Gospel Truths

by J. G. Sandom

  “Very neat.”

  “Yes, very. Of course, not everyone cooperated. There’s one report in the file which concerns a Roman magistrate who was persuaded by his local priest to abandon the I Four and testify against Scarcella and the rest. Two days before the trial, the magistrate’s youngest daughter—only twelve years old—was kidnapped by a group of Scarcella’s men, one of whom we later arrested. That’s how we got the story.” The Lemur folded his fingers together under his chin, and leaned closer to Lyman.

  “According to the informant, they took the girl to a house which they had rented near a town called Terracina, halfway between Naples and Rome, on the coast. Not just any house, mind you. Scarcella was very particular about these kinds of things. It had to be in the suburbs. It could never be too close to a neighbor, in case they heard the screams. But the walls had to be thin enough to hear through.” The Lemur sighed. “Well, they found the perfect place, apparently. As was his practice, Scarcella went upstairs and locked himself in a bedroom. He usually preferred a small room; never the master bedroom. His men, meanwhile, took the girl into the bedroom next door, where they proceeded to rape and sodomize her repeatedly for over an hour until she lost consciousness. I’ll spare you the grim details. I’m sure it will suffice if I tell you that the leader of this crew had a peculiar talent with a razor.

  “No one ever knew what Scarcella did by himself in the room next door. Somehow or other, he always heard or sensed when his victims were hovering near death, for he would suddenly appear in the doorway. The report states he was impeccably dressed on these occasions, and this night was no exception. Everyone stood aside when he came in. Scarcella walked over to the bed where the girl lay. She was barely conscious by this time. Conscious enough to be afraid, though. Conscious enough to cry out, apparently, as Scarcella pulled the pin out of the rose he was sporting on his lapel. He just stood there over her, the flower in one hand and that bloody straight pin in the other, watching her cower on the bedsheets. Then he leaned forward, turned the rose round in his fingers, and stuffed it into her mouth, stem first, as if he were planting it inside her. That’s all he did. He left immediately thereafter, and drove straight back to Rome.”

  The Lemur leaned back in his chair. “Needless to say, the girl’s father, the magistrate, never testified, and Scarcella was acquitted.

  “It was just about this time that Scarcella recruited Pontevecchio. Despite their different backgrounds, both men shared a fascist sensibility, an inordinate fear of communism, and a respect for secret power. In some ways, it was almost inevitable that they should have become partners. They offered each other so much.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The girl, the one you were just talking about.”

  “As I recall, she bled to death.” He shook his head. “Are you listening, Lyman? Pay attention, please! Marco Scarcella delivered the I Four, his political protection, and his close connection to several Latin American regimes. And in return Pontevecchio supplied the money from Banco Fabiano, and the cover of the IOR—the discreet banking services and protecting arms of the good Archbishop Grabowski. Together the three men made millions, secretly controlling both the Italian government and much of the press, bribing or killing anyone who got in their way. It was a marriage made in heaven, or almost, anyway.”

  The Lemur began to stare out of the window. It was as if he thought that Lyman needed just a few more seconds to compile the information, like the computer on his desk.

  “Two events,” the Lemur added suddenly, “brought this unholy alliance to an end. The first was the exposure of Scarcella’s I Four. And the second, the collapse of Pontevecchio’s Banco Fabiano.

  “In the spring of 1989,” he explained, “a French suspect revealed that Scarcella had helped finance a heroin factory near Florence, Italy. A detachment of guardia di finanza was ordered to investigate, but by the time they arrived Scarcella had already disappeared. Tipped off, I’m sure. They found nothing in his Tuscan villa. But at the offices of the local Perma Mattress factory, just a few miles away, they unearthed a list of almost one thousand I Four members. In one day the secret Masonic Lodge was stripped of its most powerful attraction—it wasn’t secret any longer. Scarcella escaped to South America.”

  “Is that where he is now?” Lyman asked.

  The Lemur raised an eyebrow. “No, thank God. He was spotted in May last year, in France, one month before Pontevecchio was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge. But the French gendarmerie let him get away. Then last September he flew to Switzerland, where he was arrested trying to withdraw some fifty-five million dollars from an account suspected of being connected to the Banco Fabiano scandal. He’s tucked away in Champ Dollon prison now, near Geneva. The chief superintendent wants you to try and arrange an interview, but as far as I’m concerned, it probably isn’t worth the ticket. Scarcella won’t talk to anyone.”

  “Is that so?”

  “The collapse of Fabiano happened almost simultaneously,” the Lemur added peevishly, “resulting in the largest financial scandal in banking history. I don’t remember all of the details. There are précis in the files, newspaper clippings and the like. That’s your job, anyway.”

  He looked up. “But it was really just a matter of time for Salvatore Pontevecchio. The financial hole at his Banco Fabiano grew larger and larger, until one day there was no more money left to transfer. Archbishop Grabowski pleaded ignorance, denying the IOR’s responsibility, despite the fact that the companies in which Pontevecchio had invested were owned primarily by the Church. When the statements and bank papers were finally unraveled, it appeared that the hundreds of millions of dollars embezzled from Fabiano had simply disappeared.” The Lemur smiled darkly. “Pontevecchio had already been to jail during an earlier scandal. It was there he tried to kill himself the first time. He knew what it was like.”

  Lyman looked down once again at the photograph of the Italian banker, the bulging eyes, the skin puffed up around the nylon noose. “So Pontevecchio fled to London, is that it?”

  “That’s right. In June, last year,” the Lemur said.

  “Where he tried to kill himself again, except that this time he succeeded?”

  “That’s what the inquest ruled, and I happen to agree. For a change. It’s your job to see if it was something else.”

  “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  Lyman leaned forward in his chair, hunching his shoulders like the pincers of a crab. “I mean, why not Brazil or Argentina? What did Pontevecchio hope to gain in London?”

  “Really, Lyman. Shall I lead you by the nose through all of this? According to another Mason named Angelo Balducci—who was his escort into London—Pontevecchio was trying to arrange a meeting with the Opus Dei, a wealthy right-wing Catholic group.”

  “What for?”

  “To save himself, presumably. To ask for absolution, for money, for another chance. How should I know? Balducci was arrested last year on charges of smuggling. But he claims he only helped Pontevecchio get into the country, and he has a perfect alibi.”

  The superintendent began to reassemble the files before him. “Pontevecchio’s wife, who’s now living in America, reported that he telephoned her just before his death and told her everything would be all right, that he had found something wonderful and that Archbishop Grabowski would finally have to honor his financial responsibilities. Pontevecchio was clearly on the edge, and tilting. His bank had collapsed into that hole, now one point three billion dollars wide. Scarcella would no longer protect him. Pontevecchio was a public failure, exposed. They’d dug him up, like a grub in a spadeful of earth, and he couldn’t take the light.” The Lemur slapped the top file loudly. “Justice, Lyman. What we’re paid to mete out, hard and true.”

  “I thought that was the courts’ prerogative.”

  “Don’t get cheeky, Lyman. This is our second go on this one, the second inning.”

  Isn’
t that what Cocksedge had called it, Lyman thought—a second inning?

  “Just do your standard plodding job of it and we’ll all be friends again. We’ll leave young Crosley in the customary files. Welcome aboard.”

  The Lemur pushed the rest of the papers across the desk. Then he picked up the telephone and swiveled his chair away. The briefing was over.

  Lyman eyed the superintendent closely. He did not feel offended by the briefing’s sudden termination, but he was nettled by the Lemur’s gracelessness. It would take little imagination to force a conversation on his secretary, yet the superintendent sat there without speaking, the receiver poised a fraction of an inch from his perfect, tiny ear.

  Lyman gathered up the files and headed out the door. The corridor was filling up. It would be lunchtime soon and the world was washing up, or making plans, or working through it once again.

  If Pontevecchio had died in some hotel, Lyman thought, in another part of London, the case would have gone to Scotland Yard, to the Metropolitan Police. But instead he’d hanged himself, or been the victim of a murder, beneath Blackfriars Bridge. In the public view. In that one square mile which marked the province of the City of London Police. And yet the job seemed like a task best left to Interpol. Lyman sighed. What did he know about Italian Masonry, or finance for that matter? Why wasn’t the chief inspector in on this one? The job demanded special skills.

  Lyman pushed the button for the lift and wished himself back to the Brass Monkey, the slow thick shadows of the pub which he had frequented so often as a young policeman back in Hampshire. He tried to visualize the glassy chalk stream of the River Itchen out the window, balanced precariously on the backs of trout, the female bulging of St. Catherine’s Hill, its Saxon ditch and rampart gathering the errant trees into a single copse of green, the ancient oaks and poplars rocking him to sleep a hundred feet above the ground, curled like a question mark about the moving branches. Sometimes he thought of going back to Winchester. But they had built a motorway around the Hill, and half his family and friends had died or moved away. There was little point in going back, almost as little as in reminiscing.

  The lift arrived and Lyman stepped in. It was nearly full. He turned his back to the crowd. Someone was wearing a florid perfume. It smelt like jasmine and Lyman thought about Dotty Taylor, the way her thighs had come together at the top and formed a triangle of light as she had walked away from him into the bathroom to wash up. It had only been twelve nights, twelve nights and thirteen days.

  The doors creaked open once again, this time preceded by the clapping of a hidden bell. A young woman bundled in a scarf and raincoat stared expectantly into the lift. “Going down?” she asked.

  No one answered, and for a moment Lyman heard the question as if it had been meant for him alone, a grim indictment of the last years of his life. The doors closed just as suddenly and the woman in the raincoat disappeared.

  Dotty Taylor wasn’t what he needed, Lyman thought. Cocksedge had been right. Work was the answer. He had to climb back on again, but his hands were loath and cold.

  Chapter III

  HASLEMERE

  August 18th, 1991

  THE DARK BLUE TR4 LUNGED ACROSS THE CROWDED motorway, trying to force a space between a Jaguar and a two-ton lorry. Inside the car, Lyman kept one hand on the wheel and the other on a tattered road map in his lap. He had never been to this part of Surrey before, but he knew the turn to Haslemere was fast approaching. Beside him, his dead son’s mongrel, George, stood with his nose half out the window, barking and chomping at the wind.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, George, shut up.” Lyman nudged him with his elbow but the animal remained transfixed. His fur was knotted and thick, the color of day-old snow.

  Part Corgi and part unknown, he had indecisive ears that drooped and stood erect and drooped again as he sniffed the air outside the window.

  The road curved. Lyman passed another car, and found himself within the current of a roundabout. The road signs seemed unnaturally small, pointing at the oddest angles as if they had been turned by vandals in the night. He glimpsed the one for Haslemere too late. The tires of the Triumph squealed, George barked, and Lyman swung the car around the roundabout again.

  It took him another twenty minutes before he reached the country road which, according to his map, would bring him to the house of former Superintendent Hadley. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds. A wind blew from the west across the fields, bending the hedgerows, tilting the trees. He passed a dairy farm and suddenly there it was, the lane which Hadley had described that morning with punctilious detail.

  The house was nestled in a little valley lush with rhododendron bushes. It was a large, neo-Tudor structure with bright white plaster walls and heavy wooden crossbeams. Lyman pulled his car up to the front and turned the motor off. At the rear of the house he could see a conservatory, and beyond that a kind of sunken garden full of rosebushes. He opened the door, mindful not to let the dog out in his wake, and headed for the entrance.

  The former superintendent appeared in the open doorway, his hand extended in a greeting. “Nigel,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. I was expecting you much earlier.”

  Lyman frowned. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “The roads are absolutely jammed.”

  “None of that now.”

  “Pardon?”

  “No more sirs and superintendents left for me. Given all that up. It’s Squire Hadley now.” He laughed.

  Lyman tried to smile.

  “Just call me Tim. I was only joking, Lyman.”

  “Yes, sir. Tim.” George barked from the car and Lyman rolled his eyes. “Damn dog.”

  “Well, let him out, man,” Hadley said as he bounded from the entrance. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with thinning black hair and cavernous green eyes. He had been in an auto accident as a child, and still carried the scars along his cheeks—deep-set and knotted purple lines which made his face seem more dramatic than grotesque. Perhaps it was the emerald eyes. Or perhaps it was the smile, so china perfect. Hadley opened the car door and George escaped with a growl.

  “I was afraid he’d muck up your garden,” Lyman said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Good for the soil. You should see how much I pay for dung each year.” Hadley looked up at the sky. “Why don’t we walk for a bit,” he said. “I’d invite you in but the Mrs. isn’t feeling up to visitors.”

  “Of course.”

  Hadley grinned again and Lyman thought that it had been a long time since he’d seen him smile that way. And there it was again, twice in a day, in a moment.

  There had been a time once, Lyman remembered, soon after his arrival on the force, when he and Hadley had almost become friends. Hadley—then only a chief inspector—had taken the country constable under his wing, at first no doubt to share in the warm glow of the reporters’ cameras whenever they came to interview the man who had caught the infamous College Killer.

  But after a while, the more they worked together, the more they found they had in common. Hadley frequently assigned the young inspector to his cases, tutoring him with care, introducing him to his most reliable informers. And so it was that in the first year of his tenure with the City of London Police, Lyman solved more crimes than anyone of his rank in the history of the department.

  Then something happened that Lyman had never really understood. Hadley was promoted to superintendent, and almost overnight he withdrew from everyone with whom he had hitherto shared his life, including Lyman. It was as if the previous years had only been a preparation for this inevitable ascension. He joined a different set of clubs. He bought a bigger car. He moved into another flat, in a different part of town. He met the woman who would soon be Mrs. Hadley. “Butterflies don’t mix with caterpillars,” they said around the office.

  Five months later Hadley was assigned to the Pontevecchio case. And then, upon completion of the inquest, the brand-new superintendent astounded everyone with the news that he was going to r
etire, ten years before his time. His wife had come into some money, it was said, and he planned to buy a house in Surrey and raise flowers.

  Others were less kind, insisting that the superintendent had been sacked, the victim of a power play with Cocksedge. Informal parties were arranged to bid him bon voyage. Lyman had attended these religiously, but each time he had tried to tell the superintendent what a debt of gratitude he felt, Hadley had only shaken his head and pulled away.

  In a few weeks, Hadley was forgotten practically by everyone. It was his job now that concerned them, the struggle to fill the impending vacuum. Some said the Lemur was the obvious replacement. After all, Randall had seniority, and a fine record of arrests. But he was not well liked. Others insisted Lyman had a chance.

  In truth, Lyman had never really cared about the race. He liked his job just as it was, and he did not fancy the idea of spending his career behind a desk on the fifth floor. So when he finally heard the news of Randall’s imminent promotion, he felt relieved that he had not been chosen, although one thing distressed him. They said that the deciding vote against him had been cast by Superintendent Hadley; it was his last official act.

  Lyman and Hadley crossed the driveway and headed round the house toward the conservatory. Neither of them had spoken for several minutes when suddenly Hadley said, “So what exactly do you want to know, about the case I mean?”

  Lyman was looking at a bed of heather. The lavender branches were thick with tiny spines. “I thought perhaps that you might…I don’t know, fill in the empty spaces.”