“Well, perhaps we can hope for a miracle,” Braun said. “You do believe in those still, do you not?”

“Of course I believe in miracles,” Morgen said. “Every breath I take is a miracle.”

“Then let’s see what you may remember today,” Braun said as he leaned over to turn on the cassette recorder.

“As you wish, Your Eminence,” Morgen said, suppressing the sigh he felt.

“Dawn came up all bloody red when I was only halfway across the lake,” Morgen began. “I had hoped to be across the frozen surface of the lake—the Alt Aussersee—before the sun came up, but the snow was very deep. I had been running from the SS for more than three hours and I knew they were gaining on me; it was like one of those nightmares where your feet are mired and you’re running in slow motion as a locomotive bears down on you with this hellish mechanical roar.”

Braun’s face wore a compassionate look. “I understand that you no longer have that dream?”

Morgen studied his face for a moment, trying to assess the cardinal’s sincerity. “I no longer wake up screaming from it.”

The cardinal nodded. “What did you do that morning?”

“I ran. I prayed. I recited the Twenty-third Psalm many times.” Morgen looked for a reaction, and, finding none, continued. “I had run all the way from the Salzbergwerk—the salt mine at Habersam Mountain. I saw the relic in the abandoned mine. I sneaked in. The SS guarding the entrance thought I was one of the clergy working with the Reich. They had let me see the shroud.”

Morgen’s face went blank and dreamy. “I held it,” he looked triumphantly at the cardinal. “I actually held it, the gold box with the sparkling jewels. I looked at the things inside and I read many of the documents that had lain inside for almost two thousand years. I still can’t believe that the things that I held in my hands have felled Popes, deposed governments, made and broken empires for almost twenty centuries. Every day that I think about it—and be assured, Your Eminence, that I think about this every day—I cannot understand how something so holy has inspired so much evil. Men have corrupted, murdered, lied, and stolen for it all in the name of God. And how it kept Pius XII silent on the excesses of Hitler’s Reich.”

“We don’t talk about that,” Braun snapped.

Behind his best smile of beneficence, Morgen seethed. A righteous anger rose in his chest, cut through his fear, and steadied his nerves. That someone could do this to his church, in the name of his God! Father Morgen looked about him with steadied vision, details growing sharper.

“They came for me, down from the hills above Fischerndorf,” Morgen continued.

“I could see the faint dots of their electric torches. I was encouraged because it looked as if the size of the force had dwindled. Then I heard the distant static of their voices and knew that they were gaining on me.”