The Vatican Rip (7 page)

I smiled. ‘How quaint.’

Caroline touched my arm as we left the dining room. ‘You’ll
love
Rome,’ she informed me earnestly. ‘Everything about it is positively
rapturous
.’

‘I believe you, love.’

‘
Do
ask us,’ Elsie trilled, ‘if we can be of any assistance. We’ll keep looking for you.’

‘And I’ll do the same,’ I promised with poisonous heartiness, thinking, you see if I don’t.

We parted and I hit the road.

The city was a-bustle. Cars were everywhere, including on the pavement in the slant-parked way I quickly came to expect. People pleased with their eagerness to talk. I had a great few minutes with a tiny elderly woman standing by a street kiosk, to the amusement of the kiosk man. She was drably dressed, hunch-backed and wistful behind her specs. She somehow provoked me into bargaining for the tourist map I wanted, and argued I had made a terrible choice. We went at it hammer and tongs, both of us laughing and threatening each other. She offered to show me round for a few lire but I couldn’t afford a passenger. We parted friends.

It was all happening by then. Schoolchildren, housewives, and cars, cars, cars. Green buses, the gliding trams and the shops. I knew the essentials from Maria. For weeks now we had been over things like currency, the newly-opened Metro’s Linea A, the coins you must have ready, that kind of thing, so I was not too taken aback.

Not knowing what was coming, I really enjoyed myself for an hour. I tried out the buses for a couple of stops. I had a go on the trams, and even went one stop on the cleanest Metro in the world and was appropriately confused to find nobody at the other end wanting to check my ticket. Badly shaken by this assumption of honesty, I walked into the Piazza del Risorgimento bus terminus for the best cup of coffee since breakfast. I remembered Maria’s warning in the nick of time: stand and it’s cheaper; sitting costs extra. I thought, let’s live, sat and got the map out.

Wherever I had gone so far I had come up against the most enormous brickwork wall. Its foot sloped outwards from a point several feet above the pavement. It could not have been less than a good eighty feet high. Presumably the rear end of St Peter’s church was in some churchyard behind it.

I drank my coffee feeling decidedly less full of myself. If
that
was the wall of the Vatican, there was no way of climbing it, for sure. Still, a church is a church is a church. There was bound to be a proper way in. And out. Nicking an antique from a church would be child’s play. Always is.

Despite the early time of year, numerous tourists had begun to troop about when finally I left the café. I thought, follow the wall and you will come to the entrance. Nothing could be simpler. Full of resolution, I crossed by the tourist shops crammed with mementoes and religious statuary. A group of Germans, superbly organized, were already photographing a small gateway up ahead. I headed for them and mingled. I disliked what I saw.

The gateway was one car wide. It had everything except size. Its traffic lights worked. It had businesslike gates folded back, but worst of all it had a group of vigilant blokes. They wore the navy-blue attire of tidy artists, slanted berets, cloaks with arm-holes, black stockings. That didn’t paralyse me so much as their air of diligence. No car was allowed to enter but these chaps scrutinized each car’s occupants and the passes. Worse still, an imposing-looking car earned itself the sailor’s elbow.

‘Excuse me, signor,’ I asked a man nearby. ‘What is this place?’

He did not understand and anyway saw his guide raise her folded multicoloured umbrella – the signal of the Roman guide – and was off with the rest. A hand tugged my elbow.

‘You never heard of the Vatican, son?’

My drab old lady who had ribbed me so mercilessly at the kiosk, her hat still with its ludicrous black cherries.

‘
That’s
the Vatican?’ I said weakly. ‘What’s the wall for?’

‘To keep bad people out.’ She chuckled at my face. ‘We Romans have this joke – it’s to keep the good people in.’

‘What are those men doing?’

‘In the gateway? They’re the Swiss Guard.’

I looked again, this time harder. Young, tough, vigilant and very fleet of foot should it come to a sprint. My heart sank. That bastard Arcellano.

‘How many of them are there?’

A slyness had crept into her voice. She tilted her head up at me, birdlike, her spectacles glinting. ‘Enough. You want to go in? There’s a museum, but the entrance—’

Irritably I shook her off and walked dejectedly along the wall pavement. People were drifting like a football crowd. Ahead were the pillars of the Colonnade rimming St Peter’s square. A toffee-maker and a trinketseller were doing a roaring business, blocking one of the arches leading into the square with tourists mobbing the stalls. The square itself was crammed. A pop group was singing somewhere on the Colonnade steps. There was a caravan shop selling Vatican City stamps, obviously an improvised post office. Ahead, between the fountains, rose the great basilica of St Peter’s. It was a real ball, everybody agog and full of good cheer, but I drifted into the throng feeling a right yeti.

Until then I had really felt quite confident. Idiot that I was, I had assumed the Vatican to be a church – okay, a big one, but still a church, with perhaps one or two elderly vergers pottering among the churchyard flowers. Now I was sure Arcellano had bitten off more than I could chew. It was like a frigging castle. Those calm diligent guards . . .

The mob of us moved like a slow tide, across the great circle and up the steps. The sheer scale of everything was awesome, doors a mile high and the basilica unbelievable in size and splendour. The last thing I expected was to find the place used, but there it was with people praying and milling and a Mass being said. I joined the crowd round Michelangelo’s exquisite
Pietà
, now behind protective glass, then wandered down to the main altar. The little birdlike lady happened to be standing near the great Bernini cupola, so I ducked in to see the Papal treasures, a mind-blowing session of rococo exotics. An hour later I reeled out exhausted in a state of unrequited greed. For somebody else to own all that wealth was criminal. And no sign of anything resembling Arcellano’s piece of furniture.

That familiar little figure was now flitting among some Japanese tourists. She seemed everywhere, I thought irritably. Anyway I was getting peckish. No good could possibly come of hunger when I had to suss out the Vatican, so I left St Peter’s in search of a nosh bar.

That bloody great wall was beginning to get me down. For one thing, it seemed formidably intact. For another, it emitted those chiming vibes which an antiquessensitive soul like mine hears louder than any foghorn. This wall, I thought uneasily, is not only massive and intact. It is
old
. A couple of corners and a few hundred yards and the wall turned left up the Viale Vaticano.

Halfway along there was a grand doorway complete with police-like guards and ice-cream-sellers and tourists trailing in and out of a few coaches. A notice announced that this was the Vatican Museum. I sussed it out for a few minutes, dithering and generally getting in everybody’s way until one of the guards started to notice. I found a pizzeria, a neat clean little place near the market. You choose a hunk of different pizzas cooked on trays, have your particular slice weighed and pay up. It’s everything grub should be – fast, satisfying and cheap – but I was coming to recognize that, like all things Italian, this famous type of nosh has style, even a kind of grace. So there I stood, oozing tomato sauce and miserable as sin.

What little I’d seen told me the worst. The Vatican was no peaceful East Anglian church, as I had fondly imagined. I had so far done it all properly. Exactly according to the old antiques thieves’ adage:
suss the outside, and the inside will take care of itself
. Only, the outside of this particular rip was a real downer.

Irritably I noticed I was being observed. My old woman was peering in at the window. Her face was sad, her gaze fixed wistfully on the hot food through the glass, a right Orphan of the Storm. This pest was getting on my nerves. I fidgeted and ate determinedly, but her stare bored into my shoulders. I finally surrendered and gave her a jerk of my head. She came in like Jesse Owens.

I asked grudgingly, ‘Which?’

‘
Con funghi
,’ she said, really quivering with delight.

Wise in the ways of the world, the pretty serving lass gave her a chunk big enough to feed a regiment. Blissfully the old lady tore into it, while I paid up and left. I was narked to find the irksome old biddy trotting beside me, gnawing her pizza plank.

‘
Grazie
,’ she burbled. ‘The Vatican now?’

I started to cut across the Andrea Doria among the market stalls. ‘Mind your own business.’ We risked life and limb reaching the other side unscathed. That vast dark brown wall was in clear view down the side streets.

‘The Vatican makes you so sad.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She cackled a laugh. The market was already showing signs of winding up for the day. Stallholders were beginning to box up their unsold stuff for loading. It was all so pleasant and good-humoured I almost forgot how bitter I felt. I took no notice and tried to shake her off by walking quicker. The old biddy simply trotted faster.

I’ll say this for her, she was a spry old bird. She seemed to know a lot of the market people and sprayed greetings right and left as we hurried through to the flight of steps where the street ended. I sat for breath. She sat beside me, still chewing gummily on the shredded remains of her pizza slab.

‘Going in this time?’

I eyed her. ‘Maybe.’

‘You didn’t before. You walked round the walls to study the entrances. Never seen a stranger do that before. Except once.’ She smiled at me. I had to smile back. The old dear was nothing more than a fly little chiseller, a wheeler scavenging on the fringes of the tourist crowds. Harmless. She went on, ‘Three years ago.’ Her eyes were merry as a fairground. ‘They caught him before he’d got a mile.’

My throat dried. ‘Caught him? You mean—?’

‘Si, signor. A robber. A bad man.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’

She nudged me. ‘What’s your game, signor? Tourist clipping? A con? A hideout?’

‘Just looking,’ I told her offhandedly, but worrying like mad. Was I that obvious?

‘So young and foolish,’ she said mischievously.

I rose in earnest then. I wasn’t going to take that from anyone, the stupid old bag. Anyway she was too shrewd for my liking. ‘No.’ I wagged a finger at her as she made ready to bustle after me. ‘No more. You go your way. I go mine. Goodbye, old lady.’

‘Anna.’ She was enjoying herself.

‘Goodbye, Anna.’

‘
Arrivederci
.’

She was looking after me, smiling and shaking her head. The pizza was gone.

Sickened, I stood looking at it.

The Chippendale rent table, for such it was, stood almost halfway down an immensely long gallery upstairs in the Vatican Museum. I checked its appearance against my memory of Arcellano’s photo. It was the one all right. That didn’t worry me, but its position worried me sick.

On its flat top stood a glass case containing a present from President Nixon to one of the Popes, a horrible ornithological Thing of white birds and ghastly synthetic grass. I reflected that President Nixon had a lot to answer for. Still, with any luck the Thing might get damaged when I did the rip, which would clearly be a major contribution to the world of art.

Hundreds of visitors were ambling about the Museum by now, a good sign. There were plenty of uniformed guards, which was really grotty, one at each angle and in every secluded room. This particular gallery was about twice as wide as the average living room. It couldn’t have been situated worse. No exit near by, no doors. The white library near one end of the gallery was a good hundred feet off. Okay, wall-cupboards stood against part of the opposite wall, and the protrusion of a rectangular wall-pillar created an open recess here and there, but that was all the cover there was. And the bloody windows gave me heartburn the instant I clapped eyes on them. Wherever you stood in this long corridorgallery you felt like a tomato in a greenhouse. I’d never seen windows so wide and tall before, great rectangular things, beautiful but full of the chances of being seen exactly at the wrong time. To one side the windows overlooked a raised terrace, landscaped gardens, lawns and walks. To the other, one could see a small macadam road with a line of parked cars. Each car displayed an official-looking sticker on its windscreen. More open grassy swards, and that was it. Not a place to hide.

The gardens ran off to include a lovely villa and a spectacular little grotto complete with miniature waterfall, but too far away to be any use. The entire place was a miracle of design. Lovely, but ruinous to any rip, at least in the safe old Lovejoy style.

As I hung about pretending to be overawed by the Nixon gift – as indeed I was – parties of visitors came along the gallery. I’d never seen people move so fast in all my life. Everybody simply stomped hurriedly past all the delectable antiques, for all the world as if on a route march. Most gave only a sweeping glance at the cased displays, further along, of early Christian burial artefacts and miniature votive statuary. Of course, this speed was very cheering. Except they would certainly notice, if that lovely antique table were missing and that Thing was left sitting there on the floor. You could hardly miss an aquarium full of white birds, especially if you fell over the damned thing. Simply nicking the rent table was definitely out.

A mixed party of Italians and Germans raced through. I could feel the floor vibrate and felt sad. Sad because the vibrations were small in amplitude, which meant a very substantial solid flooring. You feel these by rocking back on your heels as somebody walks past. And the lovely ceiling was an arched miracle of painting. Note that: the most difficult kind to penetrate from above. So no way in from above, through the windows, the walls, or through the floor. Gawd.