I glanced down at my shoes. They were black and plain and functional, of the type nuns wear. I wore a checkered dress of very little shape, and stockings that bagged. The cardinal gave me a look. Not a pretty look. I felt him peering inside me, as if at something particularly unpleasant only he could see.

“Beware the glamour of evil,” he said.

After dinner the cardinal hobbled onto the balcony and stood teetering with one hand on the rail. You could see he yearned for the lectern. He looked as if he was on the verge of calling out to the passersby, the woman in the too-short skirt, the man on the Vespa, the kid with the cigarette in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. Telling them things they might not want to hear but which were his job to say. How the world had fallen to apostasy and sin.

“The truth will out,” he said, smiling at his cleverness. “Paolo Orsini used his wife’s name to get elected—and certain members of society, even priests and bishops, were taken in by his celebrity. Never mind that he consorts with criminals. Even Isabella’s bodyguard—one wonders why he was dismissed shortly before her murder?”

“No one has called it murder,” I said.

“You are naive.”

We sat on the balcony eating Italian cookies, drinking espresso, and watching the light fade from the Roman sky. It might have been pleasant but for the cardinal, who kept going on about how the senator benefited financially from Isabella’s death. Killing her was much simpler than divorce. After he was done maligning Orsini, the cardinal expounded on the weaknesses of the current pope, who was quite ill. He praised the virtues of the German cardinal he hoped would replace him.

Eventually he turned his attention to his nephew.

“Have you been to confession?”

The old man often raised this question. He regarded it as part of the charge given to him by Frank’s mother: to look after Frank’s spirit as well as his material concerns. Frank would have been wise to say yes, but he couldn’t bring himself to bow to his uncle.

“And you, my dear . . . ?”

I felt his eyes boring into me again. I turned my cheek, but I still didn’t like it, the feeling of him tunneling about inside, sifting through the debris, all those things about me I couldn’t see myself or didn’t want to see. As if he’d been perched there on the Aurelian Wall, watching as my body clenched and trembled, one hand in the dirt and the other clutching my lover’s head. I was sweating again. The scent of the cemetery, this room, the relics, myself, the exhaust of the Roman streets . . .

Frank Paris intervened.

“Uncle,” he said, “I need to talk with you alone.”

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