Seth thought of Stratton’s man and how he had let Seth leave the UCLA library the night Tony Bradford was murdered.

“So over all these years since the war,” Morgen continued, “I made sure to post my important letters to Jacob Yost and make telephone calls to him in secret. Of course, the Vatican knew I was working with him to try and locate looted works of art. All of our letters and calls regarding the art were done in the normal manner and I’m certain were intercepted by whoever in the Curia is having me watched.

“But the situation changed drastically about a year ago. Last…”—Morgen closed his eyes for a moment—”last January, Yost and I managed to recover a semifamous painting. It was one of the early works of Pissarro, and had been discreetly offered for sale by a former SS colonel living under a new identity in Portugal. We led the police to his villa on the coast near Lisbon, where they took the painting and the colonel into custody. The incident received quite a lot of attention from the journalists.

“As the result of all the publicity, a man I had known forty years before as Franz Bohles von Halbach called me from Kreuzlingen. He was the SS sergeant who came to me that night forty years ago and asked forgiveness for the shooting of the village boy. He was also the one who had shown me the shroud and the Sophia Passion in their protective vault in the mine.

“Well, von Halbach was now very wealthy and calling himself Willi Max,” Morgen said, as he pushed his chair back and crossed his legs, trying to get comfortable on the hard wooden seat. “Max—von Halbach—was also dying and the moral issues he had managed to ignore or repress for forty years had begun to catch up with him. The guilt-wracked young sergeant had become a remorseful dying old man, afraid for his mortal soul.

“He had grown a bit more sophisticated in the forty years since he had come to my home in Alt Aussee for confession. He knew the significance of the painting, knew it held the keys to recovering the shroud and the Sophia Passion. And so he didn’t show up on my doorstep with painting in hand. And a good thing, for the painting would probably now be in the hands of my enemies in the Curia.

“No, realizing that secrecy was important, he decided to act discreetly. He contacted Yost, who immediately called me.”

Gunther interrupted to suggest that they eat. The men outside kept watch in shifts, coming in one by one to wolf down cold sausages and bread before continuing their watches. The men were mostly in their fifties and sixties and deferred to Morgen.

“They used to be priests,” Morgen interrupted his story to explain the men outside. “They took all they could of treachery and deceit from the church. But even after leaving the church, they felt the call to serve God. They live like priests now, but in service to God, not the church. They help a dwindling number of us within the church to fight its dishonesty and abuses.”