Moscow Rules

Lavon was saying. “I’m telling you, Gabriel, he was clean.”
     

 
    8
     
     
    VATICAN CITY
     
     
    It took just one hour for the death in St. Peter’s to reach the airwaves of Italy and another hour for the first report to appear in a roundup of European news on the BBC. By eight o’clock, the corpse had a name; by nine, an occupation.
     
     
    At 9:30 P.M. Rome time, global interest in Ostrovsky’s death increased dramatically when a spokesman for the Vatican Press Office issued a terse statement suggesting the Russian journalist appeared to have died as a result of foul play. The announcement ignited a frenzy of activity in newsrooms around the world, it being an otherwise rather slow day, and by midnight there were satellite broadcast trucks lining the Via della Conciliazione from the Tiber to St. Peter’s Square. Experts were brought in to analyze every possible angle, real or imagined: experts on the police and security forces of the Vatican; experts on the perils facing Russian journalists; experts on the Basilica itself, which had been sealed off and declared a crime scene. An American cable channel even interviewed the author of a book about Pius XII, before whose statue Ostrovsky had died. The scholar was engaged in idle speculation about a possible link between the dead Russian journalist and the controversial pope as Gabriel parked his motorbike on a quiet side street near the Vatican walls and made his way toward St. Anne’s Gate.
     
     
    A young priest was standing just inside the gate, chatting with a Swiss Guard dressed in a simple blue night uniform. The priest greeted Gabriel with a nod, then turned and escorted him silently up the Via Belvedere. They entered the Apostolic Palace through the San Damaso Courtyard and stepped into a waiting elevator that bore them slowly up to the third floor. Monsignor Luigi Donati, private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, was waiting in the frescoed loggia. He was six inches taller than Gabriel and blessed with the dark good looks of an Italian film star. His handmade black cassock hung gracefully from his slender frame, and his gold wristwatch glinted in the restrained light as he banished the young priest with a curt wave.
     
     
    “Please tell me you didn’t actually kill a man in my Basilica,” Donati murmured after the young priest had receded into the shadows.
     
     
    “I didn’t kill anyone, Luigi.”
     
     
    The monsignor frowned, then handed Gabriel a manila file folder stamped with the insignia of the Vigilanza. Gabriel lifted the cover and saw himself, cradling the dying figure of Boris Ostrovsky. There were other photos beneath: Gabriel walking away as the onlookers gathered round; Gabriel slipping out the Filarete Door; Gabriel at the side of Eli Lavon as they hurried together across St. Peter’s Square. He closed the file and held it out toward Donati like an offertory.
     
     
    “They’re yours to keep, Gabriel. Think of them as a souvenir of your visit to the Vatican.”
     
     
    “I assume the Vigilanza has another set?”
     
     
    Donati gave a slow nod of his head.
     
     
    “I would be eternally grateful if you would be so kind as to drop those prints in the nearest pontifical shredder.”
     
     
    “I will,” Donati said icily. “ After you tell me everything you know about what transpired here this afternoon.”
     
     
    “I know very little, actually.”
     
     
    “Why don’t we start with something simple, then? For example, what in God’s name were you doing there?”
     
     
    Donati removed a cigarette from his elegant gold case, tapped it impatiently against the cover, then ignited it with an executive gold lighter. There was little clerical in his demeanor; not for the first time, Gabriel had to remind himself that the tall, cassocked figure standing before him was actually a priest. Brilliant, uncompromising, and notoriously short of temper, Donati was one of the most powerful private secretaries in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. He ran the Vatican like a prime minister or CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a management style that had won him few friends behind the walls of the Vatican. The Vatican press corps called him a clerical Rasputin, the true power behind the papal throne, while his legion of enemies in the Roman Curia often referred to him as “the Black Pope,” an unflattering reference to Donati’s Jesuit past. Their loathing of Donati had diminished some during the past year.