Mary Alice has baked them as tiny tea cakes in four small pans and eases the miniature loaves onto a cooling rack. They are dark with molasses and studded with dried cherries and apricots, the tops shingled with thin slices of almond. While Billie watches, Mary Alice opens a sealed bottle of Tennessee whiskey and pours a generous amount into a bowl. There is a small jar of white powder at her elbow, and before she opens it, she fits a respirator over her mouth and nose, motioning for Billie to do the same. The door to the rest of the apartment is closed, and the others know better than to disturb them.
The white powder looks a little like granulated sugar. It has been brought into the country in a flowered jar labeled Lady Fresh Intimate Powder, tucked into Billie’s toiletry bag. In the airport, she is prepared to flirt with the Customs official who processes her, but he never unzips her suitcase. It has been Constance Halliday’s idea that the foursome should travel under the cover of flight attendants, and Billie is wearing the blue Pan Am suit, cut just a little bit too snug. The Customs officer is on the point of asking her for a date during her layover when Günther Paar, dressed in a snappy pilot’s uniform, puts a casual arm around her waist. The Customs officer makes a mournful face and waves her through with her poison.
They go directly to their rented apartments, a small studio for Günther and a larger one for the women. For two days they play tourist, trudging dutifully from the Colosseum to the Forum, tossing coins in the Trevi and paying too much for pasta in a rowdy café on the Piazza Navona. They take the kind of photos that casual travelers always take, posing with their hands inside the Bocca della Verità or arranging themselves by height on the flower-decked Spanish Steps. They buy postcards and tea towels stamped with the sights, and they drink cheap red wine from bottles wrapped in straw.
But the third morning, Mary Alice goes into the kitchen to put their plan into motion. She bakes the cakes according to the recipe she has been given, one she has practiced a dozen times in preparation for this moment. The pantry in the apartment has been stocked with everything she needs—even the American ingredients that will make the cakes unique. Through the respirator she can no longer smell them, but the aroma of spice and orange wafts out the window to the city beyond.
Taking the jar from Billie, Mary Alice stirs the powder carefully into the bowl of whiskey. When the granules are fully dissolved, she fills a syringe and injects the cakes with the poison-laced whiskey. It was Mary Alice’s idea to use thallium, and she is pleased at how well it disappears into the cakes. It is a heavy metal, odorless and tasteless, but deadly if inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
When she finishes injecting the four cakes, she wraps them carefully in waxed paper and fits them into a cardboard box stamped with the gilded logo of a vaguely Gothic-looking convent. Billie sets a fan to blow any lingering fumes out the kitchen window, and they discard their gloves, wrapping them up with the empty jar, the syringe, the pans, and the respirators. The rest of the whiskey is poured down the sink and the bottle is added to the rest of the trash. It all fits tidily into a single garbage bag and there can be no traces left of American ingredients in this small Roman kitchen.
The cakes neatly packaged, they call for the others. The four are dressed identically in the simple habits of an order of nuns that does not exist. Their dresses are modest and dark grey, covering them from mid-calf to neck, their cuffs and collars white. They have scrubbed their faces of makeup and their hair is hidden under light grey veils. They wear thick dark stockings and sensible shoes. They have stripped off all jewelry except thin wedding rings and wristwatches with expensive mechanisms hidden in cheap Timex cases. They look nothing like the glamorous quartet of stewardesses who arrived three days before, but the change is not as superficial as clothing and makeup. They have been strictly schooled in how to present themselves as modest young Brides of Christ. They walk slowly, hips held tight, gazes downcast, as they have mastered the custody of the eyes. When Günther arrives, dressed in a black suit with a white dog collar and a modest cross on a chain, they are waiting, prim-mouthed and demure.
“The four of you are scaring the shit out of me,” he tells them as they collect the box of cakes and follow him out the door.
He is in high spirits, mostly because he has nothing to do on this mission. He is window dressing, necessary because a group of nuns is unremarkable in Rome, but a group of nuns under the supervision of a priest will be completely invisible. After the success of their French mission, they have been allowed to plan and undertake this job, one requiring a good deal of ingenuity. Every step has been reviewed and approved by the Board of Directors. Their only interference has been the addition of Günther, a minor annoyance to the quartet, who hoped to complete their mission from start to finish without anyone’s help. But his smile is infectious, and he spends the short walk to Vatican City telling them about what he plans to do with the considerable bonus he is due to receive when the job is complete.
“I am taking the waters in Courtempierre-les-Bains,” he says, sketching a map of Switzerland with his hands as he walks. “I go after the Christmas holidays to give myself a complete detoxification process for the new year. And I go again after every job. I am Swiss-German, so you would think I would go to Bern, but no. I am devoted to Courtempierre-les-Bains. It has the thermal baths where you can soak away your troubles and repair your liver,” he tells them, listing the various other treatments he intends to indulge in. “Massage, sauna, therapeutic wraps. These missions are very taxing, and the body must be restored.”
He is polite enough and passably good-looking, but he has a mild case of hypochondria, and his favorite topic of conversation is the state of his digestive system.
“What kind of therapies do you enjoy, Günther?” Natalie asks, wide-eyed. “Do tell us more about the enemas.”
Helen elbows her hard in the ribs, but with Natalie’s encouragement, Günther continues to discuss his bowels until they arrive at the entrance to St. Peter’s Square. It is impressive, this open-air drawing room designed by Bernini. The long colonnaded wings sweep out and around, enclosing visitors in a way that should feel welcoming but somehow doesn’t. It is too large, too grand, intended to evoke awe. There are metal detectors at the entrance, but the guards hardly pay attention, waving them along. The little group of five moves across the vast expanse of the oval, past the obelisk, towards the wedding cake fa?ade of the basilica.
Inside the shadowy marble embrace of the church, it takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dimness. Dust motes swim in the shafts of sunlight spilling through the cupola windows, and a tired cleaner is standing in sock feet atop an altar, listlessly pushing a cloth mop. Beneath the marble top of the altar, a glass coffin holds the body of a pope, the face and hands gleaming green. They pause to watch as the cleaner polishes the glass, removing the fingerprints of the faithful. They move on to take a clockwise tour of the church, observed but not remembered by Vatican police and Swiss Guard. They blend seamlessly with every other group, the schoolchildren, the tourists, the miracle seekers. They are nobody within the Baroque grandeur of the basilica.
When they have completed the tour, it is eleven forty-five am. Every Tuesday at precisely twelve pm, Bishop Timothy Sullivan of the Boston archdiocese crosses in front of the Tourist Information Office on the west side of St. Peter’s Square. The four demure nuns and their priest are clustered in a little knot a short distance away, shielded from the nearest Swiss Guardsman by a rack of postcards featuring a pope smiling in Technicolor and ropes of wooden rosaries for sale.