Page 95 of The Salt King

The footage from Poland was still playing. The phone screen was hazing, because a patch of salt light had drifted across them all, moving against the wind.

Camera flashes were going off in front of him, and the recording lights blinked. Salt glittered in the air. There was more of it out here now than there had been when he walked through the day before yesterday. He could taste it; dry, sharp.

“Father Brocken?” the journalist pushed.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re angels.”

36

Rome, Italy

Cai had seen the election of five popes. St Peter’s Square filled with people from all over the world, waving flags and banners, reporting to hundreds of different news agencies, and at night, when people lit candles or held up the lights on their phones, the Vatican looked as though an interested galaxy had come to witness the conclave. Though people could be impassioned about the candidate they wanted to win, it always felt like a festival. People brought their kids. The trestle tables set up by the pizza trucks filled with nuns from Brazil, Nigeria, Singapore. Jesuits known all their lives for severity could be discovered being taught to skateboard in the grounds of colleges hosting youth groups from the States.

But as he struggled along the Borgo Sant’Angelo, the long avenue that led from Rome into the Vatican, the crowd made everything he’d seen here before seem like a village fair.

People were camping in the street. Groups huddled in circles were praying. There were crates and baskets of food everywhere: something had happened to the banks, Steve had said, and a haphazard barter system was taking over. He saw a commotion as four or five people slung a frightened man out of their barricaded cluster of tents, yelling something about how covetousness was a sin. At least forty nuns were making their way through the packed space, handing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. Bonfires strung smoke into the twilight. Sometimes the owners of the restaurants came out to yell at people to stop using the restaurant chairs for fuel, but it was a losing battle.

Usually a taxi could take you right to the Vatican walls. Now the roads were too full of people. Steve had to leave him near the Castel Sant’Angelo, and it took an hour to walk what should have taken ten minutes. Very soon he noticed eyes following him, assessing how easy it would be to take his phone. It was the first time he had ever felt unsafe here.

Closer to St Peter’s, technicians were putting up enormous screens so that the crowd could see . . . something. A papal address, most likely. He wondered what in God’s name the Pope was supposed to say. Soldiers lined the piazza, watching the crowd with their hands resting on their rifles, and press drones whined overhead.

Someone snatched him into a side alley.

“Give me your wallet, or I’ll cut you,” a rough voice said in Italian.

“I’m a Jesuit! I’m a Jesuit, we’re not paid!” Cai gasped. “Look, you can have my bank card, but there’s only twenty euros on it . . .”

The man let him go and burst into tears. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry . . .”

Cai patted him ineffectually. “It’s all right. I’m sorry, I have to go . . .”

He was barely inside the office when the Secretary appeared and seized his arm. “There you are! Come with me, come with me.”

“My friend at the Observatory managed to get some pictures of the movement in the salt light. It’s all—wait, where are we going?” The Secretary wasn’t taking him into his own office, but along the corridor, up the marble stairs.

“To see His Holiness. He wants to talk to you.”

“Sorry, I thought for a second you said the Pope wanted to talk to me,” Cai said, half laughing.

The Secretary looked grave, and Cai realized with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t going deaf.

Cai had never been in the same room as the Holy Father, except perhaps for Midnight Mass inside the basilica—but being inside St Peter’s Basilica at the same time as someone else was like being in Wales at the same time.

He had never been into the papal apartments.

The Secretary opened the door for him, though, and there he was: a small figure in bright white, surrounded by cardinals in red.

“Father Li,” said His Holiness, in that precise Nigerian accent famous across the world from Korea to Argentina, the one Li had only ever heard magnified across loudspeakers or on the television before. In real life, it was very quiet; so quiet that everyone else had to fall silent to hear him. “I’m glad you’re here. You are the spiritual adviser of the young man we sent to investigate the occurrences in England, I believe?”

“Yes, Your Holiness,” Cai managed. He looked around the other faces, hoping for some clues. People were giving him an unreadable mixture of stares. Some seemed angry. Some were shaken up. Some were taking great care not to meet his eye.

“I wonder if you could explain to us what he might have meant by this.” The Holy Father nodded to someone with a remote control, and a screen on the wall came on.

It showed a newsreel from the BBC. The caption underneath read:

VATICAN REPRESENTATIVE CLAIMS WIELICZKA DISASTER THE WORK OF ANGELS.

Cai pressed his hands over his mouth and thought: You look like an idiot. You look like an actor pretending to look surprised. But he really did have an urge to make sure not a single sound escaped him, because what if he said Oh fuck in front of Christ’s representative on Earth?