Free The Last Supper by Philip Willan Page A

on the Russian front. They talked about books. In addition to Italian authors, Roberto enjoyed Dickens, Wodehouse, Thackeray and Balzac. Clara could picture him as the hero of a Balzac novel, looking out over the roofs of Paris and promising himself: one day this city will be mine! He proposed to her over lunch in a fish restaurant and celebrated her acceptance by standing on his head on the beach.
    ‘We got married in the sacristy of San Carlo, because the church had been destroyed in the bombing and hadn’t yet been rebuilt,’ she wrote. ‘It was just family, because that was what Roberto wanted: he was, even then, discreet and reserved, perhaps timid.’ 6 The couple went on holiday in Switzerland, travelling around the country by train. In those carefree days Roberto may not have paid much attention to the Swiss banks. Later they would become a vital window on the world for the Banco Ambrosiano, landlocked by Italy’s severe laws on the export of currency.
    Their first child, Carlo, was born in July 1953, followed six years later by a daughter, Anna. These were happy times for the family; boom years for the Italian economy and good years for the hard-working banker, who was steadily clawing his way up the Ambrosiano hierarchy. Relief from the strains of work was available in Drezzo, a village on the Swiss border where the family had a weekend home. Here Calvi played the role of gentleman farmer, raising chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs. It was while helping to cut up a turkey that he sliced open the index finger of his right hand. He drove himself to hospital and fainted after giving instructions that the finger was not to be amputated. It required plastic surgery and forced him to wear a protective sheath thereafter, a fact that would later have a bearing on the investigation into his death.
    Francesco Pazienza, Calvi’s financial and security consultant in the last year of his life, has described the impression he made on the occasion of their first private meeting. Calvi was wearing a dark suit, pale blue shirt and sober, dark blue Mila Schön tie, he remembered. ‘When I got to know him well I discovered that he had a wardrobe that was very extensive but entirely devoid of imagination. He had dozens of suits that were all the same and lots of pairs of shoes, all identical and all black,’ he wrote. ‘Only in the summer did he allow himself some small variation on the theme, wearing suits of a slightly less funereal grey.’ 7 His skin colour was milk white, and the few hairs ringing his skull were of an unnatural black, he recalled. For someone so sartorially unadventurous, Calvi did have a touch of vanity: he used to dye his hair almost every day, with the assistance of his wife.
    The house at Drezzo provided a discreet venue for business meetings. In later years Calvi was able to use long walks in the garden to cement his relationship with senior Vatican bank officials and other business associates. Similarly, in the Bahamas, where the family bought a house at Lyford Cay, holidays were occasions for the small-scale entertaining inwhich Calvi felt most at ease. The Sicilian financier Michele Sindona and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus of the Vatican bank, partners in Calvi’s Nassau-based Cisalpine Overseas Bank (later to be known as Banco Ambrosiano Overseas Ltd, or BAOL), would both be houseguests. When the extrovert Marcinkus arrived for the first time, he threw his arms around Clara and started singing ‘
Arrivederci Roma
’. Later, as Clara recalled in her memoir, relations cooled and Marcinkus would stay instead at the home of the bishop of Nassau when he visited the Bahamas for BAOL board meetings. The cause of the tension, she understood from her husband, was the size of the Vatican’s debt to the Banco Ambrosiano.
    Clara Calvi’s memoir records her pride in her husband’s professional achievements. ‘Roberto’s successes made me happy and I am and always was his greatest admirer. Even today I am