There was silence for a time and then Kalingemala Lopore reached across the small table, lifting Emilio’s bowed head with blunt, strong fingers, and smoothing away the tears. Vincenzo Giuliani had always thought of Emilio as dark, but with those powerful brown hands cupping his face, he looked ghostly, and then Giuliani realized that Sandoz had nearly fainted. Emilio hated being touched, loathed unexpected contact. Lopore could not have known this and Giuliani took a step forward, about to explain, when he realized that the Pope was speaking.

Emilio listened, stone-faced, with the quick shallow movement of the chest that sometimes betrayed him. Giuliani could not hear their words, but he saw Sandoz freeze, and pull away, and stand and begin to pace. "I made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul, Your Holiness. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar," Emilio said in the soft, musical Latin that a young Vince Giuliani had admired and envied when they were in formation together. "Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me." Sandoz turned away, trembling. "God filled me, and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls, Your Holiness. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was in love with God, and all the children were mine."

Giuliani, stunned, felt his eyes fill. Yes, he thought. Yes.

But when Emilio turned again and faced Kalingemala Lopore, he was not weeping. He came back to the table and placed his ruined hands on its battered wood, face rigid with rage. "And now the garden is laid waste," he whispered. "The wives and the husbands and the children are all dead. And there is nothing left but ash and bone. Where was our Protector? Where was God, Your Holiness? Where is God now?"

The answer was immediate, certain. "In the ashes. In the bones. In the souls of the dead, and in the children who live because of you—"

"Nothing lives because of me!"

"You’re wrong. I live. And there are others."

"I am a blight. I carried death to Rakhat like syphilis, and God laughed while I was raped."

"God wept for you. You have paid a terrible price for His plan, and God wept when He asked it of you—"

Sandoz cried out and backed away, shaking his head. "That is the most terrible lie of all! God does not ask. I gave no consent. The dead gave no consent. God is not innocent."

The blasphemy hung in the room like smoke, but it was joined seconds later by Jeremiah’s. "He hath led me and brought me into darkness, and not into light. He hath set me in dark places as those who are dead forever. And when I cry and I entreat," Gelasius III recited, eyes knowing and full of compassion, "He hath shut out my prayer! He hath filled me with bitterness. He hath fed me ashes. He hath caused me disgrace and contempt."

Sandoz stood still and stared at nothing they could see. "I am damned," he said finally, tired to his soul, "and I don’t know why."

Kalingemala Lopore sat back in his chair, the long, strong fingers folded loosely in his lap, his faith in hidden meaning, and in God’s work in God’s time, granitic. "You are beloved of God," he said. "And you will live to see what you have made possible when you return to Rakhat."

Sandoz’s head snapped up. "I won’t go back."

"And if you are asked to do so by your superior?" Lopore asked, brows up, glancing at Giuliani.

Vincenzo Giuliani, forgotten until now in his corner, found himself looking into Emilio Sandoz’s eyes and was, for the first time in some fifty-five years, utterly cowed. He spread his hands and shook his head, beseeching Emilio to believe: I didn’t put him up to this.

"Non serviam," Sandoz said, turning from Giuliani. "I won’t be used again."

"Not even if We ask it?" the Pope pressed.

"No."

"So. Not for the Society. Not for Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, for yourself and for God, you must go back," Gelasius III told Emilio Sandoz with a terrifying, joyful certainty. "God is waiting for you, in the ruins."

VINCENZO GIULIANI WAS A MAN OF MODERATION AND HABITUAL self-control. All his adult life, he had lived among other such men—intellectual, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. He had read and written of saints and prophets, but this…. I am in over my head, he thought, and he wanted to hide, to remove himself from whatever was happening in that room, to flee from the awful grace of God. "Let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die," Giuliani thought, and felt a sudden sympathy for the Israelites at Sinai, for Jeremiah used against his will, for Peter who tried to run from Christ. For Emilio.

And yet, one had to pull oneself together, to murmur brief, graceful explanations and soothing apologies, and to accompany the Holy Father down the stairs and out into the sunshine. Courtesy demanded that one offer His Holiness lunch before the drive back to Rome. Long experience allowed one to show the way to the refectory, chatting about the Naples retreat house and its Tristano architecture. One pointed out the artwork: an excellent Caravaggio here, a rather good Titian there. One was able to smile good-humoredly at Brother Cosimo, stupefied at finding the Supreme Pontiff in his kitchen, inquiring about the availability of a fish soup the Father General had recommended.

There was, in the event, anguilla in umido over toast, served with a memorably sulphurous ’49 Lacryma Christi. The Father General of the Society of Jesus and the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church ate undisturbed at a simple wooden table in the kitchen and sat amicably over cappuccinos, toying with sfogliatele, each smiling inwardly at the unmentioned fact that they were both known as the Black Pope: one for his Jesuit soutane and the other for his equatorial skin. Neither did they mention Sandoz. Or Rakhat. They discussed instead the second excavation of Pompeii, about to be undertaken now that Vesuvius seemed satisfied that Naples had learned its latest lesson in geologic humility. They had mutual acquaintances and swapped stories of Vatican politicians and organizational chess matches. And Giuliani gained additional respect for a man who had come to the Holy See from the outside and was now deftly turning that ancient institution toward policies that struck the Father General as hopeful and wise, and very shrewd.

Afterward, they strolled out toward the Pope’s Fiat, their long shadows rippling over uneven stone pavement. Settling into his vehicle, Kalingemala Lopore reached toward the starter, but the dark hand hovered and then dropped. He lowered the window and sat looking straight ahead for a few moments before he spoke. "It seems a pity," he said quietly, "that there has been a breach between the Vatican and a religious order with such a long and distinguished history of service to Our predecessors."

Giuliani became very still. "Yes, Your Holiness," he said evenly, heart hammering. It was for this, among other reasons, that he had sent Gelasius III transcripts of the Rakhat mission reports and his own rendering of Sandoz’s story. For over five hundred years, allegiance to the papacy had been the pole around which the Jesuits’ global service had revolved, but Ignatius of Loyola had aimed for a soldierly dialectic of obedience and initiative when he founded the Society of Jesus. Patience and prayer—and relentless pressure in the direction the Jesuits wished decisions to go— paid off time after time. Even so, from the beginning, the Jesuits had championed education and a social activism that sometimes verged on the revolutionary; clashes with the Vatican were not uncommon, some far more serious than others. "It seemed unavoidable at the time, but of course…"