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read Coptic, he felt unable to translate a difficult text correctly.
    The second line awoke in him the memory of one of his conversations with the librarian. Was it the apostolic letter that Andrei had obliquely mentioned one day, dropping a fleeting hint, a mere conjecture, as he called it, a hypothesis for which he had no proof? He had refused to tell him any more about it.
    What did the triple letter M underneath mean?
    Only the last but one line was clear to Nil. Yes, he needed to go back and photograph the stone slab in Germigny again, as he had promised his friend he would just before he left.
    As for the last line, find the link between them , this was something they had often discussed: for Andrei, it was the main part of his work as a historian. But why now , and why was this word underlined?
    He tried to focus his thoughts. On the one hand there washis research on the Gospels, which Andrei had often asked him about. Then the time the librarian had been called in for questioning in connection with the Coptic manuscript. And finally, the discovery at Germigny that had deeply disturbed him. All of this suddenly seemed to have assumed such significance for his friend that he urgently wanted to discuss it with Nil as soon as he returned.
    Had Andrei discovered something in Rome? Something they might have referred to during their many private conversations? Or had he, in Rome, finally ended up talking about the things he should have kept secret?
    The gendarme had used the word “crime”. But what could have been the motive? Andrei had no possessions, and lived reclusively in his library, far from the gaze of all others. Of all others, that is, except the Vatican. And yet Nil could not accept the idea of a murder carried out at the behest of Rome. The last time the Pope had deliberately had his own priests assassinated was in Paraguay, in 1760. The political situation of the time had made that collective murder of innocent people expedient: things were different in those days. At the end of the twentieth century, the Pope would not get rid of an inoffensive scholar!
    â€œRome no longer sheds blood. The Vatican committing a crime? Impossible.”
    He remembered the frequent warnings uttered by his friend. The disquiet that had been dwelling in him for some time made his stomach tighten.
    He glanced at his watch: four minutes to go before mass; if he didn’t go down to the sacristy right now, he’d be late. He opened his desk drawer and pushed the note to the back, under a pile of letters. His fingers ran over the snapshot taken a month earlier in the church of Germigny. Andrei’s last wishes…
    He rose, and left his cell.
    Before him stretched the dark, chill corridor of the second storey – the “corridor of the Reverend Fathers” – reminding him where he was: in the Abbey. And now he was alone. Never again would the librarian’s conspiratorial smile lighten up this corridor.

10
    â€œTake a seat, Monsignor.”
    Calfo repressed a grimace, and allowed his plump body to settle back into the soft curves of the armchair, opposite the imposing desk. He didn’t like the way Emil Catzinger, the very powerful Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had summoned him to a formal meeting. As everybody knows, the serious business isn’t done around a desk, but over a shared pizza, or going for a stroll after a spaghettata in a shady garden, with a fine cigar wedged between your index and middle fingers.
    Alessandro Calfo had been born in the quartiere spagnolo , the working-class heart of Naples, from a lineage that had vegetated in the wretched promiscuity of a single-room flat overlooking the street. Immersed in a populace whose volcanic sensuality was nourished by a generous sun, he very soon perceived that he had an irrepressible need for pleasure. The flesh was there, soft, inviting, quivering, but inaccessible to a poor boy who learnt to