The Caravaggio Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

grappa, to increase their sentences from seven years to eight. Now he added a further twelve months. He felt he owed it to himself and his wife as much as to the amour propre of civil society. And if it shocked those two bastards in the dock, and those who supported them, so much the better.
    ‘Be grateful,’ he told the prisoners, ‘that your case has been heard in a country where the rule of law is not influenced by the violence and intolerance which each of you represents and which will never, I trust, be tolerated in a Christian society.’
    Again, the court burst into applause. This time, Minghella did not intervene.
     
    Three hundred kilometres south, far from the clamour of events, Cardinal Bosani and Father Visco watched the evening news on Italian state television. They were relaxing in the Camerlengo’s private sitting room in the Governorate.
    ‘Whose idea was it that the bullet holes should form a crescent?’ Bosani wanted to know. ‘That was a nice touch.’
    ‘Not mine, Eminence,’ Visco replied. ‘I regret to say that it would never have occurred to me. But I trust that the incident overall met with your approval.’
    Bosani patted his secretary’s hand reassuringly. ‘You did well, Cesare. The righteous anger of a Christian people was on display in that court today. Minghetti came across as an avenging angel, yet one acting within the law, guided by high Catholic principle. The cardinal electors will have taken note. It will be their duty to elect a pope whom those who praise Minghetti as a man of principle – and an officer of Opus Dei – can equally well respect.’

6 *
    Conclave minus 16
     
    ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you the things to come.’
    —John 16: 12-13
     
    The fourth-floor office of Father Declan O’Malley, Superior General of the Jesuits, overlooked the Borgo Santo Spirito, just a hundred metres from St Peter’s Square. Strictly speaking, the Curia Generalizia of the Company of Jesus was part of Rome, and Italy. But as a concession to the Vatican, it was designated zona extraterritoriale , giving O’Malley the de facto status of an ambassador.
    The Irishman, the first of his race to head the institution created in 1540 by St Ignatius Loyola, looked frail at first glance. His hair was snow-white and his dark eyes were sunk deep into his head. In fact, though into his seventies, he was fit and wiry, still able to get through Mass in thirty minutes flat, with or without an altar boy.
    Today was a special day for him. His nephew Liam, in Rome for the summer, had called to tell him that he was on his way over to say hello. It wasn’t, in fact, their first meeting. O’Malley had previously arranged for his nephew to attend the annual summer party at the Irish College two days after he flew in from Dublin. But it was the first time in ten years at least that he had visited him on his home turf.
    With his old-fashioned looks, set off by a thick head of reddish-blonde hair, Liam Dempsey reminded his uncle these days of the young Robert Donat, from The Thirty-Nine Steps. He had had a hard upbringing – harder even than he knew. Kitty – O’Malley’s sister – had died giving birth to him. Her husband, because of the intensity of his belief, gave priority to the child. O’Malley, keenly aware of the enormity of his brother-in-law’s dilemma, had not presumed to instruct him on the Church’s teaching, confining himself to expressions of sympathy and support that he now saw as hollow and inadequate. Pat Dempsey’s decision to sacrifice his wife was the cross he would bear, alone, for the rest of his days.
    In the years that followed, O’Malley watched intermittently as Dempsey’s faith calcified, becoming harsh and brittle, robbed of all outward show