grin as she lifted her papers and headed back out. “Except with you, honey-bunny.”
The Alitalia DC-10 touched down about fifteen minutes early due to the favorable winds. Renato Cardinal DiMilo was pleased enough to think through an appropriate prayer of thanksgiving. A longtime member of the Vatican’s diplomatic service, he was accustomed to long flights, but that wasn’t quite the same as enjoying them. He wore his red—“cardinal”—and black suit that was actually more akin to an official uniform, and not a conspicuously comfortable one at that, despite the custom tailoring that came from one of Rome’s better shops. One of the drawbacks to his clerical and diplomatic status was that he’d been unable to shed his suit coat for the flight, but he’d been able to kick off his shoes, only to find that his feet had swollen on the flight, and getting them back on was more difficult than usual. That evoked a sigh rather than a curse, as the plane taxied to the terminal. The senior flight attendant ushered him to the forward door and allowed him to leave the aircraft first. One advantage to his diplomatic status was that all he ever had to do was wave his diplomatic passport at the control officers, and in this case a senior PRC government official was there to greet him at the end of the jetway.
“Welcome to our country,” the official said, extending his hand.
“It is my pleasure to be here,” the cardinal replied, noting that this communist atheist didn’t kiss his ring, as was the usual protocol. Well, Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general were not exactly welcome in the People’s Republic of China, were they? But if the PRC expected to live in the civilized world, then they’d have to accept representation with the Holy See, and that was that. And besides, he’d go to work on these people, and, who knew, maybe he could convert one or two. Stranger things had happened, and the Roman Catholic Church had handled more formidable enemies than this one.
With a wave and a small escort group, the demi-minister conducted his distinguished visitor through the concourse toward the place where the official car and escort waited.
“How was your flight?” the underling asked.
“Lengthy but not unpleasant” was the expected reply. Diplomats had to act as though they loved flying, though even the flight crews found journeys of this length tiresome. It was his job to observe the new ambassador of the Vatican, to see how he acted, how he looked out the car’s windows, even, which, in this case, was not unlike all the other first-time diplomats who came to Beijing. They looked out at the differences. The shapes of the buildings were new and different to them, the color of the bricks, and how the brickwork looked close up and at a distance, the way in which things that were essentially the same became fascinating because of differences that were actually microscopic when viewed objectively.
It took a total of twenty-eight minutes to arrive at the residence/embassy. It was an old building, dating back to the turn of the previous century, and had been the largish home of an American Methodist missionary—evidently one who liked his American comforts, the official thought—and had passed through several incarnations, including, he’d learned the previous day, that of a bordello in the diplomatic quarter in the 1920s and ’30s, because diplomats liked their comforts as well. Ethnic Chinese, he wondered, or Russian women who’d always claimed to be of the Czarist nobility, or so he’d heard. After all, Westerners enjoyed fucking noblewomen for some reason or other, as if their body parts were different somehow. He’d heard that one, too, at the office, from one of the archivists who kept track of such things at the Ministry. Chairman Mao’s personal habits were not recorded, but his lifelong love for deflowering twelve-year-olds was well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Every national leader had something odd and distasteful about him, the young official knew. Great men had great aberrations.
The car pulled up to the old wooden frame house, where a uniformed policeman opened the door for the visiting Italian, and even saluted, earning himself a nod from the man wearing the ruby-red skullcap.
Waiting on the porch was yet another foreigner, Monsignor Franz Schepke, whose diplomatic status was that of DCM, or deputy chief of mission, which usually meant the person who was really in charge of things while the ambassador—mainly a man chosen for