The ambulance slowed at the gate beneath the Arch of the Bells where the Swiss Guards, who had been advised of the situation, waved it through into the succession of small, dark courtyards flanking the east side of St Peter’s. Just beyond the enormous bulge of the transept a uniformed member of the Vigilanza, the Vatican Security Force, waved the vehicle to a halt. The ambulance men got out, opened the rear doors and lifted out a stretcher. Then they followed the security guard through a door into a bare sloping passage tunnelled into the massive lower walls of the basilica. They passed through two small antechambers, then through a doorway concealed beneath the beckoning skeletons of Bernini’s funeral monument to Alexander VII, and thence into the basilica itself.
In the open space between the apse and the papal altar, a team of cleaners in blue overalls waited with their mops and buckets, ready to expunge every physical trace of the outrage once the body had been removed. A bishop would then be summoned to perform the spiritual equivalent, a rite of reconsecration. The ambulance men put down their stretcher and set about unwrapping the green plastic sheeting used to wrap the remains. At this point Giovanni Grimaldi turned aside, his stomach thrashing like live fish in a net. It was precisely to avoid having to witness things like this that he had come to work for the Vatican in the first place.
The son of a fisherman from Otranto, Grimaldi had started his career in the Carabinieri, and as a brighter-than-average recruit was rapidly promoted to investigative work.