Somehow, like the traffic, the work got done, things sorted themselves out.

The Jesuit mother church is called the Gesu, just a block from the Venezia. Claudio Nervi was waiting for me on the pavement outside. “Call me Claudio,” he said, shaking my hand, after I greeted him as “Father.”

He was perhaps fifty and his hair was neatly combed silver-gray. His eyes were blue, but his thin face was deeply tanned—he was handsome, in an aging-patrician way. He wore a black suit with the regulation priest’s white collar, but the suit was suspiciously well cut, and I wondered if it came from a design house. He seemed poised, confident, intelligent.

“Well now—” He stretched his long arms. “—welcome to Rome. It’s good to meet you, and I hope I can help you with your difficulty.”

I thanked him. “Your English is good.” It was, with the kind of upper-crust accent so familiar from Noël Coward films that nobody in England dares use in public nowadays.

He smiled. “I spent some years studying in a seminary near Oxford. Look, are you in a rush? Would you like to see the church? . . .”

I followed him into the gloom of the Gesu.

A handful of worshipers, old folk, sat patiently in the pews. The church was sumptuously decorated, as many Roman churches are, with a lush Baroque painting on one wall.

But on one high side altar, a human arm was on display.

At first I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. I stepped closer. On top of that altar was a reliquary, an elaborate oval casket in gold and crystal, with an angel floating beside it. And inside the casket there was indeed a human arm, intact from the elbow socket down. There were even bits of flesh, black and withered, clinging to the bones.

Claudio was murmuring softly, “Many visitors are struck by the wealth of Roman churches. One looks at every surface, and the eye is greeted by treasure, and dazzled. But they are after all the result of two millennia of dedicated wealth accretion—one can’t put it any other way—although today the Vatican is not stupendously rich; it is less wealthy than many of the larger American dioceses, for instance . . . Oh. I see you have met our hero.”

The arm turned out to be a relic of Saint Francis Xavier, who in the sixteenth century had been a Jesuit missionary to India and Japan. He had died of a fever on an island off the coast of China, and had been buried there. The Jesuit general in Rome had ordered the body exhumed and reburied on Goa—and that the right arm be cut off at the elbow, to be enshrined back in Rome.

I shuddered. “The Catholic Church always did major on relics.”