Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [140]
Hanging like a diver’s platform forty feet off the ground, it was the only opening in the cylindrical wall from top to bottom. An exit that led nowhere. Surrounded by a thin, iron safety railing, the platform was hardly wider than the door itself and no more than two feet across. The sheer wall above it rose another thirty feet to the point where the windows of the other apartments jutted sharply out. Looking upward, one could not see past those windows, but Marsciano knew they were near the top, and above them was a circular walkway and then the tower’s turreted crown.
In other words, there was no way up or down or to the sides, making no reason for the platform at all. Except as a place to stand and breathe the air of Rome and marvel at the green of the Vatican gardens below. After that there was nothing. The rest of this distant corner of the Vaticano was surrounded by a high, fortified wall built in the ninth century to keep barbarians out and at other times, as now, serving to keep people in.
Slowly, Marsciano slid his hands from the rail and went back inside to the confines of his room and the television screen that was the center of it. On it he saw what the world saw: Hefei, China—a live helicopter shot of Chao Lake and then, in a cavalcade of horror, an aerial view of a series of huge circus-like tents, one after the other, erected in city parks, alongside factories, on open land outside the city proper; and the offscreen correspondent explaining what they were—makeshift morgues for the dead.
Abruptly, Marsciano turned off the sound. He would watch but he could listen no longer; the running commentary had become unbearable. It was a scorecard on which his personal crimes—done, he reminded himself over and over, as if in some desperate attempt to save his sanity, because Palestrina had held him hostage to his love of God and the Church—were tallied, one after the other in minute-by-minute detail.
Yes, he was guilty. So were Matadi and Capizzi. They had all let Palestrina loose to commit this outrage. What was worse, if anything could be worse than what he was seeing now, was that he knew Pierre Weggen was well into his work on Yan Yeh. And the Chinese banker, sensitive and caring as Marsciano personally knew he was, would be truly horrified by what appeared to be an act of nature gone amuck in human hands, and would pressure his superiors in the Communist Party, with all he had, to listen to Weggen’s proposal to immediately rebuild China’s entire water-delivery and -filtration infrastructure. But even if they agreed to meet with Weggen, the politics would take time. Time. When there was none. When Palestrina was already moving his saboteurs to the second lake.
108
Lugano, Switzerland.
Still Wednesday, July 15. Noon.
ELENA HAD NOT REALLY LOOKED AT HARRY since she’d helped him dress Danny and get him into the van. He wondered if she’d been embarrassed by coming to him the way she had and telling what she did and now didn’t know what to do about it. What surprised him was the extent to which the whole thing had affected him, and continued to affect him. Elena was a bright, beautiful, ballsy, and caring woman who had suddenly found herself and wanted the freedom to express it. And from the way she’d presented herself—coming barefoot into his room in the dark and talking in the intimate way she had—in his mind there was no doubt she’d wanted him to be the one to help her do it. The trouble was, as he’d told himself then, this was not the time, and he had to stop thinking about it—other things were far too pressing. So now—as they wound down out of the hills from the north and turned along Lake Lugano to drive into Lugano itself, Viale Castagnola, across the Cassarate River, and up Via Serafino Balestra