Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

APRIL 1980

It is a sunny morning in Rome, and the apartment in Trastevere has its windows thrown wide open to the spring breeze rolling in from the Tiber. It is chilly in the small kitchen, but the fresh air is necessary and Mary Alice is wearing gloves as she surveys her handiwork.

“What do you think?” she asks Billie.

Billie looks over the pans of fruitcake, careful not to touch them. “I think they look like fruitcake.”

Mary Alice has baked them as tiny tea cakes in four small pans and eases the miniature loaves onto a cooling rack. They are dark with molasses and studded with dried cherries and apricots, the tops shingled with thin slices of almond. While Billie watches, Mary Alice opens a sealed bottle of Tennessee whiskey and pours a generous amount into a bowl. There is a small jar of white powder at her elbow, and before she opens it, she fits a respirator over her mouth and nose, motioning for Billie to do the same. The door to the rest of the apartment is closed, and the others know better than to disturb them.

The white powder looks a little like granulated sugar. It has been brought into the country in a flowered jar labeled Lady Fresh Intimate Powder, tucked into Billie’s toiletry bag. In the airport, she is prepared to flirt with the Customs official who processes her, but he never unzips her suitcase. It has been Constance Halliday’s idea that the foursome should travel under the cover of flight attendants, and Billie is wearing the blue Pan Am suit, cut just a little bit too snug. The Customs officer is on the point of asking her for a date during her layover when Günther Paar, dressed in a snappy pilot’s uniform, puts a casual arm around her waist. The Customs officer makes a mournful face and waves her through with her poison.

They go directly to their rented apartments, a small studio for Günther and a larger one for the women. For two days they play tourist, trudging dutifully from the Colosseum to the Forum, tossing coins in the Trevi and paying too much for pasta in a rowdy café on the Piazza Navona. They take the kind of photos that casual travelers always take, posing with their hands inside the Bocca della Verità or arranging themselves by height on the flower-decked Spanish Steps. They buy postcards and tea towels stamped with the sights, and they drink cheap red wine from bottles wrapped in straw.

But the third morning, Mary Alice goes into the kitchen to put their plan into motion. She bakes the cakes according to the recipe she has been given, one she has practiced a dozen times in preparation for this moment. The pantry in the apartment has been stocked with everything she needs—even the American ingredients that will make the cakes unique. Through the respirator she can no longer smell them, but the aroma of spice and orange wafts out the window to the city beyond.

Taking the jar from Billie, Mary Alice stirs the powder carefully into the bowl of whiskey. When the granules are fully dissolved, she fills a syringe and injects the cakes with the poison-laced whiskey. It was Mary Alice’s idea to use thallium, and she is pleased at how well it disappears into the cakes. It is a heavy metal, odorless and tasteless, but deadly if inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

When she finishes injecting the four cakes, she wraps them carefully in waxed paper and fits them into a cardboard box stamped with the gilded logo of a vaguely Gothic-looking convent. Billie sets a fan to blow any lingering fumes out the kitchen window, and they discard their gloves, wrapping them up with the empty jar, the syringe, the pans, and the respirators. The rest of the whiskey is poured down the sink and the bottle is added to the rest of the trash. It all fits tidily into a single garbage bag and there can be no traces left of American ingredients in this small Roman kitchen.

The cakes neatly packaged, they call for the others. The four are dressed identically in the simple habits of an order of nuns that does not exist. Their dresses are modest and dark grey, covering them from mid-calf to neck, their cuffs and collars white. They have scrubbed their faces of makeup and their hair is hidden under light grey veils. They wear thick dark stockings and sensible shoes. They have stripped off all jewelry except thin wedding rings and wristwatches with expensive mechanisms hidden in cheap Timex cases. They look nothing like the glamorous quartet of stewardesses who arrived three days before, but the change is not as superficial as clothing and makeup. They have been strictly schooled in how to present themselves as modest young Brides of Christ. They walk slowly, hips held tight, gazes downcast, as they have mastered the custody of the eyes. When Günther arrives, dressed in a black suit with a white dog collar and a modest cross on a chain, they are waiting, prim-mouthed and demure.

“The four of you are scaring the shit out of me,” he tells them as they collect the box of cakes and follow him out the door.

He is in high spirits, mostly because he has nothing to do on this mission. He is window dressing, necessary because a group of nuns is unremarkable in Rome, but a group of nuns under the supervision of a priest will be completely invisible. After the success of their French mission, they have been allowed to plan and undertake this job, one requiring a good deal of ingenuity. Every step has been reviewed and approved by the Board of Directors. Their only interference has been the addition of Günther, a minor annoyance to the quartet, who hoped to complete their mission from start to finish without anyone’s help. But his smile is infectious, and he spends the short walk to Vatican City telling them about what he plans to do with the considerable bonus he is due to receive when the job is complete.

“I am taking the waters in Courtempierre-les-Bains,” he says, sketching a map of Switzerland with his hands as he walks. “I go after the Christmas holidays to give myself a complete detoxification process for the new year. And I go again after every job. I am Swiss-German, so you would think I would go to Bern, but no. I am devoted to Courtempierre-les-Bains. It has the thermal baths where you can soak away your troubles and repair your liver,” he tells them, listing the various other treatments he intends to indulge in. “Massage, sauna, therapeutic wraps. These missions are very taxing, and the body must be restored.”

He is polite enough and passably good-looking, but he has a mild case of hypochondria, and his favorite topic of conversation is the state of his digestive system.

“What kind of therapies do you enjoy, Günther?” Natalie asks, wide-eyed. “Do tell us more about the enemas.”

Helen elbows her hard in the ribs, but with Natalie’s encouragement, Günther continues to discuss his bowels until they arrive at the entrance to St. Peter’s Square. It is impressive, this open-air drawing room designed by Bernini. The long colonnaded wings sweep out and around, enclosing visitors in a way that should feel welcoming but somehow doesn’t. It is too large, too grand, intended to evoke awe. There are metal detectors at the entrance, but the guards hardly pay attention, waving them along. The little group of five moves across the vast expanse of the oval, past the obelisk, towards the wedding cake façade of the basilica.

Inside the shadowy marble embrace of the church, it takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dimness. Dust motes swim in the shafts of sunlight spilling through the cupola windows, and a tired cleaner is standing in sock feet atop an altar, listlessly pushing a cloth mop. Beneath the marble top of the altar, a glass coffin holds the body of a pope, the face and hands gleaming green. They pause to watch as the cleaner polishes the glass, removing the fingerprints of the faithful. They move on to take a clockwise tour of the church, observed but not remembered by Vatican police and Swiss Guard. They blend seamlessly with every other group, the schoolchildren, the tourists, the miracle seekers. They are nobody within the Baroque grandeur of the basilica.

When they have completed the tour, it is eleven forty-five am. Every Tuesday at precisely twelve pm, Bishop Timothy Sullivan of the Boston archdiocese crosses in front of the Tourist Information Office on the west side of St. Peter’s Square. The four demure nuns and their priest are clustered in a little knot a short distance away, shielded from the nearest Swiss Guardsman by a rack of postcards featuring a pope smiling in Technicolor and ropes of wooden rosaries for sale.

As the clock strikes the hour, tolling twelve times, the bishop appears, his thinning hair combed over his scalp, his cassock billowing behind him as he lopes. He is tall and slender, a little hunched, and could easily be mistaken for an Ivy League academic if it weren’t for his expression. He is wearing a faint smile, his attempt to hide the anger that seethes in him at all times. But the smile never touches his eyes, and he struggles to hide his impatience when Mary Alice calls his name.

“Yes?” he asks briskly. He is teetering on the edge of unfriendliness, but even a nun can be useful sometimes, and as he moves closer, he realizes these nuns are young and remarkably pretty. Something surges in his blood and he sets a smile on his lips. He pauses and waits, his eyebrows raised in gentle inquiry.

“Bishop Sullivan! Oh, Your Excellency, please pardon the interruption. We are from the Order of the Sisters of Peace, our chapterhouse is outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

He doesn’t bother to pretend that he has, but his face relaxes still further at the soft Southern drawl of her vowels. “I’m afraid I haven’t,” he says kindly.

“We are here on pilgrimage,” she tells him. “Our mother superior went to school with your sister,” she hurries on. “And she gave us strict instructions we were to find you and give you this gift.”

The bishop does not bother to ask which sister. He has six, all of them devout Catholics, scattered from Boston to Denver. Mary Alice extends the box and he takes it, his smile deepening.

“How kind,” he says.

“They are fruitcakes, Your Excellency,” Natalie puts in eagerly. “We bake them to support the order. And every one is flavored with Tennessee whiskey.”

“Fruitcakes?” His expression brightens. “Are they moist? I love a moist fruitcake and that’s one thing Italians can’t get right.”

“I promise you,” Mary Alice tells him serenely, “they are as full of flavor and moist as you could hope.”

He is almost jovial now, and he looks at Günther over the heads of the little flock of nuns. “Father, how do you come to be traveling with the sisters?”

Günther smiles vaguely. “Mother Superior was concerned about the sisters traveling alone, Your Excellency. They have never been out of the States before, so I volunteered to act as shepherd.”

“Good man,” the bishop tells him. He glances at the nuns and sees how expectant they are, how bright and young they seem. They are pathetically eager, but he likes how deferential they are. It is a balm to an ego that has been badly bruised in the morning’s finance meetings. The habits are an atrocity, plain and heavy, but his eye is practiced and he can tell the one who called his name has a lush figure shrouded underneath. He speaks impulsively.

“Would you care to visit the gardens? I could show you my favorite fountain and you won’t have to take one of those boring tours.”

The five of them are very still for a moment, and the bishop interprets this as reverence. In fact, they are reluctant because they do not wish to be any longer than necessary in his company. When he dies, questions will be asked. Video cameras will be mined for footage. Witnesses will be interrogated. And they want nothing that will connect them in any way to his death.

“Oh, we couldn’t impose!” Helen interjects, looking so awestruck that the bishop cannot be offended.

“But,” Billie says tentatively, her voice almost inaudible in its modesty, “Your Excellency, we would so love it if you would taste the cake and tell us what you think. Mother Superior will want to know.”

The bishop gives a mocking grin. “Well, if there’s one person I am afraid of, it is a mother superior,” he says, opening the box. He surveys the contents with obvious pleasure. “These look quite delicious.” He takes out one tiny cake and opens the waxed paper, sniffing deeply. “I can smell the cinnamon—and is that clove?”

Mary Alice nods. “It is, Your Excellency. You have quite a good sense of smell.”

He preens and takes a large bite of the cake. He chews thoughtfully before taking another, and finishes the cake before speaking. “You can tell your mother superior that this is the best fruitcake I have ever had. Outstanding, Sisters.”

They exchange happy glances as he starts on the second. “I know it’s greedy to eat them all myself,” he says through a mouthful of cake, “but I’ll worry about that at confession.”

Natalie gives him a shocked expression. “Oh no, Your Excellency! These were baked especially for you. Mother Superior would be very upset if she thought you gave them away.”

He finishes the second cake and closes the box. “You can tell your mother superior that there is no chance of that. These are mine and I plan on hiding them from everyone. In fact, I won’t have time for lunch today, so I’m very sure they’ll be gone before the hour is up.”

They exchange happy smiles again and Günther looks around. “Sisters, are you ready to go? I think we’ve probably taken up enough of His Excellency’s time.”

“Of course,” Mary Alice says, dropping her eyes. They take turns murmuring their thanks to the bishop, who raises his hand in a hasty blessing as they leave.

He opens the box and takes a bite of the third cake. It will be three hours before his stomach starts to cramp unbearably and the vomiting and diarrhea begin. When he is completely dehydrated and his consciousness is failing, he will be admitted to a hospital in Rome under the care of a physician who will never think to test for thallium. If he had, he would have prescribed doses of activated charcoal and Prussian blue to stop the cramping and hair loss. But since he does not, the bishop will grow progressively sicker for three weeks, until his heart gives out and he dies. The press release, phoned in from a source that is not the Vatican, will list the cause of death as pancreatic cancer. The doctor who treats him understands the meaning of the mysterious deposit into his bank account. He simply signs the death certificate and asks no questions. He never corrects the press release, and neither does the Vatican. It will be another two years before the collapse of an Italian bank reveals the extent of the corruption within the finances of the Holy See, and whispers of money laundering will continue for decades to come. But a certain bishop’s scheme to sell arms to a brutal Southeast Asian regime under the cover of missionary supplies will end, and an energized rebellion will succeed in establishing a fledgling democracy for the first time.