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  ‘Ah,’ Father Azetti replied, as if he’d been curious, and as if that curiosity was now satisfied.

  ‘Giulio. What is it? Perhaps I can help.’

  Azetti shook his head. ‘Not unless you can intercede with the cardinal. Otherwise . . .’ He shrugged.

  The monsignor did his best. He charmed. He spoke to Azetti as one sophisticated cleric to another. Surely Azetti knew – better than most – how these things were done. There were channels and protocols – formalities! Surely he knew – better than most – how precious the cardinal’s time must be, and how it was the staff’s job to protect him from distraction. Come, let’s walk together.

  No. Grazie. Molto grazie.

  Finally, the monsignor attacked. Really, Azetti, you’re in dereliction of duty. You’ve abandoned your church! There’s been a christening, a death – a funeral mass! What could possibly be so important? People are talking!

  And then he cajoled. If Azetti would confide in him, the monsignor would intercede on his behalf. As it was, the cardinal in all probability did not even know that Azetti was waiting all these long days.

  Azetti shook his head. ‘I can’t tell anyone,’ he said, ‘except the cardinal.’

  Eventually the monsignor bounced angrily to his feet. ‘If you persist in this, Giulio –’

  Azetti tried to think of words that might dilute the monsignor’s wrath, but before he could say anything, Donato Maggio stuck his head in the room.

  ‘The cardinal will see you now,’ he told the priest. Orsini had decided that this was, after all, the easiest way of getting rid of him.

  Stefano Orsini sat behind an enormous wooden desk, his black robes trimmed in crimson, a red skullcap perched atop his head. He was a large man with a loose-skinned, fleshy face and enormous brown eyes. They were the eyes of a dog, a large dog, but not a friendly one. His features tightened for a moment as the priest’s aroma preceded him into the room, and then he looked up. ‘Giulio,’ he said. ‘How very nice to see you. Sit down. I’m told you’ve been waiting for a long time.’

  ‘Your grace.’ Father Azetti sat on the edge of a leather wing chair and waited for Father Maggio to leave the room. His mind was teeming with the words that he’d rehearsed. And then he saw that, rather than leaving, Maggio took a seat near the door and crossed his legs.

  Azetti coughed.

  The cardinal prompted him. ‘So?’

  Azetti glanced in the direction of Father Maggio.

  The cardinal’s eyes shifted from one priest to the other and back again. Finally he shook his head and said, ‘He’s my assistant, Giulio.’

  Azetti nodded.

  ‘And he stays,’ the cardinal added.

  Azetti nodded again. He could see that the cardinal’s patience was wearing thin.

  ‘Is it parole you’re after?’ the cardinal asked in a disdainful voice. ‘Tired of the country life?’

  Azetti heard Father Maggio snicker behind his back. But he didn’t mind. For the first time, he realized that he’d lost something in the countryside – and that was his ambition. But as terrible as that sounded, even to him, he knew in his heart that it wasn’t at all like losing a leg. It was more like being cured of a fever. As his eyes moved around Orsini’s office he realized that despite his nostalgia on that first day, nothing could induce him to return to the machinations of a life within the Vatican. In Montecastello he’d found something more precious than ambition.

  He’d found his faith.

  But this was not something that he could tell Orsini. That was so despite the fact that the cardinal was himself a rarity in the Vatican – he, too, was a true believer, an ardent and steadfast soldier of the cross. Still, Father Azetti knew that Orsini would have no interest in his soul. He was interested in power, and Azetti understood that any profession of faith would not be taken at face value but as a feint or ploy, a political maneuver.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not here on my own behalf.’ He looked into Orsini’s predatory eyes. ‘There’s something the Church needs to know.’ He hesitated. ‘Something that can only be –’

  The cardinal held up a hand and offered a cold smile. ‘Giulio . . . please. Spare me the introductory remarks.’

  Father Azetti sighed. With a nervous glance at Father Maggio, he plunged ahead, forgetting the speech that he’d rehearsed throughout the week. There was a blank moment when his head swarmed with words, and then:

  ‘I’ve heard a confession,’ he stammered. ‘I’ve heard a confession that almost stopped my heart.’

  4

  IN THE DAYS that followed, Cardinal Orsini worried.

  He worried about Man. He worried about God. And he worried about himself. What was he to do? What could anyone do? The implications of Dr. Baresi’s confession were so profound that for the first time in his life Orsini felt that he’d been asked to shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. Obviously, the matter should be taken directly to the Pope, but the Pope was barely conscious half the time, his lucidity flickering in and out like a weak radio signal. An issue like this . . . it could kill him.

  The problem was compounded by the isolation that it imposed. There was no one in whom Cardinal Orsini felt he could confide. Indeed, other than himself, the only person in the Vatican who knew of the matter was Father Maggio – a circumstance for which he had only himself to blame. Azetti hadn’t wanted him there, but he had insisted: He’s my assistant, Giulio. And then a pause. And he stays.

  Why had he said that? Because, he told himself, you’ve spent too much time in the Vatican, and too little in the world. You’re an arrogant man who couldn’t imagine a parish priest having anything of interest to say – and now Donato Maggio is your only confidant.

  Donato Maggio. The thought made him groan out loud. Maggio was a research-archivist and sometime clerk who was not shy about expressing his theological views. A traditionalist who prayed (loudly) for ‘a more muscular Catholicism,’ Maggio had referred more than once to ‘the real mass’ – which was, of course, a barely veiled criticism of the reforms enacted at Vatican II.

  If the Tridentine rite was ‘the real mass’ – because it was said in Latin with the priest’s back to the congregation – then the new mass was a fraud. And, as such, a sacrilege.

  Though he’d never discussed any theological issue with Father Maggio, Cardinal Orsini could guess where the priest stood on an array of issues. Not only would he despise the new mass, in which Latin gave way to English, Spanish, and other living languages, Maggio would also frown on the ability to fulfill the requirement of Sunday worship by attending a service on Saturday night. Like other traditionalists, he would oppose all attempts to modernize the Church in an effort to make it more accessible. With Maggio, however, it wouldn’t be a matter of opposing proposed measures, such as the ordination of women, permitting clergy to marry, or the legitimization of birth control – Maggio’s conservatism went deeper than that. He wanted to roll back reforms already in place. He was a Neanderthal.

  Accordingly, there was no point in asking Maggio’s opinion of what Dr. Baresi had done. Priests like Maggio did not have opinions: they had reflexes, and those reflexes were predictable.

  In the end it didn’t matter. Father Azetti had come to the Vatican with his ticking bomb at a time of unusual activity – which meant that Cardinal Orsini’s isolation didn’t last long. The Pope’s illness was grave enough that the College of Cardinals had begun – discreetly – to caucus its members in search of a suitable successor. Short lists of likely popes – papabiles – were being drafted and revised, and cell phones had been banned inside the Holy Office lest journalists, or others, listen in on conversations that weren’t meant to be overheard.

  It was a busy time in which the ordinary business of the day consisted of secret meetings and whispered confidences. Under the circumstances, with the Pope’s health in precipitous decline, Cardinal Orsini found himself in one smoke-filled room after another. It was a superheated atmosphere in which matters of enorm
ous importance were being discussed at the most incidental encounter: the next Pope, the future of the Church.

  Tormented as he was by Dr. Baresi’s confession, which was more momentous than any of the other matters, it was inevitable that Cardinal Orsini would share the burden that he’d been given with several of his colleagues. And so he did, soliciting the advice of two or three confidants – no more.

  The reaction, in each case, was one of shocked contemplation, followed by the observation that there was nothing to be done – or one thing only, and that too terrible to contemplate. And yet . . . everyone agreed that to do nothing was an action of another kind. And one, moreover, whose consequences might be equally great.

  To do nothing . . . Orsini thought. To do nothing was tantamount to letting the world run down like a windup clock, a clock that had been ticking since the beginning of time.

  The matter was so overwhelming that Orsini’s colleagues inevitably confided in their own friends, and the news spread. Within a week of Azetti’s stammering disclosure in the chambers of Cardinal Orsini, debate began to rage inside the walls of the Vatican. It was a secret debate in which one prelate after another wandered the archives of the Vatican’s library in search of guidance that, in the end, was nowhere to be found. There was no wisdom from the past that would settle this matter. It was agreed that the problem raised by Dr. Baresi’s sin was unanticipated in the history of the Church – and this for the simple reason that it had never before been possible.

  The result was a vacuum of dogma that ultimately yielded a consensus of its own. After weeks of informal argument, the Curia decided that whatever Dr. Baresi had done, it was God’s will. Accordingly, there was nothing for anyone else to do, unless and until the Pope recovered – or there was a new Pope to whom the matter might be submitted. At which point His Holiness might then address the matter ex cathedra. Until then everyone should back off. And so they did.

  Except Father Maggio, who, learning of this decision, took the next train to Naples.

  The offices of Umbra Domini, or ‘Shadow of the Lord,’ were in a four-story villa on the Via Viterbo, a few blocks from the Neapolitan opera house. Founded in 1966, not long after the Second Vatican Council was gaveled to an end, the order’s canonical status had remained the same for thirty years: it was a ‘secular institute,’ with more than fifty thousand members, and ‘missions’ in thirteen countries. While it had long sought the more elevated status of a ‘personal prelature,’ most Vatican watchers were of the opinion that Umbra Domini was fortunate to be in the Church at all.

  The order’s objections to the reforms of Vatican II had been broad, deep, and loud. Its spokesmen attacked the Council’s efforts to ‘democratize’ the faith, seeing in them a surrender to the forces of modernism, Zionism, and socialism. The most galling of the reforms, in Umbra Domini’s view, was the abandonment of the Latin mass, which shattered more than a thousand years of tradition and severed the common bond that held Catholics together in every corner of the world. In Umbra’s view, the vernacular mass was ‘a bastard rite, a Catholic-Lite version of a God-given liturgy.’ According to the organization’s founder, the new mass could only be explained in one way: obviously, the Throne of St. Peter had been occupied by the Antichrist throughout the deliberations of Vatican II.

  Nor was this all. While the order’s beliefs were not encoded in a public document, it was known to condemn the liberal view that other religions have elements of truth, and that – as Vatican II proclaimed – their followers ‘stand in the love of God.’ If this was so, the order argued, then the Church was guilty of persecution and mass murder. For how else to explain sixteen hundred years of papally mandated, doctrinal intolerance, culminating in the Inquisition? Unless, as Umbra Domini insisted, the doctrine had been correct all along, and followers of other faiths were in fact infidels – and enemies of the true Church.

  Critics of the order called for the excommunication of its followers, but the Pope hesitated, unwilling to provoke a schism. For years Vatican emissaries met secretly with Umbra Domini’s leaders, until, in the end, a compromise was reached. The order was given official recognition by the Vatican, and permission to conduct the mass in Latin, on condition that it take what amounted to a vow of silence. In future, Umbra would issue no public statements, and all proselytizing would be restricted to word-of-mouth.

  Inevitably, Umbra Domini turned inward. Its leaders disappeared from public view and ceased to give interviews. Occasionally a newspaper article appeared in the United States or Europe, warning that the organization was becoming a cult. The New York Times accused it of ‘obsessive secrecy and coercive recruiting practices,’ while noting the immense wealth that it had somehow managed to accumulate in only a few years. In England the Guardian went further. Pointing to ‘the improbable number of politicians, industrialists, and magistrates’ who are members of the group, the newspaper hinted that ‘a neofascist political organization is emerging in the guise of a religious order.’

  The allegation was dismissed, charmingly, by the very man Father Maggio had come to Naples to see. This was Umbra Domini’s youthful and charismatic ‘Helmsman,’ Silvio della Torre.

  At the time he addressed the allegations about the order’s neofascist nature, della Torre spoke to an audience of new members – which included, way at the back of the crowd, pressed in fact against a wall – Donato Maggio. The address took place in the tiny and ancient, Neapolitan Church of San Eufemio – an edifice that had been given to the order in its early years and one that still served as its ‘home’ pulpit.

  It was a building with a history. The Christian church was built in the eighth century, atop the site of an ancient temple to Mithras. Despite its antiquity, the church building had been so far ‘down on its knees’ in 1972 – the roof leaking and the walls crumbling – that the only alternative to donating it to Umbra was to permit it to be razed for the sake of public safety.

  Umbra had restored the church, as it had promised, although there was little in the primitive building to appeal to the ‘culture vultures’ who swooned at the sights available to them in other churches. Within a half day’s drive they might behold the works of Giotto or Michelangelo or Leonardo, or Fra Lippo Lippi. Of Raphael and Bernini. San Eufemio hardly attracted the art lovers.

  True, the exterior was graced with a pair of eighth-century cypress doors – quite plain, however enduring. But the interior space was cramped and gloomy. There were virtually no windows, and those few shed little light, because they were made of the mineral selenite, a precursor of glass that was translucent in a strong light but nowhere near transparent.

  And the other attractions were somewhat . . . off-putting. The heart of a currently out of favor saint was contained in an ugly reliquary. And pride of place was given to a very old and spooky Annunciation. The painting itself was so darkened with age that only a brilliant day permitted enough light to make it visible. And then: a wooden-faced Virgin contemplated the Holy Spirit, which was not depicted as the traditional dove but as a disembodied eye floating in midair.

  From within this gloomy space, della Torre shone like a candle. On the day he responded to press allegations that Umbra was a neofascist organization – which was the day Donato Maggio joined Umbra Domini – the young priest handled the controversy with consummate ease. First he smiled, and then thrust his hands into the air and shook his head ruefully.

  ‘The press,’ he began, ‘the press amazes me, because it is at once utterly inconsistent – and absolutely dependable. First, they complain that we talk too much,’ he said, alluding to the days when Umbra loudly trumpeted its views. ‘And now,’ he continued, ‘they complain that we don’t talk at all. Because it suits their purpose, they mistake privacy for secrecy, fraternity for conspiracy – and so prove the point of their . . . dependability.’ An amused murmur rose from the congregation. ‘The press always gets everything wrong,’ della Torre said in conclusion. ‘And you can count upon it.’ The newbies grinned.


  For his part, Father Maggio was at once a Dominican and also a member of Umbra. There were many priests in Umbra’s ranks; since it was a lay order, there was no contradiction in this dual allegiance. But Donato Maggio was perhaps a bit unusual in that he was not only a member of a religious order, but one who worked inside the Vatican. Therefore, he had a foot in two worlds, and understood the fear that each provoked in the other. To the Vatican, Umbra Domini was a barely tolerable extremist group, a sort of Catholic Hezbollah, waiting to explode. For its part, Umbra Domini saw the Vatican for what it was, or what it seemed to be: an obstacle. Massive, senile, and there.

  Though Father Maggio had never formally met Silvio della Torre, there was no difficulty in arranging a private meeting. On learning that one of Cardinal Orsini’s aides wished to speak with him on a matter of great urgency, della Torre suggested dinner that same evening. It was possible, Maggio thought, that della Torre had leapt to the conclusion that his position as secretary to Cardinal Orsini was a permanent one, but . . . so what? Even if Maggio was a lowly archival mouse, della Torre would want to hear what he had to say.

  They met in a little trattoria, not far from della Torre’s church. The restaurant was called I Matti, and though it was rather ordinary-looking from the outside, it was surprisingly elegant within. Father Maggio was greeted deferentially by the maître d’ and escorted up a flight of stairs to a private room above the ground floor. The room held a single table, which rested on a plank floor beneath a tall Palladian window. There was a small fireplace, where a jumble of wood crackled and sparked, and antique sconces that dispensed a golden glow. On the table, a white cloth, candles, and a sprig of baby’s breath.

  Silvio della Torre was gazing out the window when Father Maggio entered the room. As he turned, acknowledging the maître d’s ‘Scusi, signore,’ Maggio saw what had been hidden by the darkness of the church: that the head of Umbra Domini was dramatically good-looking. He was a man in his mid-thirties, broad-shouldered and tall. Quietly, but expensively, dressed. His thick, curly hair was so black it seemed almost blue in the light. But what surprised Maggio the most were della Torre’s eyes. They were a faded aquamarine, neither blue nor green, and rimmed by thick, luxuriant lashes.