The Absolution (30 page)

DANIELE SAT PATIENTLY
in the small room. He had gone straight there from Father Uriel's treatment room, and the person he wanted to see was keeping him waiting.

Automatically he calculated the number of bricks in the wall opposite. Two thousand one hundred and fifteen, if you assumed that the average mortar gap was ten millimetres.

He recalled the famous anecdote about the mathematician G. H. Hardy, when he went to visit his fellow mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Hardy had remarked that he had come there in taxicab number 1729, which was a very dull number.

“No,” Ramanujan replied, “it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Such was the small talk of mathematicians.

He was just considering what interesting properties 2115 might have when Carole Tataro was shown in.

He didn't stand up. Neither, for a few moments, did she sit down.

“I don't know whether to call you Carole or Maria,” he said at last.

“You can call me 1853602 if you prefer,” she said, taking a seat opposite him. He noticed how she moved the chair as far away as the small room would allow.

“Is it nice, to have a number of your own?”

She gave him a sharp look, but saw that he wasn't mocking her. “The novelty wears off.” She gestured at the walls. “I suppose you've counted them?”

“A rough approximation. 2115.”

“2187,” she corrected him. “The builders skimped on mortar, and the door is a non-standard size.”

“That's interesting,” he said. He meant the number, not the reason. “Three to the power of seven.”

She said, curiously, “Do you remember something you once said to me? You said, ‘Every number is infinite.' You meant every number is interesting, I suppose, but it was an unusual way of putting it.”

He shook his head. “I've had amnesia about most of what happened during the kidnap. I'm only just remembering things now.”

“Such as?” she said carefully.

“I've remembered what you did to me,” he said quietly. “That it was you who cut off my ears and nose and sent them to my parents.”

There was a long silence “Here's another number,” she said at last. “Twenty-four. The number of years I've already spent in here for being the person I was then.”

“I just want to know why you did it. I think I know why you tried to pin the blame on Paolo. To do what you did, and to a child . . . The Italian prison system isn't kind to people like that.”

“You think I'm a monster.”

“Aren't you?”

She sighed. “Perhaps. But that wasn't the reason I told everyone it was Paolo.”

“Why, then?”

“I was ordered to say that, if I was ever challenged.”

“Ordered? By who?”

“My . . . handler, I suppose you would say. I never knew his real name.”

“Describe him for me,” Daniele said softly.

“Tall. Blue eyes. Wide shouldered, in that rangy American way. His Italian was excellent, though he spoke with a strong Venetian accent he didn't always seem aware of.”

Daniele nodded. “His name is Ian Gilroy.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.”

“And how did he convince you to mutilate a small, frightened child who trusted you?”

“He persuaded me that it was the only way to save your life.” She looked at him. “I know that must sound extraordinary. But he told me the Italian authorities were panicking. They were no closer to finding us, but at the same time they were insisting the parents didn't pay a ransom. He was afraid Claudio or Paolo would panic and kill you to get rid of the evidence; or that the Italians would mount a hastily arranged raid as soon as they located us and we'd all be killed. He said the only way to save you was to do something to break the stalemate, something that would give your parents a reason to insist on paying the ransom.”

“And meanwhile he was telling my parents not to pay, that everything would turn out for the best if they just stayed strong,” Daniele said bitterly. “That's Gilroy, all right. Weaving his stories, so that everybody hears what they want to hear.”

“I cared for you by then, Daniele. And I could see – or thought I could see – the truth of what he was telling me. Paolo and Claudio were at each other's throats. That was partly my fault . . .”

“It was Gilroy who'd encouraged you to sleep with both of them, presumably?”

“He'd impressed on me how important it was to get close to each of them, to have some leverage, yes. And I suppose I was panicking too by then. I would have done anything to get you out of there alive, anything.”

He only looked at her. The silence dragged on.

“There isn't a day when I haven't thought about what I did. I still hear your screams in my sleep. But I told myself that it wasn't your ears or your nose that made you who you were. It was your mind. You were so clever, so quick . . . I wanted to save that part of you.”

“My mind was not unaffected too, as it turned out,” he said drily.

“I know. I've read about you, Daniele, over the years. Every article or reference I could get my hands on . . .” She paused. “The word ‘sorry' doesn't do this situation justice. Nothing can. But I'm saying it anyway. I'm so sorry.”

He said sharply, “How did you become Gilroy's asset in the first place?”

“He simply approached me one day in the street. Said he knew who I was and that he had a proposition for me. At that time, the Historic Compromise between the communists and the socialists was just a rumour. Gilroy confirmed that it was happening. We were against it, of course – it would have meant the end of the revolutionary struggle; our own people sharing political power with those we most despised. He said his lot were against it too, that it wasn't in either side's interest to have Italy ruled by a stable, moderate coalition. Temporarily, we had a shared objective.”

“For once I don't think he was lying,” Daniele said. “Chaos in Italy
did
suit both Washington and Moscow.”

She nodded. “He arranged for us to receive explosives, guns, information on possible targets . . . But I also started to notice how operations that we
hadn't
carried out were being attributed to us as well. Sometimes because it turned out we were all using the same batch of explosive.”

“He was bolstering right-wing terrorists with one hand, and left-wing terrorists with the other. Infiltrating both sides – not to bring them to justice, but to coordinate the terror. And if people ever started to work out what was going on, he had a convenient screen to hide behind. Gladio. A NATO network gone rogue. Nothing to do with the CIA at all.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“But there's one thing I still don't understand. Why are you here? If you were such a precious asset . . . couldn't you have bargained for your freedom?”

Tataro laughed hollowly. “Precious at the time, perhaps. But after the collapse of the Historic Compromise, I'd served my purpose. Besides, too many of my former colleagues were turning
pentito
. The last thing the American wanted was for me to disappear into a witness-protection scheme and start spilling the beans. In here, I can be given quiet reminders from time to time that they're still watching me.”

“If they're so dangerous,” he said, “why are you talking to me now?”

She looked him in the eye. “Because I always promised myself that if you ever turned up here, you were the one person who deserved to know the truth.”

FATHER URIEL USHERED
his patient out of the consulting room and began writing up his notes. He had twenty minutes before his next appointment: a rare gap in the middle of the day.

The patient, a Catholic priest from Belgium, had finally started to make progress. For over a month he'd talked about sin and repentance and forgiveness. He was a dissociative narcissist whose deeply held belief in his own spirituality had enabled the terrible abuse he had inflicted on a nine-year-old girl. “God brought her to me,” he would say, or “God sent her to comfort me.” After several weeks of therapy, that had changed to “God sent her to tempt me,” or “God wanted me to know the nature of sin.” Whenever a question was too tough, or reflected badly on him, he would simply start praying. Father Uriel had been treating him with an avatar therapy similar to the one he had used with Daniele. In the priest's case, he allowed him to role-play the sexual encounter with the girl he had abused. When he'd made the priest perform the role play again, whilst at the same time playing an audio recording in which the victim described the scene from her point of view, the man had finally started to cry, the first tears he'd shed that weren't self-pity.

At the end of the session the priest hadn't prayed, as he usually did. That wasn't uncommon after a breakthrough, either. Many of Father Uriel's patients lost their belief at precisely the same point at which they acknowledged the evil within their own natures. Father Uriel didn't worry overmuch about that. It always seemed to him better to save a man's soul than to save his faith.

When he had finished his notes he stared through the window at the Institute's grounds. Then, with a sigh, he lifted the phone.

“Some time ago we had a discussion,” he said when the other man answered. “About your ward.”

“Indeed. I remember it well.”

“You asked me if there was anything you could do to help his recovery . . . And you were kind enough to make a generous donation towards our work.”

“Which, as you know, I consider very valuable. I've since sent some other sponsors in your direction, incidentally.”

“I'm aware of that. I'm very grateful.”

“How
is
Daniele?”

“Improving, I think. That is, he has remembered some details about his kidnap.” Father Uriel hesitated. “Specifically, which one of his kidnappers mutilated him.”

There was a short silence. “Could it be a . . . confabulation, I think is the medical term? A made-up memory?”

“I don't believe it could, no. But in any case he has gone to see the woman in prison, to confirm it. I thought, as his guardian, you would want to know. He may be disturbed or upset by what he's discovered.”

“Thank you.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you didn't tell him that we've spoken. Strictly speaking, as a patient . . .”

“Of course not. Go in God, my friend. And if you ever find yourself in need of anything for your work, anything at all, please be sure to let me know.”

“Thank you.”

There was a click, and the conversation was over.

KAT BUZZED AT
the morgue door until Dr Hapadi came to open it. His green plastic apron, and the length of time it had taken him to answer, suggested that despite the lateness of the hour he was still working.

“I'm sorry to disturb you,” she said. “It's important.”

He showed no surprise. “You'd better come in.”

He led her into his office. Beyond, through the glass wall, she could see his assistant removing the liver and spleen from a corpse, weighing them on a pair of scales.

“There are things people haven't been telling me,” she said, turning her attention back to the medical examiner. “Right from the start. And it seems to me that you were more involved than you've been letting on. You were the first Freemason on the scene, when you were called to Cassandre's body. It had to be you who made the call to Saito.”

“I spoke to General Saito, yes,” he said quietly. “It was clear to me as soon as I saw the body that the death was connected to Freemasonry. Clear, too, that it must be Tignelli's black lodge that was responsible. We all knew what he was up to – there was no way he could have declared a state of emergency without Carabinieri support. For months he'd been putting out feelers, sounding out which Freemasons might support his plans, offering bribes or positions of power in the new administration.”

“And Saito immediately called me.”

“He decided it had to be investigated by someone who didn't know what had been going on – someone who wasn't a Mason. But it also had to be an officer who wouldn't find out too much.”

“Thanks a lot.”

He shrugged. “General Saito said you weren't popular within the Carabinieri, that you'd put a lot of backs up and people would have no problem refusing to talk to you. He said there was no way you'd ever get to the bottom of it. For what it's worth, I told him he was wrong. I've seen you at work. I thought trying to block your investigation would only make you more determined.”

“So Saito put his niece on it, to keep an eye on me. And he spoke to the other Freemasons working on the case and warned them, too. I'm guessing that included Guiseppe Malli, our IT technician.”

Hapadi nodded. “When Malli found that list on Cassandre's computer, he removed all the names of serving Carabinieri officers before he sent it on to you. We hoped you'd have enough to stop Tignelli without dragging our own people into it.”

“And yet it was you who put me in touch with Father Calergi. And Father Calergi who gave me the idea that Tignelli's plans were political.”

“Those of us who are loyal Catholics as well as Freemasons were always uneasy about Tignelli's plans,” Hapadi said quietly. “Venetian independence might have been a good idea for the Veneto, but what would it have done to the rest of the country? And in particular, to the Vatican? If Italy fell apart, the Vatican could have been bankrupted. Tignelli didn't care about that. He simply wanted power for himself.”

“That was Cassandre's motive too, I'm guessing,” she said.
“He had a photograph of himself with Pope Benedict on his desk . . . He wanted to save his own skin, for sure, but when he finally had to choose a side, he chose Rome over Tignelli. But who told the Americans about all this? Who was it that decided I couldn't stop Tignelli on my own?”

His eyes gave nothing away. “What makes you think anyone did?”

“When Tignelli died, I didn't think to ask myself how he came to be killed on the very night that Flavio and I had been discussing whether or not to issue a warrant for his arrest. Later, when I did think about it, I assumed it must have been a leak within AISI, particularly since Colonel Grimaldo told me they'd been tapping our phones. But Tignelli was already dead by the time Flavio called me to say he was issuing a warrant. So it couldn't have been AISI. That only leaves the US. They must have been bugging my apartment. But why? Who told them we were getting close?”

“Father Calergi does have some longstanding contacts in that area, I believe,” Hapadi said reluctantly. “But it was inconceivable that the Americans wouldn't find out sooner or later. They know everything that's going on in this country. They always have. Every time you use your laptop, every time you do a search on Google, every time you make a call – it's all accessible to them.”

“But if that's the case, why didn't they do a better job of it? How come they could stop Tignelli and his black lodge, but not the hacker?”

Hapadi shrugged. “There I can't help you. Maybe he was just too clever for them.”

“No,” she said. “That hacker might be a technical genius, but he's no political strategist. There's something more going on here. Something I'm still not seeing.”