The mystery fate of God's banker

The Money Changers by Charles Raw (Harvill, £20) Peter Hebblethwaite A VATICAN correspondent has to write about a good deal more than the papacy. The pope is shot: he becomes a crime reporter. Another financial scandal erupts at the Vatican: she has to familiarise herself (no sexism here) with credit transfers, shady deals. back-scratching, fraud, embezzlement, shell companies, the whole world one safely leaves in happier days to the Financial Times.
So I am grateful to Charles Raw for providing a guide, or at least some signposts, to the complexities of the financial jungle. Even with coloured pencils, it is difficult enough to keep track of capital movements that were always meant to be concealed.
Roberto Calvi, the anti-hero of this story, kept 1500 pages of notes in sealed plastic bags in a safe in the Bahamas. He used to take them out and play with them, sometimes in the presence of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Institute of Religious Works, vulgarly known as "The Vatican Bank".
Raw has had access to these scribblings. Such data will not exist in the future as transactions are increasingly computerized. His other principal sources are the records of those exhaustive and exhausting Italian trials that can take up to ten years. Philip Willan did the leg-work for him, and has redeemed his association with David Yallop's In God's Name.
Reading the book is like reliving, very slowly, the last 20 years. Remember Licio Gelli, founder and Grande Maestro of P2, the masonic lodge that was disavowed by official masons in Italy and England? Where is he now? Living quietly at home in his villa at Arezzo, being beyond the age at which Italians think it proper to put people in jail. He recently submitted three poems anonymously to a poetry competition, and won.
But that's the present. And the past? "That P2 was a conspiracy was clear. What it was a conspiracy to do is less clear, even after the monumental work of the Parliamentary Commission." Gelli might have been plotting to restore fascism, or perhaps was secretly in league with the Communists (like Robert Maxwell he had good links with Eastern Europe) or he could have been working for the Italian secret service.
He made mystery a way of life. P2 is best imagined as a pyramid inverted atop another pyramid, with Gelli at the centre, the only one who held it all together. Not for nothing was he known as the "puppetmaster". Roberto Calvi, the real subject of this book, was one of his victims, dangled on the end of Gelli's strings. It makes the death of Calvi, suspended form Blackfriars Bridge. doubly ironical.
Raw rejects the view that Calvi was murdered as ton "romantic". Calvi, who had turned the Banco Ambrosiano in Milan into an international institution, was never far from the end of his tether He exploited Archbishop Marcinkus, using his "letters of comfort" to inspire confidence and trust. When the Archbishop dropped him, Calvi despaired, and loaded bricks into his pockets to drown himself in the Thames.
Alas! he had forgotten that the Thames is a tidal river, and saw only mud flats and low water. Odd bits of rope had drifted against the scaffolding of Blackfriars Bridge and with these Calvi hanged himself. But for Raw,very properly, how Calvi died is less important than why.
Here Archbishop Marcinkus is put firmly in the dock. "If Calvi's death was suicide," writes Raw, "it was Marcinkus who made him suicidal." How? There is no suggestion that he made or sought any profit for himself. But by insisting on repayment, by a deadline he knew Calvi could not possibly meet, he was the cause of Calvi's death.
This is obviously a very serious charge. Archbishop Marcinkus replied to it in advance in the only long interview he has given in John Cornwell's book, Thief in the Night. Unlike Cornwell, Raw does not let the Vatican actors in the story speak for themselves. He is happier with the records of the endless related trials.
So Raw in the end remains very distant, an arm's length away. He adds a touch of sanctimoniousness which comes out in the title. Like Jesus, it implies, this bold spirit from the Sunday Times, "Insight" team will overthrow the tables of the modern money changers and cast them out of the temple.
In case Money Changers is too obscure a title, Raw adds the longest subtitle of modern times: "how the Vatican Bank enabled Roberto Calvi to steal $250 million for the heads of the P2 Masonic Lodge". It all depends on what you mean by enabled.