The Caravaggio Conspiracy (13 page)

‘Did you ask him what he meant by this?’ Maya asked, astonished by Rüttgers’ candour.

‘No,’ the colonel replied. ‘It wasn’t my business to ask. After all, no one was suggesting a crime had been committed. I just wished him well and told him I would pray for him. He blessed me and went on his way. Three days later he was dead.’

‘But that’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

‘I agree. And when I heard a couple of days ago that he had been buried in a sealed casket in the Teutonic Cemetery, without any proper ceremony, I thought, well, that’s it – they’ve washed their hands of him.’

Maya was silent for a moment. On the television screen, the pictures were now showing a huge demonstration in Tehran demanding the destruction of the state of Israel and recognition of Islamic sovereignty across the region. Relations between Muslims and the West seemed to be deteriorating with each passing day. 

She turned back to her father. ‘Do you think Bosani was sorry when Rüttgers died?’

‘Sorry? I really can’t say. Priests deal with issues of life and death on a daily basis. To them dying is just a means of exchange. To ask Bosani if he mourned the death of a fellow cardinal would be like asking a banker if he thought a rise in interest rates meant the end of capitalism. What I do know is that he kept us well away from the body and then raced through the funeral process. I have no doubt that he felt Christian charity at the loss of a brother-in-Christ, but when I watched him as they carried the body out of St Peter’s Basilica towards its final resting place, I can’t pretend that he looked anything other than relieved.’

The south clock of St Peter’s had just begun striking twelve as Dempsey bounded up the steps of the Jesuit headquarters on the Borgo Santo Spirito. He had intended to report to his uncle the previous night on what he’d found in the Secret Archive. Instead, he’d met up with Maya and they had spent the entire evening together, ending up in bed at his flat. It had been a tremendous emotional as well as physical outpouring and the result was that today he felt like a new man. By comparison, he decided, sorting out the apostolic succession would be no trouble at all. It was just a matter of who made the first move.

The receptionist, seated in his cubby hole on the left of the small entrance hall, looked up from his sports paper, recognized the Father General’s nephew and buzzed him straight through. Ignoring the lift, Dempsey took the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor and made his way, echoingly, down the marble corridor to the door marked
Superiore Generale
. His uncle had been at work since eight o’clock, putting the final touches to a Jesuit initiative intended to counter the spread of evangelical Protestantism in Brazil. He had hoped he could postpone this until after the conclave, which took obvious precedence. But a conference was due to take place in Rome in one week’s time. All the arrangements had been made. Air tickets were booked and hotel rooms reserved – and given that, by pure
coincidence
, the conference coincided with the most exciting few days in the Catholic world, the emergence of a new pope, no one was willing even to consider an
alternative
date. So he had just buckled down and got on with it. No sooner had he finished drafting his introductory speech than the new Provincial from Belgium was waiting, ready to fill his head with woe over the impending breakup of his country into separate Flemish and Walloon nations. Would this mean a division of the existing province into two distinct jurisdictions, he wanted to know. Given that he was from Brussels and had a foot in both camps, which job would fall to him? O’Malley made clucking noises and promised to get back to him as soon as possible. He remembered his own time at the University of Louvain – or Leuven as the locals called it – which he had very much enjoyed. It depressed him to think that two Catholic peoples, living in the fulcrum of the new Europe, could no longer stand the sight of each other. Finally, when he got the chance, he had run through the list of invitations to the traditional High Mass in the Gesù that would precede the conclave – striking out a couple of names he thought unsuitable or irrelevant and replacing them with names of his own. Father Giovanni, badly in need of a haircut, was hunched over his computer in the outer office, answering emails and fielding calls from around the world on his video screen. Dempsey’s arrival,
unannounced
, did nothing to improve his humour and the young Irishman had almost to force his way past his desk, piled up with papers, in order to get to his uncle.

‘Liam, there you are! Come in, come in,’ O’Malley said. Then he saw the harassed features of his secretary, standing in the doorway, running his hands distractedly through his hair. ‘It’s all right, Giovanni. This will only take ten minutes; then, I promise you, you will have my undivided attention.’

‘A busy day, Uncle Declan?’

‘Don’t get me started. Take a seat. I hope your trip to the Secret Archive wasn’t a waste of time?’

‘Far from it. You letter of introduction did the trick. I was made to feel like a cardinal-nephew. I saw lots of old press reports, a mountain of speeches and news releases, even a couple of letters in Arabic from the central mosque. But the real paydirt only appeared when I got a couple of minutes of my own on the library computer.’

‘I thought they were restricted.’

‘Well, he’d gone off to arrange for a load of papers to be brought to me and his screen was just sitting there. I didn’t see the harm.’

‘Don’t say any more. Probably better that I don’t know. Anyway … what did you find out?’

Dempsey ran down Bosani’s history and demonstrated how his reputation for tolerance towards Islam, established over several decades, had taken a U-turn during the time of Benedict XVI.

O’Malley listened closely to his nephew’s analysis. Dempsey stressed that the transformation in Bosani’s position did not coincide with the terrorist attacks on America and the emergence of al-Qaeda. Rather, it had only happened with the arrival of a new pope. He wondered if it might not have been Benedict who
influenced
Bosani rather than the other way round. But O’Malley had met the German pontiff after his controversial 2006 speech and was struck by the depth of his
penitence
. ‘The Holy Father,’ he said, ‘was concerned that Muslims around the world were turning to violence in pursuit of their ambitions, but he never intended to suggest that this was the will of God or of Mohammad.’

‘Then why did he quote the emperor, who made exactly that claim?’

‘Palaiologos? That’s what I’d like to know. It was an error of judgment – but who was responsible? Who put the idea in his head?’

Dempsey thought for a moment. ‘Is there no chance you could raise the issue with Bosani himself? You’re one of the most senior priests in the Catholic Church. How could he say no to you?’

‘I’m not sure what good it would do,’ O’Malley said. ‘In his present frame of mind, he might own up. Who knows? It’s possible. Or he could lie … yes, even princes of the Church can lie. Either way, we would be no further forward, except that now he would know we were on to him.’

‘And play his cards more carefully?’

‘That’s what I’d do.’

‘You’re a cunning man, Uncle.’

‘I’m the head of the Jesuits. We’re trained to be cunning. It’s in the blood.’

‘And what’s in Bosani’s blood?’

‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’

Dempsey reached into his inside pocket and took out the notebook into which he had copied the material on the library stubs linking Bosani to Battista, the one-time head of the Inquisition. He turned to the relevant page and handed it across, with its reference to a mysterious file intended for the Pope’s eyes only. His gratification came when his uncle whistled through his teeth as he took in the significance of what he’d read.

‘Odd, don’t you think?’ Dempsey said. ‘Battista was obviously a nasty piece of work, who’d burn you soon as look at you.’

His uncle took up the train of thought. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And for some reason he was under investigation on the orders of Paul V. Why would that be? I wonder.’

‘No idea. It doesn’t say. And, of coure, the file itself is missing.’

‘I see. And the last man to look at it was ..?’

‘Who else? His Eminence Lamberto Bosani, 23 January 1977.’

‘Fascinating.’

‘And that’s not all.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s some sort of a connection – I don’t know what – between Battista and a lost painting by Caravaggio,
The Betrayal of Christ
.’

A shock of recognition crossed O’Malley’s face. ‘
The Betrayal of Christ
? Are you sure?’

‘That’s what it said. Sometimes known as
The Taking of Christ
, painted
sometime
in the early 1600s.’

‘I know it.’

‘You
know
it? But it’s been lost for centuries. That’s what it said in the file.’

A look of amused disdain crept over his uncles’ features. ‘It may have been “lost” when that note was written,’ he said, ‘but in the 1980s it hung over the sofa in the parlour in Dublin where I read my
Irish Times
each morning.’

‘What? You mean the Jesusit house in Leeson Street? You’re having me on.’

‘No, it’s true. It was “discovered” in 1990. The Residence hadn’t been done up for something like thirty years. It smelled like a mixture of your grandmother’s front room and the snug of Dohenny & Nesbitt’s. Anyway, we took the art down and got the decorators in. The rector, Noel Barber – do you remember him? I think I took you along on a visit once – suggested we ask the National Gallery to do an evaluation. “Why not? You never know,” he said. The upshot was that a couple of days later, this chap Benedetti – one of those little round Italian fellas you’d think was weaned on spaghetti – turns up, looking bored, like he’d been asked to run a village stall version of the Antiques Road show.

‘He wanders round, turning up his nose at the dross he’s looking at. Not that I blamed him. But then he sees this big painting propped up against the wall in the library, where we took it for storage. He got down on his hunkers and stared at it. The look that came over his face was priceless. It was like all his Christmases had come together. To cut a long story short – and take it from me, it was a long story – it turns out to be the missing Caravaggio,
The Betrayal of Christ
. Apparently it had hung in the Mattei family’s palazzo in Monte Celio for a hundred years or more, hardly ever seen. The Mattei were big-time nobility – they produced more cardinals than you could shake a stick at. But after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy, they fell on hard times and the Caravaggio was one of a job lot sold off to a passing Scotsman called Nisbet, who kept it for years on his estate in East Lothian. The image I have is of it hanging next to a stag’s head in the library, half hidden by an aspidistra. Anyhow, another century goes by until an Irishman, Captain Percival Lea-Wilson – a Protestant,
needless
to say – buys it at auction. It was listed as by the Dutch artist Gerard Honthorst, who lived in Rome at the time of Caravaggio and painted in a similar style. This was around the time of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, and in the way of these things Lea-Wilson, who worked for the British and wasn’t what you’d call an ardent Republican, gets himself shot. In 1920, I think it was. It was his widow, a pediatrician, who very generously donated the picture to us. Turns out she’d been comforted in her distress by a Jesuit priest and felt grateful to us.’

‘Amazing. So is that where it is now – back in Leeson Street?’

O’Malley raised a pitying eyebrow. ‘The Jesuits may be crazy,’ he said, ‘but we’re not mad. No. After authentication, the painting was given to the National Gallery on permanent loan. It’s the star turn of the collection, and if you had anything else in your head except girls and guns, you’d know that.’

‘It must be worth a fortune.’

‘A hundred million euro, that’s what they tell me.’

Dempsey whistled. ‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Exactly,’ said his uncle, ‘and we weren’t going to betray him a second time by selling him off to the highest bidder.’

‘But what’s the connection with Battista? I don’t know the painting. To be honest, Caravaggio’s no more than a name to me, like Goethe or Nietzsche. I’m guessing, though, that the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane must have been painted a hundred times by a hundred different artists. So what’s special about this one, and what’s the link between two cardinals separated by more than four hundred years?’

‘As to the first,’ said O’Malley, ‘the painting is astonishing. The first time I saw it after it was restored, it took my breath away. But as to your second question, I’ve no idea. That’s what we’re going to find out.’

After Dempsey left, O’Malley picked up the phone and asked to be put through to the provost of the German College, Monsignor Josef Steinbrück. It had suddenly occurred to him that Rüttgers might have confided any fears he had about Bosani to his fellow countryman, with whom he had been staying in Rome.

Steinbrück came on the line almost at once.

‘Father General,’ he began, in his heavily accented Italian. ‘It’s been a long time. What can I do for you?’

O’Malley got straight to the point. ‘It’s about Cardinal Rüttgers.’

‘What about him?’

Did the German sound defensive? O’Malley wasn’t sure.

‘It’s just that I was wondering if he left, you know, any kind of testament.’

‘Testament? What are you talking about?’

Now he really
did
sound defensive.

‘Well, the thing is, I knew him pretty well. We’d corresponded for years. And in his last week or so of life, he seemed terribly unsettled. He seemed to believe that the Church was going through some awful crisis.’ 

Steinbrück snorted. ‘And when exactly was that not the case, Father General? I am sixty-four and I must say I have never known a time of ease or tranquillity.’

‘Quite so,’ said O’Malley, who sensed he was getting nowhere. ‘But he didn’t saying anything to you, did he?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. It is well known that he and the Camerlengo disagreed over the best approach to the Islamic question, but other than that he seemed fine. His death was, of course, a terrible tragedy, but one that comes to us all.’

‘Indeed. Just one other thing. I recall that His Eminence kept a journal. He began it during his years in Brazil. He showed it to me once. It was most insightful. You didn’t find his diary, I suppose … in his bedroom or in his suitcase?’

The provost didn’t hesitate. ‘A journal? No, no. Absolutely not. There was nothing like that.’

‘You are certain?’

‘Totally. And it was I who sealed his room pending the arrival of the Camerlengo. I would have seen it straight away. But now, Father General, with all due respect, I have to speak now with three of my seminarians whose ordinations are almost upon us.’

‘Of course, of course. I’m sorry to have troubled you. Once again, my
condolences
on your loss. The cardinal was a fine man and an outstanding Christian.’

‘There is no doubt of that. And his replacement as head of the German Church, Cardinal Von Stiegler, will be no less of a leader.’ The provost cleared his throat. ‘We should meet for lunch, Father General, maybe after the new pope is installed. Until then, goodbye and
Auf Wiederhörn
.’

‘
Auf Wiederhörn
,’ echoed O’Malley, replacing the phone on its cradle. His conversation with Steinbrück had proved extremely interesting. So Bosani had been one of the first on the scene and immediately took charge of the clean-up operation. What was that about? He flicked through the old-fashioned Roladex on his desk, squinting at the numbers that came up until he found the one he wanted.