“This is what I’ll find in the Order?”

“I’m telling you that the Order is like a family, but a family sixteen centuries deep. These are very close bonds, George. You will find your sister has exchanged one family for another—and she may not want to reverse that exchange.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

He spread those long pianist’s fingers on the table. “It’s your choice. But first let me show you my archaeological project. No, I insist.” He snapped his fingers; the waiter responded immediately.

It turned out his project concerned a small church called San Clemente, some minutes’ walk away, on the other side of the Colosseum. As a guest of Claudio’s I didn’t have to pay any entrance fee. Inside and out the church looked unprepossessing.

“But,” said Claudio enthusiastically, “it is one of Rome’s best examples of a ‘layered’ church.” By which he meant one building laid down on top of another. He took me down through the layers. It was a fascinating, eerie experience.

“You have an eighteenth-century facade, behind which is this twelfth-century basilica. Here is a rather remarkable mosaic of that period, showing the triumph of the Cross . . . But below all that we have a still earlier church, from the fourth century. I am working with some Dominican monks on the excavation of this layer.” Not that anybody was working here today. “And below that is a mithraeum.” This had probably originally been a town house of the imperial days, dedicated in the first century for use as a temple to the god Mithras, a secretive cult for men only. There was a faded fresco on one wall. It had been of the wife of an emperor, said Claudio, but retouched later to make it a portrait of the Madonna and Child. “And we believe there are layers yet to be unturned under that as well . . .”

He smiled in the gloom. “Look around you, George. Consider the deep layers of history, the extended and changing usage, of this one small church alone; and consider how little we understand even of this patch of ground. Then remember you are in Rome, where everything is drenched in history, in continuity through change. And then think of the Order. Rather like the Vatican, the Order is woven into this fabric of history and humanity . . .”

I was beginning to form an impression that this smooth clergyman was a lot less forthcoming than his appearance suggested. He was good at eating up time, at deflecting my questions, at probing into my personality, uttering vague forebodings and generating doubt: better at all that bullshit than putting himself on the line and taking responsibility to do anything. Maybe that’s a quality you need to get along in the Vatican, I thought; the Church hasn’t survived two thousand years by being proactive. But it wasn’t helping me.