I was making coffee this morning, which is probably why it came to mind: Sister Vincenza Taffarel carried a tray up at about half five and left it, as she did every day, and when it sat untouched she came back and found the lamp still burning and him propped up with papers. That's the version most people now accept. The Vatican's first statement said his secretary found him; the accounts were tidied later, and the sources still disagree on small things — what he was reading, what time exactly. He was sixty-five, and it seems to have been his heart.

Then the arithmetic of 1978, which is the sort of thing that undoes archivists: three popes in one calendar year, Paul VI, then him for thirty-three days, then a Pole. The last time that happened was 1605. There's a photograph of him at the window with his arms open, speaking into a microphone, the heavy drape hanging over the ledge — a gesture he only got to make a handful of times.