God's Spy (15 page)

No. 6: . . .
Dr Fowler: You’re not going to reply?
No. 6: You don’t know anything about Hell.
Dr Fowler: You think so? You are wrong: I have seen it with my

own eyes. I’m going to turn off the tape recorder now and tell you something that I’m sure will interest you.

Thursday, 7 April 2005, 8.32 a.m.

Fowler finally raised his eyes from the photographs lying scattered on the floor. Making no effort to pick them up, he merely glided over them. Paola asked herself if that represented an implicit response to Dante’s accusations. Many times over the course of the next few days Paola felt that she was standing in front of a man who was as unreadable as he was polite, as ambiguous as he was intelligent. Fowler was a walking contradiction, an indecipherable hieroglyph; but at that moment the only thing she felt was another emotion, blind anger, which the tremor in her lips could not conceal.

The priest sat down in front of Paola, resting his worn black briefcase against the side of her desk. In his left hand he carried a paper bag with three coffees in it. He offered one to Dicanti.

‘Cappuccino?’

‘I hate cappuccino. It reminds me of a dog I once had whose vomit was exactly that colour. But all right.’ She took one of the cups.
For several minutes Fowler didn’t say a word. Paola gave up the pretence of reading the Karosky dossier and decided to confront him. She had to know.
‘And so? You’re not going to –’ She stopped in her tracks. Paola hadn’t really looked at Fowler since he’d walked into her office; but when she did, she discovered that he was miles away. The hands that lifted the coffee cup to his lips were shaking. The room was cool enough, yet tiny drops of sweat sat like pearls on the crown of his bald head; and it was clear from the look in his green eyes that the indelible horrors he had witnessed over the years were playing themselves out once more in his mind’s eye.
Paola remained silent because she realised that the apparent ease with which Fowler had passed over the photographs was purely a façade. She waited. The priest took several minutes to recover, and when he was ready, his voice seemed faraway, lifeless.
‘It’s hard. You think that you’re over it, but then it turns up again, like a cork you’re trying to sink in a bathtub. You hold it down but it always pops back up to the surface.’
‘Maybe talking about it would help.’
‘Take my word for it: it won’t. It’s never helped in the past. There are some problems that can’t be resolved by talking.’
‘That’s a curious thing for a priest to say. Unbelievable for a psychologist. But appropriate for an agent of the CIA who was trained to kill.’
Fowler repressed a grimace. ‘They didn’t train me to kill – no more than any other soldier. I was trained in counter-espionage. God gave me the gift of perfect aim – that much is true; but I didn’t go looking for it. And, to anticipate your next question, I haven’t killed anyone since 97. I killed eleven Vietcong soldiers – at least, that I know of. But all of them were killed in combat.’
‘You enlisted voluntarily.’
‘Before you judge me, let me tell you my story. I’ve never told anyone what I’m going to tell you, so please, I only ask that you hear me out. Not that you believe or trust me, because that’s too much to ask at this moment. Simply, listen to what I have to say.’
Paola nodded in assent.
‘I suppose that all this information has arrived courtesy of our friend in the Vatican. If you’ve seen the Sant’Uffizio’s report, it will have given you a very approximate idea of my history. I enlisted voluntarily in 97, owing to certain . . . disagreements with my father. I don’t want to blow you away with a horror story about what the war did to me, because words could never describe it. Have you seen Apocalypse Now?’
‘Yes. Some time ago. I was surprised by how crude it was.’
‘A superficial farce. That film was a shadow on the wall compared to what I am trying to describe. I saw enough pain and cruelty to fill several lives. But that’s where I discovered my vocation. It didn’t come to me in a foxhole in the middle of the night, with enemy fire whistling around my head. It didn’t come looking at the face of a ten-year-old kid wearing a necklace of human ears. It happened behind the lines, on a quiet afternoon spent with the regiment’s chaplain. I knew there and then that I wanted to dedicate my life to God and his creatures. And that is what I have done.’
‘And the CIA?’
‘Don’t jump so far ahead. I didn’t want to return to the United States, as I’d have to face my parents. So I went as far away as I could, right to the edge of the Iron Curtain. I learned many things there but some of them - you’re only thirty-four years old, you wouldn’t know how to make sense of them. For you to understand what Communism meant for a German Catholic in the 970s you would have had to live through it. We inhaled the threat of nuclear war on a daily basis. The hatred that existed between the various groups was a religion unto itself. It seemed that every day we came a little closer to someone – either them or us – blowing the whole place sky-high. And that would have been the end of everything, I’m sure of it. Sooner or later, someone would have pushed the button.’
Fowler paused briefly to sip his coffee. Paola lit one of Pontiero’s cigarettes. Fowler was reaching across the desk for the packet when Paola slid it a few inches further away.
‘They’re mine. I have to smoke them all by myself.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t going to take one; I just wondered if you’d suddenly picked up the habit again.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’d rather you continue your story than we talk about that.’
Fowler intuited the pain behind her words and went back to his story. ‘Of course. I wanted to continue to be part of the military. I love the companionship, the discipline, the feeling of a military life. If you think about it, it’s conceptually not so very different from the priesthood: it’s a question of giving your life to others. Armies aren’t bad things in themselves; it’s war that’s evil. I asked to be sent to an American base as a chaplain, and as I was a diocesan, my bishop gave in to the request.’
‘I’m a little vague about the meaning of diocesan.’
‘More or less it means I’m a free agent. I’m not tied to a particular congregation. If I want, I can petition my bishop to assign me to a parish. But if I think it’s a better idea, I can undertake my pastoral labour wherever I feel its needed, but always with the bishop’s blessing, understood as formal permission.’
‘I follow.’
‘At the base I worked alongside various members of the agency who were giving special instruction in counter-espionage to military personnel who did not belong to the CIA. They invited me to join them, four hours a day, five days a week over the course of two years. It wasn’t incompatible with my pastoral work, although it did cost me a few hours sleep. So I accepted. And it turns out that I was a good student. One night, after class, one of the instructors pulled me aside and proposed that I join the company – that’s how the agency was known in its inner circles. I told him that I was a priest – that it would be impossible. I already had a tremendous job ahead of me with the hundreds of young Catholics at the base. Their superiors dedicated many hours each day to teaching them how to hate Communists. I dedicated one hour each week to reminding them that we are all children of God.’
‘A lost cause.’
‘Almost always. The priesthood is a career for long-distance runners.’
‘I think I read those words in one of the interviews with Karosky.’
‘It’s possible. We limit ourselves to scoring small points, gaining small victories. Every once in a while we achieve something a little more grand, but those incidents are few and far between. We plant small seeds, with the hope that at least some of the crop will flourish. Usually the person who plants doesn’t get to harvest, which can be demoralising.’
‘Yes, that must be really annoying.’
‘Once upon a time a king was strolling through the forest and he saw an old man, a poor man, bent over a furrow. He walked up to him and saw that he was planting seeds for chestnut trees. He asked the old man why he was doing it and the old man replied, “I love the taste of chestnuts.” The king responded, “Old man, stop punishing your back bent over a hole in the ground. Do you really not know that by the time even one of these trees has grown tall enough to bear nuts, you may not be around to gather them?” And the old man answered, “Your Majesty, if my ancestors had thought the way you do, I would never have tasted chestnuts.”’
Paola smiled, surprised by the fable’s undeniable truth.
‘Do you know what that anecdote teaches us?’ – Fowler paused before he went on – ‘that you can always get ahead with goodwill, love of God and a good strong shot of Johnnie Walker.’
Paola was a little abashed. She hadn’t imagined the upright, polite priest with a bottle of whisky in his hand, but it was clear he had been alone for most of his life.
‘When the instructor told me that another priest could help the young men on the base but that the thousands of young people behind the Iron Curtain had no one to aid them, I knew that what he was saying wasn’t far from the truth. Thousands of Christians languished under Communism, praying in bathrooms and listening to mass in dark basements. They could serve the interests of my country and those of my church at the same time, in the spaces where those two coincided. At that time, I really did believe there was more common ground between the two.’
‘And what do you think now? After all, you’ve returned to active service.’
‘I’ll get to that shortly. Back then, they offered to let me be a free agent, accepting only those missions I believed to be just. I travelled everywhere. In some missions I went as a priest, in others as a normal citizen. My life was in danger many times, but it was almost always worth the risk. I helped people who needed my assistance in one form or another. At times that assistance took the form of a timely warning, an envelope, a letter. On other occasions I organised a chain of communication, or helped to get someone out of a tight spot. I learned languages, and I even felt strong enough to go back to the United States. That was until what happened in Honduras.’
‘Hold on. You’ve skipped an important event: your parents’ funeral.’
Fowler’s face twisted in a look of extreme discomfort. ‘I didn’t take part. I merely dealt with a few pending legal matters.’
‘You surprise me, Padre Fowler. Eighty million dollars is hardly a legal matter.’
‘Ah, so you know about that as well. All right, yes, I relinquished control of the money. But I didn’t give it away, as many people think. I used it to create a non-profit foundation that works in various fields of social endeavour, inside and outside the United States. It bears the name of Howard Eisner, the chaplain who inspired me in Vietnam.’
‘You set up the Eisner Foundation?’ Paola brightened. ‘In that case, you really have been around.’
‘I didn’t create it. I just gave it a push – gave it financial backing. In reality, it was my parents’ lawyers who did most of the work – much to their dismay, I might add.’
‘Fair enough. But tell me about Honduras. Take all the time you want.’
The priest regarded Dicanti with curiosity. Her attitude had quickly changed in a subtle but important respect: she now seemed inclined to believe what he said. He asked himself what had provoked the change.
‘I don’t want to bore you with the details. The history of El Aguacate would fill an entire book, but I’ll give you the essentials. The CIA’s objective was to help the revolution. Mine was to help Catholics who were oppressed by the Sandinista regime. A volunteer army was formed, and trained to undertake guerrilla warfare in order to destabilise the government. The soldiers were recruited from among the poorest Nicaraguans. An old ally of the United States government sold them weapons, a man few people expected to turn out as he did: Osama bin Laden. And the command of the Contras fell into the hands of a high-school graduate by the name of Bernie Salazar – a fanatic, as we later learned. During the months of training I went with Salazar across the border, on incursions that became more risky each time. I helped to get some religious figures whose safety had been compromised out of the country, but I found myself progressively more at odds with Salazar with each raid. He started seeing Communists here, there and everywhere. Under every stone there was a Communist, as far as he was concerned.’
‘According to an article I read in an old psychiatric manual, fanatical leaders develop a heightened sense of paranoia very quickly.’
‘Well this was a textbook case then. I suffered an accident, which I didn’t know until much later had been planned in advance. I broke a leg and that meant I couldn’t go on any further border crossings. The guerrillas started to come back later every time. They weren’t sleeping in the barracks but in clearings in the jungle, in bivouacs. At night they were supposedly doing target practice, but we later found out they were carrying out summary executions. I was laid up in bed, but the night that Salazar captured the nuns and accused them of being Communists, someone warned me. He was a good kid, like many of those who threw their lot in with Salazar, but he was a little less fearful than the others – only a little less, because he told me what was going on in the secrecy of confession. He knew that I therefore wouldn’t tell anyone else, but that I would do everything I could to help the nuns. We did what we could . . .’
Fowler’s face was deathly pale. He stopped long enough to swallow, gazing at a spot beyond Paola, outside the window.
‘. . . But it wasn’t enough. Today Salazar, like his young recruits, is dead, and the whole world knows that the Contras seized the helicopter and threw the nuns out over a Sandinista village. They needed three trips to complete the job.’
‘Why did they do it?’
‘The message was stark; you couldn’t miss it: “We will kill anyone suspected of working with the Sandinistas. Whoever they are.”’
Paola sat for a moment, reflecting on what she’d heard. ‘And you blame yourself . . . It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘It would be difficult not to. I wasn’t able to save those nuns. And I didn’t take very good care of those young boys either. They ended up killing their own people. My desire to do good was what dragged me there, but that wasn’t what I achieved. I was just one more cog in a monstrous machine. And my country has become so used to it that it no longer bats an eyelid when someone we’ve trained, helped and protected turns against us.’
Although the sunlight was now full on his face, Fowler didn’t blink. He merely squinted, his eyes becoming two green slits as he gazed somewhere beyond the rooftops. ‘The first time I saw the pictures of the common graves,’ the priest went on, ‘I was struck by the memory of the gunfire we used to hear during those tropical nights. So-called “target practice”. I’d grown accustomed to the noise. Then one night, half asleep, I thought I heard people crying out between the rounds, but I dismissed it and went back to sleep. The next morning I told myself it had just been my imagination. If, at that moment, I had talked to the base commander, and we had investigated Salazar more thoroughly, we would have saved many lives. For that reason I am responsible for many of those deaths; for that reason I left the CIA, and for that reason I was called before the Sant’Uffizio.’
‘Padre, I don’t believe in God any more. Now I’m sure that, when we die, it’s all over. I think we go back into the earth, after taking a brief trip through the intestines of a worm. But if you need absolution, I’m offering you mine. You saved the priests that you could before the rebels laid that trap for you.’