The smoke burned black upon the death of the pontiff and kept burning, streaking the sky, while inside, the College of Cardinals convened to decide who would be the next pope. When the decision was made, the smoke would turn white. It would billow forth in its whiteness to fill the Roman sky. This would be the sign that the new pope would appear soon on the balcony at Saint Peter’s. The crowds were already gathering in anticipation, much as they had in the old days, coming down through the Porto Populo amassing along the Tiber and in the square in front of the Basilica.

From our place on Mount Giordano, we saw the dark smoke smudging the horizon.

“These zealots,” said Paolo. “They undermine everything.”

He was in a black mood, weary of the New Piety and suspicious of his colleagues in the Senate. At the same time, new issues were arising, new people to contend with. Paolo was having problems with his own family, his sister and brother-in-law, the man Johnny had replaced as a go-between at Uzio Station. The man had always been a brute, but lately, more and more, had taken his resentment out on his stepson, Dazio.

So Paolo’s sister had sent Dazio to live with us.

Paolo was fond of his nephew, and I was fond of Dazio, too. The press had gotten a hold of this new story and made it into a show, playing up the familial split, the rivalry between the two brothers-in-law, Johnny and Dazio’s stepfather.

“Poor Dazio,” I said. “The press makes everything into a circus.”

“This business with the pope—it’s a circus, too,” my brother said. “Whoever the cardinals choose, it changes nothing.”

Paolo shook his head.

He had thickened since our marriage, and suffered  recently from pains the doctors couldn’t diagnose.

“You’re wrong,” he told Johnny.

Paolo touched his stomach. He was worried. The Italian cardinals attacked him regularly. They spoke out against the government’s failure to go after organized crime. They spoke against the general atmosphere of degeneracy in which a prominent official could marry his concubine, both of their spouses still warm in the grave. Behind the scenes these same critics lobbied for Cardinal Ratzinger, the German papalist who had coined the phrase Nuova Pietà and for whom Whiting himself carried on a public campaign in the pages of Avvenire.

“This is only noise,” my brother said.

“I fear otherwise.”

“Ratzinger is German. What does he care about Italian politics?”

“If he becomes pope, it will be because of the Italian cardinals—and because of Cardinal Whiting. He’ll be indebted to them.  And support my undoing”

The smoke kept rising.

I went inside, and my brother followed.

Johnny took me by the hand.

The tabloids wrote things about Johnny and me, what went on between us. And about Paolo, too. There was a devil’s bond, secrets we had to keep. Not everything the tabloids said was true, but Paolo had lost his lean look. He had stomach complaints and his feet swelled without reason. He sat for hours in his chair, mulling the shadows.