Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something. Maybe you have to be that way when you’re young—you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we’d all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the arse. In the end I winkled his father’s number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn’t accept that we could go no farther. But his motives—and I still wasn’t sure what they were—were, unlike Daniel’s, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This was my issue—my sister—and I didn’t want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order’s complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pass to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa’s old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no passes were forthcoming.

“It’s a fucking conspiracy,” Peter groused. “I’m not exaggerating—I wouldn’t use that word lightly. And it’s all connected to the Order. These bastards are working together to keep us out. We’ve hit an outer ring of defense, and we’ve barely started . . .”

After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my “tame Jesuit” again. A couple of days after that, Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Claudio said, grinning. “But in this context secret just means ‘private’ . . .” He met me at the Vatican’s Porta Sant’ Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor passes at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.