Sherlock Holmes must have returned, because very early the next morning a sleep-tousled detective woke me up.

"Watson."

"Watson!"

"What?" I grumbled with eyes closed, wanting to stay in my nice night of dreams.

"Do you have a jacket that Bruno can borrow?" my friend whispered.

I opened my eyes at this trivial request.

"Why? He has clothes, surely."

"Come now, Watson, he can't very well wear his current garb when he travels back to England," Holmes chided me, completely himself once more.

I sat up and saw Bruno sitting there smiling.

"It is just to ride on the cart to town, so that I can obtain my own clothes if this place has any kind of a decent tailor," the Italian said. "This is important, Doctor. I have worn so many disguises in the last few years since I gave up the cassock, with none of them feeling quite natural. Sherlock has agreed to take me to every men's tailor in Rome while we are there, until I find what feels like a second skin."

It was as though these years of separation had never happened. The two men were side by side, united in being several steps ahead of me once more.

"I can't wait to return to England," I admitted, shaking the straw from my hair.

"Bit by bit, Watson. Today Bruno and I will seek out a bath, a barber, the tailor, a telegraph operator and train tickets," Holmes murmured playfully. "I shall visit a tobacconist while the tailor plies his trade."

"Your ride into town leaves very early, so there's no time to waste, doctor," Bruno reminded me. "You won't mind if we come along to your errand at the chemist's?"

I had forgotten all about it, actually. While I scrambled into my clothes, I offered Bruno one of my two jackets that happened to be in my small bag, as most of my luggage was still at the hotel. It was as I feared: he had always had wide shoulders and after frequent exercise his powerful arms couldn't fit in my narrow cut. Holmes' clothes were no doubt both too narrow and too long.

"It's fine, Doctor, I'm sure there is something for me in the town, even if they make me look like a burgher with their rustic styles."

"We have both worn worse to travel London together," Holmes recalled.

I finished dressing and moved stiffly as I followed my two friends down the ladder. Perhaps it was from too-vigorous pantomiming in the course of my duties the day before. Or it could have been wrenching out the teeth.

Bruno held out his hand to help me down the last few rungs. I pushed away the thought that his help had some sort of ulterior motive, as I had discovered his physical affection had had in the past.

"I am sorry, Doctor Watson, you spent a long day ministering to our hosts while Sherlock and I did no work at all," the Italian said to my slight scowl. "I took him all around, explained how the harvest is set up, the different peoples I've met. The children came along and they told us stories and played games."

It was naturally quite impossible to imagine Holmes doing these things. Though he was much more at ease today than he had been since Bruno disappeared, a different tension was in place as we walked to meet the cart.

My friend had that same controlled look as when Bruno told the story of the second slipper. There was no substitute for the now-animated Italian who chattered on while we walked to the stables. Holmes couldn't kiss Bruno as a distraction this time, but I sensed a deep terror that this singular person would slip away again.

I never heard what specifically had changed Bruno's mind to return with us during their day walking in the countryside. I liked to think that Bruno realized that he and Holmes had grown together so much that they did share each other's battles. "Their battles are mine," was how Bruno had translated his conversation with the waiter in the restaurant the last time I saw him in London. When the couple reunited he must have seen that the great detective did not at all care where they were, as long as they could be together.

"You must admit, Watson, that my system for harvesting and threshing wheat deserves to be tested," the detective was saying. The two men argued about ways to improve agricultural efficiency, stopping only long enough for Bruno to tell the driver that he was taking four people into town.

"Four?" I questioned the number of fingers Bruno held up. I looked over my shoulder and the man I recognized as the cantor was coming up behind us.

"You will need someone to manage all your packages, and Rebbe Haim wanted to contribute some of the community money to supplies," Bruno explained.

The couple spent the dusty journey carrying on in rapid-fire Italian. The cantor and I smiled pleasantly and watched the fields thin into the town that was barely a railroad junction.

"Go first thing to the inn to see that they haven't thrown out our extra bags," I admonished.

"Don't worry, Watson, I expect the several days our paid rooms lay empty will more than make up for our thorough baths today," Holmes said.

My Jewish friend pointed to the universal sign of the apothecary, and we entered the cramped little shop.

As it happened, the proprietor did have some Latin. He recognized my prescriptions very well and set about mixing the various solutions while we conversed haltingly.

"How did an English doctor get mixed up with a bunch of refugees?" he asked me.

"A friend and I came looking for another friend who was lost," I said, gratefully sipping the tea that tasted like real tea. The cantor was savoring it as well. He was able to communicate a little with our host in some combination of languages.

"Lost from London to here is quite lost," the chemist said, clucking his tongue at the amount of delousing fluid I'd requested.

"Could you ask my friend something?" I said suddenly to the shopkeeper. All of my contact with Bruno's adoptive village had come through the Italian, and I couldn't ask him any of my real questions.

"Just a moment."

He attended to a customer and when he'd returned, I had my question ready.

"Can you ask him why his group has adopted an Italian Catholic?"

The two men conferred for some minutes in a broken conversation. I began to fear this was an indelicate inquiry, but the cantor was serene as the other man returned to his mixtures.

"He says that your friend came to them lost. A Jew is never lost because everywhere is his home. They offered him the one thing they had."

I thanked the chemist and bowed at the cantor, allowing the shopkeeper to explain that I'd like to meet my friends if he would like to carry our parcels back to the camp. Between Bruno's money, mine, and that of the village, the medicines would be packed and transported in the cart left waiting outside.

My desperation for a bath sent me to the hotel, where my last clean-ish clothes were waiting. Bruno and Holmes had come and gone, but I found them at the tailor's.

"My man in London could have a jacket and shirt ready in no time," Holmes was saying as the Italian modeled an outmoded coat that was being pinned to his frame.

The detective's demeanor had thawed several more degrees. I was sure that he felt much better about Bruno when the latter wasn't wearing the dress of a consecrated man. Secretly, I thought Bruno looked better in a priest's weeds, but could understand why his lover felt otherwise.

The affectionate look on my friend's face reminded me of something. "Where do married couples go for a little privacy? These villagers have been on the road for months, and several pregnancies tell me they must find somewhere to go."

"They go into the fields, doctor, where else? This I discovered much to my chagrin when Bruno led me out there last night. We walked a great ways from the camp and were deep into the wheat passing a very enjoyable time, and then two more couples situated themselves in the same sector. As you know, it takes a great deal of concentration to maintain a false voice in the best of circumstances, so unless one of us could keep complete silence our two male voices, not to say appearance, would have attracted attention. We had no choice but to lie very still and wait for our neighbors to leave. Bruno and I found ways to pass the time, however."

Holmes licked his lips at my discomfort.

As if he had heard, Bruno glanced over with that masterful look I remembered from their artist's den in London. I could hardly believe this amorous Bruno had won out over all the others vying for control.

While his suit was being confected, our friend decided to buy and wear one of the loose-sleeved white peasant blouses that Stanley favored because it needed no tailoring. The blue suit pants had fit as they were. Dressed as a part-priest, part laborer, part gentleman, Bruno pushed us out onto the street.

We had what passed for a feast in these parts: sweet sausages and some kind of dumplings.

We were on our way to the barber next when Bruno stopped us. "Will you go in with me? I would very much like to invite you both."

Mystified, I followed the other two men through a door with peeling blue paint jammed between other businesses in the small commercial district.

My eyes took several moments to adjust down a short hallway. Then there were a few gas lamps burning but the illumination was multiplied by all the gold and silver.

The icons were smattered with gold leaf, which was also inlaid in the ceiling. Many sets of eyes seemed to follow us from all the icons covering the walls. One of the pieces of this dizzying landscape moved and I at last made out the sacristan with a gold candlestick in in hand and a cloth in the other.

Bruno made a reverence and knelt down before the altar to pray.

"Bruno told me that he asked around for a church and heard of this place. There is an old priest who lives above this small chapel and celebrates a private service every week for those too aged or ill to make the journey to the real Orthodox church in a neighboring town," Holmes whispered. "Apparently this place is modest compared to full-sized splendor."

Our friend suddenly abandoned his kneeling posture and lay facedown full-length before the altar, arms outstretched.

I wish I hadn't seen it. I know Holmes would rather anything other than his lover's unchanged religious fervor be displaying itself at this moment. This was the pose of a priest, an unrepentant priest.

The sacristan had not welcomed the interruption of three foreigners, one of them an Italian in some indeterminate half-priest state and sporting a wild head of hair and a ragged beard. The man had been watching Holmes and me closely to see if we were there to steal any of the costly relics crammed in the small room. We were obviously insensible to his tirade, as he was to our faltering explanations.

With one of this suspicious party insensible before the altar and the other two left aghast in the back, the sacristan made a threatening gesture with his candlestick and stormed off.

It's hard to explain what makes a scientific-minded Englishman so uncomfortable before such religious passion. I thought of the woman in Bremen who told us Bruno had been touched by the spirit, and that he followed some compass that would always leave his friends stumbling behind.

Holmes and I had grown so close in this journey that I knew we were thinking the same thing. Bruno was the sort of person we'd always ascribed to an emotional nature, one that preferred to fill in the doubts in life with some comforting assumptions. But this man with his body arranged like a cross was undoubtedly something that we were not—an exemplar of another order that made us look at our own world through the wrong end of a spyglass. We were small in comparison. It was uncomfortable. What's more, our prostrate companion would never be held entirely in our world. I caught Holmes eying the soutane covering the inert form with a sort of fear of this living membrane of Bruno's stubborn priestliness.

The door opened and an ancient patriarch creaked in. He affixed his pince-nez and took in the two uncomfortable Englishmen in the back and then turned to the long-haired, peasant-shirted, blue-trousered, soutane-clad body supine before the Sacrament displayed in a gold cross.

The sacristan was uttering some argument and the old priest motioned for us to follow him outside. He shut the door very firmly behind us and made it clear he would like to be invited to tea at the café within sight of the church.

Other than the time when I was hiding from the police after a raid, I had never felt so ashamed of my forbidden romantic leanings as during this uncomfortable wait. It was as though I was sitting with my deceased parents and they could see my relationships with Stanley and Dougan written all over my face. We couldn't converse at all, so there was nothing to do but sit there with the sacristan and the priest studying us for clues about our strange party.

Finally, Bruno emerged and the sacristan darted back inside, doubtless to count the candlesticks.

We were all bowing our thanks when the chemist came running up to us.

"Something has happened. Your friends should depart immediately," he said to me in Latin.

My heart sank, and when Bruno translated I could see some light begin to go out of the detective's eyes.

Bruno began interrogating the apothecary as we followed him down the street, but the man who had been so friendly to me shortly before had gone stiff in his manner to me, and he refused to acknowledge my friends' presence.

"Your companions were seen in company last night, Doctor. Coming out of the fields," he said with emphasis. "If he were an Orthodox priest in the company of his wife, perhaps, but there is no excuse for a Roman clergyman cavorting with another man."

A policeman came up to us and put a hand on Bruno, and another came to claim Holmes. All was done in the universal language of authority. There could be no doubt that we were in for some kind of bother.

Bruno began relaying the calamity to Holmes, but the chemist would still look only at me. "They must have ended up by the Romanian camp, because that group was talking about the scandal when they gathered for work this morning. One overseer told another farm worker and it's all over the countryside. As a doctor, you can say you were searching for two sick men, but no one is likely to sympathize with two foreigners with such tastes."

It's difficult to untangle the next few hours in my mind. We were called before the mayor at a local police station, where there was a great deal of shouting in multiple languages. The chemist was still there, and he tried to help me explain the Vatican letters Holmes and I were waving about, though it was not sure at this point that Rome would claim Bruno after another public romantic scandal. Someone dragged the old patriarch in along with the sacristan, and I wasn't sure anymore which of Bruno's irregularities were on trial—religious or romantic.

The fact that Bruno had thrown away the only papers he had out of anger at the Vatican meant that he was an unknown entity, a blank screen for everyone else's projections. This would become clear when we were hauled to a bigger town for another interrogation.

My prescriptions had been produced by the helpful apothecary, who obviously couldn't conceive that I was a member of the same hated class as Bruno and Holmes. Those authentic papers and my instruments set me apart from the unseemliness that had taken place among the wheat.

"They think you're someone else, Doctor!" the chemist shouted as we were being carried away what he had been trying to communicate to me during this confused conversation. "Labor agitators aren't received well in these parts!"

Out of deference to my doctor's role, I and my bag with the few doctor's implements proclaiming my profession were sat up front between the driver and the police chief. Bruno and Holmes had their arms bound with rope behind their backs and fastened to the vehicle. When I looked back, the detective was sitting staring at nothing. Bruno answered the fear in my eyes with a small shake of his head. No, they would not try some ill-advised escape.

This ride in a jouncing cart was very different than the one from this morning.

We found out that we were subjected to this long, uncomfortable ride because this magistrate had some French and thus could get to the bottom of who we were and why we were there, mixing around with the migrants at harvest time.

This functionary was much like you would expect any civil authority to be in a medium-sized town that put on airs about not being a small town. He had neatly combed black hair and an aggressive moustache, his head floating above some insignia-encrusted suit that was much cleaner than we were after that dusty ride.

There was another man in the room, who I at first took for another prisoner. This bespectacled person was shrinking in the corner until the magistrate ordered him to begin the questions.

"Which organization do you represent?" asked the man, who turned out to be the town librarian and the only person for miles with decent French.

"If you would only read our letters," I began, but the magistrate had pulled out an immense collection of handbills and scraps of paper, setting each down on a long table with a bang.

The man had an odd sort of smile, almost a kind of pride, on his face as he displayed his treasures, lovingly collected over what must be years. The librarian was our trembling narrator as the functionary accused us of being at the heart of all his favorite conspiracies: communists, anarchists, spies from various nations, or some sort of unwholesome religious cult designed to draw peasants out of the fields with promises of a better life. We were any and all of these things connected by the obvious degeneracy that my two friends had been practicing in the fields.

These many scrawled slogans in multiple languages were proof that the world was changing under the local authority's feet, and we were the unlucky ones seen at the crest of this invading tide. My part was by no means a small one, because if what the chemist had tried to allege—that I was caring for two escaped madmen—then I bore the couple's guilt myself.

It brought me a dark pleasure to see a few of Dr. Zollmer's signs had made it all the way to this strange moment in a distant land. There was the German writing and a clear 'Z,' but these bills also had crude drawings of men in congress. The doctor had no doubt meant to advertise the type of subnormal creatures he was pledged to stamp out, but the official took them to be an advertisement for a group practicing these same perversions.

Holmes was almost in a trance. It was like he used to get mesmerized by his altars of defeat during his attacks of melancholy, but this time I think he was watching his perfect happiness being taken over by an ugliness to which it should be invulnerable. The part of Sherlock Holmes that could always remain in control was suddenly engulfed by the chaos that most of us had felt at least once before.

His lover was stood in the center of the room, surrounded by policemen, clearly at the center of the infraction. But Bruno had retreated into some part of himself where the functionary's taunts and the periodic strikes could not reach him.

I was the one feeling the outrage that my friends curiously could not, and I was the only one who was being addressed like a person, so I entrusted my arguments in French to the shrinking man who stammered them out again in Hungarian.

It was the addition of the librarian that made the experience absolutely unbearable. He stood there in his shabby coat and his spectacles, on the verge of tears. He was being asked to translate the filth from the magistrate, and it truly made no sense how we could be all of these threats to public order at once. He was just a normal man, probably with no use for men like us, but not aware enough to have nurtured a real hatred. He had been snatched up into something ugly and senseless, confronted with the worst face of the civic authorities he was condemned to live with, and his disinterested presence pushed us into the realm of the absurd.

For some reason I felt worse for him than my two dear friends, who had both received a few well-placed blows by now.

The magistrate was shouting something over and over to Bruno. I recognized the Hungarian word for priest from the apothecary's shop.

"Are you a priest?" the magistrate demanded. He evidently couldn't bring himself to damage the soutane, so he tore at Bruno's shirt and trousers with every recitation of the question until the garments were in tatters. I couldn't understand if it would go worse for the unnatural foreigner to say he was a priest or was not. Bruno kept silent, at any rate. Thankfully, Holmes must have understood that any action on his part would make things worse.

"What were you doing in the fields together?" the librarian asked.

"Confessing," Bruno said with such ardor it made me catch my breath.

And so it went on. Our letters were translated and re-translated from their French by the librarian, and I could understand why it seemed so unlikely that our little party was under the especial protection of the pope. The librarian was made to fill out a telegram form to send to the office right at the heart of the Vatican, where we would surely receive some sort of reply.

As the voice of the group, I began arguing with the stranger about the wording of this telegram, alleging it should be in Latin and thus subject to my exclusive control.

While this was happening, Bruno was receiving more slaps to his head and face and tears to his clothing, until it seemed as though Bruno were the one whose nakedness was asserting itself, and the functionary was shouting for him to stop. I ceased my argument with the librarian, realizing I had thought something similar earlier.

When Bruno stretched out before the altar so long ago in the optimistic portion of the day, I had felt appalled. It wasn't just a discomfort with religious fervor, however. Bruno was proving to me, to Holmes, to the Vatican that he would continue to be what he was, no matter what people did to divest him, the leopard, of his spots.

He would be a priest and he would love—passionately if inconveniently. He would belong to multiple dissenting groups with conflicting missions and work for contradictory visions of the future church. No matter if we shear him to the skin, his spots would grow back, and it would be up to the rest of us to resolve these contradictions that did him no harm except when he was denied the right to be himself.

The librarian was gazing with me at this calm Italian with the wild hair who was now nearly naked under the soutane that was too holy for the magistrate to profane. I fancied I saw actual spots on his skin. Bruno looked at me and smiled. Of course he smiled. He could remain secure in who he was, but the rest of us in this room, anyone anywhere he went, would be caught up in the alchemical retort where his many changes would always take place. The leopard's spots change, but he, himself, will always have them—this was the somewhat hallucinatory idea that was running through my mind while the librarian finished the telegram and a policeman ran off to wake the telegraph operator.

The reply was swift.

The Vatican communicated that these three unlikely men were due for an audience with one of their most important offices, and they should be allowed to make this journey without impediment. One Giuseppe Maria Bruno, the man with no papers, would find that border authorities from there to Rome will be expecting to assist his crossing without unnecessary delay.

The magistrate did not seem overly disappointed by the incontrovertible proof that we had friends in very high places. Doubtless he read into the message, as I did, that we would be facing some type of ecclesiastical tribunal. He was like a child who had gotten a glimpse of Father Christmas, and, vindicated by this sight, would continue to have faith in this apparition. Except in this case, the official had caught sight of an evil he'd always believed in, and that belief helped propel his being through the world.

The functionary chewed the ends of his moustaches and everyone began waving their arms, no doubt trying to figure out whether to keep us locked up for the rest of the night until the train could collect us the next day.

As luck would have it, one of the few priests of the Roman rite in the area was visiting someone on their deathbed. The man was hauled in. I recognized him as one Holmes and I had spoken to. The priest had seen the sketch of Bruno and recognized him immediately as the one who fell into a trance and couldn't be roused for hours. Bruno's strange manner had immediately recalled the priest to the telegram from Rome warning about such a person.

The magistrate unleashed a torrent of Hungarian at the tired-looking cleric. The priest merely listened and finally said a brief phrase.

"He says he does not know him," the unlucky librarian translated. Then he relayed another sentence. "He will look after you until the station opens."

The three of us were too tired to question anything at this point. But after the nightmare was over, I began to wonder.

When we met this old priest, I assumed he'd replied to the Vatican's message, letting them know where Bruno was, but that telegram never reached us because we found Bruno first. It could be that the man didn't want to be involved in anything that would delay his return to his bed. But I rather wonder if this stranger had decided the strange case of Bruno was not up to him. He was very kind, so kind after our ordeal that I wanted to catch on to the hem of his cassock and weep.

The priest addressed me in Latin. "You are escorting your friends directly to Rome?"

"Yes I am. It was our promise to bring Bruno to meet with the authorities, and he has consented to go. You can see that he was doing the right thing—he was in the middle of getting fitted for secular clothes."

Bruno didn't seem utterly naked because of his hirsute nature. Now that the magistrate had lost his bluster, I wondered how we would get anywhere with only a soutane and little else to clutch over his chest and groin.

The priest followed my gaze. "Would you mind wearing a dead man's clothes? He was about the same size," he said to Bruno in Latin.

In a daze, we followed the priest out to the street. It was an undertaker's carriage that was waiting for him, complete with the deceased inhabitant dressed only in a nightshirt. What were to be his last fine clothes were neatly folded next to him.

"What will this man wear? His family will be disappointed to say goodbye to him without it," Bruno said.

"You need it more than he does. I have some clothing on hand for this kind of emergency," the old priest replied. "You're in luck: I believe these garments are the right size."

Bruno ripped off the remaining rags and dressed himself there on the street. I think he had turned his back on the idea of shame at some point that night.

The priest held out his hand for the soutane, and after a moment Holmes was the one who took it from Bruno's arm. It was done very delicately. Bruno looked so small in the dead man's old-fashioned suit on this foreign street.

It was not prudent for Holmes to touch Bruno to comfort him, but I lay my hand on his shoulder on Sherlock's behalf. I said, "We should like to leave as soon as possible and prefer not to walk. Do you think your undertaker can carry us to the train station?"

When we had secured the tickets I wired to Rome to spare Bruno the task. In Latin I filled out the form to give our estimated arrival.

"Don't be so alarmed, doubting Pietro," Bruno was saying when I rejoined them. "Sherlock is not looking forward to my appearance in Rome, but I feel very strong knowing that he will be close. I will be able to show you my home, my friends! What a pleasure to bring you to the Sistine Chapel and all the other wonders that have always been my dwelling place."

I couldn't tell if he was putting on a brave face for Holmes or not, but when we boarded the train, our mood lifted quickly. The hideous scene was left behind and we began to enjoy each other's company with a new bond from what we'd just endured. The two men sat with their legs barely touching and we talked of our visit to Rome as if we were on holiday. It was better than traveling as if we were all under sentence.

I was so glad to see Holmes begin to accept that no matter how cumbersome the Roman justice system turned out to be, Bruno was now traveling in his care and he would be released into his care. The Vatican was unlikely to employ the unpredictable former priest no matter how useful his knowledge might be.

We talked until they dropped off to sleep. My traveling companions bore the bruises from their beatings, and I used my doctorly authority to demand blankets and compresses for both of them. I tucked them in, side by side, and thought I saw one hand close around the other in that small privacy.

During our journey to Italy, Bruno and Holmes came up with various schemes for the relief work that the Italian might like to do in London. He had accepted Holmes' reasoning that there were plenty of refugees of various sorts in London, and while he could not claim to be a Roman representative any longer, there was no stopping Bruno from imparting spiritual as well as physical support for these unfortunates.

We arrived in Rome with almost all our trepidation left behind us. What followed might be unpleasant, but the papal power was absolute only in a very small terrain, I'd decided, and this I communicated to Bruno. In Holmes' very competent care from now on, the former priest would at least not have to bear his conflicted feelings for the pope and certain church teachings. He could be himself.

The station was crowded, and I worked to collect our bags while the two men conversed with each other about the Vatican representative who would collect us outside the station. When I turned my back, they were smiling, two harmonious faces amid the general hubbub.

A train was letting out and a surge of people filled the platform. There was a cry and a shout. I turned back to see Bruno being supported by Holmes' arms and then sliding to the floor with blood dripping out of his trouser leg and his groin.

The detective was shouting out in various languages that the attacker should be apprehended. The crowd began pressing forward and back simultaneously with those curious about what had happened to the curiously dressed gentleman sprawled on the platform and those others not wanting any part of it.

It was done with surgical precision, this single thrust to sever the femoral artery. This I could see with my futile ministrations before the police swarmed on top of us. Not sure what had taken place, the police contented themselves with wrenching Sherlock Holmes from the Italian who was expiring there on the ground.

Bruno was talking quietly. All I understood was "mi Pietro."

Holmes was asking again and again if his lover had seen his attacker, in between cursing himself for being too happy to pay attention. He'd failed his Bruno once more by not being the one who noticed everything.

By the time they arranged for the stretcher, Bruno was gone.