The City of God - Stefan Gillespie Series 08 (2023) by Russell Michael

Author:Russell, Michael [Russell, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

CITTÀ DEL VATICANO

The butcher’s lorry dropped the monsignor and me at the back of another big kitchen, this time somewhere off a street in the Vatican City. O’Flaherty disposed of his bloodstained overall and as the van doors opened we simply got out. The two men in dirty kitchen whites who were waiting to unload the carcasses gave a curt, respectful nod, as if a monsignor stepping out of a meat wagon was an everyday occurrence. I got the impression it probably was. We walked along an alleyway into the street and then to a quiet garden that extended out from the back of St Peter’s. We climbed the stairs of a building full of broad, stone corridors. O’Flaherty knocked at a door and I followed him into a room that looked out over the garden we had just walked through. It should have been bright, but everywhere there were books and where there weren’t books there were piles of documents and files, tied up in bundles, heaped on top of each other. In one corner was a bed, and that too, for the moment, was entirely covered in papers and documents. I took this in before I saw the man in the wheelchair, who sat among the books and moved forward to greet us. He looked at me quizzically, as if not quite remembering something, and then he smiled. And it was when he smiled that I recognised him.

‘Like old times, Mr Gillespie . . . is it Stefan, do I have that right?’

‘It is, sir. It’s good to see you.’

The face was still sharp. The eyes behind the glasses were still bright. But he was older, older than he should have been, it seemed. It wasn’t so long ago I had met him. Eight years. The discovery of a long-dead body in the Dublin Mountains had taken me to the little German enclave that was the Free City of Danzig, a miniature country almost surrounded by Poland and full of people who wanted to be part of Germany, whatever the cost. I went to find a missing Irish woman whose bloody-minded determination had nearly got us both killed. That wasn’t the only memory I had of her, but that was then, and eight years had passed. The man in front of me had been Danzig’s Catholic bishop, and one of the only people left in the city who was resisting the Nazi takeover of his city. Edward O’Rourke was a Russian with an Irish ancestor from two centuries earlier, who had left him his very un-Russian name. He had fled Lenin’s revolution in 1917, only to find himself, years later, in the middle of Hitler’s. When we’d met in Danzig he’d been a vigorous, middle-aged man, bright and determined. He had got old before his time.

‘An unexpected surprise,’ said the bishop, who was, it seemed still a bishop of somewhere or something, if only in name. ‘I’ve been shut in the Vatican for years. They pushed me out of Danzig, not long after you were there.

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