Over the past sixty years, he had had days when he felt perfectly well except for the blindness in his right eye. On those days, he wanted to ski or ice-skate again, but he knew that was toying with suicide. So he walked, kept in good physical condition, but learned to treat his body like it was old nitroglycerine.

He reached the landing on the second floor and walked slowly down the long corridor toward the telephone. The young priest did not follow Morgen to the telephone. Instead he walked quickly to the abbot’s room and rapped respectfully on the door.

“Father Morgen has another telephone call, Your Eminence,” the young priest said after stepping into the abbot’s simply furnished room.

“Thank you very much,” the abbot replied. And with a nod of his head, the abbot dismissed the young priest The young priest was tempted to tell Morgen about the order the abbot had issued. He and the other novice priests were to notify the abbot or his assistant whenever Morgen received a call. No explanation. But then, explanations weren’t expected by novices; they were just to give blind obedience. Still the young priest thought, there seemed something … dishonest about the whole affair.

The abbot thought much the same thing as he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and checked to make sure that the small tape recorder the CDF men from the Vatican had given to him was functioning. The men had first arrived there two days after Easter in 1962, just after Morgen had been assigned to the parish. The abbot had been a younger man then and had protested both the tapping of the hallway telephone and the order that he be forced to spy on one of his own priests. His protests were answered first by the archbishop of the diocese and later by a cardinal from the Vatican. Finally, when he continued to object, he had been called to Rome and told in no uncertain words that further protests would not be tolerated. And in the end they had told him nothing about the reason for the telephone taps.

He tried to deduce the reasons by listening to the tapes, despite the injunctions against it. The calls had been to a wide variety of people, art dealers and collectors—particularly a Zuricher namad Yost—police investigators, and government officials. The calls that initially raised the abbot’s eyebrows were the ones to or from former Nazis. At first the abbot thought the Vatican suspected Morgen of being a former Nazi himself. But that didn’t reconcile with the way the priest had received his injuries. Then, as now, Morgen had seemed like a frail, harmless old man, unable to handle a full cleric’s load, and who instead was allowed to indulge his hobby of trying to locate pieces of art stolen by the Nazis so he could return them to their rightful owners.

He had had some minor successes, and had even been written up in the Abend Zeitung by a reporter, Johanna Kerschner, who had taken an interest in him and his work.