Papal decree

34

‘Are you sure it’ll work?’ Jacopo asked.

‘No,’ Rafael answered.

Jacopo sighed. The cold London morning penetrated to his bones. They hadn’t stopped since yesterday. He needed to rest. He’d tried to sleep on the train, but with no success. He wasn’t used to seeing people killed in front of him. Gunter and Maurice were the first, and it wasn’t pleasant. He admired Rafael’s presence of mind. He had helped Gavache with the investigation, answered every question succinctly, as if he had not been present at a tragedy and lost a friend. Probably he’d lost so many in such different ways that one more didn’t matter. Life can make us immune to anything. He shivered at the image of a shot exploding in his own brain. He didn’t want to be Rafael’s next friend to die… one more.

‘I can’t believe I’ll ever get to Rome,’ Jacopo confessed.

‘Tonight you’re going to be sleeping with Norma,’ Rafael asserted.

‘I hope so,’ Jacopo replied, thinking of his wife, whom he normally didn’t have the patience to put up with. Her shrill voice asking him for money to go shopping wasn’t so unpleasant anymore.

‘Did you remember everything?’ Rafael wanted to check.

‘I’m a historian. Of course I remembered everything,’ he joked to lighten the mood.

‘A historian tends to remember things his own way.’

‘Do you think we’ll be successful?’ A serious question.

Rafael didn’t answer.

‘Fighting with Ben Isaac and Jesus Christ,’ the historian said, ‘is not going to be easy.’

‘If it were easy, we wouldn’t be here,’ Rafael replied.

Jacopo had to acknowledge this. The Holy Father would not have sent him just anywhere. The truth was that the Holy Father didn’t know he’d sent him anywhere. Jacopo was too insignificant for the pope even to know his name. The secretary was the one who gave the orders, the mediator between the earth and the god who rested in the Apostolic Palace. Despite not being a believer, Jacopo was the one Tarcisio relied on most to carry out the duties asked of him, evaluating works of art and ancient documents. This work was the reason for his loss of faith. Thousands of parchments, papers, bones, pottery jars, and coins passed through his hands. If a document said one thing, another soon appeared to contradict the first. There was an erroneous understanding of the people who had lived in antiquity. Most imagined them as savages, not very hygienic, who lived short lives, killed one another, and were always at war. This could not be further from the truth. The ancients were as intelligent as modern people. Everything the world was today, for better or for worse, was due to them.

‘Great Russell Street,’ the taxi driver informed them.

‘Okay,’ Rafael said, immediately looking at Jacopo.

‘I’m ready.’

‘That’s good. Don’t forget that not everything is what it seems.’

‘Look who’s talking,’ Jacopo said eagerly. ‘I hope Robin will collaborate. Don’t let them kill him.’

‘That doesn’t depend on me,’ Rafael asserted. ‘You take care of your part, and let him decide how to do his.’

‘Is that how it works?’

‘That’s how you survive.’