Day Of Confession

147

The marble floors, the small covered wooden benches, the semicircular rose marble altar with its bronze crucifix, the bright stained-glass ceiling. The Holy Father's private chapel.

How many times had Palestrina been here before? To pray alone with the pope or with the few select guests who might have been invited to join them. Kings, presidents, statesmen.

But this was the first time he had been summoned on the spur of the moment to pray alone with the Holy Father. And now as he came in, he found the pope seated in his bronze chair in front of the altar, head bent in prayer.

He looked up as Palestrina approached. Outstretching his hands, he took Palestrina's in his and studied him, his eyes intense and filled with worry.

'What is it?' Palestrina asked.

'This is not a good day, Eminence.' The pope's voice was barely audible. 'There is a sense of foreboding. And dread and fearfulness in my heart. It was there on arising and has sat perched on my shoulder ever since. I don't know what it is, but you are a part of it, Eminence… a part of whatever this darkness is…' The pope hesitated and his eyes probed Palestrina's. 'Tell me what it is…'

'I do not know, Holiness. To me the day seems bright, and warm with the summer sun.'

'Then pray with me that I am wrong, that it is only a feeling and will pass… Pray for the salvation of the spirit…'

The pope stood from his chair and both men knelt before the altar. Palestrina bowed his head as Pope Leo XIV led them in prayer, knowing that whatever the Holy Father felt, he was wrong.

The forbidding horror that had begun in the early morning hours as Palestrina had waked from his nightmare of the disease-bringing spirits, even as Thomas Kind was calling to tell him of the situation with Li Wen, had turned suddenly and inconceivably to good fortune.

Less than an hour earlier, Pierre Weggen had called to tell him that despite the revelation that the lakes had been deliberately poisoned by, in the official words of the Chinese, 'a mentally ill co-worker and water-quality engineer' – Beijing had decided to go ahead with the massive plan to rebuild the country's entire water-delivery system. It was a gesture designed to comfort and unite a traumatized, still-fearful, and unsettled nation, and at the same time show the world the central government remained in control. It meant that despite everything Palestrina's 'Chinese Protocol' was in place and would not be turned back. In addition, what Thomas Kind had promised he had delivered – with the deaths of Li Wen and Chen Yin, any chance that a road might be discovered that would lead from China to Rome was closed forever. And under Thomas Kind's sure hand, the final chapter removing the last possible connection would soon be written here, inside the Vatican, for, as the moth comes to the flame – neither Father Daniel nor his brother were Death sent by the spirits, but simply a worry that had only to be eliminated.

So the Holy Father was mistaken, and the thing sitting perched on his shoulder was not the shadow of Palestrina's death but the emotional and spiritual infirmities of an old and fearful man.