The Confessor (24 page)

And now, after an interminable drive down the Italian peninsula, he found himself here, in his sour-smelling room at the Abruzzi. Downstairs, the table-tennis match had deteriorated into something of a new Balkan war. The shouts of the aggrieved party filled Gabriel’s room. He thought of Peter Malone and wondered whether he was responsible for his death. Had he led the killers to him, or had Malone already been marked for elimination? Was Gabriel next on the list? As he drifted toward sleep, he heard Malone’s warning careening about his memory:
“If they think you pose a threat, they won’t hesitate to kill you.”

Tomorrow he would find Alessio Rossi. Then he would get out of Rome as quickly as possible.

GABRIEL SLEPT
poorly and was awakened early by the ringing of church bells. He opened his eyes and blinked in the severe sunlight. He showered and changed into fresh clothing, then went downstairs to the dining room for breakfast. The Croatians were nowhere to be seen, only a pair of churchy American pilgrims and a band of noisy college students from Barcelona. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and Gabriel remembered that it was a Wednesday, the day the Holy Father greeted pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.

At nine o’clock, Gabriel returned to his room and placed his first call to Inspector Alessio Rossi of the
Polizia di Stato.
A switchboard operator put him through to the detective’s voice mail. “My name is Heinrich Siedler,” Gabriel said. “I have information regarding Father Felici and Father Manzini. You can reach me at the Pensione Abruzzi.”

He hung up.
Now what?
He had no choice but to wait and hope the detective called him back. There was no television in the room. The bedside table had a built-in radio, but the tuning knob was broken.

After one hour of paralyzing boredom, he dialed the number a second time. Once again the switchboard officer transferred him straight to Rossi’s voice mail. Gabriel left a second message, identical to the first, but with a faint note of urgency in his voice.

At eleven-thirty, he placed a third call to Rossi’s number. This time he was put through to a colleague who explained that the inspector was on assignment and would not be back in the office until late afternoon. Gabriel left a third message and hung up.

He decided to use the opportunity to get out of the room. In the streets around the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore he checked his tail for signs of surveillance and saw nothing. Then he walked down the Via Napoleone III. The March air was crisp and clear and scented with wood smoke. He ate pasta in a restaurant near the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. After lunch, he walked along the looming western façade of the
Stazione Termini,
then wandered among the classical edifices of Rome’s government quarter until he found the headquarters of the
Polizia di Stato.
In a café across the street, he drank espresso and watched officers and secretaries filing in and out, wondering whether Rossi was among them.

At three o’clock, he started back toward the Pensione Abruzzi. As he was crossing the Piazza di Repubblica, a crowd of about five hundred students entered the square from the direction of the Università Romana. At the head of the procession was an unshaven boy wearing a white headband. Around his waist were sticks of mock dynamite. Behind him a group of pseudomourners carried a coffin fashioned of cardboard. As they drew closer Gabriel could see that most of the demonstrators were Italian, including the boy dressed as a suicide bomber. They chanted “Liberate the land of Palestine!” and “Death to the Jews!”—not in Arabic but in Italian. A young Italian girl, no more than twenty, thrust a leaflet into Gabriel’s hand. It depicted the Israeli prime minister dressed in the uniform of the SS with a Hitlerian toothbrush mustache, the heel of his jackboot crushing the skull of a Palestinian girl. Gabriel squeezed the leaflet into a ball and dropped it onto the square.

He passed a flower stall. A pair of
carabinieri
were flirting shamelessly with the girl who worked there. They looked up briefly as Gabriel strode by and stared at him with undisguised interest before turning their attention once more to the girl. It could have been nothing, but something about the way they looked at him made sweat run over Gabriel’s ribs.

He took his time walking back to the hotel, careful to make sure no one was following him. Along the way, he passed a bored
carabiniere
on a motorcycle, parked in a patch of sunlight, watching the madness of a traffic circle with little interest. Gabriel seemed to intrigue him even less.

He entered the Pensione Abruzzi. The Spaniards had returned from the Wednesday audience in a state of great excitement. It seemed that one of them, a girl with a spiked haircut, had managed to touch the Pope’s hand.

Upstairs in his room, Gabriel dialed Rossi’s number.

“Pronto.”

“Inspector Rossi?”

“Si.”

“My name is Heinrich Siedler. I called earlier today.”

“Are you still at the Pensione Abruzzi?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call here again.”

Click.

NIGHT FELL
and with it came a Mediterranean storm. Gabriel lay on his bed with the window open, listening to the rain smacking against the paving stones in the street below while the conversation with Alessio Rossi played over and over in his head like a loop of audio tape.

“Are you still at the Pensione Abruzzi?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call here again.”

Clearly the Italian detective wished to speak with him. It was also clear that he wanted no more contact with Herr Siedler on his office telephone. Gabriel had no choice but to wait him out and hope Rossi would make the next move.

At nine o’clock the telephone finally rang. It was the night manager.

“There’s a man here to see you.”

“What’s his name?”

“He didn’t say. Shall I send him away?”

“No, I’ll be down in a minute.”

Gabriel hung up the phone and stepped into the corridor, locking the door behind him. Downstairs, he found the night manager seated behind the front desk. No one else was there. Gabriel looked at him and shrugged. The night manager pointed a sausagelike forefinger toward the common room. Gabriel entered but found the room deserted, except for the Croatian table-tennis players.

He went back to the front desk. The Italian threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender and turned his attention to a miniature black-and-white television. Gabriel climbed the stairs to his room. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.

He saw the blow coming, a glint of light on black metal, sweeping toward him in an arc, like a shimmering swath of wet paint across blank canvas. Too late, he raised his hands to shield his head. The butt of a pistol crashed against the base of his skull behind his left ear.

The pain was immediate. His vision blurred. His legs seemed suddenly paralyzed, and he felt himself corkscrewing downward. His attacker caught him and eased him soundlessly to the linoleum floor. He heard Peter Malone’s warning one last time—
“If they think you pose a threat, they won’t hesitate to kill you”
—and then only the sound of the table-tennis match downstairs in the common room.

TAP-a-TAP-a-TAP . . .

WHEN GABRIEL
awakened, his face was burning. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into a halogen bulb not more than an inch from his face. He closed his eyes and tried to turn his head. Pain shot through the back of his skull like a second blow. He wondered how long he had been out. Long enough for his attacker to bind his mouth and wrists with packing tape. Long enough for blood to dry against the side of his neck.

The light was so close he could see nothing more of the room. He had the sense that he had not left the Abruzzi. This was confirmed when he heard shouting in Serbo-Croatian. He was on his own bed.

He tried to sit up. A gun barrel seemed to flow out of the light. It pressed against his breastbone and pushed him back onto the mattress. Then a face appeared. Heavy shadows beneath the eyes, stubble on the square chin. The lips moved, sound reached Gabriel’s ears. In his delirium, it seemed like a film out of sync, and his brain required a moment to process and comprehend the words he had just heard.

“My name is Alessio Rossi. What the fuck do you want?”

T
HE YOUNG MAN
sitting astride the
motorino
on the Via Gioberti had an air of bored insolence typical of Roman teenagers. He was not bored, nor was he a teenager, but a thirty-year-old
Vigilanza
officer assigned to Carlo Casagrande’s special section of the Vatican Security Office. His youthful appearance proved an asset in his present assignment: the surveillance of Inspector Alessio Rossi of the
Polizia di Stato.
The
Vigilanza
man knew only what he needed to know about Rossi. A troublemaker, the inspector. Poking his nose into places it didn’t belong. At the end of each shift, the officer returned to the Vatican, then typed up a detailed report and left it on Casagrande’s desk. The old general always read the Rossi reports the moment they came in. He had taken a special interest in the case.

Rossi had been acting suspiciously. Twice that day—once in the morning and again in the late afternoon—he’d driven an unmarked car from headquarters to the Via Gioberti and parked there. The
Vigilanza
man had observed Rossi staring at the Pensione Abruzzi like a man who suspected his wife was having an affair upstairs. After the second visit, the officer contacted an informant in Rossi’s department, a pretty young girl who answered the telephones and handled the filing. The girl told him that Rossi had received several telephone calls that day from a guest at the Abruzzi offering information about a cold case. The guest’s name? Siedler, the informant had answered. Heinrich Siedler.

The
Vigilanza
man had a hunch. He climbed off the
motorino
and entered the pensione. The night manager looked up from a pornographic magazine.

“Is there a man named Heinrich Siedler staying in this hotel?”

The night manager shrugged his heavy shoulders. The
Vigilanza
officer slid a pair of euro notes across the counter and watched them disappear into the manager’s grubby paw.

“Yes, I believe we have a man called Siedler staying here. Let me check.” He made a vast show of consulting the registry book. “Ah, yes, Siedler.”

The man from the Vatican pulled a photograph from the pocket of his leather jacket and laid it on the counter. This produced a noncommittal frown from the night manager. His face brightened at the appearance of more money.

“Yes, that’s him. That’s Siedler.”

The
Vigilanza
man scooped up the picture. “What room?”

THE APARTMENT
on the Via Pinciana was too large for an old man living alone: vaulted ceilings, a spacious sitting room, a broad terrace with a sweeping view of the Villa Borghese. On nights when Carlo Casagrande was tormented by memories of his wife and daughter, it seemed as cavernous as the Basilica. Had he still been a mere
carabinieri
general, the flat would have been well beyond his reach, but because the building was owned by the Vatican, Casagrande paid nothing. He felt no guilt about living well on the donations of the faithful. The flat served not only as his residence, but as his primary office as well. As a result, he took precautions that his neighbors did not. There was a
Vigilanza
man permanently at his door and another in a car parked on the Via Pinciana. Once a week, a team from the Vatican Security Office scoured the flat to make sure it was free of listening devices.

He answered the telephone on the first ring and immediately recognized the voice of the
Vigilanza
man assigned to the Rossi case. He listened in silence while the officer filed his report, then severed the connection and dialed a number.

“I need to speak to Bartoletti. It’s an emergency.”

“I’m afraid the director is unavailable at this time.”

“This is Carlo Casagrande. Make him available.”

“Yes, General Casagrande. Please hold.”

A moment later, Bartoletti came on the line. Casagrande wasted no time on pleasantries.

“We have received information that the papal assassin is staying in room twenty-two of the Pensione Abruzzi in the San Lorenzo Quarter. We have reason to believe he is armed and very dangerous.”