Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (40 page)

‘Father
Bechetti did not kill his own daughter,’ he began. ‘He felt the shame of her
existence — but it was his shame, not hers. He would have been more likely to
take his own life than his own child’s, but he did neither. And Monsignor
Tuminello did not kill Agnes either. Had she been defiled, the fault would not
have been hers in any event. Tuminello trusted completely in her goodness and
her innocence. He may not have heard her voice, but he understood her spirit
and he wanted to discover the truth about her death only in order to advance
her towards sanctity.’

Nicholas
Breakspear nodded emphatically at this last remark. Oscar looked down at him.

‘And
you did not kill her either, Monsignor Breakspear-Owen.’ The Grand Penitentiary
tilted his head and gazed up at Oscar with narrowed eyes. ‘You don’t mind if I
use your full name, do you?’ added Oscar.

‘Not in
the least,’ replied Breakspear, without the faintest sign of being discomfited.
‘It’s a bit of a mouthful. I haven’t used it for years.

‘Not
since you came to Rome, in fact.’

‘I
suppose not,’ said Breakspear easily. He laughed. ‘It’s not a criminal offence,
I trust.’

‘No,
Monsignor. It turns out that you are exactly who and what you claim to be. It’s
quite disappointing. You are not a fraud at all. Because Conan Doyle couldn’t
recollect your name, I suggested he make enquiries at your old school. He sent
a wire to the bursar asking after “Nicholas Breakspear”. I sent another on his
behalf, supplying your initials: NB-O. I found that you had written them on
the flyleaf of your first edition of
A Study in Scarlet.’

Oscar
glanced in my direction and pulled a telegram envelope out of his inside jacket
pocket.

‘This
came for you from Stonyhurst yesterday, Arthur. I know I shouldn’t have opened
it …’

I
raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.

Oscar
turned back to Breakspear and eyed him beadily. ‘You are a killer, after your
fashion, of course.’

‘Am I?’
The Grand Penitentiary appeared unmoved by the assertion.

‘You
are, and you boast of it. With the help of those scavenging boys who live up on
the hillside behind the pyramid, you are eating your way through the animal
kingdom. It’s not original and it’s not nice — but it doesn’t make you a
murderer in the eyes of the law.’

‘I am
relieved to hear it.’

‘The
worst we can accuse you of, Monsignor, is the sin of pride: dropping the
humbler part of your surname for the vanity of being able to give yourself the
name of England’s only pope.’

‘I
plead guilty to the sin of pride,’ said Breakspear, quite unabashed. ‘I am
grateful not to be charged with murder.’

‘Who is
to be?’ asked Monsignor Felici. ‘We are all guilty of something, it seems. No
doubt, I am guiltier than most. I am fatter than most, I know.’ He laughed
wheezily and glanced over his shoulder towards Axel Munthe.

‘We all
wrestle with the sins of the flesh—’ Oscar began.

‘Speak
for yourself,’ muttered Rennell Rodd, from the second row.

Oscar
paused. ‘I stand corrected, James. I am sure that Brother Matteo does not. But
Monsignor Felici does.’

‘Is he
your murderer?’ demanded Rennell Rodd, impatiently.

‘No,’
said Oscar, ‘he is not. Agnes gave him her ice cream and he accepted it.
Monsignor Felici will not become a saint on that account. Canonico del Buffalo,
a missionary and a truly holy man, failed when it came to the chocolate-cream
test.’

Oscar considered
Felici’s ample form: self-consciously the Monsignor smoothed out the purple
sash across his chest. Oscar then turned to Axel Munthe and stared fixedly at
him as he spoke.

‘Francesco
Felici looks like a man who struggles with the temptations of the flesh. There
is no reason to assume that
invariably
he succumbs to them. The
Monsignor was Agnes’s confessor. She was a child and she trusted him. I have no
reason to doubt that he repaid her trust with his respect.’

Oscar
appeared suddenly weary. He stepped back towards the altar and, with a profound
exhalation of breath and rubbing his eyes with clenched fists, he said slowly:
‘There is no evidence of any kind to suggest that Monsignor Felici — or anyone
else — took an unwholesome interest in Agnes. And there is no evidence of any
kind to suggest that Agnes, when she died, was anything but a virgin undefiled.
It was only the old exorcist’s confusion of one Agnes with another that could
have led us down that blind alley.’

‘So who
did kill the wretched girl?’ demanded Rennell Rodd.

‘The
murderer is in this room,’ said Oscar quietly. He smiled and looked directly at
Catherine English. ‘Yes, it is a man, Miss English. Most murderers are.’ He
took his silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and held it between his
open palms. ‘And it is not a priest. Outside of novels, very few clergymen
commit murder, it seems.’ He revolved the cigarette case between his fingers.
‘So the Reverend English is off the hook as well — at least so far as this
charge is concerned.’ He opened the cigarette case and considered its contents,
musing as he did so:

‘According
to an article that I read in the
Daily Chronicle
not long ago, one in a
thousand murderers is a man of the cloth, but one in ten is either a diplomat
or a civil servant.’

‘Come
on, Wilde,’ snorted Rennell Rodd from the second row. ‘Murder is a capital
offence. If you are about to accuse a man of the crime, you can’t dress it up
as a game of charades. It’s a serious business.’

‘I
agree, James. Thank you. And thank you for being here. I need you for the
denouement.’

‘Then
get to the point, man, because I am leaving in a moment.’

Oscar
snapped shut his cigarette case and slipped it into his trouser pocket, looking
directly at his audience. The sparkle had returned to his eye. I sensed this
was to be his final aria and he gave it to us
con fuoco.

‘Where
was she killed? How was she killed? Why was she killed? I will tell you. She
was killed on the seat of tears in the sacristy of the Sistine Chapel, late on
the afternoon of Thursday 7 February 1878, as Pope Pius IX lay dying. She had
gone there to shed her own tears. She loved Pio Nono — as if he were a father
and a grandfather. It was there, on the seat of tears, that Cesare Verdi, the
sacristan, found her, when he came to the sacristy at around five o’clock to
collect the little silver hammer that would be required within the hour to
prove the death of the old pope.

‘Cesare
Verdi entered the sacristy, his sacristy, and on the seat of tears, the papal
seat of tears, he saw this wretched child: Pio’s Nono’s favourite, Pio Nono’s
little lamb of God, crying her heart out. When Monsignor Tuminello told us that
Pio Nono allowed Agnes “a freedom within the Vatican enjoyed by no one else,
no one at all”, I realised how much she might be resented. To Cesare Verdi,
Agnes was more than a nuisance: she was a usurper. The sacristy was his domain,
his inheritance, and yet this child had the run of the place, she could go
where she wanted, she could play as she pleased, she could do no wrong …

‘As
little Agnes lay there, so impertinently, weeping in her sleep, Cesare Verdi
decided that her reign should end with Pio Nono’s — that the new pope, whoever
he might be, would not be subject to the little girl’s seductive charms. Verdi
took the silver hammer and, with a single blow to the back of her head, he
killed her. And to make assurance doubly sure, having struck her with the
hammer, he suffocated her with a cushion. When he was certain that she was
dead, he straightened her head, closed her eyes, pushed her lips up into a
mocking, beatific smile and laid her feet to rest upon the cushion. Later, he
discovered that blood from the wound to her head had left a mark on the velvet.
It is still there. It is no larger than a thumbprint. I would not have noticed
it, had he not pointed it out to me. He said it was the mark left by past popes
who had shed tears of blood upon the seat of tears. He called it “a stigmata”.

‘Cesare
Verdi left the dead child where he had found her and went back, with his little
silver hammer wiped clean, to the bedside of the dying pope. How he would have
disposed of the child’s body, I do not know, but the dilemma was solved for
him, inadvertently, by the intervention of Brother Matteo. Agnes’s body — left
for dead by Verdi, seen briefly by Monsignor Breakspear on his way to compline
— was stolen away in the darkness, wrapped in a Capuchin’s habit, and brought
here before daybreak, where it has rested, undisturbed, ever since.

‘Within
the world drama of a pope’s death, the disappearance from the Vatican of a
little girl, a waif and stray, did not count for very much. Searches were
mounted, enquiries were made, but nothing was found. The child was not
forgotten by those who had known and loved her, but the issue of her
“disappearance” disappeared, for years … until Monsignor Tuminello conceived
his madcap notion of making Agnes a saint!

‘On
Sunday of this week, Cesare Verdi discovered that Monsignor Tuminello had set
his heart upon unearthing the truth, the whole truth, about the death of little
Agnes. Tuminello had to be stopped, so on Monday Verdi murdered him, using
strychnine stolen from Dr Munthe’s medical bag. Dr Munthe is not careful with
his bag: I saw him leave it, unlocked and unattended, by the sideboard in the
sacristy dining room. Poisoning the communion wine presented no challenge to
Cesare Verdi. He is sacristan. He is the guardian of the communion wine at the
Sistine Chapel. With the murders of both Agnes and Monsignor Tuminello, the
only man with the motive, the means and the opportunity in each case is Cesare
Verdi. He is our murderer.’

Oscar
ran his hands down the front of his green linen suit and adjusted the
pale-yellow cottage-rose in his buttonhole. He cast his eyes down and paused,
almost as if he might have been expecting a round of applause. None came. The
silence in the room was broken only by Monsignor Felici’s heavy breathing.
Felici, Breakspear and Matteo stared fixedly in front of them. Martin English
and his sister, Munthe, Rennell Rodd and I all turned towards Verdi. He was
seated alone in the corner of the chapel, quite still, erect, his unshaven face
clouded and perplexed.

Oscar
looked up and addressed Rennell Rodd.

‘James,
I asked you here for a purpose. Cesare Verdi is half British; his mother is a
cockney. He was born by London Bridge. I don’t know my way around the Italian
judicial system, and I don’t want to, but I know British justice, and I respect
it, and I know you. I trust that, as First Secretary at the British Embassy here,
you will have the authority to arrest the man.’

Rennell
Rodd got to his feet and turned towards Verdi. ‘Don’t move, sir,’ he said.

‘I’ve
no intention of moving,’ replied the man, getting to his feet defiantly. He
looked beyond Rennell Rodd towards Oscar and, scratching his head with one hand
while holding his bowler hat to his chest with the other, enquired: ‘What’s all
this about, Mr Wilde? I’m one hundred per cent British. Don’t you remember me?
I’m Gus Green — from Willis’s Rooms in St James’s. I am not my brother, nor my
brother’s keeper. I came only because I got your telegram, telling me Cesare
was dead. I got to the Vatican just now and they sent me down here. Where is
he? What’s going on?’

Oscar
blanched.

‘I sent
you no telegram, Mr Green.’ He swayed and closed his eyes. ‘I have been
outwitted,’ he whispered, almost to himself, ‘outfoxed.’

And
then he laughed. It was a bitter, barking laugh, not like Oscar’s laugh at all.
Finally, slowly, he opened his eyes and, looking down towards the little skeleton
that lay at the side of the altar, said quietly: ‘I apologise to each of you
but most especially to the spirit of Agnes, Pio Nono’s little lamb of God. She
was all innocence. ‘He gazed around the gloomy chapel. ‘Her murderer will be
halfway to Istanbul by now. We shall never see Cesare Verdi again.’

We
never did.

Aftermath