The Mazovia Legacy (23 page)

“You have been blessed by the Pope,” Fiorentino said. “Both of you. May it help you in your work. May it help you make the correct decisions about what is to be done.”

“Perhaps it will,” Delaney said.

He and Fiorentino eyed each other warily. It was no longer the time for
realpolitik.
That was before, and, Delaney suspected, for the future. He thought, as Fiorentino took them as far as the staircase, of all the generations of Fiorentinos and Wozniaks and Hilfertys and Stoufflets and others like them who had been in the anterooms of power over the centuries, and how many more were to come. He wondered how much, or how little, their masters would ever know of the deadly serious games played out on their behalf.

T
he Vatican car let them off at their hotel just after 7 p.m. that evening. Tourists were milling around at the top of the Spanish Steps, and the local restaurants were gearing up for a busy night. There were no messages from Hilferty or anyone else. The desk clerk said that no one by the name of Hilferty had checked in. Delaney wondered when the Canadians would come back into play.

They couldn't agree at first on a next move. Natalia wanted to go straight back to Montreal and find the cache. Delaney was for staying on at least another day or two in Rome to see who might make a move and where that might lead them. There was no question in either of their minds, however, about cooperating with the Vatican on this. Delaney thought it likely that Monsignor Fiorentino would decide to call them in once again. The Papal Prefect had asked them how long they intended to stay in Rome, and he had not yet gotten the answers he was seeking from them that afternoon. Delaney felt that another encounter with him could provide them with more information.

In the end, they decided to stay for an extra day at least, if only to rest a little before what they now knew could be an intense time back in Quebec.

At dinner they were almost able to forget why they had come to Rome or to Paris and play at being tourists, if not yet lovers. Natalia was wearing one of her soft black wool tops. A short rest and a bath had left her looking refreshed and more relaxed than Delaney had seen her since before Paris. Thoughts of Zbigniew, and other worries, had apparently faded a little. Delaney was beginning to sincerely want now, here, to be the right time between them at last.

“A papal blessing seems to do you good,” Delaney said.

They were in a trattoria not far from the hotel. It had bright white walls and honey-stained wooden window frames, door panels, and shelves. The house wine was good enough for them and they had already had several small glasses each. An excellent pasta entree had come and gone. Now they were waiting for their Veal Milanese, in one of the long pauses between courses that makes eating in Italy so civilized. Natalia snapped bread sticks and munched them absently.

“They're hoping a little blessing will change our lives,” she said. “For Catholics I guess it could.”

For some reason she had brought her little rosary pouch in her purse to the restaurant and she pulled it out now so they could look at the contents. Delaney had already looked at his in the privacy of his room. Something his Irish-Catholic mother would have liked very much, he thought, before tossing it into his equipment bag next to the Browning. A good luck charm. Now two good luck charms in the bag.

The rosary Natalia had picked was just like his — semi-precious stones with an ornate cross at the end. Nothing extraordinary. Except that it had been blessed by the Pope.

“Our good luck charms,” she said, looking up. The waxy candle burning in the terra-cotta holder on their table made her eyes shine. “From the Church of Silence. You must carry yours.”

“It's in my bag. Don't worry.”

“We will need some good luck charms, won't we?”

“Yes.”

“Against the political bad ones or the church bad ones?”

“There isn't much difference anymore, Natalia. There never really was where the Catholic Church was concerned. And especially where Poland is concerned nowadays.”

“I just can't get my mind around a pope looking at spy photos and scheming overthrows with politicians,” she said. Delaney had told her a bit more about John Paul II's espionage hobby.

“He would never admit to anything like scheming overthrows, Natalia. From where he sits he's just watching over his flock, even if it is by satellite these days. He apparently told someone once, Ronald Reagan I think it was, that he'd really had nothing to do with the fall of Communism in Europe. He said the tree was already rotten and all he did was give it a little shake once in a while. Eventually, the bad apples fell off.”

“Do you think it was them?”

“Who?”

“The Vatican. Who killed my uncle.”

“I think it was probably the Polish side,” Delaney said. “One of the Polish sides. God knows.”

“Maybe God knows,” she said. “Maybe.” Natalia looked around the restaurant for a moment, choosing words.

“Are you sorry you got involved in this with me, Francis?” she asked. For a second, her eyes clouded again.

“No,” he said. He didn't want to get pulled in to this line of talk. “No, not at all.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. We'll be fine, Natalia. If we keep our wits about us, we'll be fine. We just have to stay a jump ahead of everyone, that's all. And we are certainly going to have to be very clear what we want to do with this stuff when we find it. We're probably not going to have much time to decide after we do.”

“I think I'll be able to decide that only after I see what it is we're looking for, Francis. I'll have to try to imagine what my uncle would want me to do.”

“Fair enough.”

They ate hungrily. The food was excellent and the waiter beamed at them throughout. The wine warmed them; the restaurant warmed them. Delaney began to feel the slow rush of awareness that there would very likely be further warmth later that night, a woman's touch.
She knows this too,
he thought. He liked that thought. There was no need for idle talk between them, so there was none. He liked that very much as well. They simply sat, after the meal, stirring small cups of coffee and being intensely, exactly, where they were.

Delaney held Natalia's arm as they walked up the narrow cobblestone street toward the hotel. The evening was warm, quiet. Most everyone else, apparently, was now at home or in restaurants, eating. They took no notice at first of the tiny Suzuki van that came toward them from further up the slight incline. But when the driver flashed on the bright lights and blinded them, and when Delaney heard the motor suddenly revving very fast and very near, he knew they had let their guard down much too far. His mind leapt to the gun sitting useless in his hotel room.

It was all over in an instant. The side of the van brushed hard against his right shoulder, spinning him around so that he dropped Natalia's arm, and it almost knocked them both down. It screeched to a stop and two men in leather jackets jumped out of the side door. Delaney never got a clear look at their faces. One had a moustache, he thought later. But they both had guns, large handguns. One of them smashed Delaney across the side of the face with his and he went down, hard. The blood in his left eye blinded him slightly as he tried to get back up. Natalia had already been taken; bundled into the back of the van without a sound out of her. Delaney felt a mighty kick to his chest and as he went down again there was another kick to his ribs and it was done. The van roared off in a haze of blue oil smoke down the street and out of sight.

It was suddenly very quiet again. It took a minute, not much more, for Delaney to pull himself together enough to stand up. Running after the van was useless, and impossible anyway with the intense pain in his ribs. Shouting after the van was useless. It was gone and Natalia with it.

When the very fat, very red-faced driver of an old Fiat stopped perhaps another sixty seconds later to ask him in Italian if he was all right, Delaney had recovered enough to nod his head: Yes, yes, all right, I'm all right. Two or three other people had come out of a small restaurant to see what the screeching of tires had been about and they watched as the Fiat driver helped Delaney sit on the hood of another parked car. Hit and run, hit and run, they all said in Italian. Call the police.

“No,” Delaney said. “No.
Ça va
.” He knew little Italian and hoped someone spoke French. “It's all right.” He tried English, and someone in the small crowd that had now gathered was able to understand him.

No one, it seemed, had seen Natalia being taken away. That was good. Delaney wanted no police for the moment. Probably not at all.

“It's fine, I'm fine. A car just knocked me down. I'm fine,” he said. Someone gave him a starched white napkin and he dabbed at his eyebrow where he had been first hit. “I'm fine. There is no use calling the police.”

Everyone looked astonished. In Rome, everything is reason to call the police, to make a report, to complain loudly about an outrage of one sort or another. But this foreigner did not want one, so who was to say? Delaney saw a waiter from the trattoria where he and Natalia had eaten now hurrying up the street toward them, curious about the small crowd gathering. He wanted very much to get away before anyone asked him where his dinner companion had gone.

“I'm all right now.
Grazie, grazie.
I'm fine,” he kept saying.

The business of fending off these Samaritans allowed him the small luxury of not being overwhelmed by the fact that Natalia had been abducted and was in absolutely mortal danger. Those thoughts would crowd in shortly.

Still dabbing at his eyebrow with the napkin, Delaney thanked everyone profusely once again and began to hobble with as much dignity as he could manage up the street toward the hotel. They all watched him go. He walked slowly, stiff and sore already from the body blows. But his mind raced.

No police, not for this. Hilferty not in sight, and possibly sidelined on this turf anyway. Fiorentino? Would he organize something like this? Or move so quickly against them? Nothing was clear, except the pain in his body and his intense anxiety about Natalia. The only small reassuring thought that came was that the two men in the van could have killed both Natalia and himself if they had that in mind.

They took Natalia away so they wanted her alive, at least for a time,
Delaney said over and over to himself.
And they didn't kill me, so they must want both of us alive, at least for a time.

He decided he would clean himself up before going past any desk clerks at the hotel, so he went into a tiny coffee bar, a dim one, ordered an espresso and asked for the men's toilet. The waiter stared at him and then shrugged and pointed to the back. The few other patrons didn't seem to notice what he looked like, or they didn't care.

The image in the mirror was not good. The Canadian journalist who stared back at him over the grimy sink had seen better days. There was a large gash over his eye and scrapes on the cheek below. His jacket was torn, and the knees of his pants. He opened his shirt and saw a large bruise already beginning to form over his swollen side. The water from the taps helped revive him a little and he dried himself as best he could. He had no comb and tidied his hair with his fingers. “Fuck,” he said to himself.

He barely tasted the coffee. He ordered himself a double brandy and drank it down, and then a second scalding espresso. The waiter asked him no questions, but the mirror behind the bar showed him looking worse, not better. His eye was beginning to swell up badly. He hoped it would not squeeze the lid shut so he could not see well. He was going to need to see things very clearly indeed.

He was only in the café for a few minutes. At the hotel, the desk clerks rushed out from behind their counter when he walked in, saying solicitous things. Whatever could have happened, whatever could have happened, Signore Delaney? Do you need a doctor, a policeman, what do you need? He managed to fend all of them off, and finally found himself in his room, where he simply lay on his bed in his filthy, torn clothes.

He breathed slowly in and out: trying to calm himself, trying to calm himself, trying to calm himself. The room was blessedly dark. The light from a street lamp outside was more than he wanted. As expected, some very unwelcome thoughts crowded into his mind. And panic lurked in the shadows.

He tried to organize his thinking as he had in difficult, dangerous situations before. But in those situations, the direct danger was to himself and any moves he made had been for himself. This time, he was worried about the danger to someone else. Who had taken her? Who, if anyone, to call? How to play this? How much time did he have?

He got up suddenly and dialled the number at the Vatican, which Fiorentino had given him, but he didn't know as he dialled if he wanted to speak to Fiorentino at all, even on the remote chance the Monsignor would be around at this late hour.There was a taped message in incomprehensible Italian. Delaney hung up. He looked in his wallet for the mobile phone number Hilferty had given him in Paris and dialled it even though he once again wasn't sure what he would say if someone answered. But another recorded message said the phone was turned off or out of range.
What could Hilferty do anyway?
Delaney thought bitterly.

When the throbbing in his head became too much, he fumbled around in his bag for some aspirin. The swelling had stopped building over his eye, but it would take days to go back down fully. He doubted very much that a rib was broken, but he was not about to have it checked out anyway. He was on a tight deadline, and his assignment was to find Natalia before things got unspeakably ugly. In a city he knew only slightly and where he hardly knew friend from foe.

The brandy had been a very bad idea. It made him sleepy and clouded his thinking. He lay down again to rest a little and gather his thoughts once more. But the brandy and the aspirin and the pain made it hard to keep his eyes open. He fought the impulse to do anything other than rest on the bed awake. Despite his best efforts, though, he slept.