A Season for the Dead

Eleven

The official quarters of Cardinal Michael Denney overlooked the Cortile di San Damaso, the sprawling private courtyard hidden from the outside world by the curving western wall of St. Peter’s Square.

The Vatican had not been built as a residence. Denney’s apartment was one of only two hundred or so created within the palace walls. On the far side of the square lay the residency of the Swiss Guard. In his own block, senior Vatican officials jostled for position to get the best view of the open space. His neighbors included some of the most powerful figures in the Holy See. The camerlengo, the Pope’s chamberlain, who would oversee the interregnum in the event of the pontiff’s death, was some way down the hall.

They rarely spoke these days. Denney was aware he had become persona non grata, a prisoner in a glittering cell. Sometimes he spent hours staring at the reflection of the paintings, the Murano chandeliers and the wall-length ormolu mirrors, waiting for the most menial of civil servants to return his call. All this must, he knew, change. A man could go mad in these circumstances.

The agents of that change were now assembled around the walnut dining table that sat by the long, eighteenth-century windows looking out onto the courtyard. It had taken him many weeks to persuade these three men to come to Rome and sit down together. Among them they represented a powerful trinity of interests which could, with a little persuasion and the right inducements, resurrect something from the shattered shell of the Banca Lombardia and with it a little of Michael Denney’s reputation. Sufficient, he hoped, to allow him to return home and live out the rest of his life in dignified obscurity.

Two of the men present he thought he could handle. Robert Aitcheson, the sour-faced American lawyer who oversaw corporate affairs for the bank from his base in the Bahamas, had as much reason as Denney to clear this thing up. The Feds were already on Aitcheson’s back, chasing up a hot money scam that came to light in the wake of the currency-laundering investigations introduced after September 11.

Aitcheson needed to get out of the heat. Arturo Crespi was in the same boat. Crespi was a diminutive pen-pushing banker who oversaw the movement of capital in and out of the web of funds that underpinned the bank. The Finance Ministry was asking too many questions of him already. Ostensibly, he was the bank president, although in everything he deferred to Denney, who had assembled the prolix network of offshore trusts piece by piece over the years from what had once been a legitimate, onshore financial enterprise. Crespi was weak and respectable. It suited Denney at the time. He had been instructed to get an above-average return on the money under his care. There had, he believed, been little choice, and, when they began, little in the way of legal obstruction either.

The third man stood by the window, peering down into the courtyard, sniffing from a summer cold. Emilio Neri was over six feet tall, a giant of a man in his mid-sixties, now beginning to run to flab. He had gray, lifeless eyes, a long, jutting jaw and a head of perfectly groomed silver hair. Today, as always, he wore an expensive suit: thin, pale-colored silk which now showed damp patches under the arms. He rarely smiled. He spoke only when he had something to say.

Neri was, from outward appearances, a successful Roman entrepreneur. He owned a palatial penthouse in the Via Giulia, a pretty young wife, three country houses and an apartment in New York. His name adorned the board of the Fenice Opera House in Venice, where he helped raise funds for its rebuilding, and any number of charitable organizations working with the Catholic poor.

Only once had his image as a man beyond reproach been questioned. It was in the mid-1970s when a radical press untouched by conventional party politics had existed in the city. A scurrilous reporter on a short-lived underground rag had published a portrait of Neri culled from police gossip. It was a story many recognized but few wished to acknowledge. The article told of his upbringing in Sicily as the son of a local Mafia don, his apprenticeship in the racketeering world of black-market tobacco and prostitution and his eventual emergence as a key liaison figure in the continuing dialogue between corrupt government, Church officials and the criminal state that lived then, as now, beneath the mundane façade of Italian society.

The article had accused Neri of nothing criminal. In a way, it was intended as a tribute to the man, who had genuinely come to be something of an art lover, was seen at all the right exhibitions, was always there, in his private box, at the opera and the ballet.

Three weeks after the magazine appeared its author was found in a car parked in a lane near Fiumicino airport. His eyes had been put out, probably by a man’s thumbs. His tongue had been ripped from his mouth. Every finger and both thumbs had been severed at the first socket with a knife. He survived, blind, dumb and unable, or unwilling, to try to communicate. The street gossip, which Denney later discovered was entirely accurate, claimed that Neri had performed his revenge personally in a warehouse he owned on the perimeter of the airport. He’d then, in front of the tortured journalist, changed into evening dress and flown by private plane to Venice to see Pavarotti in a new production of Turandot, after which he had attended the first-night party as an honored guest.

Denney, once he had come to know the man, wondered why he’d gone to all that trouble. Emilio Neri could have sucked the life out of another human being just by looking at him. Still, the papers wrote only about Neri’s charitable activities after that.

Denney watched Neri’s big back at the window, wondering what was going through his head. There was just one thing Neri wanted now: the return of the money he had placed in Denney’s hands. If that happened, they would, once again, be on the best of terms.

The door into the room opened. Brendan Hanrahan walked in carrying a tray with coffee on it. Throwing a mint into his mouth, Neri turned to stare at him.

“Don’t they provide you with servants anymore, Michael?” Neri asked.

“Just helping out,” Hanrahan interjected. “This is a private meeting, gentlemen. None of you wants to advertise your presence, I imagine.”

“As if anything’s secret in this place these days,” Neri sniffed.

He cast a glance out of the window and then at Denney. “I’m amazed you still have one of the best views in the place. The Church is going soft.”

“Shall we get down to business, gentlemen?” Aitcheson complained.

“I want to be on the ten o’clock plane out of here.”

“Agreed,” Crespi said.

Neri sat down at the table opposite the little banker, grinning at him. “Have you managed to replace that clerk of yours yet, Crespi? The one who talked himself to death.”

The little banker went white. “My people are trustworthy. Every one of them. I stake my word on it.”

“You’re staking more than that, my friend,” Neri said. “Enough. You know my position. You know my responsibilities. You people talk. Tell me why we’re here.”

“To get ourselves out of a hole,” Hanrahan said, and passed around copies of a single printed page.

Neri scanned the document. “Doesn’t say here when I get my money back.”

“Emilio,” Denney replied with as much pleasantry as he could muster. “I can’t work magic. We all want our money back. We can all get it, I think. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere. We have to rebuild.”

Aitcheson hadn’t been listening. His eyes were fixed on the paper. “There’s this much money still left? Why didn’t I hear of this before?”

Crespi threw up his hands. “We’ve been liquidating assets for eighteen months. Quietly. Privately. Sometimes… We didn’t know if we’d get paid. I didn’t want to raise anyone’s hopes unnecessarily. This is all very complex, gentlemen. We had so many accounts. In so many places. I couldn’t tell you about all of them, my friend. I would have bored you rigid. And for what? You wanted to know what the return was. Not where it was coming from.” He stole a glance at Neri.

“That was all anyone wanted. It’s one reason we’re in this mess in the first place.”

Neri now seemed interested in the paper. “Who else knows about this money? Where is it exactly?”

“No one outside this room.” Hanrahan looked Neri in the face. “No offense but we’ve been too lax with our secrets already. Where it is, that’s my business.”

Some $3 billion had been seized by the United States authorities alone, on the basis of tax evasion and money laundering. It infuriated Denney. Had that remained undiscovered, he could have weathered the storm. Crespi’s feverish bid to liquidate what assets he could find and shift the funds into new, undiscovered accounts had, at least, offered him a lifeline. If only Aitcheson and Neri could be persuaded to grasp this.

“So we’re not paupers,” Neri said. “I walk into this room thinking this was money down the drain. Now you tell me there’s, what, sixty, seventy million dollars out there we can lay our hands on. How did this come about?”

“You don’t want to know,” Hanrahan said with a scowl.

“We have,” added Denney, “worked very hard. We’ve had to persuade people, induce them, get them to see our point of view. It’s not been easy.”

Neri sniffed into his hand. “I heard you’d been spending a lot of money. The price of a Rome whore’s gone up ten percent in the last six months, Michael. Was that your doing?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“And none of this for yourself? To get you safe passage out of this place, back to America?”

Denney’s hand stole across the table and gripped Neri’s arm. The large man stared balefully back.

“Emilio,” Michael Denney said, “I did this for us. We can be back in business. We can put some new people in place. Let them talk to the banking authorities. Let them run the risks. We just stay behind the scenes and pull the strings, as we should have done all along. This has been a learning experience for all of us. We come out of it stronger. Richer. More powerful. And in the end, yes, I can walk out of here. I can go back to America a free man because we’ll have a whole new field of people in our debt.”

Neri smiled and looked at Aitcheson. “You hear this? We’re building a new bank. And all it takes is sixty, seventy million dollars.”

“Not enough,” Aitcheson grumbled. “You know that.”

They hadn’t said no. They were interested. Denney could feel it.

They had the light of greed in their eyes. “So we raise more. We still have the contacts. They still have the need. Lombardia wasn’t brought down by us. We were the victims of the markets and laws that didn’t even exist when we first went into business. We wipe the slate clean, we start again, we stay one step ahead of the pack.”

Denney paused, to give what came next some theatrical effect. “It requires some investment on our own part. Personally I’ll throw every last cent I have into the pot. That’s a lot of money. All my money. Whatever you want to come in with, that’s your decision. We know this business, gentlemen. We’re extremely good at it. The best. We’re needed out there.”

Neri laughed, a big deep sound, and clapped Denney on the shoulder.

“You mean this, Michael? We’re back in business. What a salesman. What a guy.”

“We’re back in business,” Denney repeated.

Hanrahan’s phone rang. He answered it. His face went dark. Then he made an excuse and left the room.

“What do you think?” Denney asked the three men, unable to stop himself stealing a glance out of the window, thinking of the world beyond.