A BOOK PROPOS A L
THE KEEPER OF THE SOUTHERN GATE
A Suspence Novel set in Rome
Maurice Rowdon


BACKGROUND: JAMES ELROY MERTON arrives in Rome from
Richmond Va. after an absence of nearly twenty years.
He was last in Rome at the age of about eighteen and
fell in love with an English girl called Laura.
They broke up after a short scene together but no
other woman-- -including his wife with whom he lived
in various parts of Virginia for over twelve years-
meant as much to him as Laura.
In fact she became
his secret obsession over the years which occult
practices served to strengthen.
He was determined
to see her again.
His wife knew nothing about
this.
Nor did his friends.
He never once wrote
a letter to Laura, never once referred to her except
in his secret incantations, never once received news
of her.
As the years went on he became convinced
that she was still living in Rome, or had perhaps
returned there after an absence. He swore to
himself that he would one day look for her there.
To this end he opened a special bank account in
New York.
His savings went into it over a period
of at least ten years: he searched for fair means
and foul to make easy money. His line was real
estate and he found himself (to his satisfaction)
in a racket which involved selling and reselling
the same area of industrial land with increasing
rake-offs, while the land itself remained unexploit-
ed. He also found himself suddenly faced by a
possible malpractices indictment and was advised
by those for whom he was the front-man to get as
far from the USA as he could.
But before this happened his wife filed a
divorce suit for neglect. For some time now he
had been bestowing no sexual attentions on hér,
being increasingly fixed on Laura.
He kept to
his room for hours together, slept alone. He
would recite an old Indian prayer to awaken a woman's
love sometimes thirty or forty times in a day,
waking up at intervals in the night to recite it in
a whisper.
His wife found him increasingly strange.
They remained friends.
You had to remain friends
with James El, as everyone called him.
He was a
generous, big-shouldered, healthy looking man with
cheerful alert eyes. In his mid-thirties he had
the robust authority of a much older man, with the
vigour of a younger. He had a habit of running
the palm of his hand over his belly when he was
particularly contented.
You couldn't help but
like James El. He ate and drank well, played
tennis and swam. For ten years he and his wife
Betty enjoyed a comfortable though not always
exciting life together.
They had two children,


neither of whom turned out delinquents.
The house
was large and comfortable.
Betty knew he didn't
consider himself above a crooked deal now and then.
That was all right.
She admired his coolness, his
tact and sheer damned courage. He was used to money
anyway, he'd always find a way out of a tricky situat-
ion. What she did mind was his growing aloofness,
his hours alone in his room, his weekends alone at
their shack in Maine.
She would have preferred him
to have an affair.
Not that he changed outwardly.
But he stopped petting her.
When she asked him what
had gone wrong he said, 'It's going right for the
first time.'
It was just like the wily bastard to
say that.
Betty had married a very different James Elroy.
For one thing he was the son of reasonably wealthy
parents who were expected to leave him a lot of money. a
But they didn't die, and increasingly disapproved of
their son. They urged him to abandon his shady
deals to no avail. Real estate was his father's
business too since he'd emigrated from Sussex,
England, at the age of thirty and bought some land
on speculation in Florida.
In 1940 James Elroy was
born--and given the Christian names of his father's
favourite poet, James Elroy Flecker.
His father
possibly wanted him to turn out some kind of hero,
and gave him as outdoor an education as possible.
James El could ride and ski and glide and high-dive
so well that by the age of twenty-five he was bored
by all of them and started a paunch instead. Tricky
real-estate deals weren't father's idea of heroism.
When he taxed James El with this he replied, 'Listen,
I like an element of risk in my life.
If I didn't
have that I'd die.
Shit, I'm not going to sit around
making a thousand bucks when with a bit of cunning I
can make ten times as much.
Anyway all business is
crooked, you know that.
They're going to ruin the
land they buy for the next thousand years so why
shouldn't they pay a price?'
His father laughed.
But he stopped laughing
when his son gambled away a good part of his fortune.
He cut him off from his inheritance during his life-
time, which meant that his wife, or whomever James El
elected to leave it to, would pick up the considerable
remains of the fortune on his (James El's) death.
As Janes El said when he heard the news, 'MT dad's
not so much hard as pig-headed.'
So the young James El with such brilliant
prospects as an heir whom Betty married was all of
a sudden no longer there.
In his place was a
well-to-do crook.
And a bit of an idealist---which was, if anything,
worse. In his teenage Roman days he had been a
communist.
Italian communism in the Fifties was


quite different from the later militant, trade-union
oriented variety.
There was a lot of poverty still,
and a group of ardent teenagers, most of them Italian,
gradually influenced James El to believe that more
injections of American capital into the country
would throw it eventually into civil war and thus
ruin Europe's 'little garden' once and for all.
The industrialisation of the country, at that time
in its early stages, should not be left in the
corrupt and venal hands of DC politicians but
proceed slowly and rationally on the basis of five-
and ten-year plans.
James El began to go to PCI
meetings, and was frequently at the communist
headquarters by the Palazzo Colonna.
At that time he was picking up good pocket
money translating treatises and documents into
English, and had a small apartment in the Via
Margutta, its windows looking down into the courtyard
of RAI headquarters.
Here he gave small parties
from time to time and came to know a good many
ministry officials, partly through his translation
work and partly because, being a potentially wealthy
young American, he attracted a lot of social attention
anyway.
He found himself at most of the important
vernissages and mixed with the artists of Via
Margutta. He came to know a minister or two.
The war had given the Angl 0-Saxon a certain aurora
of authority and desirability in Italian eyes which
still hadn't worn off.
Italy was insular, law-
abiding.
Italians had not yet begun to travel.
Smarting from feelings of inferiority due partly
to the failure of fascism and partly to the survival
of an agricultural system which had changed little
since mediaeval times, the Italian looked on the
foreign world (minus Germany) as entirely desirable
and even wise.
Combined with contempt for his
fellow-Italians, this idealisation created a serious
psychological imbalance which communism helped to
breach.
James El had a good time in Rone.
It was a
life so unexpected, so different from anything he'd
even dared to dream that he never wanted to leave.
It saddened him to see that Italians wanted to become
like everybody else and have 'gas stations along the
Via Appia' rather than stay poor and bored in a
little garden.
And comnunism seered to him the
only way of giving Italy wealth while preserving the
garden. He had discussions (even with the ministers,
who listened only because he was American).
They
went on far into the night. His head was full of
ideas.
Rome was like a voluptuous village.
Terror-
ism was unheard of. He strolled down to the little
bar each morning to take his coffee with the RAI
people.
In those days a scuffle in the street
would collect a crowd.
Rome had its thieves but
they were disciplined under known leaders, like


The Giant in the Campo dei Fiori. On the terrace of
James El's apartment you could smell the fields outside
the city when the wind was favourable. Later Rome's
air pollution became as bad as Chicago's.
RALPH MARRIOT was one of his closest buddies in
the old days.
They were the same age and a day rarely
went by without them seeing each other. Not that
James El ever felt close to him.
No one knew anything
for certain about Ralph.
He was supposedly English
but never went near England.
Where his money came
from was anybody's guess but he never seemed short of
In the night-long discussions he usu ally kept
quiet, watching and listening amiably.
The discussions were brusquely cut off one day
by a telephone call from the dreaded Questura,
Mussolini's internal security police who were retained
under the new constitution.
Even James El's heart
did a jump.
He was told to go to headquarters at
once and announce himself.
He took a taxi, still
unshaven, and to his astonishment was ushered into
the office of the Questore himself.
It wasn't the
Questore himself but a high-ranking official: the
point had been made though---he was considered
important. For two hours the genial, lazily smiling
official sat talking to him on the other side of a
vast desk. Occasionally he put a question to him and
at once cut short the answer with a casual, half-heard
remark about its irrelevance.
The gist of it was
that James El had been trailed everywhere during the
previous six months.
He'd been seen visiting PCI
headquarters several times, so had his girl (he was
living with a student called Luciana-- -this at a
time when you could still be fined L1000 for kissing
a girl in the street).
Now what was an American
of his social status doing mixed up in all this? the
official wanted to know. One could understand about
the girl Luciana, she was Italian and therefore knew
no better, and anyway she was a woman (any female
driving a car or wearing trousers caused mirth in the
streets of Rome).
Wasn't James El a little young to
get himself into what might be a very dangerous way
of life?
Shouldn't he return to the States and go
to Harvard as his father wished him to? Did he
understand that being a minor he could be sent back
to the States at any time?
Did he want that?
"We know all your movererts," the official kept
repeating.
At the end of the two hours James El heard the
official say, "Now wouldn't you like to help your
country?"
"Well, you know a lot of our communists, I mean
the top ones.
You know the sympathisers who'd join


the party if ever it became powerful.
They include
a number of our civil servants, as you know. You
speak fluent Italian. All useful stuff." Here he
leaned forward.
"Has it occurred to you that you
could supply us with useful information? I can give
you the name of someone at your embassy you could go
and see."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"You could earn a bit of money too---more than
translations bring you."
At this James El simply smiled.
The result of this. interview was that his soggiorno
was cancelled and he was given 72 hours to get out of
the country.
The police told him his father wanted
him back.
Just a month before this he'd met Laura, the
blonde English girl who had Irish blood and could
read hands and suddenly say "It's going to rain"
shortly before it did.
James El's love-life was plentiful but extremely
difficult.
Enough to say that he was Virgo with
Aquarius rising.
The Aquarian wanted freedom at any
price while Virgo was capable of pursuing a woman
for years, decades if necessary until he got her.
He met Laura one warm midsummer evening at
Vermicino in one of the cantine where they served
cave-chilled frascati on old wooden tables. She was
with Ralph and some students.
James El sat there
with her long after the others had left, and then they
went walking in the dark lanes round Frascati.
uncanny recognition took place between them.
altered James El for life. Until then he'd taken
his chance with girls, sometimes infatuated, often
bored.
Now he had a different feeling.
He'd
always been with this woman, would always be in the
future whether they were physically together or not.
It wasn't just falling in love.
He was obsessed.
He smelt her hair, the palms of her hands, and the
touch, the smell were familiar from long ago deep
in childhood and even beyond. They sat in a vine-
yard by the road kissing and fondling each other like
people examining each other after a long, long separation.
All they did was kiss and whisper about wheré she
lived and where he lived and where they were born
and things like that.
They arranged to see each
other next day in the Piazza Nazionale by the
fountain.
And then they drove back to Rome.
Next day she phoned him and said she couldn't
make it. For a week he heard nothing.
He had no
idea where she lived.
He spent that week trembling,
hardly eating, sleeping fitfully and feverishly.
He wandered the streets looking for her, called Ralph
to find out if he knew anything about her but Ralph
just shrugged his shoulders cheerfully and told him
to try Perugia where she was studying Italian at the
university, in the foreign students department.
James El drove there and found her lodgings after
searching through the university register. She
wasn't there. "E a Roma", her landlady said,
giving him a slow, smouldering, dark smile that meant
she knew his business.
He returned to Rome fit for
suicide.


Looking into Laura's eyes was like looking deep
into his own future after death. As a communist he
had poor training for this kind of thought, and the
experience found him entirely vulnerable and unprepared.
Laura was hauntingly sensual too. She was voluptuous,
marvellously soft to touch. He dreamed and dreamed
about her, lying all day on his bed and jumping up
frantically only to answer the phone.
She never
returned.
He left his apartment in Luciana's hands, furniture
and all. Luciana. had been exciting enougabefore
Laura came along.
Now he found himself unable to
touch her. He expected never to have a really relaxed
moment in his life again if he didn't find Laura.
And in a way that was how it worked out.
He flew from Ciampino airport intending never to
return to Rome and believing he could with time not
precisely forget Laura but diminish the fever. He
felt like a child all over again---needed the large
cool parental house in Colonial Heights with the
screens over the windows and a swimming pool behind
the trees.
All his father said was, "Get yourself into a
bit of trouble?"---then a chuckle and proud shake of
his head.
It was being trailed at the age of nineteen,
and the espionage offer by a high-ranking official,
that gave James El his first taste of the sweetness
of danger.
It never left his system.
Back in Virginia he enjoyed long days at the pool
with his new girlfriend Betty, who was in her first
year at Sarah Lawrence, and he even thought he was in
love with her.
And he was bitterly angry with Laura,
which made him believe he was finished with her.
Another couple of years and he married
now out of college. He tried to forget that Beteya
enjoyed a life in Rome of a quality that made his
present life seem flat and stale. Little nostalgic
scenes kept coming to mind.
Only one thing reconciled
him to a marriage largely organised by his parents,
and a home and a job: his secret determination to
relieve the flatness of it all by leading a dangerous
life, somehow, somewhere.
He looked around for risk all the time.
And when
he started up in real estate with an office of his


own he soon saw the possibilities.
The shadier
the client the better he liked him.
And the clients
were quick to realise this.
He enjoyed clandestine
meetings at roadside coffee houses.
It excited him
to employ investigation agencies.
He began making
money so fast that his father became alarmed. But
Betty loved it. She persuaded him to buy a bigger
house, and felt safe enough to get pregnant. They
holidayed twice a year.
Only when the second child came along did he
realise that he intended to return to Laura however
many years it took him. He heard from Ralph occasion-
ally, the slack, amiable, newsless letters you'd
expect him to write. Nothing about Laura. He
thought of flying to Rome to see her.
But what was
the use?
You can't make a woman love you.
least this is what he thought for a long time. His
crooked deals and countless girlfriends began to take
precedence.
But then he met an interesting woman twenty years
his senior who was said to have clairvoyant powers.
They'd hardly been introduced when she told him he
was in love with a woman far away with whom he'd
been incarnated in many previous lives.
He would
one day return to her and realise a happiness with
her which he'd never experienced with another woman.
"But she doesn't love me."
"She doesn't know she loves you.
That's
different."
It was she who gave James El his Indian love-
incantation to recite.
After that came hand-reading,
the Tarot, various techniques of divination and
finally magic itself, when he'd known her a year or
more and shown himself an ardent pupil. He took to
it like a duck to water.
The secretiveness, the
sense of a growing inner power that was quite
invisible to the outside world was if anything more
exciting than the crooked real-estate deals.
seemed to have just as much to do with danger.
His personality changed. He was less irritable with
Betty.
He gave fewer parties.
His marriage started
going down, though it took a further five years to
get to the bottom. Never once did Betty overhear
him reciting the love-incantation, though she frequent-
ly stood outside his door listening. He could feel
her approach. He performed lengthy ceremonies with
magical accoutementse and vessels, within a circle
chalked on his pinewood floor. He began to receive
'information' in a mediumistic way and increasingly
foresaw future events.
The confirmation of these
flashes by later events gave him increasing confidence.
He 'saw' that Laura was with another man but that the
man wouldn't last long: and she wasn't in love with
him.


He joined a local magicians' group, and his crooked
friends now gave way to spooky ones.
He didn't feel
quite himself in the robes, or quite at home with the
ritual sword, the sacrificial knife, the oleum magicale
and the gavel. But he noticed he had even more of a
magnetic influence on others.
He was even more dare-
devil, scorning threats of heavy fines and prison
sentences. He could 'neutralise' his enemies by means
of magic!
The women began falling for him like
skittles.
James El had such a big presence. He made
you feel you could change your life---just like that.
Surprisingly, when you looked into his eyes expecting
to find a genial, rather leonine expression suitable
to the expansive figure and the weather-beaten face
you found a pair of blazing, concentrated, obsessive
eyes, with a touch of madness in them.
About this time too he began collecting books about
clinical death.
It was an important step in his
psychological self-preparation for the life he would
one day lead in Rome. The literature on clinical death
wasn't all that extensive but every few months a new
book on the subject emerged, even if it was just a rehash
of the old ones.
The word death changed its meaning
for him.
It signified now the best of all life's
liberations, the culminative and satisfying one. In
his liberation he was going to find Laura.
While he
read the clinical death books he felt her hovering
close to him, as if speaking to him through the words.
Now he understood her. Now he realised why she hadn't
turned up that day at the Piazza Nazionale fountain.
How could she have loved the bore he'd once been-
without occult capacities, without power of divination
or prophecy or (above all) magnetic influence?
He got almost erotic pleasure from reading account
after account of the death-experience by those who'd
been revived afterwards.
'I felt myself rise and so
to speak emerge from my own body.
I could look down
on it, quite dispassionately, and hear what the nurses
were saying. My feeling was one of unbelievable
release and happiness, a floating sensation so perfect
that nothing in my life before came near it.
It was
a feeling too of peace and I may say total self-fulfil-
ment as if all my life had been an endeavour to reach
this point.
I resented bitterly being brought back
to life.
I wanted to cry. For days, weeks I yearned
for that experience again. I never forgot it.
Gradually I've realised I must wait my due time to die.
Anytear of death I might have had before is unknown to
me now.
I look forward to that experience again with
all my heart.'
And so, in an odd sense, did James El who'd never
experienced clinical death.
He realised he thought
of death and Laura in the same breath, so to speaki
He realised too that she was invisibly guiding his
life.
He felt her criticising certain things in him,
encouraging other things. She helped him with the
clairvoyance and the magic, deepening his character.
In moments of self-doubt, especially when Betty


was around, he felt he was inventing it all.
Hell,
she was thousands of miles away! She probably didn't
even remember him!
This made him unbearably restless.
But it wasn't long before he was 'living with Laura'
again.
He bégan planning his return trip to Rome.
Breaking with Betty and even the kids wasn't going to
be difficult because really it had already happened.
jur


He'd saved up enough money to buy himself a lucrative
business once he'd settled in Rome again.
By no
means a communist now, he informed himself about the
American companies and subsidiaries in Italy, including
the real-estate activities.
Laura by this time had
become his obsessive concern, haunting him day and
night, and replacing all sexual activity. He had
been warned too that celibacy was a powerful aid to
the efficacy of magic.
He was sure that the incantation was working on
Laura.
About six months before he left the USA he
began 'wotking' on her man so that she would be
separated from him by the time he reached Rome.
And providence helped him get away even faster
by tipping the police off about some of his crooked
dealings. Recently he'd been sailing perilously close
to the law in an effort to make ever bigger profits.
Now he had to get out whether Betty liked it or
not. The police investigations deteriorated the
marriage even further so that (providence was very
kind) getting out looked like the only sensible
thing to do even to her. It was all going So
nicely---until she plonked a legal injunction on
him and got a nice fat settlement which absorbed most
of his savings.
Legal fees to protect him against
an indictment, and generous 'gifts' to keep key
people quiet, took care of the rest.
By the time he left for Rome he had just enough
to keep him alive for six months---if he was careful.
The year was 1978.
THE STORY:
1. He found a cheap room on a monthly basis in a
hotel behind the Pantheon, a noisy district he'd
never liked very much. By now Rome had become Italy's
crime-city No 2 after Milan. Physically the centre
of Rome hadn't changed but everything else had.
The
road to Frascati he had so often used in the old days
was clogged with jerry-built tenement blocks.
The
weather seemed to have collapsed.
It rained incessant-
People said you didn't get the old heat any more.
It was just like any other European city now.
But he found his favourite Trastevere trattoria
much as it had always been, only cleaner and the food
better.
There were many of the old faces, including
Ralph's.
Not that James El had any sense of homeçoming.
He was nervous, sometimes distraught, without knowing
why. He hadn't written to Ralph to sav he was coming.
He strolled in unannounced and walked to the old table
for ten places.
Ralph looked astonished but within
five minutes it seemed they'd been together all these
twenty years.
He had the sickening sensation that


these years had been lost---useless and pointless.
The only excitement he found was in the thought that
he was in the same city as Laura at last. As always
Ralph was the perfect information-desk.
After a
lifetime of dolce far niente he was a dossier on
everyone of importance in the city, its underworld
too. Only he didn't know about Laura, or so he said.
He'd lost touch with her.
But he promised to find
out all he could.
"For all I know she's married to a raisin merchant
in Smyrna,' It Ralph said.
It seemed to James El that he looked foxy.
One evening he told Ralph he needed money and
noticed an immediate change of expression on Ralph's
face. His mind had begun to work fast.
His eyes
narrowed with calculation, gazing at James El across
the table.
"What kind of work are you after?"
"Something with an element of risk.' 11
He felt uncomfortable with Ralph but then he
always had.
In a week a meeting was fixed up between James El
and a Johnny Lucubrese at the Flora, downstairs in the
bar. They strolled up to the Borghese gardens and
Lucrubrese instructed him to wait for a phonecall that
evening from a man called 'Mike', who would do all the
talking.
After another week he was to inspect his
bank account at the Banco di Roma.
'Mike' did phone and made a series of what sounded
commonplace and casual remarks about meeting in Genoa,
visiting 'my country place' and so on. A week later
James El's bank balance was mysteriously credited
with a thousand dollars.
James El knew well enough that he was becoming
involved in some form of espionage and found himself
excited rather than frightened.
The new few weeks
were quiet.
He received a further thousand dollars
but no more phonecalls.
He knew he was being trailed
and observed. Ralph kept a pretty close line on him
too, and was with him most nights of the week.
Laura had been traced. She was married but
lived alone in the 'ghetto' area.
Her husband was
called Marco Petrucci and known to be rather wealthy.
They'd been together five years but had separated,
though they were good friends and went to the same
parties.
James El asked anxiously if there'd been
children and to his relief was told no.
Ralph handed
him Laura's address across the table one evening.
James El avoided getting to know other women in
this interim period.
He didn't want complications
when he came to know and once more court Laura. He
remembered a brothel in Via Monserrato from the old
days.
With the abolition of brothels it had become
a small hotel much like the one he was staying in at


the Pantheon.
You took a girl in from the street,
or you booked one at the desk.
James El found a
sweet Neapolitan kid who curled softly all round
him and worked him hard, and he would stumble back
to his hotel feeling contentedly debauched as dawn
came through.
In this way sex desire was appeased
and attachments avoided.
After a month Lucubrese met him in the gardens again
and told him he must go at once to Zurich.
He flew
next day.
The man who came to see him explained the
code of the 'Mike' phonecalls.
All had to be committed
to memory, nothing must be on paper except a certain
phone number in Rome.
This was to be used only in
an emergency. For instance, all 'Mike' phonecalls
were in pairs---first the code messages, then a
confirming call exactly one hour later that told him
(in code again) that the first had been genuine.
Unless he received this second call he was to treat
the first one as fake and regard it as an emergency
situation.
"Now when you call this number you'll be given
another one, only you have to say who you are first."
"Who am I?"
"The keeper of the southern gate."
"What?" He nearly jumped in the air at this
reference to one of the four 'gates' in the magic
he practised.
It was the most secret thing in his
life---yet these people already knew about it!
"Only in an emergency is that your name, 11 the
other man went on, unaware of his astonishment.
"And who do I ask for?"
"Lord Michael."
"But that is the keeper of the southern gate!"
he almost shouted.
Only back in Rome did he remember the sweet little
Neapolitan girl asking about the gaudy robe she'd seen
in his wardrobe (the one night he'd invited her back
to his room), and his paternal explanation of the
'magic circle' with its north, south, east and west
each in the hands of a different archangel.
began to suspect that this was a very powerful network
indeed.
Ralph assured him that no terrorism was involved.
Janes El would be asked to keep certain people under
surveillance but this would be an entirely 'protective'
role.
The surveillance served to protect people
threatened with murder or kidnapping. It provided
Control with the weak links in their daily schedules
and routines.
They would be sociallyimportart people,
and James El would be expected to live' on their level.
(James El had no objection to that, particularly as
it was the only way he'd ever get to meet Laura 'by
accident').
His first assignment came through.
It was to
observe and get to know personally a minister by the
name of Lucchino Pietrafino. 'Mike' gave him this
name enclosed in a series of apparently chatty and
harmless remarks which were in fact codes. Within
a month James El must be on familiar terms with the


minister, within two in a position of entire confidence.
He was given a spacious apartment on the choice
Aventine hill. Here he gave parties and once more
became known as a desirable social contact. He found
himself back in the fashionable restaurants of Parioli
and the Via Veneto, less and less at the Trastevere
trattoria. To his surprise Ralph joined him in his
new life, indeed made him feel that his presence was
part of the bargain.
James El felt safer with him
around---one never knew when one might not need a
dirty trick or two.
He was now quite sure that Ralph had informed on
him twenty years before. It explained why he was never
short of money---and why the Questura hadn't booted him
out of Italy as well.
Had Ralph been in love with
Laura? Somethingin Ralph's manner when he talked about
her seemed to suggest a possible background there.
Was
that why he'd informed against James El, to get rid of
him?
And would he do the same again, given a second
chance, particularly if Laura returned to their little
circle? The Tarot cards supported this suggestion.
Well, Ralph had won the first round twenty years
before. But James El was going to win the second.
In the old days, he now felt, he'd deserved to lose.
In the old days Ralph had been his master.
But now
Ralph was going to be his servant.
2) 'Jamesel's back in circulation'---it went round
Rome among those old enough to remember his 'wild' days
twenty years back, about which they now laughed.
With
a middle-aged spread, a large apartment and a cook from
the Trento he was excellent company.
One evening, at a party composed largely of Christian
Democrats, he met Laura. They stared at each other.
Her eyes widened almost with fear, then clouded.
Within seconds they were continuing a whispered convers-
ation which had been interrupted twenty years before.
A week later they dined alone at his place and
made love all night, and all next day, in paroxysms of
ecstasy that made ail the other sex they'd had seem
movements in a mime.
Gazing into her eyes for hours together he felt his
body dissolving almost into death.
Sometimes she seemed
to be drawing him into that final ecstatic release he'd
so often read about.
And she'd been drawing him all
these years, until now he was 'home'. He knew now why
she'd become his lifelong obsession, his only reason
for living.
They saw Aida together at the Caracalla and almost
cried in the last scene when Aida and Radames were
sealed in the underground tomb to die slowly in each
other's arms.
To his secret astonishment Laura showed no aware-


ness of the role she'd played in his life.
She told
him that she'd failed to turn up for the Piazza
Nazionale date twenty years back because he'd been too
'immature' for her. Yet she hadn't been happy without
him either.
Not that she'd thought much about him
during the intervening years, much less yearned for
him: but no other love affair had worked for her.
Equally to his secret astonishment he found that
her clairvoyant activities showed no development: that
is, she hadn't particularly studied the matter in the
intervening years or sought a 'master' as he had. She
read hands still, did the cards as he did.
It was
just a natural thing for her, as simple as breathing.
Now it was her turn to recognise powers in him.
She suddenly saw the man she'd always wanted to have
and inwardly pined for without knowing it.
She joined
him in his magic rites, took instruction from him.
She was madly, unbearably in love.
At another Christian Democrat party he met her
husband, Marco Petrucci, a quiet man with rather
stunning good looks, very masculine and steady.
Not necessarily strong though, James El thought;
and apparently quite oblivious of the unearthly powers
he'd married in Laura. James El couldn't understand
why people didn't swoon when they gazed into her eyes.
How could they stand about the room unaware of those
uncanny, haunting glances?
He inspected his account at the Banco di Roma
each month and found it replenished on time.
bought a car and drove Laura out to Ostia Antica,
Frascati, Palestrina, all the old places. Simultan-
eously he was going about his business of surveillance,
often with Laura in his company---at rigged dinner
parties, evenings at the Florida club,
Daily he
provided details of the minister Pietrafino's move-
ments, and consigned them to a black plastic sack
in a rubbish dump among the tenement blocks of Monte
Mario.
Just before the two months of his assignment
were up the minister was shot dead in his car on his
way to the Quirinale.
There were press photos of
him hanging from the driver's seat.
James El, his face flushed with anger, ran to the
phone and calied Ralph.
"Some people never will learn


not to do the same things every day!" was Ralph's
reply.
In other words, Pietrafino had disregarded
the warnings of the protective outfit of which James
El was part.
"We knew he was for it," Ralph added.
It sounded altogether too naif for words but James
El found himself swallowing it.
Then came an unexpected phonecall from 'Mike'.
It was a new assignment. James El knew better than
to answer back over the phone. The confirming phone-
call came within the hour.
It found James El trembling
violently.
His next assignment was Marco Petrucci,
Laura's husband.
He then broke the most sacred rule of his trade,
namely to reveal an assignment to living mortal.
He could feel a tremor of white-hot terror go through
Ralph as he did so. But he deliberately burdened him
with it---in case Ralph didn't know already.
It turned
Ralph into a fellow-conspirator with as much to lose
as he did.
Laura's husband was a wealthy and influential man
close to high-ranking Christian Democrat officials and
known to have helped architect the famous compromesso
storico or 'historical compromise'between the Christian
Democrats and the communists which ex-prime minister
Aldo Moro and pope Paul V1 had crowned with respectab-
ility.
James El took an even more dangerous step. He
told Laura to find a way of warning Marco to vary his
daily routines and continue varying them each day.
Marco Petrucci began coming to his apartment quite
regularly.
He knew about James El's affair with Laura
and didn't seem to mind (he was living with another
woman himself).
He liked James El a lot.
He invited
him without Laura sometimes.
They went hunting in the
Pisan hills though James El refused to fire at youns
wild boar so domesticated that they all but came up to
him to be scratched.
When they were alone together
in one of the chalets, sipping cointreau, in candlelight,
he tried to tip Marco off but it didn't work.
He observed Marco Petrucci more than he'd ever
observed a human being in his life, clinging to the
fiction that his role was protective.
Each day he
left careful detailed reports in the plastic bag at
Monte Mario.
He used Laura in a way that was bitterly
distasteful to hin, and resolved one day to let her in
to all his secrets.
Marco was in the habit of flying to Palermo on
business in a company-helicopter about cnce a month.
une evening he told James El cver the phore that he
was going down there the following day.
James El
made sure not to include this piece of information
in his report that same night.
Next day the helicopter crashed with Marco in it.
There was no explosion. The story was that the pilot
had died of heart failure.
Marco was killed instantly.
Laura came to James El with the news that Marco
had left her everything, his lawyers had just phoned
her.
The family would contest it but as she was still
Marco's legal wife they hadn't a chance.
She was now


a rich woman.
She now of course realised that James El had
known more about Marco's dangerous situation than
she'd thought.
That night, strolling up and down
a deserted lane on the outskirts of Frascati, he
told her everything. She said she'd had a 'brief
and unpleasant' affair with Ralph some years back,
and that it had indeed been Ralph who'd torn his
character to shreds behind his back twenty years
before.
And she'd been weak enough to believe him.
ELI (L'Esercito della Liberazione Italiana)
claimed the murder, as they'd claimed that of
the minister Pietffino.
James El blamed himself
bitterly for these deaths but again allowed Ralph
to persuade him that his role was protective.
"After all," Ralph said with the hint of a menacing
look, "didn't you and Laura both try and warn him
in advance but he didn't take any notice?"
3) The following week ex-prime minister Moro was
kidnapped. James El suddenly saw a design behind
it all: one by one the negotiators of the famous
compromesso storico were being hit.
Now the top
ones (Moro and the pope) were to go.
In that case why hadn't he been put to watch
Moro instead of two relatively unimportant men?
Socially he would have been in an ideal position to
do so, and had met Aldo Moro frequently at receptions.
His blood went cold one morning when he discovered
from the Tarot cards that he was marked out for even
bigger game.
The new instructions came on a grey afternoon
of scirocco when all Rome was looking irritable and
sallow-faced. He worked at the coded messages for
much of the night and finally had to face the fact
that he'd been given the pope as his third assignment.
'Mike' emphasised that Janes El was being called
on not to watch pope Paul V1 or any particular pope
but the pope whoever he should happen to be at the
time.
He sat puzzling over this.
The pope's tastes in food, his eating times,
his rising and retiring habits, the hours he spent
in his library etc had to be kept meticulously up
to date.
This was necessary because the pope
moved about so little.
Jares El heard rumours amone fournalists at the
Florida club that there was a Red 3risades plan afoot
to kidnap the pope, only wadi Haddad, the PLC leader
of the German-Palestinian terrorist network of which
the Red Brigades were said to be a part, refused
permission.
The pope had been under close surveill-
ance on and off for the past two years, ever since the
raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. The first plan
to kidnap the pope had been as early as 1975 after the
seizure of the Berlin politician Peter Lorenz.
James El began going to the Vatican receptions.


He came to know several highly placed Vatican
officials, more particularly Monsignor Salvatore
whose knowledge of the pope's personal habits was
greater than most other people's, and anyway they
liked each other.
James El was shown the papal
apartments and even the private apartments where
usually only secretaries and personal attendants
penetrated.
In the evening he did scale maps of
these quarters and carefully deposited them in the
plastic bag.
But he was now convinced that Ralph was his
Control, and that the outfit he was working for was
anything but protective.
Therefore Ralph was his
ene emy.
He determined from now on to draw up two kinds
of report, a true one which he kept in his own files,
and a false one which he deposited in the plastic
bag (though maps etc naturally had to be straight).
He meant to infiltrate the Vatican to the same extent
as the man or men who intended to murder the pope as
Pietrafino and Marco Petrucci had been murdered.
He would cover all their traces and seek to undo them.
He focussed his attention particularly on the papal
kitchen and the papal medical services, watching for
new or suspicious recruits. He believed that the
method chosen would be delayed-action poison, administ-
ered in a harmless-seeming injection.
He and Ralph watched each other with demoniac
concentration.
It became usual for Ralph to pop up
at all the same Vatican receptions.
James El's apartment was 'visited' but he could
get nothing out of his Trento cook. Since this man
had come with the apartment he surmised that he too
was under Control.
He began to fear Ralph's sudden appearances-
at restaurants where he was dining with Laura, even
at têtes-a-têtes with Monsignor Salvatore.
The Moro affair ended in May 1978 with the ex-
prime minister's murder.
It was a terrific shock in
Rome.
James El's income was raised in the first days
of June.
The tine came for pope Paul VA to retire to his
palace at Castel Gondolfo for the dog days, according
to custom.
James El now knew various of the Swiss
and Palatinate guard officers. Paul V1's had been a
long reign and habits had established themselves firmly.
Paul had never evoked much personal warmth.
Jares El
remembered his coronaticn over twenty vears before.
Paul's austerity of manner had kept people at a
distance.
An up-to-date portrait of him was beginn-
ing to emerge.
The pope felt rather fragile these
days. Surprisingly, given his long experience of
public affairs, he was becoming increasingly shy.
He made several references to his own death in speeches.
The Moro affair depressed him deeply.
Rumour said that it had become impossible to
kidnap the pope not only because of Haddad's disapproval


but because of the physical difficulties of taking
a man who rarely moved outside the Vatican walls,
and that for this reason Moro had been substituted for
him.
This thought too may have tortured the pope.
Moro was after all one of his best friends.
Paul V1
seemed to feel increasingly isolated, and played his
favourite Vivaldi until late at night alone in his
room.
After Moro's body was found in the back of an
abandoned car he was given two heart-stimulant injections.
The summer was unusually hot and pleasant and
James El spent a lot of time with Laura on the beaches
of Fregene, like most of Rome's professional classes.
It was there that he learned that the pope had
been confined to his bed at Castel Gondolfo with
arthrosis, an old complaint of his.
He'd suffered
two bouts of influenza this year.
But his doctors
felt no cause for anxiety.
James El raced to Castel Gondolfo to discover if
there had been sudden recruits on the papal staff,
but nothing had changed. He felt he was fussing
unduly and returned to the beach.
He now let Laura
into all his anxieties, and even showed her the two
reports, one true and one false, which he prepared
each day, so that she would see he'd chosen the pro-
tective role whether Ralph liked it or not.
Sadly
she said, "He has both of us in his hands now."
Suddenly, on Sunday August 6, Vatican radio
announced that the pope was gravely ill. A few
hours later and he was dead.
He died at 9.40 that
evening, a matter of hours after the first announce-
ment. For James El it was a typical delayed-action
death. To conceal such a murder in the case of an
old man was easy as no post-mortem would be thought
necessary. There was the telltale bloodclot.
The
pope had been given intensive treatment, and oxygen,
but the bloodclot on the lungs, or pulmonary edema,
had complicated the matter fatally.
His condition
had suddenly 'worsened' in the afternoon but no one
seemed to know for sure what had happened.
Monsignor
Pier Pastore described it as a 'cardiac crisis' and
rot an infatto, which would have been the right word
for 'heart failure'. Monsignor Giuseppe Caprio, the
pope's Under Secretary, said in a Vatican broadcast
that he hadn't expected so quick an end.
James El's conviction that despite his vigilance
the Vatican had been infiltrated was strengthened by
the fact that the day after the pope's death the German
magazine Der Spiegel published (August 1973) Hans
Joachim Klein's account of the Red Brigades' plan
to kidnap the pope.
According to Klein, Wadi Haddad
had said that no Arab country could officially let
anvone rur around free who had kidnapped a pope.
It would have had to be a 'suicide' operation. So
the plan had been dropped.
James El knew that the
Gerrans had tipped off the Italian government that
'something big' was coming up before the Moro kidnapping.
It was clear to him that German defectors from the
'Carlos' network had leaked a lot of information


recently.
The article's private message to James El
was that the attempt on the pope had been switched
from kidnapping to poisoning, and that this had succeed-
ed, only no press article could say so.
He became
obsessive in his desire to get the infiltrator out
of the Vatican as quickly as he'd got in, and increasing-
ly he saw that infiltrator, whoever he was, as Ralph's
man.
He was convinced too that the killer was still
there, and intended to remain there after the next
papal election.
'Mike' phoned him to order intensified surveillance
from the moment the next pope was elected.
But James
El resolved to save the new pope's life if he possibly
could by systematically working against Mike's instruct-
ions while seeming to abide by them.
This helped his conscience considerably.
Together
with Laura he performed magic rites to ward off danger
and convert it to good. They worked on divination
together and were perplexed by the repeated prognostication
of 'utmost happiness' combined with 'utmost doom'.
Considering James El was in effect a squalid
informer (less even than a spy) and Laura was in connivance
with him though it had cost her husband his life, it
was remarkable what serene happiness they achieved
together.
They were the envy of Rome's morbidly
promiscuous couples.


The Conclave was a brief one. Pope John Paul 1
was elected on August 26, less than three weeks after
the former pope's death.
James El now closed a clever social net round the
new pope, insinuating himself into Vatican receptions
given by the cardinals, press conferences etc.
He did
this quite openly. His friends were amused. James
El was going catholic.
Some said they'd always
expected it.
John Scales was his most informative catholic
contact at the Florida club.
After a time no one
thought it strange that James El should be avid for
every scrap of papal gossip he could get.
Pope John Paul 1 was causing distress in the
Vatican. He dispensed with the papal tiara and said
he would no longer travel in the wooder throne held
shoulder-high by attendants which made it possible
for thousands to see him.
In front of journalists
he replaced the traditional royal 'we' with 'I'.
At first the Curia insisted on issuing the texts of
his speeches with the usual 'we' but finally had to
give way.
The whole city was now talking about 'the
censored pope'.
Also the pope entered and left audiences at a
smart trot, in defiance of tradition.
Cardinal Felice,
actins dean of the Sacred College, was sent to,see
hir to reouest that he 'curb' his behaviour. James
El pricked his ears up at this.
A murder-faction could
So easily germinate from circumstances like these.
Would the work of the infiltrator be made that much
easier by deliberate negligence in the matter of the
pope's security?
At the Eall of the Consistory, adiressing the
83 cardinals who were still in Rome, the pope abandoned
the set speech which referred to the indebtedness of the
entire Church to the Roman Curia, and casually said
instead, "As soon as I had a little time, the first
thing I did on becoming pope was to get hold of the
Annuario Fontificio and study the organisation of the
HO-T See.
And the pope renominated Cardinal Jean Villot as
Secretary of State despite Villot's bitter critics in
the Curia.
Most important of all perhaps, he suddenly


cut the 'bounty' given to members of the Curia on
the election of a new pope by half, so that they got
$250 instead of $500.
James El found an appalling lack of security
round the pope which he himself tried to supply in
a desperate attempt to save him: for he was every
day more convinced that pope John Paul 1 wouldn't
last long.
The pope's only contact with the outside
world once he'd gone to bed was a bell-push, and the
nearest duty aide was beyond calling distance. The
chief papal physician, Professor Renato Buzzonetti,
who worked at a Roman hospital and not inside the
Vatican, could declare himself unavailable even in
an emergency, and in any case it took him at least
half an hour to reach the Vatican.
At this point Ralph contacted Laura secretly
and told her that he'd known about James El's false
reports since her husband Marco had phoned him the
evening before his death to tell him that he would
be flying to Palermo the next day and James El had
suppressed this information in his next report.
"Unfortunately for James El your husband told him
by phone and not person to person," he added.
"Now
I need the real information, Laura, and I'm going to
get it.
James El is alive today because we need to
know what he's up to. If you don't provide me with
his true report each day he's a dead man in a week."
Foolishly she said nothing about this conversation
to James El, fearing for his life, and secretly consigned
a copy of his true report each day to another black
plastic bag behind the Piazza Navona.
Meanwhile James El was increasingly obsessed with
the idea that the pope was shortly to be murdered.
There was an event that seemed to him an evil
potent. On September 6 Metropolitan Nikodim of
Leningrad, a senior of the Russian Grthodox church,
collapsed and died during an audience with John Paul 1
at the age of only 49.
Although James El knew well that this death was
due to natural causes the incident served to spur him
to a bold effort to discover the date for the pope's
liquidation. For cice he answered 'Mike' back on the
phone and dezanded to know if 'zero-hour' had been set
or this operation.
If so, he must know it, as there
were signs of 'counter measures' being taken at the
Vatican to foil the possibility. The pause at the
other end of the line he took for alarm. Then the
line went deai. After another hour he was told that
three dates had been set---September 17th, 13th and
28th. The beli-push at the pope's side would be
put out of action, and it was James El's duty on these
three dates to see that the aide on duty in the papal
apartments was distracted and harrassed at the tine
the pope usually went to bed.
To soueeze out of him
the manner of the death James El asked 'Mike' whether
the infiltration of the Vatican was 'medical* or otherwise
since (another lie) there was particular vigilance
going on at the Vatican about new medical staff.
The answer was yes, a doctor would examine the pope
a few hours before his bedtime on one of the. set dates,


He eliminated the dates September 17th and 18th.
That was where his Tarot pack came in useful.
All was set for the 28th.
5) On the evening of the 28th he went to the Florida
Club and almost fell up the carpeted stairs in his
excitement.
He made for Scales, the English gossip
who knew the Vatican inside out, but Scales was talking
to a girl from Paris Match at the bar.
He waited for
them to finish---no woman stayed a whole evening with
Scales.
Twenty minutes later he was offering Scales
a drink and hearing that the pope had had 'a God Almighty
row' the previous evening which could be heard all the
way down the corridor.
James El discounted the story,
remembering that pope Pius too was supposed to have had
a fatal row (with an American cardinal) the day before
his death.
Still- -something in the Vatican atmosphere
at that moment indicated it might well be true.
He picked Laura up in the car. They were due to
go to a reception in the Borgia apartments.
He drove
into Vatican City through the Arch of the Bells and
the Swiss Guards hardly looked at him.
The hot weather
had broken and Rome was back to damp and chill.
Thick
low clouds overhead glowed with a rosy kind of ominous-
ness.
All the chandeliers were on in the Borgia apart-
ments and the talk was deafening.
The idea was that
he should leave Laura in the hands of Marco Petrucci's
brother and go to the lavatory---in reality to the
papal apartments.
He made it too---through the Hall
of the Tapestries and the Tronetto room. The pope
was in the library. The officer of the guard recognised
him, and James El made out that he was on his way to
Monsignor Salvatore's apartment but had got lost.
He persuaded the officer to show him the pope's bedroom.
As they stood at its door gazing in he found himself
feeling sorry for a man so powerful that he enjoyed
neither privacy nor protection. There was one solitary
bell push by the bed.
All the aides were out of ear-
shot.
James El rushed off to Monsignor Salvator to warn
him that an 'attempt' would be made that evening, if it
hadn't been made already.
Salvatore was used to his
'exaggerations' and tried to cool him off. Urbanely
and politely, scratching his balls under his cassock,
he refused to warn the security officer or the papal
doctor.
"I've done a check on the medical arrangements
and the security arrangements and nothing's different
from what it always has been," Salvatore told him.
"But that's just the trouble!"
James dec"ided on a very dangerous course indeed,
but one he felt obliged to take. He contacted Professor
Lepezanno who was thoroughly venal and, worst of all,
close to Ralph, in fact one of Ralph's possible 'leaks'.
But the professor was high enough in the medical hierarchy
and close enough to Vatican personnel to make his
influence felt there at short notice.


Lepezanno was at home dining but told him to hop
in a taxi and come and see him.
There followed a
series of the most extraordinary accidents---if they
were accidents. The taxi was nearly rammed by a truck,
a man rushed out in front of it and nearly got himself
killed and finally there was a traffic jam that couldn't
have hemmed him in mor'e effectively had it been staged.
He had to get out and try to find another taxi. Not
least he was nearly run over in the Piazza Navona (where
traffic is barred).
It was past midnight when he got
to Lepezanno's home.
And he knew in his heart that
it was too late.
The professor made a great show of taking him
seriously and they went on all-night search forthe
papal doctor, the eminence grise behind the papàl
security arrangements, and an ambassador who was partic-
ularly close to both.
They found them all but couldn't
get access to the Vatican.
And James El thought he saw
Lepezanno making little facial signs behind the palm of
his hand not to take this Amercian madman too seriously.
By the time dawn came round he realised that the protect-
ive web round the pope was so impenetrable that---the
murder had been inevitable.
And he realised too,
looking across the café table at the yellow, lined
face of a professor who must have had a motive for
missing a night's sleep and listening him out, that he
himself was doomed.
When he got back to his apartment at seven o'clock
in the morning Laura was sleepily taking a call from
Scales. There was 'big trouble going on over at the
Vatican'.
Only a death, said Scales, could have caused
so much hithering and thithering.
6) That morning Rome was in uproar.
Almost no one
believed that John Paul 1, a manifestly healthy man of
only 65, had died naturally. The pope's brother, in
Australia at the time, told the press that John Paul
had recently had some 'bad feelings' round theheart
but a medical check had found no cause for alarm.
Father Rinaldo, in the pope's village of birth,
said the pope had never had heart trouble. Monsignor


Giuseppe Rosa, Apostolic Administrator in Venice,
said he'd been received in audience only two days
before and the pope had appeared in good health.
The pope's own physician, who had also seen him a
few days before, had found him normal.
The official story was that he'd been found at
5.30 am by his private secretary Father Magee, who
had: knocked on the pope's bedroom door and not getting
a reply looked for him in his private chapel. No
one was there either, so he returned to the bedroom
and opened the door.
The light was on and the pope
was in bed with The Imitation of Christ still in
his hand.
The pope's face was turned slightly
towards the right and bore a smiling expression.
Doctors calculated that he'd had a massive heart
attack at ten or eleven o'clock the previous evening,
Thursday 28 September.
That week there were two Red Brigades murders in
Rome.
Also Aldo Moro's will, extracted from him by
terrorists with the promise of his eventual release,
was published, revealing his horror at the indiffer-
ence shown to his fate by his own political party.
It added to the general gloom.
By October 1 the Vatican was under considerable
pressure to hold a post mortem. Then came a bit of
news that James El was waiting for.
It said that
one doctor had examined the pope only five hours
before his death and reported him fit.
Why had emergency medical assistance been absent
from the papal apartments? the papers asked. That
was another bit of information he was waiting for
too. He seethed, pacing up and down his room, with
Laura urging him to keep calm.
The call for a post mortem came mainly from a
rightwing Catholic group called Civilta Cristiana,
which asked for the 'true causesT of his death to be
investigated.
Only one simple examination of the body had been
carried out so far.
This was considered sufficient
basis for the Vatican's claim that the pope had died
after a heart attack from natural causes.
The College
of Cardinals announced that it had nc intention of
having the pope's body further examined.
Civiltà Cristiana furnished the Questura with a
report summarising the suspicious circumstances
surrounding the pope's death.
Apparently the pope had prepared for bed at ten
o'clock cn Thursdar evening.
All that was officiall-
said by the Vatican was that on beins siven the rews
that a left-wing Roman youth had that day been murdered
he had replied, "Even young people are killing each
other now... 11
These were said to be his last words.
James El calculated that he had been to all intents
and purposes dying himself at this time.
There were claims that the Vatican statement
on the circunstances of the discovery of the pope's
body had been false.
The pope had in fact been
found by the nun who brought him his morning coffee.


The coffee remained untouched in his room, so she
knocked on his bedroom door.
Through the keyhole
she saw him lying dead. She then called Father
Magee.
The Vatican denied this.
Asked if they suspected foul play, Civiltà
Cristiana announced, 'We have our information which
we have placed in the hands of the judicial authorities.'
Later its spokesman Dr Franco Antico said, "We aren't
necessarily saying anything criminal happened.
But
there are many suspect facts and the situation isn't
clear."
It took James El some time to get hold of the
Civiltà Cristiana document.
It supported in precise
detail all his findings before the pope's death, except
in the matter of that final visit from a doctor.
He checked through Scales about that visit and found
that in fact the pope hadn't received an injection.
So on that particular matter he'd been on a false
trail.
But all the other facts fitted.
By October 8 rumours and gossip were still hot
on the subject.
All Rome got hold of the report in
some form or another and embroidered it. Poison was
the favourite suggestion.
Suicide was another,
enforced suicide another.
Many people felt that prompt action on Thursday
evening could have saved the pope but there had been
a deliberate withdrawal of emergency medical facilities.
Still nobody in the Vatican explained why it had
taken them two hours after the doctors' final confirm-
ation of the pope's death to announce it to the public.
Cardinal Silvio Oddi told the press, "We know for
certain that the death of John Paul 1 was because his
heart ceased to beat due to natural causes."
No one doubted that his heart had ceased to beat
or even that he'd had a heart attack, but certainty
in the matter of 'natural causes' without an autopsy
was fatuous.
In fact an autopsy was hurriedly carried out--
or so it seemed.
Scales suddenly tipped James El
off about this, the evening before the funeral.
Despite Laura's begging him not to go out, least
of all to the Vatican area, he raced over to St Peter's
in time to see attendants ushering away the crowds
who were about to file past the pope's body, while
six white-smocked medical men entered the basilica
from the area of the sacristy and moved towards the
bier.
The Ecllowins evening he went to a Vatican
reception, trembling slightly and locking distinctly
strange, but managed to extract no information from
any of the guests about the findings of the autopsy.
No Vatican statement was issued on the sub.iect.
Janes El prepared to leave Italy with Laura,
with great secrecy of course.
But before this happened he had himself received
into the Church.
Then he confessed his activities


of the past few months to Monsignor Salvatore who
looked very grave and for a moment terrified. He gave
James El absolution and commended him for having
secretly tried to save the pope " even though only
against a quite imaginary plot produced by your own
fevered mind at the time.
"For this too I give you absolution, #1' he added.
James El felt childishly secure in Monsignor
Salvatore's tiny library where plots and informing
seemed entirely unreal.
Being received into the Church felt like being
forgiven by pope John Paul 1 for not having protected
him better, and also it rounded off James El's return
to Rome in a fittingly logical way.
His magic rites
were abandoned. So too were the prognostications and
the hand-worn Tarot pack.
He didn't care what the
future held because, being under divine protection
now, fear played little part in his life, even fear
for Laura.
His sudden relinquishment of occult techniques
which had definitely helped him overcome dangers in
the past meant that he couldn't any longer be fore-
warned about events. Laura urged him to take care.
But he only smiled at her.
Finally he persuaded her
too to abandon practices regarded by orthodox catholicism
as 'pagan'. Being James El he didn't dislike the
practices because of what orthodoxy said but because
Christ was now his Tarot pack, his magic, his power
of prophecy.
He went to church almost every day. People noticed
a strange elation in him. He took Laura to the same
restaurants as before, and to parties, with deliberate
carelessness. No new instructions came from 'Mike'.
The monthly instalments at the Banco di Roma ceased.
Meanwhile he and Laura pursued their secret plans
for departure.
There was the question of money.
It would be impossible for her to take her sizable
fortune out of Italy due to blocked-currency regulations.
They decided to take as much cash as they could handle
without arousing suspicion when withdrawing it from the
banks, and to slip across the border north of Udine.
Not that he or she had real hopes that he would
survive that long. One morning, unable to bear the
silence and suspence any longer, he rushed out to
make a call on Ralph.
The apartment was closed up.
Ralph's porter downstairs said he'd gone away suddenly.
And the phone had been disconnected.
They timed their getaway attempt for December 13.
lo unpleasant calls came. No one seemed to be trailing
them in the streets ("There'sho need", said James El,
"we're sitting targets").
The days passed in nerve-wracking boredom.
He kept making sure that Ralph wasn't back in
town.
On the evening of December 12 they went to a party,
wanting to behave as if nothing was about to happen.
When they got back there was a phonecall from Ralph.
James El's heart sank into his bowels.
"Think I'd deserted you?" Ralph said.


The two of them met without Laura later that night
at the Florida club and to James El's immense relief
he found Ralph as distraught and clearly on the run as
he himself was. They drank a lot of frascati.
Ralph said he'd got himself into a bit of a fix and
didn't know how to get out of it.
"I tried a bunk to Malta but it didn't work."
Then: "You've got to get away by latest tomorrow
night.
And take me with you."
"Take you?"
Ralph outlined his plan.
At eight o'clock the
following evening James El was to be at the church of
Santa Lucia and wait there for him, kneeling in the
tiny chapel of the Madonna on the south side of the
apse. Ralph had chosen this church because tomorrow
would be the saint's name day and the place would
not only be open in the evening but ablaze with
candles to celebrate the patron saint of light and
sight.
It would be easy to merge in with the crowd.
As for Laura, she was to wait for a car to pick
her up at James Ei's apartment.
It would arrive at
about 7.45 pm the following evening. It would take
her to the church of Santa Lucia, behind the Campo
dei Fiori, and of course she had to be equipped for
travelling.
Neither of them, however, should arouse
suspicion by taking suitcases.
If Ralph hadn't turned up by 8.15 James El and
Laura were to go without him. They would be driven
to the airport where tickets were already waiting for
them.
The driver of the car had received instructions.
It was a clever plan but James El didn't fall for it,
though Ralph acted the part of the hunted and frightened
man to perfection.
But he told Ralph, "OK, I'll be there".
He talked it over with Laura most of the night.
It was she who finally decided that Ralph must be in
earnest, having himself defied the outfit on many
occasions in order to save James El's life.
"How do you know this?" James El asked her.
"He told me himself.
He saved you for me."
James El understood this at once and she needn't have
added, "Ralph being in love with me..."
She told him how for weeks she had carried his
true reports to a plastic sack at a dump near Piazza
Navona. To her immense relief James El said, "Thank
God you did it. Your skin's safe. They won't touch
you at least. And perhaps you saved mine too."
A phonecall from Ralph at dawn- --to Laura-
confirmed her opinion. Ralph told her, "They're out
to get him and if he doesn't shift his arse out of
Rome tonight they'll get not only him but me!"
She was convinced.
She thought of doing the cards just to make sure.
But they fell asleep, exhausted, and by the time they
woke up it was time to prepare for the journey.
Next evening the crowded church was brilliant


with lighted candles and as James El stepped inside
a feeling of extraordinary happiness came over him.
As he took the holy water on the tips of his fingers
and made the sign of the cross a sentence came into
his mind with some clarity: 'And now you will meet the
keeper of the southern gate.'
Did it mean 'Mike'
himself? or something unusually fortunate?
He took
it as a good omen.
He walked down the side-aisle to the little chapel
of the madonna and knelt close to the altar.
found himself genuinely praying, his eyes closed.
He stayed like this for at least five minutes.
heard a soft step behind him and guessed it to be
Ralph. He felt a pricking sensation in the elbow
and was just about to turn to find out what had happened
when a great weakness came over him and he fell slowly
sideways.
Not until the following day was he found, already
dead by several hours.
The priest who found him said he had a look of
unbelievable happiness---'almost revelation'---on his
face.
It hadn't apparently entered James El's mind
that Michael, keeper of the southern gate, was also
Lord of Death.
8) Laura waited in James El's apartment at the
appointed time.
There were two letters from James El
for her, both marked 'To be opened later'.
A car was waiting downstairs with Ralph at the
wheel.
"We'll have to be quick about this," he said and
drove off at once.
After a time she realised they were driving towards
the coast.
"What about James El?" she asked him.
"Something went wrong. Hopefully he's meeting us
at the airport."
"What went wrong?"
She was shivering.
"TII tell you on the plane."
"Where are we going?"
He had air tickets ready. Only after take-off
did he relax.
He turned to her with a smile and said
enigmatically, "Well, I wasn't worried for you but I
was for me!"
At London airport two security men came forward
at the passport desk and asked them to follow them.
They went to a room behind the customs area.
Ralph
was placed under arrest and Laura advised to find a
London hotel for a few days as she might be needed
for questioning.
As they walked together in front of the security
men Ralph told her in a normal voice, not at all shaken,
"I knew somebody was trailing me-- --thank God it was the
police! 1
During the next few days Laura was interrogated


several times.
In the second interview they showed
her a photograph of James El and asked her if she
knew the man.
When she said yes they told her he'd
been found dead in a Roman church.
She opened the two letters from James El.
One
contained the cash he'd drawn from his own account.
The other was a copy of his will leaving her the
inheritance he'd never been able to touch.
Perhaps he hadn't forgotten after all, as he
walked into the church of Santa Lucia, that Michael
keeper of the southern gate was also Lord of Death.
Length: 80-100.000 words.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Until I see a full transcript of the report on
John Paul 1's death which was put before the judicial
authorities in Rome by the Civilta Cristiana I cannot
of course give exact details of the weaknesses in the
security arrangements surrounding the pope, or the
suspicious nature of certain circumstances relating
to his death.
I've been promised this transcript
or a faithful verbal account when I return to Italy.
Thus the sample chapter above is imaginable
rather than probable.
And of course I cannot place my characters
(and thus the action) properly until I know what
people are rumoured to have been involved in the
suspicious setup. Once I know this I will place
them from the beginning of the narrative, so that
by the time we get to the popes they are well establ-
ished and can be seen by James El as obvious threats
to papal security.
Also the theme of the unknown doctor who examined
the pope on the day of his death (it is a fact that
one did see him five hours or so before) either has
to be ridded of the imputation that an injection was
administered (as I've done here in the synopsis) or,
if in fact an injection was administered, eliminated
altogether from the narrative as a libel hazard.
'ELI' (L'Esercito della Liberazione Italiana) is
a fiction, invented to cover the fictional murders of
Pietrafino and Marco Petrucci.
The 'infiltrator' into the Vatican, with access
to the pope's person, remains a mystery in this synopsis
because I haven't decided on the form the infiltration
should take.
This also will depend on the Civiltà
Cristiana report.
But it is James El's obsessive quality, his
secret and often dark will that guides the narrative
and creates pace and tension and an increasingly
claustrophobic atmosphere as he sees John Paul's death
(and his own?) drawing near.
At no time can we be
sure that. there is actually an 'outfit' or a 'control'
behind his assignments and not simply Ralph


bringing about his destruction.
That would be
very far-fetched---Ralph filling up James El's
account at the Banco di Roma, providing him with a
splendid apartment and handing him Laura's address.
But we can't be sure. In fact I'm toying with the
idea of setting up possibilities for James El's father
to be the hidden supplier of the money (through Ralph),
or at least feasible arguments that this could be the
case.
I don't in other words want to reproduce a
typical spy-thriller situation---not because it wouldn't
work but because the genre is so artificial and in
this story we have far too rich a canvas, set partly
in the corridors of the Vatican, to waste credibility
on children's games. The atmosphere of the book
must be so fraught with tension, nervousness and
uncertainty, in this city where even the poor aren't
safe from kidnappings (since whole streets can be relied
on to raise ransom-funds) and where people who should
know continue to assert that there is a heavy cocaine-
traffic in the highest echelons of the Vatican, so
fraught that it may all seem the product of James El's
fevered and essentially religious imagination. Hope-
fully the reader will end the book with the feeling
that while he has seen everything in terms of this
fevered imagination it all rings remarkably true.
And technically this makes it possible for me to
avoid libel snares.
Who killed James El? Not Ralph. He was
driving Laura to the coast before James El even
reached the church.
Never having been directly
responsible for a killing, Ralph is confident, when
taken in at London airport, that he will get a maximum
sentence of five years. Ôn the other hand, the book
will tell us that he could have been arrested on counts
far remote from informing or terrorism, such as bigamy
and tax-swindles in Malta...
And it may not be so
easy for him to deny all knowledge of James El's
death, or the possibility that he organised a contract.
But if there was a network, and Ralph was part of it,
then James El's murder was the price required by them
for Ralph's freedom. I haven't decided yet what the
arrest means but of course the solution of the riddle
of the book will depend on it. Or I may leave it
open by having him detained simply on suspicion (as
an important witness in the matter of James El's
murder) and then-released on insufficient evidence.
What stands out clear and strong at the end of the
book is the strange connection, deeper than any
family ties, between Laura, James El and Ralph.
They were bound together to the point of their
mutual destruction, and we know that from now on
life will never be quite worth living for the other
two.
Does the story really revolve around Laura?
Is she the reason why Ralph helps James El at the
beginning and destroys him at the end? Is Ralph
as desperately in love with her, as helplessly
bound to her, as James El?
Was this why he stayed
in Rome allthose years, though he had a home and


some say a wife and shop in Malta?
Was it why he
got rid of James El twenty years back by informing
on him? And does he now give James El Laura's
address in order a) to regain admission into her
intimate circle after his fatal affair with her
and b) to become an unsuspected onlooker of James
El's affair with her?
All these are exciting possibilities which I
wish to develop, either as an undeclared subtext
ever present to the reader or the declared motivat-
ional pattern (which only the reader will see)
behind the overt events.
The riddle of the book---
apart from the obvious riddles of papal murder etc-.
is whether the outfit for which James El believes
himself to be informing really exists.
And it is
round this point that the Laura theme oscillates
most enigmatically.