A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I, by John Cornwell (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $19.95)
IN 1984, I spent a week locked in an office with David Yallop, editing In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul P, this so my then-employer, Bantam Books, could publish it as an “instant hardcover.” (It was simultaneously published in six countries, and appeared in seven others within a month.) It happened to be the week prior to my wedding, and I was overworked and nervous, so when, finally, Yallop and I said, “Enough!” and began to think about “packaging” the book, I wanted nothing more than to wrap it up quickly, and go home to get one decent night’s sleep before my life changed forever. Anyway, it was I who suggested that dismal bit of hyperbole as a subtitle. Originally, it was to be an inquiry into the death of the pope, but I thought: “What the hell. David says the man was murdered …” From a commercial point of view, I was probably right. And my apparent enthusiasm was welcome. Yallop knew I thought his book proved none of its fantastic claims. “Here’s the thing,” I’d told him, “You identify six suspects [the clerics: Monsignor—now Archbishop—Paul Marcinkus, Jean Cardinal Villot, and John Cardinal Cody; and the financiers: Roberto Calvi, Licio Gelli, and Michele Sindona], offer circumstantial evidence of each man’s possible motives and opportunities, and then conclude, given all this supposition, that surely one of them must have been guilty. It doesn’t follow, but even if it were true, wouldn’t the guilt of that one necessarily exonerate the other five, thereby discounting the evidence against them?” He shook his head. He never actually named the murderer, you see, and nervously feigned opacity whenever I pointed it out.
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