‘Why would he send them to Balzarin?’
Patrick shrugged.
‘My guess is that he knew something about Fazzini, maybe the Vatican connection in general. He must have thought he could trust Balzarin. Eamonn was a clever man, but in some ways very simple. He would have regarded the nuncio as the proper person to approach on a matter that concerned the Vatican.’
‘It wasn’t the correct procedure. His own bishop...’
‘Perhaps so. But Eamonn was never one for correct procedures. And if he thought there was no time to lose ... Anyway, we’ll never know now.’
‘What about these papers?’ Makonnen gestured towards the pile on the table. ‘The ones I found in the nunciature. What have you found in them? Apart from ...’
Patrick sipped his sherry and put the glass down on the floor. He went to the table and brought some of the papers back to the chair.
‘Several letters,’ he said. ‘Some of them date back years and relate to different stages in Balzarin’s career. There are letters from various cardinals and bishops, by no means restricted to the Vatican or Italy; a number from Italian government officials or influential people in countries to which Balzarin had been posted; a few from bankers, industrialists, the heads of finance houses; two from military officers. The most recent ones are Irish: a senator, a judge, and a member of the board of the Bank of Ireland.’
As he took the file of letters from Patrick, Makonnen commented in Italian.
‘Era piduist. He belonged to P2.’
Patrick shook his head.
‘No, I don’t think so. There may be a connection, but I can’t see any evidence of that as yet.’
Makonnen had been referring to P2 (pi-due), a secret and powerful Italian Masonic Lodge whose public exposure in 1981 had led to the collapse of Aldo Forlani’s coalition government. P2’s influence had reached as far as the Chigi Palace. Many feared that its power had not been wholly broken.
As the priest looked through the letters, Patrick continued.
‘All of these letters refer in one way or another to an organization known as The Brotherhood or, more simply, the Brothers. There are several references to a tomb, which members seem to venerate. More than one correspondent mentions the Pillars.
We also found a diary in Italian, written in what we think is Balzarin’s own handwriting. That will have to be translated in full, but even at a glance we can see there are going to be problems: people are referred to by initials or titles, places by abbreviations. Some of the entries have been heavily crossed out, as though the keeper of the diary had second thoughts about them. Which makes us think, of course, that what is left may not be as revealing as we would like.’
He handed Makonnen a medium-sized volume bound in soft burgundy leather. A small label inside the front cover declared that it had been manufactured by Olbi’s in Venice, but it bore no other distinguishing feature.
‘Father,’ Patrick went on, ‘I’m going to be frank with you. We are all in terrible danger. Two days ago, Ruth and the team working with her at the embassy received strict instructions to drop the case. They were told it was being handled at a higher level. We no longer believe that to be true. With any luck we may be safe here for a day or so, but that’s the most we can hope for.
‘As I told you, we think you are personally at considerable risk. I don’t want to sound offensive,
but you have to understand that here in Ireland you are conspicuous, even if dressed in a layman’s clothes. There are almost no black people in this country. For that reason, you can’t afford to move around freely.
‘Fortunately, Ruth has money and contacts. We intend to take you out of here tonight and find somewhere safe for you to stay until this is all over.
‘And how long will that be, Mr Canavan? A week? A month? A year? You say “until this is all over”. But how long has it been going on? Some of the engravings in that folder date back to the eighteenth century.’
Patrick paused before answering. Even in the warm room, before the fire, he felt cold. The hallucination - if that was what it had been - of two days ago still troubled him. He wondered if he should see a doctor.
Or a priest.
‘Father, I didn’t want to say this, but perhaps it’s better if I do. There’s every possibility that none of us may ever be safe again. I can give you protection for a while, but I can’t guarantee it for ever. Perhaps not even for a week. Our only hope is to find people we can trust, people powerful enough to take action against this group. I don’t have to spell out for you just how difficult that may prove to be.
‘But at least we can make a start. We can identify those whose names we know from letters, and anyone you think you can recognize from his photograph.’
He passed the first folder to Makonnen, the one containing engravings and photographs of clerics.
Makonnen did his best. The better-known figures, even those from the past, were easy enough. Some he had seen in newspapers, others in textbooks on church history. One in particular he singled out.
‘This man,’ he said, pointing at the close-up of a severe face that bore the unmistakable stamp of a lifetime spent in positions of authority, of whole generations accustomed to obedience.
‘His name is Cardinal Giancarlo Migliau. His family came to Italy from Spain after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews. That would have been about the end of the fifteenth century, I suppose. They would have come through Provence to Piedmont, where I think they settled round Turin. But one of his ancestors went on alone to Venice, where he converted to Christianity and made a fortune trading with Egypt and the Levant. He married a girl from a poor branch of a noble family, but for all that remained an outsider.
‘His sons and grandsons continued to trade with the Sultan, mainly in pepper. They bought land at Montebelluno and a villa by Palladio near Maser. By the seventeenth century, when the Great Council put noble status up for sale, they had enough money and enough influence to get their name entered in the Golden Book. They are one of the last noble families surviving in Venice.’
Makonnen paused, his eyes fixed on the photograph.
‘Migliau was made Patriarch of Venice three years ago,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a popular appointment, but the Pope insisted. He may not be liked around St Mark’s, but he has considerable influence in the rest of Italy. In many quarters people are already speaking of him as papabile, a suitable candidate for the Papacy. If the present Pope were to die soon - which God forbid -there is no doubt that Migliau would be the favourite of the conservatives.’
‘I see.’ Patrick paused. ‘What about the men on this page, do you know any of them?’
Makonnen looked carefully, but there was no one he recognized. By the time they reached the end, Patrick knew they would need the services of a good photo library.
The second folder contained prints and photographs of nuns, their habits indicating a variety of religious orders. Makonnen gave up quickly on these.
The last item was an album rather than a folder. Patrick had left it on the table, where it could be viewed more easily. He got up and arranged two dining chairs side by side.
It was an old volume, elaborately bound in a fashion popular in France in the seventeenth century. The binding had been carefully removed from its original contents and resewn onto pages more suitable for holding engravings and photographs. On the first leaf, someone had inscribed in copperplate the words I Morti. The Dead.
Underneath was a Latin inscription in the same hand: An ignoratis quia quicumque baptizati sumus in Christo Jesu, in morte ipsius baptizati sumus? Consepulti enim sumus cum Mo per baptismum in mortem... Patrick recognized it as a passage from Romans: ‘Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.’
He turned the page. A row of faces stared at him, the dead staring at the living, across more than centuries. The paper felt old and slightly mildewed, as though it had been buried for years in a tomb. He felt it beneath his fingers, fusty and slightly rotten.
The arrangement of the pages that followed differed from that in the folders. At the top of the first page was a name: Benedetta di Rovereto. Patrick recognized the name as Venetian, an old family, nobles from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Underneath and on the next page were arranged engravings and then photographs of young women, the earliest from perhaps the second half of the seventeenth century. There were seven in all.
As he looked at each face in turn, he became aware of a family resemblance between them. The clothes changed, the hairstyles altered, but the eyes, the noses, the chins all spoke of a common ancestry. They might have
