When the customer was gone, the baker’s wife, who introduced herself as Frau Lang, hung a back-in-10-minutes sign in the shop window and locked the door. She touched Elisabetta’s wrist and said guiltily, ‘Hans is Protestant but I’m Catholic. I should do more with my religion but you get out of the habit, what with our crazy hours and all the family commitments.’
‘There are many ways to live a good life,’ Elisabetta said, trying to be helpful. ‘I wonder if I might get my sister from the car.’
‘Is she a nun too?’ Frau Lang asked in bewilderment.
‘No, she’s a doctor.’
‘Well, tell her to come inside. Does she like cakes?’
‘In fact, she likes them a great deal.’
Krek sat behind his large desk with his mobile phone pressed against one ear. Double-glazed windows cut the street noises of Ljubljana’s Prešeren Square to a minimum but he could see that Čopova Street was thick with lunchtime traffic.
‘Yes, I know that communication is a perennial issue.’
He listened to the response and said, ‘I don’t trust the internet. We’ll use the old ways. The day before the Conclave our people will see it and they’ll know it was us.’
He rang off brusquely and looked up. Mulej was there, filling the door frame with his bulk and wearing a constipated expression.
‘What is it?’ Krek asked
‘I just took a call. There’s a new problem, probably not a major one but one that we should monitor closely.’
‘Spit it out, damn it!’
‘Do you remember that girl, the one from years ago who was snooping around St Callixtus?’
Krek frowned more severely, his look becoming ugly. ‘Elisabetta Celestino. Aldo Vani botched the job. She survived. She became a nun, of all things. She became harmless. We let her go. Yes, Mulej, it seems that I remember her.’
‘Someone at the Vatican pressed her into service. She left her convent and has begun working at the St Callixtus collapse. I can’t confirm it but she may have gone to Ulm today.’
‘Ulm?’ Krek roared. ‘What the hell is she doing in Ulm?’
Mulej looked out the tinted windows rather than face his boss’s fearsome stare. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’
‘Get Aldo on the phone right now.’ Krek’s voice was strained, his throat constricted by venom. ‘This time he’s going to do the job correctly. I want this woman, this nun, stopped bang in her tracks, Mulej. Tell Aldo to bring her here so I can deal with her personally. If that proves inconvenient, then have him eliminate her. Do you understand?’
The Tribunal Palace was only a few paces from the Basilica, yet it was just one of the anonymous buildings dotting the Vatican complex which tourists barely noticed. A bland administrative building, it housed, among other departments, the Gendarmerie Office.
The Inspector-General of the Gendarmerie Corps, Luca Loreti, was a competent leader, generally liked and respected by his men though the youngest recruits sometimes rolled their eyes at his twisted locutions. The officers who’d been around for a while, like Zazo, always came back to the fact that Loreti consistently stood up to his Swiss Guard counterpart, Oberst Hans Sonnenberg, and defended his men to the hilt against that prick. Not that the officers were completely reverential. Loreti, a lusty eater, had been steadily expanding in girth over time and there was a book running every year on the closest date for his annual uniform refitting.
Most of the Corps’s 130 gendarmes were now assembled in the auditorium for Loreti’s briefing. The officers sat in the front, the junior ranks behind, all very orderly and hierarchical. Loreti possessed tremendous kinetic energy for a man his size and he strode rapidly back and forth on the stage, making the audience move their heads as if they were at a tennis match.
‘First, let me compliment you on the job you did at the Pope’s funeral. Our cardinals, our bishops, our Vatican officials, over two hundred world leaders and their security details – all of them came to Vatican City, paid their respects and left in good health,’ Loreti boomed into his hand-held microphone. ‘But we cannot rest on our laurels, can we? We have five days until the Conclave begins. Many of the Cardinal Electors have already checked into the Domus Sanctae Marthae. As of today, the guest house will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Sistine Chapel will be a sterile zone. As of today, the Basilica and the Museums will be closed to the public. Our tasks will be precisely defined by protocols. I have been working with Oberst Sonnenberg to ensure that we will not be tripping over the Swiss Guards, they will not be tripping over us and there will be no gaps in our security blanket. We will control the guest house, they will control the Sistine Chapel. We will utilize our dogs and our experts to sweep the guest house for explosives and listening devices. The Guards will do the same with their experts inside the Sistine Chapel. I want you to play nice with the Guards but if there’s any trouble, let your superiors know immediately and they will let me know. All disputes will necessarily be answered at my level.’
Zazo knew the drill. This would be his second Conclave. At the first one he’d been a wide-eyed corporal, dazzled by pomp, grandeur and the heavy sense of occasion. Now he was immune to that. He had squads of men to command and his accountability went far beyond guarding a doorway.
He nudged Lorenzo Rosa in the ribs. Lorenzo, also a major, had entered the Corps the same year as Zazo and the two of them were now good friends. Initially, Zazo had resisted the urge to befriend Lorenzo because the man bore enough of a physical resemblance to Marco – tall and athletic, crisp facial lines, black hair – that on some level Zazo felt that to make a friend of him would be a betrayal. But Zazo was so naturally gregarious and eager for comradeship that he broke through the psychological block the day both men went through a poison-gas drill together and wound up puking alongside each other in a ditch.
‘This isn’t going to be as smooth as he says,’ Zazo whispered. ‘We’ll be at war with the Guards by Friday.’
Lorenzo leaned over to whisper into Zazo’s ear. ‘The Swiss can kiss my Italian ass.’
That was why Zazo liked the guy.
*
Martin Lang, the Ulm baker, was roused furiously from the sofa by his wife and sent to the bedroom to change his shirt. Over Elisabetta’s protestations, Frau Lang quickly picked up after him, then left the two women in the sitting room while she put the kettle on and began rattling porcelain and silverware.
Hans Lang came back tucking in a fresh shirt and haplessly combing wisps of hair over a balding pate with his hand. He looked every inch a man who’d been up at the ovens since the middle of the night. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said in halting English. ‘I wasn’t expecting. I’m always the last to know of such things.’
Elisabetta and Micaela apologized for the intrusion and sat stiffly by, waiting for Frau Lang to reappear. Elisabetta tried some small talk about how nice his shop was but the baker’s English was not up to the task.
When Frau Lang brought in a tray with tea and cakes, Micaela hungrily tucked into the pastries while Elisabetta nibbled demurely. ‘What can you tell us about Herr Ottinger?’ she asked.
Frau Lang did the talking. Her husband sat blearily on the sofa looking like he wanted his privacy back. ‘He was a proper old gentleman,’ she said. ‘He lived on our third floor for fifteen years. He kept to himself. I wouldn’t say we knew him well. He’d often buy a meat pie for his dinner, maybe something sweet on a Saturday. He paid his rent on time. He didn’t have many visitors. I don’t know what else I can tell you.’
‘You said he was a professor. Do you know anything about his work?’ Elisabetta asked.