Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [163]
HARRY ADDISON: I’ll find you.
ROSCANI CROSSED THE street, closing in on the station. He remembered how he’d first planned to come upon Harry Addison. Alone, with a gun. To kill him for murdering Gianni Pio. But things had turned wildly, and with a complexity he could never have imagined.
If Harry Addison was here, in the station as promised, he was still outside Vatican territory. So, Roscani hoped, was Father Daniel. Perhaps he had a chance yet, before the whole thing crumbled into the hands of Taglia and the politicians.
HARRY SAW ROSCANI come in and cross the lobby, then walk out to stand near the tracks. Stazione San Pietro was small, a depot serving a small circuitous route through Rome. There were few people. Looking around, he saw a man in a sport coat and tie who might be a plainclothes policeman. But he had noticed the man a few moments earlier, before Roscani had come in, and that made it hard to tell.
Leaving the station by another door, he walked around to the side, and came down the platform from another angle, slowly, without energy. A priest waiting for his train; a priest who had purposely left his false identification tucked under the bottom of the refrigerator in the kitchen of the apartment on Via Nicolò V.
Through an open door, he saw another man come into the station. His shirt was open at the throat, but he wore a sport coat like the first man.
Now Roscani saw him, watched him approach.
Harry stopped, a dozen feet away. “You were supposed to come alone.”
“I did.”
“No, there are two men with you.” Harry was guessing, but he thought he was guessing correctly. One man was still in the station, the other had come out onto the platform and was watching them.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Roscani’s eyes were frozen on Harry’s.
“I’m not armed.”
“Do as I say.”
Harry moved his hands out from his waist. It felt awkward and uncomfortable.
“Where is your brother?” Roscani’s voice was flat. No emotion at all.
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s—someplace else…. In a wheelchair. His legs are broken.”
“Other than that, he’s all right?”
“Mostly.”
“The nurse is still with him? Sister Elena Voso?”
“Yes…”
Harry felt a thud of emotion as Roscani said Elena’s name. He’d been right when he’d said they would identify her from what she’d left behind in the grotto. And now he knew they were treating her as a willing accomplice. He didn’t want her to be this involved, but she was anyway, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Abruptly, he glanced behind him. The second man had come out onto the platform, keeping his distance, the same as the first. Beyond him, a group of teenagers waited for a train, chattering, laughing. But it was the police who were closest.
“You don’t want to take me in, Roscani, not now, anyway.”
“Why did you call me?” The policeman continued to stare at him. He was strong and very focused. The same as Harry remembered.
“I told you, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Getting Cardinal Marsciano out of the Vatican.”
126
THEY DROVE THROUGH MIDDAY TRAFFIC. Harry and Roscani in back. Scala up front, with Castelletti driving. Along the Tiber, and then across it and through city streets to the Colosseum, down Via di San Gregorio past the ruins of the Palatine and the ancient Circus Maximus, and then down Via Ostiense and into the EUR, Esposizione Universale Roma—a grand tour of Rome, a way to talk and not be seen.
And Harry did talk, laying it out for them as simply and succinctly as he could.
The one person, he told them, who could reveal the truth behind the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome, the killing of Gianni Pio, and, very probably, the explosion of the Assisi bus was Cardinal Marsciano, who was being held incommunicado and under the threat of death inside the Vatican by Cardinal Palestrina.
Harry knew this because his brother, Father Daniel Addison, had told him. It was all he knew, a revelation from one brother to another. But it was only a scratch on the surface; the real substance, the details, had been told to Father Daniel by Marsciano in