Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [165]
Roscani said nothing. Just sat there, watching him with no expression at all. No expression, but his mind was churning. Yes, it had been the truth. How could Harry Addison even know about the pistol if he hadn’t been there? And he had been genuinely surprised the police didn’t have the gun. And the other things he said rang true with most of Roscani’s own investigation—from the missing gun to bits and pieces of a high-level struggle going on inside the Vatican.
What he said also answered why so many people had sheltered, cared for, and protected Father Daniel and lied about it: because Cardinal Marsciano had asked them to.
Marsciano’s shadow was huge. A Tuscan farm boy with roots deep in the Italian soil, a man of the people who had been loved and admired as a priest long before he’d risen to his high place inside the Church. It was a given that when such a man asked for help, it would be dispensed without question, a “why?” never asked, that it had been done never revealed.
And Palestrina, as evil architect of it all—somehow, for some reason, involved in the mass deaths in China—and as a major figure in global diplomacy, was certain to have contacts that could have put him in touch with an international terrorist like Thomas Kind.
Furthermore, Cardinal Marsciano controlled the real purse strings of the Holy See, the type of huge financial base Palestrina would need to realize some immense ambition.
Harry could see Roscani weighing what he had said and wondering whether to believe him. To win him over, to have him fully on his side with no doubts at all, Harry knew he had to give him something else.
“A priest who worked for Cardinal Marsciano came to Lugano where we were hiding,” Harry said, his eyes locked on Roscani’s, “and asked my brother to come back to Rome. He did that because Cardinal Palestrina threatened to kill Marsciano if he didn’t. So he came and told us. He arranged for a Mercedes and provided Vatican license plates and a place for us to stay when we got here…. This morning I went to his apartment. He was dead. His left hand had been cut off…. I was scared as hell and ran away…. I’ll give you the address, you can—”
Roscani cut him off. “We know about the license plates, Mr. Addison, and we know about Father Bardoni.”
“What do you know?” Harry kept going. “That it was Father Bardoni who found my brother still alive in the pandemonium of the hospital after the bus explosion? Found him, and got him out of there in his own car. Took him to the home of a doctor friend outside Rome and saw that he was cared for until he could make arrangements for the hospital in Pescara and the people to protect him there?—Do you know that, Ispettore Capo?” Harry stared at Roscani, letting what he’d said penetrate, then his manner softened and he finished. “You have to believe I’m telling you the truth about the rest.”
Castelletti was turning now, heading up Viale dell’Oceano Pacifico and back toward the Tiber.
“Mr. Addison, do you know who killed Father Bardoni?” Roscani asked quietly.
“I have a good idea. The blond man who tried to kill us in the grotto in Bellagio.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“No…”
“Does the name Thomas Kind mean anything to you?”
“Thomas Kind?”Harry felt the name stab through him.
“Then you know who he is—“
“Yes,” he said. It was like asking if he knew who Charles Manson was. Not only was Thomas Kind one of the most publicized, brutal, and elusive outlaws in the world, to some he was one of the most romantic. “Some,” meaning Hollywood. In the last months, four major movie and television projects had been announced with Thomas Kind spinning as the central character. And Harry knew firsthand, because he’d been involved in negotiating two of them, one for a star, the other for a director.
“Even if your brother weren’t confined to a wheelchair, he is in a very dangerous situation…. Kind is ingenious in finding people he wants to find. As he proved in Pescara and Bellagio, and now here, in Rome. I would suggest you tell us where he is.”
Harry hesitated. “If you take Danny in, it’s even more dangerous.