The Caravaggio Conspiracy

by Walter Ellis

  Bosani felt an almost erotic charge pass through his body – an intimation, surely, of the ecstasy to come. Truly he was blessed to be given a central role in these events. But his real reward awaited him in heaven. Once more, he picked up the Qu’ran and drew it to his lips. ‘Allah be praised,’ he whispered. Then he returned to his list of names.

  The body of Cardinal Rüttgers was found next morning. An elderly nun became concerned when he failed to emerge from his bedroom for breakfast even though she had knocked twice. It was a young priest, Father Beckmann, who found him, his head almost entirely submerged in the bathwater, his face twisted in a manner that suggested the sudden onset of a stroke. The Vatican chief physician, called in by the Camerlengo, ruled that he had had suffered a massive, if unexpected, pulmonary embolism and drowned after losing consciousness.

  His death sent sent shock waves through the Vatican. Rüttgers was one of the most popular men in the Church, who, in the event of a protracted stalemate in the forthcoming conclave might even, it was said, have been considered papabile. What could possibly have gone wrong? A healthy man, not yet fifty, he had rarely troubled his doctor. On the contrary, he regularly disappeared for days on end in the Black Forest and just two years previously had climbed the Matterhorn alone, without oxygen. Fatalists pointed out that God worked in mysterious ways; realists said that what mattered now, at a pivotal moment in the Church’s history, was that he should be replaced as German primate as quickly as possible.

  No post-mortem was conducted. After a hasty funeral Mass in the German Church, Rüttgers’ corpse, in a sealed coffin, was interred in the historic Teutonic Cemetery, hidden from public view between St Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI audience hall. Complaints from the cardinal’s archdiocese, led by members of his family, that he should be buried in his own cathedral in Freiburg rather than locked away behind high walls in the Vatican were overridden. Instead, it was decided that his embalmed heart should, in due course, be sent back to Stuttgart in a glass box.

  Superior General O’Malley was doubly disturbed by the news. He had known the German for many years. When they last spoke, just forty-eight hours previously, he appeared in rude good health and certain to add a liberal voice to the deliberations over a new pope. Amid a swelling chorus of anti-Muslim rhetoric, his was one of the few liberal voices left in Rome. Now there was talk that his successor as head of the German Church would be Cardinal Wolfgang Von Stiegel, a hardliner, with views on the future of Catholic-Muslim relations similar to those of Bosani. O’Malley was further concerned when he recalled what his friend had told him only two days before his death: that Bosani was a monster, who appeared to have no qualms about orchestrating a new crusade against Islam. The Irishman couldn’t help wondering if Rüttgers’ death might not have been accidental, but refused to allow himself to follow that line of thought lest it lead to an unacceptable conclusion. The last time there had been speculation about a possible murder in the Vatican, following the dreadful and unforeseen death of Pope John Paul I, the trauma had run long and deep, doing great damage to the Church’s image in the world. Even so, speaking privately to his nephew Liam he revealed that recent events had an eerily familiar ring to them.

  Pope Paul VI died on 6 August 1978. His fifteen-year reign had proved more eventful than the experts predicted. Not only had he overseen the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council – a latter-day Council of Trent, inaugurated by Pope John XXIII – but he had opened a dialogue between the Church and Islam and established the Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions. Among the cardinals attending the conclave called to elect his successor was Albino Luciani, the son of a socialist glassblower from Murano and his devotedly Catholic wife, Bartola, a scullery maid. Luciani grew up to be a priest, then a bishop, and by the time of his election, at the age of sixty-five, was the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice.

  Years before, following the publication of a book by O’Malley on the Ottoman and Byzantine legal systems, Luciani, then in Venice, had written the author a letter in which he wondered whether secular law, without faith, could ever hope to hold society together. The Patriarch and the Jesuit later met at an exhibition in Venice celebrating a thousand years of contact between that city and Islam. The Italian remarked on the fact that the Ottomans of the Sublime Port and the Venetians, in their watery republic, had never, in five hundred years of conflict, relaxed their defences, yet always kept trade links open and maintained a sense of mutual respect. This, not confrontation and hatred, was surely the way forward, he said. In the days leading up to the papal conclave, Luciani and O’Malley – now vice-rector of the Irish College in Rome – met once more, this time after Mass in the Jesuit mother church, known as the Gesù. Luciani reflected ruefully, but with understanding, on the long decline of the Church in Asia Minor and expressed his personal regret that Pope Paul had chosen to abolish the patriarchate of Constantinople, with which his own seat in Venice was inextricably linked.

  It was clear to the Irishman that Luciani had a sense of mission but considered himself in no way papabile. He had no idea that others saw special qualities in him and took a different view. Accordingly, he was deeply shocked when, on 26 August after one of the shortest conclaves in history, he was elected pope, taking the regnal name John Paul I.

  Throughout Rome, and across the Catholic world, the rejoicing, and relief, was obvious. The cardinal electors – more than had attended any conclave in the Church’s long history – had wanted someone of a pastoral disposition after the cold and cerebral pontificate of Paul VI. During a session in the Sistine Chapel made almost unbearable by the intense heat, the various hardliners quickly cancelled each other out until, finally, only Luciani was left. Two future popes, Karol Wojtyla of Kraków and Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, helped prepare him for his new role, which proved to be no easy task. ‘May God forgive you for what you have done,’ the Italian told them. But then the declaration was made by Cardinal Pericle Felici, the ranking cardinal deacon. ‘Habemus Papam,’ he announced, almost in tears. ‘We have a pope.’ The bells of St Peter’s rang out and, after the new pontiff had given the crowd his blessing, looking like a man in a daze, the applause was so great that he was forced to come out on to the balcony a second time.

  Even the cynics were won round. This shy, modest intellectual would purge Rome of its wickedness and usher in a new age of openness.

  12*

  28 September 1978

  Thirty-three days after becoming Pope, John Paul I was dead. He was found by an attending nun, propped up in bed, reading a book. The official explanation for his sudden demise was a myocardial infarction, a form of heart attack, which his physician in Venice dismissed as inconsistent with his known medical history. The issue could not be resolved because the body was embalmed within fourteen hours – a process that effectively obliterated the evidence. Rumours began to circulate almost at once that the Holy Father was murdered – possibly because he had resolved to deal with the mounting scandal of the P2 Masonic Lodge, a Mafia-led organization linked to the Vatican; possibly because he had proved less pliable to certain interests in the Curia than had been supposed.

  Among those said by some to have been involved were two prominent archbishops, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, under investigation for alleged financial impropriety, and Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, from Lyon, the century’s longest-serving Camerlengo, an authoritarian figure whose theological conservatism put him at odds with his new master. It was Villot, pre-empting all investigation, who called in the embalmers. They arrived on the scene within an hour of the Pope’s death. Their first task, to be carried out before rigor mortis set in, was to restore a sense of serenity to His Holiness’s features, distorted by the pain of his passing.

  O’Malley didn’t know what to think. All he knew for certain was that one week prior to Luciani’s death he had been summoned to the private papal apartment where the new Pope told him in confidence of his fears about the true nature of Church government. He had learned that
the P2 affair, with its links to the Vatican’s own bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, was much more than a local scandal, and had the potential to split the Church. If even half that he had heard were true, he confided, there were men in Rome, including senior figures in the hierarchy, who saw profit, power and control of the Italian state as more important than the law of God. But even that wasn’t all. So-called liberation theology in Latin America turned out to be more about Marxism than mankind’s relationship with God. ‘These priests seek justice,’ the Pope complained, ‘but only justice here on Earth. There is little talk of salvation, none at all of life everlasting. Our Lord is being denied His divinity by His own priests. It is as if He were no more than a more sensitive, less aggressive incarnation of the late Che Guevara.’

  But while these discoveries had unnerved the Italian, he had somehow found the time, and the strength, to focus as well on a quite separate emerging crisis, the growing unrest of Muslims around the world. It was in this context, against the backdrop of rising oil prices and the Islamic revolution in Iran, that he specially sought O’Malley’s advice.

  The Pope seemed to be reeling from a sequence of blows. The sheer extent of the challenges facing the Church had shocked him. But he was not unnerved. Instead, relying on prayer and a new team of hand-picked advisers, he seemed determined to tackle the issues as they arose and, if God so willed it, to bring each to a conclusion. The tragedy, as O’Malley saw it, was that he was not given the chance.

  The Jesuit’s unease refused to subside. On 5 October, the day after the papal funeral, O’Malley called Father John Magee, an Irish priest who served as His Holiness’s private secretary, seeking some insight into what happened. But Magee, one of the first on the scene, failed to return his call and refused afterwards to discuss the matter. O’Malley then discovered that Lamberto Bosani, a newly appointed Monsignor and deputy head of the Secretariat for Non Christians, had had an audience with the Pope during the evening that preceded his death. He wrote to Bosani, like himself an authority on the Muslim world, but received an anodyne reply. He said he had visited the papal apartment only briefly to suggest possible dates for an important inter-faith conference, but left after five minutes when staff advised him the Holy Father was unwell and planned to have an early night.

  The mysterious death of John Paul I was the longest-running news story of the year. Some reports said that he died in his bed while reading, or possibly writing; others that he was found on the floor of his private bathroom with vomit stains on his clothing. To O’Malley, it was inconceivable that anyone in the Pope’s service could have poisoned him. These weren’t the Dark Ages. Popes weren’t monsters, with enemies at every turn. Yet something had happened. Was there a link to the P2 affair? Was Opus Dei involved in a clean-up operation? Did someone remove incriminating papers from His Holiness’s bedside? Conspiracy theories abounded. The official story was that, having prayed with his staff, Luciani retired to bed and died, quietly and serenely, consoled by St Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. In that case, why the rictus of pain, which at least one of the embalmers reported?

  O’Malley had no answers.

  But the Vatican, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum. On 4 October, following a three-day lying in state and a funeral Mass conducted by Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, dean of the Sacred College, Albino Luciani, the ‘Smiling Pope’, was entombed in the grotto of St Peter’s Basilica and attention turned to his successor.

  Twelve days later, at the conclusion of the year’s second conclave, the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków, was elected Pope, the first non-Italian to sit on the Throne of Peter since the Dutchman Adriaan Boeymans, Adrian VI, in 1522. Once more the bells of St Peter’s rang out joyously. ‘Habemus Papam,’ the proto-deacon announced. ‘We have a pope.’

  But still O’Malley’s sense of loss would not go away. He had expected much from the Venetian and mourned his passing as if he had lost one of his own family. The opening remarks of Cardinal Confalonieri’s eulogy rang in his ears:

  We ask ourselves, why so quickly? The Apostle Paul tells us why in the well-known and beloved explanation: “How deep his wisdom and knowledge and how impossible to penetrate his motives or understand his methods! Who could ever know the mind of the Lord?”

  13*

  1605

  The death on 3 March of Clement VIII, after a pontificate lasting thirteen years, went unmourned by most of Rome. Thieves, beggars, whores and Jews had good reason to rejoice. But his passing could not have come at a worse moment for Cardinal Battista. When the news was brought to him, he was just about to board a ship from Civitavecchia for Malta, where he was due to conduct talks with Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of St John. Instead, he returned at once to Rome to preside over the sede vacante and organize the conclave.

  He would not have missed the conclave at any price. Even so, he was irritated at having to put off his trip to Valletta. De Wignacourt was a good soldier. More than that, he had a fine appreciation of naval tactics and had built up a Hospitaller’s fleet that, in alliance with Venice, could well frustrate the Ottomans in their bid to recapture the eastern Mediterranean. Battista wished to find out for himself how strong a fleet it was and ways in which that strength might be reduced – possibly through the lease of ships to the papal navy that might then, mysteriously, be lost or kept far from any potential action.

  But the Camerlengo had another purpose for visiting Malta. He planned afterwards to travel south to Tripoli, in Libya, for a secret meeting with his patron in the Sublime Port, Safiye Sultan, grandmother of Sultan Ahmed I. Brought to the royal court as a teenage concubine, Safiye was a native of Albania. Beautiful and strong-willed, of peasant stock, she had risen to be chief consort to Sultan Murad III, and, as Valide Sultan, or queen mother, exercised considerable power during his reign and that of her wayward son, Mehmed III. A notorious sybarite, like his father, Mehmed was best remembered in Istanbul for having had some fifty of his half-brothers and sisters strangled by deaf-mutes to ensure there could be no pretenders to his throne. No fool, he astutely left affairs of state to his mother, widely reckoned to be the cleverest politician in the empire. Upon Mehmed’s untimely death, in December 1603, Safiye’s direct authority came to an abrupt end, but as effective head of the Ottoman secret service she remained a formidable operator. Her principal objective was the recovery of Hungary for the Empire, parts of which, in spite of an unexpected victory by her son over an Austrian-led alliance in 1596, had since defected to the Hapsburgs, and the restoration of Turkish sea power. Battista, by far her most important spy, was the key to both enterprises. The brief she wished to give him was threefold: to prevent the formation of a new Holy League, the isolation of Venice from the papacy and a reduction in the strength of the Hospitallers’ fleet.

  With Battista obliged to remain in Rome, she spoke instead with Luis de Fonseca, from Toledo, one of the most senior Knights of Malta and the Camerlengo’s closest confidant. Fonseca had been captured as a boy during the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus and converted secretly to Islam. The Spaniard listened carefully and agreed that as soon as a new pope was elected he would travel to Rome to pass on her orders to the Camerlengo.

  ‘The West is growing in strength,’ Safiye told him. ‘If we do not strike soon and take Vienna, I fear we never shall. As for the Christian navies, we have done all that we can to match their technology, particularly their firepower, but they may simply be too many for us.’

  Fonseca did his best to reassure her. ‘Your Highness should not trouble herself,’ he said. ‘Battista will soon have the new pope in his pocket. He has already instructed the Spanish ambassador that Madrid’s first priority should not be the Mediterranean – which he has told him can easily be left to Venice – but the war against the Dutch Protestants and their English allies. At the same time, His Eminence and I will see to it that, when the time comes, the Hospitallers’ fleet is dispersed to the four winds.’