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take one to be polite, but he’d never enjoyed them, and their friendship hadn’t required that sort of courtesy for years.
    “I want you to head straight for the lion’s den,” Lorenzo said, drawing on his cigar to get it going. “In the nineteenth century, before there was an Italy, rebellions up and down the peninsula raised questions about the secular power of the papacy. The Church in the world, Thomas.”
    “Your favorite subject.”
    Lorenzo rolled his eyes in mock despair. “ In the world, of the world—completely different states! Have you learned nothing, Father Kelly?”
    If he’d learned nothing else, Thomas had learned that particular distinction well and truly in his years with Lorenzo Cossa. He couldn’t help grinning.
    Lorenzo grunted. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? I suppose that’s a good sign, that your sense of humor, such as it is, is returning. May I get back to the nineteenth century?”
    “Please.”
    “The questions about the Church’s secular power became questions about spiritual power. Do you see what I’m saying? These men followed their doubts to their logical end. Don’t run from that: study it. If your faith is strong—as I know it is—you’ll survive this encounter and be the better for it.”
    “And if not?”
    Lorenzo held Thomas’s eyes. “I’m offering no promises. But at the least, you’ll have added to the store of human knowledge. Is that, in itself, such a poor goal?”
    It had not been, and Thomas had worked toward it, at first mechanically, then with growing animation. Lorenzo’s prescription had proven to be precisely the cure for Thomas’s spiritual ailment. Close study of the words and actions of men whose sworn enemy was the Church gave Thomas the tools, the time, and in some way the courage, to sort out the roots of his own faith and the roots of his doubts. The doubts, he’d begun to understand, flowed from received wisdom, unexamined assumptions. Thomas—really? The faith sprang from someplace simpler, deeper: the peace he’d always felt in the presence of God. The questions the new voice was asking were only that: questions. Not sly statements of fact, just uncertainties. Legitimate; but standing against them was that undeniable, palpable sense of being home.
    Thomas was rock-certain that without Lorenzo’s help then, and in the late-night calls in the weeks and months that followed, he’d have made the huge and heavy mistake of valuing the new voice over the old peace. He’d have left his vocation, he’d have left the Church. Now, eight years later, with Thomas secure in his decision and the direction of his life, Lorenzo was asking Thomas for help.
    How could he say no?

4

    Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa replaced the ornate receiver and stared sourly at the telephone on his desk. How much had been spent to rewire these ridiculous porcelain antiques to modern standards? He relit his cigar, sighing. That they’d go to that trouble proved, yet again, the soundness of his argument: the Church, Lorenzo Cossa’s home, his chosen and very nearly his sole family, had lost its bearings. Was wandering in the wilderness. The useful elements of the modern world—functioning electronics, for example, and comfortable clothing—it eschewed in favor of gilt and ermine. But suggest a Latin Mass, or offer the once-obvious idea that the contemplation of a saint’s relics could be of spiritual use, and you were derided as pathetically old-fashioned.
    All right, then, he was. And from now on, he’d use his cell phone.
    As he puffed the cigar, the Cardinal’s mood improved. Thomas was coming, would be here in two days. Unlike Lorenzo, Thomas didn’t grow short-tempered at the Church’s frivolities; he either shrugged them off, or actually didn’t notice them, so focused was he on the high-altitude joys of recondite research. Not only a born churchman, a born Jesuit. Born and, once Lorenzo had found him, led, directed, and guided. Thomas Kelly had been