It was Giuliani's turn to be taken aback. "I have no idea. When I was a toddler, I suppose."

"I got my first pair of shoes when I was ten. Father Sandoz got them for me. When you were growing up, was there ever any question about your going to school? I don't mean college. I mean, did anyone ever imagine that you wouldn't go to high school?"

"I see what you're driving at," Giuliani said quietly. "No. There was no question at all. It was absolutely assumed that I would be educated."

"Of course," Felipe said, shrugging good-naturedly, accepting the naturalness of such an attitude for families like Giuliani's. He didn't have to say, You had a mother who knew who your father was, you had educated parents, money for a sailboat, a house, cars. "I mean, if you hadn't gone into the priesthood, you'd have been a banker or a hospital administrator or something, right?"

"Yes. Possibly. Something like that, perhaps. The import business or finance would have come pretty easily."

"And you'd feel perfectly entitled to be whatever you wanted to be, right? You're smart, you're educated, you work hard. You deserve to be who you are, what you are, where you are." The Father General didn't reply, but he didn't deny the observation's truth. "You know what I'd be, if I weren't a priest? A thief. Or worse. I was already stealing when Emilio took an interest in me. He knew about some of it, but he didn't know I was already busting into cars. Nine years old. I would have graduated to grand theft auto before I was thirteen."

"And if D. W. Yarbrough hadn't taken an interest in Emilio Sandoz?" Giuliani asked quietly. "What would Emilio have been?"

"A salesman," Reyes said, watching to see if Giuliani knew the code. "Black tar heroin, out of Mexico via Haiti. Family tradition. They all did time. His grandfather was assassinated in prison. His father's death touched off a minor gang war. His brother was killed for skimming profits."

Felipe paused and wondered if he had any right to tell Giuliani this. Some of it was a matter of public record; Emilio's file probably contained at least this much information and perhaps a great deal more.

"Look," Felipe said, caught up now in the stark contrast between his life, Emilio's life, and the lives of men like Vincenzo Giuliani, who were born to money and position and security, "there are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I've been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever—" He stopped talking, deeply embarrassed. Giuliani could never understand the price scholarship boys paid for their education: the inevitable alienation from your uncomprehending family, from roots, from your own first person, from the original «I» you once were. Angry, Felipe decided to say nothing more about Emilio Sandoz. Let Giuliani ask the man directly.

But the Father General said, "So you memorize the rules and you try not to expose yourself to humiliation."

"Yes."

"And you are stiff and formal in direct proportion to how completely you feel out of your element."

"Yes."

"Thank you. That explains a lot. I should have realized—"

They were interrupted by another shouted conversation in Italian as they hove back in toward Naples and came near another boat. Reyes caught something about the bambinos. Irritably, he asked, "Don't any of these people actually fish?"

"No, I don't think so," Giuliani said genially. "They certainly know their way around boats, but they don't fish."

Puzzled now, Felipe looked at him. "You know all these guys, don't you?"

"Yes. Second cousins, mostly." Giuliani grinned as Reyes worked it out.

"I don't believe it. Mafia! They're Mafia, aren't they," said Felipe, eyes bulging.

"Oh, goodness. I wouldn't say that. One never says that. Of course, I don't know for certain what their major source of income is," Giuliani admitted, his voice dry and soft as flour, "but I could take an educated guess." He glanced at Felipe and very nearly laughed. "And in any case, the Mafia is Sicilian. In Naples, it's the Camorra. Amounts to the same thing, I suppose," he mused. "Funny, isn't it. My grandfather and Emilio Sandoz's grandfather were in the same line of work. Sandoz reminds me a little of my grandfather, now that I think of it. He was also a charming man in his own element but very stiff and wary with people he didn't trust or was uncomfortable with. And I felt privileged to be a member of his inner circle. I'd have walked across hot coals for my grandfather. Coming about."

Felipe was too dumbfounded to move and Giuliani had to yank him out of the way of the boom. He let Reyes absorb it for a while and then spoke again, reminiscing. "My father was relatively clean but the family money was as dirty as it comes. I found out when I was about seventeen. Very idealistic age, seventeen." The Father General glanced at Reyes. "I never cease to marvel at the variety of motives men have for the priesthood. I suppose originally, for me, the vow of poverty was a way of compensating."

He began lowering the jib and took over the tiller, to bring the boat into dock. "The first cutter I ever sailed was a gift from my grandfather, and dirty money bought it. Probably bought this boat as well, come to think of it. And it's buying Emilio Sandoz the privacy and protection he needs, even as we speak. That's why we're in Naples, Reyes. Because my family owns this town."

"Where did you learn to make gloves like this?" Emilio asked John.

They were sitting outdoors, on opposite sides of a wooden table in the green shade of a grape arbor. Servos whirring spasmodically, Emilio was doggedly picking up pebbles one by one from the table, dropping them into a cup, and then tipping them out again to start the exercise over with the other hand, while John Candotti stitched the latest pair of gloves.

John had been almost glad to see that an earlier design was flawed, a seam running too close to the scar tissue between two of the fingers, rubbing it raw. It was an opening, a way to reestablish some kind of peace between them. Sandoz had barely spoken to him since that first awful day of the hearings, except to accuse John of allowing him to be blindsided.

"I thought you were supposed to help me prepare for this shit," he'd snarled when John approached him the next day. "You let me walk in there cold, you sonofabitch. You could have warned me, John. You could have given me some idea of what they said."

John was at a loss. "I tried! I did, dammit! And anyway, you knew what happened—" He thought Sandoz was going to hit him then, as ludicrous as that might have been, a small sick angry man with wrecked hands attacking him. Instead Sandoz had turned and walked away, and refused even to look at John for over a week.

Finally the fury had burned down and today, Sandoz seemed simply tired and depressed. The morning had been difficult. They were going over the death of Alan Pace. Edward Behr speculated that the man's heart might have fibrillated. There'd have been no evidence of that in an autopsy. Emilio seemed indifferent. Who knew? When John offered to redesign the gloves and make a new pair this afternoon, Sandoz shrugged listlessly and seemed willing to sit at the same table at least while Candotti worked on the new pattern.

"I used to make gloves and shoes for a living," John told him.

Emilio looked up. "Everything was mass-produced when I left."

"Yeah, well, it mostly still is but for a while, there were a bunch of us who were going to bring dignity back to human labor," John said cynically, embarrassed to admit this. "Everyone was going to have a trade, and we'd all buy only handmade things, to make a market for it all. We weren't exactly Luddites or hippies, but it was that kind of thing. Make a shoe, save the world, right?"