I've always believed (and I really do mean it) that Homo sapiens is a higher being, noble and even God-like in his innate purity and benevolence. Okay. Occasionally you do come up against evil. When that happens the natural inclination is to grab the biggest howitzer you can find and let fly, but that's all wrong. Maybe it was the gentle atmosphere which was getting to me, but there in the loo I vowed fair play for Arcellano. I nearly moved myself to tears. Maria would love me for it. Anna would lash me up a lovely unhealthy breakfast of polysaturated fats for it. And Adriana would forgive me everything for it. Noble and even God-like in my innate purity and benevolence, I dreamed on about my final confrontation with Arcellano and his pair of psychopathic killers. I would be smiling, persuasive, kind.
But as I sat on, hunched and fretting and dozing, some little gremlin in my head kept sniggering and saying, I'll be frigging kind all right. You see if I'm not.
As long as my homemade winch was strong enough.
* * *
Eventually the cafeteria noise settled to a steady muffled banging as the servers gave the counters an end-of- day scouring. It was poisonously familiar. I'd dishwashed often enough to recognize that sound anywhere. Twenty minutes later some heavy-footed bloke stopped by the loo, presumably the security, banging the doors of the other cubicles back and giving my door an experimental rap. I heard him spinning the stopcock on the ascending water main, obviously a security man of the most careful and pestilential kind. His footfalls receded and the outer door went again.
I listened to my sanctum's silence, holding my breath as I did so. Presumably I was now alone and the whole loo empty. Just in case I counted slowly to a hundred and listened again. Nothing. I did another hundred.
Nothing, not a sound.
You feel better with your feet on the floor instead of dangling. I lowered them carefully, put my briefcase down and slowly stretched. A quick peer underneath the door made me feel even better—no nasty boots waiting motionless for poor unsuspecting intruders to emerge whistling. I was alone.
Nobody's had more practice than me at being scared witless. The trouble is, every time's the worst. With the caution born of a lifetime's cowardice, I gauged the time.
Anna said the security shift of eight officers signed on at seven o'clock. The international football came on the television at half-eight, a live screening from West Germany which meant two untroubled spells of forty-five minutes, briefly intersected by that worrisome fifteen-minute interval. Some conscientious nuisance could trot out of the telly room for a quick listen for burglars in that gap. I couldn't repress a surge of irritation at weak-kneed footballers actually needing a rest between halves. Soft sods.
When I was a kid we simply switched ends and carried on. You get no help when you need it.
I'd planned a couple of hours' calm reflection at this point, but being calm doesn't work for some blokes and I'm one of them. I just can't see the point of serenity. My inner peace lasted three minutes. After that I sat and sweated.
* * *
Anna had assured me that the Vatican Secret Police were mythical. There's no such body. Security guards, yes. Secret cloak-and-dagger artists, no. I'd believed her. Alone in the gathering gloom, I wasn't so convinced.
In fact I was shaking as I peered into the deserted cafeteria. Empty places are really weird. Not bad in themselves, but you're used to seeing them filled with people, aren't you.
The cafeteria was spotless, shining and neat. And silent. Long curtains were drawn across the long curved picture windows. Through them a weak light diffused, presumably the floodlights which played along the Stradone di Giardini, the low road which runs straight as a die between the four hundred metre stretch of the Museum and the Vatican gardens. The central security possessed eighty closed-circuit TV
monitors arranged in banks five screen high before a control console. They needed light. I had to trust Anna's map of the security electronics.
Slowly I stepped out into the cafeteria, feeling curiously exposed though I made no noise, almost as if I were performing on a stage with some vast silent audience watching my every move. Absurd.
The downstairs store room was locked, which meant an irritating ten-second delay while I pressed my plastic comb through the crack. A quick lick to stick my suction-pad coat-hook on the door, a series of rapid push-and-pull motions, and the lock snicked back. The delay was minuscule but worrying. That it was locked meant some bloody guard was doing his stuff, and that was bad news. I wanted them all cheering and booing in that staff telly room between the Museo Paolino and the Sala Rotunda.
No windows in the store room, thank God. I locked the door, took the thin towel from my toolbag, rolled it into a sausage and wedged it along the door's base to prevent light leaks. My krypton bulb beamed round the room. Two spare batteries weighing a ton were the heaviest items in my toolbag, nearly, but I couldn't risk working blind for a single second. They'd be worth the effort before the night was out. A rectangular black cloth to hold the tools, a swift unpacking, jacket on the floor and I was off.
My cafeteria table on which I'd laboured so much was the same as all the rest, except that its top was thicker, and an X-shaped strut reinforced the tubular steel legs. A security man might pass it over at a glance as an average modern nosh bar table. To me it meant ripping the Vatican.
I inverted the table and levered off the gruesome shiny edging strips. The main section I wanted was held on the underside by eight mirror brackets with their flat-headed screws. For one frightening second I thought I'd forgotten my favourite screwdriver, but I'm always like that when I've a job on. It was there all the time, beside the hand drill. The wooden section was only a series of oblique triangles. To fold a polygonal surface you can only hinge it along three lines. (Experienced forgers will already know this. You beginners can work it out.) I'd done this by linen hinges, for flatness, and now I unfolded the wood. It was a lovely Andaman surface. Some call it Tadouk' wood, a rich rosewood-like Burmese wood which has been with us since the eighteenth century.
Now I took my prepared rectangular blocks and made a quick swirl of the resin adhesives. I hate these modern synthetics, but a lovely old-fashioned smelly gluepot was a wistful dream in these crummy circumstances. I laid the inverted polygonal disc on the floor and glued the little blocks across the linen hinges, which had now served their purpose. In thirty minutes the disc would be rigid, and would become the
'Chippendale' rent table's top.
Meanwhile I unplugged the tips of the four hollow legs and from two drew out the slender steel rods carefully packed inside. The tissue paper could stay in, to save telltale mess. From the other two legs I shook out a dozen pieces of quartered wooden doweling. The glued blocks had holes to take the rods which slipped in easily, to my
