Day Of Confession

EPILOGUE

Bath, Maine.

The pact had been to leave and never come back. But two days after the state funeral for Cardinal Palestrina, Harry and Danny did come back. With Harry manning the carry-ons and Danny hobbling on crutches – flying to New York and then Portland, Maine, and driving up from there on a bright summer day.

Elena had gone home to be with her parents and tell them of her plans to leave the convent and then to go to Siena and request dispensation of her vows, and afterward to join Harry in Los Angeles.

Harry drove the rented Chevy through the familiar towns of Freeport and Brunswick and finally into Bath. The old neighborhood had changed little, if at all, the white clapboard houses and faded shingle cottages brilliant in the July sunshine, the big elm and oak trees flush with summer growth as stately and timeless as ever. Passing Bath Iron Works, the ship-building yard where their father worked and died, they drove slowly south in the direction of Boothbay Harbor, then veering off Route 209, Harry took the fork onto High Street and shortly afterward a right onto Cemetery Road.

The family plot was on a grassy knoll on a hill overlooking the distant bay. It was as they both remembered, well tended, quiet, and peaceful with the chirp of birds in the nearby trees the only sound. Their father had bought the parcel with savings just after Madeline was born, knowing there would be no more children. The plot was for five, and three rested there now. Madeline, their father, and their mother, who had stipulated in her will that she be buried not with her new husband but with Madeline and the father of her children. The last two plots were for Harry and Danny if they chose.

Before, it would have been unthinkable for either brother to consider being buried there. But things had changed, as the two of them had. And who knew what life was yet to bring? It was lovely and tranquil, and in a way the idea was comforting and brought things full circle.

They left it like that, tender and up in the air, discussed but not discussed, in the way siblings talk of such things.

A day later Danny flew out of Boston for Rome and Harry for Los Angeles, their lives sadder, richer, wiser, and immeasurably changed. Together they had ventured into a nightmare and managed to come out of it alive. In the process they had collected a crazy, improbable, ragtag little band that included a nun, a crippled dwarf, and three exceptional Italian policemen and had become a team, working together for the first time since boyhood.

Heroes? – Maybe… They had saved Marsciano's life and prevented further untold thousands of innocent deaths in China… But there was the other side of it, too, the horror they had not been able to stop. And for that there would always be sorrow and emptiness and heartache. Yet it was over and in the past, and there was nothing they could do to change it. What they had to do now was try to pick things up somewhere where they had left off. Each with his own extended family – Danny with Cardinal Marsciano and the Church, Harry with the madness that was Hollywood, appended hugely by an entirely new and fantastic core that was Elena. And each with the all-so-real cognizance that he had a brother again.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, Friday, July seventeenth, Giacomo Pecci, Pope Leo XIV, ensconced under heavy guard at his summer refuge at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills near Rome, was informed of the violent happenings inside the Vatican walls, culminating with the death of Umberto Palestrina.

At six-thirty that same evening, nearly eight hours after he had left by helicopter, the Holy Father returned by car to the Vatican. By seven, he had gathered his closest advisers for a prayer mass for the dead.

On Sunday, at noon, the bells of Rome tolled in mourning for Cardinal Palestrina. And on the following Wednesday a massive state funeral was held for him inside St Peter's Basilica. Among the thousands in attendance was the newly appointed secretariat of state for the Holy See, Cardinal Nicola Marsciano.

At six o'clock that same evening Cardinal Marsciano met privately with Cardinal Joseph Matadi and Monsignor Fabio Capizzi. Immediately afterward he went to pray with the Holy Father in his private chapel, and later the two dined alone in the papal apartments. What was said there or transpired between them is not known.

Ten days later, on Monday, July twenty-seventh, Hercules had recovered sufficiently to be released from the hospital of St John and sent to a private rehabilitation center to recuperate.

Three days after that, murder charges against him were quietly dropped. A month later he was released from the rehabilitation center and given a job and a small apartment in Montepulciano in Tuscany, where he lives today as an overseer of an olive grove owned by Elena Voso's family.

In September, Gruppo Cardinale ranking prosecutor Marcello Taglia announced that the late terrorist Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind was the assassin of Rosario Parma, cardinal vicar of Rome, and that he had acted alone, with the participation of no other groups or governments. With that announcement the Italian government had formally disbanded Gruppo Cardinale and closed its investigation.

The Vatican maintained total silence.

On October first, exactly two weeks after prosecutor Taglia's formal announcement, Capo del Ufficio Centrale Vigilanza Jacov Farel took his first holiday in five years. While trying to cross the border between Italy and Austria in his private car he was arrested and charged with complicity in the murder of the Italian policeman Ispettore Capo Gianni Pio. Today, he awaits trial for that murder. The Vatican remains without comment.