“And that’s what happened in 1978?”
“No. The Curia didn’t succeed in securing the election of Cardinal Siri, their favorite. One faction of non-Italian cardinals gave its support to Albino Luciani. And that sealed his fate.”
Silence again for a moment. The captain then continued.
“In the second conclave in 1978, the ‘three-pope year,’ the Curia didn’t take any chances, and elected someone they would be able to control. It goes without saying that they hit the nail on the head. Not only did the Curia keep him under their control, but as pontiff he managed to establish an excellent relationship with the faithful. He was very useful to them.”
“I didn’t think of John Paul II that way.”
“Nobody does. But it’s difficult to blame him for it. First, because he received a very serious warning in 1981, when Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate him. The original plan wasn’t to give him a scare, but to do away with him entirely. And later, because the Vatican, indirectly, put nearly a billion dollars into the coffers of Solidarity, the Polish labor union in Gdansk that overthrew their communist regime. They did it with funds from the Vatican and from the United States.”
“But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did the people who killed the pope not destroy those papers? That’s what I would have done.”
“Listen,” her father continued, “the pope didn’t die because of the papers in his hand. But someone immediately took care to remove them. That person gave them to the man in charge of the job, who took them out of the Vatican. The order was to destroy the papers, but he never fulfilled it.”
“Why?”
“Good question. Maybe so he could keep them for blackmail. Or even as a kind of ‘life insurance,’ in case the people on top wanted to get rid of him in the future.”
“I see,” Sarah said, nodding. “Then the time has come to explain the murder. Why did they kill the pope?”
“Are you going to drink your port?” Rafael asked unexpectedly, his voice absent for some time. Sarah looked at him.
“No,” she answered, holding out the glass. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks,” Rafael said, instantly taking it.
“I want to know who killed the pope and why,” Sarah continued. “And who is that Firenzi? I need to know how I fit into this whole business.”
“Forgive me for interrupting, Captain, but we should continue this conversation in the car.”
“What car? The one we drove here in?” the young woman asked.
“No, the one I’ve got outside,” her father explained. “How did you think we’d be leaving?”
“I don’t know. With him, anything’s possible,” Sarah answered, looking at Rafael. “But where are we going? Aren’t we safe here?”
“Yes. But very soon Mafra will be crawling with agents, and we can’t run the risk of being surrounded. It’s important to keep some maneuvering room, to stay always a step ahead,” Rafael explained.
“Do you really think they’ll manage to place us in Mafra?”
“Yes. Beyond the slightest doubt.”
48
The pope died because he knew too much,” Raul said, sitting in the passenger seat of the Volvo, looking back at his daughter. Sarah leaned forward in order to hear better. Rafael seemed focused on his driving. She surmised that he already knew the story her father was telling, and was absorbed in his own thoughts.
“Knew too much about what?”
“He knew that important figures in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, including his secretary of state, Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, belonged to Masonic organizations, an offense subject to the automatic penalty of excommunication. He also came to understand that the Institute for Religious Works, the IOR-better known as the Vatican Bank-was directed by a corrupt man who, in collaboration with someone from the Banco Ambrosiano, laundered Mafia money and funds from other not-so-holy enterprises.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Paul Marcinkus, from the Vatican Bank, and Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano. And the key figure, the one who manipulated both of these men, the brains behind the whole black-market money-laundering scheme, Licio Gelli.”
“How is it possible to do something like that?”
“By means of shell companies based in South America and northern Europe, and later by purchasing foreign banks or using subsidiaries of the Banco Ambrosiano in order to bring money in or divert it. A lot of money. When the business prospered, Paul VI nicknamed Calvi ‘God’s banker.’ At some point, they expanded the operation. That is, Gelli began to demand that they launder more money, always through the Vatican and the Ambrosiano. Naturally, it wasn’t long before suspicions were aroused, and despite being brilliant bankers, Calvi and Marcinkus made mistakes. Actually, many mistakes. And it all blew up, in ‘the Vatican Bank scandal,’ shortly after the pope’s death.
“The Banco Ambrosiano,” Raul continued, “fell into the hands of Roberto Calvi, a known member of the P2 Lodge. Gelli, the Grand Master of the lodge, arranged for the Vatican Bank to take more than a twenty percent share of the Ambrosiano, involving it in irregular activities in Europe and America, with parallel, undercover societies for laundering money and other fiscal frauds.”
All of this crashed when the Bank of Italy declared a depletion of billions of dollars, which the Ambrosiano would not be able to cover. In the early eighties, when the investigations started, the Holy See’s tolerance of Calvi and his operatives’ manipulations was discovered, and it was also understood that the Vatican was willing to participate in the Ambrosiano Bank’s illicit activities. Calvi asked for help from the Vatican Bank, headed by Archbishop Marcinkus, but Marcinkus had enough trouble trying to save his own skin.
Albino Luciani was aware of these manipulations long before he became pope, because, as the patriarch of Venice, he was president of the Catholic Bank of Venice, one of the Holy See’s financial institutions. Later, from the papal throne, he had even greater access to information, which only brought increased danger.
“So they killed the pope because he was about to ruin them,” Sarah concluded.
“Exactly. And he was also planning to expose them publicly. They would all end up in jail. There was so much garbage piled up. For example, the Vatican Bank was intimately linked, through the P2, to the purchase of the Exocet missiles used by Argentina in the Falkland Islands War. Can you imagine all the implications this has?”
“Oh, my God.”
“They even used a Mafia type named Michele Sindona, who brought them large sums of money, serving as a link with Cosa Nostra.”
“Was he part of the group, too?”
“Yes, but Sindona wasn’t involved in the pope’s death, although a lot of people’s blood, including that of some notable magistrates, was on his hands. But at that point he was already up to his neck in other problems.”
“And nobody took care of the other frauds?”
“At some point, various European enforcement agencies and the U.S. Justice Department put two and two together. Even so, it took them a long time to unravel all the threads. But John Paul I, soon after being elected pope, met privately with U.S. Justice Department officials, who updated him on the situation, so that he could take whatever measures he deemed appropriate. John Paul I knew then that there were criminals in the Vatican and that he had to get rid of them. But they overtook him.”
“Were they the ones who killed him?”
“It’s not known. I believe they were morally responsible for the crime, just as guilty as whoever killed him.”
“Who was?”
“Licio Gelli, Roberto Calvi, and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, along with Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot. Of course, someone inside the Vatican had to facilitate the actual killer’s entry, and then destroy all the clues. His Holiness was found dead at four thirty in the morning, and by six in the afternoon his private quarters were already cleaned and sealed, with the key under Villot’s control. And in a little over twelve hours, every vestige of Albino Luciani’s presence in the Apostolic Palace had been erased.”