A Season for the Dead

Fifty-Four

Greta Ricci stood with the rest of the pack outside the main Vatican gate, eyeing the Swiss Guards in their blue uniforms, steadily becoming more and more convinced someone was playing them for fools.

The men on duty looked half bored, half amused. Greta couldn’t believe for one moment that the event they were expecting—an event that would make the news bulletins throughout the world—was about to happen here, in front of two dumb-looking would-be cops. The Vatican surely had other plans. Maybe they were using the helipad at the back, unseen. Maybe they were taking him out of one of the small exits in the wall which led to the Viale Vaticano at the rear, or putting him on a private train at the Vatican Station, behind St. Peter’s.

She was with Toni, the stupid teenage photographer from Naples who had been attached to her side since the story broke. He was never the most fragrant of youths at the best of times. Days and nights of constant stakeouts and itinerant sieges had given him the odor of a street bum. Which Greta Ricci believed she could have handled were it not for his manifest incompetence. Toni was six feet tall and extraordinarily well built. His strategy for getting the best picture consisted of waiting for the moment, then fighting his way to the front of the pack and elbowing himself into position for the shot.

This lent, she was forced to admit, a certain graphic immediacy to his work, which almost always appeared, with some justification, to have been taken from the inside of a brawl. But it made him useless as a journalistic colleague. He looked for nothing except the emergence of an opportunity. He had no flair for creativity beyond the raw muscle of the snatched shot, no talent for seeing that pictures must sometimes be made, not merely captured. He was a chimp with a rapid-fire Nikon, hoping that somewhere among the scores of frames he’d captured a memorable image would emerge.

Her mobile phone rang. She scowled at Toni, eyes fixed straight ahead, straining on the two smirking guards at the gate.

“Don’t,” she ordered, stabbing a finger into his back, “look away for an instant. Understand?”

He nodded. He didn’t have a sense of humor either.

“Ricci,” she snapped into the phone, walking away from the herd to get some peace and a little silence. Then she walked a little faster, a little farther, when she heard who it was.

“Nic? Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Where are you?”

“At the main gate. Where they’re telling us to be to get the best view. Not that I believe a word of it.”

“No.” He kept it short and direct and made sure she agreed, first, to the preconditions. Just her and a photographer. No other press. He couldn’t take the risk.

“You think I’d invite someone else along to my own party?” she asked, then hastily scribbled down the details that he gave her, looking all the while for the nearest cab rank.

When he rang off she walked back into the media pack and physically pulled Toni out from close to the front of it, ignoring his screeching objections.

“Shut up!” she hissed when she’d done so.

“Why? What gives?”

She looked at the faces around them. Interested faces. They were hacks. They had the same instincts she had. They knew when someone was trying to pull a stunt of their own.

She dragged him into the shadow cast by the high Vatican wall.

“I got a tip-off. Somewhere we can get a picture of Denney, all to ourselves.”

“Where?” Toni asked suspiciously.

The cameramen preferred to hunt in packs. It was safer that way. She knew he’d tell them somehow, later, so that he got first pickings.

“Never you mind. We just find a cab and get the hell out of here now.”

“What? And let those bastards loose on whatever happens next? You want to get me fired or something?”

“I want to get the story,” she snarled.

“Well, you go off and get it. If everyone else is here, then here is where I stay. If you want to change that, you ring the picture desk and get them to tell me.”

“Moron,” she muttered. “Give me your spare camera.”

“No. It’s company property.”

She glared up at him. “Give me the camera, dimwit, and I will, when they realize what a screwup you’ve made of this, do my very best to let you keep your job.”

He thought about it. Maybe there was a little insurance there.

“It’s idiot-proof,” he muttered, handing the camera over. “So you should know how to use it.”

“Moron,” she repeated, and strode quickly off toward the Piazza del Risorgimento, looking for a cab, noting, as she did, the long, khaki van covered in antennae close to the bus stops, wondering why she had failed to see it before.