A Season for the Dead by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson [Hewson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780440242116
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Eight

The apartment they gave him was on the third floor of a poky residential building adjoining the Vatican Library. It was unfit for a junior clerk, let alone a cardinal. That it was available at all was significant. Accommodation did not just materialize out of thin air in the Vatican. This was a preordained punishment by the state, one that must have been planned weeks, if not months, before. The perfidy of Neri and Aitcheson was just part of the act. Perhaps Neri had worked together with someone on the political side. There was no way of knowing.

Only one plain fact consoled Michael Denney: They could never abandon him altogether. If he was handed over to the Italian police he could incriminate any number of men in Europe and America. Three Italian cabinet ministers were deeply in his debt. The European Commission was full of his placements. He counted Lloyds’s names and members of the New York Stock Exchange among those who had, in the good times, been the grateful recipients of any number of generous gestures, from the provision of company for the night to a well-placed inside tip. These were all items he would willingly have traded over the past few months as he attempted to buy safe passage out of the Vatican by any number of different means.

It was a disappointment that he had failed, but the power of these weapons remained undiminished. He was grateful too that he had declined Neri’s whispered hints that the mob could find a way out for him. With hindsight, placing himself in the hands of Neri’s friends could have proved the most dangerous option of all. Now they would all wait, hoping he would die of boredom perhaps, or take a gun and put it to his temple, solving the problem for everybody. It was a poor reward for a lifetime’s service.

Nevertheless, Denney was a practical man. He could appreciate their logic. Trying to rebuild a new Banca Lombardia from the ashes was a desperate venture and one which, in all honesty, was more designed to elicit his own freedom than enrich anyone he could persuade to come along for the ride.

Denney had known the risks and the costs from the beginning. Thirty years ago he had changed, from being a loyal and caring servant of the Church to an agent of the Vatican state, part diplomat, part financier. The three-cornered red biretta of his position soon began to gather dust in the closet. Someone had to do this, he reasoned.

The Church was a family, but the Vatican was a nation. Denney knew from the start that it needed to be defended. Over the years, as he became more worldly, he came to appreciate too that the city-state needed to safeguard its interests, to accrue wealth, and, in the final analysis, to deal with the Devil when necessary. He had come to believe that there was no room for sentiment or misplaced ethics. He never once asked himself whether the young Michael Denney would have thought otherwise.

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