some come here once. Some come here more than once. I hope you are the second kind.” Then he said with mock chagrin, “Are you only looking for Americans?”

  “I’m looking for a particular American,” said Nate. “Do you know Matthew Ackerman?”

  The bartender paused his glass washing and looked up. He seemed to be considering his response. The young man next to Nate, obviously drunk, jumped into the conversation with a leering smile. “Everybody knows Monsignore Matteo. Even the giornalisti. He loves to talk to everyone.”