Stealing God Read online

  All his life he’d heard the stories of how Jesus cured people possessed by evil spirits, first at school then on Sundays at Mass. As a child he’d enjoyed them, been impressed and a little frightened that evil spirits could get inside you somehow. As an adult he’d found such stories vaguely annoying when read out at church alongside the eternal truths enshrined in the Gospels. He sometimes wondered how the Church could mix the real Jesus and real miracles with such long-dead superstitious crap.

  He no longer wondered.

  Now he knew it wasn’t superstition and it wasn’t crap. The demons of self-destruction were very real. On arriving to study in Rome one of his first New Testament essays had been on the miracles of Jesus and he had drawn high praise for his understanding of the destructive power of inner demons. For a brief period he was regarded as a possible scholar, even asked out for a drink by a Rome-based English Dominican. But that drink and subsequent essays quickly put him back where he belonged, among the plodders.

  His brain shifted again. Pain.

  Why was the pain of Ron’s remark so much harder to bear, so much harder to deal with, than any physical pain? As a child he had learned that it was possible to control physical pain inflicted from the outside, to feel the fist or the boot, but go to a place deep inside yourself where you could hide, where physical feelings were somehow numbed or suspended. He had had to use the lesson many times himself and, as a policeman, made sure others couldn’t find such a place as he questioned them in a cell or influenced their thinking in some stinking back alley. Yes, many times, too many. But with this pain he could find no place to hide, nowhere was free of it, when it came it possessed him.

  Pain.

  You never got to the bottom of pain. However bad it was you knew it could get worse. Of one thing he was certain, this pain wasn’t something you could beat or hide from or overcome by your own efforts. The best that could be hoped for was to accept it, live with it, and ultimately find forgiveness. If forgiveness ever came.

  Suddenly he realised he had stopped and was leaning on the low parapet, and gazing down into the brown water. It had rained heavily two days ago and the river was moving quickly, muddy and swirling. He stood up and looked towards the traffic on the next bridge. What the hell did it matter? He was who he was, what his past had made him. Now he had to make the best of it, what else was there? He smiled to himself. Nothing, there was nothing else. A pretty young woman was passing and smiled back at him, thinking his smile had been meant for her. She carried on and Jimmy watched her. Slim, in a light blue dress with long dark hair and high heels. Going to work or to meet a boyfriend. Someone with a life before them, things to do, people to meet, and places to go. Yet she had noticed him and smiled. That was nice, a fortuitous piece of uncomplicated human contact. He turned and set off; the young woman had lifted him.

  The quiet road ended at a bridge carrying one of Rome’s main roads which, having crossed the Tiber, carried on for about a hundred metres then went into a big tunnel which swallowed its four lanes. Jimmy walked to the tunnel, once inside he lost all ability to think as his head filled with the traffic noise echoing and bouncing off the walls. After about four hundred metres he turned off the footpath and went down into a pedestrian underpass. It came out on the far side of the main road where a flight of steps took him up, back into the sunlight and out onto a wide piazza. Facing him at the end of the piazza were the massive walls and dome of St Peter’s Basilica with the columns of St Peter’s Square fanning out from it.

  Jimmy began to walk across the piazza. On his right was an elegant hotel where people, mostly tourists, were sitting at tables, talking and drinking, soaking up the sunshine and the atmosphere. On the opposite side was a large, slab-like building which showed the world a blank, ochre wall topped by a shallow, red, pantiled roof. This was the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, the beginning of the Vatican and home to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. An innocent-sounding name until you were told it used to be called the Holy Office, and before that, the Inquisition. At the far end of the Palazzo the Renaissance ended abruptly and the stuccoed walls gave way to a high, steel security fence in the middle of which were two gates. Behind the fence to the side of the gates was an equally modern and ugly one-storey set of offices. These necessities of modern civilisation stood in the space between the Palazzo and St Peter’s Basilica and unashamedly jarred with everything around them as if to announce to the world, “don’t be fooled by all the history, pageant, and beauty that surrounds you; we are armed and dangerous”.

  Jimmy arrived at the gateway where two Swiss Guards were on duty. Even after eight months in Rome he still thought they looked ridiculous in their striped red, blue, and yellow uniforms, dark floppy berets, and knee-length pantaloons. Although they looked more suited to a carnival he recognised at once the faces under the berets and the look their eyes had in them. These were soldiers, guards, and they took their job very seriously. He gave his name and the name of his rector. One of the guards went to the office inside the gate where his name was checked against a list and his face checked against a photo he had had to supply on arrival at the College. He was then waved through to the office where he was electronically swept, signed in, and given his pass. The guards’ uniforms might be quaint but the security certainly wasn’t.

  He walked up the wide cobbled road between St. Peter’s and the Palazzo towards a complex of equally ancient buildings that stood behind the Basilica. This was the Vatican no tourists saw, where the work got done, where the lives and souls of over a billion Catholics world-wide were monitored, influenced, and guided.

  Why did the rector want to see him? Not a slap on the wrist. He hadn’t put a foot wrong since he came to Rome, and he was sure the rector couldn’t have found out anything about London … at least he was almost sure. He was being careful, but these days he knew he made mistakes. He had made one back in the bar with Ron and Danny. He had told them something about himself and they had laughed and the pain had come again.

  Pain.

  It always came back to pain.

  Jimmy stopped outside a small side entrance to one of the big old buildings. Here an office was made available to the Duns College rector when one of its students was in training. Jimmy paused. He wanted to clear his mind before any interview began.

  I can’t put any of it right, I can’t bring any of them back, and I can’t change what I was or what I did. This is how it is now and this is what I’ve chosen. He looked at the ancient black door. Behind it, in an office on the top floor, the rector of the College waited. He looked at his watch. He was dead on time. Unbidden, a question forced itself into his head. What the fuck am I doing here?

  But he didn’t stand and think about it because he knew the answer. He knew exactly why he was here.

  THREE

  ‘Come in.’

  The Duns College rector who answered Jimmy’s knock was unique among the administrators of Institutions in Rome preparing men for the Catholic priesthood. She was black. No one had expected Professor Pauline McBride to take any pride or pleasure in her appointment when it had been announced. No one ever did. On the rare occasion of a Duns student being accepted for training the College appeared, Brigadoon-like, from nowhere. Once brought back to life it consisted of a temporary office, a temporary phone line, some headed notepaper, the student, and a rector who served on a part-time basis until training was finished at which point Duns College and its rector once again disappeared.

  The post, though honorary, was not regarded as an honour, it was the “black spot” of Catholic academic life in Rome and when rumours of a Duns student circulated senior staff lived uneasily until the blow had fallen elsewhere. In the case of Professor McBride it was widely assumed that she would resent more deeply than most what had been done to her. After all, strictly speaking she should never even have been considered for the post. She was not a senior staff member of one of the many educational and training institutions run by the Catholic Church. She was,
when not having her time wasted by Duns business, a senior member on the faculty of the Collegio Principe, founded in 1519 by Cesare Borgia to study of the relationship between Religion, Politics, and Power. The Collegio Principe, as a secular institute, had never been on the traditional rota from which Duns rectors were drawn. The consensus as to why she had allowed herself to be “persuaded” was that she had become a new and useful statistic. The Vatican had taken the opportunity, when it arose, to rectify an increasingly awkward point of political correctness. It could now point to a black, female seminary college rector on its official list of senior appointments. Progress in racial equality and gender justice with the minimum of nuisance. The Vatican way.

  The rector’s office was a small room on a narrow, badly lit, top-floor corridor. Most of its limited space was occupied by a large, ugly desk. The bulb hanging from the ceiling had no shade and glowed weakly, shedding as much despondency as light. The single window was grimy and closed. There was no carpet on the floorboards and the walls and ceiling had been painted a slightly bilious green. In the glory-glory days of this imposing building the whole top floor would have been where the most lowly servants slept.

  Despite everything, however, the rector liked the room, it suited her mood when she had to come and make use of it.

  Professor McBride had an open laptop on the desk when Jimmy entered on which she continued working, ignoring him. He was glad to be able to stand for a few minutes, the wait would let him get his breath back from climbing the several flights of stairs which took you from the grandeur of the downstairs rooms to these garrets in the roof. The rector finally closed the laptop and nodded to the chair on the other side of the desk.

  ‘Sit down, please.’

  From their very first meeting she had reminded Jimmy of the headmistress of his primary school whom he remembered as a thoroughly unpleasant woman, though a nun. The resemblance seemed particularly pronounced today. Jimmy sat down on the hard, upright, chair while the rector busied herself slipping her computer into a carrying case which she then pushed to one side of the desk. She smiled a palpably false greeting.

  ‘It is bad enough that each month I must be dragged away from important and relevant work to waste my time discussing with you your supposed progress. I do not blame you, you understand, I merely point it out. I always think honesty by far the best policy in relationships, be they personal, political, or whatever.’ The accent was American; so was the air of superiority. For some reason Jimmy had never liked Americans; he didn’t know why. He just didn’t. ‘Do you know what this meeting is about?’

  Jimmy shook his head. How was he supposed to know? He had just been given a message to be here.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Really?’

  Jimmy had the distinct impression that she didn’t believe him. They both sat in silence. Professor McBride stared at him as if she were waiting for him to break down under her steady gaze and confess what this meeting was all about. She would have a long wait.

  So, thought Jimmy, a meeting but apparently not set up by her even though it was going to take place in the rector’s office. Strange.

  Despite the way she was looking at him Professor McBride wasn’t waiting for any sort of confession. She was filling in the time. She had been asked to get James Costello, her student, to this office by two o’clock. She had done that. Now she waited and, with nothing else to look at, she looked at Jimmy. There was a definite air about him, if not of criminality, then an intangible something that justified mistrust. An interesting man.

  ‘Has anyone questioned you about your papers recently, Mr Costello? In fact have you been approached or questioned by anybody about anything?’

  Jimmy shook his head.

  ‘No. Nobody’s questioned me about anything, not officially anyway.’

  ‘Unofficially?’

  ‘Only friends.’

  ‘And what were they interested in?’

  ‘Me. My background. Who I was, where I came from.’

  ‘And who exactly are these friends?’

  ‘Students. Two men I study with.’

  ‘I see.’ She waited. ‘And did you tell them about yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  And there she fell silent again.

  For some reason, thought Jimmy, she seemed pleased with him, with what he had said.

  ‘Would it matter?’

  ‘Would what matter?’

  ‘If I had been approached, questioned?’

  She seemed a little put out by his question.

  ‘I am your rector, Mr Costello, I am supposed to take an interest in not only your academic progress but your general wellbeing while you are here in Rome.’

  ‘Fine.’

  After another few moments’ silence Professor McBride looked at her watch. She decided to fill the wait with a little small-talk. Her questions had been a mistake, it might have unsettled him and if it had she wanted his mind elsewhere. She did her best to smile.

  ‘I have to tell you, Mr Costello, that if I had played a decisive role in your selection you would not now be here in training. You do not strike me as at all suitable for the priesthood, not even the diocesan priesthood.’ She spoke as if being a diocesan priest had about the same standing as being an inmate of San Quentin or Wormwood Scrubs. Jimmy sat and listened. He didn’t give a toss what she thought of him. All he wanted was to get on with his studies. ‘I know that Duns students are given more latitude in their general oversight because they are men of sufficient independent means to serve the Church without requiring financial support of any kind. Yet if I read your file aright …’ Aright! Jimmy gave an inward smile; what a bloody poser. ‘… you have only a policeman’s pension to live on. I must say I find that a most unusual and questionable circumstance.’ She waited for Jimmy to explain. Jimmy didn’t dislike the woman as much as she obviously disliked him but he didn’t want her as his enemy so he obliged.

  ‘My late wife and I bought our house in London when we first married. After she died I moved away and the house was sold. It was just a small house but it fetched what I thought was an almost ridiculous price. That, with savings and two investments made many years ago, gave me the finance to take up a Duns College place. Satisfied?’

  She sniffed. No, it said, she wasn’t satisfied. She looked at her watch again. Someone was late.

  ‘Well, Mr Costello, your time may be of no value but mine certainly is so I intend …’

  But Jimmy never found out what Professor McBride intended because the ancient black phone on the desk wheezed a ringing sound. She picked up the handset, listened, then put it back and looked at Jimmy.

  ‘Apparently you are about to be questioned by a detective from the Rome police. An Inspector Ricci is on his way up. I am to wait and confirm his identity and then leave him here to interview you.’

  What the hell did the police want, thought Jimmy, but he made sure that his surprise didn’t register on his face and they sat in silence looking at one another until there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  The man who came in looked very sharp. Around six feet, well groomed, middle to late twenties with the physique and good looks of an Italian footballer. He wore a light grey tailored jacket with a faint pin-stripe, and faded jeans. He should have looked wrong, top half almost a city suit, bottom half casual, but on him it looked just right. The three buttons at the end of each sleeve were undone and the cuffs slightly flared to show a glimpse of the dark, silk lining. The pale yellow shirt was open at the neck showing a very slim silver chain. The wristwatch was white metal too. Light accessories to set off his dark skin and black hair. Designer sunglasses rounded it all off.

  Jimmy looked at him: a man of two halves and already he didn’t like either of them. If this was a copper he was independently well off, seriously bent, or on some sort of bloody clothes allowance. The inspector took off his sunglasses and gave the office a brief once-over. For a second you go
t the feeling he feared for the wellbeing of his rig-out and might walk straight back out. Then he closed the door, switched on a smile, and came to Professor McBride who stood up. His Roman charm brought more light into the room than the window and bulb combined. He was the man you saw in UK and US adverts selling style in a bottle encouraging young men and the not so young to spend a lot of money to look like him, and they never would.

  ‘Good afternoon, Professor. I am Inspector Ricci; you were expecting me?’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, several minutes ago.’ He kept the smile going, gave a slight shrug, and didn’t apologise. ‘I wasn’t told the reason for this meeting.’ She was trying, thought Jimmy, but she couldn’t get the same acid tone into her voice for this charming officer that she’d managed so easily with him. ‘I have been asked to verify your identity and then leave you with Mr Costello.’ The policeman turned and pointed his smile at Jimmy; it was a nice smile. Jimmy made a mental note to be careful of this man when he turned it on. It looked very practised but would work better when he had his sunglasses on because it didn’t quite make it into his eyes. The inspector took out a leather warrant card holder and handed it to the rector.

  While she examined it he came and held out his hand to Jimmy.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Costello.’

  Jimmy stood up for the rector’s sake.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  But he waited just long enough before shaking the offered hand for the smile to melt and another look to come into the policeman’s face.

  Whatever this man wants, thought Jimmy, be sure to get off on the right foot – the wrong one. Make someone dislike you and you’re halfway to knowing where you’ll stand with him. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to antagonise the policeman, he just didn’t want him thinking it was OK to get him summoned to the rector’s office for no good reason he could think of.