I blink as if I don’t understand. The nun clicks her tongue and waves at me to follow her. In relief, I obey.
Then the housekeeper speaks up. “No,” she says. “He’s lying. I talked to him in Italian.”
* * *
I’M BROUGHT TO THE lobby. A gendarme is waiting there. He takes me across the courtyard to the gendarme station inside the Palace of the Tribunal. There’s a holding cell inside. Instead of putting me in it, he instructs me to sit on a bench by the front desk and empty my pockets.
Out comes the lunch receipt. The parking ticket. My phone. The contents of my wallet.
He looks twice when he sees a Vatican ID. When he notices the name on it, he turns back to me and says, “I remember you.”
I remember him, too. He was one of the gendarmes at Castel Gandolfo on the night of Ugo’s murder.
“What the hell were you doing in the Casa, Father?”
The profanity is a sign that I have lost his respect. That I’m no longer worthy of being treated like a priest.
“I want to make a phone call,” I say.
I’m staring at the parking ticket, trying to memorize the license plate on it.
He thinks it over, then shakes his head. “I need to talk to my captain.”
To hell with his captain. “My uncle is Cardinal Ciferri,” I say. “Give me the phone.”
He flinches when he hears Uncle Lucio’s name. But my surname is different from Lucio’s, so he feels confident enough to doubt.
“Stay put, Father,” he says. “I’ll be back.”
* * *
THE CAPTAIN SETS HIM straight. Twenty minutes later, Don Diego arrives to pick me up. I expect Diego to be furious. And he is. But not with me.
“You’re lucky you don’t lose your job for this,” he tells the gendarme. “Don’t ever humiliate a member of this family again.”
And perhaps it says something about our country that the policeman, knowing he’s in the right, still looks afraid.
The sun is low on the horizon as we walk up the path toward Lucio’s palace. Diego doesn’t say a word. His silence conveys that I’m in a kind of trouble that it would be above his pay grade to describe. But I find it impossible to focus on him. All I see in my mind’s eye is Cardinal Boia staring back at me from between those curtains.
At the door to the palace, I say, “Thanks, Diego. But I’m not coming in.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s somewhere else I need to be.”
It’s five of eight. I have an appointment with Michael Black.
“But your uncle—”
“I know.”
“His orders about this were very clear.”
“I’ll apologize some other time.”
And I can feel him staring at me as I walk away.
THE SUN NEVER SHINES on the north face of Saint Peter’s. On hot days, this is where priests turn up, mosslike, gathering to sneak cigarettes in the long cool shadows. The stone walls are forty feet thick at these corners and rise higher than the cliffs of Dover. Hell itself couldn’t warm them.
At this hour, all the other doors are locked. The sampietrini check the basilica at dark, every staircase, every nook. But a sliver of pale light glows beneath this side door. Michael must know a sampietrino who owes him a favor.