by Walter Ellis
No. It was now clear to O’Malley that someone else – most obviously Battista – had been Camerlengo for at least part of the time generally ascribed to Aldobrandini. At some point he had obviously been airbrushed out of history. But why? Who would have benefited? And what possible connection could there be to Bosani?
He was not done yet. Turning finally to the personal papers of Father Claudio Acquaviva, Superior General of the Society from 1581 to 1615, O’Malley discovered a letter received from a Father Alfonso di Conza, SJ, dated May 28, 1606. He adjusted the ancient Anglepoise lamp fixed to the study table at which he was seated and peered at the text, realizing with a tremor of excitement that it had probably not been read by anyone other than its intended recipient. It was written in the formal Italian of the period, but the author’s meaning was clear.
Father General,
I write to inform you that I was present two nights ago at a dinner given by the banker Ciriaco Mattei, brother of His Late Eminence Cardinal Mattei. In the midst of the discussions that attended the meal put before us, Don Mattei was prevailed upon by the Camerlengo, Cardinal Battista, to permit him to inspect a canvas Mattei kept in his bedchamber, painted some time before by the artist Michelangelo Merisi, known from the place of his birth as Caravaggio.
It would be safe to say that the work did not please the Camerlengo, who at once pronounced it second-rate and an abomination. Notwithstanding this negative apprehension of Master Caravaggio’s depiction of the betrayal in the Garden of Our Lord Jesus, the cardinal afterwards declared his intention to buy the work and was clearly vexed when Don Mattei declined to sell. In my hearing, the Camerlengo then warned Don Mattei to keep the canvas out of public sight, which he agreed to do.
I mention the above because, Father General, I have to report that the figure of Judas in the painting was uncommonly like the Camerlengo himself, right down to His Eminence’s foreshortened left arm. More troubling still, on the left of the arrangement was to be seen the figure of a fleeing man, his mouth open, his eyes terrified. I knew at once that I had met this man, knew him even, but it was only later, in my sleep, that his identity revealed itself to me.
The man, Father General, was our servant of God, Fr Marcel d’Amboise, from St Brieuc, in Brittany, a scholar who chose to perform his pastoral duties among the poor of Trastevere but was called on from time to time to translate documents for the Curia from Armenian and Turkish, both of which languages he spoke fluently. I must now tell you that Fr d’Amboise was murdered on the night of October 4, 1603. He was pursued through the streets and alleyways of his parish and his head savagely struck from his shoulders by an unknown assailant. No motive has yet been ascertained for the crime, nor did the sbirri appear anxious to make inquiries.
I cannot make sense of these facts, but present them to you fearing that harm was done to Fr d’Amboise lest he reveal some knowledge concerning Cardinal Battista of which he perhaps had possession.
I ask God to offer repose to his soul and, if He so wills it, to deliver the truth of his death that justice might be done.
Requesting, Father General, that you should remember me in your prayers, I remain,
Your servant and brother in Jesus,
Alfonso di Conza
O’Malley was overwhelmed by his discovery. In the days when he used to read his Irish Times in the parlour of the Jesuit House in Dublin, the depiction of the fleeing man in Caravaggio’s then unrevealed masterpiece was all but obscured by centuries of tobacco smoke and grime. But once restored by Benedetti, the painting – now hanging in a place of honour in the National Gallery - had been as remarkable to him for its harrowing portrayal of the figure running terrified from Gethsemene as it was for its rendition of Judas’ betrayal. Now he knew the reason why.
There was still one missing piece in the story. He turned to the card index and looked up the entry for Di Conza. This referred him to the calendar for the year 1606, in which was another entry in red ink: Father Alfonso di Conza, born Siena 25 March 1544; died 30 May 1606 – apparently from food poisoning. That was all. He had been a member of the order for forty-one years, since 11 August 1565, but, like Father d’Amboise, he had survived his curious encounter with Cardinal Battista by less than forty-eight hours. It was incredible: two murders of two priests, each of whom had fallen foul of Battista, and no one seemed to think it strange.
As he absorbed the significance of this latest information, his mobile phone began to vibrate in his pocket. It was Father Giovanni, reminding him that he had an urgent appointment with an insurance broker – something about health care costs for the staff of Boston College.
‘Yes, yes, Giovanni, don’t worry, I’m on my way. Just give me five minutes.’
‘Your taxi’s waiting.’
‘Very well, then … two minutes.’
He glanced back at the files. Acquaviva was in the view of many the most dynamic leader the Jesuits ever had. He’d brought in thousands of recruits and expanded the order across Europe and South America. He was also remembered for his part in the long-running dispute with the Dominicans over grace and free will, which became so bitter at one point that there were even fist fights and the Pope had to order both sides to desist. But no doubt Acquaviva had meetings as well. According to the accounts for 1606, he had been summoned to Venice on urgent business on the morning of 30 May and probably wouldn’t have read Di Conza’s letter until weeks, even months, later, by which time the poor man was long dead. Acquaviva could well have reasoned that there was nothing to be done. Caravaggio to him would have been a lost cause – possibly an artist whom he viewed with suspicion. Or perhaps he was overwhelmed with business and simply chose not to take a view. Then, as now, Vatican bureaucracy had a lot to answer for.
24*
Conclave minus 6
Dempsey knew exactly what he was going to do when he got home after his confrontation with the head of the Secret Archive. He was going to have a glass of wine, watch the news, take a bath and wait for Maya to turn up. Beyond that, he hadn’t a clue. All he knew for certain was that he’d had enough of putting his own security on the line. His apartment, on the shabby but fashionable Via della Penitenza, at the bottom end of the Janiculum Hill, was one that in his past life he would never have been able to afford. But the renewed surge in land prices in Ireland, especially near Galway, the fastest-growing city in the nation, had changed everything. It was an irony. His father had worked long, unsocial hours all his life and rarely managed a night out, never mind a shot at getting married again. Yet if he had only sold the farm during the first land-boom that came in with the new century – the one that had ended in the crash of 2008 – he’d have been a millionaire twice over.
He hadn’t mentioned to Maya that he had money. For a start, she was from a Swiss banking family, which meant that her standards of what constituted wealth probably weren’t the same as his. In all likelihood, she’d just think he was comfortably off. But there was also the fact that he didn’t want to seem part of a world he despised, where money was what people valued about you and studying for a PhD in history was viewed as the equivalent of trying to improve your golf handicap.
Not that his doctorate was exactly at the forefront of his thinking right now. Walking down the Lungotevere Gianicolense, with its view across the river to the heart of the old city, he was wondering how he had allowed himself to be drawn into a dispute within the higher reaches of a Church that he no longer even believed in. What difference would it make if Bosani got his way and a new pope was elected who took a hard line against Islam? Europeans – indigenous Europeans, that is – were already up in arms about the huge growth in the Muslim population. There were articles in the papers every other day. Afternoon television, in the interludes between gameshows and soap operas, regularly featured debates involving academics, clerics, civil rights activists and Muslim spokesmen in which the explosive growth of Islam was the central theme. The rights of immigrants to live in their own enclaves governed by sharia la
w, or to convert churches to mosques, or to organize street protests against Israel and in favour of the Palestinians, were set against the demands of native Italians to be masters in their own country. There was no doubt that if the Pope raised his voice in support of a Christian Europe, it would make headlines. But would it really bring society closer to Armageddon that it already was? Dempsey didn’t think so. A thousand years ago, popes could launch crusades; five hundred years after that they were able to broker the Holy League. But today, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the vicars of Christ were powerless. They didn’t even enjoy the spurious glamour of being prisoners anymore, as they had been in the years after the Risorgimento. They were neither threatening nor tragic. If anything, they were a photo opportunity.
It was intriguing, yet deeply frustrating. Cardinals in Rome still thought of themselves as players on the world stage. That had to be force of habit. But it was the influence these same prelates had closer to home that was of deeper concern to him. The prefect of the Secret Archive obviously meant business, and now that the police had been called in, anything could happen. The last thing he wanted was to end up in court. On the other hand, Uncle Declan was depending on him and he couldn’t let him down. Who else was there to help? Not Father bloody Giovanni, that was for sure. So it came down, like some sort of third-rate Shakespearean play, to a matter of family honour: the Omali versus the Bosani. If he owed it to no one else, he owed it to his father to stick by the Father General. Besides, it wasn’t as if the Church was going to put him on the rack. They weren’t going to murder him. A fine and a rap on the knuckles was all they had left in their armoury. So his best plan was to organize himself and work out his next move. He’d talk to Maya about it. She’d help put him straight.
He had just passed the Carabinieri barracks in the old Palazzo Salviati, halfway to the Ponte Mazzini, when he became aware of shouting in the distance and heard the characteristic wail of Italian police sirens. Behind him, a column of police vans was powering out of the heavy stone gateway of the Salviati courtyard and wheeling right onto the embankment. They passed him, one after the other, in a blur of flashing lights. What the hell! He increased his pace, curious to know what was happening. Two minutes later, as the crowd noise ahead of him continued to swell, he found his path blocked by a police cordon. The vans that had passed him were discharging groups of riot police, wearing steel helmets and body armour and carrying shields, now making their way in formation through the barrier. Immediately behind the cordon, local residents had gathered, with that lynch-mob look about them that made Dempsey wonder at first if maybe the police had just arrested a child murderer. But it wasn’t that. Instead, a little way ahead, outside Rome’s main prison, the Carcere di Regina Coeli, built on the site of a seventeenth-century monastery, a demonstration of some sort was underway. He drew closer. Several thousand protestors, flying the distinctive black and white flags of the banned Islamist party, Hizb ut-Tahrir, were chanting and waving their fists. Some threw rocks at the the police, which bounced off their plastic shields. But when the crowd parted to allow a young man in a checkered mask to run forward and hurl a petrol bomb, the response was instantaneous. As a helicopter clattered overhead, the riot squad began drumming their batons against their shields and moved forward in a broad phalanx.
‘What is it? What’s going on?’ Dempsey asked an elderly Roman wearing a beret and smoking an evil-smelling Sicilian cigarette.
‘They arrested a load of Arabs,’ he replied, coughing and spitting the result onto the pavement. ‘It’s the gang that killed that poor gardener at the Lateran cathedral.’ He coughed again. ‘Bastardi!’
By now, as the police line continued to advance, the demonstrators were pelting them with anything they could find. The real threat, however, came from a group, chanting Allahu Akbar – God is great! They carried baseball bats and moved in a tight military formation. Aware of the danger, a senior officer directed a detachment of his men to move right and force a path through the protestors. As they did so, a hail of petrol bombs came down, one of which struck a police car, enveloping it in flames.
Things were getting serious. Dempsey was reminded of riots in Kirkuk involving rival mobs of Sunnis and Kurds. A crowd-control officer ordered the Italian crowd to move back. But it was obvious that some of the locals, women as well as men, wanted to pitch in on the side of the police.
One young woman in a short skirt and tight-fitting T-shirt was particularly vehement. ‘They come over here because their own fucking countries are shit. Then they tell us they don’t want our culture, they want theirs and they throw bombs into our churches. Now they’re attacking the police.’
‘Esattamente!’ said a man in his thirties, wearing a dark suit and sunglasses. ‘Fuck them!’ A roar of approval greeted his expletive, which he had delivered in English. Emboldened, the man turned to taunt the demonstrators. ‘Send them back where they fucking came from,’ he shouted, brandishing an extended forefinger. ‘We don’t want them here – facce di merda!’
At this, all the Italians raised their fists and surged forward.
Dempsey could tell that the situation was about to get out of hand. He backed away, saying nothing, and turned right, down the side of the jail along the Via delle Mantellate, where women prisoners were housed. As the first CS gas grenades exploded behind him, he made his way to the Via San Francesco di Sales, with its turnoff into the Via della Penitenza.
Relieved to have escaped the mayhem, he headed for a large, three-storey villa with a red roof. His two-bedroom apartment occupied the basement, the entrance to which was at the bottom of a steep set of steps. He squinted into the mail box by the front door of the main household – nothing, as usual – and descended the steps. Then he reached into his trouser pocket for his house keys. That was when he realized that the door was open, or at least ajar. Instantly, he was on his guard. There could only be one explanation. This was Rome after all. Fucking hell! he thought. I’ve been burgled.
He went inside, moving with caution in case the intruder was still inside. But whoever had been there was gone. Now he checked his possessions. It was as he feared. His laptop computer, his digital camera and €500 he’d left in the drawer by his bed were missing. So were all the notes he had taken in the Secret Archive. Whoever the burglar was, he was a professional. There were papers strewn around and every drawer in the apartment was open. But nothing was broken or vandalized, and he was sure there would be no fingerprints. The intruder had simply forced the locks on his front door, then conducted a systematic search until he found what he was looking for. The money would have been a bonus, nothing more.
He felt a complete fool. He hadn’t bothered to activate the alarm when he went out that morning. His view was that any half-decent burglar would have known how to deal with it, disabling the siren after its first piercing shrieks, to the general satisfaction of the neighbourhood. Even so, it might have been some sort of deterrent.
He reached into his jacket pocket for his mobile, discovering as he did so that he had missed a call fifteen minutes earlier, probably because of the noise of the street demonstration. He rang his voicemail. It was a detective from the Rome City Police, called Drago. He and a colleague from the criminal investigation department of the Vatican gendermerie wanted to interview him at police headquarters at nine o’clock next morning in connection with a suspected theft from the Vatican library. He was advised not to be late.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. Jesus Christ! That’s all I need. Then he called Maya to give her the latest bad news.
‘Do you still want to stay with me tonight?’ he asked her after he had finished.
‘I think someone should,’ she said.
25*
July 1607: Malta
Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, the son of Costanza, Marchesa di Caravaggio, was the sort of man around whom legends grow. Descended from three of the most illustrious families in Italy, the Colonna, the Sforzi and the Doria, who combine
d in the 1570s to lead Catholic Europe in its defence against the Turks, he was both the brightest star of his generation and the errant son. Five years before, in 1602, he had been charged with a crime so grievous that it had never been uttered in public. Speculation had since rehearsed every possible malefaction, from the murder of a priest, to the rape of a nobleman’s twelve-year-old daughter, to incestuous relations with his mother. Yet so powerful was his family name and so glittering his own accomplishments as a young army officer that the Pope could not bring himself to put him to death. Instead, he was sent as a prisoner to Malta where he was placed in the charge of the Grand Master of the Knights of St John, Alof de Wignacourt.
A year later, after he had been released from jail and accepted as a novitiate, word came from Rome that, with the coronation of Paul V, Fabrizio once more enjoyed papal favour. He was appointed Joint Prior of Venice with his uncle, Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, and made an officer in the Hospitaller fleet. By the time he was instructed to pick up Caravaggio from Naples and bring him to Valletta, he had been promoted to the post of general of the galleys and was in the middle of a rebuilding programme aimed at repelling any assault by the resurgent Ottoman navy.
Two years younger than Caravaggio, with blonde hair and a flamboyant moustache, Fabrizio was to the depressed and despondent artist the very embodiment of hope. It didn’t matter that he was tired and rootless, hunted like an animal and uncertain of the nature of his own soul. Like Fabrizio, if he simply submitted himself to God and the Hospitallers, he could start afresh and remake himself in the image of a Christian Knight.
