Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [77]
49
Rome. Same time.
WHY, OF ALL TIMES, HAD ROSCANI DECIDED to quit smoking now? But as of seven this morning he had just stopped, stubbed the half-smoked cigarette into his ashtray and announced to himself that he no longer smoked. Since then, almost anything had done in place of tobacco. Coffee, gum, sweet rolls. Coffee, gum again. At the moment it was a chocolate gelato cone, and he was eating it against the July heat, licking the melting ice cream from his hand as he walked through the noonday crowds and back to the Questura. But neither melting gelato nor the lack of nicotine could pull him from the thing on his mind—the missing Llama pistol with the silencer squirreled to its barrel.
It was a thought that had come in the middle of the night and kept him awake for the rest of it. The first thing this morning he’d looked at the “Transfer of Evidence” form Pio and Jacov Farel had both signed at the farmhouse when Farel had transferred possession of the gun found at the Assisi bus site to Pio. Correct and legal. It meant Pio definitely had the gun, and after he was killed, it was gone, along with Harry Addison. But that was only routine detective work, not the thought that had waked him and had eaten at him all morning and still did. All along he’d believed the Spanish-made Llama had been carried by Father Daniel and was a definitive link between him and the dead Spanish Communist Miguel Valera, the man set up to take the blame for the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome.
But—and this was the thing—what if the gun had not belonged to Father Daniel at all but to someone else on the bus? Someone who was there to kill him. If that was the case, then they might be looking not at one crime but two: an attempt to murder the priest and the blowing up of the bus itself.
11:30 p.m.
Hot and sticky. The heat that had begun to build the previous week had not let go, and even at this late hour it was still eighty-three degrees.
Trying to get some relief against it, Cardinal Marsciano had changed from his wool vestments into khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt and gone outside to the small interior courtyard of his apartment, hoping for a breeze that might lighten the oppressiveness.
The light spill from his library window illuminated the tomatoes and peppers he had planted in late April. They had ripened early and now had fruit that was almost ready to pick. Ripened early because of the heat. Not that it was totally unexpected. It was July, and July was usually hot. For a moment Marsciano smiled, remembering the small two-story Tuscan farmhouse where he had grown up along with his parents and four brothers and three sisters. The heat of summer meant two things—exhaustively long days with the entire family getting up before sunrise and working in the fields almost until dusk and scorpions, by the thousands. Coming in and sweeping them out of the house was a two-or three-times-a-day chore, and one never got into bed or put on a pair of pants or shirt or shoe, for that matter, without shaking it out first. The sting of a scorpion would leave you with a welt and pain you would remember for a long time. The insect was the first of God’s creatures he truly despised. But then that was long before he’d known Palestrina.
Filling a watering can, Marsciano soaked the ground beneath his vegetable plants, then set the can back where it had been and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Still there was no breeze, and the night air seemed more stifling than ever.
The heat.
He tried to push it from his mind but he couldn’t, because he knew it was what had started Palestrina’s China clock ticking. Every day Marsciano watched the papers and the global weather reports on television and scanned the Internet, monitoring as best he could the weather conditions across Asia, the same as he knew Palestrina was doing. Only the secretariat would have a far more comprehensive manner of information gathering than he did, mainly because, in light of his “Chinese Protocol,” Palestrina himself had taken up the study of meteorology,