I slip inside and drift through the cool air like a grit of sand at the bottom of the sea. Tourists visiting here by day see the marble floor and the sky-high canopy, but this church has more hiding places in between than even most priests know. There are stairways hidden from view, which lead to chapels built into the pillars themselves, where clergy can rehearse and worship away from the eyes of laymen. There are dressing rooms—sacristies—where altar boys help priests vest for Mass. Overhead, tucked behind the stage lights, are the unreachable balconies that even the sampietrini have no way to clean except by dangling from ropes, swinging through the air by the metal hooks screwed into these walls. And connecting everything like arteries is a network of passageways within the walls. Between the inner and outer skin of the basilica are tunnels through which a man can travel around the whole church without ever being seen. For those reasons, no priest ever believes he’s alone here. So no priest ever comes here for confidentiality.
Michael knows that. It must be exactly what he’s counting on. This is the last place anyone would come looking for two priests meeting in the night.
I emerge from a passage beneath an old pope’s tomb onto the main floor of the basilica. All around me is a weightless, twinkling dark. From around a corner comes a sound. A metal click, as of a lock turning.
“Alex?” I hear him say. “Is that you?”
I follow it into the north transept. When Michelangelo designed Saint Peter’s, he planned a Greek cross, all four arms the same length. But then a nave was added, making the Greek cross into a Latin one, its long side facing east. Where I now stand is the right crossbeam, the only part of the main floor that is cordoned off to tourists. For most Eastern Catholics, it’s an unfamiliar place. Along the walls are the booths where pilgrims come to confess. The confessionals are built like triple coffins, with a priest’s stall in the middle and an open compartment on either side. Eastern Catholics, though, confess in the open. Only because of the years I’ve spent in this basilica do I recognize the sound of the heavy wooden door of a priest’s compartment being unlocked.
“Michael,” I whisper. “It’s me.”
The door opens.
For the first time in years, I rest eyes on the living Michael Black.
* * *
IT WAS SIXTEEN YEARS ago that he disappeared. Right after the carbon-dating verdict, my father returned to the Turin hotel room they’d been sharing and discovered that Michael was gone. He wasn’t on the train back to Rome, or in the office the next Monday. My father tried to track him down, but it wasn’t long before Father himself began to disappear into the depression that would become his grave. The search petered out. We never saw Michael again.
Only later did I learn what had happened. On the way out of Turin, an Orthodox reporter had confronted Michael and blamed him for luring a few naïve Orthodox priests into our Catholic humiliation. Michael took away his tape recorder and beat him with it until the reporter ended up in a hospital. Only because the Turin police weren’t about to prosecute a Catholic priest for defending their city’s relic did he escape punishment. So deals were made, and Michael was sent for treatment. No one could’ve been naïve enough, in those days, to believe that a few months in a mountain facility would cure him of anything serious. But maybe nobody really believed it was serious. Yet.
He’d always been unruly. His language had been coarse. But Italians understood that he was an American, a cowboy. The real trouble only started after he came back from the mountains. That was when he got picked up by the Secretariat.
There are places in the world where the Church has to fight for its life. Priests are imprisoned. Kidnapped. Even killed on the street. The Secretariat recruits a certain type of priest for those places. The American archbishop who preceded Uncle Lucio in the Governor’s Palace was almost as tall as Simon, and twice as burly. On a papal trip to Manila, when a man with a bayonet tried to attack the Holy Father, the American grabbed the attacker and tossed him through the air. Michael was half the size of that archbishop, but in someone’s eyes he had those makings.