The Confessor

VATICAN CITY

Benedetto Fó presented himself for work at the four-story office building near the entrance of Saint Peter's Square at the thoroughly reasonable Roman hour of ten-thirty. In a city filled with beautifully dressed men, Fó was clearly an exception. His trousers had long ago lost their crease, the toes of his black leather shoes were scuffed, and the pockets of his sport jacket had been misshapen by his habit of filling them with notepads, tape recorders, and batches of folded papers. The Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica, Fó did not trust a man who couldn't carry his possessions in his pockets.

He picked his way through a pack of tourists queued up outside the souvenir shops on the ground floor and tried to enter the foyer. A blue-uniformed guard blocked his path. Fó sighed heavily and rummaged through his pockets until he found his press credentials.

It was a wholly unnecessary ritual, for Benedetto Fó was the dean of the Vaticanisti and his face was as well known to the Press Office security staff as the one belonging to the Austrian bullyboy who ran the place. Forcing him to show his badge was just another form of subtle punishment, like banning him from the Pope's airplane for next month's papal visit to Argentina and Chile. Fó had been a naughty boy. Fó was on probation. He'd been placed on the rack and offered a chance to repent. One more misstep and they'd tie him to the stake and light a match.

The Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, otherwise known as the Vatican Press Office, was an island of modernity in a Renaissance sea. Fó passed through a set of automatic glass doors, then crossed a floor of polished black marble to his cubicle in the press room. The Vatican inflicted a vow of poverty on those it deemed worthy of permanent credentials. Fó's office consisted of a tiny Formica desk with a telephone and a fax machine that was forever breaking down at the worst possible time. His neighbor was a Rubenesque blonde from Inside the Vatican magazine called Giovanna. She thought him a heretic and refused his repeated invitations to lunch.

He sat heavily in his chair. A copy of L'Osservatore Romano lay on his desk, next to a stack of clippings from the Vatican News Service. The Vatican's version of Pravda and Tass. With a heavy heart, Fó began to read, like a Kremlinologist looking for hidden meaning in an announcement that a certain member of the Politburo was suffering from a heavy chest cold. It was the usual drivel. Fó pushed aside the papers and began the long deliberation about where to have lunch.

He looked at Giovanna. Perhaps this would be the day her stoicism crumbled. He squeezed his way inside her cubicle. She was hunched over a bollettino, an official press release. When Fó peered over her shoulder, she covered it with her forearm like a schoolgirl hiding a test paper from the boy at the next desk.

"What is it, Giovanna?"

"They just released it. Go get your own and see for yourself."

She shoved him into the hall. The touch of her hand on Fó's hip lingered as he made his way toward the front of the room, where a fierce-looking nun sat behind a wooden desk. She bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a teacher who used to beat him with a stick. She handed him a pair oibollettini joylessly, like a camp guard doling out punishment rations. Just to annoy her, Fó read them standing in front of the desk.

The first dealt with a staff appointment at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Hardly anything the readers of La Repubblica cared about. Fó would leave that one for Giovanna and her cohorts at the Catholic News Service. The second was far more interesting. It was issued in the form of an amendment to the Holy Father's schedule on Friday. He had cancelled an audience with a delegation from the Philippines and instead would pay a brief visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome to address the congregation.

Fó looked up and frowned. A trip to the synagogue announced two days before the fact? Impossible! An event like that should have been on the papal schedule weeks ago. It didn't take an experienced Vatican hand to know something was up.

Fó peered down a marble-floored corridor. At the end was an open door giving onto a pompous office. Seated behind a polished desk was a forbidding figure named Rudolf Gertz, the former Austrian television journalist who was now the head of the Vatican Press Office. It was against the rules to set foot in the corridor without permission. Fó decided on a suicide run. When the nun wasn't looking, he leapt down the hall like a springbok. A few steps from

Gertz's door a burly priest seized Fó by his coat collar and lifted him off the floor. Fó managed to hold up the bollettino.

"What do you think you're playing at, Rudolf? Do you take us for idiots? How dare you drop this on us with two days' notice? We should have been briefed! Why's he going? What's he going to say?"

Gertz looked up calmly. He had a skier's tan and was groomed for the evening news. Fó hung there helplessly, awaiting an answer he knew would never come, for somewhere during his journey from Vienna to the Vatican, Rudolf Gertz seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

"You don't know why he's going to the synagogue, do you, Rudolf? The Pope is keeping secrets from the Press Office. Something is up, and I'm going to find out what it is."

Gertz raised an eyebrow--"I wish you the best of luck." The burly priest took it as a signal to frog-march Fó back to the press room and deposit him at his cubicle.

Fó shoved his things into his coat pockets and headed downstairs. He walked toward the river along the Via della Conciliazione, the bollettino still crumpled in his fist. Fó knew it was a signal of cataclysmic events to come. He just didn't know what they were. Against all better judgment, he had allowed himself to be used in a game as old as time itself: a Vatican intrigue pitting one wing of the Curia against the other. He suspected that the surprise announcement of a visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome was the culmination of that game. He was furious that he'd been blindsided like everyone else. He'd made a deal. The deal, in the opinion of Benedetto Fó, had been broken.

He stopped in the piazza just outside the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo. He needed to make a telephone call--a call that. couldn't be made from his desk in the Sala Stampa. From a public telephone, he dialed a number for an extension inside the Apostolic Palace. It was the private number of a man very close to the Holy Father. He answered as though he were expecting Fó's call.

"We had an agreement, Luigi," Fó said without preamble. "You broke that agreement."

"Calm down, Benedetto. Don't hurl accusations that you'll regret later."

"I agreed to play your little game about the Holy Father's childhood in exchange for something special."

"Trust me, Benedetto, something very special will be coming your way sooner than you think."

"I'm about to be permanently banned from the Sala Stampa because I helped you. The least you could have done is warn me that this trip to the synagogue was coming."

"I couldn't do that, for reasons that will be abundantly clear to you in the coming days. As for your problems at the Sala Stampa, this too shall pass."

"Why is he going to the synagogue?"

"You'll have to wait until Friday, like everyone else."

"You're a bastard, Luigi."

"Please try to remember you're talking to a priest."

"You're not a priest. You're a cutthroat in a clerical suit."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Benedetto. I'm sorry, but the Holy Father would like a word."

The line went dead. Fó slammed down the receiver and headed wearily back to the Press Office.

A SHORT distance away, in a barricaded diplomatic compound at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac called the Via Michle Mercati,

Aaron Shilo, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, was seated behind his desk, leafing his way through a batch of morning correspondence from the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. A compact woman with short dark hair knocked on the door jamb and entered the room without waiting for permission. Yael Ravona, Ambassador Shiloh's secretary, dropped a single sheet of paper on his desk. It was a bulletin from the Vatican News Service.

"This just came over the wire."

The ambassador read it quickly, then looked up. "The synagogue? Why didn't they tell us something like this was coming? It makes no sense."

"Judging from the tone of that dispatch, the Press Office and VNS were caught off-guard."

"Put in a call to the Secretariat of State. Tell them I'd like to speak with Cardinal Brindisi."

"Yes, ambassador."

Yael Ravona walked out. The ambassador picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Tel Aviv. A moment later, he said quietly: "I need to speak to Shamron."

AT THAT same moment, Carlo Casagrande was seated in the back of his Vatican staff car, speeding along the winding S4 motorway through the mountains northeast of Rome. The reason for his unscheduled journey lay in the locked attaché case resting on the seat next to him. It was a report, delivered to him earlier that morning, by the agent he had assigned to investigate the childhood of the Holy Father. The agent had been forced to resort to a black-bag operation--a break-in at the apartment of Benedetto Fó. A hurried search of files had produced his notes on the matter. A summary of those notes was contained in the report.

The Villa Galatina appeared, perched on its own mountain, glowering at the valley below. Casagrande glimpsed one of Roberto Pucci's guards high among the battlements, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The front gate was open. A tan-suited security man glanced at the SCV license plates and waved the car onto the property.

Roberto Pucci greeted Casagrande in the entrance hall. He was dressed in riding breeches and knee-length leather boots, and smelled of gunsmoke. Obviously, he had spent the morning shooting. Don Pucci often said that the only thing he loved more than his collection of guns was making money--and the Holy Mother Church, of course. The financier escorted Casagrande down a long, gloomy gallery into a cavernous great room overlooking the garden. Cardinal Marco Brindisi was already there, a thin figure perched on the edge of a chair in front of the fire, a teacup balanced precariously on his cassocked thigh. Light reflected off the lenses of the cardinal's small round spectacles, turning them to white discs that obscured his eyes. Casagrande dropped to one knee and kissed the proffered ring. Brindisi extended the first two fingers of his right hand and solemnly offered his blessing. The cardinal, thought Casagrande, had exquisite hands.

Casagrande sat down, worked the combination locks on his attaché, and lifted the lid. Brindisi held out his hand and accepted a single sheet of typescript on Vatican Security Office letterhead, then looked down and began to read. Casagrande folded his hands across his lap and waited patiently. Roberto Pucci paced the floor, a restless hunter looking for a target of opportunity.

A moment later, Cardinal Brindisi stood and took a few teetering steps toward the fireplace. He dropped the report on the flames and watched it curl and disintegrate, then turned and faced Casagrande and Pucci, his eyes hidden behind the two white discs of light. Brindisi's uomini difiducia--his men of trust--awaited the verdict, though for Casagrande there was little suspense, because he knew the course that Brindisi would choose. Brindisi's Church was in mortal danger. Drastic measures were in order.

Roberto Pucci was a perpetual target of the Italian intelligence services, and it had been many days since the Villa Galatina had been swept for listening devices. Before Cardinal Brindisi could pronounce his death sentence, Casagrande raised his finger to his lips and his eyes to the ceiling. Despite a cold rain, they walked in Don Pucci's garden, umbrellas overhead, like mourners following a horse-drawn coffin. The hem of the cardinal's cassock quickly became soaked. To Casagrande it seemed they were wading shoulder to shoulder in blood.

"Pope Accidental is playing a very dangerous game," Cardinal Brindisi said. "His initiative to throw open the Archives is simply a ploy to give him cover to reveal things he already knows. It is an act of unbelievable recklessness. I believe it's quite possible that the Holy Father is delusional or mentally unbalanced in some way. We have a duty, indeed a divine mandate, to remove him."

Roberto Pucci cleared his throat. "Removing him and killing him are two different things, Eminence."

"Not really, Don Pucci. The conclave made him an absolute monarch. We cannot simply ask the king to step aside. Only death can end this papacy."

Casagrande looked up at the row of cypress trees swaying in the gusty wind. Kill the Pope? Insanity. He turned his gaze from the trees and looked at Brindisi. The cardinal was studying him intently. The pinched face, the round spectacles--it was like being appraised by Pius XII himself.

Brindisi looked away. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest? Do you know who spoke those words, Carlo?"

"King Henry the Second, if I'm not mistaken. And the meddlesome priest he was referring to was Thomas a Becket. Not long after he uttered those words, four of his knights stormed into the cathedral at Canterbury and cut Thomas down with their swords."

"Very impressive," said the cardinal. "Pope Accidental and Saint Thomas have much in common. Thomas was a vain, ostentatious man who did much to bring about his own demise. The same can surely be said of the Holy Father. He has no right to bypass the Curia and launch this initiative on his own. And for his sins, and his vanity, he must suffer the fate of Thomas. Send forth your knights, Carlo. Cut him down."

"If the Holy Father dies a violent death, he will become a martyr, just like Saint Thomas."

"So much the better. If his death is choreographed properly, this whole sordid affair might end in a way that suits our purposes quite nicely."

"How so, Eminence?"

"Can you imagine the wrath that will rain down on the heads of the Jews if the Holy Father is killed in a synagogue? Surely, an assassin with the skills of your friend can carry off something like that. Once he is gone, we will build a case against our papal assassin, the Israeli who settled in our midst and restored our precious works of art while he waited for his chance to murder the Holy Father. It is a remarkable story, Carlo--one the world's media will find difficult to resist."

"If not difficult to believe, Eminence."

"Not if you do your job correctly."

A silence hung over them, broken only by the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel pathway. Casagrande could not feel his feet touching the earth. He felt he was floating, viewing the scene from above: the ancient abbey; the labyrinth gardens; three men, the Holy Trinity of Crux Vera, calmly deliberating whether to murder a pope. He squeezed the handle of his umbrella, assessing whether it was real or merely an object in a dream. He wished it could carry him away, transport him to another time--a time before his faith and his obsession for revenge had caused him to behave with the same cruelty and depravity as his enemies. He saw Angelina, seated on a blanket in the shade of a stone pine in the Villa Borghese. He bent to kiss her, expecting to find the taste of strawberries on her lips, but instead he tasted blood. He heard a voice. In his memory, it was Angelina, telling him she wanted to spend the summer holiday in the mountains of the north. In reality it was Cardinal Brindisi, holding forth on why the murder of a pope would serve the interests of both the Church and Crux Vera. How easily the cardinal speaks of murder, thought Casagrande. And then he saw it all clearly. A Church in turmoil. A time for proven leadership. After the Holy Father's death, Brindisi would seize what the last conclave had denied him.

Casagrande marshaled his forces and proceeded carefully. "If I may approach the issue from an operational standpoint, Eminence, killing a pope is not something that can be done on the spur of the moment. It takes months, perhaps years, to plan something like this." He paused, waiting for Brindisi to interrupt, but the cardinal kept walking, a man on a journey with a great distance still to go. Casagrande carried on. "Once the Holy Father leaves the territory of the Vatican, he will be under the protection of Italian police and security services. At the moment, they are on war footing because of our spurious papal assassin. There will be a wall around the Holy Father that will be impossible to penetrate."

"What you say is true, Carlo. But there are two important factors weighing heavily in our favor. You work for the Vatican Security Office. You have the ability to get a man close to the Holy Father whenever you please."

"And the second?"

"The man you will get close to the Holy Father is the Leopard."

"I doubt even the Leopard would accept an assignment like the one you're proposing, Eminence."

"Offer him money. That's what creatures like him respond to."

Casagrande felt as though he were hurling himself against the walls of the old abbey. He decided to make one final assault.

"When I came to the Vatican from the carabinieri, I swore a sacred oath to protect the pope. Now you are asking me to break that oath, Eminence."

"You also swore a sacred oath to Crux Vera and to me personally, an oath that binds you to absolute obedience."

Casagrande stopped walking and turned to face the cardinal. His spectacles were dotted with rain. "I had hopes of seeing my wife and daughter once again in the Kingdom of Heaven, Eminence. Surely the only thing that awaits the man who carries out this deed is damnation."

"You need not worry about confronting the fires of Hell, Carlo. I will grant you absolution."

"Do you really have such power? The power to cleanse the soul of a man who murders a pope?"

"Of course I do!" snapped Brindisi, as if he found the question blasphemous. Then his demeanor and his tone softened. "You're tired, Carlo. This affair has been long and difficult for all of us. But there is a way out, and soon it will be over."

"At what cost, Eminence? To us? To the Church?"

"He wants to destroy the Church. I want to save it. Who do you stand with ?"

After a moment's hesitation, Casagrande said, "I stand with you, Eminence. And the Holy Mother Church."

"As I knew you would."

"I have just one question. Do you intend to accompany the Holy Father to the synagogue? I wouldn't want you to be anywhere near the Holy Father when this terrible deed is done."

"As I told the Holy Father when he asked me the same question, I intend to have a case of the flu on Friday that will not permit me to be at his side."

Casagrande seized the cardinal's hand and feverishly kissed his ring. The prelate extended his long fingers and made the sign of the cross over Casagrande's forehead. There was no love in his eyes; only coldness and a fierce determination. From Casagrande's vantage point, it seemed he was anointing a dead man.

Cardinal Brindisi departed for Rome first. Casagrande and Roberto Pucci remained behind in the garden.

"It doesn't take a terribly perceptive man to see that your heart is not in this, Carlo."

"Only a madman would relish the opportunity to murder a pope."

"What do you intend to do?"

Casagrande moved some gravel around with the toe of his shoe, then looked up at the cypress trees bending in the wind. He knew he was about to embark on a course that would ultimately lead to his own destruction.

"I'm going to Zurich," Casagrande said. "I'm going to hire an assassin."