Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [139]
Harry looked to Elena, then saw Father Renato shift into gear. Felt the van move forward. Up onto the ramp and across it into the hold of the ferry. Turning back, he saw the policemen advance on the next vehicle in line. Saw the occupants made to get out, show identification, while the vehicle itself was aggressively searched.
None in the van dared look at another. Just waited in silence for an agonizing ten minutes before the last car came on board, the gangway doors closed, and the ferry got under way.
Harry felt the sweat run down his neck, trickle from his armpits. How many more of these could they get away with? How long would their luck, if that’s what it was, hold?
THE FERRY HAD BEEN STEP ONE, sailing for Mennagio at seven fifty-six, exactly four minutes before the Italian Army sweep of the entire peninsula would begin, and fifteen minutes after Salvatore Belsito’s farm truck had been found parked on a street a half mile from Santa Chiara. Father Natalini had left it there just before six, carefully wiping the steering wheel and gearshift clean of his fingerprints, then walking quickly back to Santa Chiara.
Step two, the crossing of the border from Italy into Switzerland, would have been more difficult, if not impossible, because neither Father Renato nor Father Natalini knew Gruppo Cardinale personnel at the border checkpoint. What saved them was that Father Natalini had grown up in Porlezza, a small town inland from Mennagio, and knew as only a native could know, the narrow country roads that wound and twisted through the hills and rose up into the Alps; roads that enabled them to bypass the Gruppo Cardinale checkpoint at Oria and brought them into Switzerland unmolested at ten twenty-two in the morning.
107
The Vatican. The Tower of San Giovanni. 11:00 A.M.
MARSCIANO STOOD AT THE GLASS DOOR, THE only opening in the room to admit daylight; and, other than the locked and guarded entry door from the hallway outside, its only exit. Behind him, the television screen he could no longer bear to watch glowed like an all-seeing eye.
He could turn the TV off, of course, but he hadn’t and wouldn’t. It was a trait of character Palestrina understood all too well in Marsciano, which was why he’d ordered the twenty-inch Nokia left behind when he’d had the formerly luxurious one-room apartment stripped of all but its essentials—bed, writing table, chair—and ordered the apartment itself shut off from the rest of the building.
“The death toll in Hefei has reached sixty thousand, six hundred and is still rising. There remains no estimation where the number will end.”
The field correspondent’s voice was crisp behind him. Marsciano did not need to see the screen. It would be the same color graphic they used every hour to project the number of deaths, as if they were doing exit polls projecting votes in an election.
Finally, Marsciano pulled the door open and stepped out onto the tiny balcony. Fresh air touched him, and, mercifully, the resonance of the television diminished.
Grasping the iron safety railing, he closed his eyes. As if not seeing would somehow lessen the awfulness. In his darkness he saw another vision—the cold, conspiratorial faces of Cardinal Matadi and Monsignor Capizzi watching him dispassionately from their seats inside the limousine on the drive back to the Vatican from the Chinese Embassy. Then he saw Palestrina pick up the car phone and quietly ask for Farel, the secretariat’s gaze rising up to hold on Marsciano’s as he waited for the Vatican policeman to come on the line. And then came the secretariat’s soft-spoken words—
“Cardinal Marsciano has been taken ill in the car. Prepare a room for him in the Tower of San Giovanni.”
The chilling remembrance made Marsciano suddenly open his eyes to where he was now. Below, a Vatican gardener was looking up at him. The man stared for a moment and then turned back to what he had been doing.
How many