Carlo Molinaro could not claim to know Alexander Trecchio profoundly well, not in a practical sense. His familiarity, grounded in familial intimacy more than real knowledge, had come from long years of close friendship with Alexander’s uncle. He’d certainly watched Alexander grow up—mostly from afar, but occasionally through dinners or other family activities hosted by Cardinal Rinaldo Trecchio.
Rinaldo … It was the cardinal’s death that linked Alexander to the Vatican. It was the reason Carlo had phoned Alexander and brought him here. Because trauma knows trauma, and a space knows its own secrets, and maybe Alexander’s experiences two months ago would lend him some insight. The fact that a postcard had arrived from Alexander only the evening before seemed timed by the Fates: a jotting from a weekend trip had brought the younger man already into Molinaro’s mind, ready for him to be plucked to the forefront of his attention when this crisis broke. In Alexander, perhaps there was the hope of a little bit of reason to make sense of—
Carlo halted the track of his thoughts. In this instant, reality was more important than hope, and the reality was that Carlo might not know Alexander fully, but he knew him well enough. The way a grandfather knew a grandson or an uncle a nephew. And what he knew mattered. He knew of Alexander’s youthful desire to serve in the Church. He knew of his time in college and seminary, his fervent study. He remembered how Cardinal Rinaldo Trecchio had urged his favorite nephew along. And he also knew of the struggles of faith that had plagued Alexander after his ordination to the priesthood. Of the trials of those years that followed, which had ultimately led to struggle becoming crisis, and then loss. He’d been told of Alexander giving up the collar, leaving the priesthood. And he knew how it had pained his uncle, torn at him—but that Rinaldo had never faltered in his love for the young man.
Molinaro knew that Alexander had a keen mind, when he chose to use it—another of the reasons the nudge from the postcard had urged him to call him, in the midst of his own panic and horror. He was a gifted communicator. He had a way with words and a love of history, which explained his frequent visits to the museums and the occasional opportunities Carlo had had to visit with him, during those visits, over the past years. He had seen much. Been through much. Knew much.
But given all this, and despite the raving oddity of everything the younger man had said and done since he’d arrived at the museum, one thing Molinaro felt confident Alexander Trecchio did not know about was electrical wiring. And he damned well didn’t know about dual-redundancy linear circuitry.
This was not just an assumption on Carlo’s part. It was knowledge gained from firsthand experience. Several years ago, at a dinner in Cardinal Rinaldo’s Vatican quarters, the lead to an old lamp had burned out its fuse and Alexander had proven singularly incapable of repairing the meager fault. It had been Molinaro himself who had taken the screwdriver in his old hands, righted the fuse and rewired the lead. Alexander had simply stared on with dismissive ignorance as the schoolboy-level repair had been effected by a man who could have been his grandfather.
They had laughed at the incongruity of the scene, the three of them. But Carlo Molinaro wasn’t laughing now. At this moment, the memory meant only one thing.
There was no way Alexander could understand the circuitry and bomb-fabrication details he had just heard him describe—much less construct such a device himself. For a man who couldn’t wire a ground lead or fix a lamp plug to know about redundant circuitry and wire types … it was simply absurd.
Despite Remo Deubel’s suspicions, and despite Alexander’s bizarre and altogether inexplicable behavior, he was not responsible for this explosion. He wasn’t responsible for any of this.
Something here was very wrong.