Free Blood of the Lamb by Sam Cabot Page A

without white cotton gloves. Ah, intellectual freedom.
    Not that he minded the restrictions, really. He was amazed just to be here. He wanted nothing more than to wander through the bright rooms, along shadowed corridors, past towering windows, and across the thresholds of low, hidden doors. He yearned to unlatch cabinets, slide drawers, climb ladders. But you couldn’t. You sat and looked through the electronic catalog, a legacy of a previous Librarian’s reorganization of the treasures in his charge. You requested the items you wanted to study, and they were delivered to you.
    Thomas’s clerical collar brought him considerable deference from the staff, but he had no freer access than any other scholar. Lorenzo, of course, could have arranged for Thomas to enter any room he wanted, handle any document he cared to, without interference. That arrangement would have been highly unusual, though, and would not pass unnoticed. Because of the sensitive nature of Thomas’s research, Lorenzo had asked him to work within the system. “Unless it becomes absolutely necessary,” he’d added. “If it is, let me know and I’ll say the word.”
    Thomas had been tempted, just so he could wander those corridors; but that would be overweening and wrong. For the task Lorenzo had charged him with, the system was working fine. Right now, better than fine.
    A day of intense research here, added to the work he’d been doing in London for the past few years, had Thomas convinced he was one of the world’s leading experts on the looting of the Vatican Library in 1849. That, in itself, was no great accomplishment; but he was also more sure than ever that it was then that Sottotenente Mario Damiani—who, braggart though he may have been, did actually seem to have led the raid—had stolen the Concordat. What the Concordat was and why this mattered so much, Thomas still had no idea. All in good time, though: Lorenzo had brought him here to discover its hiding place, not its meaning.
    Methodical scholar that Thomas was, he’d spent his first afternoon following the few faint trails the first search team had found, just to make sure they’d missed nothing. When those trails faded out, he’d gone back to his original thought, and began tracking down Mario Damiani.
    All day yesterday he’d uncovered nothing but the facts of Damiani’s life and work and his service in Garibaldi’s Republican Army. Some of what he found was straight information, and some of it had to be read between the lines; some he’d already known and some he hadn’t; much was of interest to the scholar in him but little to the newly minted detective. But with the fresh new morning came a new thought and a hopeful find.
    Damiani had written in Romanesco, the traditional dialect of Rome, a choice of some Republican patriots of his era that Thomas, if he were being honest, would have to call a self-limiting affectation. In Thomas’s opinion, Romanesco wasn’t different enough from Italian to make using it the statement of fierce independence the partisans intended; it was, though, just different enough to be irritating to the Italian speaker trying to read it. For scholarly purposes Thomas had long since become fluent in Romanesco, as well as a number of other Italian dialects, dead and living. Hoping to get an idea of who Mario Damiani had really been, of how he’d thought and therefore where he might have taken something as precious as the Concordat, Thomas had requested the Library’s volumes of Damiani’s works. When they arrived they told him little, but by then he was off on a different trail.
    Waiting for the volumes to be excavated from whatever deep vault they were buried in, he’d stayed at the catalog computer and clicked idly through the list of other Romanesco poets, thinking perhaps the works of Damiani’s fellow fiery patriots might help his project of getting inside the man’s mind. The catalog included thumbnail images, usually the front covers of