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ALSO BY JOSEPH O’CONNOR NOVELS Cowboys and Indians Desperadoes The Salesman Inishowen Star of the Sea Redemption Falls Ghost Light The Thrill of It All Shadowplay   SHORT STORIES True Believers Where Have You Been?   THEATRE/SPOKEN WORD Red Roses and Petrol True Believers The Weeping of Angels Handel’s Crossing My Cousin Rachel Whole World Round (with Philip King) Heartbeat of Home (concept development and lyrics)  The Drivetime Diaries (CD) MY FATHER’SHOUSE  For Emma, Laurence and Cormac, un abbraccio.   Dear Mother, Father, and Family. This is the last letter I will be able to write as I get shot today. Dear family, I have laid down my life for my country and everything that was dear to me. I hope this war will be over soon so that you will all have peace for ever. Goodbye. Your ever loving soldier, son and brother, Willie. —Letter written by a Scottish prisoner of war in Italy ACT I THE CHOIR  September 1943: German forces occupy Rome.  Gestapo boss Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror.  Hunger is widespread. Rumours fester. The war’s outcome is far from certain.  Diplomats, refugees, and escaped Allied prisoners risk their lives fleeing for protection into Vatican City, at one fifth of a square mile the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome.  A small band of unlikely friends led by a courageous priest is drawn into deadly danger.  By Christmastime, it’s too late to turn back.  Sopranos: Delia Kiernan, Marianna de Vries  Alto: The Contessa Giovanna Landini  Tenors: Sir D’Arcy Osborne, Enzo Angelucci, Major Sam Derry  Bass: John May  Conductor: Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty 1 SUNDAY 19TH DECEMBER 1943 10:49 P.M.  119 hours and 11 minutes before the mission    Grunting, sullen, in spumes of leaden smoke, the black Daimler with diplomatic number plate noses onto Via Diciannove, beads of sleet fizzling on its hood. A single opal streetlight glints at its own reflection in an ebbing, scummy puddle where a drain has overflowed. Pulsing in the irregular blink of a café’s broken neon sign, the words “MORTE AL FASCISMO” daubed across a shutter. Scarlet. Emerald. White. Delia Kiernan is forty, a diplomat’s wife. Doctors have ordered her not to smoke. She is smoking. A week before Christmas, she’s a thousand miles from home. Sweat sticks her skirt to the backs of her stockings as she pushes the stubborn gear stick into first. The man on the rear seat groans in stifled pain, tearing at the swastikas on his epaulettes. The heavy engine grumbles. Blood throbs in her temples. On the dashboard, a scribbled map of how to get to the hospital using only the quieter streets is ready to be screwed up and tossed if she encounters an SS patrol but the darkness is making the pencil marks difficult to read and whatever hand wrote them was unsteady. She flicks on her cigarette lighter; a whiff of fuel inflames his moans. Swerving into Via Ventuno, the Daimler clips a dustbin, upending it. What spills out gives a scuttle and makes for the gutter but is ravaged by a tornado of cadaverous dogs bolting as one from gloomed doorways. Squawking brakes, jouncing over ramps, undercarriage racketing into potholes, fishtailing, oversteering, boards thudding, jinking over machine-gunned cobbles, into a street where wet leaves have made a rink of the paving stones. Whimpers from the man. Pleadings to hurry. Down a side street. Alongside the university purged and burned by the invaders. Its soccer pitch netless, strangled with weeds, the pit meant for a swimming pool yawning up at the moon and five hundred shattered windows. She remembers the bonfire of blackboards, seeing its photograph in the newspaper the morning of her daughter’s eighteenth birthday. Past the many-eyed, murderous hulk of the Colosseum like the skeleton of a washed-ashore kraken. Across the piazza, gargoyles leer from a church’s gloomy facade. She flashes her headlights twice. The bell tolls eleven. She feels it in her teeth. Wind harangues the chained-up tables and chairs outside a café, wheezing through the arrow-tipped railings. A black-clad man hurries across from the porch, damp raincoat clinging, abandoning his turned-inside-out umbrella to the gust as he scrambles into the passenger seat of the ponderous, boat-like car, trilby dripping. As she pulls away, he takes out a notebook, commences scribbling with a pencil. “What do you think you’re doing?”  “Thinking,” he says. Pulling a naggin of brandy from his pocket, he offers it to the groaning passenger who has tugged off one of his leather gloves and jammed it into his own mouth. The man shakes his head, scared eyes rolling. “For pity’s sake, let him alone,” she says. “Give it here.”  “You’re driving.” “Give it here this minute. Or you’re walking.” An eternity at the junction of Via Quattordici and Piazza Settanta as a battle-scarred Panzer rattles past, turret in slow-revolve as though bored. “What does it mean for the mission?” she asks. “If he’s gravely ill?  “We’d have to find someone else. Maybe Angelucci?” “Enzo couldn’t be trained up. Not in the time.” Hail surges hard on the windscreen as they pass Regina Coeli prison. She lights another cigarette, veins of ash falling on the collar of her raincoat. He has his eyes closed, but she’s certain he’s not praying. “For the love of God, Delia, can’t this rust-bucket go any faster?” Steaming blue streetlights, alleyways snaking up hills, ranked silhouettes of martyrs on the rooftops of churches. It comes back to her, her second morning in Rome, when she climbed the staircase to the roof of St. Peter’s, every feature of every statue worn away by time and storm. Soot-stained, weatherbeaten stalagmites. Now, a farm gate blocking a driveway. He steps out into the furies of rain and tries to haul the gate open, trilby falling off with the fervour of his shakes. In the glim of the headlights, he