Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“Your father was my teacher, my mentor and my friend and I come from a long line of people who are great believers in the power of revenge.” Valentine finished off his beer and stood up. “It’s late. I’m going to bed. You should try to get some sleep too. Your room’s at the end of the hall.” He gave her a brief smile, turned and left the room.

The residence of the cardinal archbishop of New York is a handsome one-hundred-year-old mansion at 452 Madison Avenue, directly behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral and connected to it by an underground passageway. The first floor of the mansion, generally referred to as the museum, is filled with formal antique furniture and is usually used for photo opportunities, cocktail parties and various high-level fund-raising events. The second floor contains offices and the private rooms for the archbishop’s staff, which includes a cook, three housekeepers, the two priests who serve as the archbishop’s secretaries and a monsignor who acts as chancellor of the archdiocese. The two “secretaries” are both trained marksmen, have completed a number of special weapons and tactics courses at the FBI Academy in Quantico and are usually armed when accompanying the cardinal archbishop off the premises of the mansion or the cathedral itself.

The archbishop’s private apartment on the third floor of the mansion includes a bedroom, bathroom, small kitchen, sitting room and a study. The sitting room is sparsely furnished with a couch, a few chairs, a small but well-stocked bar and a very large color television set. The study has several large stained-glass windows, a cathedral ceiling and a long, old, refectory table the archbishop uses as a desk. The apartment’s bedroom lies between the study and the sitting room and is small, a mere twelve by fourteen feet. There is a king-sized bed, and a single window, covered with brown-and-white draperies that match the bedspread. The glass in the drapery-covered window is bullet-proof and plastic laminated to prevent splintering in case of a bomb attack. Over the head of the bed there is a rather tasteless painting of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and on the wall opposite there is a large fourteenth-century gold crucifix that once was part of the altar of the Cathedral of Wroclaw. At the far end of the room is a tall ironwood vestry containing the archbishop’s ecclesiastical garb including copes, chasubles, surplices, several scarlet-and-black mantelettas, or cloaks, edged in gold thread and ermine and an emerald-studded gold pectoral cross he favored for the evening masses on Friday, the only day he personally offered the sacrament.

The man known variously as Father Ricardo Gentile, a priest of Rome, Peter Ruffino of the Art Recovery Tactical Squad and Laurence G. MacLean of Homeland Security moved silently through the rooms of the archbishop’s third-floor apartment, his footsteps hushed by a pair of cheap black Nike knockoffs. He had hidden in a small storeroom behind the sacristy until the cathedral closed at eleven, then followed the directions he’d been given to the basement crypt and the passageway leading to the mansion.

For a city and a country so recently and violently attacked, the ease with which he’d reached the private apartment of His Eminence David Cardinal Bannerman had been truly alarming. The Americans were still amateurs at this sort of thing, and remarkably innocent, still refusing to accept that they could be so deeply hated by people seriously intent on doing them harm for no other reason than their being American. The Vatican had been dispatching assassins to do the Devil’s work in the name of God for the better part of a millennium or more and other nations had been doing it for much longer.

There had been more political assassinations in Switzerland by the twelfth century than had ever taken place in the United States and the only country with fewer was its next-door neighbor, Canada. Even that bland and desolate country of ice and snow had suffered more distinct “terrorist attacks” in its time. It was, Father Gentile knew, mostly a matter of not learning from history-which the Americans were very good at, preferring to believe that, on a world level, all other nations revolved around them like planets around the sun. Perhaps a few more wealthy, certifiable zealots and madmen like Osama bin Laden and airliners thrown like so many sticks and stones would eventually teach them.

He reached the open doorway of the bedroom and paused to screw the suppressor onto the tapped muzzle of the ugly little Beretta Cougar he carried in his right hand. He looked into the room. Bannerman was asleep, snoring lightly, his thick gray hair on the single pillow. He slept on his back in the exact center of the large bed, hands folded across the coverlet like a corpse, sheet drawn up to his chin. Gentile could see the collar of his silk pajamas. Probably from Gammarelli’s, around the corner from the Pantheon. He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He gently tapped the cold end of the suppressor against the bridge of the cardinal archbishop’s patrician Irish nose.

“Wake up,” he said quietly.

Bannerman’s snoring broke and he muttered something. Father Gentile rapped him on the nose a little harder. The cardinal’s eyes shot open, the pupils widening, pain creasing the man’s forehead.

“What the hell?”

“Wake up,” Gentile said again. “We must talk. Keep your voice down; believe me, you don’t want us to be interrupted.”

Bannerman’s eyes crossed in a silly expression as he focused on the muzzle of the suppressor. It was now four inches away from his nose. A shot that close would blow his brains all over Jesus and his donkey.

“Who are you?” said Bannerman. He was an old man, well into his seventies, but his voice was still firm and strong.

“Vincit qui si vincit,” the priest with the gun responded. He conquers who conquers himself.

Bannerman’s eyes widened at the quotation. It was something every man in his position knew and also dreaded. In those few words and their response lay the seeds of a scandal of unimaginable proportions. Bannerman knew in an instant who the man was, what his authority allowed him and whom that authority came from. He also knew that he would be a dead man if he didn’t give the correct answer within the next few seconds. They were words he had never expected to say.

“Verbum pat sapient,” he whispered. A word is enough for a wise man.

“Are you a wise man, Eminence?” asked Father Gentile.

“I know what you are here for. I can read the e-mails from ASV as well as any other man.”

“What am I here for, Eminence, the Archivo Secreto Vaticano aside?”

“You’re here because of the murder of Alexander Crawley. To investigate his death.” The cardinal eased himself up on the pillow, eying Gentile in the half-light coming through the bedroom window.

“Only partly, Eminence. I have been charged with a much more complex assignment than that. Crawley is no more than the tip of the iceberg. There will be more killings, as you well know. The more killing, the more danger to the Church and her situation. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

“What do I have to do with any of this?” asked Bannerman. “This is none of my doing. It all happened more than half a century ago. This is all Spellman’s doing-him and his damn chorus boys! He was Pacelli’s friend, not me.”

“You are Archbishop Spellman’s inheritor, I’m afraid. It comes with the proud-looking manteletta you keep in your closet over there. It is as much a part of your congregation as the people of New York.”

Bannerman sat up fully, aware that the gun barrel followed his movements, its aim never far from a spot roughly between his eyes. He watched the man sitting beside him on the bed carefully. Early middle age, fit, ordinary face, the obscenity of his holy collar. He wondered if the man really was a priest at all, or whether the guardians of the ASV simply chose their operatives wherever they could. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that the man was here, now, in his bedroom and with a gun.