The Caravaggio Conspiracy (4 page)

The fourth-floor office of Father Declan O’Malley, Superior General of the Jesuits, overlooked the Borgo Santo Spirito, just a hundred metres from St Peter’s Square. Strictly speaking, the Curia Generalizia of the Company of Jesus was part of Rome, and Italy. But as a concession to the Vatican, it was designated
zona
extraterritoriale
, giving O’Malley the
de facto
status of an ambassador.

The Irishman, the first of his race to head the institution created in 1540 by St Ignatius Loyola, looked frail at first glance. His hair was snow-white and his dark eyes were sunk deep into his head. In fact, though into his seventies, he was fit and wiry, still able to get through Mass in thirty minutes flat, with or without an altar boy.

Today was a special day for him. His nephew Liam, in Rome for the summer, had called to tell him that he was on his way over to say hello. It wasn’t, in fact, their first meeting. O’Malley had previously arranged for his nephew to attend the annual summer party at the Irish College two days after he flew in from Dublin. But it was the first time in ten years at least that he had visited him on his home turf.

With his old-fashioned looks, set off by a thick head of reddish-blonde hair, Liam Dempsey reminded his uncle these days of the young Robert Donat, from
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
He had had a hard upbringing – harder even than he knew. Kitty – O’Malley’s sister – had died giving birth to him. Her husband, because of the intensity of his belief, gave priority to the child. O’Malley, keenly aware of the enormity of his brother-in-law’s dilemma, had not presumed to instruct him on the Church’s teaching, confining himself to expressions of sympathy and support that he now saw as hollow and inadequate. Pat Dempsey’s decision to sacrifice his wife was the cross he would bear, alone, for the rest of his days.

In the years that followed, O’Malley watched intermittently as Dempsey’s faith calcified, becoming harsh and brittle, robbed of all outward show of
affection
. He remembered how he had looked on, dismayed, as his nephew grew up an only child in a home lacking a mother and with a bereaved father who saw in him the origin of his loss.

Liam, now aged twenty-eight, was never told of the choice that was made. His father felt that the weight of the knowledge of what he had done was for him alone, and O’Malley respected his decision. Later, as he pursued his vocation in a variety of locations across the globe, he often thought about the brother-in-law he had left behind. It seemed to him that with Kitty gone, it was his brother-in-law who had pursued a monastic life, not him. While he travelled the world, writing his books and moving up in the Company of Jesus, it was Pat who laboured alone, getting up each morning at five, saying his prayers, attending to his cattle, seeing to it that his son was fed and educated. Which of them had better answered Christ’s call? He didn’t have the answer.

It wasn’t easy for the son either. Every day, in all weathers, Liam had trudged two miles from the farm in Bearna, overlooking Galway Bay, to the local national school, returning home each evening to help with the milking. His father, in permanent mourning, was both taciturn and a strict disciplinarian, showing his emotion only when drunk. How Liam had emerged mentally intact was a mystery. In fact, while playing rugby enthusiastically and developing an eye for the girls, he did well, taking a history degree at Trinity College, Dublin, then winning a place at the Irish army officer training college.

It was two years after he was commissioned into the Western Brigade that a second calamity befell him. His battalion was posted to Iraq to serve under the UN flag, keeping the peace beween Arabs, Turks and Kurds. A bomb, detonated as his patrol passed a water trough, killed five of his soldiers and left Liam, at the head of the column, grievously wounded. His recovery, in a specialized burns unit in Marseille, was long and agonizing. He had spent months in virtual isolation, barely able to move, with some saying privately that he’d be better off dead.

It was O’Malley, speaking from behind a surgical mask, who brought the young lieutenant the news that in the meantime his father had died from a stroke. Unable to offer the consolation of prayer, he had just stood there, watching. The loss, on top of everything else, was wretched. Father and son hadn’t spoken for more than two years, ever since Liam announced that he had lost his faith. Now they could never be reconciled.

But nothing stood still. Eighteen months on, he was about to start his PhD at University College, Galway. His thesis, examining the relationship between Garibaldi and Pope Pius IX during the
Risorgimento
, meant learning Italian, and to this end, having acquired the basics in Dublin, he had taken a three-month lease on a spacious apartment next to the Tiber. The young man’s resilience both astonished and humbled O’Malley. How he had emerged sane and well from a life so steeped in misfortune was to him nothing short of a miracle – but one in which God apparently played no part.

O’Malley prayed regularly for Liam and his father, as well as for the soul of his departed sister, who had sacrificed her own life for the sake of her son. But their blighted lives, bound together in tragedy, had made him wonder about the nature of his calling. Had he truly given up everything in order to follow Jesus? He had not ministered to the poor or the sick. Worse, he had spoken out only in private against the Holy Father’s decision to address the growing paedophile scandal not as a mortal sin but as if it were a mere misdemeanour – an embarrassment to be swept beneath the carpet. The fact of the matter was that he had made no difference in the world, and that troubled him. He had risen in the Church as a favoured son, comfortably housed, respected by the media, a confidant of popes. It was
undeniable
that he had always worked hard. But that had been his pleasure. As a young priest, he had left Ireland as soon as he could. His doctoral thesis, written while a graduate student in Louvain, examined the legal code of the great Byzantine Emperor Justinian against that of his future Ottoman counterpart, Suleiman the Magnificent. The resulting paper, published in several languages, was acclaimed as a model of its kind and his reward was a five-year appointment as special advisor to the Papal Nuncio in Istanbul.

Success in this demanding role led to speculation in Rome that he would be offered a professorship at the city’s Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies. To his considerable annoyance, the job went instead to a member of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, the White Fathers. An intellectual with no pastoral experience, O’Malley was told he must spend four years as spiritual director of a retreat house in Milwaukee – a move likened by colleagues to the State Department in Washington selecting a high-flyer to be consul-general in Cardiff. Yet even this apparent setback turned out to his advantage. Those who expected him to chafe against his exile in the Midwest were surprised when his next publication,
Between Heaven and Earth,
turned out to be a celebration of inter-faith encounters with the Lakota Indians. The book, which reached number thirty-eight in the
New York Times
bestsellers’ list, did not go unnoticed in high places. Its author’s return to the mainstream followed within three months of its publication. He was appointed
socius
, or deputy head, of the sprawling Chicago Province, where he served for three incident-packed years before being posted to Rome as vice-rector of the Irish College.

The sun streamed in through the open window in the Borgo Santo Spirito. For a moment, O’Malley felt a chill of loneliness pass through him. Then it passed. There was a knock at the door – not as polite as he might have wished. It was Father Giovanni, his private secretary.

‘Your nephew, Father General,’ he said. ‘Could I point out to you that you have a busy schedule today?’

‘You have already done so, Giovanni.’

A scowl passed over the young priest’s face as he withdrew. Behind him stood the tall, languid figure of Liam Dempsey.

O’Malley stood up and threw open his arms. ‘Liam! Come in, come in. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.’

Dempsey beamed as he advanced across the floor to his uncle. Their embrace was more than a greeting, it was a reconnection. O’Malley did his best to hide the awkwardness he felt. He stood back, his hands still on his nephew’s shoulders. ‘You look good,’ he said.

‘I feel good.’

The Jesuit smiled, perhaps a little ambiguously, and indicated an ancient leather armchair. ‘Take the weight off your feet,’ he said.

Dempsey sat down.

‘So what’s been happening?’

‘In Rome, you mean? Or back home?’

‘Let’s start with home. Did you ever get that money you were owed?’

Dempsey had recently sold the family farm. A Swedish home
furnishings
company had bought it, but the size of the final payment depended on the success of a planning application aimed at transforming the land into a retail park, complete with space for a thousand cars.

‘Yes,’ said Dempsey. ‘The cheque turned up in my bank three days ago.’

‘Was it what you were expecting?’

‘Absolutely.’ Dempsey told him the amount, which made O’Malley draw in his breath.

‘Sounds like you’ll not be needing a student loan, then. But sure who could begrudge you it after all you’ve been through? What else?’

There was news of a cousin from Athenry who was getting married in the autumn. O’Malley remembered the young fellow as a gawky teenager with  a gap-toothed smile. He hadn’t seen him in years. Another cousin, a computer technician, whose daughter had just received her First Communion, was about to be made redundant following a decision by his American employers to transfer production back to Seattle.

The priest registered his sympathy. He knew all about the ravages that had resulted from the recession that began in 2008. First the property market had collapsed, taking the construction industry with it, and then the banks had gone belly-up. It was hard to believe the extent of the greed, incompetence and fraud that had masqueraded as the Celtic Tiger. The recovery, aided – hindered, some said – by the EU, still had a long way to go. But he was heartened when Dempsey announced he had paid off his cousin’s car loan. That had been generous of him. ‘So what about the place itself?’ he asked. ‘Galway, I mean. It’s been a while.’

His nephew blew out his cheeks. ‘You’d hardly recognize it. Bearna’s
virtually
gone now. It’s become a suburb. There’s estates and apartment blocks that reach almost to the water’s edge, even if half of them are still waiting for buyers or tenants. Did you know the city population is expected to hit a hundred thousand in the next five years, a quarter of them either foreign-born or else descended from immigrants? De Valera wouldn’t know what to make of it – and he was from Puerto Rico.’

O’Malley smiled. He hadn’t been back to Galway in years.

Dempsey glanced out the window in the direction of St Peter’s. ‘You remember the talk there was when the old riverside mosque opened? Well, you should see the new place, complete with minaret. It’s part of an Islamic study centre – one of the largest in Ireland. It’s hard to take it in. When I started school, you were a foreigner if you came from anywhere east of Castlebar. Now there’s women in Merchants Road wearing burkhas, and halal butchers in all the main shopping centres. Some of the kids even speak Irish. I read somewhere that Muhammad’s now the
ninthmost
common boy’s name in the country.’

‘Changed times,’ O’Malley said. He had listened as patiently as he could, realizing to his shame that he had completely lost touch with his birthplace and that, so far as his family was concerned, the only one he felt close to these days was Liam. His own parents were long dead. Their house had been bought by a Lithuanian plumber and his wife. His sole remaining sibling, Eamonn, was in San Diego, married to a woman from Panama.

‘But how are
you
, Liam?’ he interjected, surprising himself with the
peremptory
tone of his voice. ‘In yourself, I mean. Tell me the truth. Don’t hold back because of’ – he ran his hands down the length of his cassock, symbol of his priestly separation from the world – ‘because of
this
!’

Dempsey sat back in the armchair, only his eyes registering the tension that these days was part and parcel of his life. ‘I’m grand, Uncle Declan. You can stop worrying about me. Life’s looking up. Rome is great. I’ve got this terrific apartment across the river and my Italian is coming on a treat. I’m even seeing someone – a girl, I mean. Someone I met at the Irish College bash.’

‘Is that a fact? And who would that be – if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘Her name’s Maya – Maya Studer … the daughter of Colonel Otto Studer. You’d know him, I’d imagine.’

‘The Commandant of the Swiss Guard? But that’s extraordinary.’ O’Malley looked quizzically at his nephew. ‘It’s not serious, though – is it?’

‘Not yet,’ said Dempsey. ‘A bit too early to say. But we’re having lunch today, so you never know.’

‘You never cease to surprise me. But I’m happy for you … truly.’

Dempsey nodded. He was fond of his uncle, but wary of the tradition he represented. ‘That’s enough about me, though,’ he said. ‘The real question is, who’s going to win the big election?’

O’Malley leaned back in his chair, relieved to be back on home turf. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it turns out not everyone in the Church is as relaxed about the Muslim issue as the citizens of Galway. There are even those – and I’m talking about people at the very summit of Church government – who think that the next pope’s first priority should be the instigation of open conflict with Islam.’