LUCA
We each wear a dark hoodie, and the largest sunglasses we own. I leave the sharp paring knife I took with me from the breakfast buffet in the hotel room. Despite my best efforts at finding a way, I just don’t think there’s any way to get it into Saint Peter’s Square—which is comforting in its own way, because if I can’t bring in a weapon, neither can anyone else. Besides, I don’tneeda weapon to protect Finch. I have killed to protect him before with my bare hands.
I’d just rather not kill someone on livestream to millions of Catholics worldwide.
The best thing to do would be to split up as we go through security, but I don’t want Finch out of my sight or reach any longer than need be. I do let a small group of excited French tourists enter the line ahead of me, and behind Finch. I try to make it look like I’m with them by engaging in conversation, although my French is poor, and their Italian is not much better, and I claim ignorance of English altogether.
Once we’re through, I bid goodbye to them, and manage to snatch the French flag one of them has let drop to the ground before they notice. I wrap it quickly into a bundle as I walk away from them and towards Finch, who is waiting around nervously near one of the columns.
“Here,” I say, pushing it into his hands.
“What’s this?” he says, surprised.
“Wrap yourself up in it. Over your head. There are plenty of other people here shrouding themselves in their national flags.”
He doesn’t ask any further questions, thankfully, just does as I’ve told him. Between the flag, the hoodie, and the glasses, he’s completely unrecognizable. As for me, I pull my hood well forward over my face and try to keep my head down.
All the better to concentrate on shoes, after all.
The piazza is filling up fast. There are groups of tourists here and there in brightly colored matching shirts, shaking banners that declare their country or organization. Other groups flock around tour guides holding up tall pointers topped by bright triangular flags. Finch’s French cloak is mirrored by a score of other countries’ flags as well, many of them unknown to me.
Here and there are clusters of nuns, and I look each of them over carefully as we slowly move past on the tide of the crowd, wondering if Róisín is among them. But I see no familiar faces, and no anomalous shoes.
The sun is reaching its zenith, but in deference to this morning’s clouds there are a number of people with umbrellas. Some of them are using them as sunshades. I move Finch closer to a fountain near the front, where a group has crowded around it to be refreshed by the spray. As we pass, I take up an umbrella leaning unattended against the fountain—mercifully unbranded, and the same nondescript blue as most of the others I see in use around the square.
I feel slightly safer with the umbrella open and shading my face as I move Finch further out from the crowd now. We might not fool facial recognition software if it caught us front-on, but we stand a better than average chance of escaping the notice of any human eyes looking for us.
The problem, of course, is that Róisín will also struggle to identify us. Even now, the base of the obelisk is a sea of people.
“What next?” Finch murmurs, as we take up a position as far away from the cameras as possible, but with a good view of the obelisk.
“We wait. And every few minutes, we move position.”
“Shouldn’t we waitatthe obelisk?”
I can hear the anxiety in Finch’s voice, but I can’t let my own stress cloud my judgment. “No. When the time comes, we’ll move closer.”
“It’s not long now until—”
“Finch. Wewillfind her, if she’s here. I promise. But we need to be careful about it.”
He sighs and clutches the flag tighter around himself, but whatever he’s about to say is drowned out by the noise of a striking bell, almost like an alarm. I stiffen, grabbing Finch’s arm, but the rising excitement from the crowd tells me what it is: merely an alert to the faithful that the Pope is about to appear.
“If we get separated,” I tell Finch in a low voice, “meet me at the colonnades nearest to our hotel.”
At the window from which the Papal standard flies, I see the white curtain drawing back, and a moment later, the Pope appears, hands raised in blessing. The big-screen TVs around the piazza finally, thankfully, focus on the window rather than the crowd. “Buongiorno,” booms out the Pope’s greeting around St. Peter’s Square, and then a few Latin phrases familiar to me from church.
“Come on,” I say to Finch, and we begin to move closer to the obelisk as the crowd flows forward, using the movement to disguise our own objective.
At the edges of the crowd are the curious rather than the faithful, losing interest in the Pope’s words, moving off to the other side of the piazza, or lining up in readiness to tour the Basilica. I lead Finch on a circuitous route through the assembly, spiraling in tighter as we go. By the time His Holiness has finished reading out the Bible verses and begun his homily, we’re only a few yards from the obelisk. Standing right next to us is someone livecasting in a loud whisper on their social media channel, ignoring the furious shushes of those around them. We’ll have to be careful to keep out of their background shots.
“Whereisshe?” Finch hisses in my ear. “It’s ten after.”
I bite back my initial response, because anI told you sois not going to make today any easier. “She may have been caught up. But we’ll wait here until she comes,” I murmur. “Promise.”
It seems to help. At least Finch’s grip on the flag under his chin releases a little.
Then I see them. Nuns.
