The Judas Cloth (54 page)

Nicola wondered if they were abreast of the latest rumours. An incision made in the Pope’s leg to help the discharge of matter had begun to close and this, said his doctors, could cause his erysipelas to attack his vital organs. At Easter, he had collapsed while giving his solemn blessing
urbi
et
orbe
and, as the National Party was thought to have plans to take over the city the minute he died, the Curia was laying their own for a break with custom whereby a Conclave, held
cadavere
presente,
could elect a successor before the public knew of his death.

Such talk could worry investors who must, therefore, be steered away from the whispering galleries where guesses were rife and names of
papabili
bandied like those of horses. On the Conciliatory side, d’Andrea and Amandi were heavily tipped and d’Andrea had confided to friends that this made him fear for his life. Most people, however, put this down to His Eminence’s Neapolitan flair for drama.

‘Talking of barbarians,’ said the Belgian’s companion, a quick little lawyer from Pest, ‘our hope is that Rome will treat modern powers of
finance and industry as they did the fourth-century invaders, namely baptize them!’

This meant that they wanted some sort of accolade for
Langrand-Dumonceau
– medal, blessing, title. Nicola smiled and kept quiet. He had grown good at this over the last months, during which he must have met a dozen agents sent from the financier’s centres of activity in Brussels, Paris, Vienna and Pest. Some were figureheads, like today’s Belgian, whose name rang like a motto and whose face had the shape of an escutcheon. The real business was left to men like the lawyer who buzzed with purpose and had, over lunch, described Hungarian flatlands which Langrand was buying up to resell in small profitable lots. Almost lyrically, he had evoked pale waterlogged demesnes which could be regenerated by land-hungry men who had never, until now, owned property. Was this, he exulted, not a reconciliation between the spirit of the times and that of the gospels? Church lands in Hungary could benefit from a similar scheme if only the local clergy could be made to see that wealth locked in land gave no return. If it were mortgaged and the bonds sold by Langrand’s enterprises …

The Belgian, affable in a haze of cigar smoke, talked of Langrand’s being such a good family man, devoted to his boys and to his fat little wife, Rosalie, who looked like a pile of buns! But what vision,
Monsignore
! What energy!

‘Our companies,’ murmured the lawyer, ‘know how to recompense those who help us in our mission.’

Nicola pretended not to hear.

‘You could do worse than let us raise money on Roman property.’ The lawyer puffed his lips as though ready to kiss something. ‘
Prayer-book
and pocketbook!’ He wanted to marry them. ‘Morals and money!’ It
must
circulate, he said. Practising what he preached, he had donated 20,000 francs of his companies’ money to St Peter’s Pence – now the mainstay of our economy – and to several churches which the Pope was having restored. Pius was fond of saying that the generosity of the faithful was a silver lining to current clouds, but the Belgians’ gifts only sharpened the doubts of Ferrari and Antonelli, whose notion of a silver lining was a knife between the ribs.

Turning back down the Corso, they passed San Carlo’s Church where a handbill had been pinned to the door. Nicola read: LETTER FROM EMIGRANT PATRIOTS TO THE PEOPLE OF ROME. Profiting from the agents’ momentary interest in a beggar, he stepped closer and ran his eye down the smaller print. ‘Rome … owes it to herself to crown
the Italian Revolution by a spontaneous insurrec …’ Here a breeze curled the paper, concealing a paragraph. Further down, he made out the words, ‘a new conciliatory pope …’

Flushing – some unsavoury-looking characters were amused at his interest – he moved off and caught up with the lawyer who returned to an argument started earlier when they had witnessed accredited beggars receiving their daily allowance. Giving them money, he repeated, was not the thing. One must make it possible for them to earn.

Nicola’s mind slid away. Amandi’s appointment to Pius’s old diocese had been presented as a chance for the cardinal to recover his health. But now that the invalid was Mastai, the thing took on other aspects: plotting in the provinces; exile in the hostile kingdom! That could be how the excitable old pontiff would see it.

To whom was loyalty now owed? Clearly, not to a man but to the institution. Jokes were circulating about God’s summoning Pius to Himself and his refusal to obey.

But Nicola should be attending to his birds of passage. They had reached the Caffè Ruspoli, so, proposing a refreshment, he waved them in. ‘Ruspoli,’ remembered the lawyer. There had been a prince of that name recently in Pest. Sent to stir up revolution!

People turned to listen and Nicola warned the Hungarian to lower his voice. But he had gone ahead and didn’t hear. ‘I met Kossuth too,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary. He’s our Mazzini. A man of ’48.’

Nicola, almost knocking down the Belgian, pushed forward, through a thicket of chairs, and hissed, ‘You mustn’t talk about men like that.’

‘Oh, I assure you,’ cried the insensitive lawyer, ‘my interest was mere curiosity. One meets such men as one might go to the zoo.’

The waiter, sticking to them like a limpet, must surely be a spy? No, he was only making sure that they got a good table. Am I mad, wondered Nicola, to think that being seen with men who have met Ruspoli and Kossuth could discredit me? After all, I’m here at the behest of Ferrari and Antonelli! But could they save me – or would I sink them? Maybe that’s the plan? These fellows – Belgian envoys after all – could have been put up to this by Monsignor de Mérode! Across from him, the mirrored face of la Diotallevi smiled recognition. He thought, that’s it! She’s following me! For him! The confession was a … No. Why no?

‘Are you all right, Monsignor Santi?’ asked the waiter.

How, thought Nicola, does he know my name? Suspicion whirled in
his head as he stared coldly through la Diotallevi who was greeting him indiscreetly, nodding and waving. Frowning, he turned away.

‘A glass of water?’ The waiter proffered it.

It tasted odd. Did it? Under Nicola’s clothes, his sweat had gone cold. Pulling himself together, he remembered that the waiter had worked here for years, knew him as a customer and had even talked to him about his hobby, which was keeping pigeons.

‘I’m all right,’ he told him. ‘Just a moment’s dizziness.’ Having ordered lemon sherbet for them all, he looked about for la Diotallevi to make up for his boorish discourtesy. She had left.

There was no plot. Spooning into sweet, granular globes of frozen citrus juice, he stared beneath the tables at the reassuring ordinariness of cassocked, hoop-skirted and trousered knees supported by brightly coloured ankles and heard, yet again, the gospel according to Langrand: all evils came from failure to free capital from entails and mortmain. How reassuring monotony was! Their minds moved like clock hands.

Thirteen per cent of our Belgian shareholders, they told him, were priests. Too many legacies to the Church were being challenged in our courts, so now we advise the pious to sell their property and use the proceeds to buy our bonds, which yield four and a half per cent during their lifetime and can be handed to their priest on their deathbed. Greedy and godless next-of-kin are foiled!

‘I see,’ said Nicola, who didn’t quite.

‘The merchants are back in the temple but as saviours.’

And now it came to him that these could be the agents not only of Langrand-Dumonceau but also of an older and more dangerous agency which was about its old business of kidnapping souls. He was sorry he had snubbed la Diotallevi, who had given him her trust.

He had left the businessmen back at their hotel and was on his way to the ministry when he felt a pull at his elbow.

‘Monsignor Santi.’

It was Viterbo, whose tone was challenging as if daring Nicola to take offence. He looked unhealthy. Eye-bags, soft and grey as small, dead field-mice, bulged beneath his eyes.

He was, he said, here with his sister who had come to see her son. The Mortara boy. They let her see him now. They were so sure of him! Viterbo grinned with a wheedling aggression, as if eager for Nicola to confirm his worst expectations. His character, thought Nicola sadly, had
been damaged. The likeable man he remembered from Lammenais’ funeral was as thoroughly buried as the heretic priest! Persecution did not improve people. Was it true, the printer asked, that the Rothschilds were not, after all, to float the new loan?

‘They tried to use their influence on our behalf. Naturally, it was a blow when we heard that they may be replaced by this Jew-baiting Belgian, who …’

‘Nothing’s decided,’ Nicola told him.

Viterbo had put on weight, but it was slack and hung about him like pockets of chaff. ‘Will you see my sister?’ The question came out like a bullet. ‘You won’t have to go to the Ghetto. That rag-and-bone market distresses her. In Bologna our people live with dignity now. We can meet at the Englishwoman’s. Miss Foljambe’s. Is that discreet enough?’

His rudeness was like a smell – pervasive, elusive and impossible to remark on. Perhaps it was a form of pride? Or perhaps he was unaware of it.

Nicola agreed to come and later in the afternoon made his way to the Palazzo Spada, where Miss Foljambe was holding a gathering.

The first voice he heard was Cardinal d’Andrea’s. Booming with convivial indignation, it was audible across the courtyard. ‘Eight thousand, nine hundred and forty-three priests,’ His Eminence was saying, ‘signed the address to the Pope last year, begging him to reconcile our people’s two heartfelt cries: “Long live the Pope!” and “Long live Rome, capital of the new Kingdom!”
That
was
despite fear of excommunication. How many, Monsignore,’ he called to Nicola as he came in, ‘would have signed if they had been free?’

‘My own signature,’ Nicola told him, ‘is the only one for which I can answer. But as I was too prudent to sign, Your Eminence must allow me to be too prudent to regret that now. Besides, many signatures were withdrawn. Only the very brave remained.’

‘You disapprove of bravery, Monsignore?’

‘I disapprove of being excommunicated.’

The cardinal drew him into a corner. ‘You may be right!’ he said. ‘Letting ourselves be driven out would suit
him
too well. To tell the truth, I may have been unwise. Since resigning from the
Congregatio
Indicis,
I’m a pariah. One feels the tide go out around one. I’m not even sure I’m physically safe. I haven’t been well, and one always wonders … How is Cardinal Amandi?’

Nicola, wary of the implied linkage between the two cardinals’ health, said the air of Imola was doing Amandi good.

D’Andrea’s profile shifted, chopping the air like a predatory bird’s. ‘I,’ he whispered, ‘have been receiving queries from certain quarters. I imagine he too …?’

‘I don’t know, Your Eminence. I’m here, you know …’

‘And he’s in Imola where, as you say, the air is healthier! I did think of going to Naples for a while. I have family there. But as a cardinal in Curia, I am expected to be here. Naples is now seen as enemy territory, so
he
would take it badly. To tell the truth, I asked for permission and it hasn’t come. Appalling, isn’t it, that the Servant of God indulges in petty spite? I mustn’t hold you. We mustn’t seem to conspire! You must greet your hostess.’

She seemed hardly to have changed since Nicola had met her first. Eager, shiny-eyed, with a flush on her cheek-bones and a quick smile from teeth as small as milk teeth, or a young girl’s first string of pearls. With her was a woman whom he recognised by her colouring as Viterbo’s sister.

They were introduced and Miss Foljambe packed them off to a small drawing room where they would, she promised, be undisturbed.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said the dark-haired woman who kept her hands so still that he wondered if their impulse was to break into mutinous gestures. Her husband was a lace-merchant, but she was wearing no lace. Austere then, but not, he knew, resigned.

For the last three years she had been a subject of the new Italian government which, thanks to her persistence, had appealed for her son’s release. So had half the monarchs of Europe, but Pius was impervious. He had turned the case into a symbol. The boy’s conversion was to be like the first swallow in spring – a harbinger and promise. Besides, he liked the child who had settled in well with his new teachers.
This
was what upset the mother most.

Hands still in each other’s custody, she talked of how Edgardo’s affections had been stolen. She could not blame
him.
His qualities had been used against her. ‘He was always so alert, you see, and loved learning new things, so, of course – what’s that?’

Something was happening in the corridor. Voices were raised.

‘Pay no attention,’ advised Nicola. ‘It’s just a bit of high spirits.’ He guessed that d’Andrea had been provoking someone.

‘It’s strange.’ The Signora was remembering the evening, five years ago, when they first came for Edgardo. ‘It was a June evening, still bright, yet late enough so that we didn’t open the door at once, but asked who was there. The answer was “police”. I keep hearing that word
that started it all.’ She gave a small, shy laugh. ‘I thought I heard it now.’ The laugh meant, ‘Tell me I’m being foolish.’

But Nicola too had heard it. He thought, If they find us here alone together, what can I say?

‘Have you permission to be in Rome?’

Yes, she said. She had papers.

Nicola was filled with shame. He was going to have to ask her to lie. ‘If they interrogate us, could you bear,’ he asked her, ‘to say you were asking me about the Catholic faith? It won’t help Edgardo if they think we were plotting.’

‘But I was not intending to plot with you, Monsignore.’ Sitting up very straight. ‘What would have been the use? And I did intend asking you about Edgardo’s present beliefs. I want to know how real they are to him. What do you mean by “interrogate us”? Is this house under suspicion then?’