The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Page A

type, not the usual young sensation-seeker by the look of things, though it was difficult to tell since the man was wrapped up tight in a heavy black jacket, with a woollen hat pulled low over his ears.
    Gabrielli dodged through the heavy slew of rush-hour traffic, marched up to the church, put on his best welcome smile, and threw a rapid “Buon giorno” in the direction of his visitor. Something got muttered in return; the man sounded Italian at least, though the words came through a thick scarf pulled high up to his nose. Perhaps that explained the early start, and the sensitivity to the cold.
    Then, straightaway, the visitor asked the usual question— Is it still there? —and Gabrielli’s spirits fell. In spite of appearances, the man was just another rubbernecker looking for something, anything, to chill the spine.
    The warden suppressed a grumble, took out the old key that opened the main door, let the man in, and pointed the way through the nave, half lit by the persistent morning light. He watched him go, then went to his small office, warmed his fingers around a paper cup of cappuccino, and devoured a single cornetto, filled with jam, feeling a little uneasy. He was used to a good hour on his own before anyone came, a time for reading and thinking, wandering around a church he’d come to regard as his own small universe.
    Gabrielli picked up a pamphlet and wondered whether to go and offer it to the visitor. The documents were a good twenty years old now and a little musty-smelling from the damp cupboard in the office. When he held one out, people always shook their heads and said no. But it wasn’t the money he wanted. Gabrielli was happy to give them away for free. He’d just feel happier if more people appreciated the church in his charge for what it was, instead of rushing off to see a display that was mostly, he guessed, old junk.
    In a city overloaded with the baroque and the classical, Sacro Cuore was a small, bright, sharp-featured beacon of northern neo-Gothic. The church was barely noticed by the masses as they cursed and sighed their way past it in the traffic crawl along the busy riverside road running west from the Castel Sant’Angelo. But Gabrielli knew every inch of the building, every ornate pillar and column, every last curve of the elegant vaulted ceiling, and understood, as both an architect and a lay, semi-enthusiastic churchman, how precious it was.
    Those who could speak Italian might read in the guide how a Bolognese architect, Giuseppe Gualandi, had constructed a perfect pocket-size Gothic cathedral on the orders of a French priest keen on giving Rome a Chartres in miniature, though with rather less-expensive stained glass, and in a decidedly urban location. How, too, that same French priest, inspired by a strange incident in the church itself, had set up a small exhibition, just two glass cases on the wall, one large, one small, stocked with a modest collection of exhibits.
    For some reason—Gabrielli didn’t know and didn’t much care—this small exhibition had come to be known as Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio, The Little Museum of Purgatory. It had existed in the side room, largely unvisited, for decades. But in the modern age, more and more sought targets beyond the customary sights of the Colosseum and St. Peter’s. At some unforeseen point along the years, Sacro Cuore had emerged from dusty obscurity and made its way onto the lists of arcane Roman spectacles exchanged among the knowing. And so Gabrielli’s four days a week as voluntary guardian of Sacro Cuore, once a time for meditation and solitary exploration of the dark corners of Gualandi’s creation, had altered. Now a steady trickle of visitors arrived in ever greater numbers with each passing year, as the curious, mostly young, mostly agnostic, came looking for a sight they hoped would send a shiver down the spine, make them believe, perhaps, that, in a world of pressing and trite routine, where everything was