Stealing God (16 page)

‘How many others?'

‘How many other what?'

‘Cardinals who've died suddenly. How many other unexpected deaths in, say, the last two years?'

Ricci gave a low whistle and braked slightly as a Fiat sports car cut in, apparently intent on cadging a lift on his front bumper. Jimmy's question made him forget to pump the horn.

‘It's a bit rich, isn't it, murdering cardinals?'

‘Well, if we're right, one's been done, so why not ask if there're any more?'

‘All right, if you think it's a question worth asking. You lead in this, remember.'

‘I'm seeing McBride tomorrow to sort out my leave of absence. I'll ask her who I need to see to get the information.'

‘What do you think she'll do for you, arrange something terminal like they did for me?'

Jimmy gave a small laugh.

‘The way things are going I think I may already have something terminal.'

The car came to Jimmy's district of quiet, tree-lined streets, pulled into his street, and stopped outside the Café Mozart. He got out of the car. He was tired again. No, not tired, weary.

‘I'll let you know how I get on.'

Ricci nodded and the car pulled away. Jimmy went into the apartment block and went to the stairs where he had so recently been deposited like a piece of broken rubbish.

‘Do it right next time, you bastards. Do it right and finish the fucking job.'

TWENTY-ONE

The small room on the top floor was as depressing as ever.

‘Sit down, Mr Costello.' Jimmy sat down. ‘I'm afraid I have been guilty of a little subterfuge.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘I didn't ask you here to talk about your leave of absence.' The room was stuffy. It was high up in the building and there was no air-conditioning so any warm air rose and, as the window didn't open, stuck, stale and oppressive. Jimmy began to feel not just crumpled but tainted somehow. McBride obviously wasn't affected by the room. She was wearing a smart dark blue jacket and skirt and a plain white blouse with an open collar. She was all neatly pressed and just back from the laundry. ‘I asked you here to tell you something. Something about yourself.'

‘I know all I want to know about myself, Professor. There's nothing I want to hear from you.'

‘That's true. It is not something that you'll want to hear, but I think you do need to hear it.'

‘If you say so.'

He didn't care. It was going to be nasty and it was going to be true and there was nothing he could do about it. Saying it out loud wouldn't change any of it.

‘Yesterday I explained why you are here in Rome. What I didn't explain was that I had strong reservations about using you, other councils prevailed however.' Fastidious bitch, thought Jimmy, set me up in this shit then distance yourself from the smell.

‘Not bad enough, or too bad?'

‘Not well enough, Mr Costello, not nearly well enough.'

He wasn't ready for that. It had come at him from nowhere. ‘That my opinion was overruled in your selection is obvious from your presence here.'

He wasn't sick, what was she on about? It was true he didn't bother with check-ups, but that was because he didn't care if there was something there. He had watched Bernie die from something that hadn't shown itself until it was too late to do anything and Michael had died from something that killed as soon as it showed. You died, that was all, the way didn't matter. What was the point in getting formally introduced to what was going to kill you? But he wasn't sick right now. He knew that for certain because he had just come out of hospital and he had been cleared as OK to leave. If there was anything the matter with him they would have spotted it. But something about McBride made him ask.

‘What's the matter with me?'

‘In my opinion you would do well to seek psychiatric help.'

He couldn't fault her for being different. Given what she knew about him or had guessed, she could have accused him of being many things but he hadn't expected it would be that he was a nutter.

‘I'm mad, is that it?'

‘Mr Costello, I have no medical training whatsoever, but I have spent most of my working life studying people who operate the levers of power. The men and women who decide the fate of others. My special field of study has become those who have great power but whose behaviour and motivation could be classed as abnormal.'

‘For instance?'

‘Dictators, those who lead totalitarian regimes, heads of terrorist organisations, all the ones you would expect, but also presidents, prime ministers, and, sadly, religious leaders of all faiths. I study people who perpetrate injustice on a grand scale. I study people with power.'

‘And power corrupts?'

‘Absolutely. No one who has real power can ever be sure they will not succumb to the misuse of that power or that it will not influence their mental state.'

‘What's that got to do with me? You don't think I ever had any real power, do you?'

‘No, I don't think that. Let me explain what I mean by using as an example Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Saddam was a dictator who, in his political life, had to be utterly ruthless and totally without pity or remorse. He had to care for no one nor trust anyone. In fact he had to be a monster. But he was a loving husband and father, kind, trusting, and caring. A father to be relied upon, that his family could turn to. In order to be able to live such conflicting lives he had to be two different people. He had to live a schizoid-inducing duality sustained in one case by an unshakable and fanatical belief in the rightness of his actions, and in the other by a profound love for and commitment to his family. Saddam the Dictator was able to believe in his love for the Iraqi people yet still do terrible things to them, to individuals, groups, and whole communities, to anyone he saw as a threat. I'm afraid it is not uncommon for those who have a fanatical love of abstract humanity to inflict great cruelty on real people.'

‘Is that what you spend your time doing, watching mad dictators trying to conquer the world? Why not just watch old Bond movies?'

‘Semyon Frank predicted the terrible cruelty of Bolshevism long before the October Revolution. George Bush's famous, or infamous if you prefer, War on Terror could be said to be the same thing in different clothes. The justification of evil acts is often some greater good.'

‘Well I'm not Saddam and thank God I'm not George Bush and I was never fanatical about my work as a copper. Corrupt, yes, I give you that. But fanatical? No.'

‘No indeed. You were never fanatical as a policeman, just, as you say, corrupt. Your fanaticism lay in your effort to be a good Catholic, to be a good husband and father, to be a good parishioner. You had to be obsessive about that to sustain the duality you had imposed on your life. The Good Catholic in your private life, the Corrupt Policeman in your working life. To sustain those mutually incompatible personalities was only possible so long as you took the template of your police life from a small group of highly successful but deeply dishonest officers. They were corrupt and, to some extent, they were allowed to be corrupt. They were seen as a necessary evil. You chose to go the same way and, so long as an official blind eye was turned, you could believe it was an acceptable part of an imperfect system, that there was some form of greater good which justified your individual acts of violence and dishonesty.'

He waited. She had been spot on so far and he didn't want to know where this was going. But it was something he knew he had to hear.

‘And my home life? My life as a good Catholic?'

‘I know nothing of your wife, Mr Costello, but I am pretty certain she was the one you looked to for the validation of your image of yourself as a good Catholic. Not the Church itself and certainly never any priest. I would guess she was all that you believed a good Catholic should be: devout, believing, loving, loyal. That she stayed with you, cared for you, accepted you, was the endorsement your private life needed for you to sustain it. Once she was gone, your world simply fell apart. My guess is that before she died, maybe during her illness, you glimpsed what being your wife had cost her, knowing as she did what sort of man you were as a policeman. That realisation brought you to the edge and after she died you suffered the inevitable psychotic episode. You almost killed two men whom you thought represented all that had gone wrong in your life. You were acting out a psychotic fantasy in which you had cast yourself as Nemesis. Those two men you so savagely attacked were a message to all the others that they could be reached by justice, even if they were beyond the reach of the law. That one of them was a powerful criminal who would have done you great harm after he came out hospital was what gave you your honourable early retirement. Where you should have gone, of course, was to prison.'

‘Prison would have been a death sentence.'

‘You aren't suggesting early retirement and a pension to save the Metropolitan Police embarrassment was justice for what you did?'

No, he wasn't saying anything about justice. He didn't want to say or hear anything more, because she was right. He was hearing the truth about himself and it gave him almost unbearable pain to be confronted by what he had known since he sat at Bernie's hospital bedside. What he had buried so deep that he could pretend he didn't know. Now she had calmly shredded his emotional defences and told him that the only two things his life had achieved were making his wife suffer so much and for so long, and turning himself into some sort of sick monster.

‘Are you saying that what I did to those animals was because I was sick, mentally sick?'

‘I told you, I have no medical training nor experience. I am making an interpretation of what happened on the basis of years of study. I couldn't say whether your condition made you clinically insane but I doubt it. You thought you were acting rationally and you carefully planned what you did. I'm sure you would have been found, for criminal prosecution purposes, quite sane. But what you did was the action of a very disturbed mind, a mind which I think is still very disturbed.'

She had to be wrong, please God, make her wrong.

‘So how come I'm here, how come you got overruled?'

‘My field is the politics of power, not psychiatry. There were two people on the panel which conducted your extended interview who were specialists in the field of mental health. Their view was that your going to Ireland after you left London and living quietly, going to Mass and choosing a kind old priest as the person you talked to, all showed remorse, a willingness to repent, to confront what you had done. Your decision to make amends for your life by applying to become a priest meant that you were no longer a danger to yourself or others and open to recovery.'

‘But you disagreed.'

‘I know how well a condition such as I have described can be hidden, camouflaged. The world I study is increasingly peopled by those who achieve great power but whose inner evil remains hidden until it is too late to restrain them and the monster emerges. Sadly I sometimes think that our world today owes more to the Book of Revelation than to the Gospels. I am quite sure you could appear to have begun your recovery and yet be someone who was still motivated by something that might not be fanaticism but is certainly sufficiently obsessive to be dangerous.'

‘You think I might still be a fanatical Catholic then? That applying to become a priest was part of some obsession?'

‘No, I think the goal you now pursue with such single-mindedness, a single-mindedness that could become dangerous, is to make your life right.'

‘Right?'

‘Right in a way you think your late wife would accept. I think you are determined to become a good man and you are prepared to do whatever it takes to become that good man. If you pursue such a goal without regard for the consequences either for yourself or others, you will re-create your old duality. You will try to embody the old saying that out of evil cometh good. It is a good thing for you to want to be a different person, one your wife could have loved and been proud of. It is a bad thing to destroy yourself and possibly others in the attempt.'

She was still right, of course, she knew him better than he knew himself, but suddenly the anguish which had been filling his mind left him. She knew and she had made him face it. It was no longer hidden, no longer denied, buried deep within him, festering. It was out in the open. Please God it could now be dealt with, and not in his way, but in a way Bernie would have wanted it.

‘So what can I do?'

‘You need a friend, Mr Costello. You have tried to go on living your life in your head with only yourself as judge and jury on what you are doing and how you are doing it. You are trying to fight the evil in your life entirely on your own. If you continue you will at some point break down and you may suffer another, but more severe, psychotic episode. This time if you try to kill someone you may very well succeed. If so then you will spend the rest of your life heavily sedated in an asylum or be tried for murder and serve the rest of your life in a secure establishment for the criminally insane. Either way there will be no question of a recovery.' It was the way she said it that made a cold hand clutch at his heart. She was so certain, so matter of fact. He knew she was speaking no more than the simple truth but that only increased the horror at how far he had continued to travel the road of his own destruction. ‘You need a friend, someone to take the role of your late wife, to support you and help you, someone with whom you can share your thoughts and feelings, someone you do not close out of one half of your life. You must learn to live one life and to live it outside your head, to live it with and among others.'

He thought about what she was saying, about what she meant.

‘Will it be you? Will you be my friend?'

‘Good heavens, no. As I said before I didn't want you for this work. I thought you unfit and I still think you unfit. Also I don't like you. You are not a nice man, Mr Costello, not at all nice. But putting all that to one side, I can't help you because I am far too busy. I've already said I resented the time our monthly meetings took up and kept me from my work. The meetings were necessary of course because I wanted to monitor you. Your progress or otherwise as a student was, as you now know, irrelevant, but your mental state concerned me so I had to give time to meeting you.'