In the end, he improvised a polishing method using walnut shells and an electromagnetic suspension device.

“When your mind fails you, seek answers from your spirit.”

Mind Fire was purchased for more than her father had made as a mechanic over the previous seven years. And he had lived for another seven years before a mammoth bronze casting fell over and crushed him to death. She had founded her first art gallery with the inheritance.

“You must imagine your way through obstacles.” His voice spoke to her. “Turn off your mind and let your feelings loose.”

“Give me the inspiration, Dad,” Zoe said softly as she fought back tears. ‘This needs to be a masterpiece of imagination. Help me, Dad.”

ELEVEN

The Nochspitze is a ragged splinter of granite rising some eight thousand feet above sea level in the Austrian Tyrol southwest of Innsbruck. It’s an inhospitable mountain: cold, steep, bereft of trees, and inaccessible to all but birds, skilled rock climbers, and those fortunate enough to ride in the private cable gondola that travels to the massive chalet perched just below the mountain’s summit.

The chalet had originally been built as a guest house in 1921 by an Austrian innkeeper who had hoped to lure skiers up from the slopes. It had twenty-five guest rooms, all with their own baths and fireplaces, and a dining room situated in a soaring A-frame wing that cantilevered out over the precipitous cliffsides.

But the very isolation that made the inn attractive also served as a barrier to its success. Transporting guests to the inn required a lengthy trip up winding switchback roads from Innsbruck to the tiny cable car station at the mountain’s base. In those days, unpaved roads made automobile travel impossible, so the journey had to be made by horse-drawn vehicle. In wet, frozen, or snowy weather, the trip was either impossible or so arduous as to be completely unattractive to prospective guests. The inn went bankrupt in 1924 when the gondola cable snapped, killing five people.

Two years later, a wealthy Italian industrialist bought the inn to use as a private retreat and conference center for his business, and upon his death seven years later willed it to the Catholic Church.

Behind the windowpanes of what had once been the inn’s dining room, Cardinal Neils Braun, archbishop of Vienna and head of the Pope’s Secretariat for Non-Believers, stood at military parade rest, his back straight, feet apart, hands clasped at the small of his back. He wore a heavy alpine sweater, twill slacks, and light hiking boots. His scarlet robes hung in the closet of his room, where they always stayed when he came here. He ran a hand through his thick shock of salt and pepper hair as he gazed absently through the frost-glazed windows down at the tiny human specks gliding along the ski slopes below him.

He looked across the valley and in the distance tried to pick out a mountain face he had not yet climbed. From the front of the chalet, he could see the Olympic slalom runs of the Axamer Lizum where Jean-Claude Killy made history in 1968. He squinted now as the afternoon sun edged its way from behind a cloud and burned deep shadows into the painfully white landscape. Overhead, the clouds hurried swiftly across the sky like tall ships under full sail. They were the remnants of a storm that had dumped nearly half a foot of snow in the Austrian Tyrol the night before.