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fact-checks the crosses on the Ethiopian man with all the catalogues from the Archives and the library.”
    “Is that possible?” I asked.
    “The Archives’ information service can do it.”
    I thought it over for a few seconds.
    “I don’t know…” I mulled it over. “It’d be very complicated. It’s one thing to type some words into the computer and search databases for them but it’s a whole other thing altogether to take one image and compare it with others. They could be different sizes, incompatible formats, taken from different angles. The quality of the images might not even be good enough for a computer to recognize them.”
    Glauser-Röist looked at me with compassion. It was as if we were climbing the same staircase and he was always a few steps ahead of me, always having to turn back to look at me.
    “The search for images doesn’t use those factors.” There was a hint of commiseration in his voice. “You know how in the movies the police use computers to compare the image of a murderer with digital photographs of criminals they have on file? They use parameters such as space between the eyes, width of the nose, coordinates of the forehead, nose, and jaw, and so forth. Those programs use numerical calculations to detect fugitives.”
    “I doubt very much,” I said angrily, “that our information service has a program for locating wanted criminals. We’re not the police, Captain. We’re the heart of the Catholic world. In the library and the Archives, we only work with history and art.”
    Glauser-Röist turned and opened the door.
    “Where’re you going?” I asked incredulously, on seeing that he was about to leave without answering my question.
    “To talk to Prefect Ramondino. I’m certain he can set it up with the IT department.”
    O n Friday after lunch, Sister Chiara picked me up and we left Rome behind on the highway headed south. She was spending the weekend in Naples with her family and was delighted to have company for the ride. Chiara and I weren’t the only ones leaving Rome that weekend. To fulfill one of his more ardent wishes, His Holiness was making a supreme effort in the middle of jubilee to travel to sacred places in Jordan and Israel (Mount Nebo, Bethlehem, Nazareth). One had to admire how the approach of an exhausting trip revived a body in such sad shape. The pope was a true world traveler; contact with the multitudes invigorated him. The city I was leaving behind that Friday was boiling with activity and last-minute preparations.
    In Naples I caught the night ferry, the Tirrenia, that would stop in Palermo very early Saturday morning. The weather was excellent that night, so I wrapped my coat tight around me and settled into an armchair on the second-floor deck, where I could enjoy a peaceful crossing. Any time I crossed that sea toward home, my mind was invaded by the hypnotic memories of the years I lived there. As a little girl, I had wanted to be a spy. At eight, I lamented there were no more world wars for me to take part in, like Mata Hari. At ten, I was making small flashlights out of little batteries and tiny bulbs—stolen from my older siblings’ electronic games—which I then used to spend nights hiding out under my covers, reading adventure stories. Later, at the School of the Providential Virgin Mary (which I was forced to attend upon turning thirteen, after a fateful little romantic escapade I had with my friend Vito), I continued to read compulsively as a form of catharsis, transforming the world to my imagination’s content and making it conform to the way I wanted it to be. Reality was neither pleasant nor happy for a little girl who viewed life through a magnifying glass.
    In boarding school, I read the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the Song of Songs for the first time. I discovered a deep similarity between the feelings spilled across those pages and my turbulent, impressionable inner life. I suppose that those works helped to awaken the