Free The Last Supper by Philip Willan Page B

very proud of him and proud of the name I bear. They killed him, they didn’t defeat him,’ she wrote. ‘If he had been able to conclude his very delicate negotiations with Opus Dei he would today be the most powerful man in Italy.’ 8
    Calvi’s widow was lucid and combative when I visited her in an old people’s home in a leafy suburb of Montreal in the summer of 2004. Wheelchair-bound and with the symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease, she was still defending her husband’s memory and accusing his enemies with the same determination she had shown ever since his death, her voice now reduced to an almost inaudible whisper. Gianni Agnelli (the Fiat car magnate), former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani were all on the list. She mentioned the names of others, people still involved in Italian public life or prominent in the Vatican, whom she said her husband had identified to her as members of P2. Andreotti had threatened her husband, warning him that he must not speak to the magistrates, she said, and the wife of the Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi had called her after Roberto’s death, ‘because they wanted to keep me sweet. But I have always spoken out.’
    Her husband kept important papers in London, Clara Calvi said. And she recalled a euphoric phone call received from him shortly before his death. ‘He said to me: “Darling, just be patient for a while, because something marvellous is going to happen that will completely change our lives.” A few hours later he was dead.’ The principal threat to the family came from the Vatican, she was sure of it. But her husband had been ingenuous and had trusted the wrong people. ‘He needed protection because he had so many enemies. When he saw a good business opportunity, he pounced on it. That’s what had made him so many enemies.’ Clara Calvi reserved particular venom for Licio Gelli, who was supposed to have provided that protection: ‘It makes me angry to think he’s still alive.’ And for Flavio Carboni: ‘My husband trusted Carboni, and he turned out to be a murderer.’ Whether or not Mrs Calvi was right to believe this will be determined by the decision of the courts in Rome. Under Italian law a defendant is not considered guilty until two levels of appeal have been exhausted.
    As well as identifying the Vatican as a threat to her husband, Clara Calvi set the drama of his last days within the context of the Cold War. ‘We visited the whole of South America. My husband was setting up banks everywhere,’ she said. ‘Who paid for the Berlin Wall? The pope? It was Roberto who paid. He was a banker, not a charitable foundation. He asked for the money back. They wouldn’t give it.’ 9 Latin America and Eastern Europe: these were the key fields for Roberto Calvi’s political work.
    As the person who was probably closer to her husband than any other, Clara Calvi’s memories provide an indispensable guide to the hopes and fears, and plans, that marked his final days. As someone who has refused to be silenced or cowed by fear, her words provide crucial guidance in reconstructing the forces and factors that may have determined his death. Calvi may not always have told his wife the truth, but her testimony has the authentic ring of genuine personal conviction.

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The Ministry of Fear
    On a May afternoon in 1982, at his country home near Drezzo on the Swiss border, Roberto Calvi took out his handgun and started cleaning it. It was an old 9mm Walther P38 which normally sat in its box in a wardrobe, gathering dust. His daughter Anna asked what he was doing, never having seen him take the revolver out before. ‘If they come, I will shoot,’ he told her, showing her how to hold and aim it. ‘I asked him who on earth might come and he told me that during that period many people could have had an interest in eliminating him, explaining that he had already seen signs that the operation he was working on was creating