Day of Confession Read online

HARRY COULD SEE only from his right eye. And that was more shadow than image. His left eye had no feeling or sight whatsoever. His other senses told him that he was outside and being walked across a hard surface by, he thought, two men. Somewhere he had the vaguest memory of sitting on a stool or something like it, of taking directions and saying words out loud that were spoken to him through an earphone by the same voice that had spoken to him before. He remembered that only because of the fuss someone else had made about fitting the device in his ear. Most of the argument was in Italian. But part had been fought in English. It was the wrong size. It wouldn’t work. It would show.

  Abruptly a male voice beside him spoke sharply in Italian—the same man, he thought, who had argued about the earphone while trying to fit it. A moment later, a hand shoved him from behind and he nearly stumbled. His recovery cleared his thoughts enough to tell him that while his hands were still bound behind him, his feet had been freed. He was walking on his own, and he thought he could hear traffic. His mind cleared to another level, telling him that if he could walk, he could run. The hand shoved him again. Hard. And he fell, crying out as he hit the ground and felt his face scrape the pavement. He tried to roll over, but a foot stamped on his chest, holding him there. Somewhere nearby came the sound of a man straining, then there was a clank, and he heard something heavy, like iron scraping stone, sliding past his ear. Then he was lifted up by his shoulders and put over an edge. His feet touched steel and he was forced down the rungs of a ladder. Instantly what little light there was faded, and stench dominated everything.

  A second male voice farther off cursed and then echoed. There was the sound of rushing water. The smell was overpowering. And then Harry knew. He’d been brought into the sewer. An exchange came in Italian.

  “Prepararsi?”

  “Si.”

  Harry felt a jarring between his wrists. There was a snap, and his hands came free.

  CLICK. The unmistakable metallic sound of a gun being cocked.

  “Sparagli. “Shoot him.

  In reflex reaction Harry stepped backward, throwing his hands in front of his face.

  “Sparagli!”

  Immediately there was a thundering explosion. Something slammed into his hand. Then his head. The force threw him backward into the water.

  Harry did not see the face of the gunman who stepped over him. Or of the other man who held the flashlight. Harry did not see what they saw; the enormous volume of blood covering the left side of his face, matting his hair, a trickle of it washing away in the flow of water.

  “Morto,” a voice whispered.

  “Si.”

  The gunman knelt down and rolled Harry’s body over the edge into a deeper, faster rush of water, then watched as it floated away.

  “I topi faranno it resto.”

  The mice will finish it.

  24

  The Questura, police headquarters.

  HARRY ADDISON SAT THERE, A BANDAGE OVER his left temple, dressed in the off-white polo shirt, jeans, and aviator sunglasses he wore when he left the Hotel Hassler at little after one-thirty yesterday afternoon. Nearly thirty hours earlier.

  The fifteen-second video of the fugitive Harry Addison had come anonymously to Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, the press office of the Holy See, at 3:45 that afternoon, with a request it be sent immediately to the pope. Instead it had been put on a shelf and not opened until approximately 4:50. Immediately it had been sent to Farel’s office and, after being viewed by a junior staff member, sent to Farel himself. By six o’clock Farel, Gruppo Cardinale prosecutor Marcello Taglia, Roscani, along with Castelletti and Scala, the homicide detectives assigned to Pio’s murder, and a half dozen others were sitting in the dark of a video room viewing it together.

  “Danny, I’m asking you to come in…. To give yourself up.” Harry spoke in English, and an interpreter from Roscani’s office translated into Italian.

  As far as they could tell, Harry was sitting on a wooden stool in a darkened room, alone. The wall behind him appeared to be covered with a textured and patterned wallpaper. That and Harry, his dark glasses, and the bandage on his forehead were all that was visible.

  “They know everything…. Please, for me…. Come in… please…. Please…“There was a pause and Harry’s head started to come up as if to say something more, then the tape abruptly ended.

  “Why wasn’t I told the priest might still be alive?” Roscani looked at Taglia and then Farel as the lights came up.

  “I learned of it only moments before this video was brought to my attention,” Farel said. “The incident happened yesterday, when the American asked that the casket be opened, and when it was, swore the remains were not those of his brother…. It could be the truth, it could be a lie…. Cardinal Marsciano was there. He felt the American was emotionally overwrought. It was only this afternoon, when he learned of the circumstances of Pio’s death, he sent Father Bardoni to tell me.”

  Roscani got up and crossed the room. He was irritated. This was something he should have been told of immediately. Besides, there was no love lost between him and Farel.

  “And you and your people have no idea where the video came from.”

  Farel’s eyes locked on Roscani’s and stayed there. “If we knew, Ispettore Capo, we would have done something about it, don’t you think?”

  Taglia, slim and dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, and with a bearing that suggested an aristocratic upbringing, intervened and spoke for the first time.

  “Why would he do it?”

  “Ask for the casket to be opened?” Farel looked to Taglia.

  “Yes.”

  “From what I was told he was overcome with feeling; he wanted to see his brother to tell him good-bye…. Blood runs deep, even with murderers…. Then when he saw the body was not Father Daniel, he reacted in surprise, without thinking.”

  Roscani came back across the room, working to ignore Farel’s abrasiveness. “Suppose that’s true and he made a mistake—why, a day later, does he assume the man is still alive and beg him to come forward? Especially when he’s wanted for murder himself?”

  “It’s a gamble,” Taglia said. “They’re worried that if he is alive, what he might reveal if he is caught. They have his brother call him in so they can kill him.”

  “This same brother who so emotionally asked to look at a hideous corpse now wants to kill him?”

  “Maybe that was the reason.” Farel sat back in his chair. “Maybe it was more calculated than it appears. Maybe he had a sense that everything was not as it seemed.”

  “Then why did he say so out loud? Father Daniel was officially dead. Why didn’t he leave it that way? It’s not likely the police would search for a dead man. If he were alive, he could have gone after him quietly.”

  “But where to look?” Taglia said. “Why not let the police help find him?”

  Roscani shook a cigarette from a pack and lit it. “But they send the video to the pope instead of here. Why? There’s been enough publicity, they know who we are.”

  “Because,” Farel said, “they want it released to the media. Gruppo Cardinale might do it, they might not. By sending the video to the Holy Father, they hoped he would intervene personally. Ask me to pressure you to release it. All of Italy knows how shocked and horrified he was by the cardinal vicar’s murder and how much it would mean to him to have his assassin caught and brought to justice.”

  “And did he ask you?” Roscani said.

  “Yes.”

  Roscani stared at Farel for a moment, then walked off.

  “We have to assume they’ve calculated the odds,” Farel continued, ignoring Roscani. “They know if we choose not to give it to the media, we would be losing a major chance to have the public help us fish for him. If we do, and he is alive and sees the story on television or reads about it in the newspapers and decides to do what his brother asks, we might very well get to him before they do. Thereby giving him the chance to tell us the very thing they are so concerned about.”


  “Evidently it is a chance they are willing to take,” Taglia said.

  “Evidently…” Putting out his cigarette, Roscani let his eyes wander from Taglia to Farel and then to Castelletti, Scala, and the others.

  “There is one other concern.” Farel stood up, buttoning his suit coat. “If the media are given the video, we must provide a photograph of the priest and, more significantly, details of what, until now, has been highly confidential… the Vatican cleric who murders a Roman cardinal…. I have consulted with secretariat of state Cardinal Palestrina, and he agrees that no matter the pope’s personal feelings, if this becomes public, the Holy See will be exposed to a scandal unknown for decades. And at a time when the Church’s influence is quite the opposite of hugely popular.”

  “We’re talking about murder.” Roscani was looking directly at the Vatican policeman.

  “Be respectful of your personal passions, Ispettore Capo. You will remember that they, among other things, were why you were not selected to head the investigation.” Farel stared at Roscani for a long moment, then turned to Taglia.

  “I am confident you will make the right decision…”

  With that, he walked out.

  25

  ONCE AGAIN ROSCANI HAD TO WORK TO IGNORE Farel. The Vatican policeman was gruff, direct, abrasive when it suited him, putting the Holy See before anything else, as if it and only it had any stake here. It was what you got when you dealt with him, especially if you were from a police force outside his control, and if you were, like Roscani, a person far more introspective, and a great deal less political. Roscani’s daily life was devoted to grinding it out and doing the best job he possibly could, whatever it was and whatever it took. It was an attribute he’d learned from his father—a taskmaster and maker and seller of leather goods who had died of a heart attack in his own shop at eighty while trying to move a hundred-pound anvil; the same attribute that he tried to instill in his sons.

  So, if you were like that and you realized it, you did your best to disregard people like Farel altogether, and devote your energies to things more positive and useful to what you were doing. Like Scala’s comment after Farel had gone, about what they had seen on the video, pointing out the bandage on Harry Addison’s forehead and suggesting that most probably he had been injured when Pio’s car collided with the truck. If so, and if a medical professional had treated him and they could find that person, it would give them a direction the man had gone.

  And Castelletti, not to be outdone, had picked up the videocassette itself and written down the manufacturer and manufacturer’s batch code number printed on the back. Who knew where a trace like that could go, what it might turn up? Manufacturer, to wholesaler, to a store chain, to a certain store, to a clerk who might remember selling it to someone in particular.

  And then the meeting was over, with the room emptying of everyone but Roscani and Taglia, Taglia with a decision to make, Roscani to hear it.

  “You want to give the video to the media. And, like the TV show America’s Most Wanted, let the public help us find them,” Taglia said softly.

  “Sometimes it works.”

  “And sometimes it drives fugitives farther from sight…. But there are other considerations. What Farel was talking about. The delicate nature of the whole thing. And the diplomatic implications that could rise between Italy and the Vatican…. The pope may wish one thing personally, but Farel did not mention Cardinal Palestrina without reason…. He is the real keeper of the Vatican flame and how the world views the Holy See.”

  “In other words, diplomatically, scandal is worse than murder. And you are not going to release the video.”

  “No, we are not—Gruppo Cardinale will continue to treat the hunt for fugitives as classified and confidential. All pertinent files will continue to be protected.” Taglia stood. “I’m sorry, Otello…. Buona sera.”

  “Buona sera…”

  The door closed behind Taglia, and Roscani was left alone. Frustrated, emasculated. Maybe, he thought, his wife was right. For all his dedication, the world was neither just nor perfect. And there was little he could do to change it. What he could do, however, was to stop railing so hard against it; something that would make his life and his family’s a little easier. But the reality was that he could do as little to change himself as he could the world. He had become a policeman because he did not want to go into his father’s business and because he had just been married and wanted stability before starting a family, and because the profession itself had seemed both exciting and noble.

  But then something else had happened: victims’ lives began to touch his on an everyday basis, lives torn apart, ripped often irreparably by senseless violence and intrusion. His promotion to homicide made it worse: for some reason, he began to see the murdered, whatever their age, not so much as themselves but as someone’s children—his own, at three or four or eight or twelve—each deserving to live life to its end without such terrible and vicious interruption. In that, Cardinal Parma was as much a mother’s son as Pio had been. It made finding the guilty all the more imperative. Get them before they did it again. But how often had he gotten them, only to have the courts, for one reason or another, let them go? It had driven him to rail against injustice, within the law or without. He was fighting an unwinnable war, but the thing was, he kept fighting anyway. And maybe the reason he did was simply that he was his father’s son and, like him, had grown up to be a bulldog.

  Abruptly, Roscani reached out and picked up the TV’s remote, then pointed it at the large-screen television. There was a click as it came on. He hit REWIND and then PLAY and watched the video again. Saw Harry on the stool, watched him talk behind dark glasses.

  “Danny, I’m asking you to come in…. To give yourself up…. They know everything…. Please, for me…. Come in… please…. Please…”

  Roscani saw Harry pause at the end, then start to say something more just as the tape itself ended. He hit REWIND once more and played it again. And then again. And again. The more he watched, the more he felt the anger build inside him. He wanted to look up and see Pio come through the door, smiling and easy as always, talking about his family, asking Roscani about his. Instead he saw Harry, Mr. Hollywood in sunglasses, sitting on a stool, begging his own brother to give himself up so that he could be killed.

  CLICK.

  Roscani shut off the television. In the semidarkness the thoughts came back. He didn’t want them to, but they did. How he would kill Harry Addison when he got him. And there was no doubt at all that he would get him.

  CLICK.

  He turned the TV back on and lit a cigarette, forcefully blowing out the match afterward. He couldn’t allow himself to think like that. He wondered how his father would have reacted if he had been in his place.

  Distance was what he needed. And he got it by playing the tape again. And once more. And once more after that. Forcing himself to watch it coldly, analytically, the experienced policeman looking for the smallest piece of something that would help.

  The more he watched, the more two things began to intrigue him—the textured, patterned wallpaper barely visible behind Harry; and what happened just before the end, when Harry’s head started to come up with his mouth open as if to say something more, but he never did because the tape finished. Sliding a small notebook from his jacket, he made a note.

  —Have video image computer enhanced/wallpaper.

  —Have English-speaking lip reader analyze unspoken word(s).

  REWIND.

  PLAY.

  Roscani hit the MUTE button and watched in silence. When it was finished, he did the same thing and watched it again.

  26

  Rome. The Vatican Embassy to Italy,Via Po. Same time.

  IN THEIR FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE SINCE the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome, the pope’s remaining men of trust—Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, Cardinal Joseph Matadi, Monsignor Fabio Capizzi, and Cardinal Nicola Marsciano—mixed freely with the members of t
he Council of Ministers of the European Union, who were in Rome for a meeting on economic relations with emerging nations, and who had been invited to an informal cocktail party given by Archbishop Giovanni Bellini, the apostolic nuncio to Italy.

  Of the four it was the Vatican secretariat of state, the sixty-two-year-old Palestrina, who seemed most at ease. Dressed not in the clerical garments the others wore but in a simple black suit with white Roman collar, and unmindful of the plainclothes Swiss Guards watching the room, the cardinal moved affably from one guest to the next, chatting energetically with each.

  Palestrina’s size alone—two hundred and seventy pounds over a six-foot seven-inch frame—turned heads. But it was the unexpected intensity of the rest of him—the grace with which he moved, his broad smile and riveting gray eyes under an unruly shock of stone-white hair, the iron grip of his hand as he took yours, addressing you directly and most often in your own language—that so took you off guard.

  To watch him work the room, and revel in it—renewing old friendships, making new ones, then moving on to the next, made him seem more a politician on the stump than the second-most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet it was as a representative of that Church, of the pope himself, that he and the others were here, their presence, even in the shadow of grave tragedy, speaking for itself, reminding all that the Holy See was tirelessly and unremittingly committed to the future of the European Community.

  Across the room, Cardinal Marsciano turned from the representative of Denmark and glanced at his watch.

  7:50

  Looking up, he saw Swiss investment banker Pierre Weggen enter the room. With him—and immediately causing a turn of heads and a very noticeable drop in the conversation level across the room—were Jiang Youmei, the Chinese ambassador to Italy, his foreign minister, Zhou Yi, and Yan Yeh, the president of the People’s Bank of China. The People’s Republic of China and the Vatican did not have official diplomatic relations, and had not since the Communist takeover of China in 1949, yet here were its two ranking diplomats to Italy and one of the new China’s most influential business leaders striding into the Vatican Embassy in public view with Weggen.