Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

And then there was the L.A. thing. Harry might have been Catholic, but one didn't move far in the entertainment business without having Jewish friends and clients. He'd been invited to Passover seders for years, had shared uncountable breakfasts at Nate and Al's deli in Beverly Hills, an oasis for Jewish writers and comedians; gone regularly with clients visiting relatives to the ethnic neighborhoods around Fairfax and Beverly, Pico and Robertson. More than once he'd marveled at the similarity of the yarmulke to the Catholic skullcap, the zucchetto, the black coats of the rabbis to those of bishops and priests. And now, for better or worse, he and Danny had become visiting rabbis from Israel, touring Italy as part of an ongoing discourse between Christians and Jews. Elena had become an Italian guide and translator from Rome, traveling with them. Though God forbid anyone should ask her, or them, to speak Hebrew.

Fuggitivo,' one of the carabinieri said sharply. Bringing Harry back with a rush.

'Fuggitivo,' Father Renato nodded, adding a succinct, fiery reply in Italian. Obviously both carabinieri agreed with what he said, because they suddenly stepped back, saluted, and waved the van forward.

Harry looked to Elena, then saw Father Renato shift into gear. Felt the van move forward. Up onto the ramp and across it into the hold of the ferry. Turning back, he saw the policemen advance on the next vehicle in line. Saw the occupants made to get out, show identification, while the vehicle itself was aggressively searched.

None in the van dared look at another. Just waited in silence for an agonizing ten minutes before the last car came on board, the gangway doors closed, and the ferry got under way.

Harry felt the sweat run down his neck, trickle from his armpits. How many more of these could they get away with? How long would their luck, if that's what it was, hold?

The ferry had been step one, sailing for Mennagio at seven fifty-six, exactly four minutes before the Italian Army sweep of the entire peninsula would begin, and fifteen minutes after Salvatore Belsito's farm truck had been found parked on a street a half mile from Santa Chiara. Father Natalini had left it there just before six, carefully wiping the steering wheel and gearshift clean of his fingerprints, then walking quickly back to Santa Chiara.

Step two, the crossing of the border from Italy into Switzerland, would have been more difficult, if not impossible, because neither Father Renato nor Father Natalini knew Gruppo Cardinale personnel at the border checkpoint. What saved them was that Father Natalini had grown up in Porlezza, a small town inland from Mennagio, and knew as only a native could know, the narrow country roads that wound and twisted through the hills and rose up into the Alps; roads that enabled them to bypass the Gruppo Cardinale checkpoint at Oria and brought them into Switzerland unmolested at ten twenty-two in the morning.

The Vatican. The Tower of San Giovanni. 11:00 a.m.

Marsciano stood at the glass door, the only opening in the room to admit daylight; and, other than the locked and guarded entry door from the hallway outside, its only exit. Behind him, the television screen he could no longer bear to watch glowed like an all-seeing eye.

He could turn the TV off, of course, but he hadn't and wouldn't. It was a trait of character Palestrina understood all too well in Marsciano, which was why he'd ordered the twenty-inch Nokia left behind when he'd had the formerly luxurious one-room apartment stripped of all but its essentials – bed, writing table, chair – and ordered the apartment itself shut off from the rest of the building.

'The death toll in Hefei has reached sixty thousand, six hundred and is still rising. There remains no estimation where the number will end.'

The field correspondent's voice was crisp behind him. Marsciano did not need to see the screen. It would be the same color graphic they used every hour to project the number of deaths, as if they were doing exit polls projecting votes in an election.

Finally, Marsciano pulled the door open and stepped out onto the tiny balcony. Fresh air touched him, and, mercifully, the resonance of the television diminished.

Grasping the iron safety railing, he closed his eyes. As if not seeing would somehow lessen the awfulness. In his darkness he saw another vision – the cold, conspiratorial faces of Cardinal Matadi and Monsignor Capizzi watching him dispassionately from their seats inside the limousine on the drive back to the Vatican from the Chinese Embassy. Then he saw Palestrina pick up the car phone and quietly ask for Farel, the secretariat's gaze rising up to hold on Marsciano's as he waited for the Vatican policeman to come on the line. And then came the secretariat's soft-spoken words-

'Cardinal Marsciano has been taken ill in the car. Prepare a room for him in the Tower of San Giovanni.'

The chilling remembrance made Marsciano suddenly open his eyes to where he was now. Below, a Vatican gardener was looking up at him. The man stared for a moment and then turned back to what he had been doing.

How many hundreds of times, Marsciano thought, had he come to the tower to visit foreign dignitaries staying in its ornate apartments? How many times had he looked up from the gardens below, as the worker had, to see this curious little platform on which he stood, never giving a thought to how darkly sinister it was?

Hanging like a diver's platform forty feet off the ground, it was the only opening in the cylindrical wall from top to bottom. An exit that led nowhere. Surrounded by a thin, iron safety railing, the platform was hardly wider than the door itself and no more than two feet across. The sheer wall above it rose another thirty feet to the point where the windows of the other apartments jutted sharply out. Looking upward, one could not see past those windows, but Marsciano knew they were near the top, and above them was a circular walkway and then the tower's turreted crown.

In other words, there was no way up or down or to the sides, making no reason for the platform at all. Except as a place to stand and breathe the air of Rome and marvel at the green of the Vatican gardens below. After that there was nothing. The rest of this distant corner of the Vaticano was surrounded by a high, fortified wall built in the ninth century to keep barbarians out and at other times, as now, serving to keep people in.

Slowly, Marsciano slid his hands from the rail and went back inside to the confines of his room and the television screen that was the center of it. On it he saw what the world saw: Hefei, China – a live helicopter shot aerial of Chao Lake and then, in a cavalcade of horror, an aerial view of a series of huge circus-like tents, one after the other, erected in city parks, alongside factories, on open land outside the city proper; and the offscreen correspondent explaining what they were – makeshift morgues for the dead.

Abruptly, Marsciano turned off the sound. He would watch but he could listen no longer, the running commentary had become unbearable. It was a scorecard on which his personal crimes – done, he reminded himself over and over, as if in some desperate attempt to save his sanity, because Palestrina had held him hostage to his love of God and the Church – were tallied, one after the other in minute-by-minute detail.

Yes, he was guilty. So were Matadi and Capizzi. They had all let Palestrina loose to commit this outrage. What was worse, if anything could be worse than what he was seeing now, was that he knew Pierre Weggen was well into his work on Yan Yeh. And the Chinese banker, sensitive and caring as Marsciano personally knew he was, would be truly horrified by what appeared to be an act of nature gone amuck in human hands, and would pressure his superiors in the Communist Party, with all he had, to listen to Weggen's proposal to immediately rebuild China's entire water-delivery and filtration infrastructure. But even if they agreed to meet with Weggen, the politics would take time. Time. When there was none. When Palestrina was already moving his saboteurs to the second lake.