Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

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.

Los Angeles. August 5.

In the midst of a riotous workload after his return – including hammering out a contract for a sequel to Dog on the Moon – and innumerable hour-long conversations with Elena in Italy as she prepared in body and soul to move to Los Angeles, Harry was increasingly troubled by the memories of a conversation he'd had with Danny on the drive from Maine back to Boston.

It had begun with Harry thinking about unanswered questions. And in light of his restored relationship with his brother and because of what they had experienced together and the secrets they still shared, he felt it completely natural to ask Danny to help him clarify a few things.

Harry: You called me early Friday morning Rome time and left word on my answering machine that you were scared and didn't know what to do. 'God help me!' you said.

Danny: Right.

Harry: I assume it was because you had just heard Marsciano's confession and were horrified by it and by what the repercussions might be.

Danny: Yes.

Harry: What if I had been home and had answered the phone? Would you have told me about the confession?

Danny: I was a mess, I don't know what I would have told you. That I had heard a confession, maybe. Not what was in it.

Harry: But you didn't get me, so you left word and a few hours later you were on a bus to Assisi. Why Assisi? There was hardly a church inhabitable after the earthquakes.

(It was here Harry remembered Danny's beginning to get uncomfortable with his questions.)

Danny: It didn't make any difference. It was a terrible time, the bus was going and Assisi was my solace. It always had been… What are you getting at?

Harry: That maybe it wasn't just solace, that maybe you were going there for another reason.

Danny: Like what?

Harry: Like to meet someone.

Danny: Who?

Harry: Eaton.

Danny: Eaton? – Why would I be going all the way to Assisi to see Eaton?

Harry: You tell me…

Danny: Big smile. You're wrong, Harry. It's that simple.

Harry: He was trying very hard to get to you, Danny. By providing me with false papers he was sticking his neck way out. He could have gotten into a hell of a lot of trouble if he got caught.

Danny: It's the business he was in…

Harry: He got killed trying to find you. Maybe even protect you.

Danny: It's the business he was in…

Harry: What if I said the real reason you went to Assisi all those years was not for solace but to deliver information… to Eaton…

Danny: Big incredulous grin. Are you suggesting I was the CIA's man in the Vatican?

Harry: Were you?

Danny: You really want to know?

Harry: Yes.

Danny: No… Anything else?

Harry: No…

But there was, and finally Harry had to find out. Closing his office door, he picked up the phone and called a friend at Time in New York. Ten minutes later he was talking to the magazine's CIA expert in the Washington bureau.

What were the chances, he wanted to know, of the Central Intelligence Agency's having a mole inside the Vatican. The response was a laugh. Very unlikely, he was told. But possible? Yes, possible.

'Especially,' the Time correspondent explained, 'if someone assigned to watch Italy was concerned about the Vatican 's influence on the country, particularly after the Vatican banking scandals of the early 1980s.

'Banking – and or where they had their' – Harry chose the word carefully – 'investments?'

'Right… Decide it was that important, then place an operative as close to the source as possible.'

Harry felt the chill begin to slide down his spine. Close to the source – as in private secretary to the cardinal who manages the Holy See's investments.

'Might,' he went on, 'this someone watching Italy be the Rome station chief?'

'Yes.'

'Who would know about it?'

'There's a very guarded category of operative called HUMINTS – an acronym for Human Intelligence, people who are deep cover plants. Deeper still, and, in a situation as sensitive as Vatican- U.S. relations, more likely, are people known as NOCS – an acronym for Non-Official Cover. Operatives like this are so concealed and protected even the Director of Central Intelligence might not know. A NOC would be recruited directly by someone like a station chief for a very precise positioning. In all likelihood they would have been recruited sometime earlier so that they could work their way to a position of trust with no suspicion whatsoever.'