Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [202]
163
THAT AFTERNOON AND INTO EVENING HARRY and Elena and Danny sat in a small private waiting room at the Hospital of St. John. Harry held Elena’s hand, while his mind danced everywhere. Mainly, he tried not to think. The men he’d killed, or the men others had killed. Eaton, even Thomas Kind. The worst was Adrianna. The first night they’d been together he’d sensed she was afraid to die. Yet everything she did, every story she covered, seemed to be about death in one way or another, from the war in Croatia to the refugees escaping the bloody civil wars in Africa, to the business right here and the story of the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome. What had she said to him? Something like if she’d had children she never would have been able to do what she did. Who knew?—maybe that was what she really wanted but simply didn’t know how to make it work, a home, children, and her job. She couldn’t have all three, so she chose the one that seemed to give her the most out of life, and probably it had. Until it killed her.
JUST BEFORE THE DINNER HOUR, and dressed in civilian clothes, Cardinal Marsciano joined them. An hour later, Roscani came, pale and in a wheelchair, brought from his room in another wing of the hospital by an orderly.
At five minutes to ten the waiting room door opened and a surgeon, still in his surgical scrubs, entered.
“He will be all right,” he said in Italian. “Hercules will live…”
There was no need for translation. Harry knew right away.
“Grazie, “he said getting up. “Grazie.”
“Prego.” Glancing around the room, the surgeon said he would have more information later, then nodding, turned and left, the door closing behind him.
The collective silence that followed was vast and deep, touching each one of them. That the dwarf from the sewers would recover was a bright and joyful note in a long, twisted, and painful journey they had all shared, no matter how disparately. That it was over, for the most part, was something that had yet to sink in. Yet it was over, the tidying up already well under way.
In a blink Farel had personally taken over and become a one-man damage control, as much to protect himself as the Holy See. In a matter of hours the chief of the Vatican police had called a press briefing that was broadcast live on Italian state television. In it he announced that late this morning the infamous South American terrorist Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind had instigated a bold and murderous fire-bombing rampage inside the Vatican in a presumed attempt to reach the pope himself. In the process, he had shot to death World News Network correspondent Adrianna Hall and Rome CIA station chief James Eaton, who had been nearby and gone to her aid. Meanwhile, in an attempt to protect the Holy Father, the Vatican’s beloved secretariat of state, Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, had suffered a massive heart attack and died. Farel closed the briefing with a terse pronouncement that Thomas Kind had become the only suspect in the murders of the cardinal vicar of Rome and the Italian police detective Gianni Pio and in the bombing of the Assisi bus; and, finally, that he had been killed when a firebomb exploded as he was trying to ignite it. No mention at all was made about Roscani’s presence inside Vatican territory.
ROSCANI LOOKED AROUND the room. He had left his own hospital room and come there personally to inform the Addisons and Elena Voso about Farel’s press announcement and tell them that no charges would be made against them. Marsciano’s presence had been a surprise, and for a short time he hoped that he might find a way to get the prelate to talk to him privately about what had really happened concerning the murders of both the cardinal vicar of Rome and Palestrina, the employment of Thomas Kind, and the horror in China. But the cardinal had squashed that ambition quickly with a simple apology—saying that he