“This stuff is incredible. And I believe I still haven’t seen the half of it. I think there has been a relationship between the Vatican and the Order that goes back to the founding of them both. Surely the Order has provided funds to the popes over the centuries. Surely it has provided refuge or support in turbulent times—perhaps it has sponsored one candidate for holy offices over another.

“And in that great scrinium you describe, which unlike the Vatican Archive hasn’t been burned by emperors or chewed by rats or plundered by Napoléon, there are secrets that no pope could bear to have revealed, even in these enlightened times. George, no wonder your tame Jesuit hovered over me all day. This stuff is explosive—your Order has got the pope by the balls! . . . George, you have to go back down there.”

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

“Show me Lucia,” I said to my sister.

She shook her head. “George, George—”

“Never mind the bullshit. Show me Lucia.”

But she just sat back in her chair and sipped her coffee.

I tried to keep up the pressure, tried to maintain my angry front. But it was hard. For one thing we weren’t alone. Inside the Crypt, you were never alone.

I had finally succumbed to Peter’s pressure, confronted my own complicated fears, and returned to the Crypt.

This time Rosa brought me to a place she called the peristylium. It was a small chamber, crudely cut out of the rock—but it contained a kind of garden, stone benches, trellises, a small fountain. There were even growing things here, exotic mushrooms sprouting in trays of dark soil, their colors bright and unreal. The garden was obviously very old, its walls polished smooth by centuries of soft contacts. A small stand supplied coffee, sweets, and cakes. Anywhere else this would have been a Starbucks concession, but not here; there were no logos on Crypt coffee cups.

Like everywhere else, the little garden was full of the ageless women of the Crypt. It was like an open-air café in a crowded shopping street, maybe, or a crowded airport concourse, with a dense, fluid, constantly changing, never thinning crowd. But the grammar of this crowd was different, the way they squeezed past each other, smiled, touched—for all these people were family. They talked brightly, loudly, and continually, sitting in circles cradling their coffees, close enough that their knees or shoulders touched. They would even kiss each other on the lips, softly, but not sexually; it was as if they were tasting each other.