The room was filled with ornate paraphernalia—a processional cross, a ciborium, a chip of bone from Saint Teresa’s tomb, and other relics Whiting had collected over the years. The apartment had a cloistered smell redolent of the man himself, of the clothes that hung in an open armoire, of urine, of holy water, of paper and dust. He had a desk on which he wrote out his diatribes in a small, tedious script. He was fluent in Latin, Italian, English, French, and had an influential column in Avvenire, the Catholic daily. There was a balcony off to the side where he lingered on occasion, ruminating, stepping forward toward the black railing, glancing over the edge, down to the traffic, as if getting ready to address the gathered masses in his imagination.

“The world is profligate,” he said.

He held a remote control in his hand and flicked through the stations. He paused at EWTN, the Catholic station, where some bishops were debating what the Church could do to appeal to modern Europeans.

“It’s not the Church’s job to appeal,” said the old man. “Jesus is not a soft drink.”

“No.”

“He’s not a hamburger.”

“Of course not.”

“He’s not something to be put into a package and consumed.”

He clicked some more.

Past The Powerpuff Girls dubbed in Italian. Past Mick Jagger and Shakira. Past World News Today. Away from the typhoon in Thailand and a drone attack on the Gaza Strip.

Eventually he ended back on the BBC, a reporter in front of a Manhattan hotel. It was the hotel in which Isabella had died, and the reporter was saying that some people believed that Isabella’s death might not have been the accident the New York officials seemed willing to believe. As evidence, these skeptics cited certain irregularities: alleged gaps in the hotel’s security tape, in witnesses’ memories; a lapse in passport protocol; inconsistencies in a passenger list showing who had been on the chartered jet that carried Orsini and his party across the Atlantic. All this suggested to some a sinister hand, a cover-up. The reporter went on to discuss the events preceding Isabella’s death, including the parties she’d been to recently and the celebrities in attendance.

“They don’t mention you, I notice,” said Cardinal Whiting.

“Why would they?” Frank said. “I’m not so well-known.”

“But you were there, at one of those parties.”

Despite the old man’s isolation, he had ways of knowing things. Maybe from one of those aging politicians who’d been at Orsini’s. Even the crooks—those the cardinal condemned—had been known to crawl up these stairs and drop to one knee. I worried what other rumors might have reached him.  Frank, so far as I knew, was ignorant of the affair. Or feigning ignorance.

“And you were there, too, at Orsini’s,” he said to me.