Stealing God

by James Green

  SIXTEEN

  When Jimmy came to Rome he’d rented his furnished apartment from a couple who were making an extended visit to their son in South America. It was in an expensive residential district north-east of the Vatican and had been furnished with plenty of nice things; naturally the couple had worried about getting the right kind of tenant. For them an English ex-policeman in Rome training for the priesthood had been the answer to a prayer. It was too big really for just one person but Jimmy liked the convenience of the location, being able to walk into central Rome. For longer journeys Lepanto Metro station was only five minutes’ walk and St Gioacchino’s Church was nearby so if he wanted to go to morning Mass it wasn’t a problem. He went most mornings, except when he, Danny, and Ron went together to eleven o’clock Mass at Chiesa Nuova before going to the bar for a drink. All in all he didn’t mind what it was costing him, he could afford to pay for comfort, convenience, and privacy.

  He sat in the kitchen sipping his coffee. He was tired after the journey from the hospital which reminded him that he was recuperating from a bad beating and wasn’t ready yet to go ballroom dancing. There was a buzz from the street door. He went to the intercom. It was Danny.

  ‘Come up. Top floor, the door will be open.’ There was no “glad to see you” in Jimmy’s invitation. Nobody had visited him in hospital except Ricci. It wasn’t that he’d wanted visitors, if he’d been asked he would have told the nurses to turn away any that came. But that wasn’t the point. Nobody had come to be turned away, not Danny not Ron, not anybody.

  Danny appeared at the door and Jimmy took him into the living room where he motioned to an easy chair and they sat down.

  ‘What’s been going on, Jimmy?’

  ‘I was in hospital, that’s what’s been going on. If you’d bothered to ask you’d have known.’

  Danny laughed his deep laugh.

  ‘Oh, I asked. When you suddenly dropped out of sight I asked. You’d been given permission to make a short trip back to the UK on urgent family business, which sounds a bit thin seeing as how you told us not so long ago that you’d got no family in the UK. Then I ask again, are you back yet? They tell me you’re back but you got mugged and put into hospital. Ron and I came to see you but we got told you weren’t having any visitors for as long as you were in there. No one. Why were you so off-limits? Was the mugging so bad?’

  Keeping everyone away must have been Ricci’s idea, though God knows why he did it.

  ‘They did a fair job.’

  ‘I tried to come and visit a couple of times but the answer was still no one allowed.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I just thought I didn’t have any visitors.’

  ‘I phoned every morning, all I could get was, Mr Costello is as well as could be expected. Then today they said you’d been discharged so I came round here. Look, I don’t want to know why someone was keeping you under wraps, if that’s what it was, that’s your affair. I just want to know if you’re OK.’

  ‘Thanks, Danny. I’m OK. A bit fragile still, but like a bloke said, I’m a tough old bird and I’ve been knocked around before. I’ll be fine. How are things going with you?’

  ‘Not so well.’ You could tell by the way he said it that it was going to be something serious. Danny paused before going on, getting himself ready. ‘I’m giving up at the end of this term. I tried but it’s just not for me. I wanted to tell you before anyone else because,’ he paused again, looking for the right words, ‘because I think we might have become friends. Because I think there’s something I recognise in you that I know is in me.’

  ‘About being a copper?’

  ‘No, something about living with who we are, about accepting the person we find we’ve become. I think we’re both looking for something. Not a new start, there’s never a completely new start. The past doesn’t let you go that easily. But trying to change, trying to make sure the future is different. I thought becoming a priest might be a part of building a future I could be happy to live with. Maybe you did as well. In my case I was wrong.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No. It won’t help to drag it out and show it about.’ He laughed. ‘It’s no big deal. I’ll survive. I’ll go back to Jamaica and get myself a place. I’ll get by on my pension and savings and go back to being just another old sinner. One more bad Catholic in need of God’s love and mercy.’

  They sat in silence.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No, I hate the muck.’

  ‘That’s right, I forgot. You say it whenever we go to the bar. Why do you drink it if you don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s a penance.’ They both laughed. The seriousness had gone. Now they were just talking. ‘Each day I have to say three Hail Marys, and drink at least three filthy coffees.’

  ‘It must have been a real serious sin.’

  ‘I’m a Jamaican who hates coffee. That’s not just serious, it should be mortal. But there’s no mortals these days are there, Jimmy? Nobody’s sin sends them to hell any more. Everything’s venial now, all little sins. The days of big sins and big sinners are over. Everybody gets forgiven ever since somebody discovered that God’s love is unconditional. You can’t deserve it, you can’t earn it, you get it whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Like fluoride in the water.’

  Danny laughed loudly.

  ‘Spot on. And if God’s love is unconditional his forgiveness has to be as well. So we all get forgiven whether we ask for it or not. Like fluoride in the water.’ Then the laughter died away. ‘Except that it isn’t like that, is it? Most people don’t want to think about whether they need forgiveness because they never look at themselves too closely. If they did they might not like what they see.’

  ‘Listen, it was nice of you to call but I’m a bit tired.’

  Danny got up.

  ‘Sure. I just popped round.’

  Jimmy got up and put out his hand.

  ‘Thanks, Danny. I’m sorry you’re packing it in.’

  ‘Look after yourself, Jimmy, and take care.’

  ‘I will. See you around.’

  Danny left and Jimmy closed the door behind him. He went back into the living room, picked up the phone, and dialled.

  ‘You get that meeting with the minister’s aide? Good, when is it? Pick me up. Never mind that, let me deal with it. I said I would. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. Just get me there, I’ll do the rest.’

  Jimmy put the phone down. Two days before the meeting to rest up and get ready then it was back to work. He went into the bedroom and drew the curtains and lay down on the bed. Danny’s visit had unsettled him, that was why he had bustled him out. What Danny was doing, what he had said, was too close to home. While his doubts all stayed in his head he could deal with them but Danny had laid them out for him and he could see that what was true for Danny was probably just as true for him. He lay still wondering whether, after this Cheng business was over, he’d go back to training or do like Danny and pack it in. His mind circled the question but not for long. He was tired and in a few minutes he was asleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘They won’t let you in. You can’t just walk into a government office and get a meeting with whoever you like.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Ricci had picked Jimmy up at 9.30 and was now driving through the mad Roman traffic. A passing car swerved in front of him. Ricci pumped the horn a couple of times, a reflex reaction. Everybody pumped the horn.

  ‘Just being with me won’t get you in. Being a police inspector doesn’t give me any pull. I’m not even a minor civil servant to these people.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Ricci drove on. If Jimmy wasn’t going to tell him he wasn’t going to tell him.

  ‘OK, have it your own way.’

  ‘Like you had it your way so I got no visitors?’

  Ricci gave him a quick, surprised look.

  ‘That wasn’t me, that was the hospital. At first they wouldn’t even le
t me in to see you but when they were sure you were out of danger and going to be OK they changed their minds and made me an exception. But they were right, if they hadn’t done it I would have seen to it. You’d been rambling. If you had visitors you might have said something.’

  They drove on in through the busy traffic. It was the big scooters that made Roman traffic different. All the bloody scooters in the world seemed to be on these roads and on cue a powerful black one, ridden by a woman whose leather-mixture jacket and pleated skirt clashed violently with her vivid yellow crash helmet, cut up a Suzuki rider who retaliated by revving up his big bike and roaring past her, causing shock waves of braking, swerving, and hooting. A Barbie girl in a tight white top, sunglasses, and jeans, with masses of curly black hair spilling from under her helmet calmly slid her scooter into the openings the manoeuvring caused. Then everything subsided back into the normal horn-laden chaos.

  Jimmy wondered why there were so few accidents. One day of this madness in London and the roads would be strewn with crash-helmeted corpses. But for Rome this was pure routine.

  Ricci pulled across the traffic and turned down a side street which in turn took them into a narrower street behind a big government building. On one side were the high, unlovely backs of the government offices and on the other, high blank brick walls. Warehouses, maybe, or factories, whatever they were they didn’t set a high premium on light, not on this side anyway. They came to an arched entrance originally designed for coach and horses, it was still big enough for a car or small van to get in, but nothing bigger. Ricci turned in and stopped. Immediately beyond the arch was a modern barrier blocking the access to a wide, deep, cobbled yard. Once this yard had rattled to coach wheels and horses’ hooves and would have had plenty of stabling adjacent to it. Today tyres made almost no noise and the stables were gone. In their place was a guardroom not dissimilar to the one behind the security fence at the Vatican. A soldier in army fatigues appeared from the low building; he had a clipboard in his hand and an automatic rifle slung round his shoulder. He came to the car. Another face watched them from the guardroom window. Ricci slid the window down, showed his ID, and gave his name. The guard took the ID, checked the photo, and checked Ricci. Then he checked his list, gave Ricci back his ID, and looked into the car at Jimmy. Ricci also looked.

  ‘OK, now what? Do you get us shot or what?’

  ‘Does he know who you’re here to see?’ Ricci nodded. ‘Then tell him you have an unscheduled visitor with you, give him my name, and ask him to OK it with your man inside. Tell him you apologise for not being able to give him any notice. Do it all slow and easy.’

  The soldier stood impassively, he may have understood what was said but if he did he didn’t register any kind of response. He just stood while Ricci spoke but a second guard came out of the hut and walked to where she had a clear field of fire at the car. Her automatic was in her hands but held, for the moment, casually. Ricci finished speaking and the guard went back into the hut. The other guard just stood in the same place but now she wasn’t holding her weapon so casually and the barrel was pointing at the car. After a few minutes Clipboard came back. He spoke to Ricci who turned to Jimmy.

  ‘He wants to see some ID. For God’s sake, say you’ve got some.’ Jimmy put his hand slowly into his inside jacket pocket, took out his passport, and passed it to Ricci who passed it on. The guard looked inside it, looked in at Jimmy, then he handed the passport back to Ricci, and said something to the other guard who didn’t respond but kept looking at the car. Ricci handed Jimmy his passport while the guard wrote something on the list on his clipboard. ‘He’s adding your name. He says to get a temporary pass inside at the reception desk.’

  The guard raised the barrier and they drove into a courtyard where a few cars were already parked and three bulk waste bins stood against a wall. As Jimmy got out of the car he wondered how they got emptied; the entrance would never take a refuse lorry big enough to handle them even assuming a refuse lorry could get down the narrow street as far as the entrance. The yard itself managed to retain some of the elegance of a bygone age, it was clean with three old stone troughs by the walls which had once watered horses but now acted as planters for well-tended displays. With a little imagination you could imagine carriages on the cobbles and liveried servants bustling about. But the back of the building was different. It was several storeys of grimed-over brickwork with small windows and festooned with cabling conduits. There were also several big, ugly air-conditioning boxes and plenty of black drain pipes. This was the side of the building where the waste came out and the likes of Jimmy and Ricci went in.

  They walked across the cobbles; the guard who had come out of the hut watched them all the way, the muzzle of her gun tracking them until they reached a heavy, black door. They went into the building, along a dim corridor with a bare stone floor, through another door into another corridor where the floor had some hard-wearing covering and better lighting, then through yet another door into what was obviously the main reception area.

  This was front-of-house where the people who mattered came and went. It was all style and elegance. The ceiling was high and elaborate. The floor was still stone, but now it was marble, inlaid with patterns. The two guards who stood not far from the entrance wore smart uniforms but both had their automatics in their hands and watched as Jimmy and Ricci were electronically swept by a civilian who had been by the door as they came in. Once they were waved on the guards lost interest. From the moment the car arrived at the barrier, and maybe before in the narrow street, they had been watched. It was the Vatican all over again but on a larger scale: everything looked Renaissance except the security which looked and felt very modern.

  Ricci led the way to a small desk where again he showed his ID and got checked off on a list. He clipped his pass to his jacket top pocket and began the business of getting a temporary pass for Jimmy. A phone call was made, the passport brought out again and taken away. There was the inevitable wait but finally Jimmy got his passport back, a pass was issued, and they crossed the hall to the lifts.

  Their man was on the third floor which made him important. His office was high enough to be out of the noise of the street but not so high that the rooms had become small. They walked down a thickly carpeted corridor and stopped at a door. Ricci knocked and they waited.

  ‘Knock again.’

  ‘He heard. He’ll tell us to come in when he’s ready. He’s probably pissed off for having to OK you without notice and then having to wait while we got your pass.’

  After a short while a voice called them in.

  It was a spacious, baroque room with large windows letting in plenty of light. From the ceiling there hung two elaborate chandeliers surrounded by roundels of delicate plasterwork. The rest of the ceiling was covered with a painting of well-fed, naked young ladies who were about to get up to naughty things with some small men who had pointed ears, pointed beards, and goats’ legs. The whole thing was framed at the walls by fancy, gilded plasterwork. In each corner of the plaster decoration were four, chubby, naked cherubs looking down and smiling broadly as if thoroughly amused by what was going on below. Things changed abruptly below the gilding. The walls were painted in a neutral colour and devoid of any decoration, no patterns, no pictures, no mirrors, only one severely elegant wall clock with a barely audible tick. The floor was also neutral, covered with a light-coloured carpet, the sort you put down if it wasn’t going to get trodden on by feet that saw a lot of street work. The few pieces of furniture were ultra-modern chic with two smallish abstract bronzes on chrome stands to add a dash of contemporary culture. It was all as if someone had wanted to make the strongest possible contrast with the ceiling which spoke of pleasure and dalliance during a time when office chic hadn’t existed and what interested artists was never abstract.

  Jimmy liked it all. It appealed, especially the centre-piece, a large desk with thick, chrome legs and a black, leather-covered top. It was all vaguely ridiculous and the cherubs,
he felt, still saw the funny side. The man behind the desk obviously didn’t. Either he was chewing a wasp or he was angry and about to let them know it.

  He rapped out something in Italian. Inspector Ricci’s voice was apologetic, almost humble.

  ‘Signor Costello speaks very poor Italian.’

  The minister’s aide looked at Jimmy. The wasp gave him trouble again. He should stop chewing it, thought Jimmy.

  ‘Sit down.’

  There were no chairs at the desk, only two either side of an incongruous, delicate wooden table that had a crystal vase of fresh flowers on it. They dutifully collected their chairs, put them in front of the desk, and sat down.

  The cut of the aide’s dark suit did its best to hide his chubbiness and was so expensive it almost succeeded. He had a fullish face and curly, fair hair. Jimmy pigeonholed him at once, real plaster-gilding material, pure Cinquecento, a bad-tempered cherub in a sharp suit, as vaguely ridiculous as the office which he fitted to perfection.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain, Inspector, why Mister Costello has to be present and without any notice?’

  It was Jimmy who answered.

  ‘Because as far as I’m concerned the investigation is over.’ The aide slowly turned his disapproving gaze. ‘Inspector Ricci doesn’t agree. I phoned him this morning and told him to pick me up and bring me so that I could tell you personally. Inspector Ricci made it clear that my coming unannounced was highly irregular and I almost certainly wouldn’t be admitted, but I insisted and threatened to withdraw completely from the investigation unless he brought me. So here I am.’

  The aide looked back to Ricci.

  ‘I am not satisfied, Inspector, that you have …’

  ‘It was the Chinese.’ The cherub’s eyes snapped back to Jimmy. ‘On the basis of the evidence we have been given and as a result of our own enquiries which have been as thorough as circumstances have allowed I have come to the conclusion that either Archbishop Cheng died of natural causes aggravated by many years of systematic ill-treatment or he was murdered by an agent of the Chinese government because he represented a threat to their internal security.’ Ricci looked down at the backs of his hands. They suddenly seemed to have a fascination for him. ‘There being no further information available to us I consider our investigation to be at an end. I am quite happy for Inspector Ricci to put in a dissenting report from my conclusions but my decision on this matter is final and I now consider the matter closed. I also consider that, having given my fullest cooperation, I am now free to return to my studies.’