‘But why bring in Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Who better to help him in such an endeavour? Felici can hardly go the Swiss Guard or the Roman police. Why should they be interested? Besides, Felici does not necessarily suspect Breakspear of any criminal offence. He has accepted him as a fellow chaplain all these years. It’s only now, when his junior looks set to overtake him on the canonical staircase, that his gorge rises. Breakspear is a mystery and an admirer of Sherlock Holmes. He even boasts that he was at school with Holmes’s creator. Wouldn’t it be perfect to engage Sherlock Holmes to uncover the truth about Nicholas Breakspear — to get one fiction to unmask another?’
‘Oscar, this is so fanciful, and it ignores the most telling of all the clues parcelled up and sent to Holmes: that lock of lamb’s wool. It is the lock of lamb’s wool that leads us, inexorably, to Agnes.’
Oscar moved his glass and my hat across the table. From beneath the two books that lay open before him, he picked out the third.
‘Look what I have here, Arthur, as chance would have it.’ He inspected the spine of the slim volume. ‘It’s A Study in Scarlet by one Arthur Conan Doyle. It is a first edition, published in July 1888 by Ward Lock. You may recognise it.’
‘Where does this come from?’ I asked.
‘I borrowed it from the sacristy yesterday.’ He took in my reproving glance. ‘I will return it. I know I should have asked …’
I shook my head and clicked my tongue.
‘I do hear your tut-tut of reproach, my friend,’ he continued, adopting an absurd little-boy-lost look. ‘But I think perhaps it was meant to be, because see this — on the flyleaf, in pencil, the letters NB-O. I take that to stand for Nota bene, Oscar. And I do take note, Arthur.’ He flicked through the book’s pages until he reached Chapter Seven, then put his finger on a particular line. ‘Now you take note of this, my friend. It’s an aperçu from the great Sherlock Holmes. I came across it last night. It struck me as particularly pertinent. Read it out, would you?’
I took the book in my hand and read out the sentence he had indicated: ‘When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.’
I looked up at my friend. He was smiling. With his open wallet in his hand, he was removing from it the little envelope that contained the lock of lamb’s wool.
‘What are you trying to tell me, Oscar?’
‘Encouraged by Holmes himself, no less, I am telling you that I am now looking in a different light at the clue that we have here. This may not be lamb’s wool at all, Arthur. It may be sheep’s wool — designed to point us not towards an innocent “lamb of God”, but to “the enemy within”, the false prophet of whom St Matthew warns us: the ravening wolf who comes dressed in sheep’s clothing.’
18
Tombs of the popes
We lunched at the Hôtel de Russie. James Rennell Rodd was lunching there also, but as we passed his table he made great play of studying the label on the wine that he was being served and so managed to avoid having to acknowledge us.
‘He’s cutting you,’ I said as the maître d’hôtel led us between leafy potted palms to a secluded alcove at the far end of the dining room.
‘That’s a relief,’ replied Oscar, collapsing onto a leather banquette and mopping his brow with his yellow handkerchief. The heat in the piazza had become quite oppressive. ‘James Rennell Rodd was charming once upon a time. He wrote bad poetry rather well. You might even have thought it had been translated from the French. Then he lost his looks and grew that moustache and joined the diplomatic service. Once we were friends. Once he was daring. Now he is dull, and I fear there is nothing to be done about it. He will certainly end up in the House of Lords. He has one of those terribly weak natures that are not susceptible to influence.’ Pleased with this sally, my friend grinned at me, widened his watery eyes and said, ‘I think we should have an exceptional wine with our lunch today, Arthur. Lady Windermere can treat us.’
I told Oscar that I would be happy to eat and drink whatever he cared to order. He told the waiter that, despite the weather, we wanted wild goose — ‘well roasted, with all the trimmings’. The waiter apologised, but wild goose was not on the menu. Oscar insisted he must have it. ‘We have been chasing wild goose for days,’ he said earnestly. He reiterated the line in English, French, German and Italian, then declared that his father had been right: ‘One should never make jokes with waiters’ — and ordered fresh asparagus followed by trout stuffed with sultanas, zucchini, garlic, chervil and dill. He instructed the sommelier to bring us whatever wine he pleased and the wine the sommelier brought us pleased us very much indeed.
As we dined we talked about all manner of things, except the case in hand. ‘A serious meal calls for frivolous conversation,’ Oscar explained. He seemed especially eager to cross-examine me on the subject of the young ladies I had known in my life, ‘both before you met your darling wife — and after’.
‘There have been none after,’ I told him. ‘I do assure you of that.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ he said. ‘You have so much to offer, Arthur.’
‘You say wicked things, Oscar.’
‘I dare to speak the truth. There is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life, you know. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.’
After we had laughed (a great deal) and wined and dined (if not wisely, certainly too well) and, through the foliage that surrounded our alcove, had spied Rennell Rodd leaving the restaurant, Oscar announced that he would take to his bed for an hour to prepare himself for Mass in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. ‘I’ll read Butler’s Lives of the Saints.’
‘And I’ll try to make some inroads on my correspondence,’ I said. ‘It is why I came away, after all. Touie will expect it.’
‘Don’t do any work,’ cried Oscar. ‘Tuck yourself up with Mark Twain. Read his description of the Capuchin church of the Immaculate Conception. We must go there. The burial crypt was a favourite haunt of the Marquis de Sade.’ He pressed the book on me. ‘Or read The Sign of Four — it’s a rattling good yarn and rather deep at times. ‘He riffled through the pages before passing the slim volume to me. “‘The chief proof of man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.” I am still mulling over that one.’
While Oscar went to his room to take his siesta, I did not go to mine. I left the books he had put in my care with the hall porter and decided to venture along the Via del Babuino for a stroll. I thought I might wander as far as the fountain in the Piazza di Spagna, or even go beyond it up the Spanish Steps to the Pincio Gardens, but as I passed the Anglican church of All Saints I noticed that the main door was wide open and, on the spur of the moment, I decided to step inside.
It was three in the afternoon: across the street, the clock on the bell tower of Sant’ Atanasio dei Greci was striking the hour. Outside, in the narrow Via del Babuino, it was baking hot; inside the darkened church, it was wonderfully cool. As I walked down the nave, looking up at the rafters and the stained-glass window above the altar, I breathed in the Anglican scent of beeswax polish and fading flowers, and was overwhelmed by a longing for home.
I found Catherine English and her brother standing close together at the foot of the pulpit. With her right hand she was soothing her brother’s brow.
‘Hello?’ she said, turning at the sound of my footfall.
‘Forgive me,’ I said.
‘What for?’ She smiled at me.
‘The church is always open,’ said the Reverend English, coughing to clear his throat before running his hands stiffly through his curly hair. ‘And I am always late — for something. I must go.’
‘You are never late for evensong, brother.’
‘I will see you then,’ he said. He coughed again and, with a friendly grimace, nodded to me as he retreated towards the vestry door.
‘Poor Martin.’ Catherine English sighed.
Her face looked drawn. ‘His sermon was not to everybody’s liking. His devotion to the Virgin Mary is a little too intense for Anglican tastes.’ She laughed sadly. ‘Thank you for coming to see me,’ she said, taking my hand.
‘Your brother left a message …’
‘I know.’
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes.’
I said nothing.
‘I wanted to see you,’ she continued, breaking away from me and walking towards the altar steps. ‘But for all the wrong reasons.’ She turned once more and looked me directly in the eyes. ‘I wanted a shoulder to cry on. I wanted someone sympathetic with whom I could share my woes.’
I smiled, awkwardly. ‘Well, I’m here.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. She took a deep breath and spread her arms. ‘And I have work to do. I must rearrange the flowers. They have not met with approval either —“far too fussy” I’m told.’
‘May I help you?’
‘You are a man, Dr Conan Doyle. You can watch.’
I watched as she rearranged the flowers. I assisted too, when she would let me. And I listened to her woes. And heard of her hopes and fears. Her story touched me very much and, before I left, I gave her a cheque for forty pounds.
At five o’clock Oscar and I were seated in the basilica of St Peter’s, at the west end of the great nave, at the back of the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. We were not alone. It was a Sunday in summer and the pews were crowded with visitors and pilgrims, as well as what Monsignor Tuminello described to us as ‘the ever-faithful: the widowed and the very old’. Tuminello, wearing a heavy chasuble of white and gold, his physical vigour seemingly all restored, conducted the Mass con brio. His theatrical style was more to Oscar’s taste than mine. Though his skin was yellow and his face deeply lined, his voice was rich and resonant, his bearing impressive and, when the sanctus sounded and he raised the sacrament on high, his eyes burnt with a frightening intensity. Oscar was much moved by the Monsignor’s palpable faith, so unbending and implacable. I had my reservations.
They say, ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.’ Not in my case, let me confess. I was reared by Jesuits — keen, clean-minded, earnest men, so far as I knew them, with a few black sheep among their number, but not many. I respect much that the Catholic Church has to offer: its traditions, its unbroken and solemn ritual, the beauty and truth of many of its observances, its poetical appeal to the emotions, the sensual charm of music, light and incense, its power as an instrument of law and order. For the guidance of an unthinking and uneducated world it could in many ways hardly be surpassed … But I am neither unthinking nor uneducated: I am a man of science with a mind of my own. Blind faith is not for me. Faced with having to declare an unshakeable belief in the immaculate conception or transubstantiation, for example, my spirit rebels. Never will I accept anything that cannot be proved to me.
When the service was done and the faithful had departed, we remained seated at the back of the chapel. Oscar, who had changed his suiting from lime green to olive black, looked sideways at me, with thoughtful eyes.
‘You have all this as your birthright, Arthur, and don’t want it. I don’t and I do. What a topsy-turvy world it is.’
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ boomed Monsignor Tuminello, suddenly descending upon us and holding out both hands towards us. His yellow, weathered face was wreathed in smiles. ‘I am delighted to see you,’ he growled. He had divested himself of his chasuble and replaced it with a flowing white surplice that quite engulfed him and had the effect of making him look like a Nordic troll dressed as an angel. ‘Thank you for coming, Dr Conan Doyle,’ he said, looking at me eagerly. ‘Thank you both for coming,’ he added.
We got to our feet. ‘If I am de trop …’ murmured Oscar, apologetically.
‘No, no,’ insisted the Monsignor. ‘You can both hear my story. Every Holmes must have his Watson. We all need scribes and acolytes. Where would Our Lord have been without the Apostles? Please. Follow me.’
His surplice billowing about him, he raised his left hand and, waving gaily at the sacristan, who passed us by carrying the communion plate back to the sacristy, led us out of the chapel through a side entrance. We followed him along a short corridor lined with the stumps of ancient marble columns, through a metal gateway and down a flight of steep stone steps to what appeared to be another chapel — less ornate, it seemed, but larger and more cavernous than the chapel of the Holy Sacrament above. Here there was no natural light. As Tuminello strode ahead we lost sight of him in the sepulchral gloom.
‘We are in the old basilica now,’ he said from out of the darkness. ‘These are the sacred grottoes. This is where we house the tombs of the popes. As I am papal exorcist, they are my responsibility. Except on certain special days, we don’t let the public come down here. We can talk freely. This is my domain. You may smoke.’
He struck a match and, for a moment, his illuminated face leered out at us like a gruesome jack-o’-lantern at Hallowe’en. The Monsignor was lighting a small cigar. ‘The Almighty gave us tobacco to enjoy,’ he said.
‘I am so pleased to hear it,’ said Oscar, reaching at once for his own cigarette case.
‘And wine, too,’ continued Tuminello, cheerfully.
Gradually my eyes were adjusting to the obscurity. Tuminello was standing a yard or so from us, beneath a grey-stone arch, by a black-marble sarcophagus. His glowing cigar clenched between his teeth, he bent down and from a concealed niche cut low into the wall he produced a pair of golden chalices. He held them up triumphantly.
‘Solid gold, rare rubies, and emeralds brought to Europe by Hernán Cortéz himself. Pius VI drank from these. They are now surplus to requirements. We have hundreds more in the sacristy, just as exquisite. Cesare Verdi is very relaxed about what we may borrow.’
‘So I have noticed,’ said Oscar, taking one of the chalices and studying it admiringly. Tuminello handed me the other.
It was an object of extraordinary beauty and much lighter to hold than its appearance would have suggested. From the niche, Tuminello fetched a third chalice, for himself — again golden, again encrusted with precious stones — and a bottle of wine, already uncorked.
‘Sacramental but unconsecrated. Vitis vinifera ordinario, I’m afraid, but it serves.’ He poured the wine into the chalices, sucking heavily on his cigar as he did so. I noticed that his hand trembled and the corner of his left eye twitched. He put down the wine bottle and raised his chalice. ‘To Joachim Bechetti,’ he said. ‘May he rest in peace.’
‘Amen,’ said Oscar solemnly.
‘Indeed,’ I muttered.
‘He will rest in peace, of course. He was a good man — brilliant in his day and brave in adversity. You have seen his work. He was a fine artist.’
‘I understand he is to be buried on Capri,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Tuminello, from within a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘He was born there, but I don’t think he’d been back in thirty years. Brother Matteo is accompanying the body, unembalmed.’
‘You don’t approve?’ asked Oscar.
‘It’s a mistake, given the heat. But Brother Matteo is a vegetarian with all that that implies. He maintains that embalming is “unnatural”. He claims that St Francis of Assisi spoke out against it. He didn’t. But I’m too old and too tired to argue the point. And Brother Matteo took good care of Father Bechetti when he was alive. We must let him look after him as he thinks best now he’s gone.’
‘Brother Matteo is a good man,’ said Oscar, reflectively.
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Monsignor Tuminello. ‘Brother Matteo is the pattern of earthly goodness. He practises what we preach. He despises the sin, but goes out of his way to love the sinner. He gives the best of himself to the worst of us.’ The papal exorcist took a sip of wine. ‘Brother Matteo is almost a saint, I agree, but he is terribly naive, as so many saints are. There is nothing wrong with embalming. I assisted at the embalming of Pio Nono. It was a beautiful experience, a privileg
e for all involved.’
‘Is Pio Nono here?’ asked Oscar, peering around in the darkness.
‘He was. But he’s been moved to San Lorenzo fuori le Mura — St Lawrence without the Walls. Again a mistake, but it’s what he wanted.’ Monsignor Tuminello spread his arms wide, his cigar in one hand, his chalice of wine in the other. ‘The popes should all be here, together, safe, close by St Peter. This is where they belong.’
‘Who’s this?’ I asked, indicating the black sarcophagus.
‘Gregory V,’ said Tuminello, dismissively. ‘German. We’ve had too many German popes.’ He smiled. ‘Too many Italians, too.’ He raised his chalice to us. ‘Not enough Englishmen.’
‘Just the one,’ said Oscar. ‘Nicholas Breakspear.’
‘Yes,’ said Tuminello, setting down his chalice on the floor and moving behind the black sarcophagus. ‘Hadrian IV.’
He lit a second match and held it high above another tomb. In the flickering light before the flame died, I caught a glimpse of red porphyry and an ox’s skull and two Medusa heads.
‘He’s in here, safe and sound, thanks to the embalmer’s art. When we opened up the tomb, we found he was just a little man wearing tiny Turkish slippers and a huge emerald on a rose-gold ring. Cesare Verdi has promised to give Monsignor Breakspear the ring when he gets his cardinal’s hat.’
Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders Page 19
