White Suicide: One Man, One Death, Two Lives by Gaul Simon

Author:Gaul, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Whitefox Publishing Ltd
Published: 2023-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 65

The Vatican State.

Monday, 7th August 1978. 12:15.

Alessandro Cuci wore his black single-breasted (summer weight) suit. And today the Vatican City would be a heaving ocean of black garments after the death last night, Sunday 6th August, of the frail eighty-year-old pontiff, Pope Paul VI, at Castel Gandolfo, the Papal country retreat, The real work had to begin. There were candidates in the Curia to position, and lobbying to do. He was within millimetres of all he had ever schemed of. The cardinal he was to lunch with later had long ago convinced himself that Catholic celibacy only applied to heterosexuals, and Cuci was up for some lunchtime ‘clerical’ flirting with this particular cardinal, whose vote he needed to secure.

Cuci hesitated before going through the door which separated his office from his assistant’s. In all the years he had occupied this office, he’d paid scant attention to the small, Baroque painting above the interconnecting door. Religious scenes were plentiful in the corridors he prowled in. He squinted up at the scene of The Martyrdom of St Catherine, depicted as a wanton romantic beauty, in spite of the awfulness of her predicament. There she was, kneeling with her wrists manacled, her body fettered to a massive spiked wheel, death just moments away. He studied her form and found her manly breasts arousing. The pinkness of her flesh made his neck tingle. He considered the composition to be marred by two angels, who with their overwrought expressions and cumbersome feathered wings, looked like a pair of pale-skinned Neapolitan street rascals. Perplexed, Cuci shook his head as if he had missed the point. The angels had obviously failed to save her, for if they had succeeded, she would not have been canonised and there wouldn’t be a Catherine Wheel firework. He toyed at his goatee and walked out of the door with a heavy step. What was the purpose of it all?

The cardinal he was on his way to meet would probably be wearing the same expression as St Catherine’s angels, he thought wryly. Virtually every member of the Vatican Curia (with the exception of himself, and the shady American Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, Head of the Vatican Bank), had all had their posts terminated when Pope Paul VI’s earthly reign expired at 21:40 the night before.

Cuci was only mildly anxious about the sede vacante, the period between a pope’s death and the Papal Conclave, the gathering of the College of Cardinals. It wasn’t so much that the candidate who was set to assume St Peter’s chair was in any doubt. The other P2 Freemasons within the Vatican had already chosen the wily Italian from Genoa, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, as their candidate; a decision taken long before Pope Paul VI’s drawn-out death rattle. Ever since the untidy end to the Moro affair, Cuci had wanted this sede vacante, and the subsequent transition of power, to go smoothly. There was always talk of a few papabile – Cardinals with an outside chance – actually winning, for this was set to be the largest Conclave ever, and Cardinal Siri’s third.

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